DePIN Media Network PTK Starts Up on Coinbase's Base to Bring Transparency to Making Movies

Behind PKT are Hollywood talent who say they're sick of the black box that is the industry's film production process.

Three brothers frustrated with Hollywood’s film business have banded together to create PKT, a decentralized media network that will be among the first DePIN projects to launch on Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 blockchain built on Ethereum.

Jesse Berger, a founding community member of PKT and the producer of Hollywood films like Oblivion, told CoinDesk that he had been searching for a way to make movie production more transparent.

Despite the success of his films, which have been watched by millions of people around the world, Berger said he had no visibility into the flow of revenue and the amount of money owed to him as a producer.

“I became enamored with blockchain on the basis of an immutable ledger so that you could see every transaction transparently and the idea of smart contracts to do programmatic money,” he said.

The network, which aims to be a decentralized version of Roku or Apple TV, was launched in 2019 on its own proof-of-work, layer-1 blockchain. Its first streaming platform, BIA, a hub for TV and films, will become operational later this year.

“I think that the missing piece of anybody who’s tried to attack the film industry to solve that problem has always been the aligned incentives of the audience, where they’re part of this picture, and it’s not just pay us over them,” said Josh Berger, another founding community member.

Berger also stressed the importance of making PKT accessible to the average retail consumer who may not know – and doesn’t care to know – about crypto.

“If we’re talking about the word ‘DePIN’ to a general population, I think we’ve lost to the game,” he said. “That terminology is really relevant within the understanding of the crypto sphere and how we have to communicate with the crypto folks, but in reality if we’re gonna win as a platform, we can’t talk about any of that. That’s not really gong to be relevant to the average consumer. If you’re talking about how it works, you’ve lost your audience.”

One thing that PKT’s crypto stakeholders will care about, however, is the decision to use Base, which will make PKT one of the first DePIN projects on the platform.

The move has several upsides, including the introduction of a stake-to-earn protocol that allows users to earn daily and long-term staking rewards and yields.

“We’ve always been focused on making this very user-friendly and adoptable and we wanted to be kind of a big fish in a small pond over at Base, and I really believe in Coinbase’s mission in what they’re trying to accomplish as a platform and lowering the barrier to entry to participate,” Jesse Berger said.

Collectively, DePIN has a market capitalization of $18.3 billion, according to CoinGecko, with about $5.5 billion of that on Solana. Base has less than $5 million.

Another benefit of using Base, the team said in a press release, is the technology upgrade that introduces smart contracts and Web3 features. These simplify scaling and remove the need to maintain an energy-intensive proof-of-work blockchain.

PKT will be distributing a 1:1 airdrop of its tokens on Base in three phases: During Wednesday’s launch, Feb. 21, 2025 and Aug. 21, 2025.