A16z: Blockchain Empowering the Creator Economy is the Future

Editor's Note: This article mainly discusses the connection and interaction between creators and technology, pointing out the potential of blockchain and NFTs in creation, ownership, and community engagement. Despite the growing demand for on-chain royalty enforcement, challenges remain in distinguishing between different types of NFT transfers. Newer royalty designs attempt to balance royalty payments with NFT composability, while introducing two new methods utilizing incentive mechanisms.

The following is the original article (with some deletions and reorganization for readability):

This article explores the relationship between creators and technology, specifically how blockchain and NFTs are showcasing potential in creation, ownership, and community interaction. While more people are looking to enforce creator royalties on the blockchain, difficulties persist in distinguishing between different types of NFT transactions. Recent royalty designs aim to ensure royalty payments while keeping NFTs flexible for use. Additionally, two new methods utilizing incentive mechanisms are introduced.

Featured Report: Fixing the Creator Economy

This was supposed to be the golden age of creators: today, unprecedented technologies such as the internet, media hosting sites, streaming platforms, social media, and mobile devices have provided creators with equal opportunities and broader audience reach. However, most creators today still struggle to sustain a healthy income from their work.

While tech platforms have helped us discover and connect with more artists, especially independent creators, creators still rely on a few who hold power and make all decisions for them in tech companies. While these companies are entirely dependent on the user base using their platforms and apps, they haven't shared much control, ownership, or revenue with these creators.

Larger creators may cope, but small and medium-sized creators find it challenging to thrive. The key issue is how to return control to where it rightfully belongs — in the hands of creators and fans. A future defined by blockchain will redistribute power to creators and users. Blockchain signifies ownership, and ownership means independence.

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Resource: Creators Unlocking New Possibilities with Blockchain Technology

This week, we launched Voices Onchain, a special showcase of creators leveraging blockchain technology to unlock new creative possibilities. They have formed deeper connections with fans through blockchain and explored more ways to monetize their work. Click the link below to discover the stories of the initial set of creators and help nominate other artists/creators working on the blockchain.

Click here to explore

Also featured:

• On "Art, Authenticity, and Anarchy" — FEWOCiOUS began creating art at the age of 13. After selling his first painting at 17, he continued to create and sell art through a series of successful NFT releases, including an auction in collaboration with Sotheby's.

• On "Creators' Path to Self-Sovereignty: The Answer Lies Within" — Latashá is a music artist, world-builder, and emerging tech enthusiast. She founded TOPIA, a Web3 media brand dedicated to guiding and showcasing independent artists; she also served as the community lead at NFT company ZORA. As a creative singer, rapper, producer, and performer, Latashá combines NFTs and MIDI controllers in her work.

• On "Art and Wonder in the Age of Machine Intelligence" — Refik Anadol is an internationally renowned media artist (visiting researcher and lecturer in the Design Media Arts department at UCLA). Last year, one of his artworks was collected by MoMA, marking the institution's first inclusion of tokenized art in its permanent collection. Anadol's NFT designs encompass data sculptures, quantum computing, and a space-time universal project in collaboration with NASA JPL.

• On "Telling the Creator's Journey: Pleased 2 Meet U" — Emily Yang, known as pplpleasr, is a multidisciplinary artist and co-founder of the decentralized content studio Shibuya. She transitioned from creating visual effects for films like "Batman v Superman," "Wonder Woman," and "Star Trek Beyond," as well as commercials and games, to defining the visual style of the DeFi movement and creating the first NFT cover for Fortune magazine.

About Community-Owned Characters and the Power of Decentralized Media

Every day, we consume role-based popular entertainment. A group of successful characters can become the foundation for a series spanning decades (such as Star Wars, Marvel, or Harry Potter) and be successfully integrated into products across various platforms and media types.

However, most successful characters are owned as intellectual property by a single company. This means fans have no governance rights, let alone direct ownership, and can only passively consume the products and storylines created at the discretion of the company.

Today, blockchain and crypto technology offer a new role development and ownership model that not only can deconstruct creative media but also lower the barriers for online communities to introduce new characters. These technologies enable characters to more fully represent the communities that support them.

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Creators, Creativity, and Technology

with Bob Iger (2022)

In this in-depth conversation with Disney CEO Bob Iger, the interaction of technology, content, and distribution is discussed. The conversation covers the journeys of multiple creators, especially amidst industry evolution: from TV and cable to the rise of the Internet/Web 1.0, then to Web 2.0 and distribution models like streaming and business models like advertising, all the way to Web3 and emerging technologies like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and more.

The podcast also delves into hot topics such as intellectual property (IP), decentralization, remote work, and other themes of interest to both company and community builders: the innovator's dilemma, the build vs. buy decision, how to manage creative talent, and more.

Click to Listen

Related Content:

The Art of Technology, the Technology of Art

with Simon Denny & Sonal Chokshi

We know technology has changed art, and artists have evolved with the emergence of each new technology. This is a story that has existed since the beginning of humanity, from cave paintings to computers. It is a tale of invention and mashups, of commerce and art, of outsider and canonical art, and the endless debate of how art engages new audiences.

In this episode of the a16z Web3 podcast, Berlin-based contemporary artist Simon Denny discusses how artists are experimenting on emerging technology platforms like web browsers, iPhones, and social media; how art has found its "native" medium on the blockchain, and why NFTs have become a focal point; whether we are in a globalized online monoculture, and more.

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NFT Royalties: Design, Challenges, and New Frontiers

In the secondary sales of NFTs, automatically executed royalties have been a key value proposition. In an ideal setting, creators can set royalties on-chain, and the royalty is automatically paid no matter where the work is sold on the internet, without relying on markets or other third parties to honor the royalty.

However, the demand for on-chain enforced royalties has outstripped progress in actual implementation. The challenge lies in distinguishing which NFT transfers are sales transactions that should trigger royalty payments and which are transfers of other kinds (such as transfers between a user's wallets, gifting NFTs, etc.). Newer royalty designs attempt to address this challenge by identifying different transfer types to enforce royalties where appropriate, but these mechanisms face significant trade-offs between strict royalty enforcement (ensuring royalty payment) and composability (the ability of NFTs to interact with other on-chain applications).

This article discusses the pros and cons of existing NFT royalty designs and their balance between enforcing royalties and enabling composability. The author introduces two new NFT royalty approaches that leverage incentive mechanisms to drive market participants to respect royalties. The goal is not to advocate for a specific approach but to help developers consider different design options and their trade-offs when building NFT royalty systems.

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