DePIN Media Network PKT Starts Up on Coinbase’s Base to Bring Transparency to Making Movies

PKT, a decentralized media network built by three brothers frustrated with Hollywood’s film business, is becoming one of the first DePIN projects to launch on Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 blockchain built on Ethereum.

Jesse Berger, one of PKT’s founding community members and the producer of Hollywood blockbuster Oblivion and other million-dollar movie productions, said he had been looking for a way to bring more transparency to movie production.

Although many of his movies were wildly successful and watched by millions of people worldwide, he had no transparency into the revenue flow and how much money he was owed as a producer, he told CoinDesk in an interview. That’s when he realized blockchain could be the solution.

“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, started in 2019 on its own proof-of-work, layer-1 blockchain. Its first streaming platform, BIA, a hub for TV and films, will enter operation 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.

Jesse Berger also said it’s important for PKT to be accessible to the average retail consumer who knows little – and doesn’t care to know – about crypto. Terms that can be useful to evangelize the project to stakeholders in the crypto industry, will make eyes glaze over elsewhere.

“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 is the decision to use Base because PKT will be one of the first DePIN projects on the platform.

The move has several reasons, 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 cap of $18.3 billion, according to CoinGecko data, with around $5.5 billion of that on Solana. Base has less than $5 million.

Another advantage of using Base, the team said in a release, is the technology upgrade that introduces smart contracts and Web3 features. Those simplify scaling and eliminate the need for maintaining an energy-intensive proof-of-work blockchain.

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