The Renascence won’t stop at content innovation

THiNG.FUND
6 min readDec 21, 2021

Like the financial market or art trends, concepts were born with the era. A proverb from ancient China says: at the right time, in the right place, and with the right people. Since the crypto era began, several cycles and concepts embraced many people into the new age, from public chains, parallel solutions, DeFi, NFT, metaverse and DAO. They are all game-changers.

THiNG.FUND launched its own The Renascence — the first sci-fi co-creating DAO — on December 2nd. It is also in a state of time flux.

A DAO and Why DAO?

With the vast growth of the DeFi and NFT communities, it is impossible to ignore the topic: managing decentralised protocols becomes more critical. Also, there is a challenge in autonomously inspiring the community potential.

However, governance entails high coordination costs, as there is a need to involve network participants in voting on every decision, and DAO can reduce these costs. In a DAO, smart contract participants are all able to govern collaboratively.

In such entirely new societies, people come together with a common motivation and shared interests. A powerful or wise leader is not necessary. The firm itself is run almost entirely by code. In many ways, a DAO can be seen as a combination of an investment bank, a company, and a social club, bringing these players together through crypto promises.

DAO starts from DeFi, but we already see many great ones in the NFT area with different cultures, incentive models and governance structures. Recently, we have seen the rise of a class of DAOs whose token allocation models are not tied to protocol usage or participation, as is the case with DeFi DAOs. One case contributes a unique mechanism for fragmenting NFTs, making collective ownership of individual artworks more feasible. As the boundaries of this decentralised world are expanding significantly, the forms of DAO will also evolve. We are expecting more from our community.

The Renascence — Co-creating DAO

DAOs are often not fully autonomous. Someone needs to create the decision-making framework to ensure that DAOs govern effectively and economic incentives for participants so that DAOs can prosperously develop.

The Renascence is not simply a crypto art series but a collectively created intellectual property(IP). This co-creating DAO is yet not entirely decentralised, allowing it to remain effective in this early phase. At the very beginning, three artists chose three different paths under the assumption of one post-apocalypse scenario. So here come three factions, the Interstellarist, the Rebuilder, and the Metascendee. With the NFTs that you acquired during the maindrop on Starly or through the early access program, you will have the ability for the upcoming co-creating process of each faction.

One thing that makes our community very proud is that this project is probably the first IP co-created and owned by a DAO. Each creator owns their creations, and they are naturally enabled to revise, iterate, fork, merge, and govern. Besides the content contribution, fans and patrons can also stake their digital assets on creation to obtain governance power and future commercial profit shares. By patrons’ staking, the creation also earns its fanatic basis and valuation via this process.

Traditional IP business already makes you loaded.

Of the $100 billion business empire of the world’s most profitable IP, Pokemon, $76 billion comes from licensed derivatives, ranging from games to collectable cards, books to CDs, toys, apparel, plus peripheral retail outlets, and even a Pokemon-themed jet plane.

Not only this one, but the information that we can find in public sources is that IPs that have been in operation for a longer time still maximise their revenue from licensing and derivative merchandise sales. For IPs, derivative merchandise and retailing create the most significant premium capacity for the product. They are the most direct and effective way to monetise in the entire closed-loop of the industry.

So this raises several questions:

  1. Can we, as one of the general public, with our hobbies and tastes, be a part of an excellent IP, or capture the value and share the cake?
  2. Are there clear rules in this industry for talented and free-minded persons to create and be recognised by the public?
  3. Is there a clear entrance for us to discover those hidden golden mines, especially those with sharp eyes?

Sadly, we have not seen the answers in the existing world so far.

Co-creation is not a new concept, but Co-creating + DAO would be valuable.

Co-creation is not a new concept in the traditional gaming industry. Players would love to know more about the story background, which could have a deep emotional connection. This year, at Tencent Games annual conference, Arena of Valor announced the IP Co-creation Plan to create a multiform and youthful IP matrix. The plan includes professional, industrial, and user co-creation to provide players with a more elaborate and worthy world for Arena of Valor. Arena of Valor is a hot trending game, and they took this way to expand the market and create more value from its player community.

Since the process of co-creation is a bottom-up paradigm, it is naturally compatible with the concept of DAO, so why don’t we practise it?

In the traditional business world, the consumers of an IP must be very fond of it. But there is little chance to become one of its creator team no matter how brilliant ideas and great execution powers you’ve got, just because of the narrowness of the channel.

With DAO, we could help people who directly contribute their ideas or creations with the rewards. A DAO must have the collective wisdom to decide and maintain the direction properly. Also, those content creators, derivative creators, maintainers, and other stakeholders in this co-creating system deserve more recognition and benefits.

How can everyone’s contribution be reflected?

At The Renascence Co-creation DAO, we’ve designed a contribution system to evaluate your contributing behaviours and the value of your creations. We can break down an IP series into atomic entities with this system. Each entity has its valuation, popularity, hierarchy structure, ownerships, etc., which could be easy to compose with others or inspire other creators.

You can receive points for co-creation and voting power in the process for those in the co-creation channel. Whichever way you participate in co-creation, you should benefit from your contribution.

In addition, the buyers of Starly maindrop, the participants in the Early Access program, and the owners of THiNG.FUND membership badges will all be eligible to participate in the governing. The weighting of votes varies from different NFTs. We will publish details in the following months as THiNGFUND will hear from the community and adjust rules after the pre-alpha test!

We know that Co-creation, DAO and IP are not new words. Still, together they will be the next social experiment with special meaning and value, leaving a remarkable footprint in the history of our civilisation, and we hope you are part of it!

Some links to reach us:

Website: https://thing.fund
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thing_fund
Medium: https://thingfund.medium.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/56m7QaTxne

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THiNG.FUND

A crypto art / game incubator backed by top tier academies.