Upgrade Summit 🚀 With ERC-6551, Your NFTs Have Wallets Too

[Music] thanks everyone for tuning in to the upgrade Summit and um you're probably going to have a lot of numbers in your mind that you're going to have to remember so um yeah I'll do a little bit of an intro so my name is Benny I'm calling in from Vancouver Canada a little bit of history about me um was building startups since 2015 uh part of Y combinator startup School I was one of the co-founders of crypto kitties um contributed to 721 which eventually became nfts uh number 13 employee uh founding team member of dapper uh and then yeah was leading one of the main product teams for NBA Top Shop so um now I'm a co-founder of Future Primitive uh which is a uh you'll learn all about it but we're the ones behind earc 6551 so yeah at Future Primitive um our biggest focus is really exploring these intersections around objects and networks and narratives um the output of it usually comes in different you know things it could be consumer level UPS it could be protocol it could be Dev tooling it could be a new ethereum standard which we're about to talk about uh so that's Future Primitive in a nutshell and I wanted to kind of start off the talk uh in terms of zooming out right because you a lot of times we you are we're we're so deep into like the crypto side and we get into all of the technicalities but I like to kind of zoom out and think about the grand scheme of things before we zoom in so one of the biggest questions that I ask myself is you know where is most of human history stored um at least physically right and it look you know from from what we understand it's usually libraries or museums or archives and some things to think about is the human population has grown 20 20x since the 1400s we're um near near 8 billion now and like there's more and more of us populating planet Earth and not only that thinking about um internet users right this is a little bit I think a last it's an older survey but um still relative to you know thinking about how many internet users are around the world and where are they mostly right and the other thing is like it's pretty insane for me to when I saw this like there's nearly 5,000 times more websites than the the amount of books in the world and that's only growing more more exponential as more internet users come online right and I like to kind of like put that into an analogy right so the Library of Congress it's one of the largest libraries at least in in America it's effectively the the world's internet knowledge or the websites uh make up about 16,41 libraries of Congress and uh in terms of footprint that that basically covers the footprint of the entire New York New York City and Los Angeles so imagine those two major cities blanketed with libraries of Congress full of books um that is how much knowledge uh or Internet uh websites there are and you know it's only going to continue to increase right we are looking at um from the AI side like gbt2 had 1.58 U 1.5 billion uh sources of uh information and now gbt 4 is like 100 trillion so um there's more and more information available now online and offline um that a single person can can comprehend right and so I really wanted to talk about like our ability to record history and why that's so important and to the advancement of us as like a species and it's one of the most crucial roles that we can play because at the end of the day aside from startups and crypto and blockchain and Tech and all of that like at the end of the day we're all humans right and we all live in this same planet and I like to kind of like zoom out in that view and like put perspective in things right but we really do have a serious problem on our hands right um and it's this idea of public infrastructure versus private Industries right public infrastructures as you all know in the real life is like Bridges and libraries and national parks s and in some ways the internet um email Wikipedia all this stuff crypto blockchain those are all um hopefully you know public infrastructure but you know yeah private Industries are you know some are Illustrated here they're they're they're companies that you're probably aware of and what's really kind of saddening is that whenever these companies shut down um it's effectively like a library going on fire right uh and we've seen that over the last several years of companies that are you know have wealth amounts of knowledge and culture and videos and photos that you've maybe uploaded or other people have and it just gets lit on fire when it shuts down servers and it's really kind of a sad thing that chunks of you know Humanities and the knowledge is just evaporated um and so you know what I wanted to illustrate here before I get into 6551 and nfts and all that is to really put that into perspective of why it's important to put things on chain right putting things on chain with the purpose of keeping a record on human history on the culture of humanity and instead of just about magical internet money is super important and it's way more important than the speculative aspects and I think a lot of times people kind of miss that right so one thing that I've been thinking a lot about and these numbers obviously are evolving but um on ethereum right now there there's like 2.1 billion transactions um in total and that's about eight events per second so as I've chatted here already a few minutes there's already been probably hundreds of events that are happening right but think about it most of those transactions that are on chain has been about training and speculating on ec2s um and yes there's also 721s but a lot of predominantly a lot of it's been around Defi and if you look on the bottom right like art and culture is so small and if you think in a wider scale like as I mentioned the population of Earth is 7.8 billion there's about 5.

1 internet users and crypto is 100 million at least in terms of wallets so it's super super small like um we still have time to really grow this pie right and I personally think that ethereum is relevant when it truly becomes a world computer for storing the history of humanity the culture we talk about onchain culture and so we have to kind of encapsulate these things in like what's the purpose right uh and not just like a speculative machine so I do believe that there's a future where art and culture um you know becomes the predominant reason why we are minting nfts why we're putting things on chain and Dy becomes or speculative aspects are less important and some of these things that you might want to put on chain are like attestations maybe it is your c20s maybe it's 11 5S maybe it's 721s or nfts so that's now bridging to um 6551 but before we get into that I mean I do want to talk about how nfts in my mind um since six years ago when we created crypto kitties and created the 721 standard lots of things have evolved right we went up and down and there's the latest Bull Run and I do think nfts at at the current state are broken because it's predominantly been really heavy on speculation on floor price on volume on royalties and not only that all the things that you can see here right but let's kind of get into the nitty-gritty right so I think that there are three main problems of nfts and these are the three outlines here right so when we were defining the 721 standard um the focus of it was wouldn't it be interesting to have something that's on chain that's an object that's unique and then you can own it and that's pretty much all that the 721 standard had specified anything beyond it like breeding battling burning all these things are custom contracts right the second thing is when we designed 721 we never imagined a world of like rollups right I remember leam was exploring State channels and you know plasma all this stuff right so you know at that time it was like crypto ke live on Main net and if you wanted to launch another nft it's either main net or another L1 and you these don't really connect with each other the third is crypto kitties and cheese wizards and all the early like the first generation of nfts they weren't really meant as online identities they were mostly you know cute cuddly collectible um characters and so what was really interesting is that this pfp phenomenon had brought into the attention that you know nfts can be part of your online identity so let's dive into the problem right so present day I'm sure for most of you all who have launched an nft project or or been thinking about it it's really difficult right like you you could launch a 721 nft contract and then let's say one day you're like hey wouldn't it be so cool that we can get them to battle with other nfts or breed them or uh wouldn't it be cool if there was like some really like interesting onchain game mechanic well hopefully you could write solidity and hopefully your solidity code is good enough that there's no vulnerabilities and you have to get it audited but you know six years ago like I know that that process was really really difficult especially for when we were working on crypto kitties and six years now like last year we were writing a bunch of custom contracts and I was still in shock that it's so hard it still takes so long to write uh to create something on chain or the other option is some folks have modified 721 or 998 and they've kind of like frankensteined their own mergin and kind of expressed down there it's expensive it's not composable breeding here cannot be repurposed the second thing is uh nft bridging is broken as well right like if you have a an isuki on Main net um if you want to bring it to optimism or you want to like do something on an L2 roll up it's really difficult uh you either lock it up uh in a centralized bridging contract which becomes a Honeypot or you burn it and then you me a clone and that's kind of a broken process right like how do we how does an nft supposed to live across the evm um if if it it's going to get burnt every single time right and then the third thing is our wallets have become our identities right everyone most folks have ens and like I'm just putting metamask there but you you probably use other wallets but yeah you connect to daps with your wallet you own tokens you transfer tokens but why is it that an nft doesn't have the same properties why is it that their static assets one-dimensional you keep them in a ledger or wallet you screenshot it for a bfp and you just hold on to it right um why is it so why hasn't it changed in the last six years so that kind of brings us to ERC 6551 or token bound accounts sometimes we call it tbas and these are the three benefits of thinking about 6551 right the first one is plug andplay on G mechanics so we see a future where if you own an nft right now you own the asset right but you don't control the utility you're waiting on the developer of that project to ship some sort of onchain game and and hopefully they do if they don't well too bad so sad you only the asset but you don't control the utility in the near future with something like token bound accounts because it becomes a generalized uh utility layer for nfts you can go to this place and plug and play like breeding and battling and and I think that's really really awesome right because it kind of removes the dependency from the Creator the second thing is I believe nfts should live across uh the evm chain so it should be able to have fluidity across L2 rollups and and ethereum and all of that the third is you should be able to log in as your nft across any dap so instead of connecting as metamask or rainbow wallet you should be able to connect as your board or your Zuki your Doodles or Moon birds so the kind of breakdown of how that works right so every single nft since the start of time since 2017 uh crypto kitties and everything that's in the future um every nft already has a token bound account this is one of the magic tricks uh that I I I personally think is is super awesome right in the blockchain space there are several magic tricks I would consider ZK proofs as one of them like do you know something but not know something the second magic trick that I think is super crazy is Flash loans like how do you borrow a billion dollars and and kind of return it in a millisecond in the same transaction and token M accounts is the other magic trick of how does it kind of prescribe an account for every single nft in the entire ethereum and evm space and so it has been achieved it's on mainnet now and testet and so what you're looking at here is this future of architectural where you have apps or custom light contracts there's still smart contracts that you plug into the TBA to give it functionality and we think that's going to be the future of composability the second thing is cross chain done right so we believe that nfts should live on Main net that's where value acral is that's where liquidity is that you know in our minds should be the home chain for the nft but if you want to experience apps um gains and vote on Dows and all of that we think L2 makes less sense and this is kind of some of the things that we've been working on uh on the protocol side is the idea uh the really interesting thing is because we use create two uh deterministic addresses that assign addresses to nfts if you have a doodle on mainnet let's say the ad the token bound account address is 0x123 it's the same on arbitrum it's the same in optimism it's the same on polygon so that means if you send an asset on polygon to 0x123 it's owned by the Doodles on mainnet and so the self- custodial bridge will allow you to basically control the accounts across all UVM and that's super fascinating because you can basically pay L2 gas and play a game as your doodle on mainnet and then third of all is because every nft has its own address now you can have an identifier like an ens subdomain and not only that the more interesting thing is your nft can do everything a wallet can right you can connect to adap you can own tokens you can transfer tokens and we think that's extremely interesting and um it really gives nfts the same onchain rights as a wallet so that's kind of a high over high level overview of tbas and 6551 and like I said you know crypto kitties to isuki uh they have every every asset has a TBA if you're probably wondering how do I know how do I know what the address is well token bound. org um you could think of it as like an ether scan for nfts that's where you go and you can see all the addresses and the really cool thing is that you can literally put any asset inside of an nft you can put eth usdc erc20 721 1155 if say tomorrow you create a new token standard ERC 9000 you can put that inside of a 2ba as well and then lastly is that you could connect to any dab with your nft so just to give you an example I I did some screenshots but literally on token b.org you can actually download a CSV of entire collection of addresses TBA addresses of all the nfts right so you can see here all the moonberg at least these ones here they all have addresses so uh if you're thinking about airdropping or you know you know giving a gift or something fan art you can literally just drop it into these addresses today uh and it's on Main that um and not only that it's the same with Fuki it's the same for anything else um and it's not just for pfps like even any 721 literally including um you know crypto art and all that you can see here they all have TBA addresses as well and like to drive this home like I like to make mixtape nfcs that are 721 via Zora and so like I said every 721 including this mixtape video has its own token bound account address so that means I could drop things inside here and or you know I could put tokens inside of this nft and so over the last six years there have been many different attempts in kind of exploring this idea of dynamic nfts um there was 998 and there's several other protocols that have um kind of Dove out Dove down in this space but none of those protocols or standards actually fit these criterias the first thing I will say is ERC 6551 is not a token standard a lot of people get confused and they think 6551 is replacing 721 or 1155 it's not it's actually an ethereum standard that links every nft with a smart contract wallet so how does it work or what are the designed criteria so it works with all existing NFS backwards compatible and future proof you can hold literally any asset any tokens inside number three is there's no wrapping contracts so uh contrary to some of the earlier implementations where you have to wrap your nft you don't have to do that number four is because simply this is a a wallet a smart contract wallet um just like no is safe uh in some ways it works with all existing platforms so that's super awesome and then number five is it's fully decentralized so every single nft if let's just say there's 500 million nfts on ethereum um on Main net uh literally there's 500 million smart contract accounts um so each one get each nft gets one uh and the nft is is has full custody of it the other way to think about it if you're more technical it's kind of like a multisig with one signer which is the nft so how are tbas different from EAS well it has all the same properties of an e eoa but there's no seed wordss there's no private Keys um the other way to think about this is this is Count abstraction or AA um for nfts um and we really do believe that the marriage between nfts and AA um you know it creates the perfect mix that nfts now can become your full on machine identity we get this question a lot of like you know what's 4337 what's EA what's TBA what's 65 by1 I know there's a lot of terminology at the end of the day the way I describe it is there's this huge wave that's been forming for the last two years and this huge wave is around improving user experience across the board and this wave is what I call the accounts abstraction wave right um and it's a wave that's meant to replace um some of the the the you know the rough ux that you've experienced with private keys and seed wordss and all of that and so you know token Mount accounts are on that way we're we're part of the AA movement except we just have a different surfboard right our surfboard is fully focused on nfts um and we don't you know we're not really creating accounts for D5 apps or all that right so that's how you kind of like frame like you know where this all sits in and importantly to note that 6551 is compatible with 4337 so everything that you know like pay master bundler all that type of stuff the architecture of it um it's all uh compatible so I wanted to blast through a bunch of use cases because you know we talked really high level about like the world and about information about humanity and then we talked about nfts and now 6551 so I do want to you know finish up with like here's some ideas um to to kind of hopefully stir the creativity in side of you so for gaming uh gaming is a really big one right like you could think of token Mount accounts as a decentralized inventory system every pfp now has like a backpack or an inventory system that means it could carry items and weapons and armor and all these things and it's fully decentralized which is super cool so that's what gerse is doing is that you know the gals they're pfp and now they have like um you know things dropped inside there's an emergence of like bring your own nft where like now you can log in as your doodle and and play a game with other nfts parallel they're a top 20 nft they're building a a AAA Unreal Engine five game where the characters are nfts and they have token bound accounts where they can collect tokens in the game for Dows what's really interesting is uh Coupe records from uh Cooper and what they've been working on is a nft fan pass for musician Daniel Allen and every two weeks they're dropping music nfts inside of that fan path so you could think about like what what does it mean to have like some sort of like reoccurring subscription to music or photos or what whatnot stations building a nft uh membership platform where all the badges and stickers and poops are now put inside of a membership nft membership and you might be asking why would you do that you you can already have it all in metamask the thing is there's when you're in metamask It's All One Singular layer right and so if you sell the membership you still hold the poops and the soulbound tokens it kind of messes with the higher coal relationship between them right the other thing that uh we've been uh exploring since Eve Wu is this idea of rdf or retroactive Dow formation and the idea is that you know because nfts can hold tokens you can drop an erc20 Tok governance token inside of nf's Collections and then because every NF has a wallet they can be a signer on a multis so you're forming Dows from the bottom up and and in some ways you're almost Reviving Dead projects um and that are run by the community social networks so lens protocol uh version two of the profiles because everything in in lens is nfts um nesting things and creating what we call a token graph is super important because then you have the higher relationships and ownerships um on chain and then pinata is building a token graph visualizer tribes is building a web three messenger where you can log in as your nft and talk to other nfts fashion is super cool uh this is kind of where we've been spending our last year and a half on we worked with je staple to launch sapiens and essentially it's a pfp collection where you can equip digital clothing and of course the sapiens has a TBA that owns the clothing we've also teamed up with BBC to launch several awesome projects and then iyk is exploring physical to digital using token Bon accounts when you tap on to the the chips on the clothing so wrapping up now um you know uh now that you've kind of went through the whole uh emotions of from the highest level all the way to what is actually tangible I think the message I want to leave with you guys is you know to create Onre culture you know we must produce more cultural assets that can be you know animations that can be 3D assets that can be photos that can be videos that could be mixtapes we just need to Output more we need to and Zora has been leading that charge a lot but something that I would leave with you guys is like you know um this is such an important moment in all of our times uh being builders in this space and you know think about what it means to create onchain culture and and the other thing is if you're collecting you know collect nfts collect these things because you love it um not collect it because you you can flip it uh and make a return right and so that's kind of the last message I'd leave you guys with thinking about onchain culture and how token B accounts are going to be um the driver of that Force for nfts so yeah