In a previous life, I was a film critic and grant writer and I learned how hard it can be to get a film funded. I saw the various ways of getting independent funding for filmmakers who didn’t already have huge box office success under their belts, often supported by larger organizations: campaigns specifically to support underrepresented filmmakers, compilations of emerging artists housed by streaming companies, arts funding from public institutions, crowdfunding from individuals and charities. Often the best way to support work you want made, especially work that requires as much upfront capital as film, is to vote by buying your ticket and hope that the artists will be able to convince funders to support them next time. While buying tickets is imperative, it only allows viewers to support future work indirectly, and artists still need funding before the film is released. Camila Russo created a more direct solution: audiences can support her film from the beginning, and in exchange, they contribute ideas to its creation and reap rewards from its success.

I was thrilled to chat with Camila Russo about her book The Infinite Machine, dubbed “the Ethereum book” for its comprehensive picture of Ethereum’s early years and first pivotal conflicts, and about her plans for the film adaptation. As Executive Producer for the film, Russo insisted that its production have a decentralized component to it. To accomplish this, she worked with a global team of artists to create tokens that would allow audience members to participate in the creation of the film.

I spoke to Russo about the ideas behind the story she’ll soon tell on film, and her thoughts on Ethereum’s progress since her narration left off.

The Infinite Machine covered up to 2019. So, if the story went all the way up to today, what storylines would you have wanted to include?

Oh, there's so much! My books ended when DeFi and NFTs were just picking up steam and getting built. So if there was a second part of the book or if the book had continued, I would have expanded a lot more deeply on decentralized finance. So, probably look at the biggest projects in DeFi, MakerDAO and Uniswap, Compound, Aave, the lenders, look at the founders and how these verticals work.

There's some great rivalries and drama, between like Uniswap and SushiSwap, these huge personalities, like Andre Cronje and Yearn Finance, and how that whole ecosystem works is fascinating. They are one of the biggest DeFi protocols and they don't have an actual legal entity behind it.

Obviously, LUNA is fascinating, the spectacular rise and fall. Do Kwon, such a big personality. Also the whole DeFi versus CeFi in this crash, how obvious it's been the advantages that DeFi brings over CeFi, the problems with with all these centralized entities. So yeah, those are just a few.

So obviously, we're in a bear market. There's been a crash, or a cascade of crashes. What would you hope to see survive? And maybe what would you hope to see disappear?

I think what will survive and thrive is this whole new on-chain economy that's emerging. So, you know, DeFi, NFTs, a lot of what we call web3—this sort of more decentralized, ownership-based internet—will keep growing and improving. There's a lot of innovation that is not stopping because prices are lower.

What will go away? For now, some of the scammers, the opportunists… people work in crypto to just make money quickly. You don't have those sorts of opportunities, so those people will leave and I think that that's for the best. Maybe some of the less sustainable business models that were tried out in this last bull cycle. It's just natural for things to evolve in a space that’s so new. People are experimenting, seeing what works and what doesn't.

I think there's a lot of soul searching in terms of the DAO model, like, how can it really work? How can governance really be representative? How can adults be efficient in managing organizations? All of those questions are being asked right now. And then some of these incentive models, yield farming and liquidity incentives. All of this that was so big a few months ago is also being rethought, like airdrops. I think we'll continue to see all of that, airdrops and token incentives, because they do work. Part of what make tokens so interesting is that they do allow for that kind of flexibility.

But I don't think that we'll see these techniques and mechanisms applied in the same ways that they were before. People are looking back, taking stock of what happened, what worked and what didn't. I think it'll be interesting to see the models that emerge.

What was your experience like getting this book published?

I went through a pretty traditional process. I went to an agent. Late 2017 I reached out and said “I have an idea about a book on the history of Ethereum,” and he decided to work with me and guided me through the book proposal process. We had this document that was sent over to different publishers and then I got an offer from HarperCollins. April 2018, I signed a deal with HarperCollins.

The best part of the process was reporting, doing all the interviews. I really enjoyed that.

Now that you are Executive Producer on the film, how has that experience differed creatively, publishing a book versus producing a film?

Well, it's very different. Publishing the book, I spent maybe a year just reporting. It was a lot of work, doing over a hundred interviews, following the Ethereum community around, just trying to get a feel of the actual places where like the Ethereum story started. I went to Toronto, Waterloo, and Switzerland, Miami, all of these places that are important in the Ethereum founding story. I tried to interview as many of the people who were involved at that time.

And then sitting down and actually writing the book… I love writing so I also enjoyed that part of the process, but it was really hard putting all the pieces together. There were so many stories that I wanted to include, so I had to make sure that everything flowed. So that was a whole different part of the process. You know, it was a two year process, a lot of work. Basically most of my time was spent working on the book.

Being Executive Producer is something completely different. I’m not so much involved in the actual making of the film. I'm not involved in the writing; there's a script writer for that. I was involved in deciding how to fund it. Since it's the first movie about Ethereum, we thought it would be cool to do it with the Ethereum community, with Ethereum tokens. So ideating that project, that was what came from me: thinking about who should design these NFTs, getting together this group of artists from emerging nations, the concept of these Ethereum logos that combine into these mosaics, the utility of the NFT… NFT holders have these prices attached to their NFTs that allow them to do different things related to the movie, like appear as an extra, or appear in the credits, or go to the movie premiere, stuff like that.

So yeah, that was my main role as the Executive Producer, coming up with this NFT collection. And now, I am still involved in the community, but it's nothing like spending two years, every day, dedicated to writing a book.

What are some of your favorite things to have come out of that community so far?

I'm just so, so proud that this collection has already been able to help the artists involved. Like I mentioned, there are 36 artists, mostly from emerging nations. A lot of them come from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia. Places where revenue from these NFTs makes a life-changing impact. There are artists from Cuba who were able to leave Cuba, thanks to this collection. Same with artists in Venezuela. Getting $1,000 in Venezuela… it goes a long way. So to me that's been the best thing to come out of it. And then it's just really gratifying to have a group of people behind you, behind your project, that are excited to see the movie come out, that are fans of the book and are engaged and involved, and are just with me in this process. I think it's definitely a new model of producing a film; you're building an audience beforehand, and hopefully they can help amplify the movie when it actually comes out. But, you know, you have this small allegiance with you. So it's been really nice.

So, my last question: What do you think could change about how books get published, based on everything you've learned about how economies can change with DeFi?

I think, in the same way DeFi disintermediates financial actors and third parties, tokens and crypto can help disintermediate some of the third parties that have been entrenched in the publishing industry as well. I had a great experience with HarperCollins. I love my editor, and they helped distribute the book, and it was done well, so no complaints there. But there are aspects of traditional publishing that I think can be improved with the token model.

For example, maybe the next book I publish, I would get my advance directly from my community or followers, or however you want to call them, people who want to see me write another book. Maybe I could sell an NFT, kind of like a crowdfunding campaign. They buy an NFT, and then with that NFT, they can claim the book when it's out, and with that advance, I can use it to write it. Then it would be more like self publishing, with the difference that I’d have this direct connection with my potential readers.

Same as what's happening right now with the Infinite Machine movie. In this model. I wouldn't get the help of a big publisher in distributing the book, but on the other hand, I would get 100% of sales. Which… right now, authors get a very small percentage of the actual sales on their books. So, there are trade-offs. Definitely, having a physical book published and in bookshelves and the big bookstores all over the world… that's awesome. And that would be hard to do by myself. But there's this other aspect of going directly to my audience, getting funding and support from them, and then having all of the proceeds, all of the sales, go to me.

It's kind of what we're seeing in the music industry. There are are some artists who are just going straight to their friends, selling the albums as NFTs. All of these web3 music artists, they say they made more with a single NFT album than what they have made with Spotify in all of their careers. So I think it's happening; creators are able to go directly to their consumers and to their fans, disintermediate all of these intermediaries who were taking a cut before. There's definitely trade-offs, but I think it's a model to try out. 🏹