Tech
Is there a Hollywood use case for Crypto and Blockchain technology?
Gauntlet CEO Tarun Chitra and Duke University professor Lee Reiners discuss how entertainment profit participants can embrace cryptocurrencies.
Will Hollywood Ever Enter Blockchain?
The question of whether entertainment industry players will ever embrace cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies as a solution to Hollywood’s age-old accounting problem is discussed by two experts from the cryptocurrency realm in the latest episode of Variety’s podcast “Strictly commercial.”
Tarun Chitrafounder and CEO of research and advisory firm Gauntlet and co-host of the cryptocurrency-focused podcast “The Chopping Block” and Lee Reinersa Duke University professor who studies financial regulation, discusses how the transparency and permanence of blockchain ledgers could be useful for deals in which a number of participants have small shares of profit that they pay over the course of many years.
Chitra is an investor who emphasizes cryptocurrency’s need for a decentralized approach to finance, i.e. placing trust in the blockchain community rather than a large financial institution. According to him, cryptocurrencies are the engine of a new era of investments and risk-taking activities that do not depend on Wall Street or other gatekeepers. Reiners is a cryptocurrency skeptic and sees little use in alternative currency and financial options for the vast majority of Americans.
Chitra notes that in the United States, consumers have been trading on what he calls “synthetic real dollar statements” for decades. Cryptocurrencies emerged in the wake of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, when the ease of building online communities expanded with social media platforms, around the same time that consumer confidence in established financial titans was shaken.
“Everything from credit cards to Apple Pay, I would say, from the 1980s onwards, represented a big change in how people handled money,” Chitra says. “You can think about de-fi [decentralized finance] as a kind of user-generated finance. And in the same way that many social networks handle user-generated content, like users who make podcasts, they make videos. Finance has never had users capable of generating products, right? But if you look at cryptocurrencies, especially if you look at meme coins, people create and destroy assets all the time.
In a separate interview, Reiners expressed his doubts and concerns that unsophisticated consumers are vulnerable to crypto scams. In recent months, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the establishment of Exchange Traded Funds for Bitcoin, one of the most established cryptocurrencies, which will make it easier for mainstream consumers to purchase and trade such assets.
“It’s pretty clear to me that the harms far outweigh the benefits,” Reiners says. “The challenge then is: what do you do about it from a regulatory point of view? Right. And you know, we don’t have the most functional Congress right now. This is an understatement. I think the status quo from a regulatory perspective will prevail. And I think we’ll continue to see average people being harmed by cryptocurrencies, just as we’ve been for the last 16 years.”
“Strictly Business” is Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. (Click here to sign up for our free newsletter.) New episodes debut every Wednesday and can be downloaded on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.