A roundtable with Porter Stowell (CEO, W3.io), Audie Sheridan (CTO, W3.io), Brian Freeman (CEO, Creatorland), and Giancarlo Roma (Senior Business Development Associate, Ava Labs)
The creator economy is now a $250 billion industry – and it is still accelerating at four times the rate of U.S. GDP growth. But for most creators, that headline figure remains out of reach. Their deal pipelines live in inboxes, their rates are guesswork, and the administrative burden of running a one-person media business eats the hours they should spend creating. Meanwhile, the infrastructure powering the platforms they depend on has long been dominated by centralized cloud providers charging what the industry has quietly come to call a “cloud tax.”
The Creator Economy’s Hidden BottleneckThe creator economy is now estimated at more than $250 billion and continues to grow rapidly. What structural challenges within this industry led to the development of Dealsync?
Porter Stowell, CEO, W3.io:
If you asked a creator to 10x their earnings within a year, how would they do it? It’s a hard problem to solve because time becomes their biggest bottleneck. Dealsync was created to scale an individual creator to achieve this type of goal. Less time spent on business development and payments, more time creating!
What operational challenges do creators face today when managing brand partnerships and negotiations?
Brian Freeman, CEO, Creatorland:
The biggest operational challenge is that creators are running real businesses through tools that weren’t designed for it. Their inbox is their deal pipeline, their DMs are their CRM, and their media kit is a PDF they update manually every few weeks if they remember to.
We’ve seen inboxes with 300-500 emails a week where legitimate brand deals are buried under spam, cold outreach, and platform notifications. And then there’s the information asymmetry – creators are operating blind. They don’t know what fair rates look like, they don’t know what their peers are charging, and they don’t have visibility into which brands are actively hiring.
Why Legacy Cloud Couldn’t Support the VisionEarly development of Dealsync ran into limitations on traditional cloud providers. What challenges did you encounter?
Audie Sheridan, CTO, W3.io:
Legacy cloud forces you into rigid capacity tiers. You overprovision because you have to, then pay for it whether you use it or not. The more AI-native your application, the worse the economics get. When Creatorland came to us while building Dealsync, their experience validated exactly what we’d built W3 to solve. Our approach is fundamentally different: the infrastructure is the protocol. There’s no separate compute layer to provision, maintain, or manage.
How does decentralized GPU infrastructure achieve up to 50% cost reduction while maintaining performance and scalability?
Audie Sheridan, CTO, W3.io:
What advantages did W3 Cloud provide that made building on decentralized infrastructure the clear choice?
Brian Freeman, CEO, Creatorland:
It started with cost economics and evolved into something bigger. Our early A/B tests showed W3’s inference and analysis costs were less than 5% of what the same compute cost us on our existing hyperscaler infrastructure. In production, it is looking more like less than 1%. At scale, that is millions in savings, which means more experiments, a better product, and a lower price for our users.
W3 offers a fundamentally different path: continuous, durable compute powered by distributed infrastructure around the globe.
Built for Business: The Avalanche ConnectionWhat made Avalanche a natural fit for the Dealsync platform?
Giancarlo Roma, Senior Business Development Associate, Ava Labs:
We are actively building the rails for embedded finance – real financial applications running on decentralized infrastructure. W3 is one of the teams helping make that possible, shipping production software that connects AI, payments, compliance, and settlement into workflows that enterprises can actually deploy.
Porter Stowell, CEO, W3.io:
How does W3 orchestrate Avalanche, Space and Time, and W3 Cloud into a seamless system for end users?
Audie Sheridan, CTO, W3.io:
Each component has a specific role. Avalanche provides high-throughput, low-latency settlement. Space and Time provides cryptographically verifiable data, so when Dealsync surfaces a deal recommendation, the underlying data has a provable chain of custody. W3 sits above both as the active orchestrator, making real-time decisions about routing, execution, and settlement across the entire stack. From the end user’s perspective, it’s one seamless product.
What does this collaboration signal about the future of AI-driven applications on decentralized infrastructure – and how important is modular architecture to getting there?
Giancarlo Roma, Senior Business Development Associate, Ava Labs:
The next generation of applications will be built more like modern software stacks, where different technologies handle different parts of the workflow. The user doesn’t need to see any of that complexity – they just experience a platform that is faster, more reliable, and easier to use.
Creators as Savers: The Road to BitcoinDealsync’s AI model is trained on more than 30 million data points. How does that data improve the way brand deals are evaluated and negotiated?
Brian Freeman, CEO, Creatorland:
The core value right now is pattern recognition across thousands of creator inboxes. Across our initial 700+ beta users’ inboxes we’ve identified over 31K brand deals, 11,600 unique brands, and 12,700 unique brand contacts. A significant portion of those deals had gone unanswered because creators lost them in inbox noise.
Downstream, we see this powering rate benchmarking and eventually negotiation assistance – where we can surface relevant context like “this brand typically pays X for this type of content” based on real deal data, not guesswork.
Porter Stowell, CEO, W3.io:
Dealsync solves the first problem: helping creators find and close more deals in less time. Initial findings show Dealsync is surfacing over $1,000 per creator inbox per month in hidden or lost opportunities – deals buried in inbox noise that creators never would have known about. Scale that across 100,000 users and the numbers start to compound fast. But closing a deal is only half the equation. Creators still need to get paid fast with low fees and also need to have places to put their new earnings, and that’s where the next layer of what we’re building comes in.
What Comes Next_________________________________________________________________________
