Mint Yourself: How NFTs Will Save Social Networks with Don Thibeau

been lucky enough to spend my whole career in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space and across the board whether it was while building IBM blockchain hideera hashgraph or more what I've found is that continuously it's the communities around these networks and applications that actually give them value speculative trading can be a reflection of that value but ultimately it's the means by which people engage with one another through this new asset class that has driven the growth and innovation in the space to date Now, I don't think I need to spend a lot of time on this, especially with this crowd about why NFTTS are so important, but I really like to center on that opportunity beyond crypto. There is a shift to every everyone and everything becoming a brand. Whether you're a YouTube creator, whether you're a product company selling a pair of shoes, how you articulate your value proposition to the world on social channels, through financial assets, and more is what will define how you engage with that world. And engaged communities are what make brands successful. I like to say that it's not just important that Pelaton sells a bike to an individual, but it's important that they have an individual who participates in the classes, watches their spot on the leaderboard, and continues to come back to that brand as a means to engage with the community.

And what more and more brands are recognizing is that NFTts are the best way to facilitate this type of community engagement. Whether you're talking about something like a PFP collection, an access pass to an event, an NFT that represents your ticket, the NFTts will increasingly be the means by which brands are engaging with their communities. But when we started with our journey in building NFT.com uh about a year ago, we really identified three problems in the market that were impeding growth of the NFT space as a whole. First and most importantly, social data is limited.

Pseudonymity and onchain addresses have gotten us this far and centered us on the idea of self-s sovereign identity. But from both an individual and a brand perspective, we need to reintroduce those concepts of individual identity back into the onchain world. As I like to say, if I'm the Indiana Pacers, I don't necessarily want to sell an NFT to 0X, AB7, whatever. I want to sell it to Don because I may or may not have gone to a Taylor Swift concert at their venue and bought 10 pink shirts. And that type of recurring engagement wi between a brand and their customer is the reason why they continue to flock to the space.

Now the second challenge though is that access is complex. Many of us here are more than comfortable leveraging self-custodied wallets across multiple browser extensions to create an address, get ETH, buy an NFT, take that over to Discord, comment on some stuff in Twitter, and then keep going on with our day. But the majority of users who are coming to the space for the first time are afraid of that. It's confusing. It's complex, and it prevents them actually joining the NFT space as a whole.

And last but not least, liquidity continues to fragment. Not only are there 80 plus cryptonnative NFT marketplaces, those are scattered across chains. And as more brands come to the space, like Reddit for example, they're doing so by launching their own marketplaces. I think Rarable's offering just before this is a great example that brands and communities should launch their own marketplaces. But we need to recognize that that will continue to introduce that fragmentation of liquidity into the space.

So, it's with NFT these problems in mind that we built NFT.com and first said to ourselves, why do it in the same way that caused all of these centralized institutions to exploit our data, capture attention, and begin to charge us money, you know, even for the things that we don't know about. And that was really the vision behind NFT.com. We wanted to start first and foremost with building a platform that gave the users of that platform the ability to create their own identity that is itself an NFT.

That NFT gives the holder access to their unique URL, whether that's nft.com/don/board or whatever URL name you want to come up with. so that from the moment you join our platform, you are doing so in a way where you are in control of your own identity and your own profile. But we didn't want to stop there. So the public beta that we launched just about a week ago for NFT.

com provided three features for people who were creating their profiles on NFT.com. It was first a social profile like Instagram where you can display your NFTts from across your Ethereum addresses or you could configure it to display your NFT collection if you want to promote it to your user base in an accessible human readable URL at nft.com/youcolction name. We built a discovery capability so that new users could come to the NFT space not knowing which collection they want to learn from or participate in and they could search through different collections filtering on type, price, you name it to figure out where and how they wanted to start to build their NFT collection.

And lastly, we built in that capability of trading not only through our own native marketplace, but also by building a marketplace aggregator so that you can access NFTts wherever those NFTts exist, whether that's across cryptonnative marketplaces like OpenC and Looks Rare or even in the future any brand marketplace that comes to market. But now I will enter in my admittedly somewhat controversial statement and that's that the marketplace does not matter for NFTTS. And although we really speculate in terms of users and volume for trading NFTts from our perspective, it is far more important that we create a recurring engaged user base than attain trading volume in the marketplace. And so to that end, our goal with NFT.com is to give holders of profiles the same types of benefits you would get with something like Amazon Prime.

Not only can you create that own social profile, but you get no trading fees on the NFT.com marketplace, much like you might save trading fees in Amazon with Amazon Prime. We give you the ability to start to trade like the pros. When we reintroduce social identity to the onchain world, you can see who's buying which collection. Who are the people that you respect because you like their artistic eye or maybe they've just been flipping very profitably.

And now you can begin to engage and learn from that that that identity. There's also then the ability to engage with one another. Starting with one of our next releases, you'll be able to do things like like, and eventually comment, follow, or directly offer to buy NFTts from different NFT profiles. So moving from a generic marketplace of liquidity to actually a peer-to-peer marketplace where you're engaging with the participants in an NFT community rather than just speculating on tokens like we see in the DeFi space. And lastly, we want it to also be a gateway to exclusive features, but also early access to new drops.

Often people are finding themselves too late to the game when a new NFT collection is created. And we see the profile as a means to really bring those types of exclusive benefits to a community of users that cares about NFTTS and wants to find the best way to grow their collection. Now, we started our journey relatively recently ago, about a year ago, and from the jump, we wanted to actually launch the product and build the product with a community in mind. So, we did a first NFT drop um which allowed about 4,000 people to join our community of early private beta users who helped provide direction and feedback into the platform as we've been on our development journey. This group of users has created nearly 10,000 NFT profiles.

So, just sitting at dinner at night, uh some people were a bit frustrated because they found their first name might have already been minted. So, you know, make make sure to check yours out. but really have started to prove out this model of a user controlled network for building NFT communities as something that can be incredibly valuable. We've had over 114,000 unique wallet connections and with our private or our public beta launch um started to introduce our first set of collection partners who saw the value of having a one-stop shop for promoting their NFT collection and wanted to better engage their NFT communities. So that was teams like Unstoppable Domains in the web 3 space, Supernormal, Crypto Dads, but also new brands like Allure Bridals who wants to start creating NFTts for wedding dresses and want to do so in a way which puts social network effects first.

But we're not going to stop there. And I like to think of our road map as really centering on three core themes to continue to drive growth, not of just NFT.com, but the space as a whole. And that's centered around making it easy to join, adding things like card payment to buy your NFT profile or to buy NFTts to add to your collection. Creating an onboarding experience that's like building an Instagram profile instead of setting up your own self-custodied multikey wallet system.

Second, then we want to continue to give a users a reason to stay. As I mentioned, for us it's all about driving recurring engagement and value on the platform. and that's doing things that are fun, being able to follow different crypto collectors that you like, finding different collections that you might want to add to yours. Um, and really returning that engagement socially back to the NFT space. And last, but of course not least, um, we want to take users wherever they want to go.

And that means to whichever NFT collection, whichever NFT marketplace, and even whichever chain they want to be interacting with. As a brand like NFT.com, it's important for us that we allow users to get access to NFTts wherever those NFTts exist. So, how can you get involved? Whether you're here as just somebody who's building their NFT gallery, creating your own collection, maybe you're actually issuing your own marketplace, you can join us in this journey by first, of course, creating your profile, going to nft.

com/youu to get that unique username. You can issue and promote your collection with that username, whether you want it again to be your personal gallery or there to promote the collections that you're creating. And of course, start to buy your first NFT. Find a community that interests you that has emissions that that you're aligned to and buy that NFT to start growing your collection. Of course, we're also happy to talk to anybody on the infrastructure side out there.

Again, whether you're launching your own marketplace, your own chain, your own wallet, and would love to explore how we can work together to really help bring our NFT.com community to yours and allowing them to access NFTs wherever those NFTs exist. So I'll end here ultimately saying that for us it's most important that you as the individual, the participant in this community can create a social presence and identity that you own and you control. Um so we're very excited to to have you all join us. Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Don. Uh do you want to take a couple questions? We got some time. Any questions in the audience for Don?

Any at all? Okay. Well, all good. Thank you very much, Don. Thank you, everybody.

Have a great rest of your conference.