Star Wars is a franchise like no other!
During its inception, Star Wars used to be the most centralized thing ever seen in the movie industry. Everything was conceived, written, decided, and developed by its sole creator: George Lucas. He is quite the kind of director who micromanages every aspect of movie production; from what’s on set, down to what the cast and crew are supposed to eat during the lunch break.
Despite this control mania, George Lucas has been always permissive and even enthusiastic (at alternative times in reality) about the so-called Star Wars Expanded Universe. The SWEU is that array of stories, books, comics, video games, and table games created by other artists. You may say, “Well, every Hollywood franchise worth of this name has an expanded universe aimed to increase the merchandise to sell. Today’s franchises can be so big that their prime source of income it’s not the box office the movie itself makes, but all the products branded upon it.”
True, but the Star Wars Expended Universe has a fascinating section which stands out due to its “decentralization”. Most of the SWEU material was made directly by the fans! You can find countless of books written by authors (pro or even amateur) who used their pens to show their love for Star Wars!
Did they ever face lawsuits for copyright infringement? Not really. On the contrary, most of these stories were even awarded a seal of approval from Lucas Films too! When inquired about how “canon” these creations could be, George Lucas often shrugged and limited to comment something like, “Well, yes it might be. Maybe that’s how it went. Luke married Mara Jade, the Emperor was cloned and this admiral Thrawn came back from the outer rim to fight the New Republic…”
Lucas understood that artworks made directly by the fans could only benefit the official (canon) material. It was the ’90s and nobody was accustomed to the decentralization concept, but that’s what Star Wars fans around the world were doing! Sometimes the level of collaboration among fan artists, aimed at preventing new stories from colliding, saw such highs that we can even state the Star Wars disciples created a proper DAO, without even knowing it!
This “DAO” was abruptly swept away when the Empire from the real-world (Disney) took over the Star Wars Franchise. All the SWEU created by the fans, and even some more official comics and games were downgraded to the status of “legends” and Mickey Mouse started to be a Darth Vader always ready to punish all the fans daring to commit copy-right infringement with their “stupid” fan stories!
How can Star Wars fans regain control over their favorite franchise and put an end to the lynching Disney is perpetrating since The Force Awakens?
The answer lies in the Force, aka the blockchain, and here my imagination goes really wild! What if the Star Wars fans move from the ’90s and update (and revive) their DAO properly on a blockchain? What if this new DAO rises enough funds to buy the Star Wars franchise back from the evil Disney’s empire and puts it back in the hands of the fans? Imagine having the very Star Wars fans hiring their favorite writers and directors to give life to the next movies? What if fans can even decide the narrative course for the next instalment? What if they can bring their wildest fan theories on the big screen?
Yeah, of course things should be balanced in order to avoid spoilers. Voting should be transparent, but the decisions taken regarding the plot should be kept vague and perhaps, revealed only to a handful of brave fans elected by the DAO, who are willing to sacrifice their sense of surprise for the good of the galaxy. Maybe some credits of compensation will make their job easier…
The Galactic Credit Standard
Credits, right. Here we even have room to turn the Star Wars currency into a crypto! In the Star Wars universe, there is a currency called Galactic Credit Standard, also known as Republic Credits or Imperial Credits according to the period in the galaxy timeline. The currency is first mentioned in The Phantom Menace, then finds more coverage in the Expanded Universe, before returning to the official canon in The Mandalorian.
It wouldn’t be the very first time the GCS gains the form of crypto. The very author of this crazy article tried to turn the GCS into a crypto back in 2016… Yeah, I’m crazy I know! Back then I wanted to create my own crypto, when crypto didn’t have any tangible use case yet. I sensed in the force that if a crypto could succeed it was in the form of currency for nerds. What better than the Star Wars franchise?
Where is it now? Well, the GCS failed before even starting! Why? Because back then I had 0 coding skills, so I used an automatic cryptocurrency generator, which was a simple software which copied the Litecoin blockchain, with the clock back to block 1. It included a built-in wallet and miner, so you could spread your new crypto to all of your friends. The biggest issue was that this built-in miner included even some cute trojan from Tatooine. The most embarrassing thing was that I found it out when I introduced the project on bitcointalk.org… “Hey buddy, my antivirus told me your wallet has a trojan…”
I wanted to disappear! I even paid 0.3 BTC to create that shit…!
Everything that’s left is this post on bitcointalk.org:
Another lesson learned! Today I still feel confident that a Star Wars themed cryptocurrency can be an absolute crack! Back in 2016, nobody in the SW community had any clue of what a cryptocurrency was. Today, I’m sure 90% of the SW community does know what a cryptocurrency is and many even hold some. Put these enthusiastic folks together, and you will assemble easily the biggest DAO ever by far! And this DAO will do what no other fan base ever dared to do: buy its own favorite franchise!
What if the DAO is not able to buy Star Wars from Disney?
There are many reasons why a Star Wars DAO won’t succeed in buying the franchise:
- The DAO doesn’t raise enough funds, and you need a lot of them, something in the billion $ magnitude
- Disney doesn’t want to sell
- Fans decide to do something else with the money
Well, the Star Wars fandom is as big as its galaxy. If a Star Wars DAO cannot buy the franchise, I’m sure Disney will have to consider at least hiring this organization. It would be an asset, especially in the gaming industry. A Star Wars DAO could:
- offer its members sneak peeks about the newest SW material, gadgets, toys, and other exclusive merchandise
- take care of issuing and promoting Star Wars official NFTs (for now this is down by VeVe app)
- providing Lucas Films with useful and constructive feedback about future movies and series
- and why not, create a Star Wars metaverse! This would be the ultimate metaverse! In just one day it would have more users than Decentraland and the Sandbox will ever have combined! It wouldn’t even take much development effort. You take Knights of the Old Republic and you link it to a blockchain!
Who wants to start this DAO? And when you do, remember uncle Alex. Don’t you think he deserves some GCS as a gift…? :-)
Alex Joonto (on LinkedIn Alessandro Giuntini) is a chameleon who works for a fantastic crypto company called SwissBorg during the day. During the night, he works on writing articles, conceiving ideas, and preparing to deliver his first book: Thank You, President Corona!
You can follow him on LinkedIn only. Nah, he doesn’t have any Instagram or TikTok…_