Cultural Liquidity: The Rise of Cryptomedia

Distribution—is it easy to get discovered?

Monetization—is it easy to make money?

Your social media posts do make money. It’s just that you don’t see any of it. Your gorgeous photographs, compelling essays, and motion graphics draw attention to platforms like Facebook and Google, which churn advertising dollars off of all those eyeballs. You do all the hard work. They make the money from it. And now that you see it that way, isn... See more

If you think of the manufacturing of culture as a triangle, the three points to that triangle are:

Creator tools—is it easy to make stuff?

Cryptomedia and digital assets aren’t exclusive to music; they’ll rearchitect all cultural industries. Many of us were taught that because something is digital, it has no value. We were conditioned by the early internet to assume that everything online is free. But digital creations do have value; the system is just set up so that we don’t see it.

The things that move culture—film, music, books, art, writing—have historically been fairly illiquid. Cultural impact hasn’t mapped to economic value created or captured. Liquidity is a measure of market efficiency, and the “market” of culture is inefficient.

Jacob Horne, the co-founder of Zora, coined the term “cryptomedia” to capture a new form of digital creation. Hypermedia is what we all know and love—the graphics, audio, text, and hyperlinks we interact with online all day. Cryptomedia is both universally accessible and individually ownable. Horne writes, “Cryptomedia can be thought of as hypermed... See more