NFTs, Social Tokens - $ALEX Masmej

hello everyone oh great perfect cool um hi everyone my name is alex i'm the founder of showtime some of the teammates here shout out to them um and today i'm going to talk about nfgs and especially what's next after nfts because we clearly saw how nfts became massive last year but i'm very excited about what after infrastructure goes a bit more mature we can do with consumer-facing applications beyond nfgs cool so let's start so first so far nft's completely changed creators lives they went from like a crater went from you know having zero percent or maybe a tiny tiny piece of the tick tock crater fund or fans on patreon to now basically 97.5 percent minus open c fees uh it's a massive step up for them there's two use cases for that so the first is digital art so on the left is a photo by justin aversano which is one of the pioneering photography artists i personally onboard justin on openc and justin has 10 000 followers which in web 2 is completely impossible to monetize your audience and live off your content creation activity whether it's photographies or 3d art or anything the second use case is collections pfp collections here is crypto coven um cryptocurrent is awesome there's ten thousand of them uh i feel like the role of this collection is to you know on board more women into this space which is awesome i think it's the um most new mints per wallet per collection which is great um but like both of those primitives are for for just one use case buying and selling and then the business model is primary sale and royalties there's nothing else and you know just arsenal has a hundred of them uh but crypto equivalent is 9999 uh but that's not like good for skating to millions of people right only 10 000 people can have a cryptocurren only 100 people and so it's still pretty small scale you have to buy and this is not aligned with billions of people on social media which leads me to my next slide what about social media users no one right now like there's billions of people they're not buying nfts they probably won't buy nfts at expensive prices and so there is no web 3.0 for them no one has done anything so far because crypto obviously is too slow too expensive and there's no the infra needs to evolve but what i've been thinking about for a long time is what can web3 bring to the masses for everyday users who engage who don't create content who don't buy content that's what i'm really excited about and so one thing i'm excited is social tokens obviously so i guess i'll define social tokens um it is a primitive for creators or communities so like social is a number of the term for creator tokens like you know a creator on instagram a newsletter writer a podcast host or communities um so we've seen dao's typically seed club has like a club which is their social tokens pool suite is very interesting they have a social tokens that's an nft for a membership or a pass and so to me this is what zoltokens is right d5 their token is to govern a protocol a sociologist to govern a community or a crater by any way possible it's very you know a blank canvas this is still not a mainstream primitive there's been some history and i'm about to talk about it um but so far you know uh the the field is blank for everyone to create and invent anything so i was one of the first social tokens with alex um and i can talk a bit about this um so covet hit and um i basically wanted to fulfill my dream to be in san francisco found a startup um and i i couldn't because it was the bear market the real bear market like ether at 80 and so i could not afford to move to the us that i was stuck in paris i love paris and yeah so update it worked so what i did is on stage i said please help me crowdfund my way to san francisco via is a cryptocurrency of mine called alex at the time created with raw which is like a og social token platform and so what i said is i'm going to fundraise twenty thousand dollars and whoever gives me that money i will give them 15 of my future salary which was very bull at the time because i never had made a salary um and so it did work like i did have a job i did create my startup and it's been it's been an insane journey so far um then i did other experiments with austin griffiths that you may have seen at this conference with uh voting so people could vote on my live decisions uh it was guest-less voting before snapshot labs went live which was kind of funny and so this was the first experiment but there was some red flags and like it was it was very hacky um and so there were some problems with it that were epitomized with bit clouds that came out uh quickly after and so big that had some um some issues that really highlighted the fact that you know social tokens if we make it purely financial sounds more like black mayor than uh an actual primitive that will you know empower people and so the cloud was speculation first it was a bonding curve so basically a vending machine you would bet on people absolutely zero utility um and worse even they actually did not even ask for content um so like it was literally like almost like force under servitude like they would like trade people without their content so like people are victims of their own tokens but also they own their market so they can rock people so they can also be a scammer so it's the worst of both worlds it's like you are a scammer and you are being scammed at the same time by the platform so that's not really good but please do not think that this is how social tokens work um so some learnings from this um so i'm part of seed club which is a really amazing community i invite you to check them out and in 2020 i was very influenced by brian flynn who had a lot of discussions with about you know making being in web 3 participation first so you do not want to buy you want to earn something and and if you want to do a permanent for consumers buying is you know maybe not ethically the best thing because people can lose their money not everyone is extremely financially literate so you want people to have actions they do every day on web 2 and then earn this and then same hold not sell which is if you hold the tokens it's like having an equity in a company you are incentivized to make that creator to make that community great and you share the financial upside together and then data of chain value of chain is because you know there's a lot of things in web 2 there's a lot of data we cannot do everything i think right now there's a lot of protocols and web 3 apps starting out credentializing apis credentializing um you know web 2 data and i think that's awesome the mpp of show them was a website that was entirely web 2. all the only web free thing was you know wallet connect connect your wallet and i think that's the best way to go forward because that's all you need everything else can be off chain we can have a very smooth app and you have the best of both worlds so those were my learnings um and and so i'm thinking about them all the time and so enter showtime so i use those insights to start showtime um and so the first goal is make a social platform people love no tokens uh you know the financial utility will be later first let's do a social network that people generally enjoy um and then you know uh later it will come um and yeah so nft based as i said you know that's the only web free thing everything else like comment share uh all the things that people know and love from instagram and tick tock stay the same and so it's great because it's a trust minimize volume flow i didn't put trust less because you still have to trust the showtime contracts uh you know nothing is truly trustless i would argue and so the value for is great because unlike what i did with the alex token where i had to you know perhaps give my tax return it was my salary it was in fiat here the value flow is deterministic it's an nft the royalties are included on chain um and that's great because then there's less stress involved and then grade 2x because it's web 2 interactions uh you know you only need web 3 for a couple tiny things like buying and selling nfts but but that's about it and so yeah use those two things uh to to do the app um so yeah now i'm going to talk about open problems and social tokens so it's very exciting if we make people earn tokens that means that billions of people can access technology i'm so excited um and you know nfts have made a lot of value and if we can transfer some of that value back to people who just engage on social media i think that's fascinating but there's a couple problems so first this completely cannot work on layer one which is why it's it hasn't really been tried so far um on layer one i've done it because of as their own blockchain now this so um and so today it seems like the consensus around a nice clean solution is polygon proof of stake because it's evm compatible not the smoothest best blockchain for now but like that's the best we have so far this is also where ave lance protocol uh is using um and then i guess the future could be zk roll ups for web 3 things like social tokens if you want to make people earn something for free it really has to be extremely cheap and so potentially optimistic follow-ups do not give that level of scalability that we need so probably we'll go from proof of stake to the kill ups and then no gas fees if you're able to earn things you do not want them to pay anything that's more steps in the flow that will prevent them from converting and so many transaction is something that i really love i'm part of metacartel which is a community that pioneered a transaction in 2018 and yeah i think it's just unavoidable that we need to completely hide this unless it's buying or a financial action um i think guest fees are primitive and then the last part is simply resistance which is super important actually because again you want web you want normal you know social media people to use a web free app without paying but the good thing about paying is that it's very spill resistant right um d5 protocols work because you lock your money to get a loan or to exchange a token and you don't need trust but if people can earn tokens for free actions it's going to be extremely gameable by any bots or mev bots or whatnot and so we need to find a way to maybe have a spectrum of like how much humanness that account is and that could greatly help give them some tokens i know there's a lot of projects working on it proof of humanity proof of humanity and others but um yeah so that's that's kind of the the challenges and would love to connect with anyone if you have any ideas on that front um i think actually i should add a fourth one which is wallets i think right now wallets are for power users uh rainbow and metamask are exciting but still hard for people to understand and i hope maybe like phantom can give a better solution um so that i guess that would be the first one it's like while it's still hard to do on showtime we are we have a technique to bypass wallets if you don't have a wallet uh i can talk about it quickly um but yeah that's that's kind of the the promise for now and so yeah so i didn't talk too much about your time here uh but we have a mobile app that is coming on ios and android um and you can do things like create an nft without a wallet from your camera and a lot of things that uses the principles of the you know what i would define as second generation web three apps which is layer two no gas fees um and so this is the test flight link oh am i hiding the screen no this is a test flight link you can try it out it still is not released to the public [Music] and yeah super excited and this is the end of my talk thank you so okay we actually have a couple minutes for q a if anyone has questions before the next talk or alex all righty love what you're doing by the way it's uh your story is pretty inspirational thanks for sharing um i think as far as uh showtime it seems like a really exciting idea i've been thinking there should be better ways for people to display their nfts i know instagram and some of the big boys are basically announcing they're coming out with similar features what are what are some things that you're thinking of in terms of ways to step stay a couple steps ahead of uh the giants for sure well i would say social tokens um yeah coinbase instagram i think it's very exciting to see them taking the nft uh wave by storm because as i said like right now consumers have no interest in checking out openc they will all stay on instagram because there is no web3 value out for them to be on openc and so if instagram and like places where users are already are implement nfts that's awesome but i would say that yeah like they would probably focus on the nft market which is a massive massive market um instead of doing things like social tokens and experimenting with like you know new new things that we can do on layer two i think those are some use cases that i think will be a few steps away from them because they're less in the business of pioneering but more like okay what is working on in the web free space that we can integrate that is like a proven use cases so i guess like they've implemented two things buying and seeing nfts i'm sure is what coinbase and um and instagram will do and then the pfp profile picture which is a nice idea to make sure that you know you are really part of this squad of this pfp collection um but i don't feel like those are our plans at showtime we are thinking about like what is next in a layer two guest free world what can we do to engage normal users i don't think they're going there and they're right because it's pretty risky but we're taking the risks thank you one more question oh awesome i love santi that's awesome yeah we've definitely chat like i'd love to integrate proof of immunity i'm a human on proof of humanity uh so yeah real human uh and uh but yeah definitely like i'm super excited about this space because we need this this is one of the things needed to make this work so cool all right thank you so much thank you so much everyone we are in the greatest experiment of our lifetimes