NFT Infrastructure - Panel - Near Day at ETHDenver 2023

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   hello and welcome to this nft infrastructure panel I can't see a thing but that's fine uh my name is Bruno and I'm from the remark company ecosystem we um we built nft 2.0 multi-chain uh standards and um today we're going to be talking about nft infrastructure and I think that's really relevant to Define because it can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people but before we do that I want to hear from our panelists I'd like to give them a chance to introduce themselves and their project

2. 0:32

   so that we can dive in properly on what each of them are doing and how they're addressing this really ambiguous term that you know will have to also Define during the panel so if you want to get going like from here to the end cool yeah uh hi I'm Chris uh Chris Kosinski crazy last name uh I'm one of the original co-founders of Tinder I helped invent the swipe uh I was a co-creator

3. 0:58

   of bumble as well um and some other some other companies right now I'm working on a company called Niche which puts users into interspace clubs that are organized or structured as nft gated dials under the hood but we obfuscate all the scary crypto stuff away and just give people a next evolution of social network nice great I'm uh Nate Guyer uh co-founder of mint base we've been building uh nft applications since 2018. we're actually one of the first apps to deploy on the

4. 1:30

   graph protocol if you go to their website you'll still see our logo up there from old school days and we know how painful it is to build a blockchain application indexers that's a pain in the ass uh you've got smart contracts pain in the ass uh you've got audits also expensive so that's a pain in the ass so we just take away all of that and we say okay we want you to build your own Marketplace away from us we know it all works because we use it ourselves and we're going to add an affiliate program where you can actually

5. 2:00

   get uh 1.25 of our Market fee uh directly if you're able to purchase any nft on near and the last note is we're the only fully interoperable uh Market on near where if you create your own contract deploy it and mint it'll automatically show up at our indexer where you could see a pleth of data whether it's full provenance of tokens uh this that and all sorts of neat things so thank you yeah infrastructure Carissa I'm Carissa Lynette I'm the VP

6. 2:31

   of operations for few and far Marketplace we are a digital IP minting Solution that's easy to use and seamless for most people to use and we have the added bonus of solving the problem for royalties for creators nice hey everybody my name is Austin World co-founder of Keno I'm a three-time tech founder with a specialization in economics and law I went to the London School of economics and University of

7. 2:56

   Southern California gold School of Law so I get really jazzed about smart contracts even though they're pretty dumb contracts currently but the future is bright at the intersection of technology and law Aquino we are building and about to launch multiple films on a marketplace where fans can go behind the scenes invest collect and experience A-list level films like never before all through smart contract technology on top of a protocol layer

8. 3:19

   that is the trustless place for artists to have their IP and economic rights protected in the Hollywood industry which is an afariously known for being one of the spaces where nobody trusts anybody else so we're about to change that through smart blockchain technology and we're proud to be a near partner thank you all right so defining nft infrastructure is kind of is an interesting problem especially in

9. 3:43

   this mixed like type like the these mixed types of projects that we have here um each of you probably has their own idea of it like um it can be anything like for us that remark and if the infrastructure is just the standards that we've built we don't really care about the stack underneath uh we don't really care about the storage we care about the standards and what they do and what they enable in terms of future proofing nfts but for

10. 4:07

    you it might be how something is stored for the for the movies and how you can expand that offering in order to you know enrich that media you know it can be IP tracking in terms of nfts or it can be just literally deploying an actual Marketplace as a tech stack as an infrastructure so if you were to pick one definition of nft infrastructure that means the most to you that that you define as nft infrastructure could you clarify it and why it's important for your project

11. 4:37

    um we can start from the back no yeah I think trustless Ness I'm not sure if that's a word uh but I think it works for us building out the technology that enables you to track if you're a fan your rights to Future profits in a movie so let's say you know we're going to launch a movie with Matt so and so who my co-founder mentioned earlier that he worked with but I'm not going to say his name you're like it

12. 5:03

    hits the movie theater it did 100 million dollars worldwide I don't have to go to an accountant and a lawyer to know that I'm going to receive that one percent of that film I own it's going to be trustlessly transferred to me on blockchain right that's a pretty cool Innovation infrastructure wise you know or if it's I own the right to the Batman mask in Dark Knight that's not possible that's already been done for the record

13. 5:20

    uh go watch Dark Knight a great movie um but if you had bought the right to that prop before it was made on Kino it would be shipped to you afterwards you would know that it's an authentic prop because of the infrastructure on chain and you could have traded that right across wow it's getting louder across different ecosystems through the chain right or if it's even down to IP protection like q and far is doing proud to be a few and far partner as well um and you know there's you don't have

14. 5:44

    to go through all these middlemen and so for us I think that's what is most exciting about the technology that all of our teams are building is that the worlds in which we live in are so congested with middlemen be the lawyers accountants sometimes even Engineers they if we can build technology that we can all point to and know that's the single point of trust that's a single point of failure we're able to create more efficient markets which actually then creates more opportunity for

15. 6:08

    artists individuals consumers Etc it was awesome um I think for us there's been three iterations of web3 thus far there's the first one which was static websites decentralized then there was centralized Facebook Instagram Twitter we're going back to decentralize where we own our data and we can monetize it so the first problem I think what we're desperately trying to solve is integrating people seamlessly and in order to do that it

16. 6:32

    needs to be it needs to be like Facebook and Instagram to where they don't feel the pain and the friction of logging into something having to set up something else having to buy something just to get to that one item that they wanted and the second part of this which in my personal opinion is super important and I think you'll agree it's the creators the creators are there's a bunch of controversy going around with Creator royalties and if you look at it

17. 6:57

    most of history art has art and and music and everything that makes us great has has been creators who've decided what Society is so protecting them so that we can continue to create beautiful music Beautiful artwork great cinematography and movies this is extremely important because once we start taking that right for them to the ability for them to earn money and them stop creating these things we start losing a lot of our culture and What

18. 7:27

    Makes Us great okay uh definition of infrastructure for me is uh blockchain is incredibly hard to build on top of if you're play Ember or sweat those guys just want to focus on building their app they don't want to fire up a team of uh eight people to just focus on building indexers because inductors are really hard we're talking about a fire hose of data that's shooting stuff all over the place uh if they don't want to focus on those we're taking those kind of difficult things away to let them focus on building their

19. 8:00

    app they're not using them based I'm just using them as an example the main thing is if they just want to focus on their one app going out getting people to get miles on their feet or do whatever they can focus on that we'll focus on the really complicated low-level stuff so that's uh that's the the infrastructure play for me so I think for for Niche what nfts mean for us is it represents ownership it represents some like digital Ledger of

20. 8:30

    ownership uh right now we're focusing on those being your interests your social groups your networks uh like for me it's like I belong to a Star Wars group and then like uh uh La Tech people and like a cat group and like uh the poodles and doodles in New York and all sorts of these weird things but in my wallet now I have nfts that basically have codified all my interests into into a very

21. 8:54

    central place and as we look forward to it uh we're trying to look through it through the consumer's eyes of like what do you what what does an nft mean to them and it's you know whatever stigma is attached to it now of a you know a picture of monkeys or Bieber paying a million dollars for something that that represents absolutely like no utility to I think an end consumer uh so like I said we're focusing on like it being your your digital membership card uh to

22. 9:19

    your Social Circles uh it can be a ft of that represents like an event through one of your clubs and IRL that gets added to your wallet too and adds to a rich history if I'm part of this club I went to these events and eventually we'd like it to be a digital Ledger of a physical good uh that you could buy right I'd sell a Star Wars thing online of the nft of it it's a smart contract between the two they ship it to me I

23. 9:42

    complete the circle and now that nft goes into my wallet as a digital representation of a physical good that's in my collection which adds I think to my social status of you know if I'm in that specific Club so we're looking at the pragmatic uses of what an nft means all right um all right so very happy to hear that there's a lot of innovation on top of just jpegs here in every single project

24. 10:05

    which is great um which brings us nicely to the next topic like we are kind of the ecosystem is kind of poisoned with this idea of nfts just being a static piece of media right now and it's really hard to break away from this we like we at remark try to make the standards future proof and so that you can you know take a movie and literally mint an IP right as a PDF and put it inside of that movie nft or then

25. 10:35

    add a subtitle file as literally another nft into that interview all of that is is cool but you need to make some compromises so what I'm wondering is in your quest to add utility and purpose to these nfts on your infrastructure what sacrifices have you had to make how do you decide between uh you know the compromise of keeping backwards compatibility with the old world of nfts versus innovating on top of them enough to actually make them useful and no

26. 11:06

    longer a meme but a new data structure that people want to use uh for us I think it's about interoperability interoperability where they come from where they're going to go uh and I think what they what they mean to people like we said it's not it's not the jpeg it's not the the pixels and what's contained in it I think it's what it means for people um and just just with like current market stigma uh people people don't

27. 11:32

    want to talk about FTS I'm going to Market a thing and it's it's nft it's nft that uh you start losing people so when we kind of like talk about the way that these clubs are gated we just call memberships cards we don't talk about nfts we don't talk about minting we don't talk about any any webview really because what we wanted to distill down is the value of that technology not the technology itself right and I think nft is definitely the technology but what we

28. 11:56

    want to convey is the pragmatic uses behind that perfect yeah we were the first nft Marketplace to use our weave back in the day so decentralization is super important to us storage is super important to us how how we're sorting those sort of things we've launched a Marketplace in 2018 and no one's really bugged me to say you did a bad job you know it's it's kind of telling when people in Discord say oh where'd that go oh here's the link it still exists whether you go on openc so our goal is once you mint the token and

29. 12:27

    deploy it we can shut down tomorrow and your stuff still exists when it comes to indexing there's definitely a trade-off I really feel like the indexer doesn't necessarily need to be decentralized it's just there to give us data to organize us with where's what if I'm going to go check in in an airline I want to see my NFD really quick but when I actually go to and that's the indexer that's centralized that's fine but if I want to actually check in you burn that

30. 12:52

    token or do whatever it is you need to do on chain that's the validation to to do that I mean if the trade-off is you can't do everything tomorrow General but we can slowly move that way as long as the chain does its thing the storage is there then then we can we can go nuts with decentralizing indexers and all right the graph I know is kind of a little bit tough to work with when it gets into scale so we've chosen to to go

31. 13:16

    go this route and uh I'm I'm super happy of all the decisions we've made in the last four years we've done it the best we possibly could and uh yeah let's uh off we go nice I agree with Chris interoperability is a huge component of what we're trying to do and I think nfts are a great vehicle if you look at sweatcoin which was on our Marketplace you get to earn your steps like your steps get recorded in real time based on holding this nft that is the definition

32. 13:46

    of utility for having this nft which is the vehicle to get there and now they've created this vast Community around this incentification which is getting people in shape making people feel good and creating a community of people that support each other to further this dialogue and to further that nfts are not the end they're the beginning they may go away they may transform they may

33. 14:08

    become something different but they're that first integration and in that first step into basically us being on the moon and I think that working with companies like Kino who are going to help revolutionize their industry and working with other companies like sweatcoin and working on near I think that we're starting those steps very strong okay so our uh our CTO David who's somewhere here in the audience uh he's

34. 14:32

    he has a mantra that he uses with his team we only build things that are usable viable and feasible and so when you say what do you sacrifice because we're using web through technology the answer is nothing in fact we're going to sacrifice anything it's going to be the friction of web 3 but we're going to abstract that away or remove that from the system until we're ready to introduce to introduce that to the users filament television is a 240 billion dollar industry there are billions of users of entertainment and so for us to

35. 14:56

    sit here and think that I'm going to put a ton of friction in our users faces and just hope they figure it out it's something that we will never do as a company instead and we have this workflow you can go through by an nft which we just like Chris we don't even use the term you're going to buy a behind the scenes pass which my mom will never even know is on the blockchain and that's beautiful however my best friend Jake who loves web3 will know what's on the blockchain right and so we meet

36. 15:20

    users where they're at and so we have a workflow where if you want to export to blockchain and use all the values and benefits that blockchain has to offer you can but if you don't want to and you just want to live in the keynote ecosystem because that's where you want to live and you just want to buy behind the scenes pass and get a little action on how the movie was made that's great

37. 15:36

    you know and so I think it's it's finding you know we talk about Progressive decentralization in the near ecosystem web 2.5 I think it's finding that good hybrid mix between slowly progressively showing users the future is bright blockchain is actually empowering you it's protecting your rights it's making things possible that weren't previously possible but not putting too much in people's faces that they shut down and they get scared and

38. 15:59

    then they're not using our products because then we're not actually doing anything for the whole web three ecosystem in general right one more thing to add to the interoperability okay so we should feel super proud on near that we have over 2 000 contracts interacting with each other that means all of these folks who control their own contracts some can upgrade some can't someone who lists on my market ASAC I can't touch their Market because they

39. 16:22

    control it I just found out on Solana their entire nft ecosystem I'm pretty sure is just one smart contract let that digest Mike you have metaplex who's able to update everybody's con one contract uh this was verified by dragos uh who's the DAP radar guy like tell me that's not a huge trade-off that we're that we should feel super proud about so I I encourage everyone to research that and and prove me wrong I'm happy to uh to be proved wrong but go forth that's a

40. 16:56

    pretty hefty accusation there we'll have to look into it um yeah on the topic of like centralization decentralization I've always been kind of an extremist in terms of ideals of blockchain and like I've been pestering my team about something that I like to call Progressive centralization where you start off with a really bad ux UI where everything's slow but it reads directly from the chain we don't really we don't really care much about you know

41. 17:29

    we don't really bother much with storage because our because our nfts they have multi multi multimedia uh capabilities you can just read have redundancy built into the nft so you can go our weave and ipfs and whatever but in terms of just reading the data you need to be able to use it even if all the indexers are offline even if all the centralized and Commercial apps are offline even if everything goes down I just want the

42. 17:53

    experience to be bad but possible and so then add an indexer on top and have your app check if the indexer live yes okay then take that data um so how like and we all also know when you have a especially a VC invested or or you know a commercially oriented startup or company the goal is ultimately to exit the goal is ultimately to be acquired or do something like that and so we all know what happens to those companies they usually get killed off by the

43. 18:23

    competition that acquires them so what I'm wondering is how important is decentralization to you in terms of longevity of the project like what would happen if the niche team disappeared tomorrow would I still be able to get into my dial Community somehow or would I basically be stranded in my community yeah I mean when you create that data that data exists and persists forever regardless of of Niche I mean it's it's yours it's in your wallet that uh uh

44. 18:54

    that nft belongs to yeah like we can't take it away uh specifically how it pertains to us is like what that nft grants you as far as permissions so as long as there's a club that exists that isn't structured as a dow you might not be able to like add more stuff to it let's say if Niche should just go away but you can absolutely take that down put it on another thing and still keep rolling because you've all got the the

45. 19:17

    nft which inherently grants uh permission to that so it should be reasonably easy to build an alternative client that plugs into the same nfts that everybody has or the same dial I I think that's like our end goal right we're starting with the consumer product obviously but our our end goal is to build a lean protocol off of that and then be able to whitelist it for like larger groups so like power let's you know like the Soho House app powered by Niche protocol that then interoper

46. 19:42

    interoperates with all the communities on Niche all the communities that are also powered by the niche token awesome and Nate you you mentioned our weave as your starting storage provider are you still using our weave yep uh why did you choose our weave uh okay so we started with um ipfs obviously and it was just a pain in the painting the ass uh it was uh the the final Discovery was insane uh you would ping a thing and then your page would load maybe in like eight or nine minutes like one one minute per each

47. 20:15

    ping uh then we're like okay well what's uh what's pinning what does that mean and then you start to realize okay we can use pinata we have to pay them but if we stop paying them then all your files go down and all of a sudden you're like well hell why don't we just use firestore it's the same thing we pay money we keep it up it's the what's the difference so with our weave it's definitely this neat um uh endowment mechanism where you put money into a system and then other other

48. 20:41

    nodes are incentivized to basically keep your stuff up for they say 200 years and they even have like a mild gdpr compliant Theory where every node can kind of say where gdpr compliant so if you want to take it down from our node you can but then it sends Eagles and everyone else goes oh man maybe we should put it up it's it's a it's a fascinating world uh yep interesting and you're feeling reasonably safe that you

49. 21:06

    know it won't suffer from uh fate like Thea or you know just something other cataclysmic yeah it's deep but another point to what if we go away tomorrow so uh you're messing around with near social and boss and those sort of things uh microchip gnu has been really messing around with that that stuff fascinating right it's uh we're creating minting applications on uh boss so you don't have to use mint base to Mint stuff we can build the

50. 21:38

    exact same kind of mechanics on boss so this is where we're like cool we have mint base dot XYZ or you can go do stuff but really you can build it on whatever it is you want it's all accessing the blockchain so that's uh that's the the future we're jumping into and getting weird with that's super interesting so we are running a bit short on time but I do want to cover another question here and that's related to royalties that you

51. 22:02

    mentioned before um it's to me it's a very clear-cut picture like if a if a Creator wants royalties we give them royalties that's it there's no like this this drift that you know people keep removing this in order just to get users it's to me quite poisonous for the industry but it's a very tricky problem when you go further than just a flat media files because when you have for example like in our case uh I don't know a game Avatar that that contains a backpack that contains a jacket that on

52. 22:33

    itself contains a patch and each of those is an nft contained in another nft and the patch has a different royalty and recipient and percentage than the other stuff you can't just sum it up it doesn't work you know you have to have a very intricate structure of how to define this in a way that won't let the seller of the Avatar basically rug the designer of the patch so that people have incentive to design the patches and

53. 22:56

    still get royalty uh I'm wondering how how are you looking at the royalties of um just generally your nfts and your ecosystem as they expend in functionality how are you gonna combat that current anti-royalty movement and also spin it into this multi you know like Rich nft royalty style system well I mean like the example you just gave I I smiled at having a background in law because that's not a new problem right lawyers have solved that many times now it's very expensive it's very

54. 23:27

    inefficient it's very clunky and it probably would have been 100 page contract with 10 different parties involved right so the dream is how do we work together with my background in law and your background in engineering to sit down and say hey how can we create a templatized contract that can handle 10 different parties 10 different royalty streams and it's so easy that you know my little sister could walk off the street design a patch and she could input her rights into a smart contract

55. 23:50

    without having any engineering or legal knowledge right and so that's the future that we need to build towards is smart contracts that are natural language processing you know compatible so that way normal users could sit down and I can say hey I created this amazing you know beautiful piece of artwork I want to sell it and I want to charge five percent royalties and I have the ability to dictate that in a smart contract or when it gets more complex business teams can sit down and figure those things out

56. 24:15

    right so that that's one angle the other angle two is just that we don't right now have the sort of meeting of the real world with the web 3 world right and so unfortunately we're kind of in this in a tough position where we have a lot of tech that is you know saying that we're protecting rights or or the opposite unfortunately but then you get into the real world and the contracts aren't

57. 24:37

    actually matching what was you know put on chain and so that's something we also need to work hard on and it's something we do as a team is every single one of our assets has an actual legal contract it's a PDF that's attached and that's just an intermediate step eventually all of that is going to be put into smart contract metadata it's going to be put into Action commands that can then be if then statements that can actually trigger certain transactions and responses but we are nowhere near close

58. 25:00

    to that yet like any of the standards in the nft marketplaces that you see right now aren't even close and then we have the competing terms of service like in Open Seas for example not to call them out that says oh wait any of those royalties we can just not enforce them right and so we have so much complexity both on the engineering side and the legal side that we need a lot of idealistic Visionaries I think like all of us here on stage to sit together and say all right how do we solve this how

59. 25:23

    do we make it technologically feasible how do we make it practically feasible and how do we keep the users best you know foot forward and the creators at the end of the day I would argue that I don't think there's an anti-royalty movement generally like I don't think the whole world wants to all of a sudden screw over creators I do think that users don't want to pay a ton for art in

60. 25:39

    some ways that people want to get a deal I don't necessarily blame them but I think that people generally do want artists to be paid fairly so for us we bake it in and everyone our legal contracts and our technology and I think our companies just have to leave and we have to show that that is the right thing and that's what the market demands and you know users will follow I think the goal is what we're doing which is empowering the use the Empower and the Creator like we're writing in those

61. 26:02

    royalties in the smart contract so as law as legal as the legal services catch up to what we're writing with smart contracts and we can work hand in hand realistically as someone who's a lawyer you know that when someone writes a script they have a bunch of legal documents they have to sign that says they wrote This original Ip now we have a smart contract that goes and coincides with that as this contract's changing

62. 26:25

    evolving and growing we can actually and with a programmable nfts as they grow involved as more people get cut into we can program these into the smart contracts and allow the contract to do it for us which is what we're building it few and far which is why working with someone like Kino allows us the opportunity to work to bring the legal age into web 3 in a way that's kind and not problematic but it also allows us

63. 26:48

    the Insight of understanding what what the capabilities of smart contracts are what the limitations are and how to create that hard tangible copy of a contract that protects the user via the law and what our smart contracts can actually physically do for the Creator for the user and distribute that that royalty correctly Nate your users can create marketplaces for them do they have some sort of royalty on off

64. 27:18

    switch or do you enforce a default there so we were part of the creation of the standard way back in 2020 uh Black Box dot art uh pushed us to get them into the standard our theory behind standards are behind royalties being pushing them into standards is make it easily accessible uh allowing people to pop it in there so that markets can easily check it and then use markets that obey by the royalty standards so it's uh you can use it you might not use it we also

65. 27:50

    have one-time split fees where you can view payouts just for one time not the reoccurring times we're very Pro uh royalty enforcement if we're able to figure out how to do it in an interoperable way right our Marketplace literally just figured out interoperability like four weeks ago like it's hard it's super hard so now that we have that we can start thinking about how can we solve this problem on an ecosystem-wide you can create tooling where you can send an nft engine thing I'll shut up now I think we're almost done

66. 28:21

    which is last but not least how does niche handle royalties like for these passes and so on is this ingrained uh yeah so the the club Owners when you when you would start your club decide if you want to monetize it or not and you can choose if you want an upfront um uh an initial like purchase price or you could do like a like a recurring fee structure if you want to have like dues that are recurring every month um basically right now that's that's all

67. 28:45

    we're playing with but it'll get a little more sophisticated as we go thank you that's all the time we have for today uh thank you all for paying attention and we're all be around if you want to talk to us cheers