The Rise of Decentralized Media on Ethereum | Zack Guzman - Story, Andrea Muttoni - Coinage

[Music] all right thank you everybody one of the last panels here but thank you for joining us hope everyone's having a good eth Denver so far uh today we're going to be chatting about decentralized media on ethereum um I am the host and founder of the community owned media Outlet coinage former anchor with Yahoo Finance in CNBC just want to run through kind of why decentralized Media Matters uh and why it could be the best shot that we have uh at proving out why decentralization and ownership in web 3 really matter I don't know if we can see our screen here if we bring this up uh maybe we can perhaps there we go all right so we're going to start this with two different questions first why decentralize something and specifically why decentralize media and hopefully by the end we'll show that it solves a very specific problem in media and I just want to start with a very simple premise and that is that decentralization really only matters when it's serving a purpose uh and I think you know a good example in 1776 when America rejected the king in favor of democracy it was rooted in one thing that decentral izing power solved something and it created a more fair just and trusted Society but indeed the concept alone wasn't really that rallying cry cuz that's kind of convoluted in fact they simplified it into something much sexier which was we're going to reject the monarchy for democracy and they had this phrase no taxation without representation and I think in crypto we've arrived at a weird point in time where there's a similar Revolution going on in web 3 and I'm calling it our Boston Tea Party moment in time and the reason for that is because we've been promised this solution this read write own that's what everyone refers to web 3 as and I want to focus today on that last piece the ownership part of web 3 what does the own in read write own really mean and I would say that this is what it looks like this is what ownership in crypto looks like and this could be a layer one this could be a meme coin this could be a few hours or this could be a year but really it is just ownership ship over that as more tokens come out price goes down and the question is what do you really own this is the ownership you get and I would say that Meme coins are actually even worse because they were supposed to be about Community it was supposed to be that we would all team up together in meme coin land and Morad one of the big voices in memecoins his phrase stop trading and believe in something I think it's even worse than that because if you're in web 3 you really do want to believe that this technology is here to create community and I'm going to propose that we should have a different viewership of ownership in web 3 and in fact we shouldn't have that phrase of stop trading and believe in something but we should have stop sing and own something is what I'm calling this new age and what do I mean by that I mean that we should rethink what it means to own in web 3 that we really do need to own something and not just have a token that gets dumped on us again and again and so today I want to talk about what that means in web 3 and how when you bring together a community that owns something together you can actually add to the value of the thing and so let's talk about it in this lens of why decentralize and what is the purpose and that is how we get to why media why decentralized media and I want to start with explaining what coinage is as a community-owned outlet and my background in traditional media as an anchor at Yahoo and CNBC and it's something that Elon Musk and everyone else has been talking about which is right now Trust in Media is an all-time low which is very bad for a number of reasons but one of the worst things is that we can't even agree on fact like objective fact and societies tend to fall apart indeed we saw that in the revolution Things Fall Apart when societies can't agree on fact and so when trust is at an all-time low I would say why is that and I think what we've seen is we have major Outlets catering to their bases and actually getting to more extreme edges you can have a CNN that really appeals to liberals or a fox that really appeals to conservatives and actually get more and more extreme because they're trying to optimize for ads and so the question is can you flip that model on its head and not optimize for ads but optimize for a community that owns you and gets to influence the content and you could say well you could do that or you could have a billionaire own this thing and I would say I don't think that that model is any better you can look at what happened with The Washington Post and Jeff Bezos and how a lot of editors quit there so the question is what can we do with web 3 and I'll say that uh coming from the traditional media World we've seen the rise of other platforms and independent creators with patreon substack this idea of creators charging subscribers to fund Independent Media and I think that's cool and you could also say that we've seen that with only fans uh it's a very similar thing you can charge and unlock content that way uh and it's kind of interesting in that again you're somewhat simping you don't really grow with this Creator you pay them and you get to unlock their content but at the end of the day you won't really own anything and so at coinage we tried to tackle a new paradigm which is what happens if you break down the wall between a content creator and their fans if you're following someone you already have a shared passion if you're following an influencer in the food space you love food and so what happens when you can tap into that power of their followers and at coinage we've done something very similar with patreon and only fans the difference is you know you can unlock content I'm not naked on coinage uh but it's the same thing in terms of you can mint an nft and unlock content and all of that goes into a dow uh which is community-owned and outside of just doing kind of patreon or doing kind of only fans uh we also launched nfts that let people co-own the outlet with us and what does that enable is the big question and what we've seen in our little existence is that when people me these membership tokens they can vote on the content it actually leads to more trusted content because there's transparency in terms of bringing together conflicting biases within a community you can have someone who says one thing and debate it in our token gated Telegram and you can have co-owners vote so it's not just again a a biased media Outlet trying to push one agenda and actually as we've done this we've actually seen coin grow faster than the competition in year one uh because by converting a passive subscriber into a coowner it's actually led to more engagement and so when you put all that together and you think about what a community-owned outlet might look like we are actually one of the first in the US as an nft project to pay uh a distribution back to our nft holders and obviously if you're here you're familiar with spor Dow uh and so that is maybe not new to to you but in the world of media I would say that it is revolutionary in the idea of bringing together a community to serve a higher purpose to serve for more transparent and trusted media very much in line to what we were doing back in 1776 but I think we have a little bit of a new type of political cartoon to bring it all home which is Join or Die uh because I think what we're building is is frankly pretty important uh for crypto as we try and bring together conflicting tribalist communities uh across you know not just ethereum to be honest with you but across the rest of the world of crypto uh and so if you want to get involved this is the QR code to head to coinage Media to learn more about us as a community own media outlet and I want to thank some of our members who are out here as well for making this all possible too uh and similarly we just saw the ethereum foundation go through a lot of changes uh we ourselves are actually nominating our board at coinage which are all just people that I met through through launching this uh so that is kind of coinage in a nutshell when it comes to decentralized Media for the rest of the panel we're actually going to be joined by someone else who is building similarly in uh decentralized media and the idea of decentralized ownership over IP and he will be joining us in just a moment Andrea matoni president of story protocol foundation will be coming up here as well um but he's actually sprinting over from another panel uh but he will be up here shortly um but I think you know one of the main things to describe in all of these comparisons back to this model is that I'll speak to this as a Creator which is there's incredible benefits that come from having a community bring their own POS postive Network effects to a community where you can pay a dividend out and that is that it opens doors in ways that you might not even expect so at coinage we actually run validators on a bunch of different chains mostly because one of our members had an existing relationship with uh a company that was running validators and he completely left crypto and passed those along to us and so I just use that as an example in terms of bringing together people who again are in the same content Niche and have similar interests and vote on these things with us to help us make the space better not just by covering crypto by the way in a more transparent and trusted fashion but also in a way that lets us walk the walk as a dow um and I'm really proud of the work that we've done and I think Andrea is also here I think maybe nope we don't know yet um so we're going to wait for him to come back up here but I think that's mostly everything that I had to say about coinage uh the other interesting thing is as we abstract away and I think the whole entire crypto industry is at this moment in time is when you abstract away the crypto piece this same model applies to not just crypto but really the rest of media in general the idea of uh creators owning things with their fans in this type of way is not necessarily I think the best way to unlock that creative passion uh across you know a Content Creator's followers uh instead when you do things like this and you let people vote on content it again unlocks those doors I feel like we all get it now uh which is very good um but until Andrea gets here I'll take questions from the audience if there are any I don't know there could be yes you bought one yesterday very good that's what I'm talking about yes the idea by the way I don't want to show this any harder than I already have but the idea of creating a scarce supply of nfts that correspond with ownership in something like this is that you can kind of grow over time in a sustainable way I think if we go back to this chart and the idea of crypto projects trying to figure out what the right quantity is is that you're basically trying to figure out what Supply is going to look like or what demand is going to look like in a future and if you have a certain amount of tokens that correspond to a certain amount of memberships that correspond to ownership over a dow you can actually adjust that over time depending on how many uh memberships you want to sell a year which is very different than the idea of just launching tokens into a liquidity pool and kind of winging it and hoping that price doesn't do this um which I think is very important when it comes to the way of sustainably growing over time um which again is very different than I think what mcoins are doing right now um we're still waiting I think for Andrea wherever he may be coming from the other from the other panel but if there's any other questions I'll take those too um yes one more over here thank you oh hello uh very cool what kind of creators do you seek for your platform or what kinds of creators have had the most success on your platform good question um right now the idea of where we go from here is coinage has proved this model out in terms of uh dividends patronage dividends which again here in Colorado is a concept that sport Dow has basically pioneered the idea of bringing together what's called a limited Cooperative Association which is really just you mint an nft you become a member in a thing in a DA and it enables you to pay patronage dividends if someone's active um and that model again when you abstract it away Works in any Niche because again you're tapping into the creative aspects of a of a Creator's following um and so we've done this in the food space with food influencers in New York that's a separate entity um but I think as it works we're seeing more and more creators in every Niche come to us and I think if you think about objective fact and this piece I think the main thing is that you can bring together disperate groups in the same content Niche and so there are experiments like this by the way in patreon and other independent creators that have come from Politico Who start their podcasts and they host you know Crossfire I might think of another example of together people on the right and people on the left and talking about what this looks like when you're just try and focus on objective fact but the ad model doesn't really support that so much um and so when you bring together people who really want to support the overall thing that you're putting out or support the Creator in a way that's different than kind of what substack and some of these other models like that offer um we've seen that work in a bunch of different content niches um so so the answer to your question is really anything anything at all and honestly like obviously a crypto media Outlet is very different than uh this conference by the way in terms of tokenized ownership uh a tokenized media Outlet doesn't look at all like what we're here for but the concept still works in terms of aligning interest between a token holder and the overall Dow to create value um which I think is important um if Andrea is not going to be coming over over here I think we might just call it there um so thank you very much for the questions I want to say thank you and thank you to the coinage members who came out and if you want to you can head to coinage Media as well to join us as we try and Pioneer the decentralized media Revolution uh thank you guys appreciate it [Music]