Exclusive: Camp Network launches L1 mainnet, token

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Camp wants to prove that an IP-focused chain can work long-term. 

The Camp mainnet has been officially deployed as of this morning, along with its native CAMP token. The team worked with crypto infra firm Gelato and is using the Abundance rollup L1 stack, which is built on Celestia.

The CAMP token is expected to facilitate creator royalties and AI-agent monetization, in addition to functioning as a gas and governance token.

“We’re going to continue to see growth in AI, but without the proper infrastructure or the technology to protect IP and creativity, we’re going to see a really sort of value-destructive relationship between AI and IP,” Camp Network cofounder James Chi told me in an exclusive interview. 

Chi has a TradFi background, and previously worked in investment banking at RBC Capital Markets and Goldman Sachs. He was then at Figma before ultimately starting Camp in 2023. 

“AI is going to eat creativity as we know it, and there’s not going to be the right guardrails to protect creativity as a whole,” Chi said, echoing concerns felt by creatives across gaming, film, visual art and media. 

The vision is that Camp could help solve the problems AI creates for creators and IP owners by allowing brands, creators and licensors the ability to quickly tokenize their content to establish ownership onchain. Then, AI agents can license and train on that content, and creators can then be compensated via royalties for use of their work.

There’s a lot of mission overlap here with Story, Camp’s biggest competitor at the moment.

“Most new IP generated will all be done via AI,” Camp cofounder Nirav Murthy told me. “And we envision blockchain being the mechanism by which that’s done.”

Camp is working with teams spanning the entertainment, gaming and consumer categories, including Black Mirror (which has been making crypto plays through licensor Banijay UK), Japanese IP firm Minto, and comic book creator Rob Feldman.

“The ecosystem is what matters at the end of the day. We don’t want to build the ghost chain,” Chi said.

He emphasized that Camp is trying to give creators, licensors and brands a reason to stick around long-term. 

“Our ethos is, we don’t want to lean into the pay-to-play model, right? We’ve seen that play out in crypto. People are paying, you know, upwards of eight figures of revenue to try to get big IP to launch with them,” Chi said. 

“And while that might be exciting for two to three months, after that the IP holder is not incentivized to actually build a meaningful program, because they already got paid out.”

Camp previously raised $4 million in seed funding a year ago, and raised $25 million in Series A funding in April.

Perhaps Murthy is right, and AI will be a wellspring for new and interesting IP. The threat of AI indeed feels stronger than ever before for creatives concerned that their work has already been stolen — and that they’ll lose out on jobs and income if clients opt to churn out AI-generated products.

Ownership can also be complicated, and licensing often benefits larger corporations and studios more than individual artists (who, for example, might have worked on a film, but don’t own the rights to license their work).

Licensors will ultimately have to decide if they’re ready to offer up their libraries to countless new AI models — or whether they might want to wait it out until the slew of active lawsuits against AI firms set a new standard.

While IP-focused blockchains have been tried in the past, we’re not in 2018 anymore. Although, that hasn’t stopped prediction markets, a sector borne of the ICO era, from finally finding traction with the mainstream. 

Tokenized IP on the blockchain may just be taking a longer route.

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