The word “bonfire” dates back to the 15th century, when the priest John Mirk compounded the words “bone” and “fire” in his Book of Festivals, describing a communal blaze that celebrated St. John’s Eve. In the half millennium that’s followed, even in this technological age of blockchains and AI, we still honor the bonfire as a sacred gathering space, saluting its primordial ability to bring our bones to the fire.

Bonfire.xyz is evoking that same spirit. Through custom web3-enabled websites that leverage gated content and digital assets, the organization is empowering creators to gather their communities. 

Until mid-December, Bonfire was gated and in open-beta for select creators. Artists like Odesza and Portugal, the Man were some of the first major artists to build out a unique space, with the former using Bonfire to build an non-fungible token (NFT) All-Access Pass that gave holders free tickets to stops on their tour. The musician Reo Cragun leveraged the platform to launch his Frameworks EP, showcasing a native integration with the new Sound.xyz protocol. Fellow web3 native artist Daniel Allan sold out 1000 NFTs in 24 hours using Bonfire. 

Now, following a fundraise of $6.2M, Bonfire.xyz is available to all. 

I tested the platform, building out my own creator page. Aside from standard website building features like cover photos, page templates, and domain customization, I had options to import existing NFT collections or social tokens, connect to a Discord server, and add content (audio or artwork) that can be token-gated. Other tools available are airdrops, livestreams, contests, and an integration with Mintplex, which allows creators to easily build and execute their own smart contracts.

Recently, I chatted with Bonfire co-founder Matt Alston about incorporating his learnings at Uber into web3, starting a company with his best friend, and building the modern bonfire, where a token-enabled beacon is gathering friendly faces around a shared space.

DeCential: I’d love to start at the beginning and hear more of your story – where you grew up, how you got into this space, what your web3 a-ha moment was, the origins of bonfire, things like that. 

Matt Alston: Awesome, so I'm 27. Grew up in Atlanta and then met my co-founder Melissa – we've been best friends for 10 years now. She grew up in St. Louis and we studied at Duke together. We met freshman fall, first week of school basically, and then were close friends through college. We both studied computer science.

And then Mel got really excited about blockchain. Back in 2015 she started the Duke blockchain lab, which would essentially help student-led projects get off the ground with either educational resources or a little bit of financing.

And I was kind of living vicariously through her. I was very intrigued by blockchains. And I read the Bitcoin white paper and was very interested intellectually. But the use cases at the time – basically there was just Bitcoin.

After graduation, Mel joined Coinbase. I joined Uber. Me as product manager, her as engineer. We both moved out to the Bay Area. I spent the majority of my time working on loyalty and rewards and helped launch the first version of Uber Rewards and then got to see the evolution of that program.

In 2020 we both decided that we were ready to leave our jobs and start a company together. We started nights and weekends and we actually started building a consumer social events product – no real web3 component to it. It was really more of a social shopping or social discovery and event ticket shopping experience. We couldn't launch it because of the pandemic, so we kind of did the classic first time founder experience – go after the very popular idea and do so in all the wrong ways. Learned a lot of lessons. Pivoted. 

And then I got into web3 again. It was the end of 2020 and it was when social tokens and NFT creators were starting to hit the mainstream. I had this experience where I lived in a house with a bunch of other founders for a month during the pandemic and in that house was Alex Masmej, who is one of the earlier people to issue a social token – the Alex token. 

I heard about what he was doing and I was like, well, this is kind of a loyalty point, but it's a much more powerful form of the technology and it's also programmable and not controlled by any one platform. I immediately saw a lot of parallels and so that's when I really started down the rabbit hole.

And now we're building Bonfire. It's been about a year and a half. And it's been a journey for sure.

DC: Cool. Yeah, so what was the point when the broad strokes of Bonfire emerged? At what point did that have some more clarity?

MA: Are you in – sorry, I just noticed your crew neck. Is that the Rally and FWB one?

DC: Yeah, it’s from the hackathon. 

MA: Cool yeah I've got one in my drawer over there, but it's funny because it's part of the origin story of Bonfire. Because of my background in loyalty rewards, I was most excited about social tokens, and we saw Rally and the ecosystem that they were very early in building. 

We thought this was an interesting environment to experiment in. So we started as a hackathon project – not this hackathon, but a different one where we just hacked together a prototype that let you as a creator – on Rally – airdrop your coin to people as a claimable link, and then collect coins and you can set up like a storefront.

We hacked together a semi-functional thing, got a few creators to start playing around with it, and the airdrop got a lot of traction. Creators on Rally were really looking for ways to use their coin as a mechanism for enabling earning and rewarding engagement.

So we spent six months building in the Rally ecosystem then added support for Ethereum and Polygon. And we've evolved our understanding of what social tokens are now – I think of NFTs as being part of the social token. And we really think about them as community assets that enable all sorts of interesting use cases and capabilities that communities didn't have prior to web3.

DC: Which types of creators have you seen have the most success on the platform?

MA: Definitely music. And it is not even just our platform, right? This music NFT movement has just been one of the shining bright spots. I think we've seen momentum increase in music and I think it's just so ripe for it – musicians desperately want it. And I think their fans do too. 

Right now it's an inefficient market because you have people who are the biggest fans of an artist who want to be able to support in ways that the creator would find valuable, but those connections aren't being made because there is no way to identify who your fans are, and to engage with them on your own terms. 

So music's a vertical that we're really excited about and has definitely been the most active. Increasingly we're starting to see podcasting and video and we're interested in those verticals. I would say they're much earlier, so we'll see if they materialize in the same way, but we're really focused on those three. 

DC: Are you doing any video hosting at all or is it more like uploading your content?

MA: It's not like a video NFT – the video is not on-chain. We support audio, video, and images all natively, but we actually don't mint that content because the use case that we're building for is token-gated access to the content.

And once you mint it, for the most part it's public. It's interesting because it’s all stored on IPFS so it wouldn't actually be a huge stretch for us to create a “mint this song” button. We don't have any plans to do that right now because for us, we'd rather partner with protocols like Sound – we don’t need to go offer music NFTs if there are great protocols we can integrate with instead.

DC: No need to reinvent the wheel. What was your rubric for accepting creators (prior to leaving open beta)?

MA: So we don't have a need for curation really, because we are more of a creator tooling platform – we're not demand generation, we're not gonna help your drop sell out. We'll provide tools so that you can build the experience you want, but then, sort of Shopify-like, you're responsible for bringing that audience. 

We're kind of the bottom of the funnel. We don't expect that we're the platform where you're discovering new creators. But we wanna be a place where you can engage with those die-hards – the super fans. 

The curation is just making sure that no copyrights are being violated and that people who are uploading have rights to the music because it's gonna be monetized and it's also gonna be on-chain forever. There’s a greater burden of governing everything that's going on in the platform at that layer because there's just so much more potential for abuse.

DC: Yeah, there's a lot more complexity to consider. So how are you monetizing?

MA: We haven't introduced any business model yet, and we will, I think, start with transaction fees as revshare with underlying protocols.

So we're about to launch our own NFT collections feature. It'll still be built on a third party protocol, but it'll be entirely white labeled. And so we will take – we haven't established what it'll be – somewhere in that 3-5% ballpark on primary sales.

I think the core platform will always be free, but we may have a pro tier with extra access, like additional content storage limits or the ability to have multiple co-managers of an account,  the ability to fully remove the ‘powered by Bonfire badge – that type of pro tier will probably come at the beginning of next year.

DC: That's exciting. So what does Bonfire look like in two to three years? 

MA: I think we’ve taken a very experimentative approach to building, so even at the beginning it was like, Let's get something out there and then let's just start learning and iterating.

Because we feel like there's immense potential here and we also don't know exactly what needs to be built. The use cases are still being established, but certainly the product vision is becoming more and more refined as we go.

Minting is a component that we’ll continue to rely on third parties on to do the plumbing and all of the contract work, but we want to be able to launch a community and then be able to really have a lot more interactivity. 

Right now you can put up content and people can unlock or stream the content, but we don't really have any type of interaction, so it's still a relatively passive consumption experience. But we think a lot of the potential of holding these assets is around what you can do together with them. So a lot of our focus in 2023 will be around enabling more social use cases, more of the actual engagement around content.

We built the platform in a very modular way, which allows for a lot of flexibility – which was the intent, but it also requires a greater level of understanding and energy to actually create what you're looking to do.

So now we want to provide a layer of templates and integration so that some of the things that are possible now become a lot more effortless. And at the end of the day, there are a lot of people to still onboard into web3, and I think it's gonna require very intuitive and easy-to-use tools, so we're also working on wallet provisioning, fiat onboarding – all of that, so that as an artist you're not forced to fork and build a second community in web3. You can actually bring your whole existing band with you.