

## What Is Audius (AUDIO)?

[Audius](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/audius/markets/) is a decentralized music streaming protocol initially built on [POA network](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/poa/), but now living on [Solana](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/solana/). Audius was launched to remedy the inefficiencies of the music industry, which is plagued by intransparent music rights ownership and intermediaries standing between artists and their audience. 

Audius aims to align the interests of artists, fans, and node operators through its platform powered by its native AUDIO token. Artists can upload music, stored and distributed by content and discovery nodes, that fans can listen to for free. Currently, Audius rewards content creators through rewards like featuring in the weekly trending lists. In the future, it plans to integrate stablecoins for artists to offer paid content, as well as artist tokens that give fans the ability to access exclusive content, potentially cooperating with platforms like [Rally](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/rally/). 


## Who Are the Founders of Audius?

Audius was founded in 2018 by Roneil Rumburg and Forrest Browning, two California-based entrepreneurs. Roneil Rumburg is a Stanford University alumnus who co-founded Kleiner Perkins, an early-stage seed fund investing in blockchain and AI companies. Forrest Browning, also a Stanford alumnus, is a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient and a co-founder of StacksWare, an enterprise data center management platform. The team is complemented by 21 other employees and backed by a host of other illustrious names, such as deadmau5, a popular electronic music producer, Adam Goldberg, co-founder and MD of Stanford Crypto, and Bing Gordon, co-founder of EA Games.


## What Makes Audius Unique?

The Audius ecosystem consists of four main participants: artists, fans, content nodes and discovery nodes. 

Artists publish content on the Audius content ledger. They can do so at no cost and music is streamed at 320kbps, comparable to standards of [Spotify](https://www.spotify.com/us/) and [Google Play Music](https://play.google.com/music/listen). Because of Audius’ decentralized nature, there is no copyright protection, although the protocol is working on an arbitration system that will be overlooked by the community. Artists can use Audius to experiment or share bonus tracks, and the platform plans to include artist tokens to facilitate monetization, subject to artists staking AUDIO. Artists can also articipate in reward schemes that see tokens airdropped to the most popular artists.

Fans can listen to tracks for free and may in the future be able to stake AUDIO to participate in artists’ growth on the platform. They can also showcase their verified NFTs through the platform and earn different badges.

Content nodes maintain the availability of content on AudSP, the platform-native extension to IPFS. An artist’s client elects a set of these nodes to do so automatically on the artist’s behalf, while fan clients fetch the content, submit proof, and request keys to content nodes. Artists could also choose to run their own content nodes and maintain greater control over their content distribution. The content ledger maintains a record and a single source of truth for all actions on the protocol.

Discovery nodes index metadata queryable by users In other words, they enable users to find new content and act as its registry on the platform.


## Related Pages:

Check out [Solana (SOL)](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/solana/) — the high-speed blockchain powering Audius.

Check out [Steem (STEEM)](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/) — a community-focused blockchain.

Read our [article about Crypto Music.](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/de/article/what-is-crypto-music-and-how-is-it-revolutionizing-the-music-industry)

Get the latest crypto news and latest trading insights with the [CoinMarketCap blog](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/categories/blog).


## How Many Audius (AUDIO) Coins Are There in Circulation?

The total supply of AUDIO is 1 billion tokens, with a current circulating supply of 411m AUDIO. The yearly inflation is 7%, and 50 million AUDIO were distributed to the top 10 artists and fans, with 75% going to artists based on stream count. The token distribution is as follows:



* 23% to premined rewards and airdrops
* 36% to investors
* 41% to founders and the protocol itself

The token is designed for three main purposes:



* Securing the network
* Unlocking access to features
* Acting as a governance token

Tokens can be staked as collateral of value-added services. Node operators can also stake AUDIO to secure the network and run the protocol, while each token also receives governance weight and influences the protocol’s future. 


## How Is the Audius Network Secured?

Audius chose to migrate to Solana because of the growing demand. The team indicated Solana was chosen for several reasons. First, it’s cheap, offering 1m transactions for 10$. It’s also fast, with block times of 400ms and confirmations under one second. Finally, Solana is decentralized, with over 200 nodes on its mainnet. Staking and governance functionality still remain on Ethereum, with AUDIO being a [ERC-20](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/erc-20) token. 

Solana is a layer one blockchain with a [proof-of-stake](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/proof-of-stake-pos) [consensus mechanism](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/consensus-mechanism) with partial Byzantine fault tolerance. It has 200 nodes operating worldwide that can, at their peak, process up to 50,000 transactions per second. Solana performs a set of coordinated optimizations to achieve such impressive performance and processes transactions in a multi-threaded way, which sets it apart from slower blockchains. 


## Where Can You Buy Audius (AUDIO)?

AUDIO is available on [FTX](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/ftx/), [Binance](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/binance/), [Uniswap (V2)](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/uniswap-v2/), [BitStamp](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/bitstamp/) and [Gate.io](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/gate-io/). 


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