From Solana to Ethereum: Fireside Chat with Frank and Kevin DeGods

fantastic welcome everyone my name is Kayla Haley CEO and founder at St Rock media and I'm very excited to have with me on this panel this Saturday morning afternoon Frank D Gods welcome yo what's going on man let's go uh founder of Utes and D God so very excited to have you here let's go and also Sandeep Noel thanks so much for coming from polygon awesome awesome well very excited to Jump Right In we have about uh 25 minutes here so first and foremost welcome to the mile high city not many people are actually local so I'm glad to have you all here at East Denver how's the conference treating you so far dude I'm honestly shocked at how packed it is like coming from Solana I mean man like yo there's a lot of people in Heath it's kind of crazy yeah let's go eat Denver how about you Sandeep how's it going so far yeah obviously like you know I've been in in Universe for for like last four or five editions and uh you know it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger this time it's like absolutely crazy all right Frank met with Kevin and we met up at the hotel and he was telling me he whispered he was like hey something's coming and we might be moving around from ecosystems and so you all being you know having Flagship projects being D gods and both youths on Solana tell me more about what sparked this partnership um especially on the Ute side and and thinking about moving ecosystems from Solana over to ethereum in polygon yeah so we have this motto coming into 2023 it's uh f-a-f-o which stands for [ __ ] around find out and so we were just uh we were looking to take the biggest the highest upside risk possible coming in 2023 with everything we were doing because we didn't know how the Market's going to be we don't know where everything's going to go and so when we saw what happened with Reddit nfts with Trump nfts honestly too on polygon we said wow like there's a lot of potential here they're denominating in wheat there's a lot of excitement around the right IP and the right brands on this chain and uh after talking to Ryan Sandeep sunket a lot of people on the team it just felt like man these guys are sharp they're working really hard and we want to work with partners that are you know just want to see this thing grow just as much as we do and so that's what ultimately led to the decision we talked to a lot of people but it was a no-brainer to take Utes the polygon and and work with all the brands but more than that just leverage the low latency you know High throughput transactions while still being on evm and do it in a cool way so that's just what excites me the most yeah and what have you found out so far in 2023 um where we found out well like crypto is still alive and well you know that is like what we found out I think coming into it I post FTX things are starting to look a little Bleak but man just like seeing all the turnout right now I doubt everyone could even understand the words that we're saying but thank you guys for coming out and uh man it's just incredible to watch and so there's something that's really powerful here just finding the right use cases and keeping it exciting and fun hundred percent Cindy on Twitter spaces we do a lot of as you imagine we do a lot of Twitter spaces and um affectionately uh we call polygon the B2B chain and so between your Partnerships with groups like you know whether it be Starbucks or meta or Reddit um we've talked about that a little bit here what was it that you all saw that you said okay we need to have kind of a a consumer focused um uh strategy as well thinking about communities bringing on youths what got you all excited about um partnering with youths yeah so about uh you know this B2B things also and and other things like you know if you see even before many of these things like uh you know only last two months I think arbitrum is doing good in defy but otherwise polygon was the after ethereum the second largest platform like ethereum Focus platform on D5 also uh daos for example Aragon 99 of all the Dows if you see they exist on polygon all that so it's not like truly uh you know correct but what we have thought is and our my personal mission is to get one billion people in web 3 in next 10 years right and I keep trying to find places or trying to find Avenues where we can bring Mass users into web 3. so that's why all of these things uh you know that you see Reddit Instagram and you know Starbucks and Nike and you know Sephora and like you know tons of other things so uh with with youths and Frank like I feel that Frank is by heart is already like it I I consider him you know ethos I got my daughter yeah let's go yes because and then you know my quest has been like you know it's not like it's not only uh you know D gods and youths but my question has been that ethereum becomes the most powerful platform on the layer one right like you know what we can do on the layer layer twos and things like that so the quest has been to bring how do we bring as many people uh into ethereum as possible whether it's on layer two layer one doesn't matter yeah and obviously it's good if they are on polygon but uh with with Frank like you know what he has not told many people that he had double digit million offers from multiple alternative elements and he still chose polygon for a fraction of that uh you know some uh Community incentives and things like that so you know people don't know the full story but because I know that his team him them ethos wise they are already eat that's why they chose something to work closely with ethereum than anything else so yeah it was a no-brainer for us like I know Frank is probably in the nft space I don't know of a leader more charismatic more Community Centric and uh you know a leader whose whom Community loves so much so for us it was a no-brainer that's a that's a really good point and Frank it's funny when you hey there you go there's some dabs I when you first when I first heard you speak um it was again on some Twitter space I was like who is this cat like he is very um just you know your approach to uh the way you think about solving different problems um you have fun you're light-hearted with it at the same time and so how do you how do you approach just I mean you're also a young guy right and so how do you approach thinking about solving these kind of complex problems um and yet still having a very like light-hearted and fun nature with it yeah I love this question um I think the simple thing to me is nfts cartoon jpegs are probably like two years old as an industry and so I think a lot of people look at the way things are today as the accepted reality of how it's always going to be but I think it's actually the opposite where a lot of things that were created and the more you look behind the curtain are pretty arbitrary like some dude just decided like yeah this is how meditative is gonna be [ __ ] it this is how royalties are gonna be like yeah this is how it's gonna be and we're seeing the unwinding of a lot of the early Primitives in nfts and it's changing you see what Jack butcher is doing recently with just like [ __ ] it we're just gonna update the metadata all the time change the image all the time this was like taboo a year ago you know and so seeing all these things change it's two things it reminds you one we are in a multi-billion dollar industry that's centered around trading literally jpegs you know that that in itself is a whole thing to unpack but the other side is it's so young and and early as an industry the way that it is today is very unlikely to continue to persist in a year from now and so it excites me to be a part of that change and usually that change revolves around things that are fun exciting and gets people interested in what's happening because there's a lot of boring things in the space and I strive to not be boring because that's the death of an nft 100 well and I think you you make a really good point around there's just room for flexibility right I think you throw around the term rug pool quite Loosely um I think that those terms it's really uh Innovation honestly and not you know in some instances obviously there's some some Bad actors but I think what you guys have done is very you're very Dynamic you're constantly pivoting you're constantly moving which I think is very much needed in this space speaking of just kind of like what's happening around us global economic conditions right uh there's a lot of issues going on right um both both economic as well as like self-inflicted you talk about FTX a little bit ago how are you both can thinking about kind of like from a b to B and not to just put you all in these boxes but even from like a consumer standpoint how are you thinking as Leaders within the space because I think that there are a lot of people that have uh that want to believe in what we're all building here but with a lot of things that happened you know in the last couple of months feeling like wow this is hard to continue to fight for continuing to build in this space so how are you guys thinking about leadership in the roles that you currently hold um the honest answer is that I don't think about it too much because I think if we can't we can't I can't control Jerome Powell uh you know I mean like we don't have an impact on uh macroeconomics like uh so for me it's like we have a term in the community called feed the pigs uh co-founder Kevin grew up on a pig farm and the whole story is whether it's raining whether it's like sunshine whether he had a bad day you have to just wake up and feed the pigs and just do your job and things are going to work out and that's how I look at it so things suck but we gotta feed the pigs we gotta just do our job exactly exactly it's exactly the same opinion that you know like right now we can't predict in crypto like three months is like one year right so if somebody you know comes me and tells me that you know in one year we are going to do this and like bro you don't know you don't know crypto at all right so you know you have to have this quarterly plan on this and you know the you can't like uh over index on what's going to happen in two years you need to move you know maybe not even quarter by quarter month by month like so many things change like if you ask me what was happening just before FTX and what started happening after FTX and then what is happening now it's Stark difference in how our teams are operating and what they are going after and all that and plus like you know one thing uh Frank said that we are into a multi-billion dollar industry of nfts or people trading these jpegs I feel slightly different on that that trading is a very important part that you know this 20 of the top people trade and then this brings a liquidity but a large number of people like me right like I feel it's the same old thing where you have this sense of belonging like I like first time I actually put a nft is youths right like you know and then I have this sense of belonging now wherever I'm in in the world I'll somebody will come along hey you you I'm mutes okay so yeah there is already a it's like you know if anywhere I go into the world I find somebody from Delhi and India I'll immediately you know have a sense of belonging and I think the especially these Community related nfts like what is happening we are seeing in Reddit uh you know the the trading volumes are not that not that large but I was talking to their reddit's head of crypto and all that and you know he said that the engagement amount of Engagement with these nfts is very high even though they don't want to trade it but that that feeling that this is a JPEG and you own it in the real sense you know it's it's actually maybe much bigger than the profit taking part piece of it right so so yeah I mean and and for me like now I am much much more bullish on uh you know nfts like you know before before I got into Utes right so I mean I'm I'm nft build basically now I I I never never believed in enough like you know these uh nft speculative nfts before that that is the reason like this is one section where polygon has not been like let's say the top three like you know or ethereum and Solana and polygon would be number three and all that because I never really thought that you know I'm our team that you know this is going to be a long-term thing but when I got into it and now the kind of feeling I have is I realize I think that you know this is this is very very big it's like on on chain identity and I think more important now than ever before this idea of identity community and belonging right a sense of oh wow this is and I think East Denver is actually a very different experience from a web 3 conference standpoint compared to a lot of the other events out there because they are very much focused on what specific Community you're a part of whereas being here at East Denver is very much we're all a part of the same community and so I think to your point though having uh you know it's funny when we've been putting uh my team was like are we using Frank's uh profile and I'm like that's the only picture you suffering and so having that sense of having that sense of belonging Community um is so important to your point I'm saying it is bigger than the trading use case eventually because only even now like I am feeling every week I feel like okay what's the next nft I'm bringing in and I am already thinking that okay let me buy some other suit and all that so it's a fun it's the belonging part and all that and I think that is in the larger sense when it will become like uh mainstream and they are millions or hundreds of millions of people holding nfts I think trading will be a very big part because that will provide the liquidity but a large number like 80 percent of the people will simply hold through just because of the feeling of identity and belonging and and I'll transition after this but it's something that I've actually been thinking a lot about in terms of community design right because it's not I think so many times we use the term that we are building a community um but really I believe I love that you talked about feed the pigs uh the way I would say it is uh we're cultivating a community we're nurturing a community communities are born right and so as a as a and it's not to meant to be this like you know weird concept but as you develop and really bring this about your values essentially become or you know people will self-select into your community based on the values that you project and so I think that to your point this sense of like um we are creating the first people groups of this new internet you know of us of the new way that we interact with the internet so I I think 100 and I'm excited to see in 2023 how this concept continues to evolve and how different communities because I think right now we're we're becoming more diverse I would say within web 3 but as more communities start to understand the value of blockchain and they really get those fundamentals it's going to be fun so many people are like oh pfps are you know we're done with that in nfts and I'm like no we haven't tapped into all the different cultural communities around the world and they haven't yet had their opportunity to express what their people group of web3 is going to look like so I I agree with you transitioning here for a moment a big piece of you know a big piece of the draw especially artists and creators moving into web 3 into specifically nfts is the idea around you know secondary royalties right uh there's been a lot of evolving things that have happened in the last uh couple of months um to where some of the largest platforms have basically said hey we're we're no longer going to support and enforce Creator royalties how has that impacted you all over at the gods and youths what size I think the royalties were can always be a really powerful force in nfts I just don't think they're the only way that's gonna like I had a joke but it's kind of not a joke where they should change the word royalties to tips and uh have the doordash like tip module at the end you know when you're selling on the marketplaces because man it's a Marketplace we're all caught in the middle of a Marketplace War but these marketplaces are raising a bill 14 billion dollar evaluate you know so like these guys can't just let their market share go to zero no matter how much they want to support the creators no matter how many tweets are made about it they're just not gonna like let themselves lose all that market share and so this like cutting of that royalty fee is becoming the way that marketplaces get relevance and um I think it's going to be really challenging for the genie to go back into the bottle because initially royalties were enforced by the marketplaces it was never something that was on chain you know and so now that they're not it's gonna be a challenge and we went through this a lot earlier than beneath it on Solana and um dude it's just like mints are gonna go down [ __ ] like people's excitement is gonna go down it's not pretty but I do think that the future is not threatened by the lack lack thereof of just like high royalty percentages my prediction is it's going to go to Marketplace fee sharing so it'll be a flat fee to the end user and then the marketplace will share the fee with the Creator I just think that the metadata royalties creators setting the royalty fee it's a little bit of like one of those things I was saying earlier it was kind of arbitrary and design initially and um I'm I don't know how strong the royalties are going to be for the next few months so my main message to Founders was hey guys like you might not like this but I hope you're cutting your burn rate I hope you're bunkering down because there's a reality where you're making to five to ten percent of what you were making before and uh just be ready for that if it doesn't happen royalties get saved let's [ __ ] go but just be ready for the worst case scenario I mean I am not a Creator and looking into this royalty debate from outside what I feel is that what is happening here is like whenever you have two extreme sides of any anything the truth always lies in the middle and what I feel here is what is happening wrong is that the middleman is is deciding how the market should behave I think at the end this this should be with creators only because they are followers if Frank is there he might be able to charge even 10 royalty versus a you know early artist who is just maybe he don't want it no yeah it doesn't matter I'm not saying that he wants to I'm just saying that it depends on like it's just like Gucci Versus like uh some other brand like they want to charge more for their brand it's it's about the brand why is the marketplace in the middle deciding what you should charge and what should not charge is is what I feel but I'm like I have no idea about the nuances of this so I might be completely dumb in this take but this is what I feel from the outside my my prediction is that I don't know if this is what you guys are thinking about but you know created Creator specific marketplaces specifically for your collections I imagine there's going to be a fracturing of marketplaces within within the space again really driven by values of what I mean you see it on Twitter every Saturday there's there's always no we don't want you know crater fees no we do and so I think that we're going to see a fracturing within the market and then I think at a certain point it's going to consolidate again into a few that have very specific uh you know values that they that they focus on so yeah I think um I mean I know for us it's not a high priority to launch our own marketplace right now I think what I'm way more excited about is this idea of tipping I know sounds like a meme today but I think that if you can give someone social status for tipping a collection whether it's on the way out or on the way in and they get social status for doing it knowing the psychology of this space I think it would actually be really popular and um I just think that the marketplace thing is it's really challenging to get Buy sell liquidity onto a Marketplace so even if we were to launcher like it's everyone says when is Yoga gonna drop their Marketplace they have a Marketplace eight coin commission the marketplace but nobody uses it over blur nobody uses it over openc because it's really really hard to bootstrap that both side listing and purchase you know order flow to a new Marketplace so it seems like a wasteful Endeavor for me right now but I do like the idea again uh doordash tips before creators I think it could be pretty significant um yeah because I think people just automatically tip and at the UI today is almost set up for you to just put the lowest percentage possible but if people felt like they got some type of social status for doing it I actually think it's a it's a closer solution to reality than anything else right now well I look forward to talking to you at the end of the year and seeing what you found out about that yeah [ __ ] around and find out that's great that's right Sandeep I want to um with a couple minutes we have left here I wanted to talk to you about uh you all are launching a layer two at the end of uh this month and I'm really excited to hear what your thoughts are this is a very evolving Dynamic ecosystem as well and and Landscape so I'm curious to hear what are you all seeing um as gaps in the market um and what what what does your what does your protocol what is that uh gonna add to the ecosystem yeah I mean the Gap has always been that you know how do you have a highly secured layer 2 which can be decentralized uh like right now we have layer twos but they are centralized sequencer like one sequencer is running those chains um the end goal is how do we reach a place where you have these off-chain computation but it's still done in a decentralized way and it is very seamless like for example with optimistic rollups like you have a seven day withdrawal period then you need to run Community or somebody needs to run fraud proofs and things like that so ZK the power of ZK is that it reduces all those complexities all those social economic games it's simply if the ZK is basically maths replacing everything else like you know it's fraught proofs and all that so you just prove whatever is happening put it back on ethereum and then you are done so that has a much better user experience because you can withdraw your funds technically every five minutes from the roll up and uh you know the guarantees around it are also much stronger so we are launching this ZK VM uh on 27th of March and I think if you speak with most of the researchers in the space everybody will tell you that the ZK based layer twos are kind of the Holy Grail of ethereum scaling and we are just glad that we are actually launching the first fully built audited and fully available mainnet right let's it will be available for public on March 27. fantastic fantastic okay we have a couple of fan questions so um I put out a post and I said hey I'm going to be speaking with uh Frank and Sandeep and what would you all ask him so Ryan asks he says Frank is following ORD names on Twitter um does he think Builders are coming to bitcoin and in the in the same way that they did if the ethereum ecosystem has developed is is D God's planning to play a role in this well we did this thing where we took 500 the guys that were burned a long time ago and put them on the ordinals I think it's hard to it's hard to fade Bitcoin in general and I think that Bitcoin nfts I have a simple bell curve thesis on it it's like Bitcoin is going to get more popular and people are going to want you know the Bitcoin nfts and more importantly the block space is just so limited right you have 211 gigabytes a year or 244 gigabytes a year available for on the Bitcoin block space and that like my phone has more storage than that and that's like to me it's just a no-brainer that there's going to be value there I don't think that it's going to replace the smart contracts you know that and all the functionality that you have on on Ethan polygon Etc on Solana as well but what I do think it will do is be part of the luxury Art Market in a big way I wouldn't be surprised if at the end of the year the highest sales on any nfts are all going to be like that top 10 will be in Bitcoin so that's the trajectory I think it's going not surprised Hugo launched something welcome to Bitcoin Yuga um but uh yeah I just think it's not gonna replace what's out there today but I think it will siphon and make a larger Art Market it's hard to deny I agree I agree all right so um what's going to bring in the next million users meets uh gaming and Brands what they are doing with Brands and all that I think that has a potential to not Millions maybe double digit millions in in like 12 18 months and gaming whenever it it kind of explodes fully uh you know it will be the highest users uh you know section I just think making new experiences things that you can't do in web 2 but it's only possible in web3 this is where I think all the traction will be and this is what got me excited about nfts in the first place it's just something that's new and fresh and something that's 10x better than what else is out there just the basic stuff yeah awesome time thanks guys so much thank you enjoy the rest of the conference everyone [Applause]