When Natalia Murillo was a student at the University of Southern California, a professor introduced her to the zero-knowledge proofs cryptographic technology. Since then, she has been deeply involved in web3 and blockchain technology. She dropped out of college and invested the $5,000 she had in NFTs before founding the web3 startup Koop.
Koop, which CEO Murillo and CTO Conner Chyung, both 21 years old, co-founded, just went live to the general public after spending two months in private beta. According to Murillo, Koop is fundamentally a protocol that aids communities and artists in launching NFT-based membership cards to earn money for initiatives.
The so-called “koops” are owned by their members, who decide how to use the group’s treasury cash, according to Murillo. However, its use cases appear to be mostly aimed toward content creators trying to establish communities of interested followers. Koops may be formed for everything from starting a venture fund to developing a new clothing line.
According to Murillo, the platform has already witnessed $850 million in volume from the treasuries of its 50 active communities buying and selling NFTs. He also mentioned that the firm has an 8,500 group queue for Koops. According to the business, platform sign-ups are increasing 4x week over week. Mems NFT, The Heart Project, 1Confirmation, musicians with creators, and gaming guilds are some of the current Koop users.
The web3 creator economy-focused Variant Fund and 1confirmation, as well as Palm Tree Crew, Day One Ventures, Ethereal Ventures, DeFi Alliance, Volt Capital, PearVC, DCF God, 0xmons, and angel investors including cryptocurrency influencer Cooper Turley, former Coinbase CTO and a16z investor Balaji Srinivasan, and former Sequoia partner Liu Jiang, led the $5 million funding round for Koop today.
In contrast to conventional social networks, Murillo refers to a Koop as a “socioeconomic network.” It resembles a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), a community governance structure built on blockchain that gained popularity during the previous year’s crypto bull run. Murillo noted that Koops had a few significant distinctions from DAOs.
The Koop, according to Murillo, “is lighter-touch, lighter-weight, and it’s focused more on the social experiences than on the details of whether every member votes or if it’s genuinely decentralized.” Creators who use Koops, for instance, might still decide to exercise exclusive control over their group’s finances and decision-making, but they may use the Koop community as a type of “temperature check” to aid in their decision-making.
DAOs don’t need need to be decentralized, but their ethos tends to be more concerned with allocating voting privileges fairly to each group member.
Koops, on the other hand, can be more centralized, have a tendency to be smaller in size, and provide groups the choice to band together under a temporary objective or cause and dissolve the Koop once it has been accomplished, Murillo noted.
According to Murillo, who founded the company, “we participate in fictional worlds or digital communities with more fervor and passion than our local democracies.
To demonstrate the usefulness of a Koop, she used the case of YouTuber and creative Logan Paul. Since she just does one thing—subscribe to Paul’s “Impulsive” podcasts, Murillo claimed she hasn’t felt connected to the product’s community.
