NFT Project Spotlight: Society of the Hourglass and Its Kid-Friendly Cartoons

As company after company goes bankrupt and even the strongest cryptocurrencies falter, life goes on in a surprisingly resilient NFT market. The Society of the Hourglass however, is not your average NFT project, in part because it is not a project that begins and ends with digital collectibles; it just starts with them. A proposed ecosystem spanning publishing, television and merchandising, the Society of the Hourglass is a media brand – NFTs are just the gateway to a wider world of practical developments in its burgeoning IP landscape. Crypto Briefing spoke with the project about balancing decentralization with traditional business, the nuances of intellectual property rights distribution, and of course comics.

A time to build

As the crypto market continues to falter amid rising interest rates, looming recession, high-profile bankruptcies and increasing regulatory scrutiny, NFTs have shown surprising resilience. This will probably come as no surprise to those who saw the potential of the technology early on, but for everyone else it’s fantastic. If bear markets are the “time to build”, you could do worse than doing it in the NFT space.

One project that addresses the disruptive potential of NFT technology is the Society of the Hourglass, a children’s entertainment media brand that incorporates NFTs into its community startup process. Set to include books, games and TV, Society of the Hourglass is an early-stage project that brings users into their writing space by creating NFTs. Here, the community can collaborate with professional scriptwriters and animators to brainstorm ideas, pitch stories and influence the show’s creative direction.

How many NFT projects build their “community” out of fandom, whether it’s around a specific project (like Bored Ape Yacht Club or Azuki) or an artist (like Tyler Hobbs or FEWOCiOUS), Society of the Hourglass has a more ambitious goal in mind. The NFT series – a collection of 8,888 historically themed characters minted on Ethereum – is just the backbone of a series of larger projects such as books, merchandise and an animated series in the style of classic Saturday morning cartoons.

The first half of the collection has already been made available for minting across two initial ‘chapters’, while the remainder will be rolled out in two further batches of 2,222 NFTs each. Most of the tokens represent minor personalities within Society of the Hourglass ecosystem, but a few will represent the series’ main characters, the eponymous Society of the Hourglass, a team of historical do-gooders who travel through time and right the wrongs of the past. These historical figures – named Blackbeard, Sacajawea, Nikola Tesla, Joan of Arc and Harriet Tubman – are also available as unique 1/1 NFTs, making them the five rarest pieces in the collection.

To own a Society of the Hourglass NFT provides participation rights to the show’s exclusive writers’ room on the project’s Discord server, where community members are invited to share ideas and brainstorm the story’s direction. Ultimately, however, professional writers with industry experience are charged with crafting the narratives.

Crypto Briefing sat down with Joe Payne, CEO of the company behind Society of the Hourglass, and he discussed the team’s ambitions to create a full-fledged media brand in Web3. ““Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is build a media brand and entertainment IP,” he said. “We launch through NFTs; it’s a combination of social experiment, but also a way to build a really engaged community that’s not only interested in what we’re doing, but has incentives aligned with what we’re doing where we share commercial ownership of the characters.”

Fix

If all this does the Society of the Hourglass feels more like a straightforward business venture than a community-led NFT project, that’s because it is. Society of the Hourglass is a business, and it is run as one. The Society of the Hourglass was founded by a group of seasoned serial entrepreneurs, many of whom honed their business acumen under the iron road of local giant Walmart, Inc., and is led by Payne, who is also co-founder and partner in Gravity Turn Holdings. Payne, whose previous experience as COO of a computer technology firm gave him a background in making things happen, has methodically and carefully brought his creation to life.

Society of the Hourglass has a four-stage rollout process, where each stage builds on the previous one. The first is the NFT extraction, which will take place in four chapters throughout the year and will give holders exclusive access to the IP’s creative process. The team is currently storyboarding their first book (the next step in the rollout), a Where’s Waldo?-style iteration with the project’s diverse characters and distinctive art. Third, the Society of the Hourglass hiring writers and working with Jumpcut Studios on its flagship TV series. Payne says the series will likely be released within the next year, but as with many Web3 projects, nothing is set in stone.

And of course that’s partly because there are logistical issues to hammer home. Although the Society of the Hourglass values ​​community input and lets it guide the creative direction of the project, it’s still a centralized entity (in this case, a corporation) that reserves the right to make final decisions about, well, everything.

This is partly due to the need to protect the project from imploding on itself due to unforeseen external factors. For example, the nature of the project’s IP raises interesting legal questions, and instead of taking the “move fast and break things” approach, Payne and his team choose to “go slow and be careful.” When asked if any reward mechanisms were outlined for active holders, the response reflected that of someone who had spent his professional life around lawyers. He said:

“We’re very aware and careful about anything that might even flirt with securities laws. And the last thing we want to do is create a scenario where we not only get, you know, some kind of hand-wringing or repercussions, but the community potentially experiences that. That’s why we went with shared IP ownership over the characters.”

The “shared IP” Payne refers to an arrangement where both parties— the company and the NFT holder – claim the right to use the image of that character for personal or commercial purposes without needing the other’s permission. A holder of a Society of the Hourglass NFT, for example, could use that character’s likeness for their own “spinoff” series using that character’s persona if they wish.

However – and this is a big “but” – they could not use the trademarked name of the series without permission, nor could they market under Society of the Hourglass brand without an approval process that involves putting it to the community first. In other words, holders can do whatever they want with the NFT’s likenesses, but they can’t just claim affiliation with the overall project without the company saying so.

The reasons for this should be clear: distribution of the IP rights of a children’s brand can lead to exploitation in darker corners of the Internet, and certain veto rights are appropriate to protect young Web3 users. And Payne thinks it’s worth protecting given that it’s rare to see such a deliberately child-friendly project emerge in the NFT space. A far cry from the crude scatology of goblintown.wtf or the ironic bile spewing of God Hates NFTees, the Society of the Hourglass ia family-friendly project with a target group of children between 5 and 12. These children are not degens – yet – but they are still a market, and a market that is almost overlooked in Web3 today.

The way of the future?

Some Web3 natives might be uncomfortable hearing that a team is using decentralized technology for unashamedly centralized business interests, but to see it that way would be to miss the forest for the trees. It was always going to be the case that mass adoption would be more like the commercial culture we are used to than any revolutionary movement.

It is for that reason Society of the Hourglass may be a project worth keeping an eye on. It demonstrates what mainstream NFT adoption can look like: an incremental improvement of an old way of doing things. If successful, it will be a winning proof-of-concept for a new, Web3-enabled twist on the screenwriting process. It is not an attempt to revolutionize anything; it makes few abstract promises and tracks progress in deliverables.

Finally, it takes intellectual property laws very seriously, and may very well set standards for how IP is divided up on the blockchain going forward. NFT Holders should not expect any symbolic rewards or financial interest in the project – to do so would be begging to go before a judge, which may yet be the fate of many projects that decided to “go fast and destroy things.”

To be successful, Society of the Hourglass must do one thing above all else – it must be good. Much has been made of the “radical potential” of decentralization in the creative process using Web3 technology, but it remains to be seen whether it is an effective way of writing. It would be hard to imagine 12 authors trying to write the same novel and actually getting anywhere, so it will be interesting to see Society of the Hourglass’ progress with an eye towards how fruitful decentralized writing turns out to be.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this feature owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.