CoinDesk Special: 2 Chainz on Music and NFTs

Grammy Award-winning rapper 2 Chainz and Tyler Spalding, co-founder of Flexa, sat down with Zack Seward on day two of Consensus 2022.

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ABOUT

Blockchain technology has given musicians new opportunities to monetize their craft and engage with fans. Artists of all types have given non-fungible tokens (NFTs) a chance in hopes of finding a new revenue stream and a path to ownership – and encouraging audience growth.

2 Chainz is a Grammy Award-winning rapper, serial entrepreneur and investor in The Real U, a recording company based in Atlanta. Tyler Spalding is the founder and CEO of blockchain payments company Flexa. They joined “The Hash’s” Zack Seward to talk about how they are bridging the gap between music and NFTs.

This panel occurred on June 10, 2022, the second day of CoinDesk’s Consensus 2022 festival. Michael Casey, CoinDesk’s chief content officer, does the introduction.

This episode was edited by Nia Freeman, and our executive producer is Jared Schwartz. Photo: Derek White/Getty Images for SiriusXM.

HOSTS

Zack Seward

Zack Seward is CoinDesk’s contributing editor-at-large. Up until July 2022, he served as CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief. Prior to joining CoinDesk in November 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Technical.ly, a news site focused on local tech communities on the U.S. East Coast. Before that, Seward worked as a reporter covering business and technology for a pair of NPR member stations, WHYY in Philadelphia and WXXI in Rochester, New York. Seward originally hails from San Francisco and went to college at the University of Chicago. He worked at the PBS NewsHour in Washington, D.C., before attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Michael J. Casey

Michael J. Casey is Chairman of The Decentralized AI Society, former Chief Content Officer at CoinDesk and co-author of Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age. Previously, Casey was the CEO of Streambed Media, a company he cofounded to develop provenance data for digital content. He was also a senior advisor at MIT Media Labs's Digital Currency Initiative and a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to joining MIT, Casey spent 18 years at The Wall Street Journal, where his last position was as a senior columnist covering global economic affairs.

Casey has authored five books, including "The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order" and "The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything," both co-authored with Paul Vigna.

Upon joining CoinDesk full time, Casey resigned from a variety of paid advisory positions. He maintains unpaid posts as an advisor to not-for-profit organizations, including MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative and The Deep Trust Alliance. He is a shareholder and non-executive chairman of Streambed Media.

Casey owns bitcoin.