Mad Realities and the Rise of User-Owned Content

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.

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.

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.

But what if the next Stars Wars isn’t created by George Lucas, but by a group of people on the internet? What if the next Marvel isn’t the brainchild of Stan Lee, but is crowdsourced by thousands of tokenholders? What if Pixar fans could vote on the next Pixar character, and reap the rewards of that IP’s profit? What if the next Bachelor isn’t crea... See more

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.

In a single “internet minute” on those three platforms: YouTube users stream 694K hours of video; Instagram users share 65K photos; and TikTok users watch 167M videos.

What if the next generation of user-generated content—for the next generation of the internet—is user-owned content? UOC, perhaps 🤔 The crowd not only creates the content, but owns it, sharing in economic upside all orchestrated by blockchain. In this future, a platform to power UOC would be massive.

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