Tom McLeod founded his company, Arkive, to answer one question: what if the Smithsonian was curated (and owned) by the internet?

Traditionally, museums are curated by a small number of board directors, who are ultimately responsible for acquiring thousands of pieces, of which less than 5% are on display at any one time.

Arkive exists to do things differently. Embracing the power of crowd-sourced intelligence and diversity, they use the Polygon blockchain to coordinate thousands of members, who debate and vote on which items to acquire, and then exhibit and track those items at museums all over the world.

We speak about how Tom had the idea for Arkive after selling his storage startup to Coinbase, how it actually works and why blockchain is so critical to its success, and his vision to democratise the cultural landscape.