The Pomp Podcast
#510: Jesse Walden on the Ownership Economy
- Jesse Walden's background in media piracy and artist management shaped his understanding of how creators can capture value directly without platform intermediaries.
- The ownership economy thesis centers on community-owned networks where users earn ownership stakes through participation, exemplified by Bitcoin, Ethereum, Uniswap, and Compound.
- Progressive decentralization requires building product-market fit first, then distributing governance tokens to users who are already creating value in the network.
- NFTs invert digital media ownership by allowing creators to own and monetize their work directly, with programmable royalties and portability across platforms and applications.
- Composability of NFTs—the ability to bring digital assets across different contexts and games—represents the next frontier beyond the current speculation-driven hype cycle.
- Social money (creator-issued tokens) remains experimental; the interaction model and value proposition are less clear than NFTs, though both can work complementarily.