Fireside Chat I Kartik Talwar and Roham Gharegozlou I Pragma Cannes 2025

[Music] And this is going to be a fireside chat with myself and Rohan from Dapper Labs. Please give Roham a big round of applause. Welcome back. I don't think my Oh, there you go. So, you picked a photo with a lot of black black hair, man.

Got a lot more white hair now.

This is This is the 2021 Roam that's excited about consumer crypto.

Still excited about consumer crypto. That's probably more like 2018, but but this is a cryptokitties roam. Uh well, I'm kind of curious about a bunch of things I want to cover today. And um the thing I want to kind of start by is uh this seems to be the the third wave of us finally getting excited about look everybody's coming. we got the the CryptoKitties in 2018 that sort of started this massive wave uh thanks to uh the amazing kind of cool projects that you ended up uh doing and that turned into the whole NFT era that kind of got even more millions of people and and we're kind of seeing a similar version of uh of a similar trend here with now financial institutions getting excited and kind of indicating more more demand for just regular retail.

Um so my kind of first question to you is well what do you think is different about now that wasn't the case over the last seven years in getting millions more people into crypto?

Yeah I mean look we started um you know both of us have been in crypto for a very long time. The first time our team started uh experimenting on Bitcoin was in 2014. And you know the I was on stage uh in 2021 with the title, hey, mainstream adoption is here. And I'm kind of sitting there saying, well, look, there's a lot of positive things happening, but but the infrastructure is not ready. There's there's too few examples of of actual uh mainstream adoption and and the the the sort of the drivers in terms of a regulatory clarity weren't there.

Um, and I had to start the day talking about regulatory clarity, but I think, you know, that's a big part of what's given companies like ours, our partners kind of that green light to say, well, go build anything you've you've sort of imagined and and it's an area for innovation, not for um not for regulation or for kind of um for fear. Um, and I think that from a from a sort of adoption standpoint, you mentioned the financial institutions, you know, we our company's thesis was always mainstream adoption would be driven by games and entertainment and and we did drive a lot. We we sort of changed the mind of a lot of people on like proof. Yeah.

And and what kind of crypto uh could be. But this this cycle will be driven by uh everybody getting a wallet in their an onchain wallet instead of their or in addition to their fiat wallet and starting to transact on chain. major institutions trying to transact on chain, trillions of dollars of of real world assets and and sort of investment contracts etc moving on chain. And that kind of opening up of liquidity is is huge opportunity for application developers like ours because it means just more uh more wallets and pockets effectively. And so um that's also opened up avenues for our partners to be very open with with uh user acquisition and sort of uh integration within their ecosystems.

people here might not know um but very recently we did a partnership with Disney where every single Disney Plus subscriber in the US starting and then eventually rolling out across the rest of the world will be able to come in get a Dapper wallet get a Disney pinnacle account start their uh collectibles and u and they would never do that if there was a regulatory clarity or sort of this other wave of adoption that's that's co-leading it. So very exciting time to be in crypto and I think uh you know as evidenced by u kind of the developer numbers etc. Everything's been up and to the right but we still haven't gotten kind of a major lift. Um and and I think it's it's sort of the opportunities are there for the taking.

That's amazing. I it kind of feels like the sort of like late 90s early 2000s era of like we know that the internet's going to change it. we just have to wait for everybody else to get broadband and effectively this is kind of like the version I'm hearing now before it was people have to kind of care about crypto then it was clarity now it's just purely distribution for people being ready to participate um and uh it feels like now you're kind of at the close to half a billion or more number of people who are going to be ready and that sort of opens up a lot more opportunities um

yeah exactly I mean it's it's sort of are we in the bubble where people can participate in the value uh uh speculation or are they actually using the products? And I think last cycle, you know, of course the crypto prices were up, NFD prices were up, but nobody could uh buy a board ape and even our product NBA Top Shot um was was a lot of the time was everything was sold out, prices were through the roof. Um we had issues just handling uh scale and so so we're just in a different world today. I mean, you've kind of had a pretty good success history with uh getting so many incredible brands kind of come in and part just participate in the space through you. You got obviously NBA, uh NFL, Disney now.

Um I'd be kind of curious to understand how has their thinking changed now and and obviously kind of getting the NBA to do Top Shots 5 years ago was a much different conversation than talking to Disney now. um what's kind of in their minds when they kind of make these decision and and how are they thinking about it? Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, five years ago, um I won't name names, but a senior executive at one of these major brands told me, "Hey, Rohan, we can't do this deal right now, but don't worry, crypto won't be the devil's work forever." And and of course, now he's a big champion of of uh crypto and and NFTts and and consumer applications. And the thinking has changed completely.

For one thing, if you go to any sports conference now, there's going to be a digital collectibles panel. Digital collectibles were not a thing 5 years ago. Um, and now they're a category. Everyone's an accepted uh it's an accepted thing that people want to collect digital trading cards the same way they want to collect physical trading cards. And in our case, they move and they're they're highlights.

They're sort of deeper than and you can play with them. They're deeper than just uh sort of static assets. Um, and from the perspective of of Disney, it's the same thing where, you know, it's it's they're seeing the benefits of blockchain because it means yes, their users can have true ownership and that reflects in terms of uh average revenue per user. So, we are monetizing our customers the same amount as you know, sports lease can monetize customers inside an arena or or Disney can monetize customers inside uh the parks. And so they're they're so deeply imshed and engaged in inside their their sort of niche fandom.

Um it's just a question of okay, how do we integrate this more deeply inside the rest of your ecosystem ticketing um um sort of creating really kind of value prop value that goes both ways recognizing top fans um and then rewarding them um and and I think there's very much openness to that because because they can see that alternative monetization methods on the internet are kind of broken. You can do subscriptions where you charge $8 a month, $10 a month, $12 a month, or you can do advertising. What else? What else can you do? If you're trying to do that's it.

If you're trying to sell digital goods to customers, they're kind of chachki that live inside messaging apps or or whatever it might be. And I think that there's finally realization of that. And and from our perspective, we're building it in a way that's not actually relying on us. Um, if these PL the same way that these uh uh IP owners can basically switch manufacturers for jerseys or switch manufacturers for things like trading cards, they're the IP owner. The their relationship is directly with the consumer and they can continue to reward holders of their assets.

They can continue to see that kind of they they own the the the data web effectively as opposed to a reality. the customer owns it and the customer can choose to engage less middleman effect here that will be kind of the delegation in the past if you were to go to a separate company contract them to build an app and do all these things and they sort of cut that

yeah I mean it's it's more like a almost like an open uh marketplace for middlemen where there's zero switching cost for a customer to to go from one interface to the other interface they can trade top shots on openc or they can trade top shots on NBA topshot.com um and and that the both ways the brand gets their royalty, the brand gets their um sort of almost internetwide DRM, how they're thinking about it. It's the same asset.

Exactly.

So, one thing that's kind of super interesting to me is um you are definitely in the forefront of getting these products into hands of millions of people who are largely not following crypto. Um probably 80% I would guess like if not higher. Um, and a big piece that I guess I'm curious about is how much of your product decisions are around abstracting and hiding away that something is behind crypto. Um, do you kind of actively want to tell people that this is being powered by NFTTS or it's on the blockchain or do you think that's just not relevant for these 10 to 50 million users and they just experience the product but they shouldn't know exactly how it's working?

Yeah, I mean 100%. We we used to always talk about kind of hide the wires as in sort of abstract those those concepts up but I think the deeper way is is hide the implementation not the implication as in hide the fact that it's a um you know how the technology works behind the scenes but the reality that it's a blockchain product that you have true ownership that you have you can drive more utility from it. It's Nike shoes that you can wear anywhere not just in the Nike store. That's something that's really important to make people feel. Um, and I think that the original crypto keys had it because you had to basically you you you you h you had to use a different company's wallet to use the product.

And so instantly you were sort of like, wait a second, how are these things in two places at the same time? And oh wait, the OpenC launched, you know, a few weeks after CryptoKitties and wait a second, how can I transact them over here? That for me was kind of like the the that the the moment where I said I'm never going to build anything outside of crypto ever again because the last 1015 years of my career before that was in sort of normal software where you're dealing with so much platform risk every time you have a product built on top of someone else else's API um even though the user wants your product if the API owner decides to change it or or change the terms or whatever it might be your product breaks and you have to keep

we saw that with Twitter um

Twitter in the early days 100% understand we built the product on top of GitHub um that that was kind of constantly chasing updates you know obviously the Facebook platform with Zinga and all those things we had a few um runins there um and it's sort of like what and why do you have to reinvent if you build we we did a lot of ARVR in 2013 2014 2015 and this concept of if I built something for Google Glass and then you know and these are old days so I'm showing again my age but but if you built something for for for the vision pro or for uh the MetaQuest why should the uh standards with which those things communicate change. And if I'm a user using MetaQuest, why shouldn't it be like, hey, I'm using Gmail, you're using Hotmail or whatever it might be and we can communicate openly rather than the stuff I buy in Meta stays in Meta. The stuff I buy in Apple stays in Apple and those two worlds are actually completely separate, have nothing to do with each other. Customers don't want that. Customers want an identity that transfers between their digital lives the same way it transfers between their physical lives.

Um, and I think that that's, you know, that that that and and also brands want that. Brands want visibility across openness across and frankly I think once companies use the tech, everybody is going to want that because it lets you focus on your slice building value for your customer and not having to worry about the piping. Everything automatically becomes a public MCP server effectively. As long as you put it on chain, it becomes programmable. Anyone can build on top of it.

Uh, you don't have to you don't have to think about API maintenance. You don't have to think about um tokens and rules and things like that. You just build in a protocol and and and then it runs. And by the way, it runs forever. CryptoKitties will run as long as Ethereum runs, which is which is crazy to think about,

which is Yeah. Insane. You don't see that at all. Like

it's immortal software. I mean, that that's the coolest. It's the single coolest thing I've ever come across my life.

Yeah. I think the second best example I can think of is Atari. That's probably just the oldest company, but but it's still not immortal. Um, well, speaking of MCP, I guess I'm kind of curious to see how you as Flow are thinking about AI and in crypto. Um, do you kind of see an overlap?

Do you think you need to evolve the the chain somehow, or is it just that you have to kind of make it easy for uh people to just do more integrations with AI and and EVM here?

Yeah, I mean, look, I I think this is the single most exciting time to be in technology. I I'm geeking out on it the same way I was when I got my first computer. And and there's so much more we're doing as a company. Dapper is about the same size we were um when we launched NBA Top Shot. We have three times as many products and and each team is is so much more effective and I think having more fun because they're relying on on um AI agents almost like um sort of interns to to kind of go out and do things for us.

Um but I think the the game changer that not too many people are talking about uh is that crypto is effectively the economic the governance and the programmability layer for an AIdriven world. And what I mean by that is when you have all of these sort of the ability for anyone to have their own onchain agent to program their own onchain agent, then suddenly you you want that agent to go do stuff for you. You might want that agent to go negotiate with other agents for you. You might need different companies agents working together. And again, it comes back to that Gmail versus Hotmail question.

Do you want five companies to be that's it and no one else be able to build anything else in AI? Or does the consumer want to say, "Hey, it's my data. I want to use whatever thing I want to use. Maybe I want to roll my own thing on and uh and host it. So I don't I'm not exposing my personal information.

Well, less and less people seem to care about that, the more value they get from

ideally. Yes.

What's that?

Ideally, they're not doing that, but they they should have the choice.

Well, my my point is just competition, right? And do you want this to be sort of uh the rich get richer and big companies get bigger and and sort of at we've seen how that cycle goes. They add a lot of value and then they start extracting value. um or do we want this open competition where hey anyone can use this technology to build stuff um and so that that's like one layer of it. Another layer of it is of course you know Gen AI makes it so much easier for everyone to be a creator right whether that's of text whether that's of uh uh of art of art etc um or of uh experiences and products and and and applications games whatever it might be and so your use of a given product might become sort of dynamic as in it gets built for you as you build it and so we're sort of rethinking um what application everyone should be rethinking what application architecture needs to be in AI I dream a world because going to an interface, clicking the file menu, selecting a a a task, it just doesn't make any sense anymore.

Um the interface should be customized to me and the data layer should be completely open. I think crypto is is the best sort of uh um sort of framework for for how to do that. Um and on flow there are a few things. So, one of the things I I I um I didn't even know was possible to the extent that that it is is you can build little smart resources that act as agents that sit inside wallets um and sort of act autonomously and interact with other people.

What's an example of uh one of these agents like what does that mean in in practice?

Uh well, in practice it might mean that you have a protocol that effectively says, "Hey, look, I'm um uh you're you're running out of money or your collateral is depositing is um is dropping in price. Um top me up." And there's an agent inside your wallet that you that knows how to uh top up that um top top it up based based on certain rules. Um and you can sort of remix that. So you can change it um with talking to your own, you know, offchain agent, right?

Hey chat GBT, make me a little smart resource that does XYZ, sits in my account um and negotiates or let's say I want to buy a given piece of art. Say, hey, if this ever hits OpenC, go scoop it for me. Um or say if anyone wants to buy this thing from me, tell them I I I'll sell it to them for this price. etc., etc.

And so it's almost like smart contract logic, but as a I mean NFT is not the right word because it's not it doesn't technically follow the NFT standard. Uh but it is effectively a digital asset that sits in the account that could theoretically be traded, but it's like a workflow or or

yeah, you can basically buy access to usage of of this agent because it's it's in a way so autonomous here. But uh that's a fascinating concept actually.

Precisely. and and it's it makes it's all about composability and that's the other thing is like you want to open data layer because you want to be able to build uh on top of it. Um there is one product feature that we're launching um I I shouldn't sort of leak the date but it'll be sometime in Q4 because I talked about it with the flow core development team that's basically programming um scheduled callbacks. So a smart contract can call itself back using the same clock that the blockchain uses. Um, and so it's very uh dependable.

Um, and so you can have a contract that calls other contracts every second, every block, every whatever it might be. Um, and so you can program pretty advanced use cases. And and on flow there's also no me. And so there's just a lot of um uh better um it's a more friendly environment for for for autonomous agents the same way it's a more friendly environment for consumers.

It's going to be awesome actually. I mean, this is like a good uh good sort of uh nerd sniping moment for the hackathon this weekend where people can actually kind of play with a lot of these things because now I'm kind of personally curious to see, oh, what if I can design an agent that just knows how to talk to a bunch of other services that sits on my wallet? I can probably even come up with a new standard. Um they'll be they'll be pretty good. Um maybe one other kind of quick thing is um uh speaking of hackathons obviously uh one thing that uh most people may not know is that we kind of go way back to the very first ETH global event where CryptoKitties came out of and you've sort of gone to really improve a lot of cool things in in the flow ecosystem and just uh making things better for developers.

So I'm kind of curious like how do you think about hackathons in general and how they end up kind of defining the way you think about product or or the the developer side of things with chain?

Yeah. So, so we're a proud supporter of the of the hackathon this weekend and we've been a proud supporter of every ETH global hackathon I think since Flow became EVM equivalent. Um, and I think it's where the smartest developers are trying to push the boundaries of what's possible, right? That's that's what I love about hackathons is sometimes it's about okay just learning the tools and copying something that exists. But the coolest thing is hey I wonder if this thing can exist and then you know let me just kind of go go take a trace bullet hack at it.

and we see really smart people from around the world and I think you guys are doing a great job kind of tying the threads between the the winners etc. So I think we've had over 300 apps built on flow um just out of ETH global hackathons. We've had over a thousand developers onboarded into flow just through ETH global hackathons. I think I think um flow has been the number one L1 and and sometimes uh just overall kind of like scalable network that's been chosen by developers at every youth global hackathon since we've become EVM equivalent. So it's very exciting and of course the EVM equivalence has dri driven a lot of other um uh changing our metrics and we can talk about you know why why we didn't do that earlier and and all all of that stuff but I think the main thing um about hackathons is just exploring possibilities and and showing people it's not that hard um and and that it's actually you know we still have a ways to go I would say in terms of like for AI code to be plugandplay with um with with crypto because of just how high risk kind of smart.

I mean, we're this is kind of the most common trend that we're seeing and everybody's trying to use a lot of these tools and figure out how we can delegate this, but it's also the riskiest piece, which is this maybe the one thing you don't want to delegate without knowing any security implications. So, it gets tricky fast. Yeah.

Yeah. You you don't have to you it's more like you you you have a really smart intern and so you got to check their work, right? Because they might they might do something crazy.

Um and that's really why we also love Flow because um Cadence as a programming language is much easier to read and write. So, so if you're remixing uh and something that's like based on proven infrastructure, 15 million smart contracts out there, then use Solidity and sort of like build on top of that foundation. If you're trying to do something crazy that has a high degree of complexity, you know, you might spend 6 months in audits and reodits and all that stuff if if if um if you're not careful. So, we um we certainly have some stories on on that side of things, too.

There's a lot of stories on the news about all of the blockchain sort of helping with this um preventing at least this case. Maybe my final question to you is uh you've definitely sort of in a way set the standard for how consumer gaming and products should be. Um and we kind of talked about sort of what the next explosion looks like of users, how to build great products, how kind of stable coins and will change this game. Um so kind of if you were to kind of project 5 years from now what the consumer crypto experience looks like, what do you kind of think that world will be? And uh will this be marginally different or kind of the same but just a lot more seamless?

And

I mean 5 years is tough because I think the pace of change is going to be absolutely incredible with the combination of augmented and virtual reality kind of really maturing. Um obviously agentic workflows becoming to the point where you just speak things into existence and and then um obviously crypto infrastructure becoming much more adopted and and you having basically every financial uh every piece of currency as well as financial instrument available for remixing and composability on chain. Um it's kind of hard to even um I think think through but I think entertainment and and games etc will be the only products that have interfaces. Everything else all other interfaces get abstracted away through just conversational uh interfaces and I don't mean the chat GPT today with

not a text box with like a chat just

exactly but but it's more like how do you want to interface with that with that data if it's talking to your robot that's what it is if it's popping up a hologram and interfacing with that if it's um if it's watching a video and then talking with the video whatever it might be and I think um so games entertainment will be the only place almost like probably a little bit of nostalgia too where people kind of go uh experience the world like like it used to Um but but I think our our role in it is to try and build sort of products that are as composable as possible almost like building blocks that create service area for other people to create on top of it. Um and also sort of pull our um IP partners into that world as well. Whether it's like fanfiction on the one side, whether it's sort of uh me being able to combine the the ticket I got for the game I went to, the selfie I got with the Top Shot, etc., etc. and like and like that entertainment will become co-creation will become co- um co-artnership and I think the other thing is you know in a world where AI agents do all of our work for us you know I think the world gets kind of um the the two most common the the two sort of vocations let's say or the things people will spend their time on that will be going through the roof are entertainers and entertainment right like you just want to what and then the way it's manifesting today is obviously of course YouTube stars or or Tik Tok influencers etc.

Um, and and the question is what will that uh be look like tomorrow when a Tik Tok influencer can just as easily create a game for example or or create a virtual world with with full fully create a virtual universe right a whole matrix where you can become somebody else and and and sort of live uh a different kind of uh live a different life. So and and what is that infrastructure that can facilitate all of that? What's the economic layer that that tracks the ownership? What is the governance layer that makes decisions? what is a programmability layer that you can sort of add add on top uh what else could it be other than what we've been working on for the last 10 plus years and I think I think that's super exciting

I mean that's going to be an awesome future and I feel like this is probably going to come in the next two years instead of five so this this is happening fast uh well Ron thank you so much for this amazing conversation and uh can't wait to see what all the cool things that you do with flow

thank you for having me thanks everybody let's give a big round of applause awesome [Music]