Digital Catapult Centre, a national centre to rapidly advance the UK's best digital ideas, and the UK Games Fund announced that they have created a working prototype smart contract that is designed to boost innovation and inspire talented developers to create innovative new intellectual property.

According to the official announcement, the smart contract will use Ethereum blockchain technology in order to help drive democratized creative team work. The smart contract prototype will keep a register of individual contributors to a project and will provide easy to use connections between smart contracts and real currency.

“In looking at ways to better support games developers, we identified a number of challenges facing those working in the early-stage ecosystem. Company law and practice is too often an inhibition on creative innovation,” Jeremy Silver, CEO, Digital Catapult said. “Our work with the UK Games Fund is focused on discovering better ways to serve those in creative teams, providing them with the freedom and tools to develop the games of the future. Our aim is to build an inter-connected ecosystem that supports new approaches and helps to remove barriers.”

Both the companies released a whitepaper as a part of the collaboration titled ‘Tal™ Stories: A new concept for creative teams to share project ownership and revenues’ that details of how blockchain can be used to ensure whether individual inputs and outcomes are in correlation when creative teams develop new creative IP.

“We’re working to strengthen the UK’s early-stage ecosystem for independent games developers and we see this as a way to both simplify and democratize the creative process. We’re also really keen to build a trusted business system that incentives creative talent to work outside their circles of trust as that will lead to greater innovation,” Paul Durrant, Director of UK Games Talent and Finance CIC said.

The prototype was initially tested by the UK Games Fund along with a group of 20 creative teams. The current partnership is looking to work with other partners, where smart contracts could be used to solve issues and help develop it further.