Problem Statement

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In today’s digital creator economy, inspiration is everywhere but rarely rewarded. Writers remix articles, musicians sample beats, meme creators iterate on viral content but original creators receive little or no credit or compensation. Worse, proving that a work was genuinely inspired by another is nearly impossible without revealing private drafts, sources, or creative secrets.

There is no standardized, provable way to link creative works together especially in a way that ensures automatic revenue sharing with upstream creators.

1. Lack of Verifiable Attribution for Derivative Content

• Source: Ethereum Foundation - "Composable Creator Economies" (2024)

  Highlights that derivative onchain creative works have no standard for attribution, leading to disputes over credit, royalties, and originality in tokenized media ecosystems.

• Source: MIT Media Lab - "Creative Derivatives in Web3" (2023)

  Notes that current token standards (ERC-20, ERC-721, etc.) lack native mechanisms for linking derivative works to their origins, requiring ad hoc, fragile solutions for attribution.

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2. Existing Citation Models are Social, Not Cryptographic

• Source: Zora - "Onchain Creator Incentives" (2024)

  States that social incentives (e.g., tagging creators) are unenforceable without cryptographic proofs, creating misaligned incentives in collaborative or remix-heavy content ecosystems.

• Source: Stanford Center for Blockchain Research - "Limitations of Social Attribution" (2023)

  Demonstrates that manual citation models in creative platforms are prone to omission, exploitation, and strategic misrepresentation, especially in financially incentivized environments.

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3. No Privacy-Preserving Proof Mechanism Exists

• Source: zkSummit - "Privacy in Creative Proof Systems" (2024)

  Argues that proving inspiration or derivation typically requires exposing sensitive data (drafts, sources, references)—a clear violation of creative privacy and IP protection norms.

• Source: Electric Coin Company - "Zero-Knowledge for Data Privacy" (2023)

  Shows that zk-proofs enable verifiable statements without revealing sensitive details, yet no system currently applies zk-proofs to the creative derivative space.

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4. Missing Integration with Onchain Royalty Systems

• Source: Uniswap Foundation - "Composable Liquidity for Creator Economies" (2024)

  Highlights that royalty enforcement is fragmented, with no standard to link derivative coins (e.g., Zora CoinV4) with originator revenue streams programmatically.

• Source: Zora - "Native Royalty Splitting in CoinV4" (2024)

  Notes that Zora CoinV4 supports royalty routing but lacks integration with cryptographically provable inspiration chains, making it difficult to automate downstream revenue splits.

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5. Creative Economies Need Privacy, Attribution, and Enforcement Together

• Source: World Economic Forum - "Future of the Creator Economy" (2024)

  Emphasizes that privacy, attribution, and enforcement must coexist in decentralized creator economies to build fair, transparent, and sustainable financial models for digital creativity.

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