In an exclusive interview with AltCoinDesk, Nirav Murthy, co-founder and co-CEO of Camp Network, talked about a novel application of blockchain technology – the use of on-chain vaults in financing music festivals and films.
Murthy also speaks about the benefits of tokenization of entertainment cash flows, the industry’s stance toward blockchain technology, the evolution of intellectual property in the age of AI, and more. The interview follows below.
Conversation with Nirav Murthy, co-founder of Camp Network
1) Camp Network is financing music festivals and films through on-chain vaults. What problem in entertainment finance are you trying to solve with this model?
Entertainment is highly capital intensive, but the financing infrastructure behind it is slow, opaque, and concentrated among a small group of gatekeepers. Creators often give up significant equity and pay high legal and structuring costs just to access upfront production and marketing capital. We’re building a new on-chain primitive that allows cultural projects to be financed transparently, efficiently, and without relying on antiquated intermediaries.
More importantly, on-chain vaults enable real economic ownership at the community level — fans can participate directly in the upside of the IP they help bring to life. That alignment changes behavior: community participants become core audiences and high-conviction supporters from day one. We recently saw this in action with a $200,000 vault supporting post-production and P&A for Swari Agra, and we believe this model can fundamentally modernize how entertainment is funded.
2) How does tokenizing entertainment cashflows change the relationship between creators, investors, and audiences?
Tokenizing entertainment flows collapses the distance between creators, capital, and audiences. In the traditional system, those groups are separated by layers of intermediaries, which limits transparency and weakens alignment. When cashflows are tokenized, audiences can become investors – meaning they don’t just consume culture, they participate in its economic upside.
That shift changes incentives. Creators are able to identify and directly engage their highest-conviction supporters, turning passive audiences into economically aligned core communities. Those core audiences are typically more engaged, more promotional, and more valuable over time, which ultimately makes the project more profitable. At the same time, creators gain transparency into who their real supporters are and how value flows through their ecosystem.
We’ve begun seeing this dynamic with 53 global music festivals now onboarded onto Camp — including Clockenflap, It’s The Ship, and S2O Festival — where cultural IP becomes programmable and community-aligned rather than platform-extracted.
3) How receptive has the entertainment industry been to blockchain-based financing models so far?
The industry is cautiously optimistic. Most entertainment executives haven’t seen blockchain work at scale yet, so the bar is high — it has to solve real problems, not just introduce new technology. We’re not using blockchain for its own sake; we’re using it because it unlocks better payment rails, lower fees, faster settlement, and seamless cross-border transactions in a global industry.
Where the interest becomes strongest is around rights management. Blockchain creates transparent provenance — the ability to register authorship, map participation, and automate revenue flows in a way that’s difficult to dispute. That becomes even more critical in the era of AI, where IP is king and proving ownership matters more than ever.
When blockchain is positioned as infrastructure that strengthens capital formation and protects IP — rather than as a buzzword — the conversations shift from skepticism to serious engagement.
4) Do you see tokenized entertainment assets becoming accessible to retail investors, or will institutions dominate this space?
In the near term, institutions are structurally better positioned to lead — they can move size, underwrite risk, and navigate compliance. That said, both sides are cautious. Traditional Web2 institutions are still getting comfortable with the new primitives, while many Web3-native institutions are ironically more comfortable with on-chain altcoin yields than underwriting real-world cashflows like ticket sales or streaming revenue.
Right now we’re seeing a mix of retail and institutional participation. But over time, I expect retail to play a much larger role. Retail participants can move quickly and close vaults efficiently, whereas institutions often require longer legal and diligence cycles. As the infrastructure matures and protections become standardized, broader retail access becomes not just possible, but natural.
The goal isn’t speculation — it’s building trusted, programmable rails where rights, capital, and participation are aligned from day one.
5) What are the biggest risks creators face if intellectual property doesn’t evolve fast enough for AI?
The biggest risk is that the AI economy evolves around a “steal first, settle later” model. Creative work is being absorbed at a massive scale without clear permission, attribution, or compensation – turning creators into unpaid inputs for systems that move faster than legal frameworks can keep up. As lawsuits pile up, it’s clear the tension isn’t theoretical.
At the same time, provenance becomes critical. In a world flooded with synthetic content, proving what is original, who created it, and when it was created isn’t just a legal issue — it’s an economic one. Without stronger IP infrastructure, creators don’t just lose control of their work — they lose leverage in the AI era.
6) What does a fully “programmable rights and programmable money” ecosystem look like in practice?
In practice, it means rights and payments are built directly into the internet layer instead of being managed manually through contracts, inboxes, and spreadsheets. Every piece of content would carry clear, machine-readable information around ownership, permissions, and terms of use. If someone wants to license that content, whether it is a platform, an app, or even an AI agent, that process can happen automatically.
At the same time, money can flow automatically based on those rules, so creators, collaborators, and rights holders get paid in a way that is instant and transparent. That is what we mean by programmable rights and programmable money. It is about taking ideas like attribution, licensing, and fair compensation and making them work at internet scale.
7) How do you see the intersection of AI, blockchain, and intellectual property evolving over the next five years?
Over the next five years, AI will force a complete upgrade of how ownership works on the internet. The vast majority of new IP won’t be created manually — it will be generated, remixed, or co-authored by AI systems. In that world, provenance becomes foundational. If you can’t prove what was created, by whom, and on what data it was trained, ownership and monetization break down.
Blockchain becomes critical because it allows provenance, licensing, and payments to be embedded directly into digital assets. We believe the future isn’t just about protecting large studio IP — it’s about empowering user-generated IP at a global scale. Camp is designed to become a user-owned IP repository where new work is registered at creation, not litigated after the fact.
Over time, that repository also becomes a decentralized data sampling marketplace. As models become more bespoke and domain-specific, they’ll train on licensed datasets from Camp’s network — with blockchain facilitating transparent payments back to the creators who contributed the data. Ownership, training, and monetization become programmable by default in an AI-native world.
8) If you had to summarize Camp Network in one sentence, what would it be?
Camp is the infrastructure transforming IP ownership in the AI-native economy.
