The decentralized music app Audius recently announced that it will transfer part of its content management system to Solana's high-speed blockchain after taking advantage of an Ethereum sidechain managed by the POA network that works with a set of trusted validators.
Audius' agreement with Solana is "a crucial component in the path towards mainstream adoption"
Audius takes up similar space to popular music apps like Pandora or Spotify, but allows artists to set their own terms themselves. It also allows other developers to use the content below.
Audius has experienced strong user growth in the past few weeks, and currently boasts 800.000 active users and over 150.000 tracks available to stream. The high fees to pay and slow block times on Ethereum are generating a migration of dapps outside the well-known blockchain.
It has already happened with Terra, Kin and USDC moving to Solana. Similarly, the automated market maker and pooled asset manager Balancer has had to move its services to other networks, such as Oasis and NEAR.
In an official announcement, the Audius team wrote: “Given our need to use a high-performance blockchain today, Solana's ever-growing set, which currently has 182 validators (at the time of this writing) combined with a 'battle-tested architecture gives our community confidence that the Audius catalog can grow smoothly, a crucial component on the path to mainstream adoption ”.
Notably, when Kin announced its move to Solana in June, it also announced an incentive deal with Solana that would unlock SOL token concessions for every million users Kin would bring over a 24-month period.
Audius CEO Roneil Rumburg declined to disclose the terms of the deal with Solana, saying it was mostly technical considerations. However, he revealed in a statement: “There is an agreement between the two teams which includes technical support, support results and incentives. […] Solana will help Audius have the best possible user experience. "
The conclusion of the operation expected in the second quarter of 2021
Audius operators and artists use the AUDIO token to stake, enabling different functions on the network. Stake and governance features will remain on Ethereum.
However, the higher throughput demands of hosting, searching and streaming music will be carried over to Solana, which boasts extremely low transaction fees and millisecond block times.
Audius expects the migration to take place in three phases, ending in the second quarter of 2021. The Audius app is available in Apple's iOS app stores (Apple shares - ticker: AAPL), Google's Android (ticker: GOOGL) and on the web.
The company behind the platform has raised $ 9,8 million to date, according to Rumburg, in two rounds. The first in 2018 was led by General Catalyst and Lightspeed; the second in 2020 was led by Multicoin and Blockchange.
