Original link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/b5YVwSUcq3ySg-OSAIy60w
Disclaimer: This article is for academic discussion and exchange only and does not constitute investment advice. Redline DAO has not invested in Shibuya. Readers are advised to conduct investment research.
introduction
Interactive Video in Web2
Interactive video is an emerging content media that has become popular in the past two years. The biggest difference between it and regular videos is that the audience can make choices at the bifurcation points given by the plot, so that through a series of choices, they can complete a story line according to their own wishes. If you are a fan of interactive videos, you must have heard of the Bilibili UP host with the ID "Da Ni Ni". This creator with more than 2 million fans has published popular interactive video works such as "Bikki Bottom Serial Murder Case", "The Death of Gray Wolf", and "Ice and Snow Village Murder Case". The content presentation method of interactive videos is essentially to transfer part of the decision-making power of the content from the centralized producer to the audience, which coincides with the concept of Web3 decentralization to some extent. Today's protagonist Shibuya is a pioneer in introducing interactive videos into Web3 (or introducing Web3 into the field of interactive videos).
Founding team: The owner of White Rabbit in Shibuya
Let's go back to 2020, when Emily Yang (aka. Pplpleasr), who worked at Apple, received the bad news of being laid off during the epidemic. In this dark moment, the visual artist who once worked for Hollywood Visual Studios and Blizzard Pictures thought of the cryptocurrency she had invested in three years ago and grasped this life-saving straw. In 2020, when Defi summer was in full swing, Emily Yang keenly realized that this world full of boring codes and numbers lacked a fresh artistic atmosphere, so she immediately transformed herself into Pplpleasr, bravely jumped into the crypto rabbit hole, and produced an art documentary called "x*y=k" for Uniswap V3 when it was launched.
"Raising money in Hollywood is like dealing with politicians, and a career in Web2 visual art is like riding a roller coaster," said Pplpleasr. Despite such personal pain, the cruel reality did not destroy Pplpleasr's love for anime visual art. After successfully incubating pleasrDao, "decentralizing Hollywood", "integrating Black Mirror, anime, and Love, Death and Robots with crypto", "building an A24 studio in the crypto world", and "allowing users to participate, invest, decide the direction of content and become owners of long video content" These fragmented concepts flashed through Pplpleasr's mind and converged into the "Shibuya" (Shibuya, a business district in Tokyo, Japan, an important place for the popular fashion culture of Japanese youth, and also a place where culture and ideas meet. It aims to have many screens and content that everyone can see.) The prototype of the protocol for this Web3 video platform. Among them, the film called "White Rabbit" is the first streaming work released by Shibuya.
Investment institutions: wealthy investors with luxurious backgrounds
Shibuya raised $1.5 million through NFT sales in its early days to finance the early construction of the platform and the production of subsequent videos.
On December 8, 2022, the Shibuya project announced the details of the seed round: $6.9 million in financing was led by a16z and Variant, and well-known investors such as Joseph Tsai, Kevin Durant, and Paris Hilton participated in the investment. It is worth mentioning that this is the first investment of Alibaba Executive Vice Chairman Joseph Tsai in the Web3 field. Official disclosures said that the funds will be used to incentivize new IP ideas and creators to enter the Shibuya platform, while expanding the engineering team and hiring professional UI/UX designers.
Token Economics: “Producer pass” & $WRAB
Producer pass is essentially an ERC1155 token. It represents a form of participation in voting/staking, which is also an essential tool for users to participate in creative decision-making. When participating users have this pass and stake it on the Shibuya protocol, they can cast a key vote to determine the direction of the video plot content in the NPC interaction at the end of each chapter. "The design of the producer pass is inspired by movie ticket stubs," Pplpleasr explained. "They can be a paper record of all the episodes you have watched." Shibuya officially sold a total of 5,000 producer passes for the first chapter at a price of 0.08 ETH, and sold 5,500 producer passes for the second chapter at the same price. For the producer passes for the third chapter that have been sold, the Shibuya project party adopted the form of airdrop (releasing 1:1 airdrops to the pledgers of the first two chapters) + mint sales. At present, the number of producer passes for the third chapter sold on the NFT trading platform Opensea is 2,800. At the same time, the Shibuya project created a Telegram privacy community through the DegenScore protocol, allowing members who only hold Producer Pass to participate and discuss the content and format of the new chapter to ensure that confidential content is not known to the outside world.
$WRAB is the abbreviation of White Rabbit, which is essentially an ERC20 token. Its ownership represents the user's fragmented ownership of the video content. When the film is completed, the project will cast the finished film into a video-style NFT on a decentralized storage facility and attribute its ownership to the community holding $WRAB. After staking the Producer Pass, users will receive a certain amount of $WRAB airdrops (70%). The earlier the user stakes, the more additional airdrop rewards they will receive (20%, calculated linearly in time). At the same time, when the user chooses the right majority, he or she can also receive a small amount of airdrop rewards after un-stake (10%, which was removed in the V2 version of the white paper). In the overall distribution of $WRAB, 50% of the shares will be allocated to Producer Pass holders, 40% to artists, 5% to the platform, and 5% to the project team. At the same time, the project will evenly distribute all $WRAB tokens to a total of 7 chapters.
It is worth noting that Shibuya officials elaborated on the difference between Producer Pass and $WRAB in the V2 version of the white paper. Producer Pass is defined as a form of voting/staking certificate, which may be destroyed in exchange for NFTs; while $WRAB is clearly defined as the governance token of White Rabbit DAO, and its rights include voting governance and ownership of White Rabbit films.
Project Operation: Endless Airdrops
High-frequency and high-quality airdrops have always been a magic weapon for NFT projects to attract users and drive market heat. In this regard, BAYC has pioneered (through airdrops of BAKC and mutant potions, etc., users holding BAYC can enjoy wealth and glory). Recently, the 9GAG team has taken airdrops to the extreme in the Memeland project: the first-generation product "MVP" was sold at a high price of 5.3 ETH in the form of a blind auction. It represents a senior member of the Memeland ecosystem and will receive two Captainz airdrops. The current Floor Price is close to 40 ETH; the second-generation product "The Potatoz" evolved in stages in the form of free mint. During this process, Memeland also gave players a large number of airdrops: NFTs, IPhone14, whitelists, etc.
Shibuya is an expert in airdrops. As early as March 2022, Shibuya's article on the content outlook of Chapter 2 clearly stated that the official will give special rewards to loyal community members who collect 7 Producer Passes.
At the same time, in the corners of the first chapter of "White Rabbit", Shibuya project team uniquely planted 12 mnemonic seeds, allowing "Leeuwenhoek" level observers to harvest fukubukuro (lucky bag) airdrops. Shibuya project team also stated that similar mnemonic airdrops will appear in subsequent chapters (the difficulty of watching the movie is greatly increased).
In the description of the third chapter Producer Pass, the Shibuya project clearly gave the third chapter Producer Pass airdrop to users who pledged the first two chapters Producer Pass. At the same time, the Shibuya project also generously gave a certain amount of the third chapter Producer Pass airdrop to Azuki and PudgyPenguins community members (to thank the character casting cooperation). With the release of the third chapter, the project also held an NFT lottery: giving players who participated in the pledge game the opportunity to draw blue chip NFTs (CloneX, Pudgy Penguin, Azuki Beanz).
Although the current airdrop quality is still far behind that of its predecessors, the value of its airdrops will not be underestimated after the IP becomes popular in the future.
Collaboration: White rabbit x Azuki
In the official V2 white paper released on September 28, it was revealed that the Azuki NFT character will guest star in Episode 3. After voting by community participants, Azuk#3602successfully won the highest number of votes and will appear in the third chapter of Shibuya. In the Web2 world, the linkage between various fashion brands and trendy culture has repeatedly set off waves, and often just the combination of two logos can make consumers rush to it. Linkage is an extremely effective form of expanding the circle, which often achieves a dreamy effect of 1+1>2. The video works released on the Shibuya platform are undoubtedly a good linkage platform. After all, showing static JPEGs in a dynamic video content can greatly mobilize consumers' enthusiasm to pay for it. Recently, the Shibuya project party gave the PudgyPenguins community members the airdrop of the third chapter Producer Pass on the official Twitter. We may boldly speculate that the cute little penguins will guest star as the "white rabbit" in the fourth chapter. Well, with the personal influence of pplpleasr and the excellent technical level of the Shibuya platform producers, we can expect to see more linkages between "White Rabbit" and well-known NFT projects in the future.
Risk: Some scary numbers when you think about them
Data in black and white will always tell us some cruel truths. Based on the price and mint fee of each publicly sold Producer Pass by the Shibuya project, we can roughly calculate the cost of "crowdfunding" for each chapter of the "White Rabbit" project. In March 2022, the Producer Pass of the first chapter totaled 5,000 copies, with a unit price of 0.08ETH (about 240USD at the time), that is, a total revenue of $1.2M. But after the crypto bear market, as the unit price of ETH was cut in half, the income of the Producer Pass sold by the Shibuya project for each chapter dropped sharply. In addition, most of the Producer passes of the third chapter were released to pass pledgers in the form of airdrop, which was undoubtedly a double whammy for the "White Rabbit" producers from a funding perspective.
At the same time, let's take a closer look at the timeline of "White Rabbit". We don't know when the first chapter of "White Rabbit" was produced (the project may have started production before the IP was released); the second chapter will be released to the public on June 9, 2022; the third chapter will be launched on January 10, 2023. Calculated from the time interval between the release of the second and third chapters, we roughly estimate that the overall time for the Shibuya project to produce a chapter is 6-7 months. Combined with the total length of each chapter of "White Rabbit" of less than 2 minutes (the length of the third chapter is slightly increased), this inevitably makes everyone doubt the production progress of the project (although the financing of up to 6.9 million USD in December 2022 will focus on accelerating the progress of film incubation). There is not much time left for "White Rabbit"!
In addition, data from the NFT trading platform OpenSea shows that the number of holders of the Producer Pass (total 5,000 pieces) of the first chapter of "White Rabbit" is 1.0k, the number of holders of the second chapter (total 6,000 pieces) has dropped sharply to 484, and the number of holders of the third chapter (total 2,800 pieces) is 203. The problem of over-centralization caused by investment-oriented centralized holdings has to sound the alarm again, which may run counter to the Shibuya project's concept of "making community members creators."
TL;DR
From the perspective of production relations, the transition from Web2 to Web3 is undoubtedly a major paradigm shift, that is, from a point-to-point model to a meshed structured ecosystem. In the Web2 world, more than 90% of production relations are point-to-point models, and people often only play a single role in a single business environment. For example, in a consumption scenario, consumers often only passively accept goods or services, and it is impossible to play multiple roles such as owners and investors at the same time. However, in the Web3 world, the role of each individual will be further subdivided. Individuals in the same business ecosystem may play the role of consumers, producers, content owners, and investors. Such a multi-dimensional role model has actually subtly improved the quality of Web3 products, because each role does not only think from its own perspective and standpoint, and the integration of multi-dimensional thinking will collide with more wonderful sparks of thought.
Shibuya's business logic fits this production relationship to a great extent. Users holding Producer Pass can not only experience the plot before the release of "Squid Game", but also indirectly decide the direction of the film content through staking voting and other methods, and experience the "director" addiction. Imagine lying on the sofa watching an American TV series, and when the content is climaxing, you suddenly want to add a branch copy to the story. At this time, open the device to connect the wallet to buy tokens and cast a vote to decide the direction of the plot. Is such a Web3 application scenario particularly exciting?
From the perspective of artistic content production, the contradiction between efficiency and fairness is a commonplace topic. The creation of artworks is often coupled with a high degree of individualism. In contrast, outstanding paintings, dramas, and texts in history have almost all been achieved through personal artistic achievements. Although collective democratic voting can ensure fairness, the choice of the majority will often only lead to mediocrity on the road of art. Too many noisy voices may make artistic inspiration lost in the jungle of creation. Shibuya's model may run counter to the rarity of art. Finally, the final monetization model of Shibuya's content is also a topic that is kept secret. Whether it is through the creation of IP or the sale of NFTs, Shibuya officials have not yet given any explanation or hint. This may make community members who pledged Producer Pass wonder: Did they just spend money to watch a cultural business experiment? Despite all the doubts, with the talent of pplpleasr, the project team's meticulous production and operation capabilities, and the support and endorsement of many big Vs, we still hope and believe that Shibuya can fire the first shot in the video IP field of Web3.
Standing at the crossroads of Shibuya, where neon lights emit colorful lights, should we stand still and hesitate, or follow Elon Musk and chase the "White Rabbit"?
references:
https://twitter.com/shibuyaxyz
https://medium.com/@shibuya.xyz
https://shibuyaxyz.substack.com
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/03/01/nft-artist-pplpleasrs-new-project-shibuya-brings-long-form-animation-to-web-3/
https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/12/08/paris-hilton-and-a16z-back-nft-artist-pplpleasr-in-7m-fundraising-round-for-web3-video-platform-shibuya/
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