Intro to Quix | Optimism Summit 🔴✨ The Future of Ethereum - Mark Dawson

foreign [Applause] [Music] up next we have uh Mark Dawson from Quicks um who is going to uh talk to us next hey Mark thanks for joining us hey Katie great to be here yeah thanks for thanks for being here for sure um all right I will hand it over to you you can go ahead and get started okay great I will go ahead and do a screen share [Music] um okay great can you see that Katie so I'm going okay um awesome we're good to go thanks okay cool hey everybody my name is Mark Dawson and I'm the co-founder of quix um and I'm going to talk about the optimism nft ecosystem today so that'll be a little bit of a change of pace from some of the more technical talks um this one will be a little more fun and a little bit less technical um so uh let me tell you a little bit about Quicks um we're the largest nft Marketplace on optimism were uh top five delegate in the optimism nft governance system so you might have heard about the token house and the citizens house were uh top five delegate in the token house so we'll be voting on proposals for the governance fund if you're trading on Quicks the average gas fee is 14 cents um compared to open C or like each mainnet which will be today usually about two or three dollars um a few months ago you might remember it was close to like fifty dollars so we're probably 10x or 20x30x cheaper than uh ethereum mainnet and we've traded about 2500 Ethan volumes so far we we launched Quicks in December 2021 right around the time that optimism removed its white list for apps um so if you're an entity Creator you probably have used L1 ethereum maybe Salona maybe polygon um the optimism in its ecosystem is much smaller today than the other ecosystems um but it's very exciting for a few reasons so why would you be excited to use layer 2 nfts um layer twos are of course like faster and cheaper and that sounds great um but it's actually even more exciting because it's like 10x faster uh maybe 100x cheaper so it means that you're going to be doing totally different things the way I like to say it is that like where one ethereum is like you're driving a car in Layer Two like optimism means that you're going to be flying in a plane so you're going to be taking trips that you didn't take before um so what kind of trips might those be um so the breakout use cases that I'll highlight so far Creator and smart contracts um mirror.xyz is one of the biggest web3 blogging platforms out there and historically they had one big smart contract on ethereum mainnet so that people um didn't have to deploy a smart contract for every new blog post that they made um that saves on gas but the problem is that your writing nfts can be mixed with like other people's blog posts which creates kind of a confusing experience on openc or Marketplace and it can just like make your work harder to find so earlier this year Mir moved over to optimism and now when you're creating a blog post on mirror you can deploy your blog post as its own contract on optimism it's going to cost only maybe like five dollars compared to maybe like 50 to 100 on mainnet and um on our Marketplace you can trade the writing nfts and they're all their own distinct Collections and like on etherscan they're all going to be their own contracts so that's pretty exciting and pretty Creator friendly another cool use case of where twos is reputation nfts so just about a month ago rabbit hole which is a big um like web3 education platform launched um some badges on our platform so you can collect uh these nfts to prove that maybe you learned a new skill set or that you completed some tasks so maybe you learned about some D5 protocol and now you want a reputation in Ft that doesn't really make that much sense to do on ethereum mainnet because you're probably not going to make a lot of money off of the like badge nft and so you don't want to be paying like five dollars to Mint it um but on optimism you convince it for like 10 cents and what's really exciting for me is these reputation nfts today they're mostly about collecting but eventually they could be about unlocking um maybe like some you know special skill set um I think all these like if we put more things on chain like if we give you more badges for all the stuff you're doing that gives developers a richer set of data to build on top of so my hope is that like if I've done a lot of default activities maybe when I visit a web recite it'll kind of recommend to me D5 activities or something like that so reputation nfts are a great use case of layer twos um composable nfts are another one that means nfts that combine with each other so dope Wars is an NFC project that was released actually like [Music] mid to late 2021 so they're really early on it they began on ethereum and they wanted to have these characters that they could equip items to so you know they have these characters called Hustlers and you wanna give them some like sneakers and you want and the sneakers your nfts and the house there's an entity and you want to combine them um the problem on ethereum mainnet once again is that you're going to be looking at like a five dollar gas fee for doing that and really as L1 ethereum gets more expensive the only things that you're going to want to be doing on on ethereum are things that have direct Financial benefits so maybe you'll trade on on ethereum but you're probably not going to want to like equip or interact with your nfts um I know in ethereum so they built their own Bridge actually uh which is pretty cool and Bridge their collection to optimism and that's just the beginning there's a lot more I'll say about composable nfts later um another great use case is dragonia their on-chain gaming platform I think one of the first on-chain games on optimism so with these you buy these Dragon trainer nfts and they can battle each other and it's like a little bit like Pokemon or but much more simple what's cool is that the battle interactions happen on chain um once again as you're putting more stuff on chain and doing slightly less Financial activity on chain you can be doing that on ethereum maintenance it'll be too expensive so you're going to want uh a layer two like optimism um these are all live projects today um and there's a bunch that I didn't get to talk about um so let me go ahead and focus on the ecosystem we have um about 40 000 people trading today on optimism um 40 000 unique wallets I should say and a lot of those are in Thailand and East Asia which is pretty cool um many are pre-existing in a t communities so crypto testers uh which is this guy with the Opie hat and he's green um the crypto testers is a community that's existed for a couple years and their goal is to test out new crypto protocols um they issued their Community membership nfts on optimism which we're really excited about um and those are trading on quits today um the other nfts um I'll point out here a lot of them are pure art nfts so this top one is uh called optimism and that's from our community in Thailand they have a very active community and some really strong developers over there um a lot of them were will like review smart contracts that we put out and they've created their own launch pad uh this middle one that looks like you can't quite tell what it is that's called ganland and that's AI generated art um by a project called fractal visions and that's based in Colorado I believe in the United States um we have board town in the top right this is like the animal looking ghost and that is a collection again from creators in Thailand um that one's really fun the board tone uh animal ghost project has the honor I think of being the first collection that was copied um by like a scammer and put on open C so like a scammer um you know copied all the all the art and launched their collection on ethereum mean that um and I always take that as a as a sign that you're doing something right when um when when people want to copy copy your work and take it to other places because early when you're establishing an ecosystem of course the first thing that's going to happen is people are going to sort of copy what happens on layer one if you haven't tried an optimism but now people are copying what's happening on optimism and trying to put it on layer one um so that's pretty cool this one of the person the helmet is called motorheads and that is a collection by a designer actually at op Labs named jvmi and this collection is kind of about video games and early 2000s Nostalgia so like there is this really cool mid page that had a Game Boy on it and that one's a pure art project um that's quickly developing its own community and it's one that's kind of cut off a little bit this is a duck called usagi duck and that's from an artist in Japan and she made this collection of 2000 ducks that all look very funny in Whimsical um so this is a taste of some of the communities and artwork on Quicks today that I wanted to give a shout out to um and another cool thing is that many of these communities launched using our Launchpad on Quicks so I'll take a minute to talk about that our launch pad is a Creator owned smart contract um tool that you can use to deploy your collection and we'll also create a mid page for you and you can have your own allow a list and um you can also um reserve some for your core team and do the Drop Like directly on our website uh if you're a little more sophisticated you can of course make your own smart contracts and make your own mid page and will also index and pull those collections into the marketplace so we're just a big secondary Marketplace and we're going to pull all the nfts to pull out an optimism into our Marketplace um so out of these ones Gan land motorheads board tone and usagi deck all used our launch pad and optimism created their own website and I think crypto testers did as well and optimism also created their own launch the pad I think um which is pretty cool there's also a bunch of other Launchpad tools um and Creator tools on optimism so you can find them at Nifty kit and mint flex and there might be another one um but yeah more and more Creator tools coming to optimism um I'll say it's still a very tightly knit and community so a lot of these collections will work with each other um so like the motorheads will often like cross promote with the uh four-tone nfts for example so you might be asking what's next for optimism nfts um because so far the ecosystem is collections that you might see on mainnet um so like the art ones the tradable community pieces we expect that to continue to grow but we have these really exciting things in the pipeline so we have an nft Bridge coming up that allows you to take an nft on layer 1 ethereum and Bridge it over to optimism I'm going to discuss that more at length in a couple minutes we're excited about these reputation nfts so that's something similar to what rabbit hole is doing these um sometimes we call them badges the difference here is that these are often earned rather than purchased and they're often not really good assets for trading because um there they mean that you did something right so like if you completed a quest on Rabbit Hole there's no reason for me to purchase that um but it's still really interesting and I'll talk a bit more about reputation FPS and then composable nfts so that's what I was talking about with dope Wars there's a developer named Austin Griffith he has a pretty big following on Twitter so you might have heard of him and he has proposed this ERC called erc4883 which is a specification for composable nfts that can like fit together he created a collection on optimism called optimistic loogies where you can have these little characters and you can equip items to them like bow ties or lipstick and there's a specification for doing that so we're excited to help people make composable nfts and we think that's really something special that you're going to want to do on a layer 2 rather than on mainnet ethereum so let me talk a bit about the nft bridge that is slated for launch in October 2022 so that's very soon um we have development was led by a software engineer Named Sam Goldman on the quicks team and he has uh contributed that to the optimism code base so that will be maintained by op labs when we were designing it our goals were first and foremost to be credibly neutral so like no fees or anything like that um and then fast easy and permissionless we want the structure and semantics of the bridge and especially of the corresponding smart contracts to be very close to layer one um and I think you'll find that that's a theme of a lot of projects on optimism because of the EDM equivalents it makes it easy to be very similar to layer one smart contracts and projects and and we want all the tooling around nfts that you have on layer one to also work great only or two so that means for example that every layer one collection that is a smart contract is going to have a mirrored smart contract on optimism we're not going to try and make for example one giant contract um and deploy everything on that one contract and the reason for that is that a contract for nfts is often synonymous with a collection and we want to keep that boundary there we're using the official optimism cross domain messenger and what that means is that we're using the official optimism protocol to handle cross-layer communication this is different than using an oracle um or a service like layer zero layer zero Labs created these fun omnichine nfts earlier this year starting with the ghostly goats collection um and that was really fun but uh they did use a web 2 style Oracle um to handle the message passing which is cool um because you can send nfts um uh you know in minutes um but you you might have security concerns so this is a highly secure Bridge um the trade out there is that it might be a little bit slower than using an oracle so if you're going from layer one to Layer Two it's going to be about 15 minutes I think after the Bedrock upgrade for optimism it's going to be more like five minutes to go from a layer two to layer one it's going to take a week because it has to go through the challenge period for the fault proofs so um for this bridge it's like highly secure and therefore a little bit slower um in the future there might be a fast bridge that uses uh like an oracle Like Larry zero but for this bridge for the very first bridge in the optimism in its ecosystem and one of the first official bridges in the um for one of the first official bridges in the Layer Two nft World generally um we wanted it to be as secure as possible um and then I'll just briefly discuss how it works a little bit um so it's an escrow system so it just locks your layer 1 nft on in a layer one smart contract and then sends the message to layer two and then mint's a corresponding in ftn Layer Two and then that nft can be passed around it can be traded around and then whenever you want to leave optimism you can burn that nft and it will unlock the layer 1 asset um and give it back to you so um this is how erc20 bridges work often and it's how the optimism erc20 Bridge works and this means that the asset is just as valuable on optimism as it is on layer one um because owning the nft on optimism means that you own the asset on there one so that is a deep dive on the nft bridge um I wanted to talk about how we plan to use the bridge in our Marketplace so bridging there's a technical aspect to bridging which is what I talked about with the message passing and with uh the smart contracts but what might be even more interesting is the social aspects to bridging so nfts are a little bit different from erc20 tokens because they often have artwork and a community associated with it and a community it's kind of all you have in a lot of cases and so it's going to be the nft owners at the end of the day that have to decide to bridge to optimism to take advantage of the cheaper fees and new design possibilities with the lower fees and faster transaction times it's unlikely for example that the core developers of a project can just tell everyone to bridge um and so for that reason we want to make it really easy for owners to bridge to optimism and also we want to make it easy for them to list across layers so this is like the boards on projects and this is how uh a collection is laid out on Quicks today um you're going to see a bunch of the assets like in a grid format and I just put this here to show you what like a unified collection looks like and for layer one collections we want them to still be unified even if they're partly bridged so um someone might point out for example that there is a polygon nft bridge and that open C currently supports ethereum and polygon and polygons much cheaper so why isn't everyone just bridging their ethereum entities to polygon and trading them on open c um since there's like technically support for that and the answer is that the platform is not designed to encourage bridging because once you bridge let's say you have a boarding if you bridge the board into polygon that's going to show up as a completely different collection on openc and people might think it's a scam it's going to be weird all the activity is going to be segregated between the two collections um the you're probably not going to be able to get as high of a price for that reason because people might think it's less credible um and so the way we're designing Quicks is we want it to be designed so that you bridge nfts so we're soon going to begin indexing and showing layer one nfts in your profile and quicks and we're doing that not because we're about to um also have trading happen on layer one because we were an optimism in empty Marketplace but it's so that you can have the opportunity to bridge your L1 assets and begin trading them on optimism so if you have a board eight for example on quix what you'll be able to do is uh let's say you list your board Avon quicks then you'll be able to see the board ape and its attributes and its Rarities and its activity in the same place as all the layer 1 nfts so there's still going to be 10 000 items in the collection if they're if that's how many are on layer one and it'll show maybe like 100 of them have been bridged and are for sale um but we'll still do our best to pull in all the activity and all the context from layer one that you want to see and this is really important because when you're trading nfts getting context and um feeling like you're a part of the bigger Community is really important so that is kind of how at the social layer we're encouraging people to list their nfts um on optimism to bridge optimism and to use them on optimism and if we do this correctly then this is just going to be a pure win for everyone because the lower fees on optimism mean that you can have lower price collections so on ethereum today if your floor price for your nfe collection Falls below a certain threshold the gas fees make it not worth trading anymore and that can be really sad for the collection so you might be able to breathe life into that collection by bridging it to optimism um because it allows uh trading to kind of continue even if it's only worth a few dollars and in fact a lot of the collections on optimism are only worth a few dollars um and we also allow creators to um create a custom contract for the optimism collection so um what I mean by that is when you bridge an asset from ethereum to optimism we deploy standard plain vanilla open Zeppelin In A T contract for you that's great for trading and transferring and collecting um but let's say that you now want to add the ability to I don't know have your I don't know two nfts have a baby for example I don't know let's say these two um coordinates can have a little baby baby board ape um you're gonna need to add some functionality in your smart contracts to do that so if you're looking to extend your layer 1 nft collection um yeah crypto kitties throwback things Jacob um if you're looking to extend your nft collection uh you might want to combine that with bridging so um because the way the bridge Works remember is you escort the layer one asset and then you mint a new asset on optimism but you can be minting that in a standard erc721 contract or you can be minting it in a custom one that adds some functionality so um the goal for a bridging for us is that you're opening up a new design space you're doing things that you haven't been doing before um and that we're helping your community scale uh and uh the other piece to that I'll add is that um we're looking to integrate our Bridge into our launch pad so um we're kind of in a weird Purgatory period today with layer 2 adoption because layer one definitely works and layer twos they work but there hasn't been a social consensus about which layer twos to pick or um you know their security hasn't been as battle tested as layer one ethereum obviously and so let's say you want to launch a companion collection for your uh one collection or you want to launch a brand new collection and you're excited about optimism but you want to give the community the ability to bridge back to layer one we're gonna add into our Launchpad the ability for you to lunch collection on optimism or on ethereum with like bridging kind of pre-built in as part of the plan um now you don't need to have that at launch but we want to like once again give the like design affordance to everyone to say like hey like think about scaling right now because when the next full Market kicks off gas use might crush your community so like let's pick a place at lunch for us all to move to or maybe even you mention the token originally on optimism but you know if if you don't want to be on optimism in the future you can like Bridge back to everyone ethereum um you can kind of plan that out so we're still in the design phases of like what a what a cross layer Launchpad looks like where you get the benefits of launching on optimism while still having the ability to exit to layer one if you want because that's like a really active area of design and like product research for us um so that concludes the overview I have of the optimism and itsy ecosystem I have a couple minutes left so what I might do is just show you our platform um so this is the quicks website um and you can see we're featuring our mirror writing nfts um we've recently been doing uh op nft drop so we gave this early Optimist um we name him Tim or Timmy for optimism and we gave this to like people who were trading on Quicks um you know in the early days uh and so it's really easy to get started um we're at QX dot app and we encourage anyone who's interested to join especially one of the like lower cost nft communities and hop on the Discord and if you're a developer you know consider checking out what you can vote on Layer Two and that kind of wraps so my presentation um do I still have some time Katie or should I like should I keep going or turn it back over to you you won't hey Mark I'm gonna jump in for Katie good to see you here um that uh yeah uh I think we'll just double check if there's any questions or anything but uh you're free to use a couple more minutes if you want some more stuff to chat about um otherwise I'm just going to check if there's any questions also give me one second here cool yeah I mean I can um I can of course do ecosystem spotlights all day long because we have so many um cool I'll just keep spotlighting some groups and ecosystem so this is uh called draconic egg and it was fun because these were originally Ag nfts and then they hatched at a specific day which is kind of like a reveal these are actually generated with um I forget which model but it was like an AI that made all these um which is cool cool to me anyway uh and we've actually seen a lot of dragon themed collections the other one all Spotlight is dragonia and this is like the player in game um so these dragon trainers can like fight each other um and that's a great layer to use case because you don't want to be paying 01 gas fees when you're interacting with the game on chain [Music] um and let me go to this explore page um we're in the middle of the optimism quests if you haven't heard of that uh definitely check it out this is um a way to explore the ecosystem and earn these fun nfts and you can look at your nfts on Quicks so if you've traded on uniswap you get one um if you use synthetics you get one there's you know all sorts of velodrome is another big decentralized exchange type protocol if you're writing any article in Mirror that's going to deploy an optimism and show up on Quicks and we'll trade on Quakes so a lot of fun announcements um like this group called sync swap um announced their mission statement and did it on mirror and you know they traded several thousand dollars worth of that blog post on Quicks and on optimism which is pretty fun um very cool how am I doing on time Jacob I mean we're right on time I mean we can wrap up here um really really cool to have you here Mark I mean Quicks was uh I guess at the time quick Sonic was the probably the first like meaningful transaction I did on optimism otherwise instead of just like sending money to somebody so it's really cool to have you be a part of these yeah and yeah I guess the Easter egg is we used to be called quixotic but um we got the feedback that that was like really hard to say and hard to spell so we shortened it to Quicks um I like the name it's nice thanks yeah it's uh yeah it's quick uh quick quick to transaction optimism so love it awesome well thank you so much and I love the work that you're doing especially around education and you know tying nfts to to getting people to to learn more about uh and just incentivize exploring what's out there on the optimism Network so um it's been awesome to uh to have you here thanks Mark appreciate you being here thanks yeah it's been great to be here okay cool well that about wraps it up on our end uh so thank you Mark again um and then yeah on behalf of uh Katie and I thank you so much for being a part of this uh event uh and for joining us uh to her hear more about the optimism ecosystem both from the people working on it um and from some of the people that are deploying on top of it um so yeah I'm really excited to be finishing this car conversation up and thanks so much if you're going to want to watch this later it's available on our YouTube page at youth Global on YouTube but otherwise thank you so much for joining us and we hope to see you at our next Summit tomorrow