“Fantasy Hollywood” — Crypto and Community-Owned Characters - a16z crypto

Today, crypto technologies like decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) enable a new model of character development and ownership that could not only unbundle creative media, but also lower the barrier to entry for online communities to bring new characters into the world.

The communities could distribute governance tokens to the holders of character NFTs, which in turn can be used to vote on key creative decisions. Such collaborative relationships between creator and community are already happening and will only increase as participants explore the possibilities, both creative (including governance) and financial.

Today, most successful characters exist as intellectual property owned by a single corporation. This means that fans don’t have any governance, let alone direct ownership, of these characters, limiting them to being only passive consumers of the products and narratives that the corporation decides to create. Even if fans buy public equity in the co... See more

The next iteration of DAOs is therefore emerging around creative communities, to enable crowdsourced creativity and coordination (aka “creator DAOs” and similar).

What if some of our most important and culturally-relevant non-profits, which have to spend so much time, energy, and ironically, money fundraising, were owned and governed by DAOs? A treasury backed by real-world assets with a token fueled by narrative upside would be an interesting proposition.

While most of crypto focuses on the realms of finance and art, Mad Realities tackles Hollywood head-on. Today’s power structures concentrate power at the top—in a handful of studio executives in LA and NYC skyscrapers. UGC has begun to change this, but UGC is lacking great monetization; most of the pie is hoovered up by the platforms.