Mad Realities and the Rise of User-Owned Content

Upvoting content should be as easy as upvoting on Reddit. Contributing to a show should be as easy as using your credit card or Apple Pay. Payouts should flow directly to your bank account.

bigger vision for what Mad Realities can become. They want to build out an underlying protocol and a distribution platform on top of it, allowing any person or community to create permission-less UGC.

One of my steadfast beliefs for web3 is that it needs to be (mostly) invisible to your everyday person. No one wants to understand what a blockchain is, or try to parse out the difference between fungible and non-fungible. I wrote about this in Most People Won’t Know Web3 Exists. This is especially true for a consumer-facing crypto media company.

Devin and Alice were frustrated that crypto was insular, complex, and intimidating. Crypto had bled into finance, art, and gaming, but crypto hadn’t truly come to disrupt media or culture, and it certainly wasn’t yet mainstream. They set out to change that.

The path to onboarding 1 billion people to crypto probably looks like a combination of Mosseri’s vision and what Devin and Alice are building. It boils down to culture—and at the end of the day, content powers culture.

use the building blocks of web3 to help creatives directly see upside from the success of their work and have a more intimate relationship with their audience.

audiences have never had more power in distribution or creativity: we’ve seen TikTok’s algorithm expand who can achieve fame; Twitch’s livestreams reinvent parasocial connection; and companies like HQ Trivia pioneer new forms of interactive media. But audiences have no ownership or upside. Mad Realities hopes to change that.

Mad Realities envision a world where rather than UGC populating our digital realms, we get UGC with property rights—UGC with better economics and governance. UGC that accrues value to creators rather than to platforms. Content that isn’t only user-generated, but user-owned.

underneath the hood, Mad Realities aspires to be something more: a platform for user-owned content. YouTube for web3.

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.