BLACKBOX and the Blockchain Landscape

The landscape of projects building on-chain infrastructure for culture is varied and expanding. At the Layer 1 level, a growing number of projects are building purpose-built chains to manage, license, and track creative works. Many aim to solve genuine problems of transparency, fair compensation, and provenance for digital creators. However, nearly all of them operate from a shared, often unexamined premise: that a creative work is, first and foremost, a piece of property to be owned, managed, and monetized.

The deeper question, then, is not whether blockchain can make existing systems work better. It is whether blockchain enables a different way of thinking about cultural works altogether. What if the technology that makes assets traceable and programmable could also make them unownable? What if the decentralisation that characterises blockchain governance could be turned from the management of property to the stewardship of the cultural commons?

This page situates BLACKBOX within this emerging landscape. It surveys the projects that are building Layer 1 infrastructure for cultural production, identifies the assumptions that they share, and outlines the different paths that a decentralised approach might take. The aim is not to position BLACKBOX as a competitor to existing projects, but to clarify what a genuinely non-proprietary framework might look like, and what it would require.

The Landscape

Several Web3 projects are addressing culture and creativity through blockchain infrastructure.

Story Protocol is arguably the most prominent, a Cosmos SDK-based Layer-1 blockchain designed to make intellectual property “programmable”. It allows creators to register works as NFTs that contain automated licensing terms and royalty splits, enforceable via its Programmable IP License (PIL). Its goal is to create a global, efficient IP marketplace.

Similarly, Camp Network positions itself as the "Autonomous IP Layer" for the AI era. Its core innovation is a Proof of Provenance (PoP) Protocol, which cryptographically tracks the origin and use of content at the protocol level. This is designed to ensure that AI systems and other users can be automatically and fairly charged for the data they use.

FaiRemix focuses specifically on the culture of remixing. It introduces a "Proof of Inspiration" (PoI), a cryptographic primitive that allows creators to provably link their work to its upstream influences. This creates a transparent graph of creative lineage, ensuring that original artists receive automatic attribution and royalties when their work inspires something new.

Finally, projects like SilentBerry and PubDAO represent a more focused, application-specific approach. SilentBerry is a decentralized publishing platform built on the Bitcoin network via the RGB++ protocol. It allows authors to inscribe books onto the Bitcoin blockchain, converting ownership and revenue rights into tradable digital assets. PubDAO is a "Media DAO" seeking to redefine media production and distribution using Web3 tools, aiming to become a decentralized, community-owned wire service.

These are serious projects, and they're asking important questions about how value flows through digital culture.

Where BLACKBOX differs

Existing on-chain IP projects build better infrastructure for an intellectual property framework they do not question. BLACKBOX starts from a different premise. It does not grant permission because it does not recognise the authority of an owner to grant or withhold it. Instead, it deploys the concept of user obligation: those who benefit from a work incur an obligation to its originators and to the cultural commons.

This distinction has practical consequences, which can be illustrated by considering what happens to orphan works; that is, works whose rights-holder cannot be identified or located after a diligent search. The specific rules governing orphan works vary across jurisdictions. For example, what constitutes a diligent search in one country may differ from another, and the legal consequences of using an orphan work range from statutory licenses to liability for infringement. The United States has no federal orphan works legislation at all, despite repeated reform proposals. Broadly, however, wherever copyright law requires permission for use, and the rights-holder cannot be found, use becomes legally precarious or impractical. Additionally, the existing patchwork of rules can make cross-border use of orphan works, particularly in the digital environment, fraught. The effect of this is that orphan works are frozen out of circulation, with museums and cultural institutions unable to place archives in the public domain. This is a failure inherent to the proprietary framework.

In contrast, a system that removes the requirment for permission is able to allow orphan works to circulate freely. Additionally, a hypothetical option could see 'use' generate a micro-contribution to a treasury, pooling support for the cultural commons without the prohibitive transaction costs that currently prevent museums and public collections from making orphan works available.

The table below summarises the key distinctions:

Comparison

Technical pathways

The opening question of this page was whether blockchain enables a different way of thinking about cultural works. Or, whether the technology that makes assets traceable could also make them 'unownable'. The orphan works example suggests that it can, but only if the infrastructure is designed accordingly. What follows from this? Three interlocking mechanisms seem required. First, an immutable attribution registry recording causal contribution to a work without conferring exclusive rights (e.g., built on a smart contract platform such as Ethereum or a purpose-built chain). Second, a common treasury pooling contributions arising from use. Third, a governance protocol determining distributions from the treasury (e.g., a Decentralized Autonomous Organization based voting mechanism). Together, these mechanisms recognise that a work’s significance is not fixed at creation but emerges through use, reinterpretation and cultural revival. The model thus sustains the conditions of cultural production while resisting re-commodification and without the logic of ownership or exclusion.

These are the mechanisms that follow from the logic of the project. But how are they realised in practice? The project has not yet committed to a specific technical stack, and we are specifically seeking expert input to develop a pilot, but several on-chain innovations strike me as relevant.

The on-chain attribution registry would be the foundational layer. It needs to record data such as who contributed to a work and when, without conferring any exclusive rights. In some existing projects, this function is served by NFTs. Story Protocol, for example, requires creators to mint an NFT as "ownership over the IP" before registering it on the chain. That NFT then becomes an "IP Asset" to which licensing terms and royalty splits can be attached. Camp Network similarly tokenises IP assets as ERC-721 NFTs with "traceable provenance, usage rights, and attribution baked in at the protocol level". SilentBerry divides book ownership and revenue rights into tiered NFTs (Gold, Silver, Copper Berries).

In these examples,the NFT is a mechanism through which ownership, licensing, and monetisation are enforced on-chain. The NFT can be traded, sold, or used as collateral.

As BLACKBOX rejects this logic, it requires a different approach. A registry is required to record attribution, but this does not need to be an NFT, and, crucially, it must not be transferable. The registry must be non-transferable because transferability would turn attribution into a commodity. If the record of origin can be bought and sold, it ceases to be a record of origin and becomes an asset. This would break the chain of causal contribution and sever the relational link between the originator and the work. Attribution would thereby become a tradeable good, subject to speculation, concentration, and enclosure: precisely the dynamics the project seeks to subvert. So, to ensure that the registry functions as a public record, not a market, it should be non-transferable.

Simply, the registry needs to record a chain of origin: a public, immutable record of causal contribution. The technical implementation might be a smart contract on an existing chain, a custom module on a purpose-built chain. At the most basic level, it can even be something simpler such as a signed attestation stored on IPFS, anchored periodically to a blockchain for timestamping. The site's attestation demo and heartbeat agent already explore this more primitive prototype in a browser-based context.

Several options exist, each with different trade-offs. A smart contract on an existing chain like Ethereum offers programmability and immediate access to existing infrastructure. It can enforce non-transferability and interact with other contracts, such as the treasury or governance protocol. The trade-off is cost: each registration and each use incurs transaction fees, which may be prohibitive for micro-contributions.

A soulbound token (SBT) is a specific type of non-transferable token, permanently bound to a single address. It functions as a permanent credential, not a tradeable asset. Hypotehtically, in the BLACKBOX framework, when a creator registers a work, the protocol could issues an SBT to their address. This SBT could contain the work's metadata and cryptographically prove the creator's role as originator. Because it cannot be transferred, this proof is permanent and cannot be sold or assigned to someone else. The SBT records attribution without creating a market in attribution. This is the direct technical expression of the project's philosophical commitment.

A custom module on a purpose-built chain offers the highest degree of control. The registry, treasury, and governance can be designed as native modules, with rules encoded at the protocol level rather than in smart contracts. This avoids transaction cost issues and allows for deeper customisation. The trade-off is complexity: bootstrapping a new chain requires significant resources and a validator network.

At the most basic level, the registry can be something simpler: a signed attestation stored on IPFS, anchored periodically to a blockchain for timestamping. The site's attestation demo and Site Integrity Heartbeat already explore this more primitive prototype.

Ethereum and the "world computer"

Ethereum is often described as a "world computer" in that it was designed to function as a shared, neutral, global platform where anyone can build and run applications without relying on any central authority. In other words, blockchain can be conceived as a platform for programmable governance or a way to encode rules that cannot be changed by any single party. If the word "governance" is off-putting because it evokes bureaucracy or control, another way of putting it might be "codified common agreement." But either way, the fundamental idea is that a blockchain can encode the rules by which a community chooses to operate in a transparent manner that cannot be tampered with.

A brief description of the infrastructure for those unfamiliar, is that the network runs on a distributed set of computers (nodes), governed by consensus rather than any single entity. Developers can deploy smart contracts, that is programs stored on the blockchain that execute automatically when certain conditions are met. Users interact with these contracts by sending transactions, which are validated by the network and recorded immutably.

Within this ecosystem, the native cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH), has two basic functions. First, it pays for computation: every on-chain transaction (whether transferring funds or executing a smart contract) consumes computational resources, and users pay for this in ETH, known as "gas fees." This prevents the network from being overwhelmed by spam and also aligns incentives in that users pay for what they use.

Second, ETH secures the network. Those who run the nodes that validate transactions (i.e, the network's participants) stake ETH as collateral to participate in consensus. If they act dishonestly, they can lose their stake. This creates an economic incentive to act in the network's best interest.

This second function is suggestive for a project like BLACKBOX which aims to facilitate cultural participation. For example, we could think about 'gas' in purely cultural terms. In this construction, a cultural stewardship protocol might ask users to contribute to the commons in non-material ways. Ethereum's model is economic: value is staked, and value can be lost. BLACKBOX's model is socio-cultural: contribution need not be a monetary transaction but a participation in creative and intellectual flourishing. The question is whether a protocol can encode this kind of contribution and whether the flow of cultural value can be aligned with the health of the commons, rather than with the accumulation of capital.

The choice of infrastructure will ultimately depend on the priorities of the community that gathers around the project.

TLDR ;)

This is what distinguishes BLACKBOX: It is not a technical fix for an existing system. It is a different cultural and legal imagination: one that treats cultural works as shared inheritance, subject to stewardship and care, rather than private property to be managed and sold.

The question this project asks is whether we can build a model that recognises the author's connection to the work without making that connection a property right.