The Future of the Creator Economy Peg Samuel; Vladislav Ginsburg Blockparty; Brian Mark Rally; Noah

this is going to be awesome so i'm peg samuel fear studios i was an nyu professor in media uh fear studios were were a 10 000 pfp fashion related project heading to the metaverse and all kinds of utility in it um how about each person say a little quick nip about yourselves and then we'll get into the now and the future of this thank you peg and congratulations on fear studios and fierce nfts that's an amazing project thank you uh i'm vlad ginsberg ceo and co-founder of block party uh we are a multi-platform a multi-blockchain platform for minting nfts and enabling creators to create we get we provide lots of apps and tooling and we work with warner music group as well as a number of high-profile artists to enable them to create great nf2s cool my name is noah adams i'm a photographer based out of tokyo i work with a lot of designers and streetwear artists and yeah here to talk about the future of nfts moving forward for creators hey thanks and i'm brian mark i'm the director of content and education at rally rally is a platform that lets creators and communities build their own digital economies online that includes nfts and social tokens love it so we're coming at this from all angles so i want to just for me it's kind of the thorn in my side and like a little bit of an elephant in the room like right now nfts feel like with the 10 000 projects it's like a flipper economy and there's some really good money to be made out there and it's changed some lives so i do not want to discount that at all and it's very interesting and i do feel like utility is really important but i want to just open up that piece of the discussion and then kind of get into like where we're thinking things are going and you can do you want to start noah because we were talking about that backstage you were like hot on that i was like let's talk about this outside yeah so i definitely like to speak on how in my opinion nfts were started and created as a way for creators and artists to display their work and not only display their work be compensated fairly and be supported by the community and it's kind of turned into like uh almost like like how flipping street wear and supreme clothes used to be you buy this sell it can i get this let me max min sell it where's the 10x you know and it's not so much supporting the artists and creators anymore because if you look at a lot of the jpegs that are you know big and nft they're not like some of the art is amazing don't get me wrong but some of the art it's almost like quick created just to see how fast we can get these 10 000 nfts minted so yeah i really think that moving forward for creators it's it's very important that we focus more on the artwork and the creator itself and not like making my quick cash grab you know yeah what i always what i always enjoyed about them when i heard about them like back in 2017 2018 was that there's this royalty concept for a creator so if the creators like work starts getting worth so much more money they're still getting a piece as it's not being traded 10x in one day but over the years of them being an artist they can still like reap the benefits of their art being more valuable and it's gotten into this like real frenzy right now um um do either of you guys want to also speak on that because yeah yeah thank you i think a word that that noah said that sticks out to me is community and i think like the best pfp projects today if you look in the space like the ones that are most enduring there is a community amongst the holders and i think that same thing applies to artists trying to build or creators trying to build in the space is if you can build something that really matters to a community rather than maybe to an audience or to that flipper crowd like i think that that's where maybe enduring value comes from and the ability to build something that um you know like we were talking about backstage about fierce like building something that actually has tangible value and and has real utility built in rather than just something that's a a pump and dump or you know that flash in the pan i traditionally i actually haven't really thought about pfps a lot for creators uh we haven't really gotten into those at block party when we started looking at erc 1155 me coming from the fine art industry i knew that was a token standard use it used for gaming mostly or conceived for gaming and as any art person looked at that and said oh wait that's additions so we kind of thought about 1155 as um being editions but when you dig into like what an erc 1155 actually is you're like oh well no it's just a subdivided contract that's not really an addition so we kind of shied away from from those at block party and tried to encourage creators to even if it's an edition of 10 still mint 10 individual editions and um one of the things that we've found from working with creators and at block party we talk to musicians we talk to artists and one of the things that we found um community is such a you guys talk about community is such an important thing to develop for for the creator but also what does that mean you know for what is it what does a community mean is it their audience is it the they're collectors and one of the challenges that we found working with artists and musicians especially higher profile ones like blue chip artists is that they're they're looking around and wondering like hey how is some 24 year old anonymous kid on um in the ethereum community making more money than me and i'm like a blue chip artist in a gallery and we're like well that kid is like in the community that that person is engaging every single day whereas somebody that's represented by a gallery has gotten used to their gallerist managing the marketing managing the outreach managing all these things and that artist kind of loses agency um talking to their collectors and i think what you see with the really successful artists in the nft space they have a great deal of agency and building their community in talking to their people in developing uh their culture thank you you literally just answered the question i was thinking in my head like like you know there's art and and how that the traditional art had run and then and then community you know and so you went you went there with that do you guys have stuff to add i can tell just go for it yeah i mean i think for me you know on community to to kind of add on to that that question of like what is community and what's the difference between community and audience really to me um what the technology that we're talking about here empowers is the ability to build with your community rather than just for them i think it's that shift of like being able to accrete value collectively so um an nft project on its own you're able to maybe build together and potentially increase value in that project or or build things that come out of that like we've seen projects that launch and then um you know kind of more gets added on i think what we're really interested in at rally is the combination of nfts and social tokens as kind of two pieces of the same pie sort over two sides of the same coin in the sense that the nfts serve as like the digital goods of that community and the social tokens serve as the digital currencies and so the ability to combine those adds a layer of like fungibility and the ability to reward your community with a token that becomes the money of that community you know that idea of like money as communal glue is something that that we think a lot about will you take a second just to expand just in case anybody here knows social tokens and what that means versus like an nft totally so um nft's non-fungible token um every nft is unique it's a one of one um a fungible token a social token is like the dollar bill in your wallet and so um on rally we have 280 creators each of whom have their own social token in our economy um over half of those are six figure economies now um and ten percent of them are million dollar economies and these are people who've built from the ground up bringing their audience and their community into our space and have provided a combination of rewards for holding social tokens so rewarding people who are actually like believing in and supporting that community as it as it looks to grow but also providing utility through nfts so and those nfts are purchasable with the social token and then social token is synonymous with utility token right is it yeah same thing okay actually do you mind if i ask um yeah like to de-abstract like you guys you guys have worked some amazing creators like uh portugal demand i know is a great project you guys did can you kind of maybe share like how some of these uh creators are using social tokens in their community in a meaningful way i would love to thanks um so portugal demands a great example they just released a new single a couple weeks ago the new single they offered a pre-save incentive to their community and said hey if you pre-save this on our major streaming platforms we'll reward you with ptm coin so that's them basically taking from their stash of ptm coin on rally and saying look you do something that helps us something that benefits us as a community we'll reward you with some of our token um that token then holders are able to access exclusive content libraries they're also able to spend it on merch or tickets or things like that so it really contributes to a circular economy rather than kind of the traditional creator economy of like an audience funneling money to a creator within these creator economies empowered by social tokens money can kind of move through and around from community members to community members from the founders of the community down to the members as well other good examples too um colin benders is one of our he's an analog synth musician he's got a gated uh discord that he uses token holding to to gate um as well as uh an archive of past performances of his that are only available to people who hold a certain number of his tokens cool amazing noah question for you so nft photography um tell me like a little bit about your journey because i know it took like this other stuff that we were talking about or even my project like why fierce actually went with the pfp was just meeting the market where it's at part of us we wanted to do ticketing fashion show ticketing like green room stuff and everything like what can we do with the technology and i know we were talking a little bit backstage about technology but also like nft photography started kind of slow and then like having this like ramp up moment and then your future can you talk a little bit about that yeah so i believe photography has kind of in a sense lost its value with the use of instagram and social media and twitter um and being able to create a token-backed photo in a sense is a way that photographers can really monetize and capitalize in this space um at first photographers weren't really doing well on in the nft space there's been a couple of collections that have taken off but yeah i think especially with photography it's it's very um it's very hard to kind of establish yourself as a photographer and make a living off of your photos and not just like your service as like a wedding photographer or whatever event photographer so as like an artist it's it's crucial right now the space moving forward and and you know making it making a noise making an appearance it's so interesting and then i'll let you talk because i'm i'm a i'm an art collector as well and i collect some fine art photography and it's some of it is like this um almost vintage from some motown stuff that i have and to me there's like storytelling behind the pictures and the photographer that got me wanting to buy the pieces um and that they're but to your point like i could also maybe see them on the web or see them on instagram or whatever so it's like that this the mechanism of nfts now can get you paid on your photography work but then you could probably speak to this too but as a collector and then it actually taking off to have the buyers and everything that's that's that's what i'm kind of like what boy are watching this happening um i love photography nfts because that to me uh after natively digital art and arguably photography is like an anal a hybrid analog uh digital art form it's such a great use case for a blockchain and it's such a great use case for this technology um something i've worked with tons of photographers in my final career and something that i would urge people to think about in in art and creativity and blockchain is that the art of of painting and sculpture is thousands and thousands of years old and then the photography as an art as a thing is a little over 100 years old uh in the 1970s fine art photographers were still fighting to be called fine artists and weren't and weren't considered as such so that art form is like in its it's like barely if if painting is an adult photography is like a toddler and it's just coming of age and we oftentimes think about photography as a thing that happens on a print but to your point instagram the internet has taught us that photography can be enjoyed not as a print it's just not collectible but suddenly you have a blockchain you have an nft and you can add scarcity and collectibility to digital to digital photography um there's a photographer somewhere running around denver right now called dave krugman he's a great he's a great example of this took my picture once yeah like i have i have an original and i'm in it uh he's a great example of this playing out in the real world he he shoots like these rainy dramatic new york city scenes and he tries to keep the raindrops in focus and the background is blurred that is really really nearly impossible to print as a fine art print the lighting is too soft it'll look like crap on an on a beautiful nft display as a digitally native artwork it shines you start to see a whole different element of photography a whole different collectibility and it gets super exciting yeah i just wanted to touch on that it's i feel like photography has kind of evolved from a thing that was more so printed you know and with instagram and technology it's shifting to more of digital like if you think of photos in a sense you more so think of looking them on your phone and not printing them or having them be a physical piece and i think like you said it's photography art fine art photography still in its infancy um and through nfts it'll start to grow up and get it could be renaissance yeah it could be huge yeah i love it too because what i think about when i think about all this stuff not from like the whole you know flipper thing but as a collector and an art collector that like i have these actually they're from the 70s these fine art photography on my wall and i thought well if somebody wants to offer me like 15 times what's this worth i'll sell it right off my wall in the nice frame i bought um so if you do collect and want to like sell or you know your your work as a collector you know and flip it and the piece goes back to the originator um the web in general like the web you know web one two allows you to have a collector and a buyer from anywhere and like maybe not the gallery per se in person right and then the web three piece of it all is the artist still gets paid on these things uh i think we're getting there i think um some of the smart contracts we have are properly taking the cut that's supposed to happen and properly um doing most of the work i think there's still a ways to go in guaranteeing the delivery of the royalty in a decentralized way and i think some of the things that we're seeing with the nft display companies that are starting to think about hardware on the display and software in the display maybe there's software that hooks into marketplaces and somebody could sell their art literally off their wall if it's on their display and it goes somewhere else but i i do think there's still more work to do to guarantee the delivery of the royalty in a decentralized way i agree with that i agree with that i see you nodding down there anything you want to add in um and you can even change the subject if you want i don't have to moderate completely i like your moderation though um i think um yeah i think where my head goes is it's back to community and that idea of communities of collectors are a really interesting piece here too i think like um thinking not just about um communities of artists which i think are that's that's a long there's a long road there um but even for you as a collector of like of modern photographer you know of fine photography um that's something that really like web 1 and web 2 helped empower was the ability to connect with other people who care about what you care about i think what's interesting now is the ability to build digital communities that have a financialized connection as well like you can actually kind of co-invest with other people in projects that you believe in um which is new and and different and really exciting that's pretty cool actually i just remember yeah to your point i like own a few shares of a warhawk so then that opens up this to that to me it's like a financial mechanism like okay that a different a different round of people can own you know fractionalized piece of this art that i probably wouldn't buy warhol unless i was a multi-multi-multi-millionaire as an investment piece right but now i can own even a bunch of shares of one you know and get into that investment class of people with fractionalized ownership it's so funny when i started my career in fine art and i i would go to like sotheby's and christie's and suggest that you know i had like three clients that wanted to go in together in a basquiat and flip it i would get like shoot out of the room like they would be like you can't this isn't an ass it's not a tradable asset out of here and now today christies and sotheby's and all these things are all these places are really embracing this financialization which um which is pretty neat i think it's cool and and i think and i think you're right that there's we're not none of what we're talking about on stage today is brand spanking new web one web two it's always been about finding how you other other communities that care about the same things you do and the financialization piece is where it gets interesting i love social tokens as well because you can start exploring things like earn to publish or publish to earn rather play to earn and i think we're talking about creators like fine artists photographers musicians uh i think we haven't even scratched the surface of content writers that can start publishing to earn and earning in you know earning in micro transactions in real time for contributing content that people find interesting so on that i think the world is full of like brilliant creators who are not themselves marketers who are not social media managers who are not digital publishers and the ability for these creators to reward the people who are contributing to what they're building in a token that's theirs and something that's that they're helping build um is really stellar and i think it connects to the dao space and the movement that's happening there but even the ability for that to center around one individual and for that person to be able to tap graphic designers as they need it something we see at rally is you know the people who are coming in and looking to launch tokens they're not um if you're a professional streamer you're not a maybe a graphic designer you're not maybe a social media manager and the ability um to to tap people from their community to help them build that token gated discord to help them build their social media following is really um stellar it does take a village and the ability to reward that village through your own social token is pretty stellar yeah i like that then you you have a like because i totally agree with that i was talking about that once before it's like an artist now has to be a marketer as well to have their work right or but now what i am liking about some of the platforms that you know the marketplaces is that if they've if it's a curated one then they've done a lot of the marketing and if i'm a collector on wherever then i'm like okay well this has been curated i can read about you know it's just all set up nicely for me to then decide you know about the work and all that um but it's really interesting so yeah getting into like the future of this stuff right so it's like the social tokens dows you just reminded me i was saying there's this project there's a couple projects doing this this but there's one i love them wow pixies and you know female focus but they are a dow and also buying other collections and art for their doubt and they all vote on it and there's a submission process and i just think it's super interesting and then it becomes like community on community like really good vibes here's the question for you actually because i think i'd like to know this i think you might like to know this but in a direct to consumer world and you know now artists have to be marketers or maybe don't like we ask ourselves all the time like at block party what why are we here what what is the role of the platform when a creator can go and mint themselves and market themselves what value can we add and well i'd rather ask you like you're a photographer what value can can platforms add to you as a creator so um like you were saying earlier um some people might not if you're a photographer you might not be a social media marketer or a business person and your focus is on taking the photos i think platforms can really help creators by making onboarding quite simple and explaining the tech and explaining how someone might be able to build a community or build the ecosystem and and informing them that there are certain steps that should be taken and kind of just being being there for them as a platform with maybe some marketing or explaining to these artists what a social token might be or just kind of informing them because if you don't know if you're not aware of how to create a community you're not going to create a community if you're not aware of how social tokens work you're not going to be able to get into that so it's like me i'm young and i'm in web 3 and into crypto so i have an understanding but what if someone someone's father who's been a photographer for 40 years wants to get in to to your platform you know how would someone like that be able to just log in and get started within a day or two is kind of the solution or the question i guess no i mean that's that's um that's good to know because we like we find that we work with a lot of like first time like maybe established artists doing their first couple of nfts and then once they figure it out they're like well what do i need a platform for right right right i got manifold i got i'm gonna do this myself right and actually i super support that you know i super support like once the artist is like gets matriculates from 101 to 201 to 301 is like oh i got this because that that's really what like self-sovereignty is all about in this space i think um at rally the the way that we're thinking about it one is that smooth on-ramp from web 2 to web3 like kind of sitting as that intermediary so we know that the next million people who uh who get a wallet um we need to help bring them kind of into that ecosystem with that smooth ramp and that applies to both the creators who were helping support on the platform but also their fans you know we need to figure out how to make sure that we're supporting creators with tools to educate their fans around what all of this is and what all this means um the other pieces though that we're able to provide are like liquidity so actually making the token worth something out of the gate and a token bonding curve that kind of keeps the price managed i would say generally the other piece is abundant utility and that's really what we're pushing towards as we look at 2022 is building a ton of utility for our social tokens and nfts through our third-party ecosystem and that's really like working with developers to help build token gating mechanisms for wordpress for zoom calls you know the ability to kind of make nfts which i think right now so much of the discourse is around the aesthetic or the rarity um to instead make it something that provides utility unlike anything else that we can kind of have transferable utility is a really powerful tool and something that we're really bullish on at rally so awesome so i got the i got the two minute warning so i want to i want to just like almost wrap this up can you guys hear me all of a sudden i don't feel like my mic's working um i can hear you you can hear can you guys hear me hello they turned down our mics it's time to go um so i heard on a panel one of the days here that there's something like we have two minutes left so we're gonna wrap but um there's something like 400 000 active nft wallets three million total so to me that number's low and there's just so much more coming and the future of this stuff it's like still so early i'm so in it sometimes it's but it's just nice to like get a broad perspective and even have this conversation so to me my takeaway for anybody is just like we're early it's young um even it's amazing that there's like 11 000 plus people you know at this conference i know it's not all for nfts but we're packed in here on a saturday so i'm just like really psyched about where all this is going and it's just fun to learn with each other just want to add on to that it's like if you're here right now like you said you are so early and like in this space you kind of have to be active all the time engaging and it's nice sometimes to take a step back and realize how early we are it's almost like not that i was born or here for it but the development of the first web one you know all the companies that were here when it first started how many of them are gone now and we are so early we're 10 15 years ahead of our time and it's it's gonna be fun to watch all this develop yeah yeah for uh for those of us that have that have been in the crypto space since like the early 2010s or whatever we always talk about mass adoption and the creator economy and nfts are are truly where that's happening uh because we're privileged to work with warner music we talked to some like the biggest artists back in like june and they were asking what are nfts and we had that conversation in june we're like follow this stuff here's some resources three months later they come back to us with ideas like it's kind of it's kind of nuts where somebody you hear on the radio is called is like wait here's my idea of how to use a blockchain and that to me that's a major mass adoption event and the audiences that they bring onboarding into our space and i love the idea of us being able to capture the love that people already feel for for whoever they're a fan of um we don't need to generate that love that already exists it's just up to us to help figure out a new way to for um consumers to show it to onboard them well thank you guys so much thank you guys as well thank you all