Opulous Research

5 min readSep 10, 2021

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ll know NFTs have really taken off and become one of the prevailing narratives in the market at the moment

At first most people thought of NFTs as JPGs as collectibles enabled by entries on the blockchain and during the last DeFi summer, they mostly where — although various other use cases were in their early stages (insurance, fan tokens etc)

Then $AXS went parabolic and the “play to earn” games and NFTs mixed with gaming in various other ways started to open people’s eyes to the other use cases

As the market begins to evolve past the point of viewing NFTs purely as collectibles and artwork, new projects that are integrating their use in innovative ways are starting to gain some attention

Opulous is one of them!

They are planning to use NFTs to shake up the music industry and the dynamics between artists and financing

What is Opulous?

Opulous is a peer-to-peer decentralized finance platform backed by real world assets

Simply put, it is planning to use NFTs to help music artists get access to funding

Although some of the specifics of exactly how it will work in practice are still a little unclear, the beauty of crypto is we get to watch concepts evolve from idea to reality

We have to remember, we’re on the cutting edge here!

People were skeptical of the peer-to-pool model of crypto exchanges until Uniswap did it - not so much any more

What is the Opulous Platform?

The platform has three main functions

A launchpad for the first music copyright-backed NFTs. Minting an NFT will generate monthly royalty revenue and hopefully increase in value as the career of the artist progresses. So in that way, it’s like placing a bet on or buying a share in the success of an artist (similar basic concept to what XCAD is doing with Youtube influencers)
NFT Exchange. Using this exchange, anyone can own a piece of an artist’s music copyright and also buy valuable assets previously available to only industry insiders
DeFi Loans that would be backed by real world music assets and future royalties that have been carefully selected by their expert team to reduce the risk of investment while providing the artist necessary funding to complete their project

The aim is to decentralize the process an artist goes through where they are often at the mercy of, and often exploited by, centralized record companies

Team behind Opulous

The team is relatively unknown in the blockchain space as they mainly come from the Music Industry

Lee Parsons, the CEO, also founded Ditto Music — a music company supporting over 500k independent artists worldwide including artists like Chance the Rapper

Also pulling advisors that are a combination of veterans from the art side and business side of music

A major win in my eyes for a music related project is to have an advisor who is a former Sony Music CEO, Nick Gatfield

He personally signed Amy Winehouse, Katy Perry and One Direction

So probably fair to say, he knows what he’s doing!

More on the $OPUL token

The $OPUL token has some interesting tokenomics tying the entire platform together

It will live on both Algorand and Ethereum

Unlocks are gradual as usual for DAO Maker backed projects and are always worth paying attention to especially if it’s a project you may be looking to buy in the future

Planning buys around token unlocks has often proven to be a good strategy in the past for me

Most tokens won’t be circulating on launch and the initial market cap is on the low end, which is a trend we’ve seen more of during the past few months

This helps to avoid massive pumps and dumps on launch and really motivates both the Team and early backers to make sure the project works over the long term

Thoughts on the future of Opulous

If I’m writing about something, it means I like the idea enough to look into it more

Opulous is trying to do something that is not just interesting but actually has the potential to revolutionize a part of a major industry

And as crypto investors, we love revolution, don’t we?

While I’m wary of saying the entire music industry can change because of the platform (but you never know! Just look at the effect things like MySpace and Spotify had on the industry)

Just seeding the change and giving artists and fans a viable alternative could attract a lot of attention

It has the potential to allow first-time artists, especially those from poorer countries or those with less record label infrastructure, to access proper funding without having to first relocate, then needing someone to get them in the door

All whilst still making sure artists retain creative control

As a guy who loves “real” music much more than manufactured pop, allowing artists to control their output has resulted in most of the music that I love

The road map also looks with major development happening every quarter

Where to buy $OPUL

I will be participating in one of the Private Rounds through DAO Maker

If you’d like to invest, the first round of the seed sale is over, but there will be a second round next week on https://daomaker.com/ details of which are below

Round 2 Timeline:

Registrations: 15th of September 12:00 UTC

Registrations Deadline: 17th of September 12:00 UTC

Winners Announced: 17th of September till 18:00 UTC

If you don’t participate in that round you will be able to buy the tokens once they launch

Details for when and where the launch will be should be coming soon