Audius is a cryptocurrency aiming to cut all the middle men between musicians and fans and replace them with its decentralised audio hosting and streaming protocol, since it’s launch audio has managed to get onboard 100.000 artists 5 million users and recently integrated with tic toxic the audio token has also grown grown the last year gaining the potential to become the next Spotify.
**What is audius **
Audius was founded by raniel rumburg and Forrest browning both are computer scientists with Ivy League degrees both into crypto since 2011. The both mined Bitcoin sold them at the top of the 2013 bull run and with the money started their own VC firms and made early investments into crypto companies like lightning labs. In 2018 they worked on building audius with the goal of giving musicians a censorship resistance platform and a larger piece of the profit pie on the summer audios raised 5.5 millions from venture capitals to expand its operations and supercharge development in September 2019 audius was completed and in 2020 the audio token began trading on top tier exchanges.
**How audios works **
The audius protocol consists of 3 layer 1) app layer 2) node layer 3) blockchain layer
The app layer includes the audius website and audius app for android and iOS. If you ever used either of these you will know that it doesn’t feel like using a dapp at all this is primarily because of a special non- custodial browser wallet created by audius called hedgehog which is embedded into audius standar login process. Now hedgehog works by automatically storing the private key of your wallet in your browser and it automatically completes any transaction you make without a prompt like other browser wallet. The seed phrase is sent to you via email when you sign up which is why it instructs you to save it and because keeping the key phrase in your email is not that safe audius tells not to keep much cryptos in the wallet. Now hedgehog is not that fully functional yet and this has to do with the resent changes audius made to the node layer of its tech Stack architecture of audius node layer is almost the same as polygons like polygon is a layer 2 blockchain that is used for improving scaling speed while remaining compatible with ethereum audius is in the process of swarming out its own permissioned layer 2 blockchain with solana witch began earlier this year. In other words it uses solana as a layer 2 blockchain for the ethereum.now some may recall polygons checkpoint nodes submit snapshots of the state of the plasma chain running running polygons smart contracts to ethereum this makes it possible to users to recover their tokens from ethereum using the last snapshot on ethereum if polygon ever goes down. Similarly audius nodes submit snapshots of the state of the audius protocol to ethereum specifically the section of the interplanetary file system or ipfs where audius artists store their music this makes it possible for artists to recover their music and content from ipfs using the last snapshot on ethereum of audius ever goes down. Audius actually uses a custom made extensions to ipfs called ord sp to ensure that music can quickly stored by musicians and retrieved by artists
