The Prompt Gap

The Cambrian explosion of AI capabilities has both radically changed existing industries and begun to give rise to entirely new ones. Prompt engineering - the field of designing specialized instructions to unlock capabilities in AI models that transform basic queries into exceptional outputs - is among the fastest growing and least discussed of these new markets. What began as a niche skill when first coined several years ago has quickly evolved into a growing sector with significant untapped potential.

As AI models advance, the gap between what basic prompts can achieve and what models are capable of widens. While novice users achieve acceptable results, skilled prompt engineers consistently extract outputs of exceptional quality. This widening “prompt gap” creates a lucrative opportunity for those who can bridge it.

Stealthily, this is already happening. Prompt creators across sectors (productivity, business, research, creative tooling etc.) are building substantial followings and businesses, with many amassing tens of thousands of followers on social platforms. Some are even spinning up communities or subscriptions across third-party platforms, charging users monthly fees that are often as or more expensive than a ChatGPT pro subscription.

On PromptBase and AIPRM, platforms that have been spun up to try and attack segments of this market, popular prompt collections see millions of uses monthly, with top-performing prompts executed hundreds of thousands of times. Writing-based prompts dominate usage patterns, representing approximately 80% of the most frequently used prompts across these platforms.

Despite explosive growth, monetization for prompt engineering remains highly fragmented. Dozens of platforms compete with different models, inconsistent quality standards, and varying monetization approaches. This fragmentation forces both creators and users to navigate a maze of different interfaces, costs, and prompt formats.

The fundamental challenge across all platforms is intellectual property protection. Current marketplaces require revealing prompts to buyers, creating an inherent contradiction—creators must show what they’re selling, but once shown, their intellectual property can be easily copied. Recent U.S. Copyright Office rulings indicate that AI-generated content based purely on text prompts cannot be copyrighted, further complicating protection.

This creates a barrier to fair monetization. Creators invest time and expertise developing valuable prompts, yet lack effective mechanisms to protect their work. The result is a market constrained by trust issues and artificial pricing limitations.

The combination of market growth, fragmentation, and IP protection challenges creates a significant opportunity - one we think that Promptd can solve.

Promptd: Securing the Future of Prompt Creation

Promptd is a prompt marketplace that resolves the fundamental challenges facing prompt creators. Promptd’s TEE-based architecture ensures AI workloads remain encrypted and protected throughout their entire lifecycle—even during execution. This secure execution model transforms the prompt marketplace dynamic. Creators will no longer face the “reveal to sell” dilemma, allowing them to charge prices that reflect the true value of their prompts.

Promptd leverages Ritual’s native support for calling models from a TEE, whether those are custom finetunes or off-chain APIs like OpenAI and Claude. Since users can directly call these models from a Ritual smart contract, Promptd enables on-chain payments/subscriptions, and novel creator mechanics at the protocol level that actually interplay with each individual prompt (more on that later).

For creators, Promptd’s workflow will be both intuitive and powerful. They will define their AI workload within a secure Content Creation Studio, where the system automatically encrypts it, and later runs it within a TEE. Creators set pricing and generate preview examples to showcase quality, while their actual prompts remain permanently protected.

Users will browse prompts and examples of generated content, and upon purchase, gain the ability to generate content using the creator’s prompts. Behind the scenes, user inputs flow to the TEE, combine with creator prompts, execute on specified AI models, and return results—all without exposing the underlying prompt logic.

See our prototype walkthrough below:

Because Promptd is built with the ability to tie in on-chain economic primitives with the core marketplace workflow, it enables a whole universe of financialization around prompts that aren’t accessible to existing products. For example, users might be able to stake on their favorite creators in exchange for a portion of the generated fees from that creators’ prompts. That stake doubles as a reputation system for surfacing the best creators on Promptd. We can extend this mechanic to individual prompts—tokenizing each one so holders share in that specific prompt’s revenue. These sorts of primitives can be highly effective in bootstrapping the initial marketplace.

Beyond the core platform that we’ve prototyped here, we think there’s several compelling directions for a team to evolve Promptd: browser extensions for cross-platform access, private enterprise marketplaces, custom prompt creation services, educational content, and API access for application integration. Combined with primitives like embedded wallets and seamless fiat on-ramps, we imagine that the final evolution of Promptd is an application that appeals to the average user and AI/crypto-natives alike.

A New Creator Economy

Targeting the “prompt gap” represents what we think will become one of the more valuable and interesting sectors of the AI ecosystem, if executed correctly. A new creator economy is emerging, where prompt engineers build substantial businesses by unlocking AI’s hidden potential.

We think that Promptd could be a compelling product that (1) helps target fragmentation in the prompt engineering space and (2) enables preservation of creator IP through a mix of cryptographic and economic primitives made uniquely possible by Ritual. We also understand that the execution of something like Promptd relies on both a great product and a well-executed GTM; to that end we’ve also put together some of our thoughts and validations of this market and would like to work closely with a team to develop this strategy.

We’d love to work with a team that’s excited about this new landscape, has experience building consumer-facing products with viral potential, and is keen on experimenting with novel economic mechanisms. If you’re someone who spends a lot of time researching and pushing the limits of prompting, building applications with LLMs, diving into digital-native creator businesses, or simply think that you are the right person/team to execute this, we want to talk to you.

Ready to take Promptd all the way? Make sure to apply to Ritual Shrine and note it down in your application.