Onchain IP turns static, illiquid rights into transparent, tradable assets, letting games like My Pet Hooligan convert fans from passive consumers into real economic stakeholders
The entertainment industry has long treated intellectual property like the paranoid owner of a rare painting, locked away in a private vault. It is extremely valuable, but static, illiquid, and accessible only to whoever holds the key.
The traditional framework for registering IP such as movie franchises, songs, and video games is broken, especially in a world where virtually all entertainment has gone digital. Yet the underlying legal infrastructure that records ownership is still stuck in the 20th century.
The problems with IP
The structural issues of traditional IP start with inaccessibility. Access to high-value IP investments is generally restricted to a small circle of institutions that can afford to hire lawyers to search registries, negotiate licenses, and structure sales, effectively excluding the people who prize the IP most – the fans and creators who generate its value and drive its growth.
Take the Star Wars movie franchise. Licensing the likeness of a character like Chewbacca is eye‑wateringly expensive, yet that image would be worth nothing without the movie’s loyal, fanatical audience keeping it relevant across decades.
Entertainment IP is also extremely illiquid. Trademarks and similar rights are “lumpy” assets that are hard to price and even harder to sell, with transactions that can take weeks or months to close. The model suffers from weak alignment too, because brands rarely reward communities for their role in making a property successful; the most dedicated players of a video game, for example, earn nothing from its global breakout beyond the privilege of continuing to play, and pay, inside a closed system.
Blockchain offers a better way
Bringing IP on-chain is the obvious upgrade. Instead of being locked in a vault, rights can live in a transparent, liquid, global market where success and value are measured by real engagement rather than opaque internal accounting.
On-chain IP enables immutable, verifiable ownership. If someone holds an $NFT granting defined rights to a piece of IP, no one can quietly strip those rights away, and anyone can verify who owns what, see what revenue it generates, and bid to acquire or license it through open, decentralized mechanisms. Because these rights are on programmable infrastructure, they can be traded in real time, split among multiple parties, or wrapped into new financial and creative products.
Proof that this model works is already here in projects like AMGI Studios’ My Pet Hooligan, a blockchain game built around 8,888 unique 3D characters that live as NFTs on Ethereum. AMGI has transformed dozens of characters, weapons, and accessories into player‑owned assets, moving beyond the dominant free‑to‑play model where users effectively lease “skins” from a closed server.
AMGI’s approach effectively turns its My Pet Hooligan IP into a new kind of real‑world asset. If the game goes viral and more people start playing, demand for those NFTs should increase, rewarding early adopters who took the risk of backing the ecosystem before it was mainstream. The assets provide in‑game utility, and their scarcity and desirability are visible on-chain through price, volume, and engagement metrics on marketplaces and analytics dashboards.
Music, film, and beyond
The same logic extends far beyond gaming. Musicians can bypass traditional labels by issuing NFTs or tokens that encode royalty rights, enforce revenue splits through smart contracts, and allow fans to buy into future streaming income directly. Independent filmmakers can sell tokens that entitle supporters to a share of box office, streaming, and licensing revenue, turning their communities into both financiers and evangelists.
Such systems create an entirely new asset class where discoverability becomes meritocratic, and value is easier to assess simply by looking at on-chain engagement and cash flow. Compared with today’s black‑box IP regime, on-chain IP is more open, transparent, and accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a wallet.
For entertainment, the logic is hard to ignore. Blockchain‑based IP protects creators, empowers consumers, and provides a standardized framework for participation, turning audiences from passive consumers into active stakeholders. As adoption grows, expect the walls of today’s media empires to erode, replaced by open ecosystems where every song, film, and video game character has a fair shot at finding its market.