NFT's Building Blocks - Panel featuring Chloe Lewis , Jimmy McNelis, Jonathan Victo and more...

thank you thank you uh so yes my name is chloe lewis i'm here today with these wonderful people uh to talk about nfts uh as building blocks um you know there's the meme going around of course that you know we're just all talking about jpegs of course but these jpegs are starting to be used as a standard and securing a lot of value being used by many different projects and we have a wonderful assortment of people here that use entities in a variety of ways so the first question i have everyone here is who are you guys what do you guys do and potentially what part of building nfts do you work on so we can start at the end with jimmy let's go ahead hey everyone i'm uh jimmy with a1.eth uh i am an avid nft collector myself i've been collecting entities since 2017 when crypto kitties launched um and then i also started building in the space in 2019 launched avastar's in 2020 and then uh last year uh began working um on our platform for ap our minting platform which is an api called nameless um and you may be familiar with some of the projects we've done like v friends um and natively digital with sotheby's and then most recently we did a really great project in new york city called fly fish club which uh funded a restaurant based off an nft sale and holding those nfts gives you membership and the right to go and have an omakase meal on a occasional basis and you can lease and rent out your membership so other people can go enjoy that so i've gone from collector to builder and i still am a very avid collector in the space very cool thank you very much uh we'll just keep going down the line uh so for free uh yeah sure uh my name is alex and i'm a co-founder and cto at zirian and zirian is a product which is your kind of home page from interviewers we are like showing you all your positions across different chains across different protocols so we started this like simple defy talking tracker but now we like support pretty much anything out there including your nft collections and like last year people like pushing a lot trying to make nfc support also as good as we can so i believe like right now be like one of the best places to like actually view your own nft collection also track your friends track some celebrities track some influencers just add their addresses and see like what kind of entities they're collecting we're also trying to make it more interactive we like sending you some like push notifications when someone on your follow list is buying something so you can kind of track that we also have some sweet widgets where you can just like use your nft like let's say it's a clock face on your apple watch and things like that so we are like pretty much excited a lot about the space and i guess that's why we're here to talk about nfts as well awesome thank you so much alex uh and we keep going down the line hey how's it going um my name is kasmir i am a blockchain engineer and a rapper um i invented the first generative sneaker nft project on ethereum called sneaker cred in 2020. um jimmy was vouching for it this predates nike my patent predates nike all of my prior work predates nike and i hold a patent for a digital fashion on the blockchain and this this year i'm presenting um a project i launched on scale called trap chain and it's basically a music distribution service for indie trappers indie reggae thon artists and the afrobeat artists so we're like reaching the part of the world that's normally blanked out on everybody's maps um so yeah we launched on scale in 2021 and um yeah just happy to be on this panel with such dope folks what's up jamie eve awesome thank you cash uh and we'll keep going down hey everybody my name is jonathan victor i work at protocol labs i lead bd work across ipfs and falcoin so really just in the decentralized storage space and making sure content doesn't disappear obviously a crucial component for nfts awesome thank you very much so we have avid collectors and builders we have folks that make sure that we can actually see the data that we are collecting we have um super creative uh builders in the space who are first to the trends uh and those are making sure the data is actually available uh for these projects so thank you so much to everyone here for what you're building so now we're going to get a little out of maybe what you're doing individually and hopefully into what you're hearing from your community so we're going to start here actually at the data availability side of things is there anything specifically that you're hearing from community members whether it's developers builders hopefully some builders in the space since we're at a hackathon when it comes to data availability choosing what data availability platform to use um are there any is there any alpha there uh what can you tell us about that yeah that's a great question um i think the things that have been coming up the most is as nfts have broken much more mainstream especially in the last year is really just the creativity of what do people want nfts to actually represent and so when we start thinking about nfts as digital objects not necessarily just images by themselves you start seeing things like ar and vr assets videos like things that are heavier and harder to store directly on chain and so especially for those sorts of things it requires then thinking through how do you create like a verifiable chain of trust so that you make sure that content doesn't disappear and so in our ecosystem for folks who aren't familiar ipfs is one protocol ipfs is not a blockchain by itself but it allows you to store and retrieve content based on a verifiable fingerprint of the content itself and especially for nfts that can be powerful to make sure that your nft is linking to some specific asset regardless of where it is but it also gives you the power to store it in as many different places as you want whether that's on your local computer whether it's on a cloud server whether it's on decentralized storage networks ipfs is just this global addressing layer which allows you to future proof uh the existence and the the ability to serve that content from even if you migrate to different storage layers in the future and then filecoin just as a complement to that to say how do you enable like large-scale storage and do it for super cheap with really strong guarantees those are sort of the themes that we're seeing and especially with gaming this has been the most important thing and around performance and how you can actually use ipfs and it's like cids to better like hack performance to be able to stream things and give like a web 2 experience while also having it be available over decentralized networks okay so from your community specifically the ability to use these web three assets but provide web to experiences has been like what the community has been really looking for from what you're able to offer yeah and i would say like so because we build like storage protocols a lot of the people that are in our community are the developers the builders the people who are enabling other creators to come into the space and so especially with gaming the things that people are looking at are just trying to say how do we actually take this to like much more immersive experiences things that hopefully resemble like games that you normally would buy for like your xbox or playstation things like that and so i think that requires then engineering things at a scale which honestly for web3 is still pushing boundaries uh when we're thinking about nfts and like what is the speed of delivery when we're talking about even for the mints how do we get the cost as low as possible in order to be able to say we have a billion game objects that are all nfts it really changes sort of like the dynamics there makes sense so i want to skip over to alex now if possible to speak about now you have i'm sure that as nfts have become more mainstream your communities that you're involved with have gotten much larger and they as you were saying john they expect a web to experience even if you're displaying web3 assets across multiple chains defy assets farms and whatever else has there been a big pain point with interfacing with the community and what they've wanted are there is there something that you could you could snap your fingers today and solve for the community with with just with dashboard display what would that be for the community uh yeah sure i mean there's definitely a lot of demand from people who just want to have simple tools where they can just like see their collections see like other people collections as well and we're just like trying to be one of those and i guess like the biggest pain that i can think of when it comes to that is actually discovery plus like some sort of rating systems because that's been like super hard for most of the people who try to get involved into like nfts like just to understand what is out there like obviously everyone knows they're like lots of scam projects that obviously you don't want people to buy those and like just like the information is super scattered like you need to be like on 10 different discord channels you need to like be on twitter 24 7 just like trying to understand what's going on and just like to understand like if actually what you are buying is it like i mean i'm not talking if it's going to be worthless or not like that can happen even with legitimate actions but at least like to know that it's not some complete scam or whatever just like the discovery plus like rating problem i think is where like interfaces like us are pretty well positioned to solve that to just like help users to navigate the space just like help them to find the right information and find them to like evaluate like what they're gonna purchase and i guess things like that are like super painful right now and hopefully they can be resolved in some near future makes a lot of sense so if you're hacking this weekend uh you heard it here first so one of the largest pain points is the discovery of nfts as well on various blockchains so uh hopefully we can get some more hackers working on that uh so going over to cashmere uh would love to hear as a builder in the space who's probably interfacing with different types of file storage different data availability layers different dashboards and we're going to go over soon as a collector side um but as you interface with your community you're building on scale it's a different evm uh compatible blockchain from what i understand uh but it might you might not be interfacing with as many tools that are available to certain other platforms so how has that been interfacing with your community building on scale a lot of what we have to do is actually build for our market because on 360 and ft we met mp4s and on most wallets they don't display mp4s as we found so when we did our jobs like it became very apparent we had to create our own wallet that was like a mp4 player so like that's what we're doing in development and um another thing that really kind of like sticks out is our approach to music and ft's like we do talking curated playlists so it's like essentially you can go and like you know post up your music like simple dashboard you can do upload file upload you can upload as many different um media types as possible like if you want to do jpegs or gifs or mp4s um ultimately that has to be like going through the mixture mastering process and the metadata specific to what we're doing you don't mind me asking uh do you already have a data availability data availability protocol that you're using that you've chosen for your platform or i'm down to check out i mean ultimately whatever we can do to like make the experience as close to what users are dealing with now with web 2 like with youtube music spotify stuff like that even in web3 space like you know audiences on um ethereum and stuff like that so i mean we look to be competitive and also be like integrating um as far as like making sure that folks can get the experience that they're expecting whatever does the job for the community the most efficiently which hopefully should be the answer uh so jimmy really want to hear from you as a collector uh someone who's probably using probably collecting nfts that have a variety of different data availability uh backgrounds and uh i know i would want to go to the next question with you um and i really want to dig into like what makes a good nft i know i know we talked about it before but it is a question that a lot of you know we hear about nfts this weekend this week and every single day all the time everyone who knows that a code anything is trying to build an nfu platform there's different blockchains to build on there's different data there's so much to taco but also as a collector now there's even more um so i'd like to hear from you on that yeah so i mean there's a lot that goes into what makes a good nft uh the first thing that comes to mind when when you ask me that is like the technical specs of an nft is some of what we're talking about here like having the data stored somewhere that's uh trustless decentralized distributed combination of those things ipfs is a great starting point for that fingerprint and then my company what we do generally is we'll either store the metadata directly on the ethereum blockchain as efficiently as possible and for larger files we'll actually use ipfs and then pin um the data to arweave which is you know basically storing it for 200 years of availability so this stuff is then and that's a blockchain in itself so for me a good nft is entirely on chain one of the main street stream arguments that we hear right now that's out there is like why am i collecting why am i paying for a url and that's a valid concern that i had four years ago when i started collecting cryptokitties they didn't use ipfs and most of the information about the cryptokitties is served directly on their website um so i set out with avistar as my project to make sure that this stuff was available um uh on the chain as well like we for avistars we actually did provide a url to our website but you could reconstruct the entirety of what's provided in that url directly from the chain these days um ourselves and some other nft creators are actually finding ways to uh replace that url with a like in our case like i think a base 32 or base64 base64 um code that can actually render um in real time based off of the data and output that replaces the need for that token uri to go outside of the blockchain so for for me a good nft is entirely unchained and trustless but that doesn't there's there's a lot that more that goes into that um you know a good nft um has uh um has characteristics beyond that like the reason that you want this information on chain and trustless is so that you can interact with it in a composable way we haven't seen too much cross-project composability come online yet with nfts but if you imagine that the information is trustless and available then our systems that can interact with it you don't need the trust of trusting a corporation and what's behind that url um you could take for example you know to use my own project as an example avastar's the traits are stored on chain um and you could take those traits and go create a new nft because you hold this a project could say okay you have these 12 traits and an avistar we're going to use those traits to create this new nft and through the blockchain you can actually prove then the trustless nature of how that was created because you own a previous nft that might not be a great example but if you imagine like it makes a lot of sense though because i mean you were even talking just now about having nfts to get into restaurants for example yeah and i mean in my opinion that's a great example of how you need to have some sort of available data some part of that needs to be on chain or else people are going to be either let me do a specific example there right like let's say i don't know what the exact specs are but let's say once a month you can go to that restaurant and eat well people can lease or lend lend these nfts as well but if they've already eaten that month if they've already used it that month you would want that to be recorded on chain so that you know if it's available or not to be used so i think that's really important as well because most people i know i mean i'm running a couple of nodes at home but most people are not running their own nodes they're not on ipfs nodes their own layer 1 nodes or what layer 2 wherever their nft may live so then it becomes important for dashboards to ensure that this data is shown so i'd love to hear from alex now and kind of dig deeper into um first of all maybe we can get some mp4 stuff going on on xerion which would be great but when it comes to usability of nfts are there any ways that you're thinking about can we not just display the data and not just to provide discoverability but you know we can use them for you know uh watch interfaces which is super cool is there going to be ways eventually to be able to use your nfts through this dashboard this one location where you can see all your d5 protocol assets all your yield farming assets and all your nfts in one spot uh yeah sure so there are kind of a few questions at the same time like you start one by one uh well i guess like when it comes to like different formats of data like mp4s etc i think that's pretty exciting and then all just comes down to how it can be stored and that's like pretty challenging because like especially like right now a lot of generative nfts are super popular or like even nfts like like evolve over time like getting some attributes in the future so like people are trying to experiment with like some kind of evolving nfts and obviously it's not just like a static image that you can store on ipfs and then serve forever like for the next hundred years but it's some dynamic content that you are trying to incorporate into that like one nft and then it just becomes a lot more technically challenging to store such information like somewhere like where it's like still available and like truly decentralized and not just like served from like some centralized server what happens pretty often these days and i guess there's just like a lot of like technical challenges to be solved there and i guess when it comes to like this kind of utility that you will like asking me like in the next question i think like honestly i feel like your nft collection can just like eventually become your sort of like identity because like a lot of people like this like co-apps that you go to different events you just like collect them they kind of prove that you've been like in the space in a while attended like some def con 2017 whatever so that like digital asset that you have it's not just some random jpeg but it's also like part of your like identity that like kind of your future like metavirus passports whatever and i think like lots of the things are going to become more and more useful and also like you can just like look at the collection of a person and based on that you can like already come to certain conclusions and i can imagine people building like some credit scores maybe like things like that just purely looking at the nfts that people halt and using that as they're like some sort of like virtual identity i love that you went there so i'm going to have to pose another question about i'm going to skip over a question i had but about like scan uh spam nfts uh so for example as we go to different blockchains we're in this in my opinion a multi-chain present the bridges might not be perfect but we many of us here probably use multiple different blockchains i collect nfts at least on ethereum and a few other blockchains and a lot of those blockchains might have fees low enough where you might receive lots of spam and it might be a dashboard might be a great place to potentially allow some of that social scoring to happen because you can hopefully uh flag down a lot of that spam and have it not even show on a platform so is is spam something you're looking at already to just have like an algorithm or some way the community might be able to like you're the expert so i want to just get that in there real quick yeah sure i mean that's a really good question because like spam indeed is like is a very big problem like you're trying to buy some nfc and then you receive five more films like some random project that you don't know about and i guess like for us which are like somewhat centralized dashboards like with like the team behind i think it's a very fine line where like we obviously don't want to display all the spam nfts to people but at the same time we don't want to censor that so i personally believe like that the only way to go there is to actually build some community kind of ratings and that what i was talking about like a little earlier so we need to allow users to rate that allow people to build sort of like rating systems and it should be like i don't know like it should be somewhat automated but at the same time it's very important to make sure that we as a company don't really play an active role in that because if we do that then it can very easily become censorship which we definitely want to avoid just like a very fine line between like terrain but at the same time filtering out like who decides what is spam at the end of the day i suppose um so i'll have a question for anybody here uh to answer uh but in this multi-chain present uh hopefully we again have many developers in the room who are hacking away at projects now and i mean on these boards you could see many different blockchains to choose from many are evm compatible so you can fork away your favorite nft platform and start deploying many are not evm compatible but i mean most chains these days you can build nfts on you can plug into ipfs on or r weave or use file coin services so is like is there any like best practices or first thoughts when a project or developer or artist is thinking about like how do i get started maybe we can go to jimmy at the end maybe as a collector then i'd love to hear from cash as a project builder getting started as a collector yeah like it's been there's so many changes it was easier when i started collecting because there was like crypto kitties and crypto punks so it's like pick your poison um now it's i i am in all of the collectors and their ability to uncover new projects and keep up with everything because it's absolutely bonkers um i rely on um i advocate for finding your your mastermind group and a mastermind group's like a group of like let's say like 10 to 15 individuals that um are all like together and communicating um around the topic like nfts but we're all like forging our own paths and figuring out what's important to us and then we share the most critical information back into the groups and um we learn together through that process so a lot of that makes a lot of sense i'm going to have to i would really want to hear from cash on the exact same topic so i was just going to like jump on jimmy's bandwagon because he was one of the first collectors for sneaker cred like when we launched sneaker credit it was basically an idea i had that what if you can take the sneakers out of nba 2k and be able to like make those as nfts so i thought that was pretty executable from a smart contract standpoint and from there i just like started gathering other folks who were technical and like we just would go to hackathons and hack and then we would build different pieces some pieces um are still in development like um some ar components lots of stuff to keep building on so join community groups to help you learn about what's going on and hack away and learn from the developers in the community uh so we're gonna we have some time for some questions so if anyone does have any questions i guess the mic is down there if you have any questions for any of these okay we have one in the front thank you are there any good newsletters or something for people who love nfts but hate discord and like get overwhelmed and immediately quit okay i mean we can get the answer right here i mean if someone has the answer on the mic let's decentralize the answer here who's reading all the nft newsletters i don't want to shoe but nameless so we have like the name drop newsletter and also we have our own uh nft economist who is preparing metanomics which is like what is happening in in the nft space really really dissected from an economical point of view so nameless is where we go for not having to be in a thousand discords or for two different types of uh you know information awesome lots of information there any other questions when they're in the middle thank you so i um have a friend who works for a pretty well known symphony and they've been hit pretty hard by the pandemic and um i was talking about the conference i'm going to is oh what's that and as we started talking and then we started talking about you know their fundraising obviously i said well maybe you could take some of your recorded performances and mint these into nfts and he's like oh you know we went through that and uh and then i didn't know where to send them i'm you know a noob to the space where can someone go that isn't a programmer not web three in depth and start minting um some intellectual property that they have 360 nft dot io there you go shameless plug love it chilling i mean i they don't make good nfts but the easiest way probably to get started is just on openc just go and create a storefront and get started there and experiment there yeah you're not going to really get on-chain storage they can provide you with a ipfs and things like that like later down the line you can get started basically for free there's a variety of different uh minting options out there but i would say like openc's probably the best place to get started for somebody that's brand new and has no idea what's going on oh yeah so like what i'm encouraging your your your folks would end up minting on an open sheet open c shared storefront contract and the token itself is an empty vessel you can't even tell like where the it and it's all like on their own database instead of stored so um it would just be a first foray into it um we're building an api based solution for developers to be able to win nfts um i know manifold xyz has a contract that you can deploy and look into and i assume they're at least going to use ipfs if not even some stronger stuff but there are a variety of things it's just first people need to understand what an nft is and the power of it and everything else and then they can start to worry a little bit like if they're just dabbling and getting started they don't have to go full hardcore they can just like prove out that it's going to be a good use case for what they're trying to do first and not spend a lot of money trying to to prove that out maybe just to add on there if you do it on open z after you mint so if it'll normally just do like the centralized url there's like a freeze metadata button that you can push and that'll push it to like ipfs and filecoin all right so we have time for one more question more awesome any more questions from the group so nfts oh there we go awesome yeah do you have any recommendations for on chain or next best options for storage of large file solutions like 3d files um larger videos etc for assets yeah what we do is we we pin we hash it on ipfs and then we pin it to rwev it's ar weave it's a fairly inexpensive permanent storage solution um so that's basically the approach we take and i don't think there's necessarily a hard cap limit on the file size there we've dealt with some pretty large files the other thing i would point out though is if you're going to store big files i would treat this as a backup and not as a way to serve that information to your customers you're going to want to have some like sort of cdn or something in place to serve the media on your website awesome thank you so much everyone for all the questions and for coming out and hopefully you learned a little more about how nfts can be used as building blocks and some best practices when building all right