Round 1 Is Live

Say you want a film to exist. A specific film, one nobody has made, and you’d pay to see it made. Where do you go?

You can post on social media and hope. You can email someone you know. If you have enough money, you can hire someone directly. But there’s no open infrastructure for any of this. No place where a specific creative vision, backed by real money, reaches the people who could execute on it.

Ordain is that place. It’s a commission board for creative work.

How it works

A commissioner puts up a bounty and writes a brief describing what they want made. Creators submit finished work before the deadline. When submissions close, the winner is decided by a split vote: half the decision belongs to the commissioner, half to a ranked-choice vote among the creators who submitted. The winner gets paid instantly over Bitcoin Lightning, which means it works in any country, at any dollar amount, with no intermediary holding the funds.

Creators retain full copyright. Commissioners get a perpetual license to use the finished work. Ordain coordinates payouts but doesn’t hold funds or maintain accounts. We’re a commission board, not a bank.

The five founding commissions

Round 1 launched today with five commissions. All films five minutes or less. Submissions close March 23, 2026.

First Sorrow / $250 Commissioned by John McManus. Adapt Franz Kafka’s short story “First Sorrow,” about a trapeze artist who can no longer bear to come down. Any format, any interpretation.

The President’s Face / $100 Commissioned by Rogelio Martinez. Lillian Brown did makeup for nine U.S. presidents. She died in 2020 at 106. The brief asks for one continuous makeup application. The face in the chair keeps changing, but her hands never stop. Through her conversation, we learn what’s happening in the world outside the room.

Proof of Energy / $500 Commissioned by Terence Michael. A short film tracing captured methane from a city landfill through combustion, into electricity, into ASIC miners hashing to win a Bitcoin block. The brief calls for something colorful, vibrant, and accurate. Waste into energy, step by step.

What Is It Like to Be an AI? / $750 Commissioned by Ordain. Thomas Nagel argued in 1974 that we can never know what it’s like to be a bat, because consciousness is irreducibly subjective. This commission asks filmmakers to try anyway, except with an AI. From the inside.

After the Reactor / $1,000 Commissioned by The Roving Reactor. A film about the world that abundant nuclear energy makes possible. 666 million people have no access to electricity. Another billion are connected to grids too broken to matter. The brief doesn’t ask for an argument in favor of nuclear. It asks filmmakers to assume nuclear has already won, and show what that changes.

How to participate

As a creator: visit ordain.art, read the full briefs, and submit your best work by March 23. Any tools, any country, any format.

As a future commissioner: Round 2 opens March 27, the same day Round 1 winners are announced and paid. Anyone can post a commission in Round 2. We’re limiting Round 2 to 25 commissions.

What’s next

These rounds are an experiment. We want to know whether commissions attract competitive work at low bounty levels, whether the voting mechanism produces outcomes that feel right to both commissioners and creators, and what happens when more than one person can pool money behind the same vision. We’ll find out over the next month.

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