Every platform is saying, we want to embrace UGC, we want to empower creators. But what’s the reality? In the world of Web2, creators are 'farmed' by the platforms. Your content goes viral, and the platform makes a fortune, while what you receive is the leftover scraps after layers of algorithmic exploitation. Your account, your fans, all your hard work, are built on a centralized ID that could be banned or throttled at any moment.
Web3 is here, and we thought the savior had arrived. Creators are cheering, finally able to own their data, mint their own NFTs, and build their own communities.
But soon, we discovered a new "roadblock"—high gas fees and congested networks.
You are a talented 3D modeler who has carefully designed a stylish chair for the virtual world. You want to mint it as an NFT so that all players can use it in their virtual homes. However, you find that just the gas fees for minting and listing may exceed the price of the chair itself. If a player wants to buy it, they must also pay a significant gas fee. This entire process is costly and the experience is fragmented.
The so-called "creator economy" has from the very beginning turned into a "whale game". Only high-value, highly consensual blue-chip artworks can flow in such a high-friction environment. Meanwhile, the vast, tiny UGC content that constitutes the capillaries of a world—a chair, a T-shirt, a piece of background music, a custom AI script—finds its survival space infinitely squeezed.
A metaverse without a massive amount of tiny UGC is hollow, lifeless. It’s like a city with only grand landmarks but no street vendors or pedestrians.
What we need is a foundation that allows creators to create and trade with "invisible" effort. A platform where the cost of each tiny value exchange approaches zero.
This is exactly what Somnia is doing, and it may be more thorough than you imagine.
The high performance of Somnia here means not just "fast"; it signifies a fundamental change in the economic model. When transaction costs can be negligible, a brand new, finely granular "micro-creator economy" becomes possible.
Imagine this:
The chair you designed has a casting cost of a few cents. You upload it to an open-world asset library built on Somnia. Other players or developers from other worlds can pay to use your design. Each time it’s used, even if it’s just placed in a scene, you receive a small, automatically executed royalty.
Interestingly, another designer B thinks your chair is great, but wants to add a cooler backrest. He can "fork" your design to create a new "Chair V2". When players purchase or use this V2 version, royalties will automatically be distributed to you and designer B according to the ratio you set in the smart contract.
This is a composable, nestable, permissionless creative Lego world.
Every creator, regardless of size, can capture the most direct and complete value from their own labor. The flow of value is transparent and immutable, with no platform acting as an "intermediary" to take a cut and set rules.
This is the true UGC ecosystem. It is not an empty slogan but a thriving, emergent, bottom-up economy supported by countless micro-transactions, numerous royalty payments, and countless innovative combinations.
To achieve all this, the premise is almost zero transaction costs and extremely high network capacity. Somnia's architecture is paving the way for this future. What it is building is not just a new metaverse platform; it is handing a nearly free ticket to countless underappreciated creators to enter a new world.
The prosperity of the future metaverse does not depend on how grandly a few giant companies can build structures, but on how many ordinary people are willing to place a chair they made with their own hands inside it.
