Back in 2022 I wrote a quick roundup of blockchain and film/media production tools, at a time when people seemed to think that creating NFT could refinance independent cinema.
A few years later, the picture is both more boring and more interesting. The froth has gone. Some projects have vanished, pivoted, or now look like archaeological evidence from the great “community token” age. But the underlying ideas have not disappeared. They have just moved into less shouty parts of the value chain:
Development And Funding
The most convincing film-funding examples are still not “buy a token, become Harvey Weinstein but decentralised”. They are more modest: community review, transparent selection, and alternative routes for indie projects.
Decentralized Pictures is still very much alive, now describing itself as an on-chain, community-driven nonprofit platform that has awarded over $1m to independent creators. It has also been running a 2026 Sofia Coppola Short Film Award, with $20,000, mentorship, P&A support and distribution on DCP+.
Film.io also still exists, with DAO voting, FAN tokens and community participation still part of the model. I remain instinctively allergic to any sentence containing “film” and “DAO”, but at least this is still being developed rather than preserved in amber.
A newer example worth watching is DeFilm, which pitches itself as on-chain infrastructure for independent film financing, including milestone escrow and transparent revenue waterfalls. That sounds less like crypto theatre and more like something producers might actually want at 2am when the recoupment spreadsheet has started hissing at them.
Rights, Revenue And The Eternal Question: Where Did The Money Go?
This is still one of the strongest use-cases. FilmChain remains active and continues to focus on revenue collection, royalty allocation and transparent payment flows for film, TV and digital.
This is the bit of blockchain that rarely makes headlines because it does not involve a celebrity selling “exclusive access” to a Discord channel. But it is also the bit most likely to matter. If smart contracts and trusted banking rails can help money move from distributor to rights holder with fewer mystery deductions, that is not revolutionary in the poster-on-a-wall sense, but it is useful.
Production, Provenance And AI
The new elephant in the room is AI. In 2022, blockchain in media was mostly discussed through NFTs, funding and decentralised distribution. In 2026, the more urgent question is: how do we prove where media came from, who changed it, and whether the beautiful shot of the moon exploding was filmed, generated, composited, or produced by a bored intern with a prompt box?
This is where cryptographic provenance comes in. Strictly speaking, C2PA / Content Credentials is not “blockchain” in the classic sense, but it sits in the same family of tamper-evident trust technology. The 2026 update adds live video provenance for broadcast and streaming, which is very relevant for media companies trying to survive the deepfake era.
Blockchain may also sit underneath some provenance registries, rights ledgers and AI audit trails. The useful version is not “put the whole film on-chain”, because nobody needs Paddington 3 stored as a gas-fee war crime. The useful version is hashes, signatures, rights records and audit trails that prove a file or claim has not been quietly swapped.
Distribution, Streaming And Compute
Livepeer is still going, but the pitch has evolved. It started as decentralised video transcoding and streaming infrastructure; now it is also positioning itself as an open network for real-time AI video, including live video inference, avatars, style transfer and GPU-powered workflows.
Theta has made a similar move into decentralised compute for AI. In other words, the blockchain/video infrastructure crowd has noticed that the world currently has an insatiable appetite for GPUs and has politely wheeled its trolley into the data-centre aisle.
LBRY is more complicated. The original company was hit hard by the SEC case and the broader ecosystem largely shifted toward Odysee/community continuity. So I would not list LBRY today as a clean, thriving media-production service in the same way I might have in 2022.
White Rabbit is still online too, although its current pitch reads more like human-led film sharing and discovery than the old blockchain anti-piracy angle.
NFTs, Collectibles And Fan Access
This is where the tone needs updating most. NFTs did not vanish, but the speculative mania did. Some big NFT marketplaces have shut or shrunk, including examples like Nifty Gateway and Foundation in 2026, while the survivors are leaning harder into utility, fandom, games, authentication and access rather than “number go up”.
OpenSea is still around. VeVe is still around too, and in 2026 completed a migration of its digital collectibles to Collect Chain.
But I would now treat entertainment NFTs as fan-club infrastructure rather than investment infrastructure. If the thing gets you a ticket, a collectible, a members-only screening, a meet-up, a discount, a vote, or a persistent identity across a fandom, fine. If the entire pitch is “this poster might make you rich”, check whether your wallet has an ejector seat.
The Tarantino NFT episode, meanwhile, remains a useful warning: famous IP plus NFTs plus unclear rights equals lawyers, and lawyers remain the original proof-of-work system.
Ticketing
NFT ticketing still makes more practical sense than most NFT art speculation ever did. SeatlabNFT is still active, pitching digital tickets on a carbon-neutral blockchain, with resale controls, royalties, ticket-holder rewards and claimable real-world perks.
YellowHeart also continues to be cited in NFT ticketing guides as an artist-focused ticketing platform. This is one of the more credible uses because it tackles recognisable problems: touting, fraud, resale revenue, fan data and access perks.
It is not glamorous, which is a good sign.
Storage And Archives
IPFS and Arweave remain relevant for decentralised media storage, especially where NFTs, archives, metadata or public records need to keep resolving after a company disappears.
The caution is that IPFS is not magic permanence dust. If nobody pins the file, your “permanent” asset can still drift into the void. Arweave’s pitch is stronger for long-term storage, with a pay-once model and a “permaweb” framing, though even permanent infrastructure should be treated with the healthy suspicion normally reserved for hard drives, startups and festival Wi-Fi.
Sustainability And Carbon
This area still feels underdeveloped in film compared with the rhetoric. Tools like Hedera now heavily promote sustainability, tokenisation and enterprise trust infrastructure, and Hedera remains active with low-energy transaction claims and environmental tooling. But I found fewer obvious film-production-specific blockchain carbon tools than I expected.
That may be because production sustainability has sensibly moved toward boring measurable practice: carbon calculators, travel reduction, renewable power, greener sets and reporting. Blockchain can help with audit trails and credits, but it is not a substitute for turning the generator off.
So, What Survived?
The old 2022 list now looks mixed.
Still clearly active or meaningfully alive: Decentralized Pictures, Film.io, FilmChain, Livepeer, Theta, OpenSea, VeVe, Filmzie, White Rabbit, IPFS, Arweave, Hedera, Radix and SeatlabNFT.
Harder to verify, quiet, pivoted or not something I would confidently recommend as active film infrastructure: Moviecoin, Curio, the original Tarantino NFT site, LBRY as originally understood, AfterParty’s original festival page, and the original Ffilm Werdd blockchain MVP.
Final Take
The useful future of blockchain in film is probably not “decentralise Hollywood”. Hollywood is already decentralised in the sense that nobody knows who has final cut until a lawyer enters the room.
The real uses are smaller and more practical: funding transparency, community review, royalty tracking, fan access, ticketing, rights metadata, provenance, storage and compute. Less revolution, more plumbing.
And honestly, plumbing is underrated. When it works, nobody notices. When it doesn’t, the whole production stops.