Ethereum’s AKIRA Moment: Building Lasting Onchain Culture

It was a creative and technical market, and nearly 40 years later, we're still talking about it, we're still inspired by its ideas and driven by that creative moment. It was the product of an economic bubble, it was made by an industry that was cashed up, had a chip on its shoulder, and something to prove to the mainstream, which sounds a little bit familiar. To me, it's a perfect example of the importance of long-term thinking and investment in a creative and technological ecosystem. And today I want to talk about Ethereum security, in the terms of unshamed culture and unshamed IP. I want to talk about what it looks like, it's not here yet, how we can bring it into being, and how, as creators of the Ethereum ecosystem, we can build towards it.

My name's Jack, I go by Vi, or Viper, while online. I'm the co-founder of a project called Shunpei Yaldos, which is one of Japan's biggest NFT projects. For the last four years, I've been making anime here in Tokyo, building creative communities in Japan and around the world, and having a great time. Here's the rest of the Yaldos team. I was the director of the Shunpei Yaldos anime, which just came out, we launched that in June, which was a big moment for us, the last three years of production.

I also advise some projects building IP here in Japan, like Mariah, which is a kind of tokenized AI-driven influencer. I contribute to the Threshold Network, which is a more kind of tech-driven network for the Ethereum ecosystem. And just so you know, I'm a serious guy. There's been a team card coming out on the front page of Japan, apparently. So, why do we need to do this?

Why not just keep building creative societies, and Logstads, and L2s, and whatnot? Why do we need to worry about, I'm not saying culture, I'm not saying IP. I gathered a team and announced, did a great talk on this recently, we need people who care about what we're doing. We need a talent pipeline, we need reach, we need people to tell the stories of Ethereum and why they support it. And I think we need ways to onboard people that aren't purely financial and IP-wise as well.

All the technical elements, engineering, cost, details, follow-ups, et cetera. These are all essential to Ethereum, but so is the cultural layer and the social layer and the IP that we use to reach people. And I think the way we do that is to be creative in the cultural and IP realms of Ethereum. And to me, they've already shown how powerful they are in the NFC era. A lot of money was wasted in the NFC kind of era, and a lot of broken promises, in my opinion.

But it was actually a really positive moment in certain areas. Are there any people in the audience who aren't engineers, maybe more on the art side, even PR, marketing, design, something? For some of you, maybe onboarding is the NFC kind of era, like 21, 22. I'm just going to say yes because I've proved my point in the past. Actually, a lot of the people who are leading the messaging, who are leading the protocols and narratives around things like on-chain social and distributed crypto, actually were onboarded during that time, and I think it's hugely important.

So I think that's why the filter was out of Ethereum. On-chain IP, on-chain culture. These people found ETH because they were maybe inspired by the creations people made during that era. Maybe the financial opportunity drew them here. Maybe it was like JPEG, but I don't know.

For me, I think on-chain culture, on-chain IP is a vehicle for us to make Ethereum more automated, more mainstream, and to find people where they are. And it's not that hard to summon this kind of person, this sort of creative person, to Ethereum. I think it's not such a hard sell because if you look at any of the industries or ecosystems where IP is created or generated, they're not great places for creators right now. The music industry sucks. The writing sucks out of the journals back in the day, and I would want to do it again.

TV and movies are bad. And anime is actually, even though it's bigger than ever before, it's more popular than ever before, the conditions for creators are actually much worse than they were in the 80s when materials were made. So I think if we can make the case that Ethereum is an alternative to not just financial rails but ways to coordinate people, coordinate systems, and make an alternative to traditional kind of systems out there, I think we should be able to do that more creatively. And we can look to Ethereum once again and say what people need, what conditions we need to create to make awesome cultural artifacts. Creators basically just want a few things.

They want to get paid to do the things they love. They want an audience. They want to work on interesting things. If you look at when material was made, as a result of 20 years, 30 years of talent pipeline in the anime industry, of people being able to join studios, get trained by experts, make their own things, get promotions, roles where they could have a real impact, and that's the only way you're going to make something that's significant in scale, to have that talent pipeline. And that's a result of basically having to apply the business model.

At the time of anime, it was going DHS and Baymax and really thickest techniques, and for unseen culture, that kind of business model changes quite often, which is why in one region it's very difficult to have this kind of consistent career for creators in this place. On the audience side, Ethereum is a cultural artifact of such reputation, not just because it's good, but because at distribution, they've known anime before. Anime is actually much bigger outside of Japan now than it is in Japan, too, in terms of numbers and audience, and that's largely thanks to the distribution system that's centralized around the time that it's released. The thing is, finding creators and getting them audience is probably a handle more on the health food side at the moment, which is fine, that's not a bad thing, but we do need to think of ways to get distribution through audiences as well. And generally speaking, people want to work on more than frontier spaces, and I think Ethereum is a kind of fundamental canvas for many creative things, it's a really important place to build.

And ultimately, you need great examples. People need to know that they can do this, they can make stuff, and they'll find an audience and they'll make a good product. And not to be too silly, I do think... I do think Galvos is not a bad action, I think I can put that. This was, we made an anime from a third-time director, it has a wacky style, it's original IP, I have no fans or followers whatsoever.

If I put that into an anime festival community in a district a million times, no one would have ever funded that. But Heath thinks that Heath's project was funded, and we did create the thing, and now he thinks that that is comparable to Shibuya, who's doing this big fashion collab, and there is actually a legacy of projects that has been kind of inspired in some way by that project. To me, that's kind of the power of Heath, disrupting power structures and financial structures that may be permitting these creative or people-building projects. And, you know, if you ask the average anime fan what they think about NFTs, they actually hate NFTs. But this is from sort of a small selection of comics of people who watch anime and they love it.

They're actually cheering for unchanged IP and unchanged OTAs. And that's because they love the story of the next generation kind of taking it to the next level and building something outside of the traditional super-services. I am also pretty... I'm not a purist when it comes to unchanged culture and IP. There are a lot of great networks of art, like very few unchanged art projects out there.

I actually think that loving something couldn't exist without Heath. It couldn't exist or it was shaped by the form of Heath. To me, that's unchanged IP. And Terraforms is one of my favorite products of art. They make amazing, like very pure network art.

And even if they say NFTs could be on IPFM, it might be GFX could be on IPFM. So that's what it's like. So what does it look like in the future? What are we going to see? What is the future at this moment?

And how are teams creating now into the future? I think it takes a few forms. One example I really like at the moment... Yes? A group called GX Research Group.

They're a small team. These are the minds of maybe nine or ten kind of creators, a mix of engineers, artists, AI researchers. They're making really interesting sort of capsule collections with open edition and achievements. And basically, you know, in my opinion, one of the big things with the NFT era was that these roadmaps got floated out, strange proposals were made, and teams got locked into ideas. I said it in regard to everything I've had for the last year.

But I think what we actually want to create is be building more users over time, doing more limited experiments and limited creations. And the last one, the experiment, was actually really pushing the boundary on even what any sort of new AI company is doing. You know, you don't need simulations and sort of semi-interactive games and things like that. And it ran for two weeks, and the expectations were set up front, and now they just go and work on the next project that they can build. Especially, you know, audiences and doing more experimental things like this.

There's also so much to be said about AI and cryptography and sort of what's possible here that's not possible in the real world. I think we're going to see more tokenized culture in IP, and that's partly just a reaction to NFT no longer being the dominant form of making on-chain IP or distributing on-chain software. Royalties are down, and we're kind of moving up from that now. And a lot of the boundaries that existed to launching these tokens and coins three years ago are what's now considered shallow tokens. Today, a lot of those boundaries have come down, for better or worse.

I actually think tokenized projects are highly dramatic for our creativity and NFT, but it is what it is, and we need to be a lot more of this. A couple of examples of that. Narayan, which I helped work on, that's kind of like a tokenized AI-driven influencer. And Wreck is an interesting thing. They put out this, like, Wreck paper, they call it.

They named it a brand coin. You could call it an IT coin or even a meme coin in some way. It's like a very loosely associated, you know, parallel between the token and what the team's doing. There's not a strong connection there, but it's kind of like they've invested in the power of belief. I think we're going to see a lot more things like that.

A lot of that on-chain IT innovation has been driven by that basically. And I think our third moment will come when someone figures out how to use the Web 2.0 and the Web 3.0 elements of this kind of on-chain culture and on-chain IT. I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I think the tokenized experience and a lot of Web 2.

0 audience feeds or feels will basically be indistinguishable while they shift into play really distinctly. And I think there are teams doing this or are trying to do this at the moment. I like e-diversions and abstract on-chain RPGs. They're built out in a really thoughtful way, starting with, like, very pure on-chain primitives and moving to more gaming stuff, and now building out in a non-crypto audience. But we'll see how that goes.

My takeaway is, basically, we're in this together, and actually, Ethereum was not made just by the people in the studio who drew the T-frames and the in-between. It was the effort of an industry over 20-plus, 30-plus years and a balanced pipeline and a kind of creative ecosystem and technological ecosystem. I think if you're a creator, if you're an artist or designer, go and make things on-chain, make primitives, protocols, use a platform, ignore the MCP1, because you can while you're at it, if you want. If you're a builder or an engineer, work with an artist, work with a creator. Even if it's a side project, don't just go and build without a log stack that you say is superior.

That should be cut off and be weaved and built into something. Galva started as a side project for me, and as a creative project, it's been the most fulfilling period in my life. And whether you're a miner or a layer, just invest in things that you like, that thrive for the future. If you see a great project, if you see an interesting NFT, you're taking a step forward. I didn't catch it, but apparently the Renaissance was funded for the price of an inside yacht, and I think you took that when you were yachting, right?

So I'm sure it's something we can continue to do together. I'm probably out of time, but I do want to imagine what it looks like once we've had a period of moments, once this kind of cultural, or once this area becomes salacious through the means of culture, or ideas. In Japan, anime culture is everywhere. It's your first visit, which is quite shocking to see, but it becomes normal very quickly. And that is the result, it wasn't always like this, it's the result of a lot of long-term thinking.

And here's the whole, I think it's a lifelong mission that's going to take a long time to build this stuff out and to get these pipelines and rails in place. And I know I've talked about it here a lot, I won't go too deep into this, but there's a lot of parallels actually with the British history of the anime industry. And so I think that I see, if we're somewhere here, you know, one of us, of course, after a period of 90s, we've got Evangelion, which means we have some face-to-face reprisals ahead of us. But we'll get through. From my side, I just want to say, thanks everyone for listening.

Go and watch the anime, it's coming out in a couple of months here, I think we just hit over a million views between YouTube and Amazon Prime and stuff. 150 people here in the sector to help create that, hundreds of on-chain community members, and yeah, it was a real labour of love. So thanks very much for listening, I'll be back. Thank you very much, I'm going to take a picture if you could stay there for a moment, that would be great. Thank you very much.

I love all the recent TV anime, I hope you know all the characters and the popular content.