A16z: Blockchain empowering the creator economy is the future

Original author: a16z crypto editorial team
Original translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor's note: This article mainly discusses the connection and interaction between creators and technology, pointing out the potential of blockchain and NFT in creation, ownership, and community connection. Despite the growing demand for enforcing on-chain royalties, there are still challenges in distinguishing different types of NFT transfers. Newer royalty designs attempt to strike a balance between ensuring royalty payments and the composability of NFTs, while introducing two new ways to leverage incentive mechanisms.

The following is the original text (the original content has been deleted and reorganized for easier reading and understanding):

This article discusses the relationship between creators and technology, especially how blockchain and NFT show potential in creation, ownership, and community interaction. Although more and more people want to enforce creator royalties on the blockchain, there are still difficulties in distinguishing different types of NFT transactions. Recent royalty designs attempt to ensure that royalties are paid while keeping NFTs flexible. In addition, two new ways to leverage incentives are introduced.

Featured Report: Fixing the Creator Economy

By Chris Dixon

This should have been a golden age for creators: Today, technologies such as the internet, media hosting sites, streaming platforms, social media, and mobile devices have given creators unprecedented equal opportunities and access to a wider audience. However, most creators today still struggle to maintain a healthy income from their work.

While tech platforms have helped us discover and connect more artists, especially independent creators, creators remain dependent on a handful of tech companies that hold the power and make all the decisions for them. While these companies are completely dependent on the user base that uses their platforms and apps, they don’t share much control, ownership, or revenue with these creators.

Large creators may be able to cope, but small and medium-sized creators are struggling to thrive. The key question is how to return control to where it belongs - creators and fans. A future defined by blockchain will return power to creators and users. Blockchain represents ownership, and ownership means independence.

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RESOURCES: Creators Using Blockchain to Unlock New Possibilities

This week, we launched Voices Onchain, showcasing creators who are using blockchain to unlock new creative possibilities. They are using blockchain to build deeper connections with their fans and explore more ways to monetize. Click the link below to learn about the first creators’ stories and help nominate other artists/creators also working on blockchain.

Click here to explore

See also:

• About “Art, Authenticity and Anarchism” — FEWOCiOUS has been creating art since the age of 13. After selling his first painting at the age of 17, he continued to create and sell art through a series of successful NFT releases, including auctions in partnership with Christie's.

• About "The Creator's Path to Self-Sovereignty: The Answer Lies in Themselves" - Latashá is a music artist, world builder, and emerging technology enthusiast. She founded TOPIA, a Web3 media brand dedicated to guiding and highlighting independent artists; she also served as the community head of the NFT company ZORA. As a singer-songwriter, rapper, producer, and performance artist, Latashá combines NFTs and technologies such as MIDI controllers to create.

• About "Art and Wonder in the Age of Machine Intelligence" - Refik Anadol is an internationally renowned media artist (visiting researcher and lecturer at the Department of Design Media Arts at UCLA). Last year, one of his artworks was collected by MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York), becoming the first time that the institution has included a tokenized artwork in its permanent collection. Anadol’s NFT designs span data block sculptures, quantum computing, and space metaverse projects in partnership with NASA JPL.

• About “Telling the Creator’s Journey: Pleased 2 Meet U” — Emily Yang, also known as pplpleasr, is a multidisciplinary artist and co-founder of decentralized content studio Shibuya. She went 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

By Cuy Sheffield (2021)

Every day we consume popular entertainment that is centered around characters. A group of successful characters can become the basis of a franchise that spans decades (such as Star Wars, Marvel, or Harry Potter) and is successfully integrated into products across a variety of platforms and media types.

However, most successful characters are owned as intellectual property by a single company. This means that fans do not have any governance rights, let alone direct ownership, and can only passively consume the products and storylines that companies decide to create.

Today, blockchain and crypto technologies offer a completely new model for character development and ownership that not only deconstructs creative media, but also lowers the barrier to entry for online communities to introduce new characters. These technologies allow 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 interplay of technology, content and distribution is discussed. The conversation covers the journeys of multiple creators, specifically as the industry evolved: from TV and cable to the rise of the Internet/Web 1.0, to Web 2.0 and distribution models like streaming and business models like advertising, to Web3 and emerging technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR).

The podcast also discusses hot topics such as intellectual property (IP), decentralization, remote work, and other topics of concern to companies and community builders: such as the dilemma of innovators, whether to choose to build or acquire, how to manage creative people, etc.

Click to listen

Related Content:

Art About Tech, Tech for Art

with Simon Denny & Sonal Chokshi

Technology has changed art as we know it, and artists have evolved with each new technology. It’s a story that’s been around since the beginning of humanity, from cave paintings to computers. Behind it is an endless debate about invention and hybridity, commerce and art, marginal art and classic art, and how art can reach new audiences.

In this episode of a16z’s Web3 Podcast, Berlin-based contemporary artist Simon Denny discusses how artists experiment on emerging technology platforms like web browsers, iPhones, and social media, how generative art found its “native” medium on the blockchain, and why NFTs are in the spotlight; whether we’re in a globalized online monoculture, and more.

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How NFT Royalties Work: Design, Challenges, and New Ideas

By Michael Blau, Scott Duke Kominers, and Daren Matsuoka

Automatically executed royalties have always been a key value proposition for secondary sales of NFTs. Ideally, creators could set royalties on-chain, and they would be automatically paid wherever their work was sold on the internet, without having to rely on the market or other third parties to enforce royalties in good faith.

However, the demand for on-chain enforcement of royalties has outstripped progress in actually implementing them. The problem is that it can be difficult to distinguish which NFT transfers are sales for which royalties should be paid, and which are other types of transfers (such as transfers between users' own wallets, sending NFTs as gifts, etc.). Newer royalty designs attempt to address this challenge by recognizing different types of transfers and enforcing royalties where appropriate, but these mechanisms have significant tradeoffs between strict royalty enforcement (guaranteeing that royalties are paid) 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 achieving composability. The authors introduce two new approaches to NFT royalties that leverage incentives to drive market participants to respect royalties. The goal is not to advocate for a particular approach, but to help developers consider different design options and their associated trade-offs when building NFT royalty designs.

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