Bitcoin, Ether, DeFi, and the Disintermediation of Everything: Making Inroads

The traditional firm is nearing its death. Long live the DAO.Image Credit to Belle Co via PexelsCommunity is everything, especially in today’s day-and-age. With Bitcoin, that principle’s been extended to the creation and management of money and with Ether, it’s been brought on to the creation of platform businesses and the internet-at-large. Most topics related to these ideas have been covered time and time again by excellent writers and researchers.What I’ve noticed in my time working in this disruptive space is that the impact of the blockchain, smart contracts, and overall crypto economics (DeFi) on the creative industries has been largely underserved. This year, that’s starting to change with the explosive growth of the crypto art movement, crypto games, and projects like Audius, but even so, it’s early yet.Truthfully, because of how much has happened in 2020 alone, I could write for days on-end on the rise of these sectors. Still, one has to start somewhere right?For me, that’s with going back to the basics.What made the crypto space a powerful movement from the start and continues to make it so?The disintermediation of everything.How do we understand the impact of “disintermediation” in the creative industries?Because so many industries apply in this case, I’d like to stick to music and book publishing for now. Ask yourself: what’s the biggest problem that all of these industries share? Record companies, galleries, book publishers, and all sorts of other middle-men like agents sit in the middle of the transaction between the creator and their fans, taking extravagant rents.At face value, “rents” refer to fees for providing the service of getting something from point A to point B and, in these cases, marketing it while doing so to increase its revenue and overall market penetration. Think about what a record company does. They and their…