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Ben Sharafian & Stefan Thomas: Coil – A New Business Model for the Web

Episode Summary

Coil Co-Founders Stefan Thomas and Ben Sharafian joined us to discuss the broken state of web monetization and why streaming payments to creators using ILP has a chance to change the course of the web.

Episode Notes

The difficulties of compensating content creators for their work has been a driving force of the web for decades. It gave rise to advertising-driven tech giants like Google and Facebook and contributed to the decline of industries like music and publishing. Coil aims to change this and leverage blockchain and the Interledger Protocol to build a new business model for the web.

We were joined by Coil Founder and former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas and Coil Co-Founder Ben Sharifian to discuss their ambitions to change how content is consumed and paid for.

Topics covered in this episode:

• What web monetization is
• The difference between web monetization and web payments
• The negative effects of advertising-driven business models
• What the Interledger Protocol (ILP) is
• The current state of ILP
• Why Stefan and Ben decided to leave Ripple and start Coil
• The case for web monetization as an initial use case for Coil
• The idea of users paying a fixed bandwidth per second to content creators
• Possible user experiences that could be built on top of Coil
• How to bootstrap Coil and get adoption

Episode links:

• Coil Website
• Coil: Building a New Business Model for the Web
• Layer 3 Is for Interoperability
• Talk about Ripple and Coil at TOA18 - Stefan Thomas
• E92: Stefan Thomas - Understanding Ripple
• E131: Evan Schwartz & Stefan Thomas - Building the Internet of Payments with Interledger

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This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/261