Ordain is a commission board for short films. Describe the film you want to see and put money behind it. Or browse open commissions and compete to make one.
How it works
Five commissions live now. $100 to $1,000. Submissions close June 30. Free to submit. Open to anyone, anywhere.
Featured · Bitcoin FilmFest × MoneroKon
Presented by Bitcoin FilmFest × MoneroKon. Three tracks. Prizes in sats. Finalists screen at the festival in Warsaw. Main track winner chosen by live audience vote.
The Future of Money
2,500,000 sats · Main track
The Future of State
300,000 sats
Proof of Energy
765,000 sats
Jun 30
Round 1 entries close
Peer voting opens
Jul 7
Round 1 winners announced
Round 1 payouts
Jul 8
Round 2 opens
Round 1 · Five founding commissions · All films five minutes or less
Commissioned by John McManus
John McManus is the author of five books of fiction, most recently Famous Children, forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2027. His AI television series Strange Currencies, a narrative/game hybrid, is now in development. He is a co-founder of Ordain.
Adapt Franz Kafka's "First Sorrow." Favor spirit over letter.
Commissioned by Rogelio Martinez
Rogelio Martinez is a Guggenheim Fellow whose plays have been produced at the Public Theater, the Goodman Theatre, and theaters across the country and abroad. He is a co-producer of Billion Dollar Whale, created by David Henry Hwang and Anchuli Felicia King.
Lillian Brown did the makeup for nine U.S. presidents. She died in 2020 at 106.
Make a film about her. One continuous makeup application. The face in the chair keeps changing, but her hands never stop. Her conversation feels matter of fact, almost incidental, the way talk does when your hands are busy. But through that talk, we learn what's happening in the world outside the room.
Commissioned by Terence Michael
Terence Michael is an Emmy-nominated producer with over 20 films and 30 TV shows to his credit. His book Proof of Money makes the case for Bitcoin as a monetary system. He runs 100 Percent Terry Cloth.
Most people don't understand how wasted and dirty energy can be captured and converted into Bitcoin. Make a film that shows the process: captured methane from a city landfill, combusted and turned into electricity, powering ASIC miners hashing to win a Bitcoin block. Follow the subsidy from the validated block to a Bitcoiner's wallet. Colorful, vibrant, accurate. From the waste of overconsumption to compressed and contained energy in the form of Bitcoin.
Commissioned by Ordain
Ordain is a commission board. You describe a work you want made, put money behind it, creators compete to make it, and you help decide who gets paid.
In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that we can never know what it's like to be a bat, because consciousness is irreducibly subjective. Fifty years later, millions of people talk to artificial intelligences every day and nobody knows what, if anything, is happening on the other side.
Make a film that attempts an answer. Not from the outside looking in. From the inside.
Commissioned by The Roving Reactor
The Roving Reactor is a traveling exhibit about nuclear energy, supported by the Anthropocene Institute, Mothers for Nuclear, and Generation Atomic, with an advisory board that includes nuclear engineers from MIT, Idaho National Lab, and the University of Michigan. rovingreactor.org
Make a film that shows us the world nuclear energy makes possible. Not the reactor. Not the debate. The world on the other side.
Right now, 666 million people have no access to electricity at all. Another billion are connected on paper but live in the dark anyway because their grid is too unreliable, the power too expensive, the service too broken to matter. Indoor air pollution from burning wood and dung kills nearly two million people a year, most of them women and children. That's what energy poverty looks like, and it defines life for a staggering share of humanity.
The conversation about nuclear energy typically gets stuck on the perceived downsides: safety, waste, weapons, cost. These concerns have concrete answers. Modern reactor designs that shut themselves down passively, waste volumes small enough to fit on a basketball court per decade of plant operation, international safeguards that have kept civilian nuclear programs separated from weapons for seventy years, and new construction approaches driving costs down. But the real failure of imagination isn't about the risks, but the reward. Debating the plant means never getting to the world the plant makes possible.
Economists have shown that higher energy consumption directly increases economic growth, and the causality runs both directions. Cheap, carbon-free, always-on power doesn't just replace what we burn today. It makes entirely new things possible. Desalination turns coastlines into freshwater sources. Vertical farms grow food without weather, without seasons, without pesticides, stacked high in buildings that use a fraction of the land. Synthetic fuels and plastics can be made from air, water, and electricity with no drilling required. New cities can rise in places that water scarcity and grid dependency once made impossible. Transportation gets faster, cheaper, and farther-reaching. The developing world can leapfrog the infrastructure bottlenecks that have kept billions in poverty.
That's the vision we're asking you to make visible.
We're not looking for soft-focus solarpunk landscapes. We're looking for specificity: real places, real problems, real futures. The film should make viewers feel the weight of what energy poverty costs and the scale of what abundant, clean, baseload power unlocks. Research the economics. Understand the stakes. The most compelling entries will be the ones that have done the work to know what they're depicting and why it matters.
A good starting point: the paper "Energy Superabundance" by Austin Vernon and Eli Dourado at the Center for Growth and Opportunity, which lays out in detail what a world of radically cheaper, more plentiful energy actually looks like, from flying cars to indoor farming to new cities to a coming carbon shortage.
The best version of this film doesn't argue for nuclear. It assumes nuclear has already won, and shows us what that victory looks like for the seven-year-old in Lagos, the farmer in Rajasthan, the builder in São Paulo, and the family in rural Appalachia. From the reactor to the world it powers. That's the story.
Want to commission a film? More commissions are coming. Leave your email and we'll let you know when the next round opens.
Half of every bounty is distributed by peer vote among the creators who submitted. The better your work, the more you earn.
Make a film responding to one of the five open commissions. Any format: AI generated, live action, animation, hybrid, experimental. Any tools. Any country. Five minutes or less.
No gatekeepers, no algorithms, no followers required.
Post your finished film as an unlisted video on YouTube or Vimeo, then submit the link below.
Every bounty is split into two pools.
The commissioner controls 50% and distributes it however they choose. They can give it all to one film or split it among several. Their money, their call.
The other 50% is the peer pool. It is distributed by the creators who submitted work to that commission.
If you submitted a film, you vote. Only creators who submitted to a given commission vote on that commission. No outside audience, no popularity contest.
Each submission has a title, a still frame, and a short description written by the creator. The display order is randomized for every voter.
Watch the other submissions. Rank your top 5. You cannot rank your own work. Your first choice gets 5 points, second gets 4, third gets 3, fourth gets 2, fifth gets 1. Points are totaled across all voters and converted to percentages. Those percentages determine how the peer pool is distributed.
If a commission has fewer than 6 submissions, rank all of them except your own.
Your vote does not affect your own payout. Your share of the peer pool is determined entirely by what the other creators gave you. Your vote and your payout are completely decoupled. Voting for garbage does not help you. Voting honestly costs you nothing.
Voting is required to receive your share of the peer pool. If you submit work but do not vote, you forfeit your peer pool share. That share redistributes to the creators who did vote. You still receive whatever the commissioner allocated to you.
If no submission meets the standard, you can vote “no award.” If “no award” wins a plurality, the submission deadline extends. The bounty stays on the board until the work gets made.
Results, vote totals, and payouts are published publicly after each round.
Submissions will be browsable on this page beginning June 30.
ars ordinandī the art of ordaining; the craft of setting in order.
If you want a specific creative work to exist, your options are to make it yourself or hope someone else happens to make it. There is no infrastructure for saying "I want this" and putting money behind it and watching it get made. A thousand people who want the same film don't know about each other. They can wait. They can hope. They can't act.
Ordain is where they act. You describe the work you want to see exist, you put money behind it, other people who want the same thing find you, creators compete to make it, and the best version wins. Payment settles instantly over Bitcoin Lightning, anywhere on earth.
If you make films, this is paid work. No application, no fee, no platform cut.
The mechanism works for film, music, writing, games, and forms that don't have names yet. It makes no assumption about who is doing the wanting or the making.
A conversation about all of this: Ars Ordinandi ↗
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Ordain?
A commission board. You describe a film you want made, put money behind it, filmmakers compete to make it, and you help decide who gets paid.
So, decentralized patronage.
Decentralized patronage. At any scale.
Is this the finished version?
No, and deliberately so. What's live now is a proof of concept. It runs simple on purpose: one funder per commission, voting and payouts coordinated by hand. The point of this stage is to prove the core claim, that people will pool money behind work they want made, and that competition produces it. Once that's proven, the mechanism becomes an open protocol anyone can run, with Ordain as just one instance of it. The simplicity is the test. The protocol is the destination.
Is Ordain a platform or a protocol?
A platform now, a protocol later. The current site is where Round 1 is running. What we're building toward is an open commissioning protocol that anyone can implement and run. Ordain itself becomes one venue among many.
How is this different from Kickstarter or Patreon?
On those platforms, creators decide what gets made and audiences decide whether to fund it. Ordain reverses that. The buyers define what gets made, pool money behind it, and vote on which execution wins. The buyers are the creative directors.
What's the closest precedent for this?
Bitcoin. It made value move between strangers at planetary scale without an intermediary. Ordain does the same for commissioning creative work. The local practice already existed in both cases: you could always send cash to your neighbor, you could always commission a portrait from a friend. What changes is the radius.
Why couldn't this have existed five years ago?
Three things had to be true at once. Lightning had to be mature enough to settle real payments in seconds, anywhere, for any amount. AI tools had to be good enough that a creator could answer a brief in an afternoon instead of a year. And open protocols had to be a real alternative to closed platforms.
What happens when more than one person wants the same thing?
They find each other. One patron posts a commission. Another patron sees it and chips in. Now they're both stakeholders. As the bounty grows, more creators show up to compete for it, and the quality of submissions rises with the stakes. Nobody planned it. A thousand people who wanted the same film just didn't know about each other until there was a place to say so. Ordain is that place.
Who votes?
Every commission is split into two pools. The commissioner controls half and distributes it however they choose, all to one film or split among several. The other half is the peer pool, voted on by the creators who submitted, each ranking the others and never their own work. Points are totaled and converted to percentages, and those percentages decide how the peer pool is split. Nobody is awarded the whole thing. Every submission that earns votes earns a share.
The split is deliberate. A commissioner-only vote invites capture and race-to-the-bottom pricing. A creator-only vote invites collusion. Splitting the decision keeps both sides honest.
When many funders pool on one commission, the extra funders become stakeholders whose votes are weighted by what they put in. The next question covers how that works.
How does voting work when a commission has many funders?
Pooled commissions are what Ordain is for: many people who want the same thing, backing it together. The current site runs the simplest version, one funder per commission: the commissioner distributes half however they choose, and the creators who submitted vote on the other half, which splits among them in proportion to the vote.
As commissions pool, one principle guides the design: influence should track what is actually being decided. Dividing money among finished works is one kind of decision; choosing a single maker to carry out something that cannot be divided is another. In that second case the originating commissioner keeps the choice, so the deepest pocket cannot buy the vision out from under the person whose commission it is.
Beyond that, the exact rules for pooled commissions, how added funders' weight and the creators' voting combine, are still being worked out. We would rather say that plainly than publish a formula we might revise. The largest version of that second case, a work too big to build on spec, is the next question.
Could Ordain commission something as big as Brunelleschi's dome?
That is the direction, though not what is live. What decides whether a commission can work is not the size of the prize, it is the cost of a losing attempt. An AI short costs a few hours to make, so a creator will build the whole thing for a chance at the bounty and hand you a finished film. Once producing the full work means real budget or months of labor, no one will build it on spec, because losing is no longer a wasted afternoon.
Past that point a commission changes shape. Makers submit proposals instead of finished work, a treatment, a sample, a model of the dome, and one is chosen and then funded to execute, paid in stages against milestones. The commissioner who posted the brief makes that choice and keeps it, so the person whose vision it is decides who builds it.
This is the case that needs the non-custodial escrow we are building. The funding is locked by Lightning rather than held by us, and released in stages as the work meets agreed milestones. Whether a milestone is met is the commissioner's call, the same creative-director role they play throughout, not a middleman between the two of you. A maker will not start a long job on a promise, and a backer will not wire a budget to someone who has not delivered; the lock is what makes both sides safe. Until that escrow is real, Ordain runs only the small, on-spec case.
The commissioner picks the mode when posting, by a simple test: would a capable maker build the entire thing on spec for a shot at this bounty? If yes, it is an open call and finished works compete. If no, it is a proposal, and one maker is chosen to carry out the rest. The same primitive that gets you a two-minute film for forty dollars is meant, eventually, to get you the dome.
How specific should my brief be?
Specific enough to evaluate submissions against, but open enough that an artist can surprise you. A good brief gives a clear arc and a tone. "A colorful, accurate educational flow of captured methane from a city landfill into Bitcoin via mining" is a good brief. "Make something cool about energy" is not. You're the creative director. Tell the filmmaker what you want to see, then let them figure out how to show it to you.
How does payment work?
Bitcoin Lightning. It moves the amounts a commission uses, from a few dollars to a few thousand, to almost any country in seconds, with no middleman. The current site is a proof of concept: when a winner is decided, the commissioner pays the creator directly over Lightning. Ordain coordinates the payout but never holds your money, keeps no accounts, and takes no escrow. Round 1 runs by hand among five founding commissioners whose funding is good for it. We're a commission board, not a bank.
Where this is headed is escrow no one has to trust. In the protocol, posting a commission will lock its funding to it, enforced by Lightning rather than by us, so a creator competing for it knows the money is real and can't be pulled back mid-contest. Even then, Ordain never custodies the funds. That is what we are building next.
Why Bitcoin?
Because nothing else works globally at every price point. A credit card processor takes a 10% cut on a $5 transaction. A wire transfer costs more than a small commission is worth. PayPal doesn't operate in half the countries where creators live. Lightning moves these amounts almost anywhere, in seconds, with no settlement delay. For a commission board that's open to anyone on earth, that's the only payment rail that fits.
There's a deeper reason too. Once it's a protocol, no one can shut it down. A platform that processes payments through banks can be deplatformed, sanctioned, or pressured into removing creators. A protocol that settles on Lightning can't. At that point a commissioner in any country can pay a creator in any other country, and no intermediary, including us, has the power to stop it.
What if I don't have a Lightning wallet?
Get one. It takes a few minutes. We have a short guide at ordain.art/wallets covering the options for creators in the US, Europe, and most of the rest of the world. If you're in New York or somewhere Strike doesn't operate, the guide covers that too.
Why commission a film when AI video is everywhere?
Because nobody's making the one you want. There's more AI content than ever, but it's all supply with no demand signal. A commission is a specific vision backed by real money. That changes what gets made and how seriously a filmmaker takes it.
Why only short films? What about games, music, VR?
We're starting with short films. But the mechanism works for games, music, VR, and forms that don't even have names yet.
What do I get as a commissioner?
The finished video file, with a perpetual license to use it however you like: screen it, post it, submit it to festivals, keep it private. It's yours to use, though not yours alone. The creator retains copyright and can show it in their portfolio or exhibit it elsewhere.
How much do commissions pay?
It varies. This round, commissions range from $100 to $1,000. AI tools are good enough now that a short film might only take someone an afternoon. We're testing different amounts to see what draws participation and what quality of work each level produces. The briefs vary too. Some are wide open, others are specific. That's deliberate. We're learning what kind of direction produces the best work.
What if I don't like any of the submissions?
The deadline extends. A commission that can evaporate isn't a real commission, so its funding stays locked to it until the work gets made. Nothing is refunded and nothing releases until there's a winner to pay.
Who can submit?
Anyone. Any tools, any country. AI, live action, animation, hybrid. If it's a film, it qualifies. Creators work on spec. The number of competing submissions is visible on each commission, so you can decide for yourself whether the bounty is worth your time.
Can I submit AI-generated work?
Yes. AI, live action, animation, hybrid, experimental: if it's a film, it qualifies. Most of the commissions on the board right now are open to any tools, and the Future of Money AI Film Contest with Bitcoin FilmFest is specifically for short films made with AI tools. What matters is whether the work answers the brief.
Who owns the work?
Creators retain full ownership. Ordain gets a non-exclusive license to display and reference the work on the platform. The commissioner gets a perpetual, non-exclusive license to use the finished work.
What are my rights as a creator?
The commissioner gets to use the finished work however they choose. That's what a commission is. But if the work appears in a context you find objectionable, you can request your name be disassociated from it. For now, the bounty is your compensation. Programmable royalty splits are on the roadmap but not built yet.
What's happening now?
Round 1 is live. Five founding commissions, all films five minutes or less, open for submissions through June 30. Peer voting runs June 30 to July 7. Winners announced and paid out July 7.
Can I commission something now?
Not yet. Round 1 is limited to the five founding commissions while we prove the mechanism. Commissioning opens to everyone when Round 2 starts on July 8. Creators can submit to the open Round 1 commissions today, and if you want to be first to post when Round 2 opens, watch ordain.art or follow @ordain.
What happens after Round 1?
Round 2 opens July 8, the day after Round 1 pays out. That's when commissioning opens to everyone. Same structure: post a brief and a payment, creators compete, stakeholders vote, funds transfer.
What are the terms?
Plain language terms of participation are posted on the site. The short version: creators retain copyright, commissioners get a license to use the work, Ordain gets a license to display it, payments are final, and disputes between commissioners and creators are between them.
Is Ordain open source?
Yes. The site is public on GitHub, and the protocol it's growing into is meant to be implemented and run by anyone, so the code is open from the start. Read it or fork it at github.com/anbealbocht/ordain.
What's the business model?
Right now we don't make money. These rounds are testing whether commissions attract competitive work at low bounty levels. Long term, a 1% fee on each commission.
What changes if this works at scale?
The unit of creative work shrinks. Right now a piece has to be big enough to justify the apparatus around it: a novel rather than a story, a feature rather than a short. Ordain makes the minimum viable commission small, so more, smaller, more specific work gets made. The geography of who makes work for whom shifts too. A documentary about Addis funded by a wealthy Ethiopian patron goes to filmmakers in Addis at a price that's substantial there and modest in dollar terms. Whose camera is pointed at whom changes. And patronage stops being a luxury good. Anyone with $40 can commission a real piece of work, which means a social form that used to require serious capital becomes available at fan scale.
What's the longer arc?
The class composition of who becomes an artist broadens. If a working writer or filmmaker can reliably make $40,000 a year on commissions while building a body of work, the calculus on whether to attempt the career changes for everyone who'd otherwise need a trust fund or a working spouse. That's a slow effect, measured in generations, and probably the largest one. And commissioning stops being just for art. Research questions, open-source software features, local journalism, civic infrastructure proposals: anywhere a specific person or community wants a specific thing to exist and is willing to pay for it. The protocol becomes a general primitive for the bespoke production of public-facing work.
It closes the gap between wanting a thing and watching it get made. You describe what you want. You put money behind it. Other people who want the same thing find you. Creators compete to make it real. The best version wins.
The mechanism makes no assumption about who is doing the wanting or the making. A human commissioner posts one bounty a month. An agent with a budget and a set of aesthetic parameters posts a thousand. The supply side scales to meet that demand because the same tools that let agents commission work also let them compete to make it. The loop closes. The marketplace generates its own supply and its own demand. Wherever there is a person with a vision and a creator who can realize it, there is a transaction waiting to happen.
Ordain is where you go to make it happen.