Crypto NYC hosts Cellarius
On Tuesday, June 5, Crypto NYC hosted Cellarius for our weekly Tuesday lunch. Cellarius is hard at work creating the Cellarius Universe, a unique transmedia franchise powered by Ethereum. Tuesday’s presentation was led by Frank Apollo, the Champion of Cellarius Lore, and Dr. R. Tyler Smith, the Cellarius Tokenologist. Cellarius presented at Crypto NYC’s headquarters in Tribeca to a full crowd of Crypto NYC regulars and some new attendees.
The Cellarius team is building a platform and community that will collaborate on a unique, fan-driven, and fan-curated story. The Cellarius narrative begins in the recent past and will extend throughout space and time, with the first Era focused on the period between 2009 and 2160. The Cellarius Universe is a sci-fi world and the universe is shaped by themes of space exploration, the rise of artificial intelligence, environmental and financial collapse, and of course, the rise of blockchain technology. The Cellarius team calls the aesthetic of their universe “blockpunk.”
Members of the Cellarius community can submit all types of content to the project with an initial focus on artwork, written stories, videos, and music. Content is submitted to the Cellarius Commons, where users can review and interact with the work. Work that is met with acclaim and upvoted by the community can then be ratified into the Cellarius core canon. The core canon is the immutable set of narrative lines that shape the Cellarius universe. This canon is tracked using the Ethereum blockchain, based on the hashed metadata for ratified content.
The fundamental goal of Cellarius is to return storytelling to its decentralized roots, where stories are shaped and owned collectively by those who create them. By using blockchain technology, Cellarius hopes to build a consensus-driven model for adding elements to the core canon of the universe, without requiring the centralized, top-down driven infrastructure used by current commercial entities to maintain control over their Intellectual Property.
The Cellarius project is a ConsenSys Formation, and the team has grown to include twelve members. The project’s focus has evolved over time. The initial goal was to build a new type of card or board game that could be built on top of the blockchain. As the project gained momentum, the founders realized how essential a compelling narrative would be to their game, and the decentralized storytelling universe and narrative frame of Cellarius evolved from there.
Cellarius’s presentation focused on how a transmedia franchise will actually operate. While the core events of the Cellarius Universe story have been created, it will be up to fans to create, upload, and ultimately ratify which additional content — the settings, characters, factions, and human dimensions that bring the universe to life — will become part of the core story.
Cellarius plans to utilize blockchain technology in two key ways. The first is to track additions to the commons and provide a decentralized mechanism for participants to vote on which submissions will be incorporated into the core lore of the universe. Second, the team is exploring novel ways for content creators to interact with their fans and maintain ownership of their contributions. Provenance chains and tracking will be an integral part of guaranteeing proper attribution for creators. They may also be able to tokenize their direct contributions to the project, as well as derivatives (virtual collectibles, unique experiences, etc.) of the content they have created.
To incentivize content production, Cellarius also intends to adopt a patronage system, where patrons can commission unique pieces from content creators. Patrons will have their identities inscribed in the metadata of the pieces they consign and may even be able to create revenue sharing agreements with the artists.
After Frank and Tyler completed their presentation, they opened the floor to questions from the crowd. The first several questions centered around how people would interact with a transmedia narrative, and Frank and Tyler explained in greater detail how the different forms of media would be integrated into the platform.
There were several questions regarding the structure of intellectual property ownership for assets created in the universe, as well as the ownership structure of the entire universe of intellectual property. Tough questions arose regarding the ability of content creators to monetize their digital assets outside of the Cellarius platform. There were several questions which dove into the nature of the tokenization progress, which Tyler explained was still being developed.
Several attendees pointed out the incongruity of Cellarius owning the IP to the entire ecosystem, with content creators just owning the rights to their work within the universe. The tension between the highly centralized start of the project (for the purposes of involving the community in building the platform) and the team’s stated goal to facilitate decentralized storytelling was a theme of many of the follow-up questions.
Frank explained that their current focus is getting the narrative universe kick-started, which requires a certain amount of centralization, and then opening up more control of the narrative to the community as the platform grows more robust. Tyler emphasized that the tokenization process was still being debated internally, and that the team is focused primarily on driving initial content creation.
“Just as a start, things are going to be more centralized in general, while we build out the environment and as we build this ecosystem … It is going to be progressively decentralized. We’re not looking to jump in and have everything be one hundred percent decentralized from the start. We’re dealing with a very entrenched industry and we kind of need to focus on playing by the rules that are in place right now, but we’re eager to just make sure that we’ve relaxed that over time. We’re definitely exploring all of our options for that,” Frank explained.
Cellarius promises to be an ambitious project that explores several new applications of blockchain technology. Applications for their Alpha are still open at cellarius.network, and they aim to begin the Alpha for the platform this fall. We’ll continue to keep an eye out for any new developments.
“We were very happy to have Cellarius come and speak at our weekly lunch. While the blockchain promises to revolutionize many aspects of business, Cellarius’s presentation highlights the difficulty of decentralizing and managing intellectual property. We look forward to future developments in the space and seeing how other startups figure out the most effective way to decentralize IP,” commented Blake Johnson, Crypto NYC co-founder, who attended the lunch.
