The Ownership Economy - Medha Kothari

um so hey y'all i'm really excited to be here so today i'm going to be talking about ratatouille the musical and why it's a case for crypto so i know my talk was initially titled the ownership economy but i swear this relates and it relates to crypto um i actually put a poll out earlier this week to let the masses decide like what to talk about and of course in classic crypto meme fashion people overwhelmingly chose ratatouille so that's why we're here before we get started uh let me introduce myself really quick so i'm meda i've been in the crypto space since about 2017. um so it's been it's been a wild journey honestly um i started off as a software engineer in the space moving around a bunch of different projects until i settled on the cello ecosystem so that's basically like a layer one ethereum like chain focused on financial inclusion and so there i was kind of working on dap tooling and any sort of dev tooling that helped app developers build on top of our smart contract platform and then most recently i switched careers into ventures so now i'm an investor at variant fund which is a crypto dedicated fund that's focused on the ownership economy which is the idea that all internet era protocols and products and projects should be owned and operated by its users i also started a non-profit back in 2018 called shi256 with a couple of friends and this was the first 501c3 dedicated to increasing diversity in the space and that's something i'm still working on on evenings and weekends um yeah so let's get back into what you are here for so show of hands how many of you guys know or have heard of ratatouille like the disney movie okay sounds like almost all of you um hands down now how many of y'all have heard of ratatouille the musical like one person i literally see one hand over here amazing so let me give a brief overview of what this is uh to set the stage so basically the origins was that disney um two years ago in the peak of the pandemic in 2020 launched a new ride themed after the ratatouille movie and then a random tick-tocker named emily jacobson was really inspired by this and created a little jingle it was really cute it was like an ode to remy the rat from the movie and she posted a tick tock with a little jingle and sped up her voice to make it sound more like remy um and then two months later this random tick tock went viral for context this was like october 2020 peak of the pandemic where lots of artists had lost their jobs broadway was closed and people just had so much pent up creative energy and so what ended up happening was thousands and thousands of people started using this sound and then later this musical genius of a composer his name was daniel merczlift found the sound and made a whole ass symphony to accompany the sound and put that into tick-tock pretty soon this became this theatrical movement people started making remixes adjacent songs like entire songs with the new lyrics based off of like this original jingle dancers got involved they took these songs and made choreographies to them set designers got involved and made entire visualizations of what a potential set for each scene could look like and these are some examples of some of them and then people from the disney ecosystem started getting involved too so like the original voice of remy like the rat from ratatouille got involved and started posting tick tocks disney even made nods to it on their own social media and kind of played along with the meme which i found really surprising and then a group of people came together and said we want to make a broadway caliber digital musical putting together all of these sort of like disparate creative ideas from tick tock into one cohesive online play so they held auditions made this whole playbill poster like everything it was really official and then really famous people started getting involved like if you guys know titus burgess from unbreakable kimmy schmidt he's in the middle right here jj riemann from book of mormon ashley park from emily in paris and they put together this entire production they started selling tickets on the official playbill site which is where broadway shows sell tickets and then they said that all the money would be donated towards the actors fund which is a non-profit for the acting community and then the musical happened and it ended up getting over 245 million views and raised over 2 million dollars in just a course of like a couple weeks and i watched it all and it was a whole production i found the whole idea so cool like i was just geeking out when i was thinking about it because people took original disney canon and remixed it to make an entire new reality and a whole other host of like media of creations and so i think this was one of the coolest examples of large-scale decentralized content creation community-led creation that i've ever really seen um so now you guys are probably wondering okay she spent the last four minutes talking about ratatouille who wears the crypto um and trust me you just have to like trust the process i swear it all makes sense um so i kind of alluded to this whole theatrical phenomenon as decentralized content creation and this concept is also happening very rapidly in the crypto space right now specifically this has been happening in two ways one is artist-owned nft media so individual like musicians for example or artists selling their nft art and then two through community owned nft media using cc0 so let me start with the latter one because i think that's the one people have more questions about so what is cc0 this is basically the creative commons license not a crypto thing at all it's just a license which allows people to contribute their projects or art or whatever to be used for public use the idea is that you're basically giving up all of your ip and copyright and whatever other rights associated with your work and dedicating them to the public domain for anyone to use for any purpose they can also make money off of it like they can do whatever they want and increasingly it's becoming more and more common to launch nft projects under this license so some notable examples include nouns and blitmap so i'll go over nouns nouns is this generative nft project on the ethereum chain they're these little cute pixel characters and they've gone anywhere between like 30 to even over 100 each which is a sizeable amount of money and one noun is generated every day and on their faq page they have this little blurb and it's it's basically verbage around how they're cc0 so they said nouns is an open standard for generative art and because all artwork is released under the public domain and the code is open source artists and developers both are free to build and use nouns in any way they want and nouns is just as much yours as it is ours which i thought was really interesting i think what this enables is that there's so much composability and remixability that developers and artists can kind of like imbue into the system and the idea with cc0 is that all of these derivative works end up accruing value back to the original and of course there's definitely drawbacks to this like i'm not going to spend all my time talking about that but like you know these things could be corrupted like you know malicious actors could kind of take control of this like media ip and do bad things with it or the fact that like you know individual artists now have the same rights as everyone else also has like interesting effects but the thesis here is that cc0 projects allow for much more network effects than non-cc0 projects and are way more likely to create sustainable communities and these cc0 projects will attract builders and developers and artists that add continual value to these communities and this value is then accrued to the original like nft holders and this can kind of be seen with announced they have a treasury of 17 000 eth right now which you know depending on the price of each can be anywhere between like 20 to 40 like 60 million dollars which is a lot of money and they only have a community of around 200 people right now or 200 entities but the market has deemed them valuable clearly despite the fact that the ip is owned by everyone so let's take this idea back to my original example of ratatouille the musical so there's three different kind of leading questions that i want to start with the first one was what would happen if disney the brand was cc0 so disney could at any point have sued any of these like tick tock creators for using their ip for like creating this play for whatever luckily they didn't and they were weirdly like supportive of this to an extent but they they really could have sued them and then also disney can at any point take this idea that went super violent viral and turn it into their own play like i fully imagine um like in a couple years there's gonna be a broadway play completely like filmed after this um and they don't really need to give credit or compensation to any of the original creators if they do that's on them that's great but they have no like they have no need to do that but imagine a world where disney characters and the whole like ecosystem is cc0 where anyone can create derivatives of these characters and ecosystems that disney has developed and again this is just a thought exercise but i think it could lead to some really really interesting experiments that we've never had a chance to do and disney would of course still get the benefits from this um based on the ideas and the thesis behind cc0 that that i mentioned take this a step further and what if the content itself had been created on decentralized rails imagine if the content itself was launched on a platform that was crypto native so like what if the tick tocks themselves could have been made into nfts where you could point each asset back to the original creator um for a little bit of context when the when the tick tock like movement turned into a kind of official broadway play vibe there was a little bit of pushback with the play even though it was made and inspired by the community the community of original tick tock creators didn't necessarily get a direct cut out of it right like all the money from the tickets were like donated and even though they worked with the original creators again it like the value didn't necessarily accrue to them directly but you can imagine if the platform they had used to you know launch this content had allowed for things like upgradable nfts for example that could have been very very different for example you could imagine like a singer could have put out vocals and lyrics for one of the ratatouille songs and then later allowed a composer to upgrade the nft with music and then both of them would kind of get the value accrual and they could even like program things like splits like okay the artist for every resell gets this amount the singer gets this like whatever it is and then lastly like the last leading question what if these tick tocks were actually cc0 nft so not just artist-owned nfts but that the artist had put out into the public domain which again would just only add to like the remixability and composability of these little units and in theory the value would still accrue to the original nft media which would then be owned by the creator and so they would kind of um earn revenue that way um but yeah all in all i think the most important thing to note here is that the space is truly so so new and all of these things are experiments i don't know what will end up taking off but i think playing around with different crypto enabled business models and media experiences is going to lead to some really huge changes in how we engage with media and culture at large but yeah thanks so much for listening to me and coming out to my talk if you're interested in seeing some of the more random thoughts i have you can find them all on my twitter which is just my name over here yeah thank you