BBW24 – Day 1 – NFTs 2.0: Redefining Digital Art and Ownership

hi everyone so we're going to kick it off and start with the evolution of the nft landscape from the 2021 boom and I'm going to pass it over to Nick to kind of bring us through the the evolution and his experiences yeah absolutely and I think um what we'll be useful is to give a little bit of background in my experiences so um in uh 2021 I was the event coordinator for nft NYC um I've worked with v friends um I was right alongside Gary on his aditt ministrative team uh help kind of build some of the things there at vriends and then um yeah I've uh been in the space for a long time now um I led the web 3 content and one of Gary's Publications so my whole job was to lead a team of writers graphic designers and short form video creators making content in and around web 3 for a whole year so I had to have my ear to the streets in terms of what was happening um for that entire space I watched FTX go I've watched um the rise and fall of many projects that were very relevant and I think you know for me um what we're starting to see and I saw it firsthand with with vriends was um the 1 to 3% of projects that are starting to build Legacy Brands like uh a Disney model for example I saw I can speak to V friends for example they um with trading card games with Partnerships with Mattel with uh all these different intellectual property plays uh to build a broader brand across um many different uh Landscapes awesome Eduardo do you have any com to add um not not such a very good background um I started like a company in 2022 um with a couple of friends we made um some previous startup experience and then during Co period we found out hey we like blockchain we like nfts um we got into the the topic and we decided to found a company that allow people to display nfts everywhere on any Monitor and we also provide monitors to artist and we personalize them um and more or less two years ago um we found this company and we start working in Europe now we want to reach the US market and expand in this kind of um in this market um and we've been working with artists so we have a sort of expert on the artist side trying to understand how an nft artist or a digital artist think and on the market side we are trying to we are trying to work with museums and galleries trying to democratize Art in a sense that we want to help anyone to reach any kind of stage with our frames and basically personal background uh I am an economics students I've graduated in Business Administration couple of months ago but yeah that's it GRS thank you uh hi my name is Maria um I run PR and marketing company called Interstellar digital and we have worked with some nft infrastructure projects such as rable nft Marketplace rure uh they did nft infrastructure collaborated with big Brands like nikil Adan um Mino also nft infrastructure we also worked with some artists um for example Miss uh she had a collection on salana that was sold in like 2 minutes back in 2021 on um or 2022 on Magic Eden and uh yeah like helped many nft artists many projects some games that dropped nfts um to sell out to get the word out there um to succeed and yeah happy to be here and disc us nfts and thank you um to the previous speaker so have you guys seen any key trends in the current market I would say maybe what I saw like for the past couple of years ordinals and runes became popular which are basically nfts on bitcoin blockchain but they don't call themselves n nft they say like no we are ordinals we're runes so that's that's a trend yeah I see like orinal is the biggest news right now um I feel like they are a thing especially in the artistic part of the nfts um because the lot there are a lot of artists now that are trying to explore this kind of field they want to uh enter the ordinal Market they want to be part of it uh but I see how NFD now um has passed the you know that hype moment and on my personal view now we are on what in economics like we we we call like the slope of Enlightenment in a sense that we are trying to reach the confirmation of the technology the technology is something that is useful it's something that it's revolutionary to many extent like a lot of in a lot of perspectives and um I believe that also the artistic Market is becoming solid we are seeing solid players that are remaining in the market and they are not like cameras or here just to you know exploit the opportunity of the of the babble that's awesome Nick do you want to add anything yeah I mean I think um for me I've noticed a lot of more Niche communities of these people that started as artists in the nft space uh got a huge base from that and then are able to produce shows produce their own Gatherings and um get into the more traditional Art Market um I think I think like I talked about before um I think the evolution has been with like I said with the IPS and everything like that but um yeah those are just some Trends but I think that um and we'll talk about it in a bit I see um the way that I really and I'll be brief with this basically um the way I Define nfts really is just proof of ownership of an asset um and through that framework everything else can be built on top of it um whether you're proving that you own this thing and you were verifying that you are the um through I don't want to get too much into it I could I could get into it but kind of goes into our our next topic a little bit about how nfts are lowering the barriers for some artists yeah can you kind of delve into that and and give some some advice on how the nfts uh are helping artists out there and creators out there in the space yeah look I mean I think there are so many different ways um ultimately I think it's it's especially with the rise of nfts in 2021 you saw a lot of artists like get um a lot more exposure that they wouldn't have necessarily got um going the traditional route um I can talk about the you know the royalties and in in perpetuity talk about like all those different technical things but I think ultimately um it's provided a way for artists to have a new Avenue um to display their creativity I think that that's something that's really important um you know you're not just confined to a brush and a canvas it's um it's something that you can have a platform um and really expand out from there so um and we've seen some creative things like artists are now giving tokens instead of tickets concert tickets um so that's really it's kind of cool different yeah absolutely um I think if I can add to what you were saying um it's important that nfds are giving the opportunity to everyone to exibit they they hard like you don't have to enter into sort of like standards to be an artist now but you can be you can mix a lot of different Arts you can make a video you can mix music and art you can use AI to create a piece of art that it's you know it comes from your mind but maybe you don't have like the opportunity to create it physically but you're using AI to do it so it's it's a mix of things that it's democratizing art to some extent like everyone can be an artist we don't have to um add a label to what art is because art is something that it's beautiful and what is beautiful it's completely subjective and I think that giving to people the opportunity to be artist to be an artist giving to giving to people more opportunity to be an artist it's something that will help the artistic movement in any direction so I feel like we are giving more much more opportunity to everyone to be an artist and to be part of this movement and at the same time you need to build your own exposure that's sure that's for sure but at the same time you have the tools to do it and I think it's it's a beautiful thing that nfts are doing right now should I add um also I think it's a good opportunity for for established artists um I think a lot of people already uh talked about it on different stages I'll just repeat the main narrative uh nfts basically allowed uh established artists doesn't matter fine artists or musical artists um to eliminate middle man and basically um collect all the royalties and uh yeah because like for example when it comes to music mus industry um most of money they like it goes to uh music labels and nowadays if music artists like issue an nft and some music artists did it like Steve Aoki or blondish um yeah if they do it they they can collaborate with their audience like directly they don't need any label to manage it basically what are some of the limitations and challenges you're seeing in the space right now mhm well um maybe it's not super user friendly still so a lot of people even if they want to have an nft collection they don't exactly know how and um also with the bare market and with like uh um decreasing of the floor prices of many blue chip nfts I think it's like scared some collectors away as well I think that's that's that's the main ones from me I don't know do you think from a compliance standpoint as well there's not enough Clarity out there yeah no for sure we see like SEC suing open C which is one of the biggest nft marketplaces and uh yeah like that's and I think there is a lawsuit again draft draft Kings as well so yeah of course like that will scare a lot of projects away from the industry yeah and it's still not clear uh but I think there is like a news from like today's news that the like the parliament in the UK they um think about um uh considering nfts not as Securities but as like personal property and that would be like step forward I guess yeah yeah like on top of that um we were having this discussion before to me the biggest challenge now it's the confidence like we need to uh bring to people confidence again because after the when the babble burst like people were super confident on the nfts like were like oh this is the future now they lost their money they won their money back they're not going to invest in nfts anymore so adding to the fact that it's not completely user friendly we are going to reach the mass adoption when the people feel confident again on the technology and we need to sell to some extent this technology to people to let them understand how powerful it is because the average man who is not interested in this kind of Technology doesn't know how important and how revolutionary nfts can be from an artistic perspective and from an everyday everyday life perspective cuz the technology can literally like save time can um Cel the middlemen in so many things even in Selling Houses for example well you as the challenges right so I think um it depends on who you ask I think that if you ask an artist well there's not enough of a market right now right um if you ask uh technologists well there's not widespread adoption and Integrations into um everyday life I think of it more as okay like going off of the thesis that I brought forth before uh nfts are proof of ownership of an asset as a foundation uh and not to that's the simplest way we can think about it um I think that finding ways to integrate it into things that solve real problems like for example um what I foresee is is with uh with AI and defix um and the fact that there's so many people out there that aren't able to actually decipher like did this piece of information come from this person I I truly believe that social media platforms will use some sort of tokenization infrastructure for every post that goes up on their platform to verify what information came from who utilizing an IPS ipfs infrastructure and um allowing some sort of ZK verification in order to uh verify that this person's this this person's who they say they are without revealing the rest of the information uh maintaining Anonymous um standing I think that's interesting because I think I knew I threw a lot of terms out there I don't know if everybody think that's interesting though because in the in the compliance space I think like the Deep fakes out there are are literally what's keeping compliance officers up at night they're they're trying to figure out you know what controls to put into place how to verify people if you think about some of the you know opening accounts online with people with fake IDs and all that information that's out there so it's interesting yeah um we were actually going to go into our next topic of how Ai and virtual reality is emerging and how that's helping the space out so any comments that edu and and Maria want to add into the how AI specifically the question yeah um how AI in virtual reality is is emerging in the digital art space Oh uh in digital art I think AI it's it's a key point now like we are using AI to create digital art a lot of artists are using it the the problem is right now it's about like copyright because you can use um an an image created by someone else to create your own image it's something that needs to be solved and what saying it's a possible solution a very clear and possible solution for this kind of things cuz we need to solve the problem because the problem exists and the problem is a key of the Art Market CU right now the Art Market it's becoming the digital art Market is becoming bigger and bigger and uh it's something that we need to be aware of because when we are going to sell art now we're selling physical art and digital art or maybe we're selling selling both together so we're selling an nft that is a pro of ownership of an asset that is physical so we're selling the digital version and the physical version um AI in this case it's entering the market in a very strong way and we need to control it to some extent at least we need to control the copyright and the right of the artist to earn money from what they create even if it's created with a eye or not but the artist needs to earn money from there on the virtual reality um I think that the tool we're using to enter virtual reality it's still too big like apple Vision Pro it's something that or like Mata Quest um it's something that it's amazing like if you try it you will love it but at the same time it's a bit awkward to go around with like this kind of big glasses right so we're not going to use it currently in in everyday life when we're going to reach a point where the technology it's fresh to be on a normal GL glasses like mine for example everyone is going to use it and is going to be a key for digital art for example imagine if you will have digital art pocket stop and the young people will understand it like Pokémon go has pocket stop and instead of having pocket stop with Pokémon you will have digital art Poké stop so you can have like the explanation of something you are seeing in in real life apple is doing it now like iOS 18 3 days ago 4 days ago um have a function in the camera that if you go around and like you know see something that is like relevant they will give you real time explanation of what you're seeing so we are there we just need to reach Mass adoption and you will sell space in real life to artist because artists want to put their art everywhere you're not going to have advertisements you're going to have artists creating advertisement for you walking around with a pair of Glass glasses and say oh I like this kind of ND from Carl this nice I want to buy it you can buy it from your glasses and it's not that far in my opinion we're close to to it also there are some projects that try to solve the problem of um copyrights on AI generated events oh sorry IM not events um yeah like for example my friends um who worked previously at like meta and Snapchat they're trying to create the startup who would like solve this problem of um um basically who owns the right of um AI generated image because right now bigger companies they cannot use AI generated content like there is no way Coca-Cola will be posting like a AI generated images on their social media and stuff so yeah I I mean we solve this problem I guess we we solve a lot of problems for artists and everyone yeah I think uh I think about two things one um I think leveraging AI to audit uh security flaws within uh infrastructures is super we we are not talking about that enough um is leveraging that and then also um in this I know that we only have we have less than eight minutes so maybe like we want to like make this into a conversational thing with the audience I don't know but um something I've been thinking about and I actually haven't really worked out the best way to approach this is um one of the biggest issues that uh is talked about with open Ai and what have you is it sourcing the data set that they got is from the internet like how do you actually uh give credit um and dividend out based on what percentage of said data set came from your um call right so I'm thinking about this in the sense that wouldn't it be in an amazing world where we could tokenize our data sets that we anything that we publish to the internet and then if it gets referenced or called by any said um AI that we get some sort of allocation of percent of that month that user's monthly fee or something I don't know is is there something I mean is anybody have anything from the crowd or any comments on the panel like I agree with you this is the future like content creators are going to be paid like this yeah I think we have someone too yeah hi uh kind of more of a comment but I just wanted to say like earlier someone mentioned Desi which is like decentralized science and then they said like they were talking about like P reviewed papers I kind of see this like the same thing right like they were talking about like how you know you can you know it's legit because it's on a blockchain and they can get rewarded from it I kind of see it as the same way again it's not nft it's a peer-reviewed paper but like that that could be an nft right right so yeah I think I think that that is a very important case and I think it's going to be used in other areas like deepin and that sort of thing so yeah uh so I have a question just um based on some of the people I've met doing different nft projects I kind of want to open this up to you guys what are some of the more out of the box projects that you've kind of seen like use cases fors like for example like when uh we were in Nashville we met a company that selling hash rate uh for a Bitcoin mining operation and like kind of selling the hash rate as an nft giving you access to that so I'm just wondering like what are some kind of new innovative ideas you guys have seen well real quick this actually kind of highlights a a not like not everybody in the nft space understands or knows this but um there's this one project called the I this like secret raccoon Society I don't know it doesn't matter anyway um it's all a combination of of animals and whatever anyway um this particular project they launched and um eventually they had some sort of cryptic message that they sent out they said um this is all your fault like da da d d da we're like shutting this down or something and they converted all of the assets like whatever traits that you had of your nft whatever the thing it was it got converted to a pile of bones right and that was a pure lesson in oh if the server goes down of the website that is hosting these images it could just go away you're you're and then your nft is done right that is something that really just H I just think that that's a really classic um rock po well there's that yeah there's that but it's also a classic example of of of big big thing that people don't talk about in the nft space where the Regulatory Compliance comes in yeah that's right see yeah shout out and I think that also comes from should I go the fact that ERC 721s are not actually inscribed on ethereum right which I think is a value proposition of ordinals which are actually inscribed um my name is Calvin I've been draining my bank account with nfts for four years now a lot of opinions on this stuffff um I'm sure you do my question was so a popular take in the space a cular popular discussion point is how to reshape the Normie narrative about what nfts are and obviously crypto and nfts are different but to people outside of blockchain they're both scams and it's kind of been that way kind of ever since FTX went down right so it's been two two and a half years of most people thinking that they are scams other than price going up and people wanting to flex pictures and things like that what sort of specific actions do you guys think we could take to help reshape the public sentiment of you know digital Collectibles that is the word the phrase that I always use in set of nfts now people can think of you know trading cards they collected growing up you know I just call them digital trading cards you know digital Collectibles how do we reshape the public perception and Nick you mentioned one point of giving them real world use case and I think that's a great point I didn't know if there's any other specific actions as you know participants in this community that would help reshape the public opinion of nfts you know the do bubble late 90s like how they said that the internet was a fad and it was just it was going to go away right internet stocks the hype all the Investments all the everything around that it's the same thing is that the builders and the people are going to go in their caves and and build and then you're not going to even realize that you're actually using an nft like it's it's just not going to even need to be a thing that you think about right you just need to to me you just need to put nfts in real life and it will come naturally cuz like um as I said before like when a new technology comes out we have like a corve and you analyze that there is the peak and then you go down and then you go up again slowly and constantly and it's it's called slope of Enlightenment and in this part of the curve you're going to analyze how the technology goes into your life without you noticing it and to answer also your questions there is a little startup in Italy and trust me that the fact that is in Italy to me it's so strange that it's trying to put nfds into like real estate exchanges so if you if I want to sell to you my house uh I just need to send you the nfds that proves that I'm the owner of my house and they're facing a huge problem with like the law because it's impossible you need to go to a la firm uh sign a contract and blah blah but at some point you will find a way to do it you will find a way to have your nfts in your healthc care as he said before uh I mean before the panel actually um basically you ZK up your health data and then reveal one part like oh this is your blood type and not reveal like your social security number yeah that's is is yeah to me is exactly like 5G technology you know you can drive a a tram again I'm Italian I will try to put things in Italy because if if something works in Italy works everywhere because we are skeptical we don't like technology and blah blah but we can drive a train without a driver right now and it's very very like we can be confident like they're not going to create disaster or anything but if you go to my mom or my grandma they won't trust it they will say no I prefer the physical driver I want to see the men there so it's part of like you know you need to start having it have to accept the technology and to go further and further and I think I think that we will we're going to use nfds without knowing that we're using nfds it has been the same with AI we have been using AI with Google Gmail every day without noticing it now that now we call it AI but we have been using it for years before like holding it AI I think we are out of time but we are out of time but we can wrap up quickly if anyone has a last comment we do have drinks to get to as [Laughter] well might be yeah so uh because I have have like PR and marketing company we have the hub for like newer companies in the space a lot of companies approach us recently we had a company approached us uh they are from Germany uh music nfts they already work with Snoop Dog aen um a lot of other like very famous music artists I I I don't want to lie but like Charlie XX or whatever like some some big names basically and they also say that like here buy our nfts and you will receive royalties in usdc circle uh every month and I have I have a friend uh who bought their nfts and he has royalties every month and I was like thinking maybe I should buy two um so I we cannot judge based on one company obviously but probably if like music artists big ones big names willing to do so then seems like yes