Shib has been on a roll the last few weeks, firing off a slew of announcements in the run-up to TOKEN2049 in Dubai where it is making a big splash.
But probably the most important of those announcements, so far, is Shiba Inu joining the Content Delivery and Security Association (CDSA), a grouping of senior technology executives from venerable Hollywood studios and media companies.
Shytoshi Kusama, the pseudonymous lead developer of Shiba Inu, joined The Shib to explain the importance of this development and what it means for Shib.
“We have a set of technologies that are very unique, that no one else is building, including identity; security products like encryption,” Kusama said. “We have all these different components to give any company, project, city, or country the ability to truly build on an incredible technological stack.”
The CDSA works to create standards and to address the problems facing the content industry. On its board sits some of the world’s biggest content and technology companies.
The challenges facing the media and entertainment industry are not new. They include much-discussed things like password leeching, copyright issues, the threat from artificial intelligence, and more.
To see how some of these issues are becoming existential, one just has to see how the rise of new technologies and the changes they have wrought have weighed on the profits of Hollywood and the studios.
The numbers tell the story. Paramount, a respected name in the industry, commanded a market cap of about $68 billion in 2017 but is down to about $7.5 billion now. To compare, Shiba Inu, a crypto token created in 2020, now has a fully diluted valuation of $16 billion, more than twice that of Paramount!
CDSA could leverage Shib’s technology in a potentially transformative transition that would hand back to the studios and content companies control over their content and power over their fate. Because Shib’s blockchain, reinforced with the fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) technology provided by its partner Zama, is the silver bullet, so to speak, that Hollywood has been looking for as it tries to catch up with the deluge of technology changes disrupting the industry.
“Hollywood has not really gotten its head around all the enormous opportunities presented by blockchain technology,” Seth Shapiro, two-time Emmy Award winner and global leader in media and technology, told The Shib.” And so our goal here is to help educate.”
Shapiro should know. He was an adjunct professor at USC and a governor of the Television Academy; and is the chair of the Web3 Advisory Council at the National Association of Broadcasters. His clients and partners have included AT&T, Betfair, Comcast, DIRECTV, Disney, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Intel, IPG, McCann, NBC, Neo Cricket Mumbai, New Zealand Trade & Enterprise, News Corp, Nokia, Showtime Networks, Telstra, Turner, Universal, and a range of new ventures.
He has also served as an expert before both the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission.
On the board of CDSA now sits companies like Adobe, Lionsgate, Lego Technicolor, Walt Disney Company, Amblin, Amazon, etc.
In addition to the cutting-edge technology and infrastructure that Shib can provide, it also offers a clutch of compelling reasons for a marquee Hollywood or content brand to work with it.
For instance, Shib is one of the top digital currencies; it’s the number three most widely held crypto on centralized exchanges; and it’s the number two most searched for searched terms in crypto.
“The Shib Army is exactly the kind of audience that, you know, media people need to think about, need to engage with,” Kusama told us. “They need to speak a language that people all over the world understand. And whoever does that first is going to have a huge advantage over the others.”
As an example, Netflix, which changed the streaming game starting in 2007, is now much bigger by market cap than many old-school studio brands.
“Shib has done a better job than any other project, in my view, of creating cap, of creating and inspiring a worldwide audience,” Kusama said. “And so that’s really, in my opinion, what Hollywood needs in order to bring great IP (intellectual property).
“In blockchain, we are the number one ERC 20 token, last I checked. And when you consider all these things, who else should (Hollywood) go to?”
Kusama also highlighted how the benefits of any potential partnership could cascade across the Shib ecosystem and the Shib Army.
“We’re here to help people,” he said. “We’re here for people. But the only way we’re going to truly build a project that can get in the top five is if we partner with ultra-strong brands and bring liquidity in through smart partnerships that bring in value. It’s simple, right?
“Like, if Disney signs with us, or even Paramount, if anyone signs with us, they have so many users, 100 million users, the amount of transaction volume is going to be insane. And it doesn’t have to be them. It could be any single product that could work. It could be Welly selling to McDonald’s. It could be Shibwater being picked up at Walmart.
“And all we’re trying to do and are doing very nicely is complete the system so that everybody wins.
“We win when the system is set up and it’s handed to people because anyone is going to be able to really use this. We’re just trying to make sure that, you know, companies that we love and brands that we love don’t fall to the wayside.”
