Key Takeaways
- Animoca Brands is launching a dedicated fund to bring Japanese intellectual property (IP) on-chain.
- From Pokémon to Hello Kitty, Japan’s wealth of intellectual property is ideally suited to tokenization.
- Japanese companies own many brands, characters, and stories that lend themselves to remixing, licensing, and fan-driven expansion.
Non-fungible tokens can represent digital artworks, collectibles, or even licensing rights by recording IP ownership on-chain.
From icons of twentieth-century nostalgia to modern-day blockbusters, Japanese media brands have created some of the world’s most recognizable intellectual property (IP) assets.
This makes them ideal applications for new, blockchain-based IP solutions.
To that end, Animoca Brands has teamed up with Antler Global’s Ibex to launch a dedicated fund to “bring Japan’s anime and manga IP on-chain.”
What is On-Chain IP?
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can represent digital artworks, collectibles, or even licensing rights by recording IP ownership on-chain.
Smart contracts encode provenance, scarcity, and sometimes usage terms, enabling novel ownership models and decentralized IP management.
Early pioneers of the concept included crypto-native projects like Azuki and Bored Ape Yacht Club, which grant commercialization rights to NFT holders.
Meanwhile, platforms like Story Protocol have explored tokenizing existing rights to IP assets across diverse media.
Big Brands Get in on the Action
Although crypto-native NFT projects have pioneered the concept of on-chain IP, several media powerhouses have tentatively explored the technology.
In 2022, Sony Music filed trademark applications for NFT-backed music and visual media.
That same year, Warner Media Group partnered with the Web3 games studio Splinterlands to explore new revenue and licensing arrangements for its musical artists.
Japan’s IP Goldmine
From Pokémon to Hello Kitty, Japan’s wealth of intellectual property is ideally suited to tokenization.
Unlike Western media giants, which primarily treat NFTs as digital collectibles, Japanese studios possess vast catalogs of characters and stories that naturally lend themselves to remixing, licensing, and fan-driven expansion.
For these companies, moving IP management on-chain promises to significantly reduce legal costs. It will partly automate what is otherwise a lengthy bureaucratic process and open it up to a wider range of potential partners.
James Morales is CCN’s blockchain and crypto policy reporter. He has been working in the news media since 2020, writing about topics such as payments, banking and financial technology. These days, he likes to explore the latest blockchain innovations and the evolving landscape of global crypto regulation.
With an educational background in social anthropology and media studies, James uses his platform as a journalist to explore how new technologies work, why they matter and how they might shape our future.
