Why building on a blockchain for finance will fix how business gets done in entertainment.
When we launched Storyline, people asked one thing. Where’s the flash?
Because at the time, what was top of mind in “blockchain for entertainment” were sexy crypto collectibles.
But the infrastructure of entertainment, the contracts driving the engine of content creation, is what represents blockchain’s real opportunity to transform this industry.
Behind every high-stakes hit are hundreds of humdrum, well-enforced product delivery contracts. They represent 40% of the $220B that goes into entertainment’s global content spend.
The problem is that complex contract workflows and limited trust among players result in extreme delays in closing deals, getting paid and accessing working capital. It’s a pain point that unites everyone involved, from talent, producers, representatives and beyond.
Let’s explore some parallels for a moment. Consider the tedium of obtaining a personal loan — by all accounts, a vastly different space, but with the same trust issues, anxieties and slowness.
The team at Figure has rewritten the rules in lending. They created Provenance Blockchain to make diligence efficient (trust issues: addressed) and settlements instantaneous (speed issues: addressed).
That’s why we’re leveraging the power of Provenance Blockchain to fix how business gets done in entertainment.
Storyline today pulls contract workflow activity out of email and brings all participants together on a clear, shared workspace.
Building on Provenance allows us to record those contracts and payment flows on-chain, enabling efficient, expedited receivables factoring. It’s an entry point to our mission of transforming entertainment finance at-large. (Liquidity issues: being addressed.)
It’s also designed for this. Assessing counterparty risk, executing receivables financing, enabling payments and packaging those receivables to investors hunting for diversity in yield assets — these functions are central to our strategy, and at the core of the Figure and Provenance ecosystems.
On a more practical level, plugging into institutional-grade technology so successfully utilized in similar use cases, and a developer landscape so willing to engage in traditional spaces like ours, is a huge plus.
Having built an ecosystem of 50+ financial institutions with $3B+ in completed transactions, and as pioneers in on-chain loan origination, equity management, private fund services, banking and payments, the Provenance team’s fintech creds are second to none.
So the entertainment industry building on the leading blockchain for financial services? It couldn’t make more sense.
Megh Duwadi is co-founder and CEO of Storyline, a Los Angeles-based entertainment deal management platform and Provenance Blockchain Foundation developer grant recipient.