99 Red Booleans: One BUIDLR's Journey - Matthew Reed

so uh yeah like like like he said my name is matthew reed um i wasn't quite sure how i wanted to put this together but i've been building for a while so i thought the most valuable thing i could do is just share that journey um we'll talk about the title later so you can find me on twitter at blurredon um and then kind of just want to dive in a little bit where i'm coming from uh born and raised in ohio um it's been 20 years there's a good place to grow up and i ended up getting into art and went off to california to go to art center which was a really great school but a lot of student loan debt and then they had a fellowship with caltech which was really cool so you had some creative minds mashing with the uh more scientific minds and i'll talk a little bit more about that too you'll see how the journey goes and then ultimately i ended up in boulder with my wife and looking to just find a better living for the kid that we just had so but it's been great it kind of lined up with covid and you know the way the world works you're able to keep all these relationships and keep keep everything moving it was like nothing ever happened and i was really surprised to meet the crypto community here as well i had no idea how thriving it was and it's been pretty awesome um so i kind of split this presentation into mind body and soul but that's more about work less about literal mind body and soul and to talk about how maybe my mind was shaped it started with ron paul like a lot of people i think that are in the crypto world there was an old man on stage that was just fighting for principal and i thought that was pretty interesting and he led to a lot of thinking about monetary reform in my mind which led to this gentleman richard c cook who had he was an analyst for the white house and um for nasa and started working on monetary reform himself and speaking to how it could be reformed and you started hearing words like universal basic income social dividends all this interesting stuff that makes your mind go whoa maybe there's a way to get out of this debt-based world that we live in so i started writing emails back to the you know the fellowship at caltech i found this guy named virgil and wrote a diatribe about how this needs to be you know richard was a great guy but he wasn't thinking about how it could just be put into a digital form and come to life so i wrote a really long email and got a very short response from this guy named virgil i didn't know at the time he said just look into bitcoin and that's virgil who you guys might know and i had more conversations with him about colored coins because as i started to go down the rabbit hole i got excited about the possibilities and colored coins were pretty pretty phenomenal idea that i threw back at him he said he didn't know much about it evaluation of a currency system isn't my forte but we all know that he went in to really dig into some stuff from there um but where my mind started to get excited was one you know these are all places i think everybody's starting to dive into um this idea of voter fraud in the middle there the idea of colored coins over there on the right and then i think something that maybe hasn't hit yet but localized currencies where the power that could be just because we can tell where you're at and maybe that extra layer over top of a currency might get interesting and maybe it's been done i just haven't been following so then it goes into the body where this is more like the body of work that i've where the journey i've taken with work um been working with these guys out of brooklyn new york called double dane cartwright that are amazing creative group that you know because i love art kind of sticks to that world of just putting things out that are a little more artworthy right and out into the world um then i got to work with this guy for a year and a half he has big vision really tough to work with but i love him he was a good guy um you know he wanted to build the future of e-commerce and we took it to task and it was rough i think coming out of that i had a little post-traumatic stress so we built something called nate smith labs while we were there with him because double day had and it met had an agreement with nike where we couldn't really be doing other stuff and of course in the world of kanye adidas starts to creep in so we created nate smith labs which was really just going to be a skunk works um place that we were going to get creative and we did fun stuff for a while because i had sea legs like i said coming out of that camp and we just played with optical reflections and mirrors and this type of fun stuff that's probably ripe for the metaverse at this point although i don't know if i'd get on the optical reflection route and if any of you know anything about that please contact me um and then finally seoul this is where we get into what this was originally called it's the products that i've been building it's like where my heart wanted to go with all this stuff so um you had this thing called black market we created and it was a little bit before nfts but it had nfts in it and it's still it's still being built we're just retooling because after the big atom bomb of last year went off with nfts we were doing it different and we're deciding hey let's go back in and retool this so but all along double day all these things i've been around it's about culture commerce it's about people dropping stuff and getting noticed and it's about exclusivity in real life participation is a big piece of it so i think the group i've been blessed to be with has shown us that it's important to nurture the groups that you're you're catering to right um so black market was this location sensitive it was kind of inspired by the autonomy of uh the apple store right where you could walk in and walk out and it was pretty pretty amazing experience but we wanted artists brands and others to have that power where you could set up ad hoc locations pop-up shops and sell physical goods the example we always used which was a little antiquated now was you could imagine at staples center or crypto.com center now they would have a memorial for kobe and because you come in proximity you have this opportunity to buy these things and contribute to those things but that wasn't where it stopped because it could go all around to the ymcas that he supported over la and those pop-up shops could sell the same thing and start to nurture back to those funds that kobe was there for um and then the nfts were there if people were coming to the games could they get i mean this isn't top shot but this was the idea that if they're coming to the game can they collect the player tokens and get them all right but it was expensive and it was not working exactly the way we wanted so that gets us to now the the new baby that came out of the oven is black drop and basically it was just stepping back to say what everybody was saying at the time faster cheaper cleaner right um but then we also needed to be more inclusive we we want to include the no corners we want to make it easy to understand for people to log in and not have it be overly complex to jump from a wallet to an exchange although we're still working on that and we also felt the emv compatibility was super important but we also knew we needed help so there's an amazing gentleman out of the denver community james young who stepped up helped a lot his team was priceless and all um this near foundation uh we got a lot of support from them and this is this is the protocol we chose to go with to help us kind of do that the uh what do you call it a layer one in disguise operating with layer two so what we what we did what we ended up aiming for was a bespoke nft ecosystem that still cherished community experience design right we're not trying to we're not just trying to put out ten thousand tokens and and have people flock in it was really going to be well what community are we starting with here and how do we nurture it to grow into something much bigger and so we found a great partner out of detroit called one time run who's been dropping original artwork or printed physical artwork over the web for the past decade and so we we latched on to them pretty good i mean we had done some previous work but they're very interested in getting inside of this this space and it was it felt like a glove because nfts are great for for artwork and it is really cool the idea that you could have a printed piece and a companion so they were really all gangbusters for this and that's that's kind of where we're at and what we decided to do was help them create a genesis card to kind of nurture that group that was there in the beginning the people that they told hey let's this is new for us but let's hop on our discord channel and then they experimented with some other things and the genesis card was basically a gift that said if you you know if you join us you're gonna you're gonna see some benefits to having holding this card and with the genesis card we wrote in what would be maybe the beginning of a dow which is not formally one but it's informally one where the genesis card makes sure that well actually through the platform at large there is a 1x fund where one percent of all royalties are going to flow into that for arts in general and as that formalizes the genesis card holders will people will be stakeholders that get to vote into that system the second part was called what we called rare drops in which um it was kind of like our spin of you gotta you gotta keep reality in it and this idea of first fridays which are endemic to art communities right so while our first rare drop wasn't on a first friday it will be from here on out the idea is that we will discover up-and-coming artists and put them out there in the world where um where that will drop to the people who are genesis card holders and be made available to the broader market and then the idea of companion nfts i was talking about was just in general these artists that one time run have really long relationships with will continue to do their physical drops on there but now they have this opportunity to add the nft to it it's not like they have to stay together we don't know where this goes from here but the idea is that now they have this extra lever to pull and try out and get into the group and we also want to start to pull digital natives into one time run because because one time run has always been about the sort of traditional artists and that's in quotes and what they really want to do is start to pull in these digital natives and see if they can start to do prints for them as well so that's kind of a little glimpse of the one-time run limited card here's the first rare drop we did with an artist named natural and we experimented with different levels of rarity there's actually nine of these some that are daytime dusk and midnight they're quite beautiful and then you know just to kind of give you a little picture of it like if if the intention with black drop was to be white label which is not really the word that we use because we we're trying to do more than just like slap a label on it and help these people we want to get a little more endemic with the audience and help out but the marketplace is there um the artist profiles and their artwork will build up beneath it as they release the portfolios there are for are there for our users we figured out a way for people to it's almost a web 2.5 using taurus and web 3 off to allow people to log in without a password with their email and then get a and then we'll generate a wallet for them a non-custodial wallet for them on the fly so our users on board pretty quick they have a wallet that comes with them we give them a way to back it up we teach them a little bit along the way and so you know the future for us we're excited that this is out there now and we want to offer black drop to more brands more more communities as we go the future of one time run dot limited is this idea of wallets to walls like really the journey is always about having the vision that you can lean back into when things get hard right because it took me i mean 10 plus years to get here in the crypto community being a holder and then finally deciding to build but just building this alone in black market took a long time to get here so the vision for one time run has always been when is that time when we get the artwork up on the walls that digital and the nfts can display there and not only that like because i have this dream in my living room of having like a giant beautiful landscape of you know colorado front range or something and maybe it begins to the sun rises and sets with the actual day or something like that the art is alive well then composability comes in is there a point where i can buy i can buy a bundle of wood through one time run that i can actually give to the cowboy and the work of art that will start a fire that night or something does the word come to life like that and then this idea of private key prints so it's just if the if the nft can travel and one time run has a really great relationship with kind of and know how to to get these fine art prints out there how does the private key of a digital piece go back to the physical world it shouldn't be that hard with this group and just that that permission and that legal construct is there that the person who owns it at that moment has that ability to print that print put it up on their wall frame it and so that's kind of it where where black drop is and i think i think it's exciting to finally have a product out there like i said we're only this past month i've been live the idea is that what we learn from black drop gets fed back into black market black market becomes a really active localized marketplace uh one of the cooler features of black market is we could we can make nfts reign over a particular geo-fenced area so people can just walk around and collect them and you couldn't do that so effectively with with ethereum but now with with near protocol kind of underpinning all this for us at least it's pretty seamless and fast and and pretty impressive and so i guess i end with what the is 99 red bullings and i i just kind of get caught off guard when people are expecting utility out of nfts or crypto when to me it's just so evident you know and i looked at um nfts as sort of like a true or false you either have it or you don't and that little gateway is kind of like so powerful we know how powerful ones and zeros are i mean there's so much built on that so i just kind of looked serendipitously at the sort of like the la outro of the song to kind of say 99 dreams i have had and everyone a red balloon it's all over and i'm standing pretty in this dust that was a city it has a lot of political and war overture to it but what i was pointing out here is if i could find a souvenir just to prove the rule the world was here and here's a red balloon i think of you and let go that's kind of nft in a sense right this disprovable artifact that kind of floats around and that's why i named it that and that's really it i thank you