Deep Dive into NFTs Melissa Henderson mod; Tyler Mulvihill Consensys NFT; David Feinstein SuperRare

okay so it's really early in the morning so we're going to make this really cool and fun my name is melissa henderson i'm the head of community at ape works we help deploy smart contracts onto ethereum blockchain we're a developer framework for python data scientists and content traders i'm also the creator of violet summer zine which is a content and lifestyle driven platform so if you check out my nfts show a little bit um or my vr site violetsummerzine.com and i want to introduce my amazing panelists for this morning so do you want to start sure so tyler mulvihill i'm the co-head of nfts at consensus prior to consensus i started a company called trium which is a full lifecycle management platform for nfts consensus acquired that company and oddly enough if you know anything about the history of consensus i actually started that under the other consensus umbrella venture production studio model so i've been hopping around the consensus mesh for a long time and my co-f my co-head is johnna powell and she's up there in that shiny jacket if you want to talk to her after this too i'm david i'm with super air i uh joined super air uh april of last year but helping the co-founders out since october 2018. i remember coming to uh east denver when it was 500 people i'm a local here in denver and would be hanging up ipads on the walls with them and not really understanding what nfts are i'm from like the enterprise software world and then when this thing exploded they brought me over to figure out how to uh work creatively with brands and uh agencies and how to uh move them into web3 so here i am awesome awesome so yeah there's been a breakthrough nft trend in 2021 i know there was entities have been around for a few years but i think with this upcoming market creators really grasped hold to the concept of ownership and deploying their uh creativity on the blockchain so from you know a super rare perspective um what are you seeing um on your platform in terms of like uh the most i guess minted product products and um yeah like from you know a business perspective what does that mean for for your brand yeah so super we were the first digital art marketplace uh we only work like with one of ones with artists so we the big things we do is we curate artists uh separate from like openc you have to be accepted on onto the platform um and then second all the brands and agencies they're all coming to us saying like how do we get on how do we get into this and what we've been advising is we're all about like empowering the artists it's all about like putting the artist in control of like their content and ip and everything that they want to create so when brands come to us like porsche is a good example they instead of saying hey we want to create the nft on our behalf they uh empowered a designer on the team to create like the sketch and then back the artist so when we talk to these like brands we say why don't we bring on the artist or why don't you work with artists on the platform they're the ones that create the work it's um they're we're gonna back them from the super perspective and the brand is gonna empower them so like that's the major shift for what we see or the evolution of this whole web 3 is how do brands empower the creators that are at their companies or work with creators that have the same beliefs awesome should i go yeah of course okay so so the question was um what are you seeing on your platform yeah like what are you seeing on your platform from like a consensus standpoint because you guys touch you know a lot of different um elements of nfts from you know the wallet side um and you know how what are the biggest i guess takeaways from 2021 yeah so i guess the consensus business nft business unit really started the last quarter of 2021. so we've only been around for a short while but the thing that's unique about consensus is that the business model is a bit different than almost every other company so for those of you who don't know consensus runs in fiera consensus runs and created metamask consensus uh created truffle developer suite so really if you're doing anything in web3 you're touching those products and maybe people probably don't know this either but the company is incredibly interested and doing a lot of work around decentralizing not only these products but the company so we have a lot of room to do really cool stuff and our business model is different in that we don't want to just be a sas platform for nft minting we don't want to just be a marketplace for secondary sales because the ethos of what we're doing with the business unit is to bring the next tens of millions of users into web3 and so if you've used the metamask wallet if you use some of these developer tools you know the shortcomings the shortcomings of web3 generally and so the amount of the amount of work that the amount of change that we can affect from a business unit to like improve the nft display on metamask is is epic so instead of just driving as much volume through our marketplace as possible to try to take a fee over that really we can we can change the business model in that as long as we're getting mainstream users or new users into the ecosystem using our wallets and our tools that could be a win so um what we're seeing in i guess the the shift that we're seeing is that um brands are now ready the business models are now um somewhat fleshed out and so someone fleshed out like very loosely somewhat fleshed out um and and what that have faster conversations and so um we can onboard them into web3 i love that so i know we were talking about that backstage the relationship between brands and these creators and that ownership you know perspective because in web 2 a lot of the brands like you work for a brand and then that's you know you're kind of under their identity but web3 is about this digital identity and um nfts are just the first iteration of that so when you are bringing on these new brands into the nft space how are you maintaining the values of web3 or or these values that we're building as a community in web3 from i guess a super rare perspective because you've been around with super your number seven employee right yeah so time magazine is is one brand that it seemed to have done it right and understands it there's been brands that come to us and so what time magazine has done is like when they they did the front covers so they already have a community that like people wanted the nfts or it's kind of like its own art when they work with artists like when people did the front cover of time we had people on board or create the nft and then send it to the time magazine wallet so we're pretty much telling brands now let's bring on the artist or like let's understand or find you guys or find the artist that like works for them and let's mark it from the super rare in the brand perspective they have the dollars and the reach and the essentially the big budgets to get the story out we always tell them to do that if they come to us and ask like typically they'll come to us and say this is how we're gonna do it and it's been great kind of saying that's just not how it's going to work here and it won't work on super rare yeah good good point um i think brands still really need hand-holding into the space so most brands come and they ask us like what what should we do how should we market this how do we not screw this up how does this not look like a money grab and the really cool thing is that a lot of brands are totally okay with going straight web3 and requiring their users to use like metamask as as like they need to get ether they need to like go through the process they need to download metamask they need to understand what it means like have a wallet and part of the reason for that is because it's less work for the brands and so if you if you want to go through um like a fiat flow so if you want to offer in credit card then one you're ostracizing the web three folks who have the metamask and they're just like i want to buy an nft but now i have to buy this with a credit card and then then like wait for a week and it's just it's not how we're used to doing stuff so brands are like okay let's go let's let's require them to download a meta mask and frankly everyone you know everyone says that the wallet experience needs help but and and we all say this but i mean i keep i don't know what we're talking about metamask like too much but um we i saw 500 people be onboarded into metamask in like 30 seconds or less so i don't think the onboarding is actually the issue it's just like what do i do with this and how do i understand seed phrases and all that crazy stuff afterwards so it actually doesn't affect the sales process of the nfts so when you tell a brand that you're like okay all we have to do is just put a button here that says connect metamask and like don't have to do anything else and the money will come directly to us okay let's go so um but that being said we also at like we've created a fiat flow that's kind of beautiful now so we'll be rolling that out to more normies but it's through a metamask flow so it's it's the backdoor trojan horse that we're all used to awesome yeah i mean i think that metamask could do better with interoperability i mean with other layers like where you can you know connect to matic or you know the harmony one um how do you explain to brands you know about the gas fees because that's kind of one of the biggest challenges with the narrative right now and or just in crypto in general a lot of web 2 normies were like oh well this is bad for the environment like how do you explain to them um about the different uh just nft structure structures that they can um you know take that route not just you know have a blue chip on ethereum but maybe put it on polygon or put it on you know the near one of the other protocols um i guess from like a an artist's perspective on super rare like how are you navigating that yes so superior is just theory and paste so that is a big issue that like especially if you're an artist like imr like third world crunch hey so uh that is a big issue uh we are looking at like adding chains or looking up the roll-ups and everything else but when brands come to us yeah we gotta walk them through the you gotta get some eat for gas and if you're gonna empower these artists to do this on your behalf you better send them the ether are you gonna pay for these fees so right now like we are uh it's a high transaction like the average sale on super is like 10 ether so we do see it as an issue like we do need to figure this out for the smaller type of artists and sales because gas is expensive and then last year we had the whole like the carbon offset issues and questions and brands are worried about ruining the environment and we just came out and showed this statistics that like 70 percent of the mining happens on renewable sources we did a couple of white papers just to like make them feel comfortable and that kind of just like blew by but it's obviously going to continue to come up yeah so our platform is evm compatible with all side chains and l2 solutions so polygon and polygon scale palm i mean consensus build the palm network we have relationships with almost all of the l2s and and side chains that are really uh where the where the activity is happening um so not really an issue i think we're actually a lot of what we have to do now is is focused on l2s because decentraland for example like you have to launch on polygon right and openc if you want if a brand wants a secondary sales to happen on openc then you need to be either polygon or ethereum mainnet so you don't even have an option like it's like if you want to do a wearable and decentralized you want to list it on openc it's like polygon's your option so it's kind of a forced it's a forced hand there um uh and yeah i i agree with your point um when you when you when you connect to a network on metamask it should automatically connect to that network yeah so you don't go like wait oh where's all my money what's happening like how come i have like five thousand eath like yeah yeah you're like whoa i'm rich but it's wrinkly yeah that's happened a couple times you thought you got an airdrop but uh yeah oh by the way all that's coming air drop oh no no not the air drops i did not say that just kidding like metamask token coming soon like just kidding i didn't say that um now all of the all of the uh the the ui changes and like the the really the table stake stuff um the nft business unit is affecting change within consensus and the metamask team and the in the inferior team to make sure that the experience is like absolutely killer so um it's not a static thing this is going to get so cool this year yeah i'm looking forward to it and i guess like what is the most popular i know david we were talking about music nfts because they're kind of break the breakout nfts and you know culture really drives innovation and you know what what have you been seeing in the space like what are some of the popular ones um that you can chat about so actually this we had a party on thursday with our for our rare community and actually just heard of a crazy cool utility that's coming one of the uh artists that played his name's balkan bump um he wants we're gonna do a show at uh at uh red rocks this summer and he's gonna take an nft that he's going to essentially mint the song in like various pieces and then let the community buy the pieces and then now i'm not a tech guy but our smart contracts guys said that this is possible but ultimately if you go to the show and enough people say that they're at the show and they want that song to be played he'll get a ping so now you're creating utility within like the few people that are going to the show can now essentially decide when that song is played so that's just a pretty cool utility thinking outside the box with nft like with music um it's like every day there's something totally different and crazy that's like popping up yeah are you guys actually super rare putting on the show at red rocks uh so well this all came out on thursday and since i'm head of partnerships i'm going to make this happen so okay make sure we're all in the invite it's awesome we gotta throw a party at red rocks that's cool um maybe you can partner yeah actually so this is the perfect segue so um part so the my old company created uh a generative art music project called euler beats if you don't know it it's you probably know it as euler beats but it's it's euler and the whole concept was to kind of figure out what musicians wanted to do and then build a platform based on the learnings so one check this project out it's awesome two we have something called the remix studio which is complete waiting for launch only in discord we've mentioned this so this is a little bit of alpha and and so what we've done is we the last launch was called futura and you could buy a mix and these mixes were made up of different clips so what you were talking about before it's almost like samples in in real life um and so each of these mixes has a variety of rarity traits based on so it's like it's like pfps for music with a bunch of rarity traits and so if you have two mixes you can use this remixing tool mix them together create a remix and then sell that yourself um so you're kind of you now you now become the musician and like none of us here are probably producers or actually all of us are probably dj's like in this in this era at this point yeah but but if you're not it's it's super simple so you just like click the sounds that you like you click mint nft and there's like a bunch of cool mechanisms that like you can get 50 off if you own this and yada yada um and then increasing nft so the reason we're doing all this is to create something called the oiler beats artist platform which allows any artist mainstream little big to when they release their song they have a sample pack they can release it and then you can do the same thing so like imagine tiesto and like no name dj like all of a sudden somebody figures out that their sounds smashed together sounds amazing and they can go on this platform and do this so we're going to release the remix studio check out how people are using it the engine is all built for oiler beats artists and sometime this year when we learn about what people actually want um that's gonna i basically do what i think you just said um some yeah maybe a collab like maybe we can do all the work and you guys can throw the party maybe we can write the smart contracts yeah let's do it we can do a plug-in um no that's so that's super dope um and i guess the i want to end with dalles because they are the future and you see a lot of these nft communities becoming dowels um like how are you guys empowering dows and kind of be or just be your own bank uh from a metamask perspective or consensus perspective and then also from a super rare perspective yeah so superior became or essentially 1.0 was just a regular company and then we became a dow august of last year so we the coolest thing about the dao is like the early adopters the collectors and artists essentially received like coins uh governance tokens for being the first to create and help create this marketplace so i was a since i was a collector uh in 2018 or 2019 i was essentially given tokens for being part of the on-ramp of this uh ser of this uh company now uh 2.

0 what we're doing now is we have space so you could put in a proposal and the community decides like hey can you create a space to create your own super rare essentially so now you can build out and curate the artists of your choice so for example we have a group in mexico or an artist that's empowering latin american artists and so we brought him on and it's called metaphysica and now they can create whatever artist that they want they don't have to go through the central authority or through super air and then we take a cut so we're going to be rolling that out all this year um and that's just like the 2.0 of like now you have a chance to either get on super rare or be onboarded through all of these different partners or what we call spaces that's pretty dope yeah that's awesome um so consensus is doing a ton of work around daos we have a crypto economics team full of quants and trad finance people who understand crypto ii um so they're doing a ton of work around tokens dowse decentralization what it means for our products how to decentralize things like infuria um so not leaking anything here but like the amount of work under the covers that's happening at this this company that people don't normally get it get a view in it's absolutely amazing seeing this happening um shout out shout out to oiler beats again we we donated one of the uh what are the originals to a dow at that point it was like 700 or 800 people and it was the biggest dow at that time now that's like that is is ridiculous to say it's like eat denver 500 people it was a big was a big place so yeah where's doubt where dials and nfts one the work that um that pre and erin are doing at formerly open law that are responsible for for flamingo dow et cetera is it's awesome you have to follow what they're doing even though all their doubts are very expensive i've asked him to make one cheaper for me um uh but yeah no one of the interesting things is we all see the future where we're working for multiple dows instead of one big company but to get there we know the tooling is pretty far behind so when when you look around the ecosystem and um you're looking at places to work that you want to work one of the things that i majorly considered when we were selling this company was like can i actually is there a glide path to doing this so like what does it mean to be in a dao at consensus and so we're working all that out now not like okay you can't do that because now you have an ownership of competing something or other um so i don't know i just it's really just really good to be back at consensus i think it's also like wealth building too because like for example if you're in cryptochicks um and you hold you know five of their pfps and now all of a sudden you're in their dao and then you go to another you know dao and you're you know doing stuff with them you're essentially building your own digital wealth and i think that's the power of like dolls and communities so is there any like tooling that uh y'all recommend to brands like what what if brands want to start their own like dial like super fans or anything like that like have you seen any movement in this space so far i guess david from a super rare partnerships perspective we talked about gucci yeah so there's like i mean essentially what the spaces that we created is essentially allowing brands or an individual or person to create their own like company um and on board so it's i think it's like a subset of a dow like they're still going to be the ones in control but like they're going to be empowering whoever they want to like as super air empowers the artist the whole dao thing i i i wouldn't say this to companies but i would say just take a step back and let this thing bake out for a few more years because you definitely do give up control and a lot of like things that i don't think a lot of private companies are ready for yeah yeah i think i think dials are step two step one is just getting these companies um comfortable with discord my gosh yes not getting rugged on discord right i'll say that that a lot of the so even within i wish i could tell more about what we're doing that that's going to happen next quarter so at like austin or something we'll have another one of these conversations and talk more broadly about what we're doing but these brands they're diving in and they understand that they need to do that they need to get on discord and so community management is obviously a huge everyone like just give me your best community manager it doesn't matter but they don't like these people don't really exist yet like there's no job there's no somebody with like three years of community experience that understands bot control on discord and setting it up and and like speaking for the company et cetera but they're actually they're actually saying okay which is scary because we're essentially saying okay okay to them and giving them the green check mark because they they're the trusted advisors and you know things can go very wrong in discord so again at consensus we have an absolutely enormous customer success team that manages a lot of the customer success and onboarding and and these ticket answering and managing discords and it's like it's like 200 person team and it's getting bigger every day so i think that's that is an insane market opportunity to create a dow around um so that there's just a group of community members that don't have to necessarily just go on one project it's like they can manage five projects and that's almost like a dow inside of a dial [Music] my head is like spinning um but okay cool yeah so i guess we can end with your favorite pfps in your wallets right now uh i guess i can go i got it hyper demon um by late fx i was like air dropped and i thought that was really cool um and then emily lazar's september monster so my theme is more like monsters and like fun demons that are in my wallet right now what's in yours i don't dox myself ever because i feel like if i do oh okay then people will just wallet stalk me and then oh shoot okay when i get rugged on a couple of my projects they're going to get upset at me so i don't do that but i really like i really like two things one things that are at risk of ip violation okay because one it's really cool uh two it goes back to the crypto anarchy type routes that we all kind of share so just test the waters like like maybe tow the gray line a little bit because we're only we're not the ones creating the projects but we you can buy it like see what happens it like it'll then the stories will pop up and the sec the second thing is recently i've gotten a lot more back into physical art and now it annoys me because there's like absolutely zero correlation between physical art that doesn't have anything to do with nfts and like the world that we all live in so i i'm trying to get back into it to figure out how to bridge that gap because as soon as you get all the like the trad artists in that is that is an exponential increase of people that enter this world so kind of weird answer but no i like that defy answer um okay i'll take it so my uh biggest pfp backing the community is amazing uh the crypto dick butts so i'm a big dick butt holder uh i've been uh super bullish on them we're going to be buying this is the utility that i love is they created a dow all the revenues are going towards buying uh gooch island so we're out looking for an island um and if you own a dick butt then you get to go to uh huge island so check it out awesome so hard this weekend um meta birkins is actually one of my favorite like toeing the line because like come on like [ __ ] hermes but thank you so much for joining us at the deep dive panel and hopefully we'll see you around east denver [Applause]