The Creative Crypto on Rize: Blockchain, Bourbon, and Sober Reflections

This article was originally published on the PROPS Project’s Medium Page at this link.

---

Hello PROPS community! We’re Michael and Kirk from the “Blockchain & Bourbon” weekly show on Rize and the founding members of the Sndbox incubator and The Creative Crypto magazine. As creatives at heart, we are excited to share our experiences today working with blockchain, how we discovered Rize, and how we see blockchain-based media evolving into the future.

A bit about us - we’re both architects by background and we came into the blockchain space with a hunch that it might be extremely relevant to our aging and unempowered profession. Design industries suffer tremendously from the reality of relying almost completely on wealthy clients, and only a few technologies available today can really empower artists, architects, designers, musicians, etc. on a daily basis.

When we initially learned about cryptocurrency, we first explored Steemit.com, the Reddit-style forum powered by the Steem blockchain, and its capacity to distribute crypto rewards to bloggers. Over the course of several months, we experimented with tailoring the functionalities to support design-type projects like Steem Park, where we fundraised for public furniture and programs 100% with crypto. We realized early on that earning crypto with these new decentralized applications could liberate an old creative economic model and afford us a whole new way of making impactful work. This led us to starting Sndbox, an incubator for other professionals to integrate with blockchain platforms, and The Creative Crypto, an online magazine that reports on the unique people and stories in blockchain. For more on our mission, check out this new video created by the talented Humdinger & Sons -

“Blockchain & Bourbon” was initially a casual approach to the whole cryptoverse and a quite shameless spinoff of the YouTube show Hot Ones. We wanted to nurture a much less assuming outlet that speaks to the culture and future of blockchain, rather than the infinite amount of technical analyses or financial predictions. Instead, we figured people were much more interested in whisky and fun tales rather than how hashes work.

The series also gave us an outlet to explore the decentralized world of video, and this ultimately brought us to Rize. Having peer-to-peer video is revolutionary in itself and does away with some of the nonsense that comes with going through a 3rd party like YouTube or Twitch. But PROPS is going one step further, catalyzing a whole new type of digital broadcasting with a lineup of unique apps. Instead of adapting old technology onto blockchain, Rize and other applications are reinventing all types of interaction that best leverage blockchain’s potential.

This went right in line with our intention to converge crypto-tech with creative practice, so we immediately started testing Rize out. We immediately noticed the difference in audience engagement and discussion productivity from typical streams and video uploads. Since our humble beginnings of recording linear conversations on a couch, we’ve experimented with various formats, locations, and themes, all while seeing our audience grow steadily both in size and enthusiasm.

Within the blockchain sector, we’re starting to see a whole network of disruptive platforms emerge to tackle the issue of centralized media - crypto-powered internet browsers, art registries, video uploads, livestreaming, and much much more. Having used Rize this extensively and communicating with the team directly, we know that we’re in store for a whole new ecosystem of empowering media, one that is much more equitable for both its makers and audience members. Imagine a future where all the money spent on advertising or effort put into comments and interaction are rewarded back to everyone who use a given website or technology. This is what PROPS is stacking up to do and we’re already starting to feel the impact of their endeavors.

• illustration by @carrotcake

Now and over the course of the coming months, you’ll be seeing us incorporate the app more and more into our incubator program and general programming through live shows, exhibitions, workshops, and other activities that strive to capture the public’s imagination on why blockchain-powered technology is markedly better than the current alternatives. We’ll be definitely utilizing Rize along the way to capture and share these experiences worldwide and we’re excited to have you all along for the journey.

---

So we hope you’ll tune in and engage us every Friday (4pm EST) on Rize in the @creativecrypto room! Big thanks to the PROPS team for inviting us.

---

cover illustrations by @zsolt.vidak

---