The prototype shows how decentralized technologies can unlock new models for content licensing, attribution, and value exchange across the creative industries. Built on DECaDE’s multi-year research into media provenance, rights management, and distributed marketplaces, the platform offers a glimpse of a future where creators and organisations can exchange rights to reuse digital assets with greater transparency, trust, and control.
This development comes at a pivotal moment for the creative sector. In the age of Generative AI, large-scale reuse of digital assets is essential for training AI systems—yet there are still no widely adopted frameworks for discovering, licensing, and compensating creators at scale. While today’s blanket AI opt-in and opt-out mechanisms provide a welcome start, creators consistently tell us they need a way to express:
- who may re-use a work
- for what purpose
- under what compensation terms
In short: consent, control, and compensation – the themes summarised in the recent Time to ACCCT report co-authored by DECaDE in May 2025.
DECaDE’s research shows that C2PA can also form the basis of a Creative Content Exchange aligned with the UK government’s Industrial Strategy. Crucially, the use of open standards and decentralised technologies such as blockchain can enable markets that scale globally without relying on centralised platforms as gatekeepers to broker deals on content rights.
“DECaDE’s mission has always been to design decentralized platforms that support a peer-to-peer digital economy—one where anyone can be a producer or consumer of digital content. This prototype shows how provenance technologies and open standards can help creators maintain agency over their work, support transparent AI development, and enable new economic models for creativity in the UK and beyond.”
Professor John Collomosse, Director of DECaDE
This need for a decentralised, creator-inclusive solution is especially acute for freelancers and SMEs, who account for 57% of global creative sector GVA and 30% of UK creative jobs. These creators operate in a profoundly decentralised, international ecosystem. A single centralised registry for the world’s media is neither realistic nor desirable. What is needed instead is a network of federated, linked, decentralised registries, powered by open standards and interoperable provenance signals that persist through the creative supply chain.
The prototype will be available for hands-on demonstration at CVMP 2025, with a short paper available (download below) and further technical documentation to be released through DECaDE and its partners.
DECaDE is the UKRI Centre for the Decentralised Digital Economy, bringing together expertise in AI, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), and cybersecurity, alongside business, law, and human-centred design. The centre collaborates with over 30 commercial partners, including Adobe and the BBC, and works closely with policymakers, including the Cabinet Office and Scottish Government.
For further information or press enquiries please contact decade@surrey.ac.uk
