Beyond Hype Where Are NFT's Headed Matt Medved; gmoney; Swan Sit; Alex Atallah OpenSea, Alex Saln

hi everyone uh i am matt medved uh co-founder and ceo of nft now uh the premier publication for nft coverage and curation and we have an amazing uh panel now uh we have gmail up here i'm right here behind you oh good okay we're waiting for a chair hold on hold on no i'm i'm gonna be off stage because of the camera because of the feed got it got it cool anyway uh we have got the panel um beyond the hype uh where are nfts headed uh and we have incredible panelists to discuss this um so some forward-looking questions uh as we look towards the future so i'm going to begin with a question on use cases because we have all seen an incredible rise in market volume and mainstream attention around popular use cases like digital art digital collectibles now photography music nfts what are for each of you um the most interesting emerging use cases that you're excited about and you could see making a market impact in the near future yeah i'm alex the co-founder of openc and i should we just go around and introduce ourselves first maybe um i'll pass it hi i'm swan sit i'm an advisor to a lot of nft and web 3 companies hi i'm alex co-founder head of product at rareball super excited to be here and i'm gmoney a collector of nfts and all around nft advocate [Applause] thanks for having us here i think it's been pretty surprising how many nfts are these 10 000 profile picture collectibles and they're they're important they're giving people identity in the web three space but i think what we need going forward is nfts that give people access or unique abilities in the internet that they wouldn't have otherwise nfts really provide a brand new way for platforms to share users without having to worry about an api that might go down or access that might expire or assets that might not exist in five years or ten years so like really really cool applications of nfts that i'm seeing now get going that couldn't get enough funding two years ago or didn't have the right team two years ago are doing things like real world items fabrica is doing land titles there are some things are doing truly unlockable content that you cannot unlock unless you own the nf team i just ran into a company called lit protocol that's doing this where you can have actually like images that cannot be seen unless you own the nft or a zoom meeting that you cannot enter unless you match some on-chain condition and then other types of visual nfts that haven't been explored yet so far we have these static and sometimes animated images but what we're missing is much richer visual and uh and auditory experiences um one project that i found that i really really liked is called mona where you explore these 3d rooms and it's kind of like virtual land but it's a room and it's the coolest room ever it just it feels like an art experience that could not exist in the real world and it's truly unique to the digital realm so i think we'll see a lot more experimentation along those lines and i'm that's partly why i'm here at east denver i'm really really excited to see them develop those are great ideas and i want to piggyback on that you mentioned land deeds anything that requires authentication or has data silos in web 2 is super primed for how this will work in web 3. so birth records membership loyalty verification of your education or employment history all those things can be universally done so my background i was in web 2 i was the head of digital marketing at companies like nike and revlon massive data silos and if you buy through a retail partner we have no idea who you are so if i think through not just the collectible parts of nft but if i were still at nike what i would do is the shoe coming off the supply chain i'd put an nfc chip in it into the rubber embedded so you can't get to it now i know exactly where my products are flowing through the supply chain something falls off the back of the truck ends up on the gray market i know which factory which truck distributor it came from then as it sells through maybe it sold through foot locker maybe it sold through nike went through footlocker i have no idea who that customer is but if it's chipped and the customer wants to opt in and scan that i know exactly who they are think about secondary resell markets we don't need goat or stockx anymore the primary manufacturer can have that information and then all the way down to the consumer you know when nike used to nike does these drops the sneakers app every saturday morning 7 a.m pacific right and most people get an l because those shoes are hot drops if you have wealth you're not getting up at 7am on a saturday morning to try to hit refresh 30 times and get an out you're probably buying that shoe for 10x on the secondary market nike has no idea who those consumers are so imagine being able to see in a wallet they have 30 pairs of rare jordans airdrop something start building a relationship so i think it's the new advent of not only d to c true d to c relationships but ownership of consumer data by the consumer your wallet is the biggest representation of who you are and while it's universally accessible and viewable they don't know who you are so if brands do the work of creating enough value for you to want to share your wallet now it's a much more holistic view of consumer data and a much better value exchange because the brands now have to pony up what customers would actually want in order to share that thank you that's a great answer um i wanted to get back to alex you mentioned that nftes are often used as 10 000 items supply pfp and uh actually have a thesis about that that uh what it allows us to have is to have the digital scarcity and that like uh the 2020 was a lot about nft art and then um almost like none of the nft art went up in price sadly uh and the pfp trend one of the foundation of the pfp trend is okay we should have only ten thousand items and uh i think that community is the only scar thing that we have in the metaverse that we can have all all sorts of land all sorts of games all sorts of everything but the people who are doing like job who are pushing something who are advocating or proposing well doing really something um useful uh this or the release car supply and nfts and bfbs they became this like social uh consensus that we will create this artificial artificial scarcity that will like belong to us and then we collectively 10 000 people will go and push this to the other world like we see world of women being like signed up with with hollywood uh we see no clonex uh as interoperable 3d avatar that you can use in multiple games and uh it all represents cultural artifacts that metaverse consists of and that's why they're valuable and so i'm super bullish on 3d avatars that will be interoperable across multiple environments and not exactly 3d and i think the twitter move by enabling you to put nft on avatar is a huge one now like all the other guys will will catch up and we will have interoperable digital identity and then interoperable gaming items interoperable 3d chair that you can move from one game to another i'm excited about all sorts of digital only metaverse native access keys as well but like digital only metaverse native cultural artifacts for nfts yeah and to add to what everybody said i i think everybody brought up very valid points um i've always had the thesis that nfts are the thing that take crypto mainstream which is why i very much have been pushing for mainstream adoption as much as possible so you know at the more people we can educate about the space you get more creativity coming to the space right and so to to build on what swan said i very much think that over the next year or two we're going to see a lot of uh play between the digital space and the physical space and that to me is probably one of the most exciting things because we're not going to be fully digital tomorrow and i think that's a transition that happens over the next 10 to 20 years maybe faster but i very much think that it happens as a gradient over time and because of that you just need to be looking out for these applications and crypto coming into your everyday life in the real world absolutely absolutely the next topic i wanted to discuss um is around usability one of the biggest mainstream uh you know hurdles to mainstream adoption that exists is uh there's no frictionless way to get into this ecosystem how are you thinking about [Music] usability and security from a platform perspective i'd love to hear from both the alex's yeah it is no small secret that usability is tough for nfts like i mean for just kind of a comparison there's less than 10 million nft users probably more like around 6 million to 8 million monthly and that's compared to 1.8 billion monthly gamers in the world so there's a really long way to go um gaming is just you know video games are way more usable in the centralized world um i for one we need we need better games in in the nft space i think we need game studios that are willing to try make errors throw it throw most of it away try again make some errors throw most of it away and continue to iterate and we're seeing some games make a lot of progress in that direction those those applications will bring a lot of mass adoption themselves it it won't necessarily be the marketplaces but the marketplaces have a lot of work to do too um for one keeping users safe is super important and huge shout out to our community for reporting content and for being vigilant um we have a lot of great users doing a lot of good work along with our our support team but what we uh what i think we need is better prioritization of of nfts that that have a lot of skin in the game you know if you if you decentralize your metadata sufficiently and if you you know if your contracts have all the metadata on chain and they cost a lot to deploy then they should be more visible than nfts that cost you know that that were just made um kind of programmatically and without paying anything um there are a lot of a lot of ways to make nfts more like better nfcs more discoverable and on the wallet and fiat flow i think we'll see a lot of really cool developments there this year and next year now that banks and card companies like um like mastercard and visa are getting involved thank you for the question so i think the usability and security are like one of the most important things in the space for everybody who is entering the nft space and security is actually even more important so we the whole 2020 we've been talking about okay uh nfts are hard to use we need on-ramp buy with credit card login with email and password type of usability experience for nfts and then all of a sudden 10 million people learn how to use metamask pretty easily and enjoy their board daves and they put hardware wallets into their computers and enjoy all that stuff so i think uh from the usability standpoint we are more or less okay now from the security it's a little bit worse uh we don't want to have the like ico moment for nfts uh to for nfts to become the like obscene word uh and that's why we should self regulate as a community we should call out projects that are doing like that job alex great suggestion to just elevate those who are committed who have skin in the game because those will be right yeah this one is working so um right now the security uh lays on the marketplace's shoulders a lot so there is no fundamental way to understand which nft collection is like legit and which is not if you're looking only the on-chain data you can have exactly like on-chain copy with another contract and that's why marketplaces are have a blue cheek blue takes yellow tigs for okay this is the legitimate collection we probably need something better than this for the whole community to organize around collections that should be verified that are known to be legitimate uh maybe like talking curated registry or something decentralized there um and security of metadata super important there was several conversations i i think there should be almost like nft preserve metadata project that will have only one task to make sure that ipfs links that are stored inside blockchain as metadata storages are preserved and if anyone in in in town wants to help with that we should coordinate uh so a lot of needs to be done on the security uh rack pools are probably the biggest threat for the mainstream adoption uh i have a lot of friends that are doing cool with nfts and i have a lot of friends who just entered the space and they said oh i bought something hypey and then it went down or it was rugged pool and now i hate nfts gamers hate nfts because they think that maybe another way of big companies to like claim like like put big companies to basically take their money so yeah um i think i i'm a little lost there but i throw a bunch of data points thank you next next topic i want to talk about is um the opportunity that we have when building web 3 and a web 3 future and what a shame it would be if we just simply rebuilt the same hierarchies and inequities that have existed in web 2. so how are each of each of you thinking about building and fostering gender and racial diversity and representation in the nft space well for us it starts with our team uh we have a very strong focus on diversity for our hiring practices in all different parts of open sea um and then it you know we don't we don't really look at that when making decisions about collections um we want diverse content and i think the uh we really want to encourage new groups of people to create nfts um but we you know we want we want nfts to like exist right for what they're showing and and for the communities that they're fostering the great thing about diversity is that it it means there's new communities for nfts that have not been developed yet and every new community if it's 10 even if it's just 10 000 nfts is a is just more growth for the whole space it's like there's nothing but diversity is purely good for the nft space and it's it's a self-fulfilling prophecy where it's just gonna keep uh keep growing and and new groups of people who've never had a community on centralized social media before are going to find it way easier to do with nfts because you know they don't have to worry about about visibility on facebook or twitter or you know or or getting you know some kind of non-preferential treatment um their nfts just speak for themselves and the the comm like every new community it's kind of a tribe that has specific interests that are accelerated now with shared incentives so uh diversity is it's one of the like most beautiful parts of the nft space in comparison to all other types of social media i think it's early but competition's good and we don't like the fang companies of web 2 because they own all of our data but in web 3 while the data is more accessible and universal we still have very concentrated centers of power in our oligopolies i'm not going to fault these guys they've built incredible platforms that are easy to use but if we want to expand and diversify we have to challenge ourselves to not always go to the easiest simplest solution or to take part in building the future that we want to be a part of beyond that just like any new technology or movement you're brought in generally by someone who looks or sounds like you right the information's available we could google it but you start getting interested when someone you trust brings you in so we have to develop different pockets and avenues of bringing people who don't like look like us into this area so i'm one of the founding members of bffs brit morin jamie schmidt tyra banks gwyneth paltrow mila kunis cat cole a bunch of women from all walks of life there's 70 of us and it's an organization dedicated towards bringing in women and gender non-binary people for access and education we're all kind of doing it every day but when you have a movement with big names willing to donate their platform their time their wealth to it then you start actually making a difference so having organizations and groups not out so official because web 2 we tend to be really slow in making sure everything's perfect throw something up start reaching out and tell people even if the conversation's really difficult i mean how many of us have heard but i can't touch it when you're talking about an nft right like we have to have those hard conversations and that's the only way we diversify [Applause] probably won't be able to get the same reaction from you guys [Laughter] uh so i just yesterday we had an amazing conversation with the near team about web 3 and about like what what is actually web3 what is the definition of that tree and uh one thing that we had in common is uh that web 3 is a lot about ownership that um in in web 2 the ownership of everything was was very very much concentrated like big companies monopolies and the web 3 we have tokens we have communities we have nfts and the ownership level is much much more distributed than this and um i think this is an amazing opportunity to just rebuild something from scratch and redistribute it in a more healthy way than it was done before and i'm actually pretty excited about the diversity of the nft space that is already there uh a lot of creators in the nft space are super diverse coming from different backgrounds countries it is so accessible uh it is much more diverse than defile let's say these days uh which is i'm super excited about and well of course we are making necessary steps to to help that starting from hiring from endorsing who we put on the homepage communities we were super honored to feature the women rice project empowering female creators and i personally i think i own probably only female pfp i might be wrong but it's uh most of the time that i've been putting like my my money into lately because like i support this so um let's let's let's redo stuff from scratch in the proper way that's my call no i was uh and and to add to what everybody on stage said um you know i i agree like there's a lot that can be done right like i'm a person of color i live in puerto rico one of the things i've been doing is you know how can i empower people locally which is why you know i started my mediversal conference last year and you know like how can i see this technology that i have seen firsthand change creators lives and and do it in my backyard and do it with people that might not have access to this technology and i agree i think everything that was on stage that everybody on stage said uh you know these are all things that we have to do and as leaders we're in that position you know to help make it happen and i'm trying to do what i can because i think that diversity in in anything right like whether in not just web3 or nfts is super important right because everybody has their own personal experience right and that is what leads to that creativity of a new use case for nfts or a new type of nft utility that maybe somebody else hadn't thought of and i just want to say like as much work that needs to be done i i kind of want to just like you know between yesterday and today looking in the crowd and and walking around the conference yesterday just compared to like seven eight months ago when i was going to crypto conferences the amount of diversity that i see in the crowds i think has been really good and like a really good testament to how far we've come in such a short period of time and i'm not saying that like our work is done because there's definitely still a lot more work to be done but like i like yesterday like you know crypto eath is what 30 40 percent off highs you know there's a line around the block to get into the castle and you know there's a lot of women in the line there's a lot of women walking around that are networking working on projects developing stuff and so like that like makes me super bullish on the industry and like makes me like really happy to kind of be part of this movement right now we've got about we've got about five minutes left so and the closing question um as we look to the future what does the metaverse mean for each of you and how are you preparing for it both personally and professionally okay [Laughter] yeah let's start with g oh all right [Laughter] um so so personally like i i think i believe that we're already in the in the metaverse it's just a 2d metaverse right because what is the metaverse it's just a community of people in a digital environment and i think over time that will become more immersive and it will be a you know a more 3d experience where all of our senses get integrated whereas right now it's it's mostly just us typing in front of the computer and you know like i i just think that over time as it becomes more frictionless and much easier that leads to more adoption um and you know i i think we're all here right now and by each of us doing what we're doing everyone in this room we're all generally preparing for it right because we all see that digital future we want to be a part of it and we want to help increase that adoption so i i guess when i think about this question you know like one of my goals is to you know my main goals are to disrupt and to increase adoption right and so like what can i do to help on board as many people as possible to get to that scale where crypto becomes an everyday part of life and you know i think a free and open metaverse is like the key uh the key component to that i've had a lot of conversations with friends about what is the metaverse especially people outside of the nft space ask me and you know those questions like this clubhouse and twitter spaces count as the metaverse do they have to be like economic transactions for it to count is the metaverse only virtual reality i i don't really know the answer to the question of what doesn't count as the metaverse i feel like roughly when people talk about it it's a new type of networking that humanity is doing where your physical location doesn't matter it is a very general description of it and what it and and the internet was just the first step forward what web 3 is doing is kind of built rebuilding economies onto the internet in a way where we don't have to worry about physical location anymore and there's just tons of things that society just depends upon for physical location you can imagine like trading all kinds of collectibles and then redeeming your nfts for the real world item when you want to but trading purely in the metaverse and purely virtual goods until you do that and there's all kinds of things this unlocks and all kinds of parts of the internet that are still centralized on computers here and there when they'd be much more powerful if they were broken up and if they could last tens of years decades even centuries so personally i try to think about i try to decouple my assumptions about how the internet works from just the way it has worked in the past and it's really hard to do every once in a while you think of something and then you realize oh wait it doesn't need to be the case where we you know we host this ourselves or it doesn't need to be the case that you know like us at openc um just may you know close source this part of the of the project it doesn't need to be the case that you know that out this algorithm needs to be secret it's actually a lot better when it's shared with other companies and it's a much better user experience and it's it's going to last longer building things that last longer than the internet companies of the 90s and the 2000s is really what we have to do and the best way to take advantage of web3 [Music] so that's pretty much what i'm or how i respond to it personally too i'll take a different angle and focus on metaverse as defined by spaces like decentraland or sandbox i spent my entire career at companies like nike and revlon doing marketing and building community and that's the that's the focus of what a lot of this stuff is and i help web 2 companies like those enter web3 i also help a lot of the blue chips you guys know and love grow up from a project into a company so the contrarian thing i'm about to say is as you guys think about sandbox land and you're shopping around location doesn't matter physical location doesn't matter but metaverse i don't think matters either because the first time your avatar goes in and you're walking around wandering around maybe it's cool that your plot of land is next to adidas but how many times are you going to walk across town with your metaverse no you're just going to click and go to the experience that matters so we all talk about community community for me is the intersection of two things commonality of purpose meets frequency of touch you have to believe in the same thing and you have to communicate enough with your tribe to feel included so the experiences that are in the metaverse that are built i don't think are going to be proximity don't go pay 3x for that piece of land next to someone cool if the apes have a party on the edge of the swamp are you not gonna go because it's too far for your avatar to walk no you'll fly on your hoverboard or you'll one click and go because that community is dope and you want to be a part of it so metaverse is for me like what web 2.

5 is right now we're not going to have goggles on all day every day we'll still want to participate in a 2d kind of way but think about the affinities and the tribes you want to be a part of because that's what from the ground up is web 3 not where your physical spatial location is thank you guys for amazing these answers and i want to piggyback on what you said the location doesn't matter this is the most important things in the metaverse uh there is a simple reality check metaverse is already here i i take to attend the most broad definition of metaverse as just like the digital universe that we all live in you open your iphone you go to the screen time and you check like how many hours have you spent in this interface to the metaverse uh every day for me it's more like seven hours usually combined with my computer would be probably ten and uh i can say that i can probably i probably live in the metaverse since the fifth year of my like skull uh i was born in in the city where i was like 8 000 people and there was just literally nothing else except for metaverse from me there and uh how am i preparing to the metaverse well i already live in it so for me it's mostly about making it better building uh things that will make the architecture of metavirus uh better from my perspective and it all goes in the understanding of it the matter should be open it should it should be accessible open it should be built on principles of decentralization uh open vap and ownership open ownership of course so we are building the liquidity layer for the metaverse that is open that's that's my mission i want to make the metaverse better more open and then building liquidity layer for that that's my take and that's a wrap thank you everyone let's give it up for our panelists