ETHKL March 2021: What's Up with Crypto Art?

uh so this month uh our uh meetup is about uh crypto art uh we have uh our guests who've kindly uh taken their time to join us uh matthew who's a nft producer at nifty gateway and andres who is the owner of ethercards and uh just a quick note for a sponsor uh eaterscan just to uh provide us with the uh zoom channel and the time and resources to uh be able to to run this uh i don't have a huge announcement this month but last month we did try a couple clubhouse sessions and uh i think we generally got good feedback so if you guys have any suggestions any more interest for uh clubhouse or or ideas uh feel free to ping me uh after we officially end today's meetup um we have one suggestion there to have like a joint uh clubhouse conversation with uh the singaporean folks with rahman and since we have people here from other cities around the world as well if you guys are interested we can do like a joint conversation we might need to figure out a good time that fits everyone's time zone but we can probably work it out and so some monthly roundup stuff uh just i think yesterday um second march uh aws announced uh they're like giving this general support of ethereum nodes on amazon managed blockchain so if you use them it'll be very easy to like set up a node very quickly there is a question always of you know note let's not everyone use aws because then it's not very decentralized but i think especially if you're starting out like a new depth that's a very good way to get a node running instead of having to figure that thing out for yourself uh we also have a big news of bitfenix and tether who settled with the new york attorney general's office they have had a two year long case outstanding against them where uh the nyag is claiming that the usct isn't fully backed it does appear that they didn't pull that uh sort of allegation against uh tefl but they did settle it out of court tata paid 18.5 million us dollars which is pretty much a a slap on the wrist uh i'm sure they can afford to pay much much more than that and one uh sort of kind of collateral damage from this is that new yorkers are banned from accessing bitfenix and related services although i'm not sure how exactly they are planning to enforce that uh also another big one was uh eip1559 has been around for uh ages and ages now uh especially with the congestion scene last month there was a lot of uh talk about um when are we getting this up uh but then we also had a lot of pushback from minus um so yeah so you can see on the left side there like only one mining pool has officially announced that they're supporting it whereas there's a lot more that save that said they've opposed just to kind of shield my own a little bit of my own work at the dashboard i can share the link later just to show sort of some statistics based on their position about 63 percent of mining pools are known to be opposed to um erp-1559 and couple days ago there was like a big call kind of discussing it with uh the different stakeholders um i do have one thing that i guess is a little bit recorded but this is recorded but just share a little bit what i've heard in the grapevine is that uh some of the larger mining pools are not necessarily heavily against it but uh because there are one or two of the smaller pools that have made a huge fuss about how eip1509 is biased against miners and they were essentially doing this sort of cut customer acquisition thing pulling minus from the bigger mining pools so uh that led to some of the bigger mining pools having to officially uh put this position but that's you know that's just in the grapevine i don't know how true that is particularly um very related for today uh chris dixon from uh anderson horowitz wrote a good article about uh nfts and a thousand true fans uh there's a popular uh essay from uh 2008 uh a thousand two feds about how contributors can um sort of monetize from um from creating art or other similar work um and uh nfts is said to be able to um unlock that um that's a question for the two guests later um so for more local news uh by nance uh announced that uh for p2p they're uh kind of allowed uh using e-wallet for payment uh so there is touch and go and grab pay listed in in this list i don't know um i've never tried either one to make any p2p payments if you guys any of you have uh please feel free later to share your experience um my understanding from a friend who works at grab is that grep doesn't officially um accept crypto so i don't know if binance is doing it kind of in a roundabout way but yeah if you have any experience feel free to share uh i think yeah second march also uh the science ministry deputy minister said that uh the government malaysian government have started tracing uh study start a project to trace uh the kovit 19 vaccine using blockchain and not much more detail about it beyond that so if anyone knows a little bit more about this like what blockchain it is whether it's mission permissionless um feel free to share as well and lastly we have a bunch of news around how uh illegal miners have uh either stolen a lot of electricity or have been clamped down by the police i think there's even more than these three articles i just didn't have space to put all of them um that's probably a top signal if there ever was one and yeah i mean in hindsight i can say this because the price did drop towards the end of february but a lot of these articles came before that as well okay so that's the end of the roundup um please uh welcome matthew everyone and uh matthew if you have any if you wanna share your screen uh please feel free to do so i'm going to stop sharing now are you muted by the way yes i just saw that excuse the muted mic it's 4 am where i'm calling in from uh i'm in lovely portland oregon calling in nice to to be here with everyone um let me share my screen and get this slide up here so you have to so you don't have to keep looking at my covet haircut one second here we go yeah i have to i just gave permissions to my computer to do this i'll hop out and hop right back in and it should be able to share one sec okay oh wow there's a bunch of chat messages a patricia does that mean it's uh further or closer than um then but denver looks nice there we go let's try this on okay now i can see my windows all right well can you see this yep okay can you see this though are you able to still see the slide i put in the presentation great okay so this is a very simple presentation but i feel like the the contents of this are quite rich and really interesting and timely right now um the space is moving so quickly and before we go to further essentially i just kind of want to go back and look at um first of all like why is this moment happening right now when it comes to crypto art specifically and nfts generally it definitely feels like a little bit as if niagara falls is pouring over a few cups that are the crypto art and nft marketplaces and everything is just overflowing uh the space is getting flooded with the tension we're at nearly a quarter a billion dollars in sales over a nearly 100 000 um nfts have been mentioned but specifically when it comes to crypto art um the mass media is starting to pick up and use nft nfts as if it's a common word now um there used to be a debate uh trying to figure out how to rebrand from nfts to something else it appears as if that is something that is not necessarily um an important thing to happen at least in the the mass media today um so like why is it happening where did it come from and where is it going um i feel like this this is a really interesting chart to look at to kind of explore the history this goes back to 2018 but i kind of want to make sure that we go back a little bit more to the roots of what's happening today but if we look at today obviously we see a project like nifty gateway where i'm a producer at helping artists and creators structure their jobs conceive what they want to to launch putting together the marketing the promotion and getting everything together for a specific drop date where they release their work to a rabid audience of nearly 50 000 collectors uh to purchase and buy their works um obviously there's there's something there that people are clicking with sales have gone up these are amazing numbers but everything started way back in the quiet days of 2014 certain concepts and ideas um specifically from the bitcoin network um talking about colored coins um trying to represent offline assets um a lot of people started with real estate as uh tokens was sort of like the genesis of what we know as nfts today and then the counterparty network had a couple different really popular experiments i know a lot of some of you here may be familiar with the rare pepe experiment um and then of course their spells of genesis and and everyone's fan favorite krypto punks which it seems like twitter profiles are just switching over to crypto punk inspired avatars almost every day right now as the floor for that project continues to rise and then 2017 we have crypto kitties that pops into the scene um december 2017 open c first uh kick started to kind of deal with the demand that uh cryptokitties brought to the scene at the end or the height of the 2017 bull around early 2018 we have projects like um super rare uh origin that popped in since when it comes to specifically handling crypto art but then with the crash um in early 2018 there's a silence that fell on the nft space and that's when things got really interesting in the the early community started to build up and what comprises crypto are in the nft space today got really busy building in that silence after the crash in early 2018. um the crypto art oh geez like x copy cody artnem robbie barrett hackathon miss al simpson vk crypto killer acid rare skrilla and there's a lot of others that came in and started creating art and buying art it was really a community-led mission it was really small everyone knew everyone over on on openc on super rare specifically rather prices were so low anything over 100 was like wow that was a big sale what are you what are you doing with that it was it was really amazing times there's also a project like sense that i was a co-founder of and now advisor that was a blockchain based social network that started to attract a lot of crypto artists themselves that came and started sharing their process started talking about what it means to tokenize art using nfts and the community kept building we kept interacting and artists like connie digital started to kind of talk about what they're doing in this place called the metaverse or blockchain-based vr worlds like cryptovoxels where they were setting up virtual galleries for their art and folks that were on scent like the co-founders of async art conlon and no shot they started exploring the metaverse further sharing their art collaborating with other people to kind of build out whole neighborhoods in these virtual worlds conlan the co-founder of async art in particular was instrumental in building out the shared aesthetic of the gangnam district in crypto voxels the all-black landscape he has a build there where after he set a then record uh for buying a matt kane work of art on super air for around like 13 or 1400 he housed it in his cryptovoxels gallery and shortly after there um around uh the 20 uh end of 2019 i myself uh kind of jumped in and it was a part of history when i scooped up a a lot of money and javinci collaboration on super rare for a then staggering sixteen hundred dollars or like around 11 eth and it was crazy people were like what are you doing that's worth one eighth there's no real value here but behind these purchases the community was building there was a crypto art fair that happened um in crypto voxels about 50 different artists came together to create commissioned art for this metaverse event that also took place in los angeles in the fall of 2019 and interest was growing and around december of 2019 that's when the space had its like first big whale splash onto the scene and that's when whale shark um the infamous or infamous pseudonymous figure who's behind the whale project who's taken his millions of dollars of crypto art has now tens of millions of dollars of nba top shots and other nft assets and put them into a vault and essentially tokenize them for the community to kind of take part in and sharing the upside and he came into the scene in december and that's when things really got interesting he started buying again first tens of thousands of dollars worth of crypto art and then it quickly reached hundreds of thousands of dollars and more artists started to pour in right and the community kept growing this was really really really really interesting right and then in 2020 around february we had nftnyc and that was the first time that a lot of the people in the nfc and crypto our community were able to kind of gather in place in new york city i flew there a lot of folks from sent from were there people um from tri-roll the social money projects were there everyone was andrew's fine but like the list goes on and on and on and on and right around that time that's when common and no shot actually launched asynchron and a then record was set for the first work that they featured there that was a collaboration featuring many of the the prominent artists in the space at the time and i believe medicare even scooped that up for 70 000 right and it was like wow the numbers keep getting bigger and more artists more collectors started to come in but it was still very small it's like our own little project everyone still knows everyone but what we've seen is that there's been a steady progression of new collectors new big collectors after whale shark we have folks like pablo and colborne the co-founders of the museum of crypto art who came in and started buying a lot of art and around the summer that's when they started making pretty high five figure sales of crypto art um i think probably one of the most memorable purchase was when they bought uh pax a red pixel for like i think it was like fifty five thousand five five 555.55 and it was a performance purchase it was something that kind of got people talking i think they're featured in a couple media outlets and again it's just like this organic push towards people really believing that these nfts in particular the crypto art hold some sort of value and as these numbers started to go up as more collectors started coming more artists start joining and it's been really interesting to see how this community and creator-led movement has has grown to a point where obviously now um mainstream attention is here we have incredible interest from musicians um some of the names are crazy justin bieber is excited about this actively trying to put something together we have major rappers that have already put out nfts that are working we have blau who's self-released a tokenized album raised tens of millions of dollars um we have again major film studios that are coming to this uh of course uh the bigger artists from the traditional art world are starting to start thinking about how to deal with um digital art christie's of course were seven days away from the conclusion of of beeples um work that is featured there last i checked was that the bid was at three and a half million dollars and again like he people played an instrumental role in coming into the scene late 2020 on nifty gateway and having just like first of all really interesting mechanics behind this drop pricing a couple works of art at a dollar each and putting out there having it scooped up in seconds and having the secondary market explode for this and again it's not all about the numbers but the numbers are have consistently been a source of attraction for folks that are not yet in the nft in crypto art scene to come in here and see what's happening in projects that make it easy to purchase and experiment with the their purchasing of nfts like nifty gateway and and makers place even with their credit card and debit enabled purchases it's constantly helped grow the scene so now we're seeing this market-driven onboarding that's starting to happen and potentially the the up the limit is well as many people are out as are out there because who's not potentially a collector of something to recap everything we started with this crypto art we're what crypto art is today everything started as this community-led movement creators doing a lot of really interesting experimentation that brought folks in that we're excited and passionate about supporting these creators and that kind of snowballed into where we were today where just the the bare basic um idea of being able to buy and sell permissions permissionlessly on these rare digital assets on these open marketplaces is something that's really interesting um at the end of the day and it's powerful when it's an idea that now you're starting to see hundreds of thousands of people on the way to a million start to understand and grok and right now the velocity that this thing is going and the number of new artists and creators that are coming into the space wanting to do something with nfts and crypto art we're going to see many many more communities onboarded to this idea of being able to buy and sell rare digital assets which is amazing it's great because with this fundamental layer of understanding and this base layer of new collectors around the world from here this is where heading into the future we're going to start seeing hopefully more experimentation when it comes to things like interoperability other projects out there beginning to adopt create and popularize different standards when it comes to incorporating nfts into their projects and that's where the ideas of like this um like using future revenue from sales created or derived from nft start to come in that's when for musicians in some of these virtual worlds they're starting to build out the idea of streaming music and having licenses that allow them via nfts to hold on to the masters if you will and send out or sell licenses for folks to stream their work starts to come in and a lot of different really powerful financial primitive tools powered by nfts and d5 and all the other bits of infrastructure that have popped up recently and that will continue to pop up in the future will become possible but at the end of the day it still needs to be it's still going to be a creator driven marketplace where the people the ideas the artists who are experimenting kicking the tires and keeping the interest of their collectors and new collectors will continue to be integral to inspiring space to move forward and grow and get excited and to avoid something like what happened um in the end of uh or the beginning of 2018 with the crash when all the the steam behind the icos and the six page white papers promising the whole world to folks if they just send them some ether kind of fizzled out and popped because there is nothing behind really most of those ideas now we have the opportunity to actually present ready-made final products and products that continually can be integrated into the future using this nft infrastructure so i hope you all appreciated this very simple uh presentation i was very tired in the morning um so i hope this is enough but i just wanted to recount the history of the space um and kind of shed a light in everything that came before and how that's important and everything that will come uh into the future so thank you very much uh thanks matthew there are some questions for you but i'm gonna keep it for later um um for for now um thanks matthew for giving us a brief look into the past of nfps and up until the present and i think andres has some things to share that potentially points to the future of nft art so andres if you're okay to unmute and share your screen yep i'm good shall i start yeah uh do you have a slides to share i i will i will show some uh some browser windows not slides but uh i i just want to to have us a couple of words before i do that okay so hello everybody my name is andreas kristoff i'm from eater cards we are in the space for since since 2013 we did quite a few things some of you might have might know us from the audience we started in 2013 we built the first bitcoin atm in asia and deployed it in early 2014 and then we switched to ripple because there was no ethereum yet we removed xrp so it cannot be pumped and built in rig signatures from monaro so it is more private and built a distributed asset management system then as soon as ethereum came out in late 2014 we started to work with ethereum and it is we've been working with ethereum ever since worked with quite a few big names we worked did projects for consensus we built oracles for consensus before i think before chain link existed we did uh we did quite a few things with nfts as well many years ago uh one of the things we did the nfc ticketing for defcon osaka and we are going to do the nft cutting for the bogota defcon whenever that defcon is going to be and so we have been around nfps for a long time and there was a particular project that we started about a year ago which was a a blockchain based educational project very kindly supported and funded by the ethereum foundation which was about to issue certificates on the blockchain which went which was which was going well and we did well but like three four months into the into the development implementation i realized that there is no business case no business model behind the project so when the project when the funding is over the project likely may or may not survive so we started to think about in what ways we can create monetization structure for a project like that and there is this death valley of crypto project i think many of us knows this from the from the industry if you are doing a financial project like anything food-based where you can have the number go up then you will get funded because people will come and give you money but if you don't do if you are not doing a financial project but you do something else like education or even like a dedicated a distributed vpn or for example like a like a job board or anything like that getting funded is very difficult because uh the crowd will not come to you as easily and vcs will stay away from you usually because the vc's like to monetize by by selling the customer data and if you are doing a blockchain project right you don't have customer data to sell so there is this there is this problem with the space and we wanted to find a solution for that so i came up with the idea of an nft based funding and monetization framework that can be used to to to monetize and fund non-financial projects open source open open technology projects on the blockchain and in order to pilot it we we were looking for use cases and we decided to uh to use ether cards as the use case for it so that's how the project started and it kind of blew up a like three four weeks ago in a good way and now we feel we are living in a slow-mo nuclear explosion so let's see how it goes but so far this is amazing and what i would like to do now is to show you the the the project i want to show you both parts i want to show you the platform ethercards and i want to show you the nft token and the tokenization system behind it which is technically an nft based monetization slash funding framework so if you follow me let me share my screen and then i'll get started i think it's going to take another 10 minutes and then we can we can have questions share screen okay so okay i assume you can you can see my screen may i get a feedback thank you again thank you so this is the this is the teaser page of ethercar this is the counter with the 14 days left and it shows the two important parts of the project the platform and the token i'm going to go in this order and i'm going to explain the platform first uh the platform is the platform is a monetization and gamification framework for nfts it it is a framework for artists and ft holders and marketplaces to to gamify and monetize the nft's better better what we are going to do we are going to release a series of tools or games for the artist marketplaces that they can utilize to to create engagement around is so you can do something with it other than buying selling and holding and what we are going to do we're going to roll out a couple of these engagements we're going to start with two but we've got already six or seven very interesting ones in the in the pipeline i'm going to explain these two very simple ones and the first one is raffle raffles are very simple there is no innovation in in the in in this uh from the sense that it's a simple referral uh you can open a raffle anybody can open a raffle on the platform uh you can upload your nft you can say that you want to to mint 100 tickets each ticket is 0.1 ether and then you go and people can buy the tickets they can discover the referrals they can buy the tickets and when the last uh ticket is sold yeah we re the summer the smart contract reaches out to chain link vrf uh it gets a verified random number of winner is selected the winner withdraws the nft and you can withdraw the the money for the tickets uh i can actually show it to you because i got that on the in the test net so this is this is an earlier version of the of the of the page with the different raffles you can select one of the nfts the nft will show up and you will be able to buy buy the tickets your tickets will show up and all the tickets are gone the rough will be automatically resolved by the smart contract i cannot show it to you because i forgot to find this wallet with the wrinkabi eater so you just have to believe me but you can come here actually you try it yourself so this is very simple but it can be very powerful think about it you've got uh a 20 eater floor punk uh yes because even the cheapest punk sauna is like around 20 liter which is crazy but you've got this 20 liter floor plank you upload it to raffle you meet hundred tickets and you say each ticket will be 0.

3 ether people will come they will see here is a punk which worth at least 20 liter but they have a fair chance to get it for 0.3 liter so people will buy the tickets and one of the luck one the lucky one will actually get the punk uh for zero point liter and you just sowed your 20 punk for 30 eater so this can be used in many different ways and this can actually create engagement between the between the the artist and their audience the second game that we are coming out with is called a bingo we call we bingo there we use the term a bit liberally it is not technically a bingo it's more like a puzzle game the way it works i actually i think i can show an early version of this as well we go back here and on this page here is one bingo this is just a test this is just a just a demo of a bingo so in this in this particular page the user who is visiting this page has these seven cat nfts in in their wallet so the system will when you load the bingo page the smart contract will know which nfts makes sense in the context of the bingo and will display the nfts and then as you can see uh the corresponding seven cats are also highlighted in the original artwork but you can also see there is a lot more cats that are not highlighted so the objective of the game very simple you need to find the nfts purchase by exchange to find or to get all the missing cats and when you when you complete uh collected all the 16 cats all the cats will be highlighted on the picture and you can you can claim the price the price can be anything it can be an eater can be eater can be another very expensive nft token or it can be erc20 tokens so it can actually be used for promotion as well we've got quite a few interesting versions of this game but even without the versions this can be used in many different ways for example imagine that you've got 15 out of the 16 cats and you just can't find the last one so what you can do for example you can create your own bingo and specify that missing cat as the solution for the bingo and then and then say you put up two eaters for that and whoever can can supply for for that one cat can get the twitters and you get them a sim card that you can use to to complete your puzzle so basically you can turn this bingo into a bounty and again there is a lot of different ways that you can use it and for example the other way if the if the if the price is another nft then it is possible to set up a higher layer higher level of puzzle where you need to to find those nfts through multiple bingos and then collect them into into a bingo game which which speak fires those nfts interest important point here is that if you claim the price for something then you will lose the nfts that you use to to complete the puzzle so it means we are technically incentivizing people to give up their nfts for short term profit this is seems simple but it has very interesting consequences on the long term one question that usually comes up at this point is how do you acquire these uh these cards this can be anywhere i mean this this can come from from all the other big and important uh platforms for example from nifty or open c for or for somewhere else and so and you can use those nfts to create a bingo or you can actually choose to to mint it on uh on eater cards if you choose it to meet it to eat on it or cars then you can also specify the rarity of each of the cats you can say this cat is much more uh much more rare than this cat and this cat is a and and so this cat is much more common than this cut and then you can also specify the the maximum issuance of each of the members of the series and once you did that the system will automatically offer you to create blind bags blind bags or sealed bags of cards are a very known uh common structure in in real world the collectible card games like when you buy a bag of pokemon cards you don't know what cards are in the bag you only know that there is 10 cards inside but you don't know which one you open it and you see it same concept here the once you created your series the system cal can automatically create these backs and sell this back for you in fact the system will be able to create multiple types of bags which should be here but somebody got removed i will have to fix that for example this bag is the cheapest but has the the least chance of having having the rare cat and there could be a bag which is more more expensive but it has more chance of getting the rare cards inside so in this way you create engagement and you create create interaction and create reasons for people to buy nfts not only because they know what it is but also because they don't know what's uh what's on it so these are the first two engagements that we are coming with but there is a lot more that is that is in the pipeline and this will be released uh regularly after the first two ones the important part of the of this platform is that it is technically a b2b platform the the real uh importance of this gamification and uh and monetization platform uh can be realized when big marketplaces again right like nifty or like uh open c will integrate with them and will make it available to to their users so they can create this kind of engagements because reference and all the other things natively from their their platform they don't even have to visit ether cards but they can use the same set of uh of security audited smart contracts it's good for us because we make a little bit of money it's good for them and it's definitely good for their customers regarding the business model we make it very simple when you create a referral or create a bingo you say you pay a setup fee right now it's set to 0.1 liter and after that it's all yours whatever you make however many tickets you sell or don't sell if you make 10 eater or 10 000 liter we don't care we don't take a cut we take the sata fee and we don't reach into your pocket the rest of the money is yours so this is the platform and now i would like to spend another five minutes to explain the token that uh uh that comes with the platform and then we can have questions um sorry can i give you two minutes because we're kind of uh a bit over time so just rush it a little bit i will do my best sir uh the go ahead the the token looks like uh looks like a normal nfd card it has a serial number it goes from zero to 999 it has rare art created by real artists who created who who provided this art for these cards for these nfts but other than that it also has a set of of traits and these traits are very important because these traits are made to work well with the platform with the ethercars platform some trades are for for creators some for players and some for technically everybody i will i will show you three examples just to shorten the time for example if you have a card in your wallet which is connected with data cards uh contract which has the free bingo setup trade you don't have to pay for setting up a bingo it's technically free for you you don't need to do anything you just keep this card in your wallet if you are a player and if you want to buy uh blind bags and you have lucky if you have the lucky trade on your card then whatever blind bag you buy even the cheapest ones you will get the content of the best ones so basically the system will max out your luck because you have the lucky trade on your card one more thing is the is the royalty trade this is very special it's technically every transaction service fee that goes into the ethercar smart contract one percent of every transaction will go to the owner of this card there is only one card out of the 10 000 but in order to make the chances better we have one card with one percent ten cards with zero point one percent and one hundred cards with zero point zero one percent of this reality threat so we're basically giving up three percent of the of the revenue of either cards and giving away four hundred and eleven uh lucky people who will get these cards and as the last thought as you uh these traits are special because these are forever later on the platform will support for you to purchase new trades but all of those trades will actually be limited either by time expiration date or by a certain amount of use they will disappear but the trades on these cards which is going to be sold in 14 days are forever and as you can see this platform and this card can actually be very easily used for any other platform out there you can actually let's say sushi sushi swept can actually issue their own sushi cards with the sushi trades that will let you swap two assets on their platform without paying the transaction the exchange fee and any other project any other service based project even if it is not financial based can utilize this this feature token system to raise funds and to monetize themselves i'm done thank you thank you andres uh okay there's a bunch of questions here um i think typically i ask my own question first but i think there's a lot of questions so i think uh and because i i messed up earlier so i will get the audience questions um for both uh andres and matthew um but i just have one question before that is um because both of you have been around uh in nft for a while um uh and matthew i know you've been uh involved in a bunch of other sort of nfp related uh communities so um can both of you give a little bit more introduction especially around the other nfp stuff that you've been uh working on um matthew first yeah um so in addition to being an nfg producer at nifty gateway and in addition to being a co-founder and advisor at sense which kind of before i had kind of left the day-to-day there we set up a project called valuables early december of last year where we started tokenizing tweets and again it was really a fun experiment showing that like almost anything that can be tokenized will be tokenized but then applying the scarcity dynamic that was popular and is popular in in crypto art collecting where that one tweet signed by the original author um that then on the surface at least can not no longer be minted again proved to be something that was interesting to the folks that have been in the space and especially in the context of the broader story of a lot of the previous works of art that have been released for example artists like cody who had tweeted out many years ago about a particular piece that they're putting up on the marketplace that eventually obviously had been acquired by another collector that collector then went through cody's twitter feed found the corresponding tweet to the artwork that he collected and bought the tweet to kind of complete the story um so that was an interesting project that i was a part of and then hadith knows that i'm also the the creator and host of the weekly whip meetup which is a metaverse event not strictly focused on nfts uh but incorporates a lot of projects going on in nfts crypto artists as well as the defy space to kind of bring people together every thursday 12 p.m pacific to share two to three minute short and sweet updates on their latest works in progress to kind of cross-pollinate these interesting ideas that are happening largely in their own little silos uh as an uh as a way to not bring the different communities together to have this really fun time in these blockchain based uh nft powered vr worlds like cryptovoxels and decentraland um so that's sort of like the other projects that i had been directly involved in when it comes to the intersection of nfts and all the amazing things going on in the space thanks matthew and andres uh i've been dealing with nfts for uh for quite a while as well uh constantly seeking to to find ways to uh to teach them new tricks uh and i think uh most of our experience and ideas are going to are going to put into into eater cars both into the platform and into the token so yeah that's that's about it okay um oh yeah and uh matthew i do know you have a art gallery on crypto voxels if i'm not mistaken uh you might wanna share the link uh in the chat so people can see your collection oh yeah as i'm finding and fumbling around with my browser these weary eyes um yeah crypto art collecting is something that again because of my connection with scent and meeting all these artists um i became a bit of a collector uh about two and a half years ago which is quite fortunate um given the latest state of the market i was able to acquire a bunch of classics from some of the amazing artists the the crypto ogs i think they're calling themselves right now um which has been just absolutely insane and i've done a bit of writing on the topic so like i know people are coming into the space and it's great to just collect exactly what you love and i'm just trying to kind of temper the expectations of speculative profit with like a great collector's mentality which is when you come into the space even if you do want to make a return on your investment make sure that at the end of the day you are only buying what you love and in a metaverse future where you wake up every day in vr and you have to look at your wall if you are not happy or if you won't be happy looking at this piece that you're thinking about buying today um 50 years into that metaverse future don't buy it only by what you love um but yeah like uh hadith was mentioning i had this crypto art stadium that i call it uh encrypt voxels where i hang all of my work let me enter my meta mask so i can unlock the url real quick as i'm installing oh i'm not on my my personal computer i'll show you that in the chat in a second yeah it's okay to the next question yeah in the meantime uh there's a bunch of questions i want to make sure um we kind of rotate the uh the question between the two speakers um so maybe the next one i can uh ask undress it as a in the chat there's actually four questions uh let's see so yeah it's okay i'll take it yeah um so if you can see it you can kind of repeat it quickly for for listeners and then answer it oh this one so how far along is the platform in current state the the raffle is ready to be deployed the bingo i'm still working on it it was supposed to be get ready by the by the release but we got a little bit off guard by the amount of pr and interaction i need to do with the community so that is a bit behind schedule but after a week or two we will be able to deploy the bingo as well the platform to creators to create cars to put on on the various market spaces or it is meant to consumers to uh we don't want to became a platform we've got great platforms like nifty like openclick address we want to became a tool set so people yes you can you will be able to create nfts on the platform but you can just take your nfts from the other platform and gamify it here so the platform is a tool set that connects the the creators and the players and creates engagements we don't want to become uh an nft marketplace up to what extent does the platform cover from creation of the card games until the minting and drop process we're going to start with simple processes you can create the the tokens you can create the engagement and we will get more and more complex eventually i want to create i want to provide everybody a tool set so they can do pretty much anything that that collectible card games can do and way more than that think about nfts that will starve and this and disappear and die if you don't feed them or or lose powers when you move them so there's a lot of things that with this with this platform we can add to standard nfts one thing is important the way we did it we don't need to modify the the standard so we can use straight up 721 we can use straight up 1155 we don't need to modify the contract we don't need special tokens for this can you customize the smart constructs of the cars to change the road to lose absolutely you can actually set your own rules and connect it with your own site and make cars do whatever you want on your platform okay thanks okay so uh flipping to matthew next uh there's a question from kirk um i'm interested in the interaction of large physical art with digital art and fully nft eyes art thick monument scale bronze sculptures with integrated digital art in it so does nifty gateway have any ideas or a road map for this use case so i don't know specifically about large-scale bronze statues that's super specific but a lot of the artists that we are working with um are thinking about how to pair physical art with the digital and there's a few different like possible vectors to go from there right so assigning equal value to the physical and the the digital item and making sure that they're linked in a specific way you see people that are incorporating like qr codes as a way to kind of bind the the digital nft asset to the physical you're seeing other experiments with folks that are trying to say well you can either have the digital nft or you can have a physical um so like there's a redeeming aspect that they're experimenting with where on nifty like of course we would drop the digital nft folks would collect it and then they would have the option to in many cases burn the nft to redeem the physical or just use the nft as a ticket to say hey i own the nft please send me the physical um when it comes to like large-scale installations in like major museums or major metropolitan areas or something like that it's not something we've seen um kind of experimented with yet but i feel like with the current um wave of interest i'm expecting to hopefully interact with um a big city thinking about how they can incorporate nfts into their their cultural heritage heading for that would be really interesting in that physical and digital sense oh that's cool um if there's anyone uh here who is like as a relation to the malaysian kind of museum or or art space uh feel free to uh to reach out um okay then uh question on ethercards uh jonathan asks uh andres will the cards and trades of the cards be revealed as you buy them on 18th march or all at the end when the ten thousand cards are sold all at the end all at the end so nobody will know whether the best rates have been already dished out or not yet so when the when the card basically either when the ten 000 cards are sold or after three weeks this is the current plan we will close it close the sale and then all the cards and the trades gets reviewed okay cool by the way if anyone has any questions you want to ask verbally feel free to unmute yourself uh just take a quick pause just so i can see uh your name uh at the top and and then you can ask your question directly otherwise i'm gonna kind of like randomly pick from the chat that we have so far um so uh matthew someone's asking how do they get in touch with you uh to get introduced on to nifty there's quite a queue right now if you can answer that yeah sure um well first in in terms of getting in contact with me you can find me on twitter at nifty time i'm pretty responsive on there in the dms they should be open you can read my writing on scent scent dot co matthew and then anyone that's interested or is an artist um that wants to reach out and talk about um how they could potentially get on nifty gateway feel free to email me as well if that's more convenient matthew.farrick gemini.

com i left that in the the chat here too so feel free to copy that down and use that i think hadith mentioned we do have quite a queue in terms of our drop schedule we're full basically fully booked up until the end of july which is crazy um and just more inbound interest comes in every day but i'm very happy to talk to everyone um give advice if um we can't fit you into a schedule and then talk about some really cool updates that we have coming um to uh hopefully alleviate that schedule issue that we have right now with our drop schedule constraints cool uh andres a bit seeker asked how are features of its cars like royalty rooted ones related to eip 2981 royalty standard or if it's related at all they are not no they are not right now this is uh we wanted to create a an implementation that can be used with with straight 720 ones and 1155s so right now they are not related to to any of the other standards the the thing is with those realities it's a it's a it's a longer discussion but realities in that sense are usually connected with the platform and with a platform and if you move the cards from uh or the nfts from the platform it's much less likely that can be uh can be enforced uh we do have a reality system on the ether cards but if you want to do an actually truly uh truly legit reality system you need to give up on two notions you the first thing is that you should not uh that you cannot actually take royalty on the secondary market sales if you want the cards to be truly free what you can do you can incentivize the buyer on the secondary market to pay the rarity because it's good for them but you cannot enforce it if you enforce it then you have already taken actions that made that nfd not actually freely movable the other thing is that you need to give up if you think about it you cannot make the royalty the percentage of the sales price because it's impossible to know the royal the sales price in a in in the in an open and the permissionless blockchain i can send you the i can send you the nft and you may pay for it with a bag of potatoes or if you pay for it with cash or you pay for it with an interpretive dance there is no way to have a percentage on that and you need to give up this notion so what you can do there you can do two things you either put a very low amount a reasonable amount which people will will be able to pay after they acquire the cards and they can say okay i know that you know if i want to do this and this and that with the cards then i need to i need to this this need to pay this amount but that amount has nothing to do with the actual purchase price because again it is impossible to know for sure and it can be very easily hidden so don't even bother so the only way that what you can do you can either put a very small price on it or you can price the card or the price the art according to your own standards and you say this card or this art worth this much so you need to pay 10 percent of that uh but again you cannot actually use the actual purchase price as the uh as the as the basis unless it is on a specific platform but if you are restricted restricting it to a specific platform then you are doing uh stuff with nfts that you that i don't think then the the system was built for uh and to clarify for example it would be like a variable uh where a platform you can sell yeah yes but if the if the token is being sold on on another platform or just trade between two wallets the variable the wearable reality cannot be enforced and uh and this is something that that you need to need to accept because there is no way around it you either log the token or you you give up the notion of realities okay cool i have a cool question here from jonathan is there any possible collaboration between nifty and ether cards wink uh i i can definitely answer from my side we we we would like to because again we don't want to be a marketplace we want to provide tools for the marketplaces so yes absolutely we would love to speak yeah and very very happy to continue that conversation monday so thank you very much happy to meet you here and happy to schedule something up after we finish this up sounds great thank you very much um okay i think there's actually a the very first question uh from the earlier zoom link uh someone asked uh for matthew uh what's your definition of the meta verse it seems a loose subjective concept well totally very very loose and subjective i usually go to what andrew steinwald um said and how he defined it it's a digital space where folks live work and play and essentially like earn a living at this point so that can mean even twitter in a sense applies to that people are essentially living and playing on twitter all day a lot of people especially artists use it as their main um means of distribution sharing information on their latest drop to drive them to the marketplaces but it could also be like a blog like sense um sort of powered by the blockchain that facilitates these cross-chain payments and things like that and of course most obviously uh some of these blockchain uh powered vr worlds like cryptovoxels decentralized omnium space and hopefully super soon the sandbox which we can get in there and enjoy some of the community games that that world is ready made for um so that's sort of how i define a digital space where you live work and play very broad still i'm sure it'll get more defined but um a question and a topic that i definitely love to talk about great question cool uh and andres i think uh harry actually asked this a couple times for you um didn't understand no fee concept no no no there is no fee no no fee there is no taking percentage so what we do if you want to set up your bingo you pay a small setup fee 0.1 ether and then you can do your bingo you can issue your tickets and whatever money you get from your ticket sale it is all yours we don't take a cut on that and of course you will have to pay the gas fees so that's have we we can't do much about that although we are moving to probably to optimism and once you move to optimism gas fees will be much much more manageable but yes there is a fee there is a small setup fee 0.1 ether right now but after that whatever you get from the from the sale of your tickets is all yours we don't take a cut uh and interestingly andres mentioned optimism uh on an anecdotal basis i noticed a bunch of nfts nft projects have moved to uh matic so i don't know if maybe uh matthew do you have any opinion on let's say if nifty gateway have plans to move to a specific uh side chain or from what you've heard from other projects what's the kind of popular one yeah um so can't comment on the nifty gateway situation but for it for sent we i mean we have direct experience building automatic especially when we build out that valuables project where we're tokenizing tweets so the integration with matic was actually super streamlined we incorporated payments on the ethereum blockchain so folks where are that are familiar with buying or transacting in eth or any other erc-20 are able to buy and sell using e on ethereum and settle that way and in that sense even if gas costs are high um it's not prohibitively expensive compared to minting on the ethereum blockchain so that when someone wanted to buy a tweet if they actually the the tweet uh original author sold it the minting of it would happen right on the matic blockchain in the background and everything would be abstracted and since open seas at the time of when we created valuables was in the process of getting ready to integrate a lot of the projects that were on matic into the openc store so you can effectively um see the assets and purchase them and interact with them like we thought it was a great way to go and it seems that with the way the industry is going and the building that's happening on there today as well projects like avogadro just to name one um it definitely seems like the right direction and as the economy over there starts to build up and folks start transacting natively within matic it will become even more interesting because from a user experience perspective um the low to no cost transaction fees that layer 2 solutions like matic present just make the it makes it so much better to interact and it increases the velocity of interaction and buying and selling and um playing of the games that interacts with the blockchain and needs that sort of um sort of settlement layer and things like that and the ease of access to get over to ethereum i think will continue to improve and um yeah it's an amazing amazing project the team's really helpful um folks that are familiar with building on ethereum can get over to matic relatively easily so yeah nothing but the highest prices for for a project like matic i know there's other solutions out there too like near protocol and things like that um but i can't speak to them as much as i can thematic okay cool um so yeah actually i'm just gonna say i'm sorry yes it's polygon i'm referring to the ticker symbol yeah um quadri has a question i believe for andres um um how does the pack work in the smart contracts you package the nfts and the element of randomness to include rare nfts no yeah it's so basically when uh you can do packs with with serious that were created on on on on ethercards and what happens when you buy a pack you are not actually buying a pack of nfts then the system will get a via referendum number from uh chaining and mean uh 10 nfds in the series right there so they are not these are not pre-packaged nfts which is just a visual representation because that helps people to understand what's going on but basically they are going to be minted based on the rarity constraints uh created by the by the creators of those of those series okay cool um i believe that's the questions from the audience so unless you guys have more i can get to my own questions that uh i delayed um so uh this is a it is a relatively personal one and might there might be people here who are um who have a similar question so i have a friend who is an artist he creates like gif uh kind of images uh he's checked out the art nfts for for the last like one or two months but uh his opinion is that it feels like the only artists that uh can make it in the nft world are those who already have a following uh like your peoples and you know people who have like thousands of uh followers on instagram um do you have any comments uh on that 18 million he has 18 million not thousands okay you know i mean for other uh at least thousand thousands of fans but what about those who don't have a following already uh how can they participate in the nft creator economy uh i guess either so i mean this is a common question that comes up and it's sort of like a chicken and egg problem a cold start problem right you have to kind of get your work out there first of all um and then a lot of people say you need to get on social media and like talk about yourself share your work um which i mean you can do that but no one really wants to listen to someone talk about their own work right so one of the easiest ways to kind of get involved in the community would be to kind of just interact with other folks who share like their latest drop or who may be on like a clubhouse or a podcast kind of get in there and raise your hand let folks know like hey i'm an artist i'm doing cool things i'm on super rare or whatever wearable or open seat right um i appreciate your work and kind of like just being a member of the community and having and when when you do that artists i do this too i'm not an artist but just click through the link and you're able to see oh this person has a great storefront wow they have good artwork it's amazing price point they have some pieces that are for sale that i can just boom right away by i think it's really important um interacting and then making sure that you have art out there that folks can purchase and i feel like as soon as you do that you as soon as you get that first collector you're on the road to your next collector then you're on your road to 100 and just like that kevin kelly like 100 true fans right or a thousand true fans um it's just that process along the way and another interesting dynamic is that well even if you do quote unquote make it and you get this collector base well other people seem to be more successful and that's always going to be the case but if you sort of analyze the trends of certain artists you see that in certain moments they're definitely more popular and more sought after than others and it's sort of like fashion or sort of like any other collectible where like pokemon 10 ish years ago maybe 15 i'm a little bit old now i guess um super popular it was everywhere everyone was talking about it then it cooled off and then pokemon go came and then it cooled off right same thing with fashion same thing with artists and things like this everyone seems to have their time and their moment as soon as that new collector comes in and gets super passionate um it starts to spark a wave of interest in them but again to begin get involved in the community talk about other people's art how it's cool maybe how it relates to yours indirectly link back to what you're doing and make sure that you have some art on sale that people can scoop up right away that's super important thanks um there's a couple questions for andres i think you've answered some of them already but just for the benefit of uh people who will be watching the recordings later uh so roman's asking whether uh ethercart's uh code will be open sourced uh yeah and mit licensed yes yes this web open source and mit license the whole the whole thing the whole importance of the of of this kind of monetization strategy that this can be used for open source mit licensed uh technologies that are using open platforms uh because this is the this is the these are the projects that gets the that that that has the most problems getting monetized because they want to be true to their uh to their ideas and they want to create something that can be used by others and so the fundamental goal and the and the final form of ethercats is is to get this monetization platform given to the community or refer to the community so projects that are want to be open source want to use open technologies and distribute their technologies and don't want to monetize user data and they don't want to create a financial project they can still monetize themselves i can talk about longer why it is going to work but i don't want to take the take the time for that but the system was designed that the assets that you issue like in this case the cars that you issue the cards will be valuable if the if the platform will have traction so if the platform will do well the cars will will work a lot because they provide free or heavily reduced services for for a fairly small selection of the of the of the holders so those cards will work but if the platform is not doing well the cards will be worthless so one of the business goals behind this monetization system that i built is that finally we can have a blockchain this monetization which is not absolutely just just hype and speculation but actually there is a correlation between the asset price and the the project's performance imagine that okay uh so a couple more questions for you andres um some platforms allow for ns nesting of nfts does your platform handle the card back similarly not yet not yet we only do with 720 ones for now we want to want to keep increasing the range we want to be able to take 1155s and other plot other standards as well but right now it's 721. okay and then the other question was uh just to clarify in order to make the cards into nfts is that handled on your platform or on other platforms like nifty we have a whitelist so you can you can do it on my plot or our platform but you can do it on nifty on openc and in the couple of others other platforms so if if the if the if the if those platforms are in the white list you can utilize them with with little cars it's not because we want to limit it it's because we want to avoid getting nfts that that are that are not well reviewed how do i say this yeah so we want to make sure yes yeah yeah okay cool uh so um okay this is one of my questions uh for both of you um so recently i believe it was hash masks they had a little bit of sort of drama with them on twitter where people were saying uh on the token contract itself uh there's no actual link to ipfs um so and this is so at eaterscan i've seen a bunch of nft projects who they have metadata such as images but it's stored on a centralized server and so theoretically the company or project can change the underlying image and so that nft that you own isn't actually uh tied to a particular image uh so yeah so uh just at first uh what are your thoughts on this kind of situation that we see in the in the space thank you i think it's it's a disgrace i think this is this should not happen this is this is i don't know if it's laziness or or or what but uh i i do not think that this is prepared this way this i don't think uh it is very much acceptable to have an nft token that people buy for 100 liter or more that it's basically only has a serial number and if the servers go down you can't actually get the image of the token i don't this is not rocket surgery to to put it into the into the token so i i think i i don't i don't like this practice yeah given the the prices that hash masks were fetching and the hype around it it feels and there's also other questions like 77 artists are they all real like there's just like a lot of question marks unanswered about the project that to me as a collector we're kind of warning signs that we're like kind of stay away from this watch it from afar see what happens it looks good aesthetically i mean i don't think anyone could really argue with that but to andreas andres's point it's it's kind of a lazy practice not up front with the collector and again like if project goes away everything's pretty much gone the original images boom like what are you collecting just that serial number so i feel like it's really important for projects to to be thoughtful about how they deal with the the the root images whether they're using ipfs or they're thinking a little bit longer term with something like our weave and the perma web um or they're going full on chain gang with like um what a lot of the generative art projects are doing on artblocks.io and trying to put most of the metadata on chain um to call it up and and to really have it become sort of this forever art um and and really put thought behind how they deal with that um so that's sort of my thoughts so very very aligned with you andres so on on that particular note matthew that you mentioned so i do know there are some projects that have uh put the sort of svg data directly on chain uh so for example i think other stars has like this render ever star uh function um but it's it's very heavy right like it's a huge amount of of data that's on chain so do you know any other um approaches that other projects have done um to make it more sustainable uh i'm not sure if there's any on ethereum blockchain if there's any other way to make things more sustainable i know there are other projects like um in that are stepping in the footsteps of a project like avistars um these different projects that are launching on artblocks.

io are largely following that on chain approach trying to put the majority of again like the the degenerative art kernels and like linking to even if they're using um more open sourced protocols and things like that onto um just putting all that associated metadata on chain again it's very heavy it's not for every sort of project especially for animated projects or things that you're seeing on like a super rare or a nifty gateway where file sizes are over 100 megabytes approaching 300 megabytes like it's not for that it seems like there definitely will need to be a better solution built out around what folks more commonly associate today with popular um forms of crypto art and collectibles but look at what is happening at a project like art blocks dot io that is working with a large number of these generative artists focused on doing things on chain and where they're going i feel like the next solution when it comes to a more sustainable approach or approach that could be potentially leveraged by other crypto artists not doing um things like generative art it could be something that they discover and then share with the rest of the community um let me see there's a question here to uh sort of explain what i meant by the image is separate from the token uh i don't know if i can yeah i can do it can explain it for the addition yes in particular in in let's say for example in the in the hashmasks nft there is no there is no point there no no any data that actually shows the or points to the image all they have is a serial number that goes from 1 2 or 0 two sixteen sixteen thousand so all you have in the token is a serial number and then uh that token that you need to access the the company's web servers where they look at the serial number okay this is token number three and then they will display you the picture for the token but if they would decide to to to replace the the image with turkey pepper then you would see twerky pepper and there is nothing that you could do against it because because it is there is their discretion to to say okay this is number three this is your image there you go and there is nothing in the token that would actually help you to prove otherwise that that was not the image no hash no link no url no nothing just a serial number which goes from zero to sixteen thousand yep uh i hope that explains it for um dash that's the uh question um so uh yeah so he's also asked matthew can you share what are the selection criteria for getting approved on nifty yeah so it's we definitely take a holistic approach but like as a common rule of thumb we like to look at obviously more established artists people that are just starting out there's a lot of other options for them again like a wearable open c uh applying to other projects even like a super rare known origin uh maker's place um even other newer projects like a female focus more on like photography and video art but for for us we like to look at the the artists their social engagement whether they have a large following or not like how robust is their community how engaged are they if they post on on instagram or they post on twitter like are people retweeting them commenting are they engaging with them um it's that's incredibly important also like a history of actually maybe selling something to their fan base if they're artists obviously that makes that could mean prince in the physical sense it could mean other digital art if they're different type of creator it could be selling music records etc etc just having a connection with the community in a way that the community is actively supporting the creator is a really really important uh criteria that we look for and then also just like the passion they want to create and they're trying to push the bounds of um the space forward people coming in especially right now there's a lot of great people but there's a lot of people that are just trying to hop on board to kind of miss so they don't miss the bus um so they can take advantage of the boom that's happening right now and that doesn't really help anyone if they just want to get in we want people that are passionate about creating about their craft and about doing incredibly cool and trying to experiment and push the bounce forward and use nfts in a way that allows them to do something that they weren't able to do before it wasn't easy to do before so it's a really broad general criteria we like to talk to everyone's case-by-case basis but those are general rules of thumb that we look for thanks uh matthew um murshid you have a raised hand feel free to unmute yourself you should be able to do that um unless it was by accident and if you don't admit yourself i'm just gonna skip you we we are at 9 39 p.m malaysian time uh which is uh quite a bit past uh the the time that was promised to us by the uh by the speakers so um i just have one last question i think from from my end uh and it's a softball question so you know uh just to end it um so feel free to uh to answer this in your own way uh but it's the kind of the the most basic question that uh people ask of um you know if it's a digital image uh what's stopping me from copying it and then enjoying it for myself so where does that value come from uh and maybe matthew can answer first i mean you can go to the louvre and take a picture of the mona lisa no one's gonna buy that right everything goes back to the authentic creation nfts enable the artists to specify what is the authentic digital asset that is provably rare and you can determine who owns that at any given time you can copy paste an image of a work of art that kodi or xcopy or people created and try to sell that but if you don't have that signature to prove that you're you're a b poor kodi or an x copy um or along that chain of of provenance of ownership from one of their older works people aren't going to buy it or if they do buy and they pay something like they're going to be pissed and some you're going to have some problems down the way andres i i don't have anything to add to it i think it was it was the perfect answer okay cool um yeah so uh thanks guys uh before we go off of the official part of the meetup uh how do people reach out to you and your project can you just quickly share yeah like i mentioned you can follow me on twitter at niftytime um you can read my work at scentscent.co matthew and again i left my email out there matthew.farrick at gemini.com feel free to reach out to me there uh okay i also put my contacting for into the chat please look at it uh you can ha you can contact me at andras at ether.

com or you can contact us at ether underscore cards on twitter and from that from the description of the twitter the header you can see our discord server and you can always find me there cool thanks thanks a lot um both of you um yeah so feel free to uh connect with each other afterwards uh i'm sure you can find i can help as well and let's uh hope to see a collaboration from um nifty gateway and uh cards and maybe the ekl community and jonathan especially can uh can take some credit uh for that partnership in the future thank you very much for that yeah all right uh so thanks everyone for joining um i am going to end the meetup officially and stop recording uh if people want to hang around after uh this just to like uh chat or ask questions uh feel free but otherwise uh if you have to go off to go to sleep or to like shower and do your early morning stuff uh feel free to do so right so thanks everyone see you again next month thanks everyone see ya