NFTs, DAOs and the New Creator Economy

[Music] and so um yeah we are following up a great discussion panel on governance model and in order to keep gender quality in order we are this time a very male dominated panel so i will have a excellent three guests today who represent actually really different angles in the blockchain ecosystem we have chris from tezos robbie from animoka brands and pavel from coinfirm and i represent the ikea clean energy services team anchored at sustainability and innovation in our global team in sweden so first of all just for the participants of this event and this session our topic today is a part of uh decentralized web and data economy um which is one of the five five pillars of this conference this year and it's actually the first panel um for this section of the conference and we're going to pick one of the hottest topic in the dlt space at least for the last year or so which are nfts so first let me um introduce the the three speakers or i would rather like you guys to introduce yourself and let me ask you this question uh looking at the decentralized web and creators economy um where do your companies come from and how what is your contact surface with this specific area of the tlt ecosystem robbie can you start please sure i'll go first i'm robbie young i'm the ceo of animoka brands we are a game developer and entertainment company um focused on blockchain games um so that includes both nfts as well as as fungible tokens and we specialize in working with brands so we have um you know we work with some brands you may know we have games featuring formula one motogp as well as our own games such as the sandbox and our focus really is on this sort of new evolution of giving property rights to gamers so that they're able to actually own for the first time the digital assets that are in their in their games that they're playing as well as being able to transact in and be rewarded by in-game currency that is also tokenized so i think blockchain has has been having a huge impact on the potential for consumers consuming gaming entertainment and we think this is really just the beginning thank you pavel can you say a few words about your company and yourself sure hi everyone i'm pablo kuskovsky ceo co-founder of coinfirm confirm is a blockchain analytics company we are on the market since 2016. uh providing our services across the world to over 250 clients last year we launched amlt oracle which is an aml solution for the focus on d5 projects or decentralized finance open finance uh we see this as a huge huge market in terms of you know the future uh solution and this market uh that's also which is also including the non-fungible tokens is actually you know for this market to grow we see you know the need for um aml compliance solution and money laundering contractors financing solution that's been extremely successful and launch of the products we have over 20 clients and already signed up and growing and we also see you know protocols joining in like most recently we you know invited rsk with um talking to our client tool which basically provides us not only d5 products but also protocols who are using and allowing to transact directly with with our aml uh oracle amer oracle is effectively a smart contract which is which is native for d5 projects so you can plug in easily you know by deploying in on on the d5 project you can plug in directly to our aml oracle and you know make your transaction fully compliant thank you thanks and finally chris from tezos uh thank you it's great to be here everyone my name is chris carella i'm a serial entrepreneur i've been involved in five web 2 exits i've um joined tq tezos to work on new nfg ventures at tq and so tq tezos is a new york city-based company that works on the tesla's blockchain we work on everything from the infrastructure to the dev tools to the application layer and um tezos is a layer one blockchain built on a proof of work algorithm and so that means rnfts are more eco-friendly than many of the others and in fact tezos nfts are six orders of magnitude uh more efficient or require six words of magnitude less energy than ethereum mfts and uh so that's been a a big moment for us and a big selling point for us recently and then also just as a general evangelist of tezus mfts i'll point that um there was a fine art project that launched today acutemarket.com which is a sundance film uh launched as an nft and picket nunc is a big community project uh that is growing like med and then stay tuned as we have another marketplace launching at the end of this month excellent great to have you with us so um i've wanted to start with a little bit of a shaking statement um and i'd like you to to tell me if you would agree or perhaps disagree with this statement and the statement i've picked for the beginning of this panel is a quote that says nft's market is clearly in a bubble it's actually more of a gambling rather than an investment so perhaps i'll allow robbie to to start first and what's your thoughts sure your thoughts on this um so i guess this is one of those things that um the tricky things about bubbles is we only know they exist after they pop so that's always a difficult one to prognosticate upon definitely i think you know we've been in nfts now for for going on four years and i think that just generally in tech you know i've been in tech for 25 years and we've seen plenty of cycles um i think that you know our view is we view what's happening with nfts and blockchain gaming in general to be very much akin to what happened to the web in the mid to late 90s and i and i say that in the best possible way meaning i think we're just at the beginning of a very major revolution in how you know networked computing is done and and how we share entertainment and exp and and content um that said i think that the last three months has been the point where because of various projects uh related to art nfts as well as some game nft projects i think that we've broken through to the popular culture consciousness and so in that respect you know it's not really just sort of a nerdy project being done by people like my fellow panelists and i here anymore but it's something that people are you know people who are less focused on on blockchain and and our virtual worlds are interested in now as a subject because you know when when somebody goes and sets a record for for um spending money on on a living our living artists artwork um it grabs headlines and it makes people think okay so what is this and and should i should i be paying attention to it um i think that uh we're at the beginning and and so i'm gonna put aside your question of gambling because i think that that actually is a is a provocative statement that can actually be um used about anything we spend money on to be honest you know you could argue that how much i paid for my house was gambling so so i think it all comes down to what the value for the user is and um and whether you know in our case we make games so it's really about whether players have fun and if they have fun and they get benefit for the time and money they spend with us then i think that's fabulous thanks any thoughts on uh what robbie said any thoughts on my question chris pavel i think you know what robbie said is exactly you know i i it's aligned with my thinking you know i mean we are early i don't think you know it's a bubble i mean we are far from it and and i think you know we actually are in the proof of concept you know so we try to find out what is the framework what is actually working what is not working what are the risks it was still very early in this in this and you know trying you know of the of the market so i don't think uh i mean the excitement which we see uh is um i believe you know that the indication of the future because this is you know everyone is feeling that okay we can digitize you know or monetize was digitize and digitize what is you know in real life so this connection and this this this you know link between real life and like art you know normal art and non-fungible tokens and crypto and you know transactions which you can you know do internationally across board that that's very exciting from for a number of reasons even if we look at you know just just to you know talking about art if we say that you know um this this market is currently not very liquid and we we creating liquidity for this market it's still proof of concept so it's still early days but even imagining this this you know multi-billion market becoming a you know very liquid market that's that's you know creating huge huge huge opportunity also you know it's fueled by like coinbase recent uh ipo so we see everything is is putting together but i don't think we are there yet in terms of even discussing the market uh not to say about bubble yeah thanks cool and i'll uh i'll just take a slightly different perspective which is one i don't think we can generalize all nfts as being in a bubble and a few themselves or just a foundational and i think revolutionary technology that provides provenance and ownership um i i often get the question i also don't think of them as investment assets or investments at all and so i often get the question of how do i get started in nfds and my answer is find something you love something that you want to buy and that you want to hold on to and that five years from now you still want to show people and um you know i really think i'm big on the art side of the mfts and i think of mfts as beautiful objects and um you know objects have value and the value is often contextualized by the situation and so you know a pele world cup medal um has a certain value because he's the greatest player to play the game and for internet objects often the context is the community and the culture around that community and so i will add that i do think some of the large marketplaces namely nifty gateway and nba top shot are building a community and culture of day traders and when you have people day trading nfts you start to have unrealistic uh evaluations and and you maybe have something that resembles a bubble that will pop and i just think that kind of community engagement is bad for um all of us working on mfps that's so true so true i i actually find nfts close to my heart i have been a gamer all my life started as a young kid with atari platform and i have been always frustrated with the fact that uh especially since mmo games came into the market that you can invest you know tons of hours into creating characters in the game and certain digital wealth but it's never yours it's always you know part of a company that releases the game so i'm what you robbie said resonates with me a lot you know it's a it's in fact nfts are are like infrastructure for digital ownership and new new economy so this brings me actually to the second quote i've picked for this session which is on the other spectrum um and perhaps it's a wiser quote perhaps it's it's a more balanced way of looking at nfts and let me read it to you so the new infrastructure of ownership built on the top of daos and nfts is a fundamental layer for the web 3-0 world new data economy and it's essential in moving businesses into the future metaverse and um since you chris said about the that you had two exits in web 2-0 i i liked it because this is clearly about web 3-0 maybe i would like allow you to start this would you agree or disagree with this mate statement how does it resonate with you yeah so i agree with this statement and it resonates strongly and it's the one of the main reasons i'm working on this stuff and um i think um i think it's actually the first real building block that we've seen over the med verse and i'll just say in 2006 2007 i worked in the last wave of virtual worlds uh we threw around the term metaverse a lot um but ultimately people didn't have ownership and there was no cross-platform nature to this and you didn't have an internet uh an inventory that traveled with you as you travel um like like like in the movie or book ready player one uh i'll also say that i think we often think of the metaverse as a virtual world in a three-dimensional world and maybe there are goggles or maybe it's your screen but i actually think we just live in the metaverse and we now have ownership of digital objects we can show them on our phones they'll be ar they'll be vr and yeah i just think this is a fundamental building block of um where we're going yeah i absolutely agree and i think that the key here is that you know this sort of so-called web 3.0 is built on the idea of not just file transfer so the ability to download you know video and audio and text but the idea that you're transferring ownership and that's the fundamental building block and so that's something that's really really powerful um and you know it has huge implications for e-government and finance of course and just the the sort of infrastructure of daily life but at the same time it actually has big implications for entertainment too and our view and this is very you know self-serving because we're an entertainment company is we feel like mass consumer adoption is actually going to be driven by entertainment because people tend to seek out entertainment often more than a more efficient way to do their banking or something that actually may be quite beneficial to them but not quite so sexy and fun because you know we're all tired of standing in line at the government office for paperwork but you know maybe that's not a compelling reason to adopt a new technology necessarily um but you know when it comes to entertainment products what we've seen with with different kinds of particularly portable technologies you know smartphones were largely driven by non-voice you know applications um because people really enjoy the entertainment experience so i think we're quite excited about this idea of being able to transfer value easily and smoothly and efficiently because as we all know once you get accustomed to the ease with which you can exchange crypto with somebody else on earth for anybody who's ever tried to make a bank transfer either domestically or internationally from any country to any country you know you understand that this is the beginning of something big yeah i mean if i can add you know from my point of view i see you know web trio has you know embedded more embedded finance you know so i think you know like every service can be now connected with a payment you know it started with crypto it if you are crypto long enough and you open your mind you actually see nfts or any let's say you know digital assets which you which you own directly coming very very soon so i remember when we started in coinfield and you know we discussed okay what does it mean to you know that the crypto the blockchain space actually it was quite clear that at some point this will come you know nft will come right i mean there's some i mean you have the digital space and you have also like if you treat digital spaces market right you know so currently it's almost almost disconnected with the real world at some point because it's not so easy to kind of transfer the the real world objects into digital space and and on them in this way and currently we have this linkage right so it's almost like you know um embedded finance uh linking the the real object into digital uh virtual uh space that's something which is which is revolutionary i think right and obviously you know there's this huge huge um risks connected to this uh which we need to analyze and obviously this is what we do right and you know this is this is what you know my angle will be always you know what does it mean um from there from the you know wider perspective when we're talking about you know cross-border you know transfer embedded finance art to this and etc so we still i think early in this process but you know i think overall it's very exciting thanks thanks for sharing the one thing i would just love to jump in and add is the other part of ownership the other part of mfts beyond ownership is just the authenticity and the prominence and as we push towards um a future internet i think that this provides some strong protections for for people and i think largely of uh if i read an article that i think is from the new york times i would love to see um that it is from the new york times and then it's been signed and then i know where this source came from uh in a world of deep fakes um i want to know that uh video you put out is you put out as an nft uh so i know it was by you and so if a video comes out that just deep fakes you you can say hey all of my mfts have been i mean all of my videos have mfps backing them i didn't make that video and i just think that the proof of authenticity is uh is just as important as the proof of ownership yeah absolutely and i would add to that one feature which we don't talk about much because we have as a market as an industry yet to deliver i think really on it is interoperability as well um something we're quite focused on in games just because as gamers we think you know it would the the holy grail of gaming is if you can take your content that you've spent all your time modding and and personalizing and then bring it to another game from one game to another because that's just something that's never been possible before but thanks to nfts and a little cooperation amongst us developers i think we can do it for us at ikea i think it's also very cool um future to investigate because i just imagine you know we own not only physical um rights to our furniture and designs but also digital rights to you know millions of furniture in all their iterations throughout the history and if you can imagine the world of the future where you know we even more than today we could have this second life or maybe the primary life in digital realm uh we will be surrounded by the a lot of objects that will only exist in their digital form or primarily and then this creates a new really new economy um where like you just mentioned uh the intellectual rights property rights but also the the the exchangeability will function in a completely different way than they do today and um so uh that's very exciting i see one question here i will go back to the questions from the audience at the end of this session but there is one question that i would like to ask you maybe chris you could answer that there is this question from a person who asks besides digital collectibles like trading cards and art what would be the other use cases for nfts and how can they support the blockchain ecosystem as a whole we mentioned a few but maybe you could throw a few other ideas yeah and so i think the future and by the future i mean the short-term future of mfts provide utility and um it's actually very obvious to think about utility in games you buy a store if it gives you a plus one but i also think that there's just this real-life utility where um you buy the nft and you get access to the event you um you show up to concerts and uh you get proof of attendance for being at the concert and that comes as an mft and then you have proof of fandom in that case and if you collect five concerts the artist can reward you with special merch or maybe another nft and so i think there's a lot of bringing the digital nft space uh into the physical space um and and there's just a lot of opportunity there and i can probably talk about it for hours but i'll leave it there and see if someone wants to elaborate uh i would add on to that you know the excitement frankly that comes from you know somebody going and collecting all of those sort of digital stamps of going to the concerts but then being able to translate that into you know a fan collection that they can then pass on to somebody else who didn't have the chance to go to all those concerts but wants the benefit reward that comes from having done that so the fact that you end up with a liquid marketplace for fans to be able to share that passion actually is really important and i think that you know we come from a very sort of open source software mentality so i think you know our dna is thinking about keeping this open and sharing this because we believe that the market will grow as a result and therefore our business will also grow as opposed to trying to build walls around it and make sure i'm you know this protocol is mine i'm controlling all these users and not sharing them with anybody else um because frankly i think that that's short-sighted at this point and that totally speaks to like how does this all benefit the ecosystem which is when the nfps are on the blockchain they're very composable and um everyone can do fun stuff with it and i also i use this example also like i've been to every kanye west tour i have no proof of it uh i could have an mft of every single one of it and then what could developers do and knowing about my fandom great um i have one more um uh quote that i would like to uh add um into this discussion panel and this uh is something that uh i was asked actually before this conference started and i thought it it would give an interesting angle into the nft space and let me start with the quote first so um daos and nfts living on the internet independently from any major jurisdictions they often exceed the legislative frameworks um which may generate legal uncertainty do you gentlemen see this as a risk or actually as an opportunity and maybe i'd like to start with pavel now since you pavel are representing this risk um mitigation blockchain analytics angle how do you see this i think i mean if you if you would you you would ask me like 10 years ago if what i think about cross-border transaction anonymous you know of art and etc i would say you know that's crazy right i think you know that's completely you know if we're just talking about you know in particular art if we talk about gaming you know every every exciting thing which which rob and chris said you know from the compliance perspective it's nightmare right and we are not talking about about you know only about you know where is the jurisdiction you know which i think is important but you know at the same time is the real i mean is the value of real value of this of this non-fungible token exact or actually it's a separate you know uh transfer of value within this non-functional token uh between different parties which are anonymous you know so i think you know the the entire ecosystem will be growing very very fast um in the near future uh but at the same time it will be at some point stopped by you know the regulations or let's say uh kind of adjust it you know we see this with with cryptocurrency at the beginning now we see with the d5 space you know which which here you can see that we actually providing you know aml four four four d five space and you know like i'm just actually almost on a weekly basis calling with european commission have calls with european commission financial action task force the d5 space peer-to-peer transactions is critical right and it means that if we add to this non-fungible tokens which are which are effectively you know peer-to-peer transactions or you know the centralized uh platform uh connected with with you know something which is you know which value is actually actually almost like unrelated to to anything right then we're creating huge risks right and this this risk needs to be addressed luckily what how i compare and i spent 15 years in traditional financial sector when i compare what we can do in terms of analytics for the crypto space for the crypto space for the blockchain space i think we we are able to address this risk in principle right and you know obviously we need to have uh consensus from from the market that you know other participants want to use it right and and want to actually be transparent in terms of oh maybe not transparent but they want to be identified and the transfer should be identified otherwise uh i i see you know markets like open c uh which is huge huge risk in terms of regulations in terms of money laundering counter-terrorist financing terrorist financing human trafficking etc etc right so we need to we need to you know do the the cleanup act and see what's going to be the outcome um robbie chris any thoughts on on that yeah i mean that that was such a serious answer and uh so i'll just take a slightly different thing which is um uh i'm trying not to say this but like i think ray regulation is often uh hostile to innovation and uh this is not even just a decentralized web web 3 problem like even if you build a web 2 app now it's like there's gdpr there's a uk version of gdpr there's a california version of gdpr i think there's a brazil version of gdpr and web 2 apps are very easy to build they're cheap the infrastructure exists it's actually very hard to comply with all of those privacy policies all at the same time and so i think um globally we need to get our act together and make sure what i love what i love about our industry is almost like everyone is building nobody really care you know every you know then you know the market is becoming mature everyone cares you know that's that's kind of cycles you know and that's that's a lot actually it's like pushing the boundaries of regulations as well right yeah no i agree and i think that i think that regulation is something that ultimately we always welcome because regulation helps us to set standards and it helps to make sure that everybody plays by a reasonable set of rules i think to this point you know we've been relatively self-governing but one of the things i think that is held back and why you know like the ipo of coinbase for example is a great signal for the market is it's helping us to set more precedent and more regulation as to how the traditional financial markets view blockchain related businesses and that's important because we can't you know we can't exist forever as a parallel universe there has to be interconnections and so i think this is you know the beginning of the the more mainstreaming um of of blockchain related tech but at the same time i think this creates a huge challenge for the current um forms of governance that exist in in this world because i mean just think about it what one of the biggest innovation that bitcoin did was it enabled the ownership of money to not only um persons uh and legal entities but to software so today thanks to bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies out there software can own money software can participate with us in transactions without us knowing about it i mean how are we going to regulate that having ai agents running on the web and doing stuff there are some questions here in the forum i can see about the risks of nfts being you know sold and purchased by bots and all sort of things i mean this is the new reality we are moving in and yes i see this uh you know we will need cybernetic governance models to embrace all those changes and you know difficulties so that's a that's a really big challenge um for sure i think what you will notice though is that regardless of where the regulation borders are set up so to speak um industry will have a tendency to push those borders as hard as it possibly can and i think of things like financial trading where you know trading houses put their put their computers physically as close as possible to the exchange so that the cables are shorter you know so these kind of things exist in current markets already and i think that we'll see this kind of you know everybody looking to try to position themselves to run the most efficiently um and within the you know the the loosest definition of the rules as possible because that's kind of how people run their lives anyway regardless of whether it's on the web 3.0 or not exactly well i promise to to the um organizers that we will leave some space for the questions from the audience uh so uh i've seen a few uh interesting ones and victoria daniel if you have seen something you would like to promote to our guests because they don't necessarily see all the questions please please feel free um there was um one question here um related to digital avatars so maybe i'd like to have chris and robbie commenting on this uh stephanie wrote beyond gaming the next destination would be fashion gucci has already released its first pair of digital sneakers the big groups like lvmh are all looking into nfts for digital fashion and accessories we will all be very well dressed avatars what are your thoughts on that i'll go quick robbie and then i'll kick you over to you who are probably the expert here but um yeah yes i think it's uh when i said before like find an mst that you love i think digital fashion is a great example and especially when we have the interoperability that robbie was talking about where i can take my gucci shoes to fortnight and then roblox and you know and then i can drive my f1 car with them uh it's super important the other thing i'll say is i'm also excited about ar fashion and the rumors of the apple glasses or whatever device might be around and so you may actually just be walking around your city and looking at people and seeing these digital fashions which could also be sold as nfps and and before you bulk at the idea of spending money on digital fashion in addition to your physical fashion um keep in mind the digital fashion will never wear out um and it will last forever um and also if you think about it you know with the right kind of smart contract your digital fashion can also evolve like a subscription so there's no reason you can't pay gucci for your shoes to become more fashionable each season right it's just a different it's it's a different model that's self that self evolves so there's all kinds of things that you can do and i think i think brands will have a really fun time embracing the new tools i have also i have also a question that might be interesting for for you from blockchain analytics a risk mitigation perspective and the new ownership of digital data a person is asking here in the chat i would love to know any practical use cases for fractionalized nfts which are tradedly which are tradable and possibly regulated have you had any customers looking into this fractionalized nfts uh and the way of regulating this yeah uh and i think you know that's you know nft's it's a it's it's a word you know right now which is which is used but i think you know the future will be the the fractional ownership uh of nfts or fractional ownership or of of you know anything which is which is digital right so yes uh we have a lot of you know interest in this space it's definitely you know that the first choice here is you know the jurisdiction which the contractual side of of of you know where is the you know nft created or what is the law which is governing you know specific um let's say you know nft or the con underlying contract i think that's critical i think you know currently it's it's omitted it's you know it's actually not clear so that's something which is definitely needs to be addressed and i know that some of the jurisdictions are looking you know actively into properly regulating this and actually also having a view what does it mean but but in principle you have the civil law and you have contractual law to to govern um you know nfts and i've i would strongly encourage people to read you know what they are buying and how they are buying because at the same time we see a lot of you know scam ransomwares in the nft space right and without proper understanding what is the the law behind uh considering international aspect of you know blockchain space it's almost impossible at the moment to recover any of the you know stolen goods uh or anything which is you know run somewhere in nft right so basically you pay me or i'm gonna create an over you know nft of your good right and this type of stories right or you know that's that's that's big market at the moment as well there is also a direct question here to you robbie uh where a person is curious about the possible merger of gaming and education let me read this question robbie talking about transferring value and creating equitable access and inclusion to decentralized worlds have you ever thought in designing a school in the mode of a game so that kids could game and be educated at the same time this would allow independence from governmental policies unions etc stopping education in developing countries what are your thoughts on that two thoughts um so first to some background we looked into this and we created education related games um as a mobile developer for many years education is an incredible field but it's very challenging and coming from the purely commercial side similar to other types of government contracting it really is learning a completely new business development and marketing organization to be able to figure out how to navigate working with schools i think it's possible to create independent educational products but what we were hoping is to create products where we can work with schools and provide digital tools that can be you know supplementary in schools because we felt that that would have the the most chance of success when you know teachers can help to deploy these kind of solutions but that said dealing with schools and jurisdictions and stuff i mean even if you just look at the us for example and you think about how many school districts there are in cities and states and towns and counties and it's it's a nightmare honestly to navigate um so i would love to do it but the challenge is enormous enormous i uh i've thought about this over the years i think there's a big opportunity in in historical fiction so you might read a book uh that was fiction but but set in the timepiece and so now at the end you know who the king was in 1300 um and i often think that like sim city was maybe the most profound educational software of all time uh it's like how i learned how cities rhyme and then since then we've had sieve and we've had assassin's creed and so i do think like the youth is learning through gaming um but you know it's more rather than direct education it's more learning history through historical fiction and gaming i agree well it's like when we look at this idea of avatars because obviously nfts are being widely used for avatars crypto punks is one of the most um you know highly traded nft projects and they're mostly being used for avatars and avatars are something that i think a certain generation of users really just doesn't even need explaining why one would want to have an avatar because they've conducted so much of their life online and you know that's not my generation that's that's gen z and the millennials um but i think um uh you know the more we all spend in the in the metaverse as chris said whether the meta versus uh online in different formats or whether it's an actual 3d immersive environment um the more that these kind of representations of ourselves will matter yeah i could wrap it up with one thought i mean it all could potentially lead to the new uh definition of reputation going forward i mean if you can imagine like you guys have given examples of um digitalizing experiences or participations in events via the non-fungible tokens this could theoretically create a new layer in the web 3-0 of something that we could refer to as a meta reputation where things we do things we we say we publish we participate they are building in a way our digital but non-mutable digital footprint behind that could become our you know meta reputation so that but we don't have enough time to there is huge risk in this what you just said and i'm not sure if we agree on this how however i think it already exists and it's called a credit score [Laughter] definitely um but this session is just too short to embrace all the great ideas and i'm super happy to have possibility to speak to all three of you for all the participants you can easily find all four of us at linkedin so feel free to search for us and reach out and i will give the voice back to the studio to victoria and daniel thank you thank you thank you marek and thank you chris robbie and pablo thank you once again for joining us today and sharing your views on nfts and what's going on in the market i want to thank also the amazing group of attendees that we have now they have been super active in the chat i don't know if you medic could find the questions because we had a lot of comments and and and that's good right because then it's a way to know that people are getting a lot of out of the session so thank you once again