I’ve spent the better part of the last year building something I genuinely believe has never quite existed before, and I’ve been thinking hard about who in the investment world might actually get it.
So I decided to write this down. Not as a formal pitch. More as a public thinking-out-loud, because the best conversations I’ve had about Indikin have always started with someone saying “that reminds me of someone you should meet.”
If that’s you by the end of this, I’d love to hear from you.
What is Indikin, exactly?
Indikin is a Film3 ecosystem now looking towards Ethereum. At its core: a streaming platform (IndiFlix) where independent filmmakers own their work, earn directly from audiences, and don’t hand over creative control to a studio or middleman. Layered on top of that is $INDIKIN, an Ethereum-native DeFi index token that generates real, volume-backed yield for holders through a 1% increasing to 3% transfer tax routed as UNI rewards.
No emissions. No rebasing. Yield only when there’s real trading volume.
It’s a place where filmmakers are owners, not vendors. Where fans are participants, not subscribers. And where the infrastructure is a publicly traded token on a decentralised exchange, not a gated platform with a CEO deciding who gets what.
We’re currently raising a $10M hybrid seed round (token + equity) to fund Ethereum liquidity, seven strategic Film3 acquisitions, and the buildout of our AI agent suite.
That’s the quick version. What follows is a more honest account of who I think should be in the room with us and why.
The investors I’ve been thinking about
Jesse Walden — Variant Fund
Jesse Walden [linkedin.com/in/jessewalden] is someone who has walked this road before — literally. He spent years managing independent musicians, helping artists like Solange reach fans directly without label dependency. He then built Mediachain, a blockchain protocol for tracking digital media ownership, which Spotify acquired. He went on to coin the “ownership economy” thesis that now frames how most serious Web3 investors think about creator-native platforms.
When I read Variant’s portfolio — Mirror, Friends With Benefits, Uniswap — it reads like a map of where Indikin is trying to go. The filmmaker as owner. The fan as stakeholder. The token as the economic bridge between them.
I’m curious whether Jesse sees what I see when he looks at independent cinema through that lens.
Richard Muirhead — Fabric Ventures
Richard Muirhead [linkedin.com/in/richardmuirhead] has been building for the open economy since before most of us were using the phrase. Fabric Ventures recently co-launched a Web3 accelerator in the UK alongside Coinbase and Animoca — explicitly backing “tokenised business models across all sectors.”
That sentence could describe Indikin almost word for word.
What appeals to me about Fabric specifically is their comfort with European regulatory infrastructure. We’re operating through Bitjoin AB, a Swedish entity, and building toward a MiCA-aware structure. The fact that Fabric has been deep in that conversation — at Downing Street, at ETH Denver, at Digital Asset Summit — tells me they understand the landscape we’re navigating.
I’d be fascinated to hear how they’d look at Film3 as a creator economy vertical.
Yat Siu — Animoca Brands
Yat Siu [linkedin.com/in/yatsiu] and the team at Animoca have built the most active Web3 entertainment investment portfolio on the planet — 600+ companies. They just launched a Web3 entertainment fund focused on underutilised IP. They’re backing gaming, anime, culture — anywhere they see digital property rights being underserved by existing infrastructure.
Independent cinema is one of the most underserved creative industries on earth when it comes to ownership and distribution economics. Filmmakers pour years into projects, hand them to platforms, and lose control. Indikin is the attempt to change that infrastructure.
Animoca backs people who want to rebuild cultural industries from the ground up. I’d love to know if film is on their radar.
The team at 1kx
1kx [1kx.network] published a report in late 2025 that stuck with me. They tracked $20 billion in onchain fees across 1,200+ protocols and concluded that the era of speculation-led crypto was over — and that the next phase would be driven by consumer-facing apps generating real onchain revenue.
That is precisely what Indikin is designed to produce. Every streaming subscription, every filmmaker transaction, every token swap through IndiFlix flows through the INDIKIN transfer tax mechanism. Volume becomes yield. Users become holders. Holders become stakeholders.
I think 1kx would find the mechanics interesting. I’m curious whether they’ve seen a Film3 project structured this way before.
Joel Monegro — Placeholder VC
Joel Monegro [placeholder.vc] is the thinker behind fat protocols and some of the most durable frameworks for understanding how value accrues in decentralised networks. Placeholder’s portfolio — Decentraland, Arweave — skews toward projects that are building new information infrastructure, not just applications on top of existing infrastructure.
The Indikin Production Fund is, in essence, a decentralised capital allocation mechanism for independent film. The ecosystem is built to eventually hand governance to its community. The token is the economic spine of a filmmaker-owned creative network.
I’d be genuinely curious how Joel would stress-test that thesis.
Richard Muirhead + the Greenfield One team
I mention Greenfield One [greenfield.one] separately because I think the EU angle warrants its own moment. Their 2025 thesis on Ethereum as a sequencing layer, combined with their track record of deploying in European Web3 infrastructure, makes them a natural conversation partner for a project anchored in Sweden with a Cayman Foundation overlay and an Ethereum-native token.
If Fabric and Greenfield are co-investors in your portfolio, you tend to be building something with serious structural foundations. That’s the category I want Indikin to sit in.
Why I’m writing this publicly
Honestly? Because the investors I most want to meet are not the ones responding to cold emails. They’re the ones who get a message from someone they trust saying “I just read something you should see.”
Indikin sits at an intersection that doesn’t have a neat category yet. It’s not a pure DeFi play. It’s not a streaming startup. It’s not an NFT project. It’s a filmmaker ownership economy built on Ethereum — and the right investor for it will probably have a background in at least two of those worlds.
If you’ve read this far and you know someone at any of these funds, or someone who knows someone, I’d be genuinely grateful for an introduction. Not a warm lead. Just a conversation.
You can reach me directly here on LinkedIn or at rich@indikin.com
The films are already being made. The infrastructure is already being built. We’re just looking for the right people to build it with.
Rich Tella is COO and Co-Founder of Indikin. Indikin is a Film3 ecosystem platform with eyes on Ethereum combining independent cinema streaming (IndiFlix), a DeFi index token ($INDIKIN), and a decentralised production fund. Nothing in this article constitutes investment advice.