An ongoing full-feature movie project, “The Infinite Machine,” aims to reproduce the story behind the world’s second-largest digital asset, Ethereum, and its creators. With the movie set to become the first-ever NFT-financed film, one of the producing companies, Versus Entertainment, recently announced that Decentraland and Lumiere were on board to host the movie in the metaverse.
In April this year, the creative team announced that the movie would be produced by Oscar-nominated director Ridley Scott, who is world-renowned for overseeing such classic titles as “Blade Runner” and “Gladiator“.
A Crypto Drama
“The Infinite Machine” is a movie adapted from financial journalist and cryptocurrency expert Camilla Russo’s book. In the fast-paced read, the author details the wild and often hapless adventures of a team of “hippy-anarchists”, reluctantly led by an ambivalent visionary, to make a super-charged, global network.
“The Infinite Machine” tells the story of Vitalik Buterin, the controversial co-founder of Ethereum, who, as a supremely gifted nineteen-year-old, convinced a crack group of coders to join him in his quest. First conceptualized by Buterin in 2013, the platform officially went live in 2015 with eight co-founders, including Gavin Wood and Charles Hoskinson, who later respectively went on to found Polkadot and Cardano.
The storyline explores the brilliant innovation and reckless greed unlocked and unleashed by the platform, and the consequences surrounding the frenzy as it grew—the increased regulatory scrutiny, incipient Wall Street interest, and the founding team’s effort to scale the Ethereum platform enough to allow it to eventually become accessible to the masses.
The movie will be written and directed by Shyam Madiraju, along with Ridley Scott, Tom Moran, and Vera Meyer of Scott Free, producing alongside Alejandro Miranda of Versus Entertainment. According to the project roadmap, a script for the movie should be finalized by Q3 this year.
“It’s incredibly exciting to have Ridley Scott and the crew at Scott Free produce the movie of “The Infinite Machine” alongside us. I can’t imagine a better team to turn the riveting story about the people behind the most revolutionary technology since the internet into a feature film that will capture the hearts of our generation,” enthused Russo.
NFT Collection to Fund the Movie
The movie aims to be the first fully NFT-funded feature movie, as the producers are financing much of the process by selling an NFT Collection. The collection in question is a colorful exploration of Ethereum logos, and is the fruit of the collaborative efforts of 36 emerging artists from Cuba, Argentina, Venezuela, Kenya, Australia, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Honduras, India, Mexico, Spain, and the U.S.
Each artist created a piece representing their vision for Ethereum, decentralization values, and ten versions of the Ethereum logo. Each take on the ETH logo has then been further divided into four quadrants, and programmatically combined, thereby creating 10,499 unique ETH logo mosaics that reflect the combined visions of the emerging artists.
“The Infinite Machine” NFT collection has a sales goal to not only fund the filming of the movie, but also to use Ethereum’s underlying technology to boost artists in emerging nations whose voices could benefit from amplification in the NFT space. Holders of the NFTs will have the chance to receive movie-related perks linked to their NFTs, and future airdrops as production gets underway.
“The main goal of this NFT collection is to help fund The Infinite Machine movie together with the Ethereum community, and we have taken the first step towards that, but this project is also about supporting artists who live in oppressive regimes and can benefit from decentralization the most, and I’m extremely proud this initial sale is already making a big impact on their lives,” commented Russo.
The first round in 2021 was a huge success, and the first edition mint was sold out within 28 hours, raising $670K. The second round saw similar success, as 39.54% of the collection was minted, raising a total of 412.75 ETH. The project is expected to conduct its third round of NFT issues in the coming months.
