Hashrate Studios

Inspiration

The Independent Filmmaking Business used to regularly disrupt the international Entertainment industry. However, with the increasing dominance of large-budget and data-driven actors like Disney+, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple, and others, the market is becoming increasingly platformized. We built Hashrate Studios, so Indie Producers can raise capital directly from their audiences, build communities around their content right from the start of their production, and subsequently tailor Entertainment experiences that truly matter to global audiences. Our goal is to position Indie Producers within the Web 3 space so they can regain their unique ability to be a driving force for innovative and bold content on a global scale. The team of founders behind Hashrate Studios is composed of a film producer who produces for one of the world's leading independent film production companies and a blockchain OG who knows the technical aspects of building cutting-edge blockchain products inside out with a particular focus on architecture for ecosystems.

What it does

Based on our excellent network of award-winning screenwriters, newcoming talent, and A-list cast, the team behind Hashrate Studios provides exclusively curated film production projects to its community. Each film project is represented by an NFT collection of stylized artworks and behind-the-scenes content, which NEAR users can purchase to finance a particular production project and become part of the Hashrate community. Our current web app demo showcases a non-responsive UX of Hashrate Studios. It additionally provides a first pilot project in which NEAR wallet holders can invest by purchasing project-themed NFT artworks.

Please find our demo deck as follows: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aIbSa1-RjXHN8rpRqGqZwkgayuA_pFoa/view?usp=sharing

How we built it

Initially, we defined the actors of our ecosystem and created a first map of interactions as a base for our incentive design. After the first iteration, we talked to other participants to verify our concept. Once we were confident that our approach led to interest and excitement, we created a dedicated design in Figma that we implemented using React and the create-near-app as our foundation. We also implemented a basic NFT contract deployed on the testnet. Main page graphics were hand-drawn by our amazing designer (IG @poxy.gen), and short movie impressions are generated via artificial intelligence. So all assets are entirely owned by us. We deployed the app's first version and asked other participants for initial feedback on the implemented idea. We also started to draft the architecture for our DAO but didn't manage to implement anything here yet. Next, we will clean up the created web app, implement the feedback, deploy the contracts to the mainnet, and implement complete DAO contracts to build our community.

Challenges we ran into

The development process was smooth, but we had initial setup issues with our M1 Macs to set up the create-near-app repository. We resolved this by splitting the web app development and contract development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud that we were able to build a fully functional prototype of our vision that is ready to operate within the NEAR Ecosystem. We managed to implement our vision in a very short time and can launch the project after some cleanup.

What we learned

We learned about another project with a similar idea confirming our assumptions of web3-enabled movie production. As we are implementing our project as an ecosystem and community-enabled project, we do not see it as a competition but as a second player to enable this ecosystem. We were also impressed by the level of professionalism of the other participants. So we had some productive discussions to improve our concept further.

What's next for Hashrate Studios

The demo application and initial showcase episode are only the beginning of Hashrate Studios. In the coming weeks, we will add more episodes and feature film projects of award-winning screenwriters and newcoming top talent to our curated selection, all while working to grow our community towards reaching a critical mass. Find us on Twitter @HashrateStudios