as musicians, record label owners and entrepreneurs, Andrew and I have long found ourselves exploring the web3 landscape from that perspective. We asked ourselves: how do we improve distribution and streaming for musicians? Will future record labels be fully decentralised? Should we begin issuing smart contracts for traditional label-artist deals??
we each waded into the waters tentatively, learning from the ground up. As a former political philosophy student and newsroom journalist, I’ve always been deeply interested in social and governance structures, so my journey naturally led me to becoming involved in the young DAO landscape. becoming a contributor and governing member to these value-generating, self-sufficient communities opened my eyes to both the difficulties and unbounded potential of these systems. for the first time, I felt like I was at the forefront of something important - I was a part of an experiment to wrestle back ownership from traditional structures of entrepreneurial value.
when Andrew proposed to me the idea of the crypto-novel, we both immediately knew that it was both conceptually exciting and a highly unusual approach to collaboration: people would buy multi-media NFTs (composed of text, imagery and music) in order to be granted permission to add words to the novel. as the NFTs are bought and sold, the stories will continue to grow, and the intellectual property rights from all these contributions are leveraged for the benefit of the entire ecosystem. when the IP of a story is licensed, for example, contributors will be rewarded.
if our value proposition was to optimise for the highest quality NFT literature then clearly the method wasn’t ideal… but we quickly realised that this wasn’t our intention at all. it goes without saying that the Quest of Evolution and its community would benefit greatly from executing a great piece of literature, but the real value for us lies in response to the question …….: how will people act??
The Quest of Evolution is a project that aims to offer the grounds to harness a chaotic approach to collaboration, while rewarding the community with royalties and ownership.
the curiosity that drove us into web3 and the experimental freedom that we found upon arrival are both central to this endeavour. we want people to use these NFTs as they please. someone might hold it for years before realising, suddenly, the perfect continuation to the story… or, conversely, and more frequently, people will spoil it on purpose. it’s no coincidence that the first question we receive after concept pitches is “what about. text-art penises tho?”.
our model incentivises people to contribute text in order to join the royalty pool, but this isn’t us closing the door on the proven value-creation brought by scarcity and collectibility. by and large what we are doing is building utility and collaboration into an NFT project and leaving it’s potential open-ended for future diversification into more sophisticated forms of collaboration and output.
BIG PICTURE.
crypto-novels will be the first iteration of a much broader collaborative framework. we want to create a fluid space where new forms of collaboration can be designed and launched. we want to create a space for thinkers, writers, musicians, visual artists and entrepreneurs to bounce off each other in unusual ways, via unusual mediums.
our core principle is that contributors are paid fairly through smart contract royalty splitters and token allocation, laying the foundation for a transparent creative hub that is owned and directed by its users.
let’s start making crypto-novels.
by Bob Juburi