How We Launched the First-Ever Government Backed NFT - TOKEN2049 London 2022

okay thank you very much everyone for being here um so I'm not doing a product pitch I don't have some crazy slides I actually have no slides um but today I want to talk to you about how together with my two best friends on top of a small bakery in North London we actually launched the first ever government-backed nft um so before I do that I want to give you a bit of context and a bit of background about myself and how this story really came to happen so I come from the world of traditional Finance I spent three years at Goldman Sachs I was a quantitative Trader there building on working on building algorithmic trading Solutions in the liquid markets and it was in February of last year that one of my best friends Isaac hamblish is now also my co-founder he was working at Facebook at the time and he moved over to the nft steam at Instagram working as a data scientist so at the time the space was really growing Top Shot was becoming a huge thing with digital Collectibles for NBA and he rang me and said look this space is growing very very quickly we should probably take a look so we started getting involved as collectors initially probably the same way that a lot of people get involved in the NFD space buying nfts selling nfts trading nfts and also getting involved in community so speaking to people on Discord on Twitter and so on and we started connecting with a lot of creators a lot of people that wanted to put their artwork out there to tap into web3 the promise of decentralization Creator royalties which are obviously a big debate right now and we realized that a lot of them didn't have sufficient support or infrastructure for them to launch their own nfts without knowing how to code or without having a significant amount of capital to support the coding so we were developers ourselves I'd probably spent 12 to 14 hours a day in my prior Road just coding so did Isaac at Facebook at Instagram at the time our third co-founder Nathan well he's now our co-founder also joined us in helping creators launch their own nft collections by just doing smart contracts for them auditing code helping them with their website or whichever way possible we also were speaking to collectors people that are buying and minting nfts and they were telling us about their pain points as people that engage in the ecosystem the high transaction fees the competition against bots malicious actors and basically anything that makes the consumer experience when buying nfts extremely poor so we decided we'd like to create a platform that actually solves both of these problems and that's how fed or XYZ was born in February of early this year we created a platform that essentially enables creators to launch enter and nft collections completely code free with zero Capital required whilst at the same time ensuring that their collectors have access to the best possible minting experience without competing against sports or malicious actors but it was a couple of weeks after we started the company that the war in Ukraine broke out and seeing the impact of armed conflict on the life of innocent civilians we knew we wanted to help in some way so we were out at the pub one night as all good stories go and one of our friends he'd read on the financial times that Ukraine was actually looking to raise funds for war relief through crypto so he said look you should probably reach out and offer your help in some way just see if you can do something so we got to the office the next morning at the time you know we were pretty small there was only three of us we had a very very very very basic infrastructure built for the platform yeah and we basically Googled the first government email we could find for Ukraine and sent them what was probably the coldest email I've said in my life saying that guys um we're a small company in London we do nfts we're seeing that you guys want to do crypto so let us know how we can help now I think there's something quite interesting about these kind of approaches because what we found out much later on was that a lot of companies similar to ours had had the same idea of reaching out to help but they thought they're probably already working with someone they probably have their own developers we're not big enough to do this and so they never reached out but what do you know the Ukrainian government came back to us a couple of hours later saying look we'd love to chat so we jump on a call with them and just to contextualize us a little we're working out of a cram little Office three of us on top of a bakery in North Finchley in North London as well um speaking to all of us are in these Ukrainian government officials that are telling us about this idea they have of actually launching an nft collection the idea behind the collection itself was quite simple but actually it was it was beautiful they wanted to immortalize the different moments of the war different events different parts of the timeline of what was happening between Ukraine and Russia through artwork and leveraging the immutability of the blockchain to essentially ensure that this memory of the war this timeline of the war is there forever they call it meta history's War line but they had two problems in launching this nft collection the first one was that having bigger fish to fry they didn't have a team of developers that could work with them and the second problem that they had was that okay let's assume that they do get a team of developers to work with them it's actually very likely that Russia will bought the cell so from our perspective this was exactly the scenario we'd envisioned as a way of helping a Creator we had someone who wanted to launch an nft collection but didn't have the necessary infrastructure or developers to do so and at the same time they wanted to protect themselves from a sub-optimal minting experience the idea of a cell getting boted a website going down high transaction fees or anything that could really intervene in the sale and basically making sure that it didn't go ahead so we gave them our proposal we said that this is exactly what we're building right now and they came back to us a couple a couple of hours later saying that we were on the weeks that followed were quite surreal from our perspective mind you we were still a team of three we actually expanded to four for the purposes of the sale and we were having all these secretive meetings with Ukrainian government officials marketing experts to help us expand the reach of the collection which had which hadn't launched yet um we were speaking to Ukrainian white hat hackers who were attacking our website daily to ensure that we were robust enough to sustain a Russian attack all of a sudden Forbes picks up on the story and now we start getting real media attention we're seeing articles coming day in and day out talking about meta history War line and how fair.xyz is going to launch this collection with the Ukrainian government the first ever government-backed NFD we start getting a bit nervous at this point we start receiving hundreds of emails every single day from anywhere with you know anywhere from like a bit of support saying we love you guys thanks so much for doing this for our country all the way to look I'm an observer on the sidelines but I'll be supporting all the way to we're going to go kill you because you're not you know because you're not supporting Russia in this which was obviously a bit scary when when you're um when you're a small company or I guess even if you're a large company no one likes getting death threats anyway the day of the sale comes about and we have these two large screens in the office definitely not as big as these but you can imagine screen here and a screen here on the first screen we had how many sales how many nfts were getting minted through the platform on the second screen we had how many requests are coming to our server and how many of them is our algorithm deeming to be malicious so the sale starts and things are going smoothly we we see 10 nfts minted 100 nfts minted 200 300 it's going great we've raced a few a few thousand dollars at this point and we see our server requests also they're going up as expected right we're hitting a hundred thousand requests which makes sense a lot of people are visiting the website they don't intend to buy 500 000 requests one million requests all of a sudden on telegram we receive a message from the team over at Ukraine that was helping us with this saying hey guys so they they've done their own website for the launch to promote it a bit they say hey guys our website's just gone down we're getting attacked at this point we start getting very scared and mind you just to remind you we have this little chart that was telling us how many requests our website was hitting every single second and all of a sudden it hits 10 million 50 million 100 million our algorithm kicks in it starts classifying them as malicious you know usually when these things happen it gets quite scary on that day we got attacked by Russia left right and Center we sustained 20 billion malicious requests coming coming from Russia against our platform but I'm happy to say that our anti-bought system did work and we actually sustained the wholesale without a single second of downtime and more importantly being able to raise just under one million dollars for the Ukrainian government in a matter of a few hours which is really cool today fat.xyz is leveraging the same technology that we handed to the Ukrainian government to any creator anyone can come on our platform and launch their own nft collection in a matter of minutes whilst ensuring that their collectors get access to the best minting experience we survived a Russia botting attack we're confident we can survive smaller botting attacks as well we believe that the Creator economy is flourishing again through the empowerment that nfts provide the idea of the centralized ownership the idea of royalty payments and the idea of having true ownership over one's digital property and Persona so Faraday XYZ is here to power the next generation of the Creator economy thank you very much oh [Applause] yes yes my man well done Zach how are you feeling all right yeah good thank you very much have you had a good conference uh yeah it's been awesome some great panelists so far which has been uh really cool obviously stay at the market right now it's good to see so many people still you know vibing with crypto still involved still in the space so yeah cool do you want to know what I think tell me I think it's a [ __ ] great time to buy crypto and I'll tell you why it's a great time to buy crypto because if you've done your work and you have conviction right irrespective if you're looking at is it a generational hold then for me anytime there is a an event driven de-risking and liquidation fundamentally everything is still working perfectly it's people that got margin calls so if the price action is negative that's a great time to buy yeah by the way this is financial device this is I'm going to tell you something like um when we started the company yeah it was we went we went to do a raise of VC fund like we went to do VC funding okay and uh the last check we got which was also the last check they ever gave out yeah it was from three hours Capital uh-oh um so obviously you start a company you kind of get that experience of one of the biggest players going under okay quite scary so that's interesting so what happens when three hours Capital make an investment in you and then they essentially become defunct what happens from our perspective nothing should we just give out their position to everybody that's here today can we talk can we tokenize their position and give it out to people uh I think you have to speak to the Liquidators yeah I mean definitely I think the Liquidators are going to want to have first dibs on that yeah because I know you're going to kill it I appreciate it no look I think it's an interesting market for sure um one of the things in crypto and I'm sure a lot of you here have definitely been in the space for way longer than I have I've been an observer for maybe six or seven years more or less involved for the past four years full time for the past year you've definitely seen kind of like down markets a lot more than I have but something that I've always heard is the idea of keep you know keep building uh this is our core thesis right now uh we're going to keep building bull market bear Market we know that the infrastructure is good we know blockchain's good we know that it's going to get mainstream adoption so you know I you're absolutely uh speaking the truth and uh we had Max from liscon earlier on he's been in crypto for 10 years and he said the exact thing absolutely just keep on building because it's not going anywhere and actually it's all about staying in the game right 100 coming up with new ways you know having a focus on where it's going having your North Star but certainly showing up and I think events like token 2049 in London represent what we're all about and it gives us the chance to meet and connect right absolutely I mean if you look around the room it's full of innovation people are still building people still deploying and I think that's one of the most exciting things to look forward to so dude it's been awesome to meet you thank you so much