A secure, adaptable and sustainable model for the public funding of global arts and culture
Great storytelling will always connect, but the pathways to that connection have changed.
‘Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate, than by the content of the communication.’
Marshall McLuhan
Today's teenagers have never known a world without smartphones and social networks.
They are the best connected, informed and diverse of any generation in history, but more than that, they don’t just consume culture handed from above - they make, share and remix it too.
Ahead of them are two generations born into a world shaped in no small part by public service broadcasting.
Pioneered in the 1920s by the British Broadcasting Corporation - better known as the BBC, the approach was revolutionary and widely emulated throughout the world, providing a template that has been vital to the functioning of democratic societies ever since.
Neither commercial nor State-controlled, public broadcasting’s only raison d’etre is public service. It is the public’s broadcasting organisation; it speaks to everyone as a citizen. Public broadcasters encourage access to and participation in public life. They develop knowledge, broaden horizons and enable people to better understand themselves by better understanding the world and others.
Public Broadcasting Why? How? - UNESCO
Public service broadcasters central security was assured against a publicly owned asset - the terrestrial broadcasting spectrum. This provided a foundation for sustainable funding for the creative community and evolved through thoughtfully considered and adaptable governance structures that prioritised the public good over profit.
Absolved of commercial imperative, public broadcasting was able to elevate daring storytellers, fund bold ideas and spotlight emerging areas of research that were outside mainstream discourse, whilst allowing talent to remain free to benefit from the commercial exploitation of their work.
Pound for pound, no country in the world has a better record in helping new creative talent to find its feet
Incentive mechanisms
‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.’
At their inception, public service broadcasters acted as centralised intermediaries, coordinating a number of stakeholders to ensure the system’s goal of ensuring primacy of the public good.
As communication technologies have evolved, the existing public service model for funding freely created and openly accessed arts and culture has struggled to adapt.
Mobile phones and social platforms have lowered barriers to entry for a new generation of creators, ensuring a rapid departure of youth from traditional television, leaving the average age of a primetime BBC viewer at 61, whilst the supposedly edgier Channel 4 - originators of Black Mirror, comes in at 55.
Into the void left behind, has flooded a new borderless digital economy, flush with passionate creative endeavour, but monopolised by corporate interests, whose motives are detached from the far-sighted values that nurtured the talents of the previous generation of storytellers.
Around the world, public funding for the arts is being cut, replaced with commercial sponsorships that bring with them inherent conflicts. In the US both PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) and NPR (National Public Radio), historically two of America’s most trusted and impartial institutions are under threat.
PBS gave the world Sesame Street, among many other things, whilst NPR nurtured the producers behind podcast studio Gimlet Media, recently acquired by Spotify for over $200m.
Both the BBC and Channel 4 utilises the broadcast spectrum to secure their platform but then align incentives in different ways. The BBC charges a ‘ licence fee’ paid by the UK population with its status akin to a public utility, whilst Channel 4 - as a non-profit, relies on on a corporate partnership model - where commercial revenues are fully reinvested in public service programming.
As the world becomes more and more globally connected, the BBC and Channel 4, along with the entire public broadcasting model finds itself at a crossroads with only two real options.
Path 1 - Paid subscriptions
Initially this approach looks to provide both sustainable revenues aligned with a quality product. However this model has downsides - in the short term access is linked to the ability to pay, therefore reinforcing filter bubble culture, whilst over the long term a winner take all market dynamic gradually shifts a platform’s relationship to its value creating contributors from cooperative to competitive.
Why Decentralisation Matters, Chris Dixon
Path 2 - Advertising supported
Down the other path lie partnerships with corporate sponsors. This approach might ensure open access to all but at the expense of compromising a public service broadcasters core values. Brand sponsors exchange money with PSBs in return for something akin to ‘abstracted trust’.
Sponsors with the deepest pockets are almost always those whose core operations are the least trustworthy. Over time, this misalignment has ensured that independent storytelling has been weaponised into marketing materials for products that are almost always in direct conflict with the public good, a case in point being the perpetual link between professional sports and the junk food industry.
As media and distribution have been digitised that conflict has been turbocharged with the birth of the ‘influencer economy’ presiding over a world in which everyone’s values are bought and sold on the open market.
“In almost every area of our lives, we have the incentive to do the wrong thing. If we all had the incentive to do the right thing, we would all be in a radically win-win situation, with a totally new world.”
The internet of book-keeping
‘Double-spending is a potential flaw in a digital cash scheme in which the same single digital token can be spent more than once. Unlike physical cash, a digital token consists of a digital file that can be duplicated or falsified’
The internet, the world wide web and software such as Linux, were released as free, open source software, with a central ideal of open access for all, giving birth to something known as Commons Based Peer Production.
Commons based peer production (CBPP) is a new model of socioeconomic production in which people work cooperatively on commons-based (publicly accessible) resources. The most well described and significant examples of CBPP are Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, other examples include Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and The Pirate Bay.
The Internet has dramatically lowered communications costs, and the costs associated with providing access to information goods. These developments made CBPP possible because they allowed people who shared a common interest to find each other, communicate, share work on a common project, and distribute the product of that work to anyone who wanted it. The low costs associated with communication, production, and distribution meant that there was no need for an organization with capital to take ownership of the projects and run them in a way which would generate revenue.
Richard Red, The Crypto Commons
Open source projects have always been driven by passion ahead of profit since there was no solution to the double spend problem.
Traditional finance has relied for centuries on double entry bookkeeping delivered by trusted intermediaries such as banks to ensure that when money (or anything of value) is sent, it moves definitively from one ledger of accounts to another.
With digital information now easy to create, copy and share and no global bookkeeper able to keep track, the value of digital media plunged, with all value accruing to centralised companies with the power to control copyright or the ability to mine and sell the information trails we leave in our day to day online lives.
Decades later, the only truly scarce asset is our attention; our data now the oil in the machine of the digital economy with profound and predictable effects on media, culture and society.
The attention merchant’s basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. But a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention.
This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our 'automatic' attention as opposed to our 'controlled' attention, the kind we direct with intent.
Tim Wu - The Attention Merchants
The hard problem of ensuring the primacy of the public good, whilst aligning the incentives of a complex mix of competing stakeholders remained unsolved.
Magic Internet Money
‘Satoshi architected the perfect genetic code necessary to a new species of money, Bitcoin. He then waited for the precise moment to plant the new species, the 2008 Financial Crisis. At that moment, he distributed the whitepaper to the only group that cared — the Cypherpunks. And finally, he nurtured Bitcoin to a stage where it no longer needed him’
Dan Held, Planting Bitcoin
Social contract theory is what underpins working democratic societies - it is the agreement made between individuals and those that would seek to govern them.
Money is a social contract between people in society - with trust in the system key to the ongoing coordination of efficient, fair and productive economies at local and global scales.
However every financial system is fallible. Over time misaligned incentives warp behaviour in even the most rational individual or company, drive inequality and reward those closer to the rules governing the money supply, therefore compounding the issue, since the motive for radical change is neutered at source.
Fiat money is the result of a social contract: The people give the state control over the supply and other vital functions of money. The state, in turn, uses that power to manage the economy, redistribute wealth, and fight crime. But many don’t realize that bitcoin works through a social contract as well.
On the eve of the 2008 Financial Crisis, Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the world to Bitcoin - a new incentive mechanism that solved the double spend accounting problem, enabling participants who do not know each other or trust each other to coordinate useful work in emergent digital communities.
In Bitcoin’s case the useful work to be contributed was that of checking and time stamping transactions in the network into a ‘chain of blocks’ - a mention in the whitepaper that birthed the entire 'blockchain’ industry. Miners around the world were incentivised to solve complex maths puzzles, whilst simultaneously checking each others work, with the reward for a successful ‘proof of work’ being the emergent financial network’s native currency - bitcoin.
An entirely new accounting system, optimised for digital networks, was born, that no longer relied on a trust being assured by an intermediary such as a bank.
Now the internet could not only transport information and media, a revolution in distributed trust also enabled a native mechanism for transferring value.
In the 11 years since the publication of the Bitcoin whitepaper by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, this simple mechanism design has incentivised the creation of the most transparent, open and secure economic system the world has ever known and has launched a new global and borderless currency that was mentioned twice in Google’s 2017 ‘Year in Search’.
Decentralised Autonomous Organisations
"It's cool if your employer is a decentralised chain of blocks, it's very cypher-punk.”
In 2015 a team of developers set out to evolve Bitcoin’s social contract through a project called Decred (Decentralised Credits).
With experience contributing to the Bitcoin project, they set out to address three fundamental issues that they believed held back the potential of the nascent network.
‘Proof of work’ security model. Instead of relying purely on miners to secure the network they added ‘proof of stake’ to the mix via a hybrid system, enabling holders of the network’s currency to also check transactions and share in the reward for securing the network.
Lack of adaptable governance. The hybrid system enabled opt-in governance participation via a ticket system, allowing the community to approve blocks, changes ot consensus rules, and control project level decisions via Politea. These systems help avoid protracted disputes and chain splits - where a sub-community breaks off and creates an alternative version of the currency.
Unsustainable funding. In Decred miners receive 60% of the block reward whilst stakers receive 30% for securing the network. The final 10% of the reward is directed into a network treasury whose spend is directed by a governance platform named Politea, ensuring the community can be sustainably funded over the long term.
Decred is not governed by a corporation, nor secured by a bank, not even built on the existing financial system - it is something completely new.
It is a secure, adaptable and sustainably funded public network that uses its own native currency to incentivise creative contributions that will further the founding values of the community it represents.
The project mission is to develop technology for the public benefit, with a primary focus on cryptocurrency technology.
Just as the public service broadcasting model leveraged a public asset - the terrestrial broadcasting spectrum, to release the creative potential of a generation, so Decred offers a fundamentally new technology platform - Decentralised Autonomous Organisations, that can enable a new generation of talent to self-organise around shared goals, challenge existing thinking and shape new cultural narratives free from commercial, state or political pressures.
Creative freedom and freedom of work, for decred's DAO it does not matter nationality, gender, religion, or names. This changes everything because any one from anywhere in the world can participate.
Comment in Decred’s Matrix chat
In more prosaic terms, DAOs lower the costs of coordination at both a local and global scale, removing many of the bureaucratic elements of existing organisations, enabling contributors to spend less time sourcing funding and managing stakeholders and more time creating.
One of the priorities of the Decred organisation is to minimise the amount of bullshit workers have to deal with. Stripping out the bullshit means that time spent working on the project tends to feel quite productive.
Cultural Evolution on Crypto Networks
“Protocols die when they run out of believers.”
Naval Ravikant
Satoshi’s mythology
Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper at a point in time when old institutions were facing a crisis of trust, to a group of cypher-punks who were motivated to challenge the status quo and embedded a key cultural trigger, timestamped in the source code.
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.
The technical decisions made Bitcoin possible, but it was the cultural narrative that made it a movement.
Bitcoin’s growth resembles that of a social movement. Social movements are purposeful, organized groups striving to work toward a common goal. These groups might be attempting to create change (Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring), to resist change (anti-globalization movement), or to provide a political voice to those otherwise disenfranchised (civil rights movements). Social movements create social change
Banks vs Banksy
Ethereum focussed venture studio Consensys launched the annual Ethereal event in an attempt to advance a pop-culture front to an ecosystem that has gradually found itself being defined by its ‘De-Fi’ (Decentralised Finance) ecosystem.
De-fi projects and many large US based corporations are seeking to rebuild the existing economic system on open source crypto rails.
The De-Fi story switches between narratives of bringing institutional investors into the ecosystem and offering the Western world’s financial market tool-kit to the populations of developing nations.
This emergent characteristic is in no small part down to the arrival of well capitalised VC funds, networks of reformed bankers, global accounting consultancies and all manner of enterprise and governmental alliances for whom the iterative progress of De-Fi is really just business as usual.
Facebook’s Libra is the natural pinnacle to this hubris, the world’s dominant social network and an association of many of the world’s largest and most extractive corporations attempting to claim the moral high ground.
We have tried to design a system which limits the power of single organisations, including Facebook, so that this network can have a chance to become a public good one day.
Viewed through this lens, Satoshi Nakamoto and the Bitcoin project is less a new economic system than the world’s greatest artistic statement, a stunt of unprecedented scale and impact.
Banksy would be proud.
What could kill Decred?
The Decred team have successfully evolved Bitcoin’s social contract to make it secure, adaptable and sustainable and it has amassed a small but intelligent and open minded community. It also shares Bitcoin’s cypherpunk philosophy advocating cryptography as a tool for social change, social impact and freedom of expression.
In comparison to Bitcoin, the Decred implementation has made several significant changes. It has expanded the rules of the contract which adds extra dimensions to the social layer. Decred enables people who hold the currency to collaborate and decide about the future of the project.
When asked what could kill Decred on the Decred In Depth podcast, one of the projects leads answered…
Apathy...
JZ, Decred Contractor
For Decred to succeed it will need to marry its cooperative approach to contributions, to an evolving cultural narrative that turns it from a respected project into a cohesive social movement.
Just as Satoshi developed both a technical and a cultural statement that he seeded with a cypher-punk community desperate to challenge the existing systems of control, so Decred needs to build a bridge from Politea to a broader creative community who can distil the networks founding constitution and challenger mentality through more accessible and relatable communications.
First the building blocks, then the funnel, then the message projection to drive new users into the funnel.
Decred Independent Contractor Roadmap, Dustorf, Decred Contractor
The most successful brands of recent memory have been those that have understood that building trust is not about marketing, it is about creating and facilitating genuinely disruptive cultural movements and then seeding that culture through influential networks that share similar values. It is something that Nike and Apple have understood for years, with Steve Jobs summarising the strategy in this legendary talk.
These were brands born into and made famous in an era when TV was dominant and a cultural narrative could be defined and controlled. There is a mistake made by most product companies, especially in a social era, that marketing is analogous to building a community when in fact it is far more about cooperation and collaboration, taking a role closer to the facilitator of a community’s intrinsic ambitions, rather than authors of a campaign message.
While brands have traditionally been planned and designed directly by corporations, the rise of networked media has challenged the coherence of centrally-managed brand identities. New blockchain-based decentralized organizations take this a step further by giving users financial incentive to spread brand narratives of their own.
Headless Brands, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti, Sam Hart
For nascent economic and social systems such as Decred, the technological foundations are best in class, however it is the cultural relevance that is still to be defined.
WORDS
Decred is an autonomous digital currency. Not governed by a corporation, nor secured by a bank, not even built on the existing financial system - it is something completely new.
It is a secure, adaptable and sustainably funded public network that uses its own native currency to incentivise creative contributions that will further the founding values of the community it represents.
The project mission is to develop technology for the public benefit, with a primary focus on cryptocurrency technology.
The creative concept: ‘Another Way’
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Buckminster Fuller
50% loss of animals on earth since 1970.Global debt hits a record $250 trillion.Autocracies and populism are on the rise.
Old systems are failing, new stories are emerging.Young people around the world are challenging the status quo.The creative insight
Currently Decred is positioned as ‘a new kind of workplace’. We believe this core product benefit can be positioned in a far more emotionally resonant and impactful way.
Decred offers another way of working.
In fact when seen through the lens of this simple creative idea, Decred’s project history and value proposition is driven by the motivation to find Another Way to do things…
Another Way to govern
Another Way to fund
Another Way to create
The genius of Satoshi Nakamoto wasn’t to release a whitepaper or to solve the Byzantine General’s problem, it was to show, at exactly the right moment in time, that there was another way, a real alternative to the existing status quo - something that seemed impossible... right up until the moment it wasn’t.
Another Way
Just as Nike made ‘Just Do It’ the world’s most famous slogan, imbuing plastic running shoes with personality and motivation that inspired a generation, so we believe Another Way can be a rallying cry to a new generation who are challenging long held assumptions and firmly held beliefs at a point in the world when change is desperately needed and hope is in short supply.
We believe that Another Way is a powerful idea that will resonate with and can be translated to a diverse range of people from all cultures and all corners of the world.
It is an idea that distills Decred’s ethos, values and reason for being into a simple and memorable positioning that can offer a wide range of creative executions built around relatable human stories.
Another Way exists to intelligently expose and explain the fractures in our existing systems and introduces paths forward to frontiers of emerging systems, cultures and communities that bridge contemporary insight and ancient wisdom.
Connecting people, purpose and planet, Another Way will become a trusted field manual for a rapidly changing world, enabled by a globally distributed network of creative talent, funded by the Decred community.
I imagine trust as a remarkable force that allows us to overcome uncertainty, to be vulnerable, to try something new or do something differently. It is literally the bridge between the known and the unknown.
Another Way values
By interpreting Decred’s brand values through a new cultural lens, we can evolve the social contract to demonstrate its value to the global creative community.
Secure
Great artists and extraordinary feats of creative endeavour are always built on secure foundations.
It is no coincidence that the vast majority of the world’s most enduring musicians have maintained their cultural relevance because they retained control of their creative works.
For the vast majority of artists, the traditional system of copyright and publishing has favoured those with financial backing or with a secure foundation from which to build.
Decent offers a new way for artists to fund their creative work ensuring those who create the value are those that retain the value.
Adaptable
New forms of digital native culture are emerging alongside the existing mediums of film, television and radio.
The next generation of global arts and culture will be unrestrained by form, genre or platform, with creators connecting and merging across creative boundaries.
Real world events will link to virtual reality universes, interactive and immersive streaming media will sit next to beautiful photography and portraiture, whilst upgradeable digital art will redefine our understanding of ownership and access.
Creative success in this new world is about being adaptable - just as it always has.
Sustainable
The funding of arts and culture is a broken system, with filmmakers, writers, artists and musicians spending most of their time attempting to fund their creative endeavours through a wildly complex sea of funding models.
Decent is setting out to provide a sustainable funding mechanism for the creative arts, one that is not dependent on billionaire philanthropists, tax incentives or being born into a privileged position.
We believe that the best creative work is delivered by those who have the ability to make mistakes, to learn their craft and to tell their story without compromising their values, no matter where they come from.
Politea proposal phasing
The broad concept presented previously gives an umbrella view of the proposed project and covers a large domain.
We aim to deconstruct this macro vision into specific phased proposals that are iterative in their approach and are led by an initial development phase funded from discretionary marketing funds.
You can read the specific development phase funding request here.
We estimate 6 weeks for delivery, dependent on initial community feedback on this development phase.
The successful 2019 marketing proposal on Politea included two tiers:
Planned Programming
Discretionary Spending
When paired with consistent funding over time, we believe this mix of structure and flexibility will ensure the best possible outcome.
Decent Partners, an established UK based company would become a Decred corporate contractor.
Phase 1
Proposal 1 - 12 Months
Original series
We will develop a range of original series under the Another Way concept built around a long running interview series that also produces a range of other platform specific media assets including, podcasts, photography, infographics, animations and written materials.
The series would feature individuals who are challenging orthodox thinking and experimenting with new systems of living, thinking, governing, working and being.
From how we grow our food, to how we organise our communities, to decentralised financial systems, mental health and wellbeing, and psychedelic research, Another Way will change the way you think about the world around you.
To control costs during the initial launch phase, interviews will be primarily conducted at our London based studio space.
Example interviewees will come from across the cultural spectrum and include names such as:
Bruce Parry
Vinay Gupta
Rachel Botsman
Adrian Bejan
JME
Mhairi Black
Marguerite deCourcelle (coin_artist)
Meltem DeMirrors
Matan Field
We will also include Decred names - including anonymous contributors (we have experience bringing alive mysterious characters in creative ways).
Jake Yocom-Piatt
Richard
Haon
Elian
NNNKO56
Praxis
Degeri
The range of interviewees and the areas of discussion would be discussed on Politea to enable input from the community.
Over the series we would include a variety of people who have connections to Decred.
This series is designed to build solid cultural foundations that are imbued with the values of the Decred project.
Though delivered under the marketing umbrella, this is not ‘marketing’ per se. Every integration with the Decred community and story will be credible and authentic and selected on its own merit to the series. The aim would be to reinforce the collective intelligence narrative of the project.
Timeline
The series would be delivered consistently over a 12 month period.
Full delivery schedules, community involvement outlines and budgets would be produced as part of the development plan.
Costs
Dependent on development phase.
Phase 1
Proposal 2 - 12 Months
Events & Experiences
As part of the Another Way concept we will develop a range of events and experiences that will also contribute relevant cultural content towards the overall ecosystem.
Digital art and live music collide in this new immersive experience curated by Thris Tian, Co-Founder of Boiler Room.
We are currently curating a digital art and live music event with The Tate Modern in London alongside partners MoCDA.
The aim of this project is to create an immersive experience that brings together live music, culture and digital art around the central concepts of Another Way.
This project would be designed in such a way as to be location agnostic, with the aim to build the experience into the programmes of global music and culture events.
We will look to activate our creative network in locations in the UK, Europe, US, South America and Asia and link into existing Decred operations.
These events would also offer opportunities for us to develop new and seamlessly integrated use cases for DCR.
Timeline
We would aim to deliver 12 Space Jungle events over a 12 month period across 12 international locations.
Full delivery schedules, community involvement outlines and budgets would be produced as part of the development plan.
Costs
Dependent on development phase.
Phase 1
Proposal 3 - 12 months
UK Marketing
With the latest LATAM proposal on Politea gaining solid feedback and requests for similar proposals that can also activate local markets, we feel that there is huge untapped potential in the UK, where Decred doesn’t currently have any marketing base.
We believe it would make sense to develop a UK specific marketing function that could integrate with the original series production and events and experiences. We can also use this as a starting point for entries into other European markets.
We have a 7000 square foot central London based studio and community events space that we are currently redeveloping to focus on offering young creative talent mentoring and creative opportunities, alongside dedicated digital production facilities.
Costs
Dependent on development phase.
Phase 2
Proposal 4 - TBD
DecentDAO
As the Decred story evolves alongside the price, we believe that it will be prudent to create a number of implementations of the Politea UX, dedicated to managing a consistent flow of funds from the treasury and focused on activating a specific area of focus - namely the management and funding of the global creative community.
Inspired by the Pi system, we see an opportunity to develop the Another Way concept into DecentDAO, a new and complementary user experience and suite of apps on top of the Decred ecosystem that utilise timestamping and ticket voting, but that are designed from the ground up to appeal to the creative community.
This ‘layered DAO’ approach enables the Decred project to further decentralise its governance and spending and ensures funds are managed efficiently and fairly.
Layering also removes potential bottlenecks on Politeia whilst enabling a network of domain specific expertise to form around the project, ensuring a steady supply of smaller contributors to join the project.
Timeline
Dependent on scope of work.
Costs
To follow Phase 1 development and launch as a parallel work stream.
Phase 2 development costs to be submitted as separate initiative.
Decent partners
A Creative Conspiracy
Decent co-ordinates a global network of established and emerging creative talent for whom public service broadcasting principals are core to their values.
We are developing web series, events, experiences, products and production facilities that will inherit these same fundamental values based around the Another Way concept.
Filmmakers, writers, photographers, artists, multi-disciplinary designers, VFX teams, app developers, community builders, hackers and engineers, driven by a mission to challenge the status quo.
Decred Contractor Partner
Our aim is to become a central contractor within the Decred ecosystem, onboarding the creative community through a range of bold and provocative initiatives that will engage, inspire and empower a new generation of social impact driven creators, communities and organisations.
An On-Ramp for the Creative Community
Inspired by the Pi system, we see an opportunity to develop a new and complementary user experience and suite of apps on top of the Decred ecosystem that utilise timestamping and ticket voting, but that are designed from the ground up to appeal to the global creative community.
Developing unique use cases for Decred
With the creative initiatives establishing a cohesive and integrated cultural narrative across a range of platforms online and in the real world, we aim for Decent to incubate an ecosystem of complementary products and services that offer unique use cases for using DCR.
Public Service Reimagined
Bitcoin’s immaculate conception is a hard act to follow, but we believe that Decred can forge a different path, enabling a globally distributed creative renaissance, reimagining the public service model for a networked world.
Decent experience
Our experience sits at the intersection of multi-platform storytelling, community development and emerging technology, alongside an ambition to work on projects that exist to serve the public interest.
We have co-founded and scaled a number of digital media startups that are built around passionate fan communities such as football and live music on a range of social networks and have worked consistently across projects developed for the public good with broadcasters like the BBC and Channel 4.
Our journey to cryptocurrency came in 2011 when we launched a social game on Facebook and saw how effectively virtual goods and an in game currency could be for incentivising, rewarding and coordinating community activities on digital networks. Unfortunately, as the game was breaking through into the mainstream and with 15m players, Facebook killed the entire social games industry demonstrating the platform risk inherent in the current system.
We followed that by building a global digital media brand around the world’s most popular sport - football, that was funded through a traditional ad supported media model. The project reasserted our belief that misaligned incentives in digital advertising supported models would continue to be the limiting factor when attempting to sustain the creative energy and enthusiasm of creative contributors from around the world.
With social networks becoming increasingly misaligned with their users, we have been searching for a sustainable funding, governance and incentive structure that could facilitate a distributed network of creative talent to tell stories with purpose that exist to serve the public good.
We have spent time investing in and developing proposals around a range of crypto projects that have focussed on addressing three key areas - governance, sustainable funding and projects that prioritise the public good.
We are early investors in Blockstack, Filecoin, Polkadot and Edgeware as well as fundraising platform Neufund and anti-counterfeiting startup Taelpay. Alongside this we have dived deep into Ethereum’s De-Fi ecosystem, hoping to find a model that seemed resilient and sustainable over the long term, with conversations beginning with Consensys in early 2017, alongside conversations with DAOstack, Aragon and the HTLC-DASH streaming video proposal designed to run on the Lightning Network.
Separately one of our partners ran one of the world’s largest mining operations - mining Litecoin and Decred and was one of the founding investors in Ethereum as well as being a market maker for a number of projects.
When Norway based Element became the world’s first listed company to gain regulatory approval to launch an ICO, we led the vision and project management of the Element Iron token project, setting out to link real world commodities to digital tokens through an innovative new platform, with the eventual aim of paying workers with asset linked coins. Our vision was to build a trusted and transparent brand in the world’s least trusted industry.
After an immense amount of research and experience in this space, we returned to Decred since it was becoming obvious that the project’s team were guided by the same public good principles that we were and that there was immense potential to add value to the project across a number of areas.
Every time you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want.
― Anna Lappe