Just like Defi’s money legos are about to revolutionize finance, media legos will deeply alter the social layers of the web. They will change how creators issue, distribute and monetize their work while defining new rules for content exploration, collecting and community building. This post dives into the paradigm shifts underpinning the internet renaissance and reveals opportunities for innovators.
Digital ownership and originality
NFTs are scarce, digital representations of a unique good or asset. BTC or ETH are also scarce but as monetary assets they have to be fungible - every unit is arbitrarily exchangeable for any other unit. NFTs are a horizontal piece of infrastructure that can be used to issue digital representations of art, music, collectibles, essays, books, virtual fashion or financial assets like invoices, warehouse receipts or real estate units.
They can represent exclusive ownership or access rights (think licenses) to the underlying piece of content, but they don’t have to. In most of the current early experiments PNG, MP3, XYZ file can still be copied and distributed over the internet without limitations. What makes the NFT unique is its provenance - it links one original piece of media to its creator for eternity. This link is cryptographically verifiable. Hence, NFTs are the first system that allows information to be both free and valuable at the same time by having a provable record of originality.
The more that a creation is experienced, circulated or remixed the more value it will accrue to the original. The actual work is a derivative of the value of its simulations.
The future of collecting may be less in owning the thing that nobody else has, and more in owning the thing that everybody else has.
This is a paradigm shift; the inversion of the internet; a renaissance.
Creator economy
Based on the concept of provenance, creators are empowered to issue media NFTs with baked in creator fees. Every time a media asset is interacted with or sold on secondary markets creators would benefit economically from their work’s rising popularity.
Creator fees can be programmed in various different ways borrowing from Defi’s financial primitives. E.g. creator fees could vary based on the absolute volume of a secondary market transaction, the frequency of secondary market transactions or they could be priced on a bonding curve. Rents or licensing fees on a daily base might be explored - programmatic, continuous monetization. Either of these variations will be self enforced through the programmable media asset itself - no need for legacy rights enforcement in front of meat-space courts.
Beyond that, media assets can be used to express the provenance of status through a sovereign prove of belonging and praticipation within a community.
Open data architectures
Creators and collectors won’t be locked into any given marketplace or interface. Instead, experiences and interfaces will be built around the NFTs. The underlying data architecture is turned upside down. In web2 data and media assets have been created and siloed in closed architectures (bandcamp, unity) but in web3 games, virtual worlds and other interfaces new experiences will be created around the media asset itself. Based on this new logic we might see the rise of completely new media standards coming with strong network effects.
Programmatic capital formation over IP
The DAO experiment of 2016 or the ICO hype in 2017 have been early harbingers of how the future of capital formation over IP might look like. Crowd funded creative work can be re-invented by combining media media assets with defi’s financial primitives. What started with $ESSAY on Mirror or generalized freelance markets on Erasure Bay might be used to fund complex creative work like music albums, books or movies up front in return for an ownership stake in the media asset’s long term upside - funding over IP.
Based on this development we might see new types of record labels, art auction or publishing houses with direct access to the underlying media asset (shout out to Sfermion). Crypto won’t just transform venture capital and asset management but also capital formation across the media landscape.
Stateful, interactive and composable content to crate new experiences
Most of the innovation we’ve seen in the NFT space today has been rather collectible focused, not experience focused. Within this new paradigm we can create entirely new user experiences which haven’t been possible before.
Top left: a piece issued on Async Art (portfolio) which displays twot underprivileged orphan boys and their professional idol (pilot, firefighter, astronaut) based on their annual preferences. On each of the boy’s birthdays the door opens and a BTC address is revealed to collect donations for them. The BTC sent will be programatically distributed on their 18th birthday.
Top right: B20 bundles the Beeple 20 Collection - one of the most historic and valuable art project in the NFT space - along with the VR monuments it lives in. The ownership of this bundle has been fractionalized into B20 tokens. The bundle itself is immutable, unless bought out entirely, by anyone with the requisite DAI and B20 tokens.
Bottom left: Catalog powered by Zora enables musicians to issue scarce virtual vniyls which can be fractionalized and traded on secondary markets - letting the creators participate in the upside of every valuation change through programmatic fees.
Bottom right: Mirror’s $ESSAY experiment proved that creative work can be funded up front leaving the backers and the issuer with an ownership staek in the actual work result - or book or movie or xyz going forward.
A media asset can change its shapes, colors, sounds, text or combinations thereof based on arbitrary data inputs. It can have various different states. A picture can change colors or shapes within it based on time-, weather-, or geo location data from a physical object or based on interactions with it’s owners. It can be interactive. Thinking this concept further the state of one media asset can define the state of another or multiple other media assets - they are composable and interoperable.
Authors and movie makers could create stories which change sceneries, protagonists or story lines based on interactions with the respective audience - analogous to Netflix’ Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch. New multiplayer games could be launched taking into account arbitrary input data around celebrities, performance data of athletes etc.
Experiences can be bundled by linking the ownership of a media asset to other services in the virtual or physical world like concert tickets, ownership or access to other virtual goods, merchandise and more. The owner of a branded fashion or digital art asset might get access to its customized, physical 3D printed equivalent etc.
If media assets are derivatives of the value of their simulations than we can think of programmatic index portfolios of media assets (NFTX, Balancer) or bundled exposure to a piece of virtual land, a virtual musuem and the art exhibition taking place within it (B20) for example. The design space for the financialization of media assets is gigantic.
Contextual media graphs to create neo- search and social layers
Once all content went on chain we will find new ways of organizing and contextualizing it. This category has barely been explored yet given taht we are still in the early installment phase following Carlotta Perez’ technological surge cycle.
By creating not just a graph of media assets but by contextualizing those assets, their meta data and relationships to one another we can create a semantic, machine readable web that understands context. To access and browse through it we need query and indexing tools (thegraph) across different ledgers as well as a generalizable and customizable interface to browse through it (Anytype).
Atop of such neo OS we could build new search- and recommendation engines underpinned by the open economy’s principles of openness, collaboration and participation. Open marketplaces for customizable and open source search algorithms, interfaces or recommendation engines could thrive while putting an end to manipulative, black box data monopolies.
This is just a tiny piece of the tip of the iceberg. If you are an entrepreneur considering to pursue your next venture in the field of open media - please reach out.
Thanks for the inspiration and critical feedback on this post Trent McConaghy (who built the first open media project I’m aware of - Asribe - in 2013), Zhanna and Anton from Anytype, Lisa, Conlan and Nate from Async, Jon from Shapeshift, Ian from IDEO, Jacob from Zora, Michael from Catalog, Andrew from Sfermion, Christoph from Virtex and others.
Thank you for this wonderful insight. Technology often produces surprises that no one predicts. Modern technology is not changing us. It's changing society. I'm thinking more and more about the Metaverse here and what changes it will bring. In the Metaverse, everyone will create virtual worlds/comments/pictures/games/experiences via icon/asset-based tools/engines/NFT's. If we think about the Metaverse, it will be a living experience that exists consistently for everyone and in real-time. We need to think about a new economic model. Individuals and companies will be able to create, own, invest, sell, and be rewarded for an incredibly wide range of "work" that produces "value" that is recognized by others. Content and meta-things will be created and operated by an incredibly wide range of contributors. In a new (metaverse) economy, we need new models and ways to store and use the value we create in different decentralized places.