Build Scalable NFT Infrastructure to Power the next Generation of web3 with Chris Gale

on web 3 and have a general look at what's been happening in the uh NFT market of uh of late, which has been um full of very interesting events and uh surprises. Um first of all, a little bit more about Few and Far. Uh we're a pretty new um NFT marketplace and launchpad built on near protocol. uh we help companies um provide uh exceptional digital minting solutions and we go above and beyond just the JPEG and PFP collections and we're looking at real world utility working with uh real big Fortune 500 brands. Um we ensure really that seamless and simple user experience uh for the end user to really engage with NFTs and web 3 whilst ensuring that IP owners are actually getting paid the royalties that they are deserved.

Uh we're backed by some of the top VCs in the space including Panta Capital. Um a little bit about me. Um I'm a serial builder. I've been in the space since 2016. I was a co-founder of a company uh project called Veracity.

Um before then I was uh had a mobile advertising business that I exited and we reverse merged and listed on the NASDAQ. Um so what we're doing few and far um creating three complexities or three issues within the NFT and web 3 space at the moment. Um first thing is simple on boarding really focusing on putting the user first and and using latest technologies of blockchain to solve that. Uh second, making sure that royalties are paid and protected, so they're guaranteed for creators, for IP owners, as well as then looking at the next generation NFTs with what we call programmable NFTs or PNFTs, which you'll start to hear more about. And this was taken just uh 3 hours ago actually uh quote from Polygon's Ryan Wyatt uh looking at mass adoption happening on Polygon.

And we're really starting to see next generation use cases of NFTs being adopted by some huge brands such as Starbucks with their Odyssey program, uh, Bank of America. Um, and really, we all know Nike who've been a trailblazer in the NFT space for mass market. Um, but one problem that we're seeing of late is that royalties can be uh sidestepped. Um, and here's a quote from Bank of America um that is, you know, loving this program. how royalty streams can be linked to secondary sales.

Um, and citing Nike as an example that this is a huge revenue stream and a future revenue stream for digital assets and digital collectibles. But then what we've got now is a market which has been built um in the first generation of NFTs which is under threat. And it's under threat because the logic of NFT marketplaces has kept the business logic within the smart contract of the marketplace and not in the smart contract of the IP creator or the project. Um what that's happened is creating a war on marketplaces in a bid to attract users. Uh and by then um not paying or not honoring the royalties that have been set up um to give back to the users, it's been able to drive traffic.

And a big driver and uh news that's happened a couple of weeks ago is a new uh challenger platform called Blur has come out and is opering um royalty-free payments uh which has been getting a lot of traction and now it's reported that 80% of all NFT royalties are going unpaid. Magic Eden followed suit very quickly afterwards saying that they will not honor royalties as set up in the smart contract. So now we've got a bit of a race to the bottom and this is goes against what the web 3 ethos is all about and the promise that you can earn royalties in perpetuity. Second to that, we we do have this well-known challenge within web 3 of complexity and whether uh you know non-custodial custodial solutions. Um but right now I think everybody in the room can say that there's a lot of friction that exists when a user has to use a a meta mask um has to use a uh a third party wallet extension uh and for the mass market this just generates a huge amount of drop off which is reported at 86%.

So something that is not going to gain mainstream adoption. Um and you know custodial solutions there's been a number of marketplaces that have come along and said oh well web 3 onboarding is really difficult. So we've built a web two solution with a social or login uh which is uh fully custodial uh uh wallets uh to solve the problem which is a big step back from where we're trying to go with decentralization and web 3. So looking at what we've been thinking about and we've been solving and working on this for the past six months now and looking to really enforce royalties for those IP owners by a unique design and that's putting the power back in the hand of the IP creators. And we do that today by um really looking at how that business logic exists.

that business logic being the transactions uh the royalties that are due on every transaction and actually putting that back into the logic of the smart contract of the IP owner. So the marketplace can't dictate those business terms. And a really nice um uh example of this of what the problem is right now is imagine if you had a a shop uh you had a store and you had a cash register and you uh put in a you you you trusted somebody that you've never met before. you don't have any employment contract with, you trust him to be responsible for managing your cash register without you there. And that's very much what's happening now with whether these marketplaces can come and transact and not honor the uh business logic and it makes it very difficult for a business uh is making it difficult for creators and artists.

But we're not going to be driving adoption for brands like Starbucks and Disney if all of a sudden we aren't honoring those royalties that they have very much built their business around uh in in legacy terms. And um going on to to talk about um the the few and fast solution uh we've got we forked a um NEP 721 standard uh which then enables us to give control back to that uh IP owner and build in a secondary mechanism that allows the creator to choose which marketplaces that they list on which today isn't really possible but now it gives it's very new technology that on Ethereum uh on Salana uh starting to enforce those uh those royalties, but it becomes very much a centralized design. And so jumping now, let's look at what the we we refine as programmable or PNFTs. Um the first um wave of of NFT technology has been very much um about immutability and locking a piece of image, a piece of art to a token and giving security of that user the guarantee that that art is theirs and it won't ever change. Now we're seeing more use cases and more utility where mass market and companies within gaming within uh loyalty and rewards are looking to use NFTTS differently and they're looking to have more control within the um um within customizable elements of that NFTs.

So you could get the community to be able to design your own PFP, design your own avatar and you can change and trade and uh in and out the traits. Um, we're looking at dynamic aspect of the media linked to these NFTs and that dynamic aspect can evolve over time which then gives the ability for companies or for projects to evolve the art to evolve the story to reward users for for um um for for activity and and their their image can change over time. Um, we touched upon controllable, but having then the ability for creators to control which marketplaces they want to be listed on. And if a marketplace stops playing by the rules of what they want to do, they can easily stop their community uh transacting on those marketplaces. Um, and composability to allow embedded um added utility within each and every NFT.

And all this can happen fully on chain without the need of centralized databases to to coordinate and to manage this. Um, and what we've done at Few and Far, um, specifically, which is the NFT launchpad and marketplace, um, as well as then the the API, uh, that we'll go and talk about in a moment, is to create a really nice onboarding flow. And we do this through using web- based wallets. Um, this, um, alliteration is built on near protocol. Um, and it allows us to a user to create a non-custodial fully onchain wallet through just simply using an email address and a passcode uh, password.

And by that generates an on-chain wallet. Um, it also is a human readable wallet which can be uh chris.n u which is much better than a than a very complicated hashed wallet address that scares a lot of users. And we use a a wallet recovery password that's automatically emailed and backed up to that user which allows them to recover their private seed uh and and eject the wallet and and connect it to any other third party uh wallet operator. Um, and through this onboarding, we're able to take the user through this process within under 10 seconds.

And that includes minting their first NFT on the platform. So, it's really good to get users on boarded. And you can come to fif.com and and try that experience. Um and the second side of our business, we have an enterprise API u which enables brands uh companies, creators, artists to get on board very very cost- effectively, very fast without needing to be an expert uh smart contract developer using our our technical developer tools.

Um what this looks like from an API is a is a REST API. Um you can integrate into your app or onto your site with just a few lines of code. Um requires keys for authentication. Um and it bypasses the need for onchain communication through the API uh by creating a draft contract. Um there's three main steps that we we uh our developers um which we've got around 10 developers now building in the first couple of months since launching this.

Um and the one of the really great benefits is we're seeing a reduction in gas fees up to 98% with other layer ones. Um the NFT contracts um are fully backwards compatible. So it's not going to be breaking anything that uh has been launching. Uh and one nice thing about NIA is it's uh it's it's fully carbon neutral and we'll be rolling this out onto an EVM chains uh later on this year. Um the step one is then creating access through contract deployment uh where with your API on both either test net or mainet you'll be able to integrate uh a setup wallet which handles all the funding.

um from that integration wallet. That's where you'll be calling your gas and and it's typically needs about $100 to set up to create a 10,000 and distribute to 10,000 different wallet addresses. So again, it kind of compare that to uh to to to to another chain, you're talking 100 $200,000. Um and the other thing is with permissions, you are in full control and ownership of your contract as a as a builder. Um and you are super owner with your wallet address controlling that contract.

You can then uh employ admins um and control admin access rights. Um but all rights you own the the contract in perpetuity through our templates. Um and the simple contract can be deployed in multiple collections through one contract which is again another quite unique uh stance that we take at few and far rather than needing a separate contract for every different collection. You can then do a lot nicer organization and you can have your community see all the collections under one contract. it's easier to manage onchain.

Um, once you got a UU ID generated, that's what you'll need to then be able to recognize and mint NFTs to certain collections. Um, and we also support full whitelisting functionality where you can uh manage who has access to be able to mint your your NFTs and who doesn't. Um, step two then is uh looking at the contract uh the the creation and the collection creation life cycle where you can create a draft. That's where you enter all the basic information. the business logic of which wallet addresses are going to get paid, how much royalties, um and and information on the the description, the title, the promise, etc.

Um adding assets to your your collection. We follow the similar um um specifications as OpenC, so you can then label your assets as per spec, add any meta uh JSON meta files, um and the quantity of assets and NFTTS. Um and then finally, you can create those collections uh onchain. um through calling the the API and the great thing is that you can make any changes through an API call to either the draft or the full-on chain and then when you're ready to mint you know this can all all happen within a few hours of development um when the mint happens it calls our API it signals the UU ID and then it sends the you send the near wallet address or the email address which is a new feature that's rolling out which is very unique so you'll be able to mint NFTs to an email address which reduces significant friction And that user can then come to the few and far platform, use that email address to register their account very very easily and they will see their NFTTS and that wallet that's been generated on the back end u silently for them and then it'll give them full access to the uh private keys. Um we offer um different types of flexible uh flexible types of NFTs.

So soulbound, generative, dynamic and many of those programmable features that we just talked about all through the API. And then you're able to uh do minting um um have your collections automatically l minted and verified on specific marketplaces. Um finally just going to talk about a really cool collection that we've been working with uh with sweat and sweat economy. Um sweat economy are one of the largest apps uh in web 3. They've got a 120 million users overall but of that 14 million of those users have a crypto wallet within the sweatcoin app.

Um and few and far partnered with them. We we did a um an NFT drop with those users to 10,000 uh individual holders. Um and what we do is within our onchain uh indexer, we look at onchain transactions and those transactions are looking at your step data through the app which is all optin and all the steps that you do to help keep fit and keep active um are actually being added up on chain and our indexer then adds that to the metadata of the NFT. And so over time, the more steps that you're doing, the your NFT evolves um and evolves, the the the the image of the NFT evolves um and it becomes then a leaderboard and a contest and a competition uh to encourage fitness and walking and from that you can earn prizes and you can win crypto as well as other real world goods um etc. Um and then finally, we've we've got um a number of resources online.

So encourage you if you're interested in taking a look at our our developer docs um you can scan this and see online if it'll work. Um otherwise log on to pfar.com and you'll see in the resources everything online. Um you can drop me an email or a note and I'll be over here to take any questions. Um but yeah, thank you all very much.

We're also co-sponsoring the um the the the opening party tomorrow night uh where we'll be uh giving some NFTs away which will get you a free drink at the bar as well and it will show you the the simple onboarding process which take you two or three clicks to do. Um and looking forward to seeing you all there. Thank you.