PBS NOVA’s Crypto Decoded: ‘I Hope That the Film Helps Demystify Crypto’
In recent years, there’s been a glut of documentaries on cryptocurrency, from the Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain (2018) to the 2016 film Banking on Bitcoin, along with a crop of Netflix films exploring the good, bad, and just plain criminal enterprises of crypto. Coinbase even had a self-referential, partisan film on how creator Brian Armstrong founded the company, which many saw as a transparent marketing gambit to promote the company itself. The question remains: Does crypto truly need a film to advance it these days?
The one-hour Crypto Decoded documentary on PBS NOVA takes a different approach, seeking to court audiences that might be seeking real clarity. Filmed last year and this year in New York, California, and Amsterdam, the team visited one of the world’s largest Ethereum conferences (ETHAmsterdam) and participated in an early test-run of the Merge by the Ethereum Foundation. They also spotlight EquityCoin, a cryptocurrency project started by Brooklyn-based real estate investor Vernon J. and computer programmer Akil Ash to bring affordable housing in a low-income New York neighborhood where banks were uncertain about venturing.
“The most exciting thing for me was to see what many people agree is the ‘early days’ of an emerging tech,” producer Edna Alburquerque told me. “Rather than a specific use case, I found it really inspiring and exciting to see how much energy and excitement there is in this space.”
The NOVA team hadn’t expected to release the film during a downturn in the crypto market, much less the dramatic implosion of FTX, but Alburquerque said the idea for the film had percolated long before the current moment. The team noticed a large segment of the population had heard of crypto but was still struggling to define and understand it. “We were all in agreement that it was starting to feel that crypto was entering more mainstream conversations,” Alburquerque said. “The reason NOVA thought it was a good topic was because it was the kind of topic people have heard of, they know a little about, and a lot of people are still confused about.”
“I hope that the film helps demystify crypto a little bit,” Alburquerque said. After watching the film, she wants audiences to understand crypto as “a financial tool” and peek inside the “loftier social visions that many crypto pioneers see it as.”
But the process for storyboarding a narrative that was largely about transactions on a blockchain network proved onerous, to say the least. “That was one of the main challenges – how do you visualize these things that are happening behind-the-scenes in a computer or an abstract space?” she asked.
The NOVA team, however, was up to the challenge and had even come across this problem before when it was filming documentaries on topics like the microbiome, dark energy, or the Dead Sea scrolls. “It led me, at least as a filmmaker, to think about how so many things we do today are unknown to us,” she said.
For this reason, in Crypto Decoded, Alburquerque and the other filmmakers focused on projects capturing how crypto interfaced with everyday life. “Crypto is such a huge field and it has many potential uses across many fields,” she said.
One route in was real estate, as illustrated by the EquityCoin project. “Most people can definitely relate to the fact that the world of real estate has a lot of gatekeeping,” Alburquerque said. In East New York, Brooklyn, where the EquityCoin project was based, the community had already struggled to obtain financing from big banks and were looking to supplant banks with community. Residents said crypto was “a beacon to revitalize our community.”
Adding to that, the film delves into the Merge through Danny Ryan, a key researcher behind the Ethereum project, and also looks at the exuberance found at an Ethereum conference in Europe. “We got to go to ETHAmsterdam, which is a big coding conference. You feel the energy of these hackathons, these coding spaces where people are just excited about the technology,” Alburquerque told me.
The team agreed that it might be useful to see how this early period of crypto is viewed by historians: “I wish I had a time machine and could watch this from the perspective of viewers 20 years from now,” Alburquerque said.
The full video can be watched on PBS NOVA.
In recent years, there’s been a glut of documentaries on cryptocurrency, from the Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain (2018) to the 2016 film Banking on Bitcoin, along with a crop of Netflix films exploring the good, bad, and just plain criminal enterprises of crypto. Coinbase even had a self-referential, partisan film on how creator Brian Armstrong founded the company, which many saw as a transparent marketing gambit to promote the company itself. The question remains: Does crypto truly need a film to advance it these days?
Subscribe for full article
Get Access to Our Exclusive Content
Already subscribed? Log In
