# @YourFavoriteCharacter: next Spiderman must be onchain from day 1

Source: https://x.com/alextang/status/2008181034064687521
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/YourFavoriteCharacter-next-Spiderman-must-be-onchain-from-day-1?index=0x6964b947106093915064f5e32ff465bae1a701c59d1f0f3fd6557adaa07ef6e252ed5ded
Submitted by rvolz.eth on 2026-01-12 UTC, 5 upvotes, 0 comments

## Summary

Characters, rather than franchises, carry the lasting value of intellectual property, and onchain "character economies" could let fans share in that value from the start. Iron Man, created in the 1960s, was revived by a 2008 film, and the three Iron Man films alone generated roughly $2.4 billion in box office revenue. The piece notes that Japan's production committee model splits rights among multiple parties, making ownership hard to see from outside, and it argues that onchain infrastructure would make existing character value legible rather than create it.

## Article

No more creator tokens. No more bringing big IPs onchain. None of that will happen unless... The next Spiderman is on chain from day 1.

***

For decades, intellectual property has been discussed as if it were a single, monolithic asset: franchises, universes, portfolios. That framing is not wrong, but it misses how people actually engage with culture. Audiences may remember the worlds, but the lasting emotional bond almost always forms with the characters.

Most successful IPs are remembered through a small number of faces. You may not follow every Pokémon game or collect cards, but you know Pikachu. You may not read Marvel comics, but you know Iron Man. Characters become the emotional and cultural entry points, the elements audiences carry with them across time, platforms, and formats.

Over time, some characters outgrow the franchise that introduced them and begin to behave like independent assets. This dynamic has always existed. What is new is our ability to observe it clearly, measure it, and increasingly build infrastructure around it.

Characters as the True Carriers of Cultural Memory

IP endures because characters endure. Franchises rise and fall in relevance, but specific characters resurface across generations, mediums, and cultural cycles.

Iron Man illustrates this well. Created in the 1960s, the character spent decades as a secondary figure within Marvel’s broader universe. It was not until the 2008 film adaptation that Iron Man was reintroduced to a global audience, effectively rebooting both the character and the Marvel Cinematic Universe itself. The three Iron Man films alone generated roughly $2.4 billion in box office revenue, while the broader revival unlocked merchandising cycles, licensing deals, games, spin-offs, and brand partnerships that continue to compound today. A character that once lived primarily on printed pages became a long-running economic engine spanning film, toys, streaming, gaming, and consumer products.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. Pokémon as a franchise is enormous, but its cultural gravity is unevenly distributed. Pikachu, Charizard, Gengar, and a small subset of characters account for a disproportionate share of recognition, merchandise demand, and cross-generational attachment. New formats revive these characters repeatedly without requiring audiences to engage with the full canon.

Characters do not simply exist within IP. Over time, they become the IP.

Why Characters Behave Like Assets

Characters exhibit traits we typically associate with financial assets because people already treat them that way:

Their popularity is volatile, surging after new releases, adaptations, or viral moments, then receding during dormant periods. Secondary characters can break out unexpectedly through fan engagement, reinterpretation, or cultural timing.

They carry optionality. A character can move from manga to anime, from anime to games, from games to live action, from live action to merchandise, with each transition opening new revenue streams and new audiences.

They compound over time. A successful adaptation increases the value of future adaptations by reinforcing relevance and expanding reach.

Most importantly, characters generate identity-level attachment. Fans defend them, argue about them, cosplay them, write fan fiction, and build communities around them. Supporting a character often functions as a form of self-expression. From a behavioral standpoint, believing in a character is not fundamentally different from believing in a brand, a company, or a movement.

The Linguistic Signal

This shift is already visible in everyday language, particularly among Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Expressions like “main character energy” would have sounded strange a decade ago. Today, they are part of common vocabulary. People increasingly describe themselves and others through fictional archetypes. Someone is not just confident or withdrawn anymore; they are on a villain arc or being an NPC.

This is more than slang. It reflects a deeper cognitive shift. Characters have become reference frames for identity, behavior, and aspiration. As culture fragments across platforms and formats, characters function as stable emotional anchors that are portable, recognizable, and charged with meaning. People already think in characters. The economic layer is simply lagging behind.

The Structural Problem With Today’s IP Industry

Despite this reality, the IP industry remains structurally opaque and fragmented. Japan’s production committee model is a clear illustration. Different entities split rights across the original manga, the anime adaptation, games, merchandise, and regional distribution. Even at the character level, ownership can be segmented, with one party controlling protagonists, another villains, and others holding rights limited by geography or publication year.

From the outside, it is nearly impossible to understand who owns what. From the inside, monetization depends heavily on negotiations, relationships, and legacy structures. This fragmentation is a major reason retail audiences have never had direct economic exposure to IP, let alone individual characters. Even institutional investors struggle to gain clean, transparent exposure. Cultural upside is therefore captured by a narrow set of intermediaries, often long after fan conviction has already been demonstrated

From Fan Economies to Character Economies

Fan economies already exist, but they are informal and indirect. Fans signal belief through attention, time, content creation, social amplification, and spending. They determine which characters deserve more screen time, more merchandise, more spin-offs, and more relevance. Studios watch these signals closely, but the feedback loop remains slow and opaque.

What is emerging now is the possibility of character economies: systems where belief and participation can be expressed continuously and transparently, and where characters develop economic lives alongside their cultural ones. In this model, success is not extracted from fans but shared with them. Conviction becomes legible. Momentum becomes visible. Revival moments become measurable inflection points.

What This Is Not

It is important to distinguish this from earlier attempts to tokenize attention. Meme coins, AI agent tokens, and early SocialFi experiments experienced bursts of activity before collapsing. They were largely driven by speculation and reflexive trading, without durable cultural grounding or real-world demand loops.

Character economies operate on a different substrate. Fictional characters already sit at the center of large, existing economic systems: ticket sales, merchandise, games, streaming rights, licensing, and brand partnerships. That value exists regardless of whether tokens exist. On-chain infrastructure does not create it. It makes it legible, composable, and participatory.

Why This Becomes Inevitable

Historically, crypto discussions around IP focused on ownership, provenance, and rights management. Those matter, but they miss the larger shift. The real unlock is enabling characters to persist economically across time, mediums, and audiences. Tokens are not the starting point; they are the outcome.

The natural question is why creators, studios, or IP owners would share upside rather than retain full control. In practice, most characters never reach escape velocity under today’s model. New IP requires upfront capital, distribution, and sustained attention long before it generates meaningful revenue. Early risk is concentrated with creators, while downstream upside is fragmented and often opaque.

Character economies change that dynamic by allowing creators to pull future belief forward. Early fan conviction can be converted into capital, signal, and momentum without sacrificing creative control or long-term ownership. Rather than replacing existing revenue streams, this model expands them by deepening engagement, strengthening demand, and improving the odds that a character survives long enough to compound.

At scale, this is less about speculation and more about coordination. Characters that matter culturally already generate economic gravity. The next step is building systems that allow belief, participation, and value to move in the same direction, with clearer incentives for everyone involved.