CoinGecko Virtual Meetup Featured Guest: Roneil Rumburg

CoinGecko will be hosting our Virtual Meetup #11 on April 8 @ 9PM EST. Held monthly, CoinGecko Virtual Meetup is our live online community event where we explore different key topics in the crypto sphere and invite industry leaders to share their two satoshis.

This month, we will be discussing the landscape of opportunities that the crypto space provides to creators. One of our featured guests is Roneil Rumburg, co-founder and CEO of Audius. Audius is a fully decentralized music streaming protocol built with public blockchain infrastructure and other decentralized technologies that allow artists to distribute to and get paid directly from their fans.

Read on to get to know Roneil better!

I’m one of the cofounders of Audius, a digital streaming service that connects fans directly with artists and exclusive new music. Audius is owned and run by a vibrant, open-source community of artists, fans, and developers all around the world, and serves over 4 million listeners every month.

Prior to Audius, I co-founded Kleiner Perkins' early-stage seed fund, KPCB Edge. At KP, I was responsible for seed investments into Blockchain and AI companies, including Lightning Labs.

2. How did you come up with the idea for Audius?

My co-founder Forrest and I saw many of our favorite creators on Soundcloud start to get kicked off the network or choose to close their accounts, and the pace of this quickened in 2015/2016. We felt this was caused by Soundcloud’s moderation policies, lack of monetization features, and an inability to port their audience between platforms.

We started to ask ourselves - what if artists could own their own means of distribution? And the rules that distribution operates by could not be changed without the community’s support? Which ultimately led to the founding of Audius a few years later in 2018.

Yes! So many - our blog is the best place to keep up to date on this, but here are the big ongoing areas of work for our community:

Solana migration
Monetization features
The Audius passport - making Audius identity usable in 3rd-party products
NFT support, beginning with helping artists showcase their NFT-related activity within Audius

4. What are your thoughts on the space for crypto creators?

There are green fields everywhere you turn right now. The early settlers of new platforms and new paradigms are always the most rewarded by the rise and growth in them, and we are still really early in crypto. So I would encourage creators of all kinds to get smart on what these tools mean for them - if you show up now and put in the work, there are endless opportunities to seize.

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Stephanie Goh

Stephanie has a keen interest in breaking down complex topics into beginner-friendly pieces. She has been in the crypto space since 2020 and wants to continue contributing to the demystification of the crypto industry to a broader audience.