This article is influenced by the following tweet and contains my personal ideas about Onchain Media: Onchain Media Meditations. While his explanation explores new technologies leveraging onchain features like composability, network effects, and interoperability, I hope to provide suggestive ideas in response through this article.
One of blockchain's powerful aspects is the combination of public goods and tokenization. Examples include Nouns, which uses CC0, and Uniswap, which adopts open source. Historically, monetizing public goods was challenging, but blockchain has made it possible. In essence, blockchain transforms previously non-monetizable public goods into profitable ventures through tokenization.
Traditionally, media content rights were owned by the creators. Publicly sharing these rights aligns with the crypto ethos and appears to be a beneficial approach. Imagine if J.K. Rowling wrote a novel, placed it in the public domain, and tokenized it. This public domain status would allow anyone to fork the novel, create illustrations, music, games, or even movies based on it. This fosters creativity and expands the original work's reach.
Next, let's consider the design that Axie Infinity implemented to integrate non-crypto users (Normies) into crypto products. They separated asset ownership from gameplay, allowing those who owned Axie NFTs to rent them to players who focused solely on playing the game. This model enabled players to "play to earn" without dealing with blockchain complexities, thereby involving Normies in the product.
Applying this concept, imagine publishing a 200-page book. Each page is sold as an NFT, resulting in 200 NFTs. NFT holders can freely create content, recorded fully on-chain in SVG format. If an NFT holder isn't adept at writing, they can rent their NFT to a better writer. The book, sold on the blockchain, distributes revenue between content creators and NFT holders, creating a decentralized magazine that includes non-crypto users.
This fee distribution model can leverage Variant's Progressive Ownership model. Regularly publishing such magazines could establish a Hyperstructure.
Currently, there is no incentive to share lists of articles you find valuable, music playlists, or favorite YouTube videos. Similarly, researchers and writers lack incentives to share primitive information before it's turned into content, such as notes in Figma, Notion, or memo apps. However, such information, when shared, possesses public good qualities—non-rivalrous and non-excludable—and benefits society.
Wouldn't you like to know the articles Vitalik reads or gain insights from him? Or learn what your role models are reading and learning? Many people would be interested in your preferences too. By incentivizing the sharing of unique personal insights and enabling earnings from this, a new media model emerges. Those who aren't confident writers can still become creators and earn revenue. This model transforms anyone into a curator, sharing drafts or preliminary ideas. Followers value your preferences and insights, enhancing engagement and knowledge sharing.
The implementation is straightforward:
Followers pay a subscription fee to access your lists.
You disclose the information and receive the fee.
Ethereum is described as a "computer that lives in the sky" (source). Imagine a computer connected to numerous keyboards and mouse, operated by many people simultaneously. Looking at the Finder on a Mac, you can see how tagging files helps organize them efficiently. Could this concept be applied to the computer in the sky?
When media content is tokenized using ERC721, we can attach attestations like:
[Contract address], [token ID], [Array of tags]
Tags might include terms like zero-knowledge proofs, Layer 2, or articles. By having many media sources execute this contract and add tags, we could achieve universal tagging. This system would streamline content organization across the blockchain.
