NFTs for Everyone

for you for you for you look at all those people ash bennington real vision carolyn wend oh we're friends max jackson nfd artist sparrow reed from dada jake brockman aha in the house ash bennington real vision again hey louise welcome everybody to eat denver are you having a good time oh yeah yes definitely having a wonderful time so far have you been able to walk around the virtual castle meet people yeah yeah taking a little walk around not enough of a walk though the times were a bit all over the place for me i'll get in soon though for sure excellent are we getting any fees any chance everybody gets pleased this sounds promising rare for nft um givers the givers of the inner peace say again scratch it scratch it oh yeah no we're not doing all that right now i'm scratching hey are we backstage right now or are we no we're live y'all are all on on camera barbara and um i think i'm gonna bow out let you all discuss enough tease for everybody enjoy your time guys awesome thank you very much all right welcome everyone to the panel uh why don't we all go around the horn and just introduce ourselves and say hello um i don't know if we were all on the same screen if we're all seeing everybody in the same order but uh mxjxn is next on to my right so why don't you go first and tell us how to pronounce the handle oh it's max jackson i'm just trying to save space max jackson what's going on man that's me hey how you doing um yeah so i i've been doing art for three years pretty seriously as like a calligrapher doing like abstract um circular mandala type work and i was just pumping them out every day just my daily practice to keep myself sane and i've been following crypto art for years since 2014 and i always wanted to get into nfts and then i saw in about middle of the summer that that uh you know maker's place was a thing and i just like it was on my radar so i started learning 3d and for the past three months i've just been crushing 3d art and bridging my calligraphy and just taking taking crypto art like full on every day that's awesome man i'm glad we have an artist sparrow hi hi hi everybody um i'm sparrow i'm an artist um i'm also a software engineer so this space was like purpose made for me um to express both of the important things in my life um i've been working with nfts for two years now i guess um big fan of mint based i'm on super rare i'm on known origin i've got my own contracts on wearable as well hopefully very soon to be launching a a collection on near using the mint based contract yay very cool a double threat a programmer and an artist wonderful uh neck guy you're up next yeah sorry i'm filling in for my co-founder carl she was supposed to be here she's got a dental operation so she would just be mumbling the whole time but yes i'm here uh i'm the co-founder of mint base we've been on mainnet for over two years we've done uh we're really focused on purposeful nfts and we've done ticketing for conferences and now we're we got hit with the gas fees so in august we basically stopped and halted all big production on ethereum and have been heads down programming on near every day of our life until now so we'll be launching on test next week and it's a whole new paradigm i'm pretty excited to see what we can do with cheaper transactions fantastic and congratulations chloe lewis welcome hey thank you very much so yeah chloe lewis here founder of the marma j foundation just an altruistic foundation where i try and use uh nfts and different web through technologies to try and uh raise funds i guess for the local population here in antigua in the caribbean but also to educate people as well so that's pretty much what i do wonderful wonderful jake welcome thank you thank you so much for having me uh my name is jake brookman i'm primarily the founder of coin fund which is a crypto fund in the space we've been investing in the nfc space for many years now uh investors in dapper labs uh wearable i'm an angel in async.art and a bunch of other stuff i also uh run a digital art gallery which is nft focused called first edition.xyz and i'm also a digital artist i just launched a kind of a generative series the other day called space phases a b c d and e cool i love there's so many artistic people on the panel this is wonderful okay so here's something that i like to do uh whenever i do a panel because i tune in sometimes to see panels and i start watching and i have no idea what everyone is talking about so for people who may not know let's jump in and really start at the very beginning what are nfts and why are they significant in your life whoever would like to jump in first sure i'll go why not so i guess i'll take it first from the vantage point of uh trying to be an educator uh so as a lot of us who have been in the blockchain space for a while or have you know followed the financial markets in the blockchain space in my opinion nfts are just everything else aside from the economic parts of the blockchain um so basically tokens that can't just be swapped uh uh you know back and forth for another one it's a unique asset um and from my standpoint why they're so important is because it's something that it's very easy for everyone to understand uh you can see it uh you can see what's going on in the blockchain instead of just being math and cryptography and numbers so that's kind of the way i kind of take like what is an nft and why it's important to a lot of people that might not be you know uh technologically uh inclined great does anybody have anything they'd like to add to that what are nfts in in your opinion and how do you view them max uh well so i get the question from friends a lot all the time because they see me posting about it regularly and they're like what is an nft what is crypto art and i'm like well you've heard of tokens right okay so the nft to a token is like a pokemon card and like then they get it like it could be a deed it could be a pokemon card it's just a piece of information that's not interchangeable with the rest and then they seem to understand and i love it because that can be anything really right you know and maybe somebody can jump in uh but you know my understanding kind of of an nft is i think of when you think about bitcoin or ethereum uh the idea is that they're fundable every one unit is equal to any other unit and what makes the an nft uh unique is that it's uh it has a cryptographic uh hash on it that makes it specific and unique so that every token is totally unique and it has it has unique properties uh of being able uh to to effectively to tokenize things like art one-of-a-kind uh one-of-a-kind instruments or or works art really anything that you want it to be and i think that's a really really fascinating fascinating idea if we think about you know for example bitcoin if you think of it as a dollar one dollar is equal to every other dollar this is amazing because everyone is unique and then we have all these really far interesting people on this panel uh who are doing creative things with them um spyro why don't you jump in on as well well so yeah i was just going to say the the thing that led me to blockchain as an artist was trying to solve the provenance problem with art and and first registration and certificate of authenticity and the token really does that for for artists so i can you can see all of my pieces come from my address right it's verified there's no dispute no one needs to research what my body of work is it's all there on on a public blockchain um to me that's the power of nfts right awesome i'd love to i love to jump in as well as uh please we published a thesis on nfts on our blog at coinfund and one of the kind of the views that we we put forward there is um you know we can think of nfts as intel like liquid intellectual property essentially property rights for art collectibles in-game assets uh but the interesting thing about our thesis is that like a lot of people they come into the nft space through art but what i think i've realized in the course of looking at the space for a number of years is that the addressable market of things that can be tokenized as nfts is actually quite large so we start with our collectibles but we can also go to movies we can go to music we can do fonts 3d models stock photography uh recently someone tokenized the blog post and if you really start to count up the number of digital objects that you can do this with um that list really really grows but i think i think art is a huge uh area in that for sure right matt why don't you jump in tell us a little bit about mint base and what the protocol enables sure and just one more one more note on what an nft is to me so in our world we have today is here's an api owned by twitter they say what you can and can't get what kind of information you can get and they can take down different endpoints and increase end points they control it all nft land is like okay now the api is the smart contract in the middle and once it's deployed we can all not touch this and anyone can interact with it so that's the big jumping off point it's this api that anyone can interact with like moving a token from a to b without mint bases permission or the mentor's permission it's all just right there any any app can interact with it is all about deploying your own contract you own your own contract we're kind of like a super rare factory where anyone should be able to come on deploy their own contract work with our back end machine and show the nfts and see how they work so it's you owning your own smart contract is kind of the focus yeah it's really interesting the way you describe it as a decentralized entity uh that not even the mentor has control over and once it's out there uh it's out there one of the things that i think is super cool about nft is the reason why i wanted to host this panel is well look at this panel we have artists we have activists we have investors we have developers this is pretty cool and this is a really interesting thing that i see in this space so i'm just curious what what are the projects using nfts that you guys are most excited about right now sure i'd love to take that um so obviously we're excited about kind of the infrastructure of nft so like what nate is working on is uh you know platform for minting nfts there are a bunch of people working in different marketplaces from open c to wearable to zora to foundation but what really super excites me is that once we convert art and you know other digital content into this kind of asset it becomes a bit of a financial asset class and that means that we can start to build um financial applications for these things we could use um nfts as collateral for loans we can create derivatives we can uh create index funds where or fractionalize ownership of works and i think all of that is super exciting and is going to lead to a new era of financialization uh for art and other such assets that really wasn't accessible to anyone before it really didn't exist in the world before and i think that's a huge huge uh technological financial innovation yeah definitely i would just add to that you know there are a lot of interesting i'm an investment person myself and there are a lot of i cover finance and uh and investing at real vision and you know there are a lot of interesting technologies that are out there that people in the finance space are going to be able to make money off of right but what's interesting to me about this is that this is a technology that can potentially empower content creators to participate uh in some of that revenue stream and i think that that's what makes this such an exciting technology uh that it's not just about doing things like banking it's about doing things like create empowering creative people uh to do things uh and to get paid for it which is a wonderful thing it looks like we may have just lost chloe i think we may have been having some technical problems there um go ahead sparrow did you want to say something yeah no so i mean you're saying that that that's never been done before isn't really correct that's what the traditional art market is all about right my compelling art as financial instruments or investments or whatever and we've we've all seen where that leads and what we're trying certainly me as an artist trying to get away from that traditional art market and it's really sometimes alarming to see it happening here in this space sparrow what is it that you would like to see more of the vow the value that artists create being returned to them and not being dependent upon markets the whims of a market to drive what it is that they create so that everybody's free to create as and when they wish what they wish we've been working really closely with sparrow on our uh rust contracts for near and we're trying to get these right it's uh it's interesting interesting uh yeah developing all this stuff in the ground up we're literally building the erc 721 standard uh and it's an interesting and also hard thing to do so yeah it's uh it was it was a question that was asked of john crane just before this about royalties and how that was going to get sorted out and it's been years on ethereum trying to sort out royalties for for artists and they're still not interoperable between marketplaces all the marketplaces are siloed so fortunately we've got an opportunity on near to do it so that they are interoperable from the very beginning and that's exciting yes yeah we're building the market right now as well so some open sea-ish kind of features in the core of the market is uh the split fee system so as soon as you list you can say this person this person this person and this person all contributed to this nft they all get x percent and the royalty mechanism kicks in every time it sells and resells so it's been fascinating building that and building the nft out and seeing how the store contracts interact with the market uh and trying to create a standard while we're doing all this so it's been it's been an interesting few months yeah max yeah please one one thing that's super exciting for me about nfts right now is just um bridging between just using them for art or content delivery and also uh uh defy aspects uh charge particles is launching next week they're going to be a way to basically put ave tokens inside your artwork so your your your artwork becomes your bank account which is super exciting um and you know it technically that means your nfp is growing value over time um but also on nft staking projects that are starting to spring up are super interesting you know i foresee a lot of uh community likewise uh being spoken in some of the previous um in some of the previous panels uh community dows for uh for nft ownership i think i think because there's such a huge artist community i really see a lot a lot of uh organizations coming out of that where the artists are actually staking their artworks and growing the value of their communities together because layer 2 is going to thrive this year so there's just going to be so many things happening there welcome back chloe thank you glad to make it back in well you jump in in one just one second i wanted to i asked uh jake a question to pick up on two of the points that max and nat made uh two of the things that left out at me that i found interesting first were the capacity uh to divide revenue streams uh between collaborators and the second thing uh the word that uh that nasa that i thought for me is one of the keys of what nfts allow us to do he said sell and resell this is something that's a fascinating concept now typically if you an artist were to sell a painting or a sculpture a hundred years ago once that painting was gone they weren't able to collect royalties on it the idea that people can now continue uh to generate revenue as something continues to circulate i think is a fascinating one oh what's your view on that uh from the investor perspective yeah i think i think that's absolutely um revolutionary from the artist perspective but also from the perspective of creating a market right people are willing to buy these assets because they know that they are as a matter of fact fundamentally valued right so we always think of art as being kind of like subjectively valued um from people valuing it at different prices but um there's also a case to say like with certain nft assets like music or writing right that can be monetized and have a royalty stream the tokens that represent those assets and have a fundamental value using a traditional model but i'll give you an example in the art world right um so a good friend of mine dimitri cherniak is a generative artist who recently did a drop i actually two years ago i was the the guy who pushed him to create his first nft uh and then this past sunday uh he did a drop he he made a nice return on the drop he meant about a thousand pieces from an algorithm that he was working on for like two years it's a really beautiful algorithm called ringers which wraps a piece of string around some pegs but the really interesting thing is two days later the secondary market volume of his drop exceeded the original volume of the initial sale and he got royalties on that and so the fact that an artist can create a body of work like a thousand pieces and then just have that live on ethereum like on the blockchain and continuously receive royalties from secondary sales is absolutely revolutionary i think um and it has created a lot of value for uh for him as the as the originator of the work and and it's also creating a lot of value for um the collectors of the items as well excellent chloe why don't you jump in tell us a little bit about what you're doing okay so um i guess i've i've been in the crypto space for quite a while and i first started to get into the nft space when i started realizing that i could just kind of have my own smart contract and use that to kind of educate other people about getting into this space so for me with nfts i know that a lot of people first come in in the art space you know taking what they've been doing maybe traditionally in digital art and then realizing that they can remove uh the middlemen they can go straight to their customers and start selling their artwork where i think a lot of the value and i think of what jake was talking about creating that having intrinsic value to these nft i think a lot of that comes from you know having the blockchain where these assets can have multiple use cases and so you start having intrinsic value because for example i know in the previous accounts we're talking about like axi and having you know uh game items on the blockchain where you can start having yes the visual representation of uh an art piece or a token but also you can have underlying value of you know using that token to play a game and have a speed boost or you know in crypto voxels you're able to have a token where it can be a piece of land and you start renting it out and so i think what i try and work on personally is uh bringing artists on board through you know the what you see visually okay yes you could take art and put it on chain but also trying to help people realize that it's more than just uh creating value because something looks beautiful but also creating value because you can actually use it for something um which is now secured by the blockchain which is secured by you know all these things that we know and love about the blockchain your cryptographic assets sparrow was talking about you can know who created it and you could actually have that ip visual and everyone can see sparrow's full body of work uh so now if spell creates some game items people can go oh cool this game item was created by this person who did all of this other work and so i think um nfts are a great way to not you know to showcase what else can you do as a creative that can go beyond just you know creating our or having value that we might be used to in the web 2 space yeah chloe's a super human power she's always doing like she reminds me a lot of uh defy dad like his way he does stuff is he just goes and just i don't know how that works i'm just going to see how it works and i know that's not good oh that's awesome i'm going to go with that always experiment with it all you know let's all move around see what happens blow things up you know to pick up on on chloe's point i think she made a good one there which is all the new uh the new things that can be done what have we not talked about so far uh that you guys see as a potential use case for nfts oh we're just getting started on use cases seriously oh many yeah nate did the ticketing yeah for f berlin was it um and a couple big conferences so i mean ticketing is is something that i think is just starting to get off the ground yeah other kinds of you know utility nfts that will um let you enter parcels for like a party or something like that i mean this hasn't been done yet but it will be um there's lots of different ways that having a particular nft can open up experiences for you and i think it's in the experience realm that we're going to see a lot of innovation yeah well i love that i love that view sorry to interpret i love that view but i was um someone framed it to me very interestingly there they said um you know how when you go to websites with your browser you get cookies in the same way nfts could be cookies for the physical world like if you attend a concert or an event like you're saying you you you get kind of a proof of attendance okay in fact we have a proof of attendance protocol at blockchain today like if you attend back when we used to go to physical conferences you you get an nft that mark your attendance and you can imagine that in the future uh maybe advertisers uh could use that information to you know kind of its channels for products or something like that yeah i very much like the way that sparrow put it open up experiences yeah we were getting to this kind of golden era of getting past the collectibility i think this time last year it was technologies were coming out like the graph protocol where developers could build stuff that actually usable uh wallets were okay enough arjun was getting usable uh trust wallet of these immigrations this time last year was like oh my god this is this is gonna work and then probably i don't know april is when the gas fees just went straight up and so i think now we're in this weird phase where like all the daps are kind of sprawling like do we go to matic do we go to xdi and we're all kind of all over the place i think the next purposeful nft phase is going to start shaping its head probably in another five months that's that's my gut because right now on on ethereum layer one there's stape load is still a massive issue where all these nfts gonna go when you know nodes can't sink anymore there's there's a lot of stuff happening so yeah and on that point i think that's where interoperability is going to be a really big point for all these nfts like in my opinion if you're going to a concert and you're getting a ticket you know i think of an idea of like the whole lindsay lohan uh drop that she did today to raise money for charity but you know imagine you're going to a concert you have your nft you know maybe the the artist can sign that nft and it gets upgraded live right there into a vip badge where maybe before it was on a different network to have you know low trend zero transaction fees or a low security blockchain or maybe now that it was signed by this artist it might be worth a lot more or maybe you want to move it to a different blockchain where it might be worth spending the you know the fifty dollars to move across the bridge and you want to pay a hundred dollars to list it well if it was signed by a super big artist and it got upgraded to a vip badge well then maybe we're willing to move that across to a different blockchain whereas the other 10 000 people that are at the concert you know they don't want to be spending anything for their ticket they want to spend you know or a penny or whatever so i think that like over the next few months or hope you know hopefully you know very soon the interoperability between these chains will be seamless for people that don't really want to have to worry about the technology behind what's going on yeah i'll add two more points on ticketing that i find absolutely fascinating uh the first is the resale problem where tickets get resold the artist won't get compensated for it uh and and then and the second is anyone who's ever bought tickets uh for a concert or a sporting event knows that fear of going oh crap i just handed a complete stranger 200 and i have no idea whether whether i bought something that's real or fake the ability to solve that in a decentralized way really really exciting oh my god third third point to that not only are those verified in need but also developers can create voting apps from that from that ticket are you the owner of the ticket yes uh then you can vote on x y and z so it's it's deep yeah lots of fun aside content content aside access and like membership features are my probably what i'm most excited about about nfts i'm hoping to take my my lens artwork which are these mandala 3d artworks and and make a website where you know if you have the if you have the nft and it's got the right data in it you see some generative content nobody else gets to see stuff like that because it's just a playground right now wonderful i can't believe that we just got that just a minute left i thought we were like halfway through it was like we blinked and we're done can i say one more thing please the most exciting thing not a million dollar sales it's it's the community the the crypto art community is on fire these people have like not even a lot of money but they're spending it to share their art every day and networking and like it there's so much potential is huge art gallery auction house if you're not there on twitter you i mean on telegram you gotta be i'm afraid we may be about to get cut off but i can't think of a better sentiment to end on i had to get that in there no i thank you for that that's actually the first pla auction house i went to to buy my first like ethereum nft was at that telegram group so um everyone should definitely find their way in yeah go spend money you can't afford to spend there it's wonderful well it looks like we haven't gotten kicked off the stage yet um so uh oh there it is what's up y'all thank you so much for moderating ash as well thank you so much everyone for joining us yeah so i'm just gonna go one i'm gonna plug async just before we go right because if you want to talk about the the ability for tokens to make a difference in art async is exactly that right it has created an art form because of tokenization that allows our to change over time and be living art not with something static on your wall listen card all the way you also you also give power to the collectors to interfere with the art which is something very special yes yes making those connections jessica yeah it really builds up that relationship um when the token owners can actually do something and interact with an art piece well excellent thank you so much everybody for such great knowledge that you shared rare do you want to spill it do you want to share any thoughts on what just happened no i agree i like sparrow's takes on the that last part about the a-think art as well like that programmable art is a big reason for for nfts and we'll see a lot going forward especially once everything starts getting more watered down with too many there's too many people releasing enough teas the cream is going to have to rise to the top and a lot of this stuff i think yeah and something that we were talking about in another um panel earlier is that when all these forms of nps gather together in the sort of holistic experience then the nfp becomes uh you know that the community of functionalities of the nfps are gonna solidify into a one experience and that's gonna be an interesting thing to see in the future well thank you so much again we have here um we have uh now yeah thank you good week thank you bye y'all