Our timelines were just filled with a bunch of pastel Miyazaki’s ghosts. Studio Ghibli-style AI generations have become the internet’s new favorite aesthetic. PFPs and marketing campaigns were reborn overnight in the watercolor warmth of Spirited Away. Selfies rendered as soot sprites. 

The results are charming yet deeply unsettling. Why? Because Hayao Miyazaki didn’t draw them––and no one asked permission. This isn’t just a copyright problem. It’s an authenticity problem where there is a growing inability to see, trace, or understand the origins of the content that shapes our culture. 

In the chaos of AI-generated images and memecoins, we’re watching creativity get flattened, authorship obscured, and ownership erased. If that feels like a plague, it’s because it is.

The unfettered mess unleashed by generative AI has caused a powerful use case for blockchain to emerge: proof of provenance and onchain verifiability for agentic creation. By anchoring content to public, immutable ledgers, blockchain enables creators to prove authorship, timestamp originality, license works programmatically, and track derivatives across the network—without relying on centralized gatekeepers.

With the tools of blockchain, creators can participate in fairer, more transparent ecosystems that reward origin and empower open-source and composable content systems.

The collapse of creative clarity

Studio Ghibli has not been the only target. In late 2024, Philip Banks created Chill Guy, a laid-back dog meme that exploded into a half-billion-dollar meme token on Solana. But Banks never gave permission. His accounts were hacked. A false licensing deal was forged. When the truth surfaced, the token crashed 45% in 30 minutes.

Now imagine that story playing out across every medium, on a global scale. That’s exactly what’s happening with OpenAI’s recent co-option of Studio Ghibli’s IP. Now, AI’s tools can mimic any voice, style, or aesthetic—trained on unlicensed data scraped from the internet and any medium it can consume. 

Amazon is replacing voice actors with AI. Manga localization is being outsourced to machines. Lawsuits from The New York Times, Getty, and independent artists are piling up. A major problem is that enforcement can’t keep pace with reproduction. The systems we rely on to manage content—from cloud drives to social platforms—cannot tell you where something came from. 

They fail at proving provenance and, in turn, fail the creators whose livelihoods depend on IP rights. We’re building the next generation of digital culture on a foundation of guesses, not guarantees.

Creative authenticity requires new blockchain infrastructure

We don’t need more IP lawsuits. We need new rails. Authenticity, or even lucidity—the ability to see clearly and act truthfully—is not just a philosophical idea. In a generative world, it’s a technical requirement. If we want to preserve creative integrity in the age of AI, we need infrastructure that makes origin, attribution, and authorship cryptographically native to every digital asset.

Using content-addressable storage and Merkle tree structures, creators can hash their work and register it to a public chain. This hash becomes a permanent fingerprint of the original content. Smart contracts can define licensing conditions, automate royalties, and even govern remix rights.

Each derivative, usage event, or ownership change is logged immutably—creating a verifiable timeline of creation, modification, and transaction. This doesn’t just protect artists. It improves the machines, too. With blockchain, creators can cryptographically register their work at the moment of creation. Every change, license, or remix becomes part of a transparent, tamper-proof timeline. Smart contracts can automate royalties. Attribution becomes verifiable. And usage becomes traceable—whether that’s a social post, a dataset, or an AI-generated derivative.

This isn’t just hype. It’s a structural shift from guesswork to guarantees, from hearsay to hashes.

Without it, artists will keep getting erased. Investors will keep getting rugged. And trust in the creative economy will continue to corrode.

Building a truthful internet

Freedom of communication and property rights are foundational principles in the canon of Western philosophy. We know that open communication channels and the rule of law to protect private property are the frameworks for building a free society. 

However, today, our creative systems are plagued with black-box models, closed-source platforms, and training systems on data without audit trails. We have mistaken this flood of content for an abundance of creativity when, in fact, it’s a hollow kind of plenty—one that undermines the creative people it imitates.

If we want a future where new Miyazakis, Picassos, and myriad creators are possible––where artists can take risks without getting scraped into the next proprietary model––we must build systems that protect them by design.

Blockchain is how we embed authorship into content, how we stop laundering aesthetics, and how we let creativity thrive without erasure. This is not just about bad actors. It’s bad architecture. And the cure isn’t outrage—it’s about provenance. Authenticity isn’t a luxury anymore. It’s a blockchain. 

Nirav Murthy

Nirav Murthy is a co-founder at Camp Network and has previous experience as an Investment Banking & Growth Equity Associate at The Raine Group. Prior to that, Nirav worked as a Brand Ambassador at CRV. Nirav holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Over the past decade, the tokenized credit market has soared to new heights. The industry, which converts traditional credit products, such as loans, bonds, or other debt instruments, into digital tokens that exist on a blockchain, has helped to democratize the world of investment for more participants, with each token issued representing a fraction of the underlying credit asset. This fractionalisation allows the token to be easily traded, transferred, and managed on decentralised platforms.  

To date, $10 billion in tokenized bonds have been issued by leading institutions, including the World Bank and the City of Lugano. The market’s growing popularity stems from the significant benefits it offers—enhanced liquidity, transparency, and accessibility. Investors can now buy and sell portions of loans or bonds, making these traditionally illiquid assets more flexible and tradable. Blockchain’s transparent, immutable ledger ensures that all transactions are secure and verifiable in real time, reducing fraud and increasing trust. Additionally, tokenized credit products open the door to a broader pool of investors by lowering entry barriers, allowing even small-scale participants to invest in assets that were once limited to large institutional players. As more financial institutions and platforms adopt tokenization, this market is expected to expand, transforming how credit products are issued, traded, and managed.

Yet despite this advancement, the growth of the tokenised credit market is still constrained by one critical issue: return on investment. Decentralized finance lending currently offers lower yields when compared to traditional lending markets, especially in the current high-interest rate environment. 

This can be solved by providing funding for cross-border payments as it is an ideal use case to expand the tokenized credit market and unlock higher yields, offering consistent cash flows and a natural fit for blockchain’s speed and cost-efficiency.

The core challenges: Low yields and volatility

The total allocation of the tokenized credit market remains relatively small compared to the size of the multi-trillion-dollar global bond market. The limited allocation is largely due to challenges in liquidity, investor hesitancy concerning yields, and regulatory uncertainty.

Concerning returns, the tokenised credit market currently offers an average yield of around 9.65% on $10 billion of tokenised credit assets. While this might seem attractive compared to traditional bond yields, tractional private credit markets saw average yields of 12% from 2018 to 2023, leading many investors to still view DeFi as volatile and uncertain. Therefore, to unlock further growth, it is critical that the industry addresses yield-related issues and enhances investor confidence in the pioneering asset class.

Institutional investors demand not just high yields but also stability and predictability. In traditional credit markets, low volatility and reliable income streams are key drivers of investment flows, whereas the DeFi sector is still seen as nascent and volatile. The ecosystem needs to prove that it can generate attractive, risk-adjusted returns for both institutional and retail investors. This means improving the robustness of the platforms and expanding the range of available asset classes, such as into payments.

Increasing yields to boost growth

To drive greater adoption and attract more capital into tokenised credit markets, several strategies are necessary to make yields more attractive:

1. Enhance liquidity. One of the key factors limiting yield attractiveness is liquidity, as tokenized assets must have deeper secondary markets to allow investors to exit positions easily without significantly affecting prices. This can be achieved by expanding the number of platforms that offer trading of tokenized debt assets, and increasing institutional participation can help create the necessary liquidity for more stable returns.

2. Broaden asset classes. The tokenized credit market is currently focused on a narrow range of assets, such as mortgages and corporate bonds. However, to make yields more appealing, the market needs to diversify into other asset classes. Tokenizing revenue-generating assets like payments, real estate, and infrastructure projects could provide higher yields and open up new opportunities for investors who are seeking different risk-return profiles.

3. Leverage stable asset classes. Integrating more stable, low-risk asset classes into the DeFi ecosystem could help balance the risk-reward equation. For example, tokenized government bonds or investment-grade corporate debt could offer lower but more stable yields, which may be attractive to institutional investors or pension funds looking for secure, long-term returns.

Finding new asset classes for tokenization

To ensure sustained growth in the tokenized credit market, new asset classes must be explored. The current landscape focuses heavily on fixed-income instruments, but there are untapped opportunities in sectors including real estate, intellectual property rights, royalties, and even carbon credits.

However, the payments industry presents the best asset class for the expansion of the tokenized credit market. Playing a fundamental role in all global commerce, the payments industry handles extremely high transaction volumes with largely consistent returns. Cross-border payments are of particular interest; each provider must maintain sufficient liquidity in each jurisdiction in which it operates to provide fast and low-cost transactions, forming a significant burden for aspiring founders and scaling payment companies.

This burden creates huge inefficiencies and locks up capital that could otherwise be invested or otherwise used more productively elsewhere. The tokenized credit market offers an effective solution to this problem, lending to cross-border payment companies to enable them to operate pre-funded accounts in more jurisdictions, reaching a market untapped by traditional lenders due to high perceived risks and archaic due diligence processes. Utilising on-chain collateral for loans and offering highly flexible lines of credit, the tokenised credit market can go where the traditional private lending market never could, gaining access to a key source of transaction volume and higher yields.

The future of tokenized credit markets

As the tokenised credit market continues to evolve, funding payments companies stand out as an important asset class that can generate higher yields and attract more capital, enabling the tokenised credit market to take the next step in its growth. 

To ensure the broader DeFi ecosystem thrives, the sector must focus on enhancing liquidity, stabilising yields, and diversifying into new asset classes, be that the payments industry or any other sector with high demand for flexible, on-chain liquidity. 

Mouloukou Sanoh

Mouloukou Sanoh is an experienced investor and operator, with private equity and investment banking in his arsenal. He co-founded Cassava, Africa’s largest web3 platform, and led key investments at Adaverse, Cardano’s venture arm. He was on Forbes 30 Under 30 2023.

Bitcoin: The Inverse of Clown World by Knut Svanholm and Luke de Wolf, Lemniscate Media, 175 pages, $25.00.

This is a book review from The Mining Issue of Bitcoin Magazine Print. Get your copy here.

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There is a similarity across the Bitcoin books published this [last] summer: They’re all about self-improvement and spiritual development. As a community, we seem to have moved on from writing about what money is, what it used to be, or how it operates in the modern world — or the specific ways in which bitcoin differs.

Instead, we’re now writing and thinking about life with bitcoin. Bitcoin has a culture, its virtues and values push its users in certain directions. [Aleks] Svetski writes about classical virtues and how they let us live well on a bitcoin standard. Mekhail writes about how to raise kids with intention and a long-term, orange, focus. In Bitcoin: The Inverse of Clown World, Knut Svanholm and his podcast sidekick Luke de Wolf gives us “a journey of introspection and self-improvement” (page 11). This “is a book about you” (page 13); not that different from how [George] Mekhail thinks about parenting.

It’s an unbelievably entertaining and powerful book, with plenty of food for thought about the insanities of our world. The chapter headings are slick, the chapters themselves digestible and relatable. If a measure of a book is how often I laugh, pull out my highlighter, or incessantly send quotes to friends, then Inverse of Clown World receives excellent marks. It’s the perfect combination of light, relaxed reading and hard-hitting punch — sprinkled with a whole jar of humor. 

The allure of Inverse is to see that all the madness in the world — political grandstanding, gender dysphoria, the broad moral, fiscal, and political decay — call out for an explanation. Why is it happening? How did it come to this? It seems so obviously irrelevant and so obviously stupid.

Svanholm and de Wolf have an answer, which “is more straightforward than you might think. When the money stops working, everything becomes political and a farce” (page 51). Shockingly, the book’s main suggestion is that moral and political collapse is downstream of the money.  

Hurling us straight off the deep end, the opening chapter is praxeology — that arcane, philosophical foundation for all Austrian economics. We then venture from the highest echelons of academic economics and mathematics to popular culture interpretations of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, to observations of reciprocal altruism in nature and its counterpart in human internet affairs. High and low, indeed.

Some dozen pages in, it feels like reading a textbook-like description of markets and the stylized economic hypothetical known as the prisoner’s dilemma. The authors draw important conclusions from the modern debate about that game-theoretical exercise: “[economist Robert] Axelrod’s findings emphasized the importance of being friendly and forgiving, but also appropriately retaliatory” (page 19). “The balance between self-interest and cooperative behavior is crucial in the game of life, where decisions shape futures” (page 21).

What that has to do with Clown World is a little unclear, and indeed we must wait some fifty pages to get an inkling of what precisely the authors mean by the label. Then again, if you’ve read Svanholm before or listened to the Bitcoin Infinity Show at all — or, you know, not been cave-bound for the last decade-plus — you have a pretty good idea. 

Several descriptions are broad-stroke, which is understandable when you try to capture something roughly meaning “everything stupid”. It’s the desire for free lunches (page 41). It’s where “pleasing bureaucrats becomes increasingly profitable, while providing as much value as possible to your fellow man becomes increasingly futile” (page 50). Clown World directly follows from a political money, “which makes people focus on totally arbitrary issues” (page 65); indeed, most so-called societal problems aren’t even problems. Clown World is equality-focused (page 101). In contrast, Bitcoin is fair, honest, and meritocratic. At the very end of the book, we learn that “Clown World is a byproduct of people not taking responsibility”. From that definition it quickly follows, via self-reflection and better “mental software”, that “Taking responsibility for your actions is the only thing that can make the whole damn circus disappear” (page 163): 

”Success in the Bitcoin world comes from providing value to your fellow human beings, not mass theft or political manipulation. Everything Divided by 21 Million equals the inverse of Clown World.”

There is no doubt in my mind that Clown World is indeed disappearing, pulling away its most ardent proponents and last, bitter beneficiaries kicking and screaming. Messrs Svanholm and de Wolf think something similar:

”things such as Bitcoin ATMs will look as ridiculous as phone booths in the not-too-distant future. […] it’s not only the ATMs that will fall into obsolescence. Everything in the Jurassic fiat currency world is on the brink of extinction. Are you a dinosaur or a human being?”

Between the ridiculing of wokeness and climate change worries, we get plenty of advice about screening out noise and guarding one’s time and mind. We get personal chapters about Knut running through the rainy slush of Gothenburg, Sweden, as well as unbelievably lengthy adventures in the Einsteinian spacetime and astrophysics. The far-fetched relevance to Clown World (“our attention also shapes our realities”, page 113) could have been reached without this much extravagance. 

We get musings on creativity, stoicism, and what the relationship is between freedom and responsibility. Indeed, “whatever small step you take to increase your personal freedom footprint increases the total level of freedom dioxide in the atmosphere” (page 133).

Why should you read this book at all? It’s simple, really: It’s Knut, it’s funny, and at times it’s pretty inspiring.

Selected quotes:

•  “When people know enough about Bitcoin to have stopped worrying about their financial future, they usually care less about how others perceive their words and actions and more about honesty and integrity” (page 53). 
• “In a world where correct pronoun assignments, teenaged weather activists, the big game last night, Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend, and a mostly harmless flu are headline news, it’s easy to see that some force is trying to avert our eyes from the men behind the curtain” (pages 24-25)
• “Clownish political ideas have existed for as long as politics itself. They come in many ways, shapes, and forms, and it can be hard to see their ridiculousness when living among them” (page 36)

Final nugget:

“You’re an absolute winner if you have one more Satoshi this year than last. Zoom out and be patient. Sell your chairs, slay your heroes, and take responsibility for your actions” (page 63).

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.