The Ethereum ecosystem is open source, and it deserves media content that is open source as well.

This is something I believe very strongly, alongside my longtime conviction that CC0 educational content is a bonafide public good. To wit, today I am excited to announce the official launch of Zero Rights Media (zerorights.media), a zero-copyright onchain content collective dedicated to producing and curating media that make us all excited about Ethereum and life onchain.

Watch this little stinger to get jazzed up before you read on (you can collect it for free on Base too here.)

Collect a copy of Still Day Zero for free on Base via Zora:

Now if you're an enjoyooor of our video podcast ZEROPOD, or a connoisseur of the beautiful short films my friend JackWyldes has been cheffing up all year long (nice mustache by the way, very based), then you are already a fan of ZRM. Today's launch simply represents a rebrand and consolidation of all of the projects we have been building on Base over the past two years (and also takes into account all of the lessons we've learned along the way.)

An Open Source Repo (But Make It Media)

All of the educational onchain videos and short films that Jack and I have been putting out these past two years, teaching people about all aspects of the Ethereum, Base, Superchain and Nouns ecosystems, will now be released by Zero Rights Media instead of The Noun Square (TNS.) Our YouTube, Spotify, Twitter/X, TikTok, Zora, ENS and Basename have all been rebranded to reflect this.

We will continue to openly encourage other creators to reuse our content -- slice it up, remix it, repost it (with attribution please, but otherwise, go nuts!) Some like Leo Clarke from CC0 Films have already been experimenting with building accounts on TikTok and elsewhere featuring clips from ours and other podcasts. We would love to see more positive sum games like this being played in 2025!

This rebrand is a conscious decision to minimize market confusion, keep it simple (stupid), and lean into the success of ZEROPOD, plus our other video content by Jack, while championing first principles that are both Ethereum and Nouns-native, chief among them the power of open source.

Jack and I will be working very closely together in 2025 to create banger after banger, and also to curate & co-release CC0 and CC-BY content from other talented creators in the space (more on this below.) We will be experimenting hard at the intersection of decentralized contribution & centralized distribution.

And speaking of Jack, I have learned so much from this dude by building alongside him these past couple years and I have so much respect for his boundless creativity, his superhuman storytelling abilities and his impressive work ethic. I'm even more bullish on what we can produce together for you this year as a zero-coded power couple... Watch this space.

Zero to 100 Podcast Growth

Over the past year, ZEROPOD has also progressed from an obscure little CC0 pod about nouns and Ethereum, into one of the fastest growing onchain podcasts in the space, with over 25,000 mints of our onchain editions on Pods.media (plus another 4000 mints on Zora before we migrated over.) We have been seeing steady growth of the pod on YouTube at the same time, and in 2024 we were in the top 20% of video podcasts by watch time for all of Spotify. We've had incredible guests on the show like Base's Jesse Pollak, Dan Romero from Farcaster, Jacob from Zora, Luca from Pudgy Penguins and many more. I'm excited to continue to grow and level up ZEROPOD on all fronts in 2025.

Borrowing Lessons from Yellow

Almost exactly one year ago, alongside the core team of The Noun Square (me, Benbodhi, RobotFishGirl, BrettDrawsStuff, ProfWerder, Symbiotech, Santhosh and JackWyldes), I launched a fork of Nouns DAO on Base called The Yellow Collective. It features a daily auction and unique community-drawn traits, and has grown into a thriving Farcaster-native culture club that aims to support and empower creators onchain.

In fact, we paid out over 60 ETH last year to artists and creators through regular art contests, collaborations and commissions. I had a lot of fun coordinating many of these artist collabs last year, and our monthly Based & Yellow Artist Spotlight Editions alone brought in over 10 ETH for the artists that we partnered with, giving distribution, attention and income to these talented creators who might not otherwise have gotten it.

I want to take some of the lessons from Yellow and apply them to Zero Rights this year, by inviting the best and brightest content creators in our space to collaborate on interesting open source content drops, and by doing what we do best in boosting onchain distribution on Base and helping these creators earn more for their work, just like we've done for countless artists via Yellow in 2024.

The year has just begun, but we already have some really fun tentative collaborations lined up with Rachel Wilkins (Good News Show), Goldy and Dan from Nounish, GM Farcaster, the spicy ladies from Los Fomos, Kyle Patrick, Sloppy and more.

Be A Zero Hero

To follow along on our journey this year and help us grow, please make sure you follow @zerorightsmedia on all socials (X, Farcaster, YouTube) so you don't miss our upcoming content, both original videos and curated collaborations.

You can also join our Zero Heroes Discord server to meet other fans and get early alpha on all things ZRM and ZEROPOD. Follow JackWyldes on Farcaster and X because he is criminally underrated and that won't be the case by the end of this year I'm sure of it. And follow me too I guess if you like mid takes and bad puns: Farcaster. X.

We are also in the process of re-building our website from the ground up to be a single-stop destination for fans to view all of our content & socials and get to know other members of the community. But for now, you can bookmark zerorights.media as a placeholder with helpful ZRM links, and expect some announcements very soon about new design and functionality.

It's Still Day Zero. There's so much to build. LFG.

For Our Nounish Audience: Some Words About TNS & NOC ⌐◨-◨

The Noun Square originally began in 2022 with a simple idea: Host a Twitter Space about Nouns every single day, at the end of the daily auction. When we started this endeavour, I don't think my original cofounder Dan or I knew what we were getting ourselves into.

Earlier this morning, we hosted our 935th straight Space in a row without ever missing a single day. It's been an epic run (almost 3 years!) and throughout all the many seasons of Nouns, NOC has remained as a steadfast touchpoint for the community, day in and day out. I'm proud of that.

As part of this restructuring and planning for 2025, our team has made the somewhat difficult decision to sunset the daily Noun O' Clock Live show after episode 1000, which is coming up in a couple months' time. In the meantime, next month we will be launching a weekly show about the Nouniverse to be hosted on X, Mondays at 11 AM EST.

While we didn't see a path forward in the current meta and climate to continue producing the daily show on an ongoing basis, we are nonetheless excited about the opportunity to teach new people about Nouns at a set time and day that they can remember and set a reminder for. After a month or so of overlap, this weekly show will replace the daily show. It will be called The Noun Square (in honor of Nouny's legacy) and I'm excited to see what RFG and the team can do with a full week to prepare and promote, and a show that doesn't change airtime every single day.

Speaking of this, I would like to take a moment to thank the dedicated TNS team who have always gone above and beyond to make sure that this show could continue with such consistency and quality for so long, especially RobotFishGirl, BrettDrawsStuff, Symbiotech and Santhosh. I would also like to thank all the Nouners who supported our proposals over the past two years. We always received resounding support onchain and that gave us renewed excitement and dedication to keep iterating and cooking. Thank you for your trust and agency.

In all honesty, I think the daily show kept the nounish lanterns burning all through the bear more than most would care to admit, and there's really no telling where the project might be if we hadn't been able to continue making Noun O' Clock a "daily celebration for the internet," and creating engaging content to teach people about the best parts of this weird little community. Even as we make some difficult changes going forward, I'm proud of that legacy.

Our previous round of funding from Nouns expires in a couple weeks, and these operational changes are coming from a series of ruthless retrospectives, and are in line with our commitment to try and figure out a way to continue and adapt for another six months of building after January. In 2024, we started to see a lot of success in earning onchain revenue for our video content, and we want to go all in on this direction to FAFO and see what can happen, while also leveraging our lessons on collaborative distribution from Yellow to create more win-win partnerships with other creators in the space, with the goal of turning Zero Rights Media into a premiere content creation organization for the entire Ethereum ecosystem.

We are very inspired by the success of the Nouns Esports org, which has impressed crypto fans and critics alike in their niche by embodying the Nounish ethos of transparency, which is rare in the esports industry. Similarly, we want to be a flag-bearer for another important Nounish ideal, open source and CC0, in the crowded and often-pvp space of media content creation.

Zero Rights Media is and always will be "a nouns thing ⌐◨-◨ "

In conclusion: The Noun Square is dead; long live The Noun Square.

See you onchain,

Toady and Team