Thread by @GuyZys

WE ARE LIVE!

https://twitter.com/LegendaoNFT/status/1546841910220046337?s=20&t=GuIIitBSDCdMO7dkp2zA8Q

Today we are making film/web3 history by launching @ThatKevinSmith's new movie #KillRoyWasHere on @LegendaoNFT using @SecretNetwork unique #privacy technology.

Why is this so significant? Let's do a deep dive 👇👇

For the first time ever, a feature-film (imdb.com/title/tt699324…) is premiered world-wide and with open-access (for anyone who mints), not in your local cinema, or a streaming service, but on an open-access platform

Once you mint it, you own it. You have unique and first access to the film, other unique content (every NFT is different), and to one-of-a-kind IP from the film (your own KillRoy). It's yours and you can do whatever you want with it (including selling it, starting tomorrow)

This is SO different from how things are done today. When you purchase a movie/song from a streaming service, you don't really own it (you certainly don't own any IP), & you can't resell it.

If the streaming service goes down, so does your content (flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subac…)

IMHO releasing a movie on a decentralized platform is the first attempt at breaking free from intermediaries in the entertainment industry, which is known to be extractive. It's the v0.1 of a decentralized @netflix/@Spotify, that gives both artists and consumers more control

If you care about the technical innovation involved and what we did @LegendaoNFT and @scrt_labs to make this happen (and there's A LOT) - read below.

If not, join us in making history at killroywashere.io

(Now it's time for some tech talk..)

The basic building block for releasing a movie on the blockchain is #NFT - a token that links a certain wallet (owning it) to some digital content. Usually, the NFT itself only holds metadata that points elsewhere (ideally, to a decentralized storage), due to the actual data size

However, as we discussed many times before, blockchains are public, which means that everyone can look at the NFT you 'own' and copy its content vice.com/en/article/xgd…

This isn't very useful for releasing new, exclusive content like premiering a feature-film!

The solution that everyone has adopted to date to deliver rich content (e.g., video/audio) through NFTs is called 'tokengating'. For some stuff like physical merchandise it may make sense, but for digital content it DOES NOT.

Why? Because tokengating gets us back to the 'old way' of gatekeepers. It's a clear antithesis to what #web3 stands for.

It means that you don't really own your NFT, because there's someone, somewhere, who holds a key to a server, that decides whether to give you access or not!

If anything, this is worse than purely centralized services, because there you're at least aware that they can rug you at any time.

The only REAL solution is a solution without intermediaries, and for that you need on-chain privacy.

That's where @SecretNetwork comes in. In Secret, you don't need gatekeepers, since every NFT can hold private metadata, that can only be decrypted by the NFT owner. This is done by issuing a signed query to the chain, which reencrypts the private metadata to the owner.

The private metadata that the owner gets essentially has a decryption key for the data (often just an AES128/256 key) and either the data itself, or a link to a decentralized storage holding the data (encrypted!), if it's big.

So far so good, and until today we and others building these kind of 'secret' NFTs on @SecretNetwork only had to get the key + digital content to the client's browser (or mobile) and decrypt the content there.

But this doesn't work for something as large as a feature-film!

Downloading a full film to the browser and decrypting it in one go, before streaming it client-side is really inefficient and would create a horrible UX.

So instead, @ToviLevis from our team came up with an amazing idea - use a streaming protocol that supports encryption!

The way this essentially works is as follows: the movie is encrypted in 'blocks' with a kind of a table-of-contents in the beginning, mapping each point in the movie to an encrypted block.

If you're tech-saavy you'd note this leaks indexing information, but this seems acceptable

Now, instead of loading a full movie and decrypting it in memory, you can simply load and decrypt it in the browser bit-by-bit. You can also control the movie whatever way you like, and it's responsive as hell. you practically don't feel any latency at all.

To be very honest, when we took on this project, I saw it as a (super cool) PoC at best, but I'm so proud of the @scrt_labs @LegendaoNFT team that has shown even to me that you can both avoid intermediaries, like #web3 intended, and build amazing, responsive UX.

We're open to sharing these ideas/code with anyone who's interested. Disrupting #Hollywood starts on @SecretNetwork today.

If you want to take part in this historical moment – head to killroywashere.io, and join us in @LegendaoNFT's discord to discuss 🚀