The Post-PFP Era: What's Next for NFT Markets? | Andrea Lerdo de Tejada - Palm

am a former columnist from coindesk and now doing my own newsletter I'm also the author of a book called Bitcoin is Magic which despite the title does have stuff in about nfts in it um I am going to have Andrea and straith uh just go ahead and introduce themselves and since we're since we're only three here go ahead and just give a little description of of what you're working on and then we'll we'll go from there into the conversation sure hi I'm strai I'm the chief creative for candy digital uh we work with uh large Brands entertainment Studios sports teams to really build and develop immersive web 3 experiences in a lot of ways we believe that fans and fan communities are the creators of Tomorrow and everything that we do is about resourcing empowering these communities to own Steward and Shepherd uh Shepherd the stories that they're passionate about so that's what we've been building at Candy over the course of the past two years and can definitely share a lot about how we see uh the n markets evolving and certainly how these projects have embraced and begun with nfts and built really like Rich worlds around them and luckily enough I get to work with Andrea on the palm Network yeah thank you so Candi is one of the main drivers of volume in the pal Network I'm Andre Alo I'm the executive director of the pal foundation and together with stra we also you know try to foster a network that is focused on nfts and culture not only for creators but also for for Brands and their fans and the project right now that we're focused on from the foundation side is the pound Collective which is the first Dow as a service tool that enables anyone to create a sub dowo with a click through and then decide if they want to give membership in an open or closed way or gated way and then H try and and you know reach out to the community and build the communities in different ways using um blockchain and and the da structure for transparency efficiency and and to give their communities a new a new way of expressing a voice nice um and we're going to uh definitely get into some of the more sort of technical Innovation side of things um but I'm actually going to flip what I gave you guys ahead of time I'm feeling a little bit inspired um because we do we are in a unique moment right now or not unique moment it's a moment that has happened about five times where everything went to zero and now it's coming back um and nft in particular I think had at least this last time around a very steep Peak to trough um and so I wanted to talk about that first actually um just I mean maybe maybe you can talk a little bit about what it has been to go through that and but then more generally I'm curious what it means for nft development the ecosystem and um you know just being able to put the energy into building these things when there's these huge swings that maybe are even a little bit more steep in in FTS than in the rest of crypto yeah I I guess and make sure you're both getting kind of right up on the mic as much as you can is that good that's good okay um I think that of course the cyclical nature of nfts is a challenge for us it's certainly a challenge for large and established IP who are entering the space for the first time everything that those partners that we work with that are encountering outside of the NF te space I would say is equally challenging right now if you're a brand if you are a a publisher right now you are going through a transformational cycle it's not just nfts and so I think when I think about what we've experienced over the course of the past three years now building this platform with Partners like Warner Brothers Discovery is that again everything that we've started with has originated in in the blockchain in an nft project but that's not the end of the platform that's only the start Point um our Northstar is about building a way for fans to own their story and own their identity in a superhero ecosystem for DC and that's something that's never been done before so to a certain extent like we want to watch the Cycles we've now I think completed uh by the end of March we will have completed 90 drops on the DC nft platform so we're learning a lot about collector mechanics but we're we're also critically learn learning about is the way in which fans are engaging with nfts and what's happening right now is far deeper than just a collector Behavior what we're seeing by introducing utilities to these nfts like governance like voting the ability to vote to create and drive Comics forward the the ability to vote to see the storyline that you want in a comic or the title that you want in a comic what we're seeing is this new collaborative creative Network emerging and people are spending hundreds of thousands of hours doing this people are spending hundreds of thousands of hours on uh on votes on args on on inor experiences and that to us has been like a really profound learning um that allows us to again be really cleare eyed about this Mission and this Vision about owning your story in a superhero ecosystem because the behavior that we're seeing is that people want to play in the story world that they're creating they don't just see these as assets they want that they want to hold on to they want to to engage with them in a richer way Andrea what about Palm sort of weathering the the turbulence and and now capitalizing on the Resurgence I hope yeah well I absolutely agree is that okay that's great hear me okay I absolutely agree with stra and um for us at Palm we want to focus on what's beyond the speculative nature of blockchain crypto and nfts what's the utility behind it no beyond the pfp which is amazing that this is the topic that we get to speak on because I love it um because I think the p is just like the email of the Internet it's just the one thing that started it but the utility that you can have in an nft is boundless it's whatever you want to put in it you can put in it whatever you want it to be it can be it can hold identity it can hold you know certificates it can be the new way forward for us to have a more transparent secure way and to straight Point what we're trying to do with this Dow we it's a DA service we have two four toolkits one is the Palm ID and this is a an account obstruction so that you can create your palm ID validate it against um against social identifiers and prove that you're a human and you're in a secure network so nfts and IDs are also going to be something that will drive us forward and as Strait was saying as people are now understanding more how a dow works and how you can have a voice in a governance system especially as we're moving forward with Brands the brands that understand that we are in an influence economy and the consumers now want to have a decision and a voice on what we design what we consume and what we what we buy the the shift from a consumer feedback that today happens in an email or you know on a form to a do structure that gives very transparent um ways for for the brand to engage to the community and then interact and Implement what the community actually wants to see out of the brand is something really novel but it's it's been there for a while like Generations 15 and younger are already expecting this to happen and so we are building the tools for Brands and artists to communicate to their communities and hopefully have that more horizontal relationship so I want to sort of transition to talk about this novel stuff which we've already gotten a little bit of um but I kind of have a hard question for for you straith which is you're working with DC and DC is actually sort of notorious for having had one of the most famous fan interaction storytelling events of all time in the early 90s when fans voted to kill a robin who they didn't like um so the the question for you is describe like what is it about this technology or these platforms that makes this difference from like tearing out a little slip from the back of a comic book and mailing it in in 1992 yeah I I mean I think that they're having the precedent for fan voting I think is big like I think that that actually is a part of the Legacy that we want to hold on to not that it never needs to be as visceral as physical or physical as tearing something out but the idea that you could have a voice and that being encoded into comics for 30 years I think is uh again a piece of DC history that we want to recognize what makes this different is that the first comic that has been created uh and in some ways creative directed by fans through their votes again these choices are votes that are established by DC writers and artists like Dan Abnet and Pablo M khar these fans are creating a comic together now it is uh a three series uh comic called Batman the Legacy cowl that's the very first comic that's been uh released that's the very first DC Comic that's been released on the blockchain so the very first creative commitment from DC on the blockchain was something that was created for fans and to me that's really profound in terms of what that partner thinks about this technology that the first thing and their sort of conception of the future is that it will be developed in collaboration with fans so like there's something beautiful to me in seeing that '90s experiment come to life in a new way but also in a richer way the voting program that we have uh that we've worked on with DC and with fans has now spanned 57 votes and it's resulted not just in three comic books but in the introduction of a new DC supervillain for the first time this is the first time that fans have been able to create Canon with DC and to me that like that's a watershed moment the idea that a major uh a major Comic publisher a major Studio can create uh a governance track that allows fans to partic to participate and to meaningfully create with them and within the systems the IP systems that they've already established so it it's a continuation of that Legacy I think in some ways it's an homage to it it's a recognition of it but we want to continue to expand it and look at ways where we can take advantage of token ownership to unlock new opportunities for people to contribute to and create with uh large IP and of course the ability to do 57 you said is a lot different than doing one about one fork in the story um so whether it's you know we're talking about narrative here um but whether it's you know governance identity what have you um and palm is also largely focused on kind of creators um so what are other kind of Novel interactions that maybe we're not even seeing in production yet that are possible so we actually just went to Mexico City for the first time for the second time to Sonam Mako Sonam Mako is the largest Latin America actually now the largest artw art fair in the world it had 81,000 visitors this year and what we did we used the Dow tool to do a call for digital art um globally we received 87 submissions and then we had um curators curated from those submissions and 10 of those were displayed within Sonam Mako so it was the first instance that a cre a creator that is not represent Ed by a fancy gallery that then was curated by a fancy Fair could show in Sonam Mako and then in addition we had the community vote for their favorite which we also added as as part of the display so we are also now you know democratizing art and technology in a way where the community becomes also a curator of art we're giving them the chance to to see who they want to see in these spaces and we were lucky enough to have a fair that's you know close to Innovation and understands this importance but for us it was amazing to see 10 of the eight of the 10 artists that that were selected lived or flew to Mexico City and it was amazing to see the reactions of you know we have a display of three to 3 MERS by two M only digital display and and people would come by and they're like what is this I'm like this is fine art it is digital and it's even better than the other boots because instead of you having to put it physically in one space and choose that space and leave it there you can take take it with you and display it in every screen that you go to and so people were really amazed and and engaging about this Paradigm Shift of understanding and finding digital art in spaces where they are not used to seeing it so for us this this like shift or this push into the traditional Art Space and how we're bridging these two worlds um was just a an amazing success and and I think that that invites a a really fundamental question about again I'm trying to bend this towards the market a little bit um in interesting ways hopefully but um this idea of digital ownership itself is still novel and obviously a little bit difficult for a lot of people to wrap their heads around and specifically I think in the art world we obviously saw some blowback in 2020 and that landscape has changed but um comic people are also big collectors they're about like ownership so I guess the the general question is like what is the how is the perception of the idea of how is the idea of digital ownership Landing with people now um maybe even versus four years ago yeah well at least in in this experience in Sonam Mako in Affair people were absolutely stunned by the fact that that they could buy the piece by scanning the QR code and that the money would go directly to the artist instead of the you know the gallery and then the the fair and then whomever and so it's just a a process what's the hardest people of it all is on boarding someone you know getting that custodial wallet into a into a phone or into a computer I think is still the hardest moment but once someone has that step done then the the the process of you know understanding why you're owning something why it's you know I think we really need to stop calling metamask or wallets wallets and just call them Universal passwords or Universal keys to interact with the with the blockchain because it's not for crypto it's for everything that you want to own and display as in your possession or ATT tied to you so the the term wallet kind of also gives people that feel of it has to be money it has to be crypto and so us explaining that a little bit deeper then gave people the understanding like oh it's actually like a universal box no for anything that I want to display on a blockchain and I think the the I'm interested in the comics question in particular because Comics has actually transitioned to digital in a certain way much more so than the art world but I don't know if people are seeing the differentiation between just like your comixology subscription and blockchain stuff there's still work to be done there absolutely I I think that our thesis around that is that the shortest distance between uh an idea and a community is a story so embedding any experience that feels foreign in a story that users can understand and direct and also own so the idea of again maybe it feels abstract to own something digitally for Comic collectors so showing the value of that through the reader or through a utility like voting or through uh an experience like having access to a comic signing with Jim Le or uh through an experience like an alternate reality game but I think our approach to it to onboard folks is to do it through storytelling and do it through the stories that matter to them the most so we only have a few minutes left but I will ask you both to do something very difficult which is talk about interesting things that you're not personally working on so what are the sort of new themes or ideas or technologies that maybe are a little bit more distant from your own projects that you you're still interested in and and and that are catching your eye I'm very interested in the boring aspect of the NF in the boring aspect of the nfts the boring yeah like for us blockchain and nfts and everything it's about you know hype and um you know art and all of these things and we're running around after them but for me like the the identity piece the certification piece and the the provenance piece of blockchain is one of the things that interest me the most and the other is people working in in order to build bridges for interconnectivity between chains because for me that's one of the hardest things to achieve and also one of the most important because if people are collecting imp Palm they should be able to take whatever they're collecting and move it wherever they want to go because maybe this is going to be building here but you know marel is going to be building somewhere else and how do you interconnect these things so yeah big one for all crypto projects yeah for me I uh I think that there's like really nothing more powerful than seeing yourself like represented in an artwork or in culture or written into a body of work and I think like over the course of the past two years what has really moved me and really inspired me is around sort of the generative art movement and the ability to uh collect something that looks like you feels like you exists like just for you that idea of generative art generative production I feel like is uh a really powerful not just gen ra but really mode and theme of creation that I think will unfold in really significant ways over the course of the next uh decade and and certainly in in ways that I think have encouraged more creators and welcome more creators into the fold but also allowed more collectors to maybe be seen uh in our works for the first time very nice um well we don't have much time left we have time for maybe one more comment from each of you just about whatever I don't know I don't have a question well actually I just want to say thank thank you to to straight on you I'm really happy to be in a panel with you this was not planned but we're both working in Palm and very excited about the work that we're doing and thank you everyone that showed up to to listen to us speak yeah I would Echo that like grateful to be here with you all grateful to the the audience here for the generosity of your time and really really excited about how we can continue to use this technology to empower communities to own their story so thank you yeah well uh straight from candy and from Palm thank you so much um and we will I think be around for a couple minutes if anybody wants to say hi uh please do so and thanks everybody for for being here at eth Denver and for seeing the [Applause] panel all right