In the rapidly evolving landscape of music technology, blockchain is emerging as a powerful catalyst for transforming how intellectual property rights are managed and distributed. The global blockchain-enabled music licensing market reached $320 million in 2024 and is projected to grow at a robust 28.5% CAGR, reaching $2.93 billion by 2033 (Growth Market Reports). Yet, despite this momentum, the industry faces a fundamental challenge: how do you bring complex, decades-old metadata standards like DDEX onto a blockchain in a way that's both secure and scalable?
When Original Works, a foundation incubated by Revelator, a leader in music rights management, approached us with this exact challenge, we knew we were stepping into uncharted territory. The result? A decentralized DDEX registry powered by Zero-Knowledge Proofs that cut proof generation time from 16 hours to just 3 minutes, setting a new standard for what's possible at the intersection of blockchain and music metadata.

The Music Industry's $2.5 Billion Problem

Picture this: an estimated $2.5 billion in royalty payments that should be paid to artists are currently delayed or unpaid (Gamma Law). The culprit? An outdated, fragmented system for managing music intellectual property rights that hasn't fundamentally changed in decades. While streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music have revolutionized music consumption, the backend infrastructure for tracking ownership, licenses, and royalties has struggled to keep pace.
The industry standard for exchanging music metadata is DDEX (Digital Data Exchange), an XML-based format that enables companies to communicate information along the digital supply chain. DDEX is widely adopted by major players, including streaming platforms, record labels, and digital distributors. Yet for all its ubiquity, DDEX comes with significant limitations: it's centralized, prone to data silos, and lacks the transparency and immutability that blockchain technology promises. The global streaming sector alone hit $46.66 billion in 2024 (The Music Universe), yet the infrastructure managing rights and royalties behind these streams remains fundamentally outdated.

The Challenge: Validating 50,000 Lines of XML Rules On-Chain

Original Works set out to create a decentralized ecosystem for IP management that would provide a unified, tamper-proof, and automated system for sharing and validating critical information between industry stakeholders. The vision was clear: transition DDEX registration to the blockchain. The execution? That's where things got complex.

What Made This Project Unprecedented

DDEX messages use XML format and follow strict schemas (XSD) with over 50,000 lines of validation rules. Imagine trying to verify that a music release conforms to tens of thousands of business rules, everything from proper artist credits to territorial licensing restrictions, without relying on a centralized authority. That's exactly what we needed to achieve.
The technical hurdles were formidable:

• Complex Schema Validation: Validating XML against XSD schemas requires sophisticated parsing logic, far too complex for traditional smart contracts.
• Gas Cost Constraints: Conducting XML validation directly on Ethereum would be prohibitively expensive due to transaction gas limits. We needed a way to prove validation happened correctly without executing it on-chain.
• Scalability Demands: The music industry processes thousands of releases daily. Our solution had to scale to handle real-world transaction volumes efficiently.
• Data Availability: Ethereum's new EIP-4844 BLOBs allow storing large data on-chain, but only for 18 days. We needed a mechanism to ensure long-term accessibility and auditability.

The Solution: Zero-Knowledge Proofs Meet Music Metadata

At the core of our approach was Risc0, a Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine that enables generating cryptographic proofs for complex computations. Think of Zero-Knowledge Proofs as a way to prove you've done your homework correctly without showing your work - you can verify that XML validation happened according to DDEX rules without actually executing that validation on the blockchain.

How We Built It: The Technical Architecture

Here's where things get interesting. By leveraging Risc0, we could write validation logic in Rust, a language with mature libraries for XML parsing, while ensuring the computational process remained verifiable and tamper-proof. This was crucial because DDEX messages often contain embedded files like album cover images that need to be extracted and stored separately.
Our CLI tool first extracts these embedded files and uploads them to IPFS (the InterPlanetary File System), replacing local file paths with corresponding Content Identifiers (CIDs). This ensures all media assets are preserved in a decentralized manner before the message is packed into an EIP-4844 BLOB and submitted on-chain.
Once validators retrieve a BLOB, they process it using Risc0, extracting key metadata while generating a Zero-Knowledge Proof that verifies the correctness of the operation. Since BLOBs disappear after 18 days, we implemented an archival mechanism where validators upload both the raw BLOB and its extracted, human-readable JSON-formatted messages to IPFS. The CID of the archived BLOB is then recorded in our subgraph, ensuring long-term availability and complete auditability.

The Breakthrough: From 16 Hours to 3 Minutes

Initially, generating Zero-Knowledge Proofs for XML validation took up to 16 hours per file, far from practical given the high volume of daily transactions in the music industry. This was our most critical bottleneck. To optimize proof generation, we took several strategic steps. First, we preprocessed raw XML files into JSON, reducing computational complexity while maintaining data integrity. This alone yielded significant improvements. Then came the game-changer: GPU acceleration and hardware-specific optimizations.
The result? We cut proof generation time from 16 hours to just 3 minutes, a 320x improvement that made real-world deployment not just feasible, but practical. The resulting proofs, along with extracted metadata, are submitted to our smart contracts, where they're verified and emitted as on-chain events. Our subgraph indexes these events, completing the decentralized pipeline for registering and validating intellectual property metadata.

Real-World Impact: What This Means for the Music Industry

Beyond the impressive performance metrics, this project addresses fundamental pain points that have plagued the music industry for years. By bringing DDEX metadata onto the blockchain with Zero-Knowledge Proof validation, we've created a system that is:

• Transparent: All metadata registrations are recorded on-chain, providing an immutable audit trail that anyone can verify.
• Tamper-Proof: Once metadata is registered and validated, it cannot be altered retroactively, protecting artists and rights holders from disputes.
• Scalable: With 3-minute proof generation times, the system can handle the thousands of releases that flow through the industry daily.
• Decentralized: No single entity controls the validation process—a network of validators ensures data integrity through cryptographic proofs.

Consider the implications: artists who currently wait months to see royalty payments could potentially receive compensation in near real-time. Record labels and publishers gain unprecedented visibility into how their catalog is being used across different platforms and territories. Digital Service Providers can access standardized, verified metadata that reduces licensing friction and accelerates content distribution.

The Broader Context: Blockchain's Role in Music's Future

This project sits at the intersection of several converging trends in the music and blockchain industries. While blockchain adoption in music is still in its experimental phase, with most initiatives being proofs of concept or pilots, the technology's potential to transform rights management is undeniable. According to recent research, the main impediments to mass blockchain adoption in music aren't technological; they're about data governance, standardization, and the limited quality of existing music metadata. By tackling DDEX integration head-on, we're addressing these fundamental challenges rather than building isolated blockchain solutions that can't interoperate with existing industry infrastructure.
As Bruno Guez, CEO of Revelator, noted in an interview: 

"We're using a token incentive design to boost fan engagement, transforming the way artists interact with their audiences. The music industry isn't ready for Web3 yet, but for that to change, every music company needs to be able to support a new blockchain-based infrastructure across the digital supply chain." 

This includes everything from tokenization and smart contracts to automated payments.

Technical Innovation: Why Zero-Knowledge Proofs Matter

Zero-Knowledge Proofs represent one of the most powerful cryptographic innovations for blockchain scalability and privacy. In 2024, we've seen rapid advances in ZKP technology, from hardware acceleration achieving 586x speedups, to new proof systems that handle neural networks and complex computations efficiently.
For the music industry specifically, ZKPs solve a critical problem: how do you prove complex business logic compliance (like DDEX validation) without revealing sensitive commercial information or incurring prohibitive on-chain execution costs? Our implementation demonstrates that ZKPs aren't just theoretical - they're production-ready for real-world data validation at scale.

Lessons Learned: The Challenges We Overcame

That said, bringing DDEX to blockchain came with its unique set of challenges that demanded creative problem-solving. The integration of cutting-edge technologies like EIP-4844 BLOBs for data availability and the Risc0 virtual machine for generating Zero-Knowledge Proofs added layers of complexity. These technologies, though groundbreaking, came with limitations that required rigorous optimization. The ultimate challenge was balancing the computational demands of Zero-Knowledge Proofs with real-world scalability. Initial proof generation times of 16 hours simply weren't viable; we had to push the boundaries of what was possible with hardware optimization, careful algorithmic choices, and preprocessing strategies.
Our team of blockchain developers worked intensively over four months, iterating on architectures and testing different optimization approaches. The breakthrough came from a combination of preprocessing XML to JSON, implementing GPU acceleration, and fine-tuning the proof generation pipeline. Each improvement built on the last, ultimately achieving the dramatic performance gains we needed.

What's Next: The Future of Decentralized Music IP

The Original Works project demonstrates that blockchain technology can handle the complexity of real-world music industry workflows, not as a distant future possibility, but today. With proof generation optimized to 3 minutes and a fully decentralized validation network, the system is ready to process the high volume of metadata exchanges that the industry demands.
Looking ahead, we anticipate more music companies adopting blockchain-based infrastructure as the technology matures. The transparency, security, and efficiency gains are too significant to ignore. As Gilad Woltsovitch, Co-Founder of Original Works, put it: 

"The innovative solutions developed by the Rumble Fish team were instrumental in overcoming the complex challenges of bringing DDEX metadata to the blockchain. The result is a decentralized, efficient, and scalable system that has fundamentally transformed how we manage intellectual property metadata."

For artists, this means faster royalty payments and greater control over their intellectual property. For publishers and labels, it means reduced administrative overhead and improved rights tracking. For the entire industry, it means a more transparent, equitable ecosystem where creators are fairly compensated, and stakeholders can trust the data they're working with.

Conclusion: Building the Infrastructure for Music's Blockchain Future

Through this collaboration with Original Works, we've successfully built an efficient, scalable, and fully decentralized system that brings DDEX metadata management onto the blockchain. The technical innovations, from Zero-Knowledge Proof optimization to decentralized validation networks, address both the technical and industry-specific challenges that have prevented widespread blockchain adoption in music.
The 320x improvement in proof generation speed isn't just a performance metric; it's the difference between a proof of concept and a production system. It's the kind of optimization that makes decentralized music IP management not just theoretically possible, but practically viable for the thousands of daily transactions that power the global music industry.
As the blockchain-enabled music licensing market continues its projected growth toward $2.93 billion by 2033, projects like this will serve as blueprints for how to bridge the gap between traditional industry standards and decentralized infrastructure. The future of music IP management is transparent, tamper-proof, and decentralized, and that future is being built today.

Ready to explore how blockchain technology can transform your music tech infrastructure? Our blockchain development team specializes in Zero-Knowledge Proofs, decentralized systems, and complex integrations. 
View the full Original Works case study
Get in touch with our team