Paving the Way for Adoption of NFTs to the Mainstream - Zach Burks

uh let's see we have next zach burks from mintable excited to see zach again very good hey good to see you again likewise how are you i'm good i'm good i like your sport that's pretty cool thank you i got the spork and i i have a fur you know just embracing are you embracing i wish i wish i could embrace i'm in i'm in asia right now so it's like really hot and i want to be in denver i want to be in the snow yeah i miss denver i used to live in denver so it's uh it's something i miss it's also a rainbow it's a rainbow spork this is unbelievable anyway all right i'll let you get to mintable excited to see what's going on uh the newest developments with what you guys are doing i don't know if you're going to be talking about silica a little bit i'll be like this cool yeah awesome let me talk about how we can make nfts mainstream and get you know millions of people talking about nfts and make it a household name i think it's pretty possible so yeah i'm excited perfect well the floor is yours exactly cool thank you hey everyone uh my name is zach burks i'm with mintable.app uh you know we're a nft platform but before i start going into the talk i want to give a little bit of background about myself um to kind of share you know how i've learned some of these things and how i've been in the space i found bitcoin 2013 um became a smart contract developer in early 2016 um converted all my bitcoin to ethereum uh about 2015. uh and then sis six uh since 2016 i've been working you know full-time basically as a smart contract developer i found nfts when crypto punks came out um you know and then later that year cryptokitties and this was kind of the turning point for me with cryptokitties uh i was actually the first person to make money with cryptokitties funny enough um but that's what made me realize the power of nfts and since cryptokitties came out i've done pretty much nothing but nfts uh we made mintable in 2018 uh and you know now it's 2021 wow and we're still running it so that's cool so i've been in this space for a while and one of the things that i've seen uh is nfts are an e-commerce product right and a lot of people don't think about that because you know in the blockchain space we think uh web 3 and you know this is a new kind of internet and a new era but some things still apply from the old era right so some principles from e-commerce still apply to even new technologies like nfts so in order for us to take nft is to be mainstream right because this is the goal we want hundreds of millions of people using nfts right we want it to be where every event you go to has an nfd related to it where almost every collectible item you have is a you know nft itself where nfts are used for insurance and documentation and you know possibly voting uh and so it's a it's a mainstream thing right where everyone is interacting with nfts and the reason we want this is because it's very easy for say your mother and i'm gonna talk about my mom a lot in this talk because your mom is a good test can your mom do something uh easily right because you know most of our moms are not technical at least mine isn't so can my mom use an nft in the current state of nfts probably not right um but can my mom use d5 100 not there's no way right my mom will just never understand d5 so when you look at things like nfts it is the easiest path for someone to enter crypto and so this is why this is the key to the success of crypto is really relying on nfts if we can get 100 million people interact with nfts that we have now made crypto a household interaction and people don't realize it right and so the way we do that is through e-commerce and you may be wondering uh you know why e-commerce and we'll go over but basically buying an nft is an e-commerce transaction and if you look on the screen i have two completely different things um one is a bar of gold and one is a picasso painting right and one is uh you know it's on an auction house another one is just on website to buy gold they all have the same thing in common though is the the the layout the information presented the way that you interact with the page in order to purchase your item in order to sell the item right and the reason i'm talking about this in particular is because when you ask yourself what is the main reason um or the main gateway for crypto uh just like normal crypto not nfts uh the answer would be like coinbase right so if you ask how does your mom interact with bitcoin or ethereum for their very first time they go to coinbase or finance or kraken and they buy on an exchange right that's the same for nfts is the gateway for interaction for nfts is an exchange a marketplace right and so just like on amazon is a marketplace essentially right ebay is a marketplace etsy is a marketplace and so we need to have marketplaces because that's the gateway to nft adoption and so when we look at marketplaces now we have to look at how do they apply e-commerce principles to the nft ecosystem you know effectively right and one of the things that we have to look at is where we are at now and why we're not where we should be right because nfcs came out about you know oh wow four about four years ago uh i normally say three but it's been four uh so about four years ago nfts came out and you know we only have roughly 150 000 nft users but yet we have we have a little bit more than 5 million ethereum users now these numbers are slightly out of date because everything grows so fast but the market sizes it did 330 million last year not 150 million so again these are slightly out of date um and let's even just double we could just double you know the 150k users for nfts let's say it's 300 000 there's 300 million uh volume and there's 10 million ethereum users if you take the 10 million to 300 000 that ratio is still very very small uh you know that's just like a third of 110 percent which is just uh you know abysmal we should be having at least half of all ethereum users using nfts and why don't we have that is because the gateway for interaction nfts is just not there yet we don't have the amazon for nfts we don't have the coinbase for nfts and this is important one of the main key aspects on these marketplaces is you have to stand out if you're a creator if because most of the nfts that are being transacted and that are unique they're not coming from projects they're coming from individual creators and so when you have you know let's say there's six hundred thousand nfts that are in existence uh and you create maybe five as an artist it's very hard for you to stand out you have five out of six hundred thousand right so you need to be what you are you're a creator and you want to create something unique and you want that content to be seen and appreciated so standing out from the crowd is one aspect that needs to be applied into a marketplace situation which helps the seller out it helps the creator out uh and then the flexibility right they can't be limited either in their creativity it can't just be you know only images or only 50 megabytes or uh you know you can only put your title you can only put a description right these limitations reduce the ability to going back to the last slide stand out right if i can only do 50 megabytes i can't do like a 4k video i can't put you know a youtube video in my description or something like that right so i can't stand out and sell my product which is an e-commerce product it's by nft um you know which is it's a bad it's a bad experience for people overall uh sorry it's like seven it's like 7 30 in the morning for me gotta have my coffee um so we gotta improve the usability of these marketplaces and the ability for creators to stand out so that your mom can go on these marketplaces and the gateways for nfts and interact with them easily just like she does on amazon right even my grandma uses amazon um you know and that's level above my mom so if my grandma can't use open c or mintable then there's a problem there right um and so these are kind of some specific rundowns of the issues with nft marketplaces it's like they're a mix of like cryptocurrency and really bad ecommerce websites um there's a limited ability for creators there's high fees um and i want to show just so people understand in their mind's eye so this is amazon obviously right and it's very familiar we've all seen pages like this on amazon right so just keep this in your mind and think about the design the layout of this and here is open c under wearable right so there's wearable and there's amazon right so there's a big difference automatically that we can see here and i don't have enough time to go into all the the principles the e-commerce principles that have been around for you know like 20 years now um that are missing on wearable site uh but let's go back to amazon keep this in your mind guy and we're gonna go to openc now right here's opencv again very different right uh very different from amazon and we go back amazon keep this your mind's eye and now let's look at mintable right hold up ebay my bad okay but ebay or amazon keeping your mind die and then here's principles right and so we try to provide some principles of e-commerce transactions and e-commerce marketplaces to the enft space which is what we're trying to do here um and so we we try to take the design principle the functionality and everything and put that into the web you know web3 for the nft ecosystem um one of the things is that in order to get to the next level we need to be able to have some advantages and so we can talk about something like layer juice and side chains and you know uh it's been the whole day you've you've heard you know layer 2's come up and side chains come up just because the gas prices are so high right now but for a marketplace layer twos just don't make a lot of sense economically and i'll explain why and it's very simple from a user standpoint you're gonna pay more using a layer two than you would just using mainnet ethereum which sounds crazy because you're like well wait layer twos are supposed to save money right but and i'm talking about this for a reason i'll explain once i get to the point uh essentially by using a layer two you have to ensure that that side chain or enter the new blockchain using a bridge or something like that uh and by doing that you're paying a transaction uh sometimes multiple transactions to do something that you effectively could have just done in one transaction right so if you wanted to buy an nft on the table it's one transaction right and you just send e uh in a contract interaction but if you wanted to use a layer 2 to buy the same item you're going to first need to enter the layer 2 with whatever currency that they're using submit your transaction on the layer 2 which is free and then exit that layer 2. so you've just paid 2 transactions with high gas prices when you could just pay one transaction and so economically layer twos don't make sense so we should be focusing on a layer two for an experience of a user um to reduce those gas space instead we should be doing something like uh you know innovation so with mintable we've actually created gas suspenting right and so this means is that you can mint an item without needing a transaction at all and it's on main end ethereum there's no layer two that you're worried about there's no liquidity issue or user issue that you have to worry about you can just sign a message with your metamask wallet and your item is minted you don't have to pay a single fee once it's minted it's listed for sell and you don't have to pay anything so there's literally no barrier to entry now to be able to create our work on our platform and this is this is actually been really huge all of our numbers have skyrocketed since we released gas was minting we just surpassed like 10 000 nfts created um and you know we came out in december of uh 2020 right so it's been like two months uh we have ten thousand items created we've done over like fifty thousand dollars in sales already and so these are all great numbers the users we have we have like you know 7 500 users already uh which is about 20 to 25 of all the nft users currently from the the latest estimates that we can gather so this is an important standpoint because now my mom she can go to mintable she can upload a photo of you know her kids me uh and type in their information like this is my kids and this is my kid's title and subtitle and description uh and she doesn't need to know anything about crypto other than that she has an extension and she presses sign the message right um later we'll be doing even more things to remove it even further so that you'll have assets on the blockchain without needing to even have a crypto wallet and see these are the innovations that we need to push the space forward adopting something like matic or something like xdy or even rollups is just not necessarily feasible for a new user and it's not something that's gonna push adoption to a mainstream level right um it's just it's just not how it works right paypal didn't get there by um you know using a good technology and making users interact with that they did it by hiding everything in the back right and this is what we have to do as marketplaces we have to look like an e-commerce uh traditional experience we have to hide as much of things as we can in the background and we have to provide a familiar experience to users right um and this is just a little bit we have a dow but i'm not going to talk about that in this um this discussion but we let creators stand out and this is one of the things that we've been focusing on and this is why we actually have a higher sell rate on mintable than a wearable or open seat for our sellers because there's so much more flexibility of what you can do with your creations from the private files being like you know two three gigabyte private files we've had 4k resolution items we've had like uh like like a 360 degree video uploaded we've had a full album music album uploaded pdfs so there's a ton of different things you can upload completely a 3d interactive viewer for your 3d files which means that your nft is no longer just a an image and so creators can stand out they can design their whole page um if you look at this you can see this item description the tags that they have the subtitles and titles that they have all these things is user defined and lets that user stand out in the search page in the browsing page and this is really important it's just like on ebay or etsy or amazon and so these aspects are things that we have to achieve on all marketplaces on all gateways in order to get to a level where you can hear about nfts in your dining room table from your parents and they say hey look at this i just bought this you know this digital item you know last night and they they may not know too much about blockchain but they know what they bought is an e-commerce transaction as a digital item and this is something that is you know eventually our goal once we get to this level the adoption of just normal cryptocurrencies and like the price of ether and the price of bitcoin is going to skyrocket we're talking you know like 20 thousand dollars an ether kind of thing if you have hundreds of millions of people using nfts now if there's 100 million people using nfts there is one problem and that's gas prices but there are ways to mitigate some traditional you don't need to move to a layer 2 to mitigate the gas cost and this is something for another talk uh that's kind of like cutting edge technology uh but that's what we need in this space because we need innovation in the space we don't necessarily need to move to a layer two when we can redo the 721 standard and redesign it to be more economical right which is what we've done and mintable and make gases minting and you know reduce the transactions needed on our platform instead of using like wrapped ether right like openc uses rap ether and you're gonna have to submit like two transactions just to even get started on openc uh which is bad that's just bad you're making our users pay you know seventy five dollars just to get interact uh interacting on your platform um so we gotta get we have all these goals and we got to get there and we got to get to that level of adoption and we'll do that eventually right nfps are going to be big and huge and it just requires us to do certain things in the right manner right and not take the easy way out but instead kind of dive in and innovate in the best way possible um so that's pretty much it i can't see the chat i would like to know if there's any questions i'm sure there are but uh you know maybe uh maybe jessica can come back and let me know if there's any questions but anyways um check out mintable right so mintable's a really cool marketplace and it's free to make your nfts on the mainnet ethereum so you know you don't have to worry about gas prices go check it out we've got gaseous minting which is really awesome and we have all these other features like direct messaging and review systems private files um it's really awesome and i think that a lot of people they see the value of it what's up jessica excellent presentation thank you so much that was really insightful yeah thanks yeah yeah and i like your take on you know it's like really direct and and there's a a really clear route on how to get there i love it it was it was really great have you been uh talking about this approach of like the market sort of fit of things like that before or this is kind of like a new way that you're putting things together just here is yeah um we've i mean i've talked about this for a few years now um if you it's the same question if you ask yourself how does my mom get into crypto the answer is from an exchange right and if you ask how does your mom get into nfts the answer is from an exchange a marketplace right so this is the gateway uh and that's that's the first you know interaction and so that has to be perfect right if you went to if you went to coinbase and they charged you you know 150 to get started no one's gonna have a coinbase account right but you go to openc and you gotta pay all these transactions and gas fees uh which is just bad right so we need to fix things like that yeah um let me see if we have some some questions um mostly what i see is just comments like well but it doesn't have to look exactly like amazon you know uh things like that right it doesn't yeah exactly we can propose some some new aesthetics too and something that i also would like to see when it comes to how the information is displayed is um perhaps crypto uh markets can offer the transparency part of things like terms of service like a really uh easy to understand uh you know the transparency of the whole uh marketplace i think that could be an interesting thing to sort of highlight as opposed to you know the already established web to um marketplaces that tend to be you know the the little uh the little writing that you're never gonna see is what what is gonna take you right so yeah i think i think transparency is important and making sure that people understand you know the different costs associating things like that for sure yeah okay well thank you so much zach um we are out of time uh but yeah we hope to to hear more from you in the future i'm sure that we will uh thank you so much we're gonna move on to our next activity hi thank you bye