BlockPunk

BlockPunk emerged in 2018 from the Entrepreneur First accelerator in Singapore, founded by Julian Lai-Hung and Jatin Shah. The venture was established to address inefficiencies in the anime merchandise supply chain and to empower creators in a market increasingly dominated by large streaming platforms. Lai-Hung, the CEO, brought extensive industry experience, having served as a veteran film and TV executive at Warner Bros. for nine years and later as the head of anime at Netflix, where he managed the launch of its Japan service. The CTO, Jatin Shah, contributed deep technical expertise with a Ph.D. in computer science from Yale, specializing in consensus mechanisms, and prior experience as a product manager at LinkedIn before its IPO.

The company positioned itself as a next-generation entertainment studio leveraging Web 3.0 technologies. Its core offering was a decentralized platform that enabled anime, film, and TV creators to directly fund, stream, and sell merchandise to a global fanbase. By utilizing blockchain, BlockPunk provided a mechanism for creating scarce, collectible digital merchandise and authenticating physical goods, thereby offering creators a new revenue stream and combating the prevalence of unlicensed products. The platform's model was designed to give creators a fairer deal, allowing them to retain more control and upside compared to the fixed-fee structures common in the streaming world. Users and fans could engage with creators through features like polling and prediction markets to indicate demand for specific merchandise.

BlockPunk successfully secured S$1.3 million (approximately US$957,000) in a seed funding round in February 2019. The round was led by SeedPlus and saw participation from prominent investors including SGInnovate, Hustle Fund, Entrepreneur First, and a strategic partnership with Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. The firm achieved several milestones, launching what it described as the world's first anime NFTs and an anime movie sale on a blockchain. However, despite these early achievements and a clear vision, the company faced challenges in scaling its operations. The co-founder cited market timing as a significant factor, noting that the consumer-facing applications for blockchain were still in their nascent stages and the market for NFTs was highly sensitive to cryptocurrency price fluctuations. After pivoting its mission multiple times, from creator decentralization to a merchandise search engine, the company ultimately ceased taking new business in September 2020 and entered liquidation in June 2021.

Keywords: BlockPunk, Julian Lai-Hung, Jatin Shah, anime NFTs, decentralized entertainment, blockchain collectibles, creator economy, digital merchandise, anime merchandise, Web 3.0 entertainment, peer-to-peer streaming, crypto collectibles, Entrepreneur First, SGInnovate, SeedPlus, authentic merchandise, fan engagement platform, direct-to-fan, entertainment IP, blockchain studio