Web3 is booming, and Arweave is becoming a popular infrastructure choice for developers. PermaDAO is a community where everyone can contribute to the Arweave ecosystem. It's a place to propose and tackle tasks related to Arweave, with the support and feedback of the entire community. Join PermaDAO and help shape Web3!

Author: Spike @ Contributor of PermaDAO

Reviewer: Bananaa @ Contributor of PermaDAO

History of IP On-Chain: A Trio of NFTs, Gaming, and AI Narrative

The definition and role of IP

IP (Intellectual Property) refers to the legal protection object of the intellectual achievements produced by people in their creative labor. It includes patents, trademarks, Copyrights, industrial designs and other forms of intellectual property. The role of IP is to protect the rights and interests of creators, encourage innovation and creativity, and promote scientific and technological progress and economic development.

In Web3, IP can be combined with blockchain technology to achieve more secure, transparent and traceable intellectual property protection. By recording relevant information about IP on the blockchain, it can ensure that the ownership and use rights of intellectual property are effectively authenticated and protected. At the same time, the decentralized nature of the blockchain can also prevent intellectual property rights from being tampered with or infringements from being hidden.

For example, let's say a music creator wants to protect the copyright of his or her work. He can store information about his work, such as the music file, when it was created, the copyright owner, etc., encrypted on the blockchain. In this way, anyone using the music work can query the relevant copyright information through the blockchain, so as to ensure legal use and payment.

But unfortunately, this is only theoretical feasibility, in the early days, the cooperation between NFT and IP is in the field of creator economy, such as music, film NFT, but the final winner is PFP head, and the real NFT music, art platform startup projects basically failed.

Even so, the emergence of Web3 makes the Internet gradually shift from a centralized model to a decentralized one, which is an indisputable fact. Specifically, the current Web3 provides IP with the following important functions:

The main application scenarios of IP

Decentralized Domain Name System (DDNS)

The traditional Domain Name System (DNS) relies on a centralized organization to manage the mapping between domain names and IP addresses. In Web3, by using the public chain and address mapping function, a decentralized domain name system based on the public chain can be realized, making the ownership and control of the domain name belong to the user, which increases the security and credibility.

Take ENS (Ethereum Domain Name System) as an example, each domain name corresponds to a unique smart contract address, through which the corresponding public chain address can be found. Users can obtain their own domain name by purchasing or registering it, and bind it to their personal identifier. When other users want to access the domain name, they can do so by querying the account name address and connecting to the corresponding service through the address.

The advantage of ENS is that it can realize the true decentralization of domain names and no longer rely on centralized domain name registeries, while also providing higher availability and censorship resistance. Since ENS is implemented based on Ethereum, the ownership and control of domain names are entirely in the hands of the users themselves, without interference from any centralized authority. In addition, ENS can provide increased security against attacks such as domain name hijacking or common DNS contamination.

Proof of ownership of digital assets

Through IP chain, the uniqueness and immutability of digital assets can be achieved, thus ensuring the ownership of digital assets. The following is a concrete example:

Copyright protection and traceability

In the early vision, one of the application scenarios of IP was in the area of copyright protection and traceability. Through blockchain technology, copyright protection and traceability of digital content can be realized, ensuring that the rights and interests of creators are effectively safeguarded.

For example, it's still Alice, who uploads her music Atom NFT work to the Arweaver-based platform Piainty. During the upload process, the musical composition is split into several audio clips and encrypted to generate a unique hash value. These hashes are recorded on the blockchain and associated with the copyright information of the musical piece.

When other users buy or use the music piece on the platform, the system will automatically verify the copyright information and ensure that the user has a legal authorization. At the same time, since each audio clip has a unique hash value, it can be traced through the records on the blockchain to track the use and spread of the music work.

In this way, musicians can better protect their Copyrights and ensure that their musical works are not subject to unauthorized use and piracy. At the same time, users can also trust the platform more, as they can verify the authenticity and legitimacy of musical works through the records on the blockchain.

But as mentioned above, the IP + NFT copyright system is basically not working, not to mention the zeitgeist of zero royalties, which seriously hurts the motivation of creators.

The failure of NFT copyright protection is explored

In the process of combining IP with Web3, privacy protection and data security are the main challenges and opportunities.

The core concept of Web3 is decentralization, storing data on the blockchain, and achieving data transparency and traceability. However, this also brings with it a host of privacy and security concerns. For example, music casting NFT or not does not prevent downloading and listening, as well as the spread of copies.

One possible solution to this problem is to use encryption to protect users' privacy and data security. For example, starting from the protection of the identity of the uploader, the Mind Network can be used to encrypt the user's personal information and transaction data, so that it is not easy to be stolen or tampered with during transmission and storage.

In addition, when developing applications combining IP and Web3, a series of security measures should be taken, such as access control, authentication and audit mechanism, to ensure users' privacy and data security.

But in reality, NFT is almost impossible to implement an effective copyright tracking and protection system for several reasons:

The FT (homogenized) token price system is A = (1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1), a1, a2,a3 only the serial number is different, but the actual meaning is the same.

But NFT is an arithmetic or arithmetic sequence, B = {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8}, where each element is a fraction of B, but the elements are directly very different, which means that NFT has stronger internal volatility than FT.

FT token trading is essentially a zero-sum game, where the best choice for one is the worst for both parties.

The uneven nature of the NFT leaves room for "gold rush", and beyond the mud, there is the possibility of gold

But the most extreme case is the entire project zero, which is the same dilemma of NFT and FT, we can understand that the lower limit of both sides is the same low, but the upper limit NFT > FT.

The current NFT is a ground rent economy. Land rent is not limited to The Sandbox virtual land auction, but all NFT is a kind of occupation of certain resources and then get remuneration, once possession, many times to share its profits, and then form the former's eternal exploitation of the latter, in essence is an unequal and inevitably centralized system design, such as the secondary sales of the distribution model.

The ideal NFT must be a tax economy. Every individual is an equal object to participate in the construction of the whole society, and celebrity effect should not be the only choice. The new world created must not be a renovation of the old world, but a complete revolution.

For example, sudoAMM and Uniswap's acquisition of the NFT aggregator trading platform marks the two-way flow of NFT and DeFi, but these are assuming that NFT has the liquidity of DeFi.

But in fact, the illiquidity of NFT already exists, which is essentially a difference in the path of financialization:

Or we can adopt a filter system of blockchain NFT, for example, to review the originality of certain projects, but with a review mechanism whether there is still a decentralized spirit is very complicated.

In addition, collectibles and works of art need to be distinguished, the typical representative of collectibles is NBA Top Shot, the art is elegant or vulgar is not important, the important thing is to reflect the unique aesthetic of a single or continuous work, such as the loading of spirit rhyme, and collectibles are closer to the collection psychology in the mind of children.

This distinction does not have scientific precision, but a better understanding of the current situation of NFT, such as the price and influence of Crypto Punk, that it is a collection + art is no problem.

But these are not the broadest markets, and by far the best type of value entry is the games market.

Game IP on-chain: Web2 IP vs. native Web3 IP

In the game IP narrative model, it is mainly divided into two categories, one is the classic IP needs to make some degree of chain modification version, but there is almost no real implementation of the version, we take its Web3 transformation as an example to illustrate; The other is the original Web3 game IP, we take the dark forest as an example to illustrate.

The best example of Web3's model for traditional IP is Sorare, which can basically be seen as a parody of FIFA (Real Soccer), with the basic logic not very different.

"FIFA" is the FIFA official authorized EA for gamification of the football IP, so far has issued a total of 22 big versions, in the global sports fans and game fans loved, and can and well-known stars for personal IP, peripheral cooperation, is a very typical football commercialization path.

Before the cooperation of "FIFA", the main income of FIFA was the commercial cooperation of the right to host the World Cup, such as the most typical broadcast rights auction, but with the help of gamification, it can obtain more continuous daily income outside the World Cup.

And after the emergence of Web 3, there are more new options for the commercialization of sports IP, such as OKX sponsorship of the English Premier League team Manchester United, Dapper Labs and NBA cooperation to launch the chain version of the star card NBA TOP SHOT, and Sorare brought by the on-chain game and NFT elements.

"FIFA 22" will be launched on October 1, 2021, according to its development status, it can be considered that "FIFA" is in the front, and Sorare is still starting.

Sorare hasn't exploded with the World Cup, but commercialisation is still firmly on track

Sorare represents the future of the Web 3 IP trend. Well-known sports events and celebrity individuals still need new ways to monetize and continue to make profits, which is the premise and basis for their enthusiasm for NFT, Token or crypto companies willing to seek cooperation.

But there are still serious remnants of the "old days" when it comes to gaming experiences and commercialization models. Whether it is NBA Top Sho or Sorare, they are seeking to cooperate with existing giants, and innovative profit models such as NFT exceed the game experience itself, which is a common problem in the current sports chain tour.

And in the native Web3 game IP, the most well-known is the Dark Forest.

On-chain MMORTS (massively multiplayer online real-time strategy games) is a massively multiplayer online Strategy games based on ZKSNARK technology. It is set as a battle against a planet in space. Based on the dark forest theory in the Three-Body Problem as the game design principle, it saves itself to the greatest extent and defeats the enemy through the incomplete information mechanism.

Initial setup: Incomplete information game and RTS real-time strategy game under zkSNARKs

zkSNARKs is a powerful cryptographic tool that can be used to verify calculations of secret data. Zero-knowledge proofs used in a chess-like game might prove such a thing." I move my horse from secret place A to secret place B. I won't tell you where A and B actually are, but this proof proves that moving from A to B is indeed a valid design."

In order to understand the impact that zkSNARKs may have on the digital world, it's important to understand the difference between two categories of games: fully informed and incomplete.

A fully informed game is one in which all players know the full state of the game universe. For example, checkers and chess are complete information games because all players always know the positions of all the pieces on the board. Similarly, CryptoKitties is a completely informative game because all players know who owns what Kitty and what the attributes of each Kitty are.

Incomplete information games (also known as "hidden information games") are games in which the player may not know the full state of the world. Poker, for example, is a game of incomplete information because you don't know what cards your opponent has in their hand. Strategy games like StarCraft and EVE Online also fall into this category. In StarCraft and other RTS games, information concealment is implemented through the "fog of war" - areas of the game map that are obscured before they are explored by the player.

Incomplete information games allow the player to explore richer, more dramatic strategic Spaces. Information asymmetries enable things like deception, conditional coordination, complex social dynamics, and sudden player behavior on a large scale. Because of this, almost all popular Mmos are incomplete information games.

Until now, it has been nearly impossible to build an incomplete information setup on a decentralized system. This is because the data layer of most decentralized systems is completely open and transparent by design. There can be no concept of private information if the full state of the game is stored in a transparent data layer that anyone can examine.

Zero-knowledge cryptography changes that. With zkSNARKs, players can retain a private state while publicly submitting verifiably valid actions. This allows us to build games like Dark Forest, which relies on the "crypto fog of war" guaranteed by zkSNARKs.

Bounties are distributed according to rounds, using a directed invitation system to keep players loyal and competitive.

dfDAO: PVP arena with higher freedom

After GR, dfdao plans to launch a mode on Layer 2 to build a trusted neutral PvP arena and build a funding pool for community grants. Funds raised through Gitcoin will be used to reimburse contributors for cloud infrastructure costs, Gas and NFT foundry costs.

The organization hopes to make Dark Forest a positive-sum game ecology where players can compete, collaborate, learn, and build.

On August 24, 2022, AltLayer Network announced that it would host Dark Forest, a decentralized real-time strategy game built on zkSNARKS, a zero-knowledge proof technology, on the game's dedicated execution layer.

As well as incorporating more community plugins to activate the game's community engagement.

There are four main highlights of the game:

With the recent launch of the Dark Forest Hall, through which anyone can launch their own Dark Forest universe, control is gradually shifting to the hands of the community. dfDAO has been selected into the Gitcoin Grants support program, and a plugin system has been launched that will give participants more control. With the core development team taking on a more supportive role.

It can be found that the cultivation of game IP is extremely difficult, the current chain tour has basically entered a period of silence, the chain change of traditional games has basically no successful examples, and the development of native IP is currently really successful only dark forest.

But from the game category, the game guild itself is also an important part of the discussion, September 13, Vietnam game association Ancient8 launched based on OP Stack L2 network Ancient8 Chain, the network will focus on game developers and game players to provide services.

Ancient8 is GameFi's infrastructure, focused on software and community. Ancient8 is building the GameFi community and Launchpad startup platform to serve as a marketing distribution channel for GameFi and Metaverse projects, already attracting millions of users.

Ancient8 manages the largest blockchain gaming guild in Vietnam and enables everyone to build Metaverse through blockchain software products, guild scholarships, blockchain education, institution-level research and communities.

Ancient8's vision is to democratize society and finance in Metaverse.

Triple buff, the history of Ancient8's development.

When Axie swept Southeast Asia, it was accompanied by the economic organization of the guild. The reason for this is the economic organization, because the absolute poverty in Southeast Asia prevents its huge young population from participating in production activities, and the guild can organize production in a relatively cheap way and earn the difference.

Ancient8 is also in this background of operation and born, from the game "gold guild" started. In January 2022, it received a seed round of $4 million from top Capital, with participation from Dragonfly Capital, Pantera Capital and Hashed. Ancient8 said it will use the funding to form a decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) to further build community around play-for-money games.

It will gradually evolve into the DAO, focusing on marketing and community building. DC community has nearly 100,000 members and 115.4K Followers on Twitter.

Evolve to infrastructure, product line is increasingly rich. It is currently divided into three product segments: Research and Dojo Launchpad, and Community.

The research is divided into game, Macro, Academy and Exclusive sections, and regularly issues reports on the game field, reflecting its in-depth research ability and deeply binding the accumulated game products.

Dojo Launchpad, as a game launch platform, is currently mainly its own platform NFT PASS, and is still in contact with more games.

In addition to receiving investment, Ancient8 is also actively expanding its foreign investment and building deep relationships with game projects.

On March 14, 2019, Web3 MMO Delysium completed its first round of private funding of $4 million. The funds raised will mainly be used for game development and ecosystem expansion. The team plans to launch Alpha and Beta versions with PVP tournaments in mid-2022.

On March 14, 2019, Metaverse Game Studios' dark science fiction-themed RPG chain Angelic closed a $10 million round.

On April 21, 2022, NFT lending agreement MetaLend completed the $5 million seed round of financing led by Pantera Capital, Vietnam Game association Ancient8 and other participants. MetaLend is currently in beta with a public launch planned for the second quarter.

On July 26, 2022, game studio Mighty Bear Games completed a $10 million funding round through a token sale. This round of funding will be used to launch a blockchain game division and produce Web3 killer game Mighty Action Heroes.

On September 2, 2022, shortlisted for BNB CHain Vietnam Web 3 Accelerator.

On October 30, 2022, Web3 game studio Roboto Games completes $15 million Series A funding round, led by a16z and participated by Ancient8. The company's total funding to date is $19.5 million, including its 2019 seed round. The money will be used to build the company's second game and hire artists and marketers.

As you can see, game guilds, unlike individual chain IP, are more focused on longer-term operations, and the latest trend is to build stronger and richer infrastructure.

On the whole, although the game IP is temporarily silent, with the help of continuous ecological construction, it has the opportunity to undertake more abundant IP chain functions in the future.

The new birth of the oldest IP: AI-assisted narrative economics?

Recently, a16z made a high-profile investment in the open source IP Protocol Story Protocol, writing in its investment note that "Today, Soundcloud has banned derivatives, videos with soundtracks have been removed from YouTube, and original artists who survive have neither ownership nor compensation."

In fact, on-chain IP does not need to be overly concerned with copyright protection, as long as the IP is attractive enough to create economic value far more than the loss of piracy, such as the classic theory of a thousand readers, the core hobby group is fully motivated to pay for excellent content.

For another example, SCP Ventures recently participated in S31 Labs, its core idea is to create content through AI, any user can directly "fork" others' works, continuous writing, similar to the monkey printer to print Shakespeare, the era of human symbiosis has arrived. As its own statement, "Cascad3 (S31 product) is a dedicated platform for the community to create IP services, including a set of original fractal structure creator economic system, to help create IP to achieve fair and automatic distribution. The community can use Cascad3 to generate a creative map, intuitively show the connection between co-created works, and facilitate the collaboration between co-creators and content consumer browsing. In addition, Cascad3 will also be the most suitable scene for the second creation of public domain IP (such as the Romance of The Three Kingdoms). The Cascad3 platform will be in public beta soon, and there are already many mature Web2 IP's ready to be led by the original author to open the community to co-create."

We can find that the core idea of these two projects is not copyright protection or content quality itself, but all the participation of open source IP, in the centralized traditional literature and art market, its producers are highly concentrated in colleges and universities, writers' associations, a small number of schools, the general public has no right to participate in production, but can only be a passive recipient.

However, on Web3, the open source IP itself has extreme freedom, if the user lacks the ability to create, you can directly access AI and other tools for creation, in this sense, Cascad3 is not only a platform for human collaboration, but also a platform for human-machine collaboration.

The significance of AI flooding into the field of creation is not in the content itself, but the migration of the main paradigm. For a long time, human beings are the source of hatred between each other, such as class, rich and poor, gender and other contradictions, but with the support of AI, human beings are equal in the face of AI. Any content disseminated in the public field can be solidified and quantified into specific terms. Human beings will make mistakes, but the concept of machine mistakes is extremely low.

In addition, the significance of Cascad3 is to re-establish a complete creator economic system, no matter how the content is transferred and distributed, as long as you participate in one of the links, it can be converted into the corresponding economic incentive part, continue to participate in the economic system, there is no need to worry about the amount of labor can not be precipitated.

For a long time, creative freedom and community activity has always been a trouble of antinomy, in order to maintain creative freedom, it is necessary to formulate more rich and detailed rules; But at the same time, the complexity of the rules can discourage creators.

The idea of Cascads is to establish a fairer distribution mechanism. In the test in early September, several decentralized collaborative organizations including PermaDAO are actively trying it. SeeDAO even participated in the early project incubation and initial trial.

From a more basic logic, Arweave's series of low-level changes have put the foundation of the creator economy in place. The combination of UDL (Universal Data License), UCM (Universal Content Marketplace), and $U will change the next era of the creator economy.

More basic infrastructure is being rolled out, the most important is the UDL designed by Forward Research and the adoption of UCM and $U protocols, which will change the current status quo of simple data upload from the basic protocol layer, and can stimulate its economic value.

EPILOGUE

The IP development history of Web3 has experienced NFT copyright protection, game development and open source IP trilogy, of which NFT basically declared failure and is currently concentrated in financial hype, and it is difficult to see signs of recovery in the short term.

The game is a very long-term track, open source IP has gradually entered the practical stage, is currently the most likely to change the economic status of creators in the direction of Arweave has done a full layout in this direction, basically can meet the current and future applications.

  🔗 More about PermaDAO：Website | Twitter | Telegram | Discord | Medium | Youtube