Hi Ian, thank you for joining Diversity in Blockchain’s ChainChat series. 

I appreciate you inviting me and am happy to be here.

It's nice to meet you. How it works is we ask each guest to leave a question for the next guest. And the last question, which Dr Tammy Francis left for you, is this one: Thinking practically, what are you doing in the spaces you occupy to add diversity, be inclusive, and make sure that those that you invite belong?

What I've been doing a lot lately is going to more in-person events and bringing more of my community, my friends, and my network that may not necessarily be exposed to crypto, blockchain, or the tech that encompasses it as a whole. Then networking with other people, I'm always putting people's names in rooms they may not be able to always step into. I’m like, “Hey, I know this XYZ person with domain expertise. And I think they'd be perfect for you to tap on to,” just to get that networking going. I did that just this week, too. I was at a networking event this past weekend, and someone there was working in digital, 3D fashion — stuff for the Metaverse. I connected her with a well-known fashion designer that I know from back in school. I'm always seeing where I can provide value and edify. Connect someone to someone else. You never know how impactful it can be for somebody.

Great. That's exactly what we were speaking about with Dr Tammy Francis. Getting one person connected to one other person and making waves or creating a ripple effect that way. Perfect answer. I think she will be very happy with it. Alright, so tell me a bit about yourself. What are you up to in this space?

Yeah, sure. My background stems from media and tech. For about six or seven years, I've been a filmmaker, producer, stuntman, and active in the entertainment, TV, and film space. Where I'm at now is combining my passion and my love for both tech and film. Greenlit protocol is my company and startup. It’s an end-to-end media rights management and royalty tracking platform. Essentially, we help entertainment professionals protect, monetize and capitalize on their Intellectual Property (IP) using Blockchain technology.

Super cool. And you have something else you're working on, or do you want to keep that one quiet?

No, yeah. So I also co-run and co-organize a film collective called Minorities in Film. I'm also a co-founder of that. We help minorities within the film and entertainment space advance their careers, as well as doing community projects and producing and creating content together.

Yeah, that's really cool as well. In line with the question that Dr Tammy Francis left, I think you are particularly active in that area of onboarding and helping people feel included in the space, right?

It's called MiFILM for short — Minorities In Film. We do a lot of education in the film space and how emerging technologies can help advance and accelerate, whether that's workflow, career options, movie building, or things like that. Having some educational components around it because the founder and I are adamant about technology and using it to our advantage. Using it to our advantage and leveraging it. Brittany Franklin, who co-founded the Minorities In Film project with me, is very passionate about it because of the current lack of diversity and resources for people of color and people with disabilities. It's because she's also hard of hearing. As a director, she wouldn't be able to actually do her job here without technology and advancements like that. She's adamant about leveraging tech and being creative technologically to tell the right story.

It's also nice to see where the tech can help in those situations. 

This flows nicely to my next question: What kind of challenges are there that can be solved with tech? Or with Blockchain specifically?

I mean, it's kind of Where do we start? In the early days, when I was doing initial research and diving into blockchain tech and the ecosystem as a whole, I watched this webinar, and one of the speakers was saying that People like to walk around with like this bucket of paint and call it blockchain and slap it on everything. As if it's a solution for everything. And that's not really the case. When I was in the design phase and thinking of the problem there to solve, I looked at the entire film supply chain from ideation all the way to distribution and revenue. A lot of the practicality of what blockchain does is it brings transparency and insight that most creators or revenue recipients wouldn't have otherwise. One of the most promising things is it creates this nature where it can be trusted. It’s common to hear that blockchain is of a trustless nature. It's decentralized. That means that we no longer have to rely on a central authority where there could be human error, more emotion, wrongdoing, illicit, or just, you know — malicious behavior.

Absolutely. Emotion or subjectivity. Whereas with Blockchain, there can be more objectivity because the code decides. If that code is created fairly, then it should be fairer. In theory.

Yeah, absolutely right. Coded biases. The documentary on Netflix where they talk about how AI sometimes is developed with biases that folks have and may not be aware of themselves. Blockchain can really work around that. You design a smart contract in a way that's fair, efficient, and open, where folks can view it, see that there's nothing wrong or malicious therein and then be able to trust that it will execute upon the stated terms.

Absolutely. How would you weigh up — 60/40, 30/70, 50/50 — your involvement in the media and tech sides?

Oh, man. I'm a techie, techie first. I love my gadgets. But you can't minimize the art. We did an NFT collection back in 2021. As a kind of Proof of Concept. The goal was to raise funds for a community short film project. So we worked with artists, and the name or the kind of theme was that artists are essential. Stemming from the pandemic, when everyone was locked indoors and couldn't go anywhere, everybody turned to artists, right? You watched Netflix, and you found new creative passions such as, like, you know, artistic endeavours or just learning on YouTube and things of that nature. Artists are essential to our community but sometimes the most overlooked and underpaid. And so we wanted to create a showcase that spoke to that. And that's why we created that NFT collection. However, I would say it's a true 50/50. Because I'm always gonna see how and where I can use technology to not only advance the storytelling component of whatever I'm working on but also to enhance and increase my efficiencies with workflows and how I get the day-to-day tasks and things done, whether that comes from automation, bots, or anything like that. And software. We're solving a mundane, manual pain point where many users still manage everything in spreadsheets. Multiple people have hands in the pie, making it complex and clunky. And just a challenge to scale that at large.

Returning to what you were saying about NFTs, how have you seen that evolve? The collection that you had? Or have? Is it still in existence? Sorry, I try not to ask more than one question in each question, but I can never help myself. So okay, how did your NFT project from 2021 evolve? 

Yeah, some pieces are still up for sale. It was a good learning experience because we realized that our community was not up to speed or knowledgeable about the benefits or practicality of blockchain or NFTs within the film industry. And so they can still be bid on. We plan to use any funds from that to put back into the community to advance programming or have it be the start of our community project or ecosystem from there. But the evolution of NFTs is becoming sounder as more and more of these legacy brands and companies start to adopt them. The Reddit, the Starbucks, the MasterCard. As they come in, NFTs will be subtly infused within the ecosystem. Adopted. Folks will start to interact, leverage, and use them without even knowing they're interacting with them. They’ll become a main part of brand interaction and ecosystems, how they build engagement and loyalties, and just more interactive solutions in the space.

So for somebody who doesn't know anything about NFTs, could we say that you buy a membership that gets you a certain set of benefits and is represented with a digital insignia? Or is that oversimplistic?

Yeah, so it really depends on how it's marketed per se from the brand. At its core, it's programmable access. When you think about that, that can be a ticket. It can be a membership program. It could be a subscription. It could be a piece of art. It could be any of those. Getting into that programmable access concept puts another layer on top of what folks are traditionally used to with their normal access, where it's static and outdated. It’s more programmable. And it's usable across the board and improves how we interact with different brands and their use cases.

Great answer. We're starting to see more versatility. That's for sure. And what barriers to entry into the Web3 space, in general, do you currently detect?

I think a lot of misconceptions. And what I mean by that is something I learned or just observed with my peers in the space related to media and film. There's this misconception that it is just marketed to buy from the news and media outlets. And the misconception around crypto and blockchain is that they're always talked about in synonymous ways. They're marketed as one of the same. There's a stark distinction between crypto and blockchain. When you look at it, Blockchain is the technical layer, the infrastructure that other things can run on. Crypto is a tokenized layer that sits on top of a blockchain. If people really took the time to understand blockchain and how it can solve some pain points or be used in their industry, they could see its value proposition. Right. Blockchain can exist without a token or a membership or something of that nature. And there’s still value. Crypto can't really exist without a blockchain, but blockchain can exist without crypto. So I think first, differentiating between crypto and blockchain and understanding what the value proposition of blockchain is, is the biggest hurdle. It’s vast, it’s unknown, and the media portrays them as the same thing.

Correct. Where should diversity efforts be focused?

Yeah, that's a good one. It's twofold. Half is in the onboarding. The other half is in the funding. If we look at Tech founders across the board, minorities and Black people receive less than 1% of venture capital funding. I feel like if you back more minorities, then more minorities can build more products that speak to their culture. Culture is the onboarding of diversity. We can look at many things culture has brought us, from streetwear to hip-hop to anything, whether it's media or music, and they transcend different regions. Hip-hop is not only in the US, right? It's across the world. Streetwear is across the world. And that is bred from culture. So it starts at the top, where you fund more minorities, and they can build more products geared and tailored towards minorities and, therefore, onboard them. That’s diversity: when there’s a more equal and level playing field for diverse groups.

That's a really good answer. Anecdotes or experiences about your own lessons in diversity:  when did you learn your most important lesson in diversity?

When it comes to working with different diverse backgrounds and groups, you begin to understand your own biases and then learn how to navigate them or put them aside to really listen, understand, and be understood. Often, we speak from our own experience and are not necessarily able to understand different backgrounds and experiences. I'm lucky enough that I've been well-travelled, six countries overseas in Europe, lived on two different coasts, and just travelled a lot. So I got to interact with people from all different walks of life. It has really allowed me to look at the world and notice how I interact with people within different spaces.

Where do you see Greenlit in five years' time? What's your projection? Do you see? I’m incapable of asking just one question. Okay, where do you see Greenlit in five years?

Yeah, it is the premier, go-to platform to help any IP owner and any person who is a stakeholder within IP manage IP rights and payouts across media entertainment. From film, and TV, all the way from gaming to comic publishers, authors and things of that nature. We'll start seeing more of an open marketplace around IP rights. Because of blockchain now, we can have more transparent pricing around acquiring rights and trading rights. And, being able to now leverage all the benefits of blockchain and having some tokenization around Intellectual Property Rights, whether loans, staking, or just opening the borders. Facilitating more deals across borders and removing that friction for creators, IP owners, vendors, and distributors.

And this might be a tricky one to answer. But within all of that, how does the law come into play at the moment? In the US, there's a legal framework for IP. But how is it looking for a legal framework for IP in blockchain? 

Yeah, yeah, great question. Right. At its core, we're really a Contract Lifecycle Management platform for Intellectual Property Rights. So we facilitate those licencing and contractual deals between parties, and they can manage it all on the platform. Obviously, there's currently no regulation within the US around what NFTs are and how they apply. But from a licencing standpoint and a REIT standpoint, having a public ledger does allow for more transparent transactions and facilitates management. And so we're closely monitoring. Our model does operate within that legal framework of assigning rights to a token holder without issuing a security, even though the SEC is on a rampage of Everything's a security. I think we won't see any type of real regulation until maybe early 2024, as some of these cases are evolving. They're going to be setting the precedent. From consulting and talking, we operate within a framework where the token really just describes ownership at its core. And it's just a token that sits in a digital public ledger. And that points to an agreement that is contractually binding between two parties.

Yeah, so the same rules and regulations could apply, at least in the media and IP. The same rules could apply, whether there's blockchain technology or not backing it, that just the blockchain technology adds transparency for the seller/buyer.

Correct. It's a more modern way. It comes down to, you know, how platforms build in interactivity. That's somewhat of the lens through which the SEC is looking at it. The issue with some cases is not necessarily how they’re built but how the everyday consumer interacts with them. And I think that will be an important distinction, as we work with production companies, agencies, etc. The framework still applies. It’s just presented in a way where the token adds this ownership as an ascribing layer — it points to the owner and where the file is located.

You've done really well with my curveball questions, by the way. Any other insight or knowledge or things you want to share before I ask you to leave another question for our next guest?

I always encourage people to go after the life they want. Build the business. You're free to build. The universe will make room for your talents, goals, and wants. You just have to put in the work and stay consistent long enough to reap the benefits.

Nice. Thank you. And then a question for our next guest. We don't know who it is yet. It can be tech related. It doesn't have to be. It can be completely random. What would you like to ask our next guest?

What do diversity and decentralization look like? How can decentralization lead to more diverse economies?

Okay, cool. I always say the same if anybody has been listening to a few of these episodes. I always write the questions down even though I don't need to because it's recorded. To stay fresh in my head. How can decentralization lead to more diversity? That's a good one. Excellent. Okay, thank you so much for sharing your time and knowledge with me. We will be in touch.

Absolutely. I appreciate you having me and am excited to share this with the world.

Exactly. Alright. Well, have a great rest of your day and speak to you soon.

Thank you. Take care. Bye bye.