Startups are incentivizing their community with the opportunity to buy items in NFT format. These NFTs are given to members that can be traded on a range of platforms, facilitating easy entry into and further involvement in the brand’s ecosystem.
Interview with the Creator of “Society of the Hourglass and Its Kid-Friendly Cartoons”
Discover some characters that are people and other ones that are not.
The project’s NFTs act as a one-stop destination for everything that relates to the AR/VR and collectibles market.
Society of the Hourglass is among the first family-focused NFT projects. This is a hint at how the market could evolve in the future.
As more companies have gone bust and even the strongest cryptocurrencies have struggled in the market, NFTs seem to be quite resilient. This is due to how multifaceted the market has become as a whole. Society of the Hourglass is not a typical NFT project just because they don’t solely focus on creating digital collectibles, but also on publishing, merchandising, and television development. Crypto Briefing spoke with them about balancing decentralization and traditional business practices, nuances of intellectual property distribution, and cartoons.
Building a long-lasting, sustainable brand
As the crypto market continues to decline in value, Bear Markets are a time to make money and build NFTs. For those of us who have seen the potential early on, bear markets are not a bad time to build NFTs, especially if you plan on making a living off them in the future.
An early-stage project that’s taking advantage of the disruptive potential of NFTs is Society of the Hourglass. By minting NFTs, members of the community are able to collaborate with professional screenwriters and animators on their stories. Here, ideas can be freely brainstormed, pitched, and influenced by a large community.
Society of the Hourglass creates NFTs that are both unique and creative. While many projects in the NFT world focus their “community” on their fandom, Society of the Hourglass has an ambitious goal that is more than simply creating cool NFTs. It is a process that requires higher-level investments as they create 8,888 characters with uniquely designed Ethereum cards, books, and animated series.
The first half of the collection has already been made available for minting across two initial “chapters,” with the rest set to be released in batches of 2,222 NFTs each. Most of the already-minted tokens represent minor characters within the Society of the Hourglass ecosystem, but a few will represent the show’s primary characters, members of a team that travels through time, correcting mistakes from history. They are also available as unique 1/1 NFTs, making them five of the rarest pieces in this collection.
Owning a Society of the Hourglass NFT grants participation rights to the show’s exclusive writers’ room on the project’s Discord server, where community members are encouraged to share ideas and brainstorm the story’s direction. Professional writers with industry experience create narratives.
As commercialism infects technology, Joe Payne, head of the company behind Society of the Hourglass, discusses their ambition to create a fully-fledged media brand in Web 3. ‘We’re launching through NFTs; it’s a combination of social experiment, but also a way of building a really engaged community that is not only interested in what we do but has incentives aligned with what we’re doing where we share commercial ownership over the characters.’
With the new Today Show-themed cartoon podcast on NFT, updates are in
Society of the Hourglass is a business, and it’s run like one. It was founded by a group of experienced serial entrepreneurs, many of whom honed their business acumen under the iron sway of Walmart, Inc. Payne is the co-founder and partner at Gravity Turn Holdings; his prior experience as a COO gave him the necessary ability to bring his creation to life methodically and carefully.
Society of the Hourglass has a four-stage rollout process, with each stage building on the previous one. The first is the NFT minting, which will take place in four chapters throughout the year and will grant holders exclusive access to the IP’s creative process. The team is currently storyboarding its first book (the next stage in the rollout), a Where’s Waldo-style iteration featuring the project’s multitudinous characters and distinctive art. Thirdly, the Society of the Hourglass is hiring writers and working with Jumpcut Studios on the flagship product, the television series. Payne says that much like many Web3 projects, nothing is set in stone, but it’s likely that it will be released within a year.
And of course, that is partly because logistics must be hammered out. Although Society of the Hourglass values community input and makes it available to steer the creative direction of its project, it is nonetheless a centralized entity (in this case, a limited liability company) whose final decision-making power over all aspects of production remains firmly in place.
Trying to protect the project from imploding from unknown external factors is one of the motivations for being careful. Legal issues, including intellectual property rights and ownership, also play a role in this equation for PN4L. There’s still work to be done in order to finalize rewards for shareholders as anyone who is familiar with company law can attest.
“Many people are wary about anything that might be considered to be a security or the last thing we want is for the community to experience consequences for anything we make. We opted for shared IP ownership over our characters in order to avoid any potential legal issues.”
Richard Payne talks about the shared IP arrangement, which is where both parties—the company and the NFT holder—claim to have rights to use a character’s likeness for personal or commercial purposes without needing the other’s permission. For example, an owner of a Society of the Hourglass NFT could create their own “spinoff” series using that same character’s persona.
However, not all people and brands can use the trademarked name of the series without permission, or market under the Society of the Hourglass brand without an approval process that involves putting it to the community first. In other words, holders can do whatever they like with their NFTs’ likenesses, but they cannot simply claim association with the overall project without our company’s say-so.
Because it could lead to the exploitation of children’s IP rights, allowing a model like this could be beneficial. Other NXT-related projects have not captured the market established by this one. Despite not being crass or bile-spewing, the project is geared towards kids aged between 5 and 12, and their target market is currently overlooked in Web3
How can 2D animation teach us about social change?
However, there’s nothing revolutionary about how blockchain-based businesses are doing business. The idea of mass adoption was always going to look more like the commercial culture we are accustomed to than a new mode of society.
Society of the Hourglass demonstrates how mainstream adoption of blockchain technology can be gradual. It promises to improve an existing process rather than trying to revolutionize it and tracks its progress with deliverables.
NFTs are scarce on the blockchain, and Copymatic will take intellectual property to the highest standard. The team will not be offering financial incentives for their work or creating any winners among the IP holders. It’s unclear how ICOs should behave, but this is a good example of what it may look like in practice.
If they want to succeed, Society of the Hourglass will need to make one thing their priority: they must be good. Many people are focusing on the “radical potential” of decentralized technology and blockchain in creative processes but it is unclear if this method is any more effective than traditional methods. It will be interesting to see how Society of the Hourglass progress with an eye toward how successful this type of writing turns out to be.
