I didn’t set out to build a platform. I set out to make a film.
Degen Generation started as a straightforward documentary premise, follow Pulsechain and other DeFi users through a full market cycle and see what happens to them. What I didn’t anticipate was what would happen to me in the process.
Spending years inside decentralised finance, watching how value flows, how communities form around tokens, how ordinary people relate to money when the intermediaries are removed, it changed how I think about almost everything. Including how films get made and who gets to make them.
The independent film industry has a problem it doesn’t like to talk about honestly. It isn’t a talent problem. It isn’t a story problem. It is a structural problem, and it has been the same structural problem for decades.
Filmmakers chase funding from gatekeepers who take time, money and often creative control in exchange for access. They chase distribution through festivals and platforms that may or may not find them an audience. They fight to retain the rights to their own work in deals born from exhaustion as much as negotiation. The ones who survive this process long enough to build a career are the exceptions, not the rule. The system filters for persistence and compromise rather than vision.
I watched DeFi solve analogous problems in finance in real time. Decentralised, community-owned, transparent, automated value distribution with no single gatekeeper controlling access. It wasn’t perfect, Degen Generation documents that honestly, but the underlying logic was sound. Remove the intermediary. Let value flow directly between the people creating it and the people who believe in it.
The question I couldn’t stop asking was: what does that look like for film?
The Thesis
Independent filmmakers and their audiences already have a relationship. Fans follow directors, not just films. They track projects from announcement to release, share trailers, evangelise to friends, show up opening weekend. That relationship has real economic value and the current system captures almost none of it, not for the filmmaker and not for the fan.
Web3 changes that. Token infrastructure allows a filmmaker to give their community genuine economic participation in their work. Not a donation. Not a merchandise purchase. A stake. A mechanism through which the people who believed earliest share in what gets built.
This is not a radical idea in finance. Index funds, community ownership models, revenue sharing structures, these exist and work. What hasn’t existed is the infrastructure to apply them to independent film in a way that is accessible, automated, and filmmaker-controlled.
That is what Indikin is.
What Indikin Actually Does
The Indikin ecosystem addresses the four core problems that kill independent film careers: funding, distribution, exposure, and intellectual property control.
Funding works through a decentralised model built around filmmaker tokens. Each filmmaker who joins Indikin has the option to launch their own token, think of it less as a financial instrument and more as a direct line of communication and participation between a filmmaker and their community. A percentage is deposited into the Indikin Production Fund, which is currently but not eternally governed collectively by the founding filmmakers and used to allocate grants and production support. The fund grows as the ecosystem grows. Every new filmmaker who joins strengthens the whole.
Distribution runs through Indikin Streaming, a native platform Indiflix, built on smart contracts that automate revenue splitting. When a film streams, value flows automatically, to the filmmaker, to token holders, to crew and production participants, and back into the Production Fund to support future projects. No intermediary taking a margin. No opaque accounting. The contract handles it.
Exposure is tied to the Indikin Token Index, an index of all filmmaker tokens bonded to the native $INDIKIN token. Investors who want broad exposure to independent film can hold $INDIKIN and gain indirect participation across every filmmaker in the ecosystem. As the index grows, so does the visibility of every filmmaker within it.
Intellectual property stays with the filmmaker. Always. The revenue split percentages are set by the filmmaker before requesting funding support. Indikin doesn’t own your work. It provides the infrastructure to monetise it on your own terms.
What Degen Generation Taught Me
The documentary wasn’t just research. It was a live experiment in what happens when ordinary people engage with decentralised finance without a safety net or a guide. Some of them thrived. Most of them lost money. All of them learned something about how value actually works when the traditional system steps aside.
What I took from it wasn’t a cautionary tale. It was a technical education. I understood liquidity pools, token bonding, reflection mechanics, and community-driven economies not from a whitepaper but from watching real people navigate them in real time. That knowledge is embedded in how Indikin is designed — the scholarship model, the production fund structure, the filmmaker token mechanics. Nothing in the ecosystem was theorised in isolation. It was built from observation.
That’s the part I think matters most. Indikin isn’t a Web3 company that decided to enter film. It’s filmmakers who spent years inside Web3 and built the tools needed for what comes next.
What Comes Next
I have a film I want to make. I’m not ready to announce it yet, the right moment for that is coming. What I can say is that it is the most ambitious project I’ve attached my name to, and it will not get made through traditional funding routes. Not because those routes are entirely closed, but because they are the wrong fit for what this project is and who I want to make it with and for.
Indikin is how I intend to fund it. Not as a workaround. As the proof of concept the platform was always building toward. A filmmaker using the ecosystem he built to finance the film he wants to make, with a community that participates in both the process and the outcome.
That’s the experiment. That’s the thesis made practical.
If you’ve read the litepaper, followed the project, or simply believe that independent film deserves better infrastructure than it currently has, this is the moment to pay attention.
Support me, the team and all future indie filmmakers by creating your free creator profile at indikin.online
Or simply become an ambassador at indikin.online/earn to earn 50% on every subscriber you bring onboard.
The platform is being built. The film is coming.