The Tampa Bay Innovation Center hosted an online panel discussion as part of its long-running TecTalk series of events to help educate and engage the Tampa Bay tech ecosystem. This event focused on the emerging use of NFTs and how they will be used by businesses and brands in the future.
Participating in the panel discussion were:
- Angie Dalton of Signum Growth Capital
- Nicholas Grous of ARK Invest
- Frank Downing of ARK Invest
They were joined on screen by:
- Myself, Ken Evans, Managing Director of the TBIC B2B Startup Accelerator
- Tonya Elmore, CEO of the Tampa Bay Innovation Center
- Cathie Wood, Chief Investment Officer of ARK Invest
Transcript below:
good morning everyone my name is ken evans with tampa bay innovation center i’d like to introduce tonya elmore who’s the ceo of the tampa bay innovation
center and she will provide the welcome and the kickoff for this event thank you for joining yes well as well it’s my
pleasure um to welcome each of you to our tech talk series uh first ever really focused on innovation uh we’ve
had this series i think it’s one of the longest running uh series in the region um when it was previously hosted at
microsoft uh when we were doing more uh events in person so welcome um as we
stated um the tampa bay innovation center um is very happy to have this series we’ve been in the region for more
than 20 years working with hundreds and hundreds of tech startups and we develop programs like tech talk to serve and
help with the growth and advancement of our tech community so i’m pleased to say that the foundation of our early work
has been instrumental in paving the way uh for the establishment of the entrepreneurial ecosystem but also for a
brand new 45 000 square foot innovation center and we couldn’t do it without our partners public and private on the
public side our partners at pinellas county the city of st petersburg and the federal economic development
administration and of course on this panel today um our newest partner is arc
investment management um they have partnered with the tampa bay innovation center to establish the new facility and
it is now called the ark innovation center so with that i’d like to turn this back over to our managing director
ken evans to talk about the panel and uh move forward with our uh program but
we’re so excited about the new facility and more programs uh we’ll be partnering with ark and other community members on
this innovation series [Music] great thank you tanya and welcome
everyone uh i just wanted to um let me stop sharing my screen here for a
second so we can see everyone’s face uh i just want to take a minute talk about the accelerator program that i run at
the tampa bay innovation center we’ve been running it for about two and a half years now we are on our fifth cohort of
companies uh it mainly is a program for first-time founders uh early-stage
emerging tech companies that are trying to get to the point where they can uh
build some traction with their marketplace so we focus a lot on what i’ll call basic survival skills of an
early tech company uh we don’t focus on a lot of pitching we don’t focus too much on capital raising we focus on
those things that are most likely to generate success for an early stage company which is getting a product to
market that can actually generate revenue so over the last two and a half years we’ve run through a number of
different companies in all sorts of uh industries uh but primarily focused on b2b companies and those that are
building emerging tech for enterprise or small to medium business customers so that’s the mission of the
accelerator our agenda for today is to talk a little bit about nfts and web3 so we have a distinguished panel of experts
joining us today for this event to talk a little bit about the future so i sent out a number of tweets and a
number of posts on social media encouraging everyone to do some of their nft 101 homework so we don’t have to
spend too much time on the basics uh we probably will talk a little bit about that but i really want to get into
what’s the future of nfts i want to talk about where this is going why this is going to be important or why nfts and
web 3 are going to be important for any businesses or brands that hope to leverage that technology over the future
so as tanya mentioned the uh the tech talk uh events have been running for i think since 2009. we’re launching a new
series uh we’ll have three different uh types of tech talks in the future one
which we call the spotlight series which will highlight an individual founder or startup one which will be the ops series
which will focus on basic business operations efficiency and especially leadership skills which are very very
important for first-time founders and this series which we’re calling the innovation series to focus on new and emerging technology tech trends and
things that are really shaping the industry as we go forward whether they’re disruptive or iterative we want to make sure that we’re bringing a
highlight uh to the community and to our region around these type of educational
and collaborative events because we want to provide a glue for the community to bring people together have founders find
co-founders and really just kind of build the momentum for the tampa bay region with that i’d like to introduce our
panelists that we have uh with us uh we uh well we have kathy wood from arkhan vest kathy did you want to say a couple
of words are you in a position where you can join us for a welcome
if not i understand can you hear me yeah yeah yeah no i’m sorry i’m in a car and i wasn’t supposed to be a panelist you
are in such fine hands here with uh nick frank and angie uh i think i’m
looking forward to the discussion i always learn from them so so i think we should get on with the
show we’re thrilled at our partnership we’re thrilled to be um to to be working with the community
pete and uh to be uh live casting this to anyone in the world so
thanks so much excellent well thank you so much for joining in for the kind words and uh and your support for
our mission here in the in the region uh with that i i’m going to actually ask the individuals to give a quick brief
intro of the self i always mess that up if i’m doing it so i’m going to introduce we have angie dalton from
signum growth capital we had frank downing uh from arkhanvest and we have uh nick cruz from uh arkhamvest angie if
you could give us uh your 30 60 second intro of who you are and then we’ll get into the panel after that angie you go
first followed by nick and then frank great thank you so much ken um so my background is very traditional and
investment banking tech and equity research tech um my area of emphasis uh even though i was
always a generalist was gaming and new forms of entertainment since um you know early 2000s and um and
then in 2016 um at guggenheim i shifted
to crypto and kind of saw this this um kind of explosion of potential activity
in the area of online identity so people in video games
for decades have been buying selling trading digital assets and you know referred to as skins or items in the
game and it felt like we were merging onto behavior that was already happening
in gaming and it felt like there was going to be this move toward um crypto
as an enabling tool because when we get to this fully online world we’ll be in a world of where we care a
lot about property rights because all of our identity and all of our stuff will be there in that digital
world so i’ll leave it at that i’m an advisor to arkhamvest and i’m very
excited to be here thank you angie i appreciate you joining us nick hi everyone and thank you thank you for
having me today i’m really excited to be here really excited to dive in about this topic around you know the future of
nfts and just a quick background on myself i’ve been working at arc for almost four years now um and i work on
the next generation internet theme um covering specifically digital entertainment and you know two years ago
if you uh looked at that space it didn’t really necessarily include nfts
but as we’ve been watching this nft space grow we’ve seen more traditional companies in
the digital entertainment space whether it be in gaming whether it be in streaming or even social media
begin to adopt this new form of content and new form of interaction um and and
way to represent yourself and items as angie just mentioned online and so
really excited to to dive into this excellent thank next we we need to have coffee and we need to talk about my
napster days because i really want to talk about how hollywood and the entertainment industry is embracing or
running away from these opportunities going forward frank give us an intro please yeah hey everybody uh frank
downing i’m also an analyst at arkhamvest also working on our next generation internet strategy uh with
nick uh i cover cloud computing on the equity side as well as crypto assets uh everything ranging from smart contract
blockchains to decentralized finance and the world of nfts and web3 uh so really excited to be
here and talk about this today i originally got into crypto uh with nick back in 2017 uh building at-home mining
rigs uh mining ether on the ethereum blockchain and it’s just remarkable how
much the space has grown and diversified since then and there’s so many new ways to participate in crypto uh particularly
through the web 3 angle so looking forward to chatting um other thing i’d add is that nick and i both uh moved
down to st pete in the past six months and are loving being in the tampa bay region so far so exciting to be
connecting with this community excellent thanks uh and uh happy to have you here so the the title of the of the
talk is the future so let’s focus as much as we can on the future if we need to explain you know uh you know some of
the infrastructure along the way that’s fine but um i was looking at the gartner hype cycle report
uh for um emerging technologies overall and the most recent one that i was able
to get my hands on because i’m not a paid subscriber is nfts were at the peak of uh inflated
expectations so right at the top before things kind of dive into the the crater
of despair um the year before that gartner put um
a lot of different things related to covet including social distancing technologies was at the peak of height
inflation’s a year before that so a year later where nfts barely was on gartner’s
radar uh when it went from almost nothing to the very very peak of uh inflated expectations so talk to me a
little bit about where you think we are in the hype cycle of nfts and how uh
long it’s gonna stay at the peak uh versus go through that trough and how quickly you think we’re uh going to get
to the other side of that is it you know is it a two-year cycle is it a five-year cycle is it a ten-year cycle before we
see enterprises and and lots of brands not just the ones that are leaning into it ahead of uh the the
industry but where are we going to be with the uh acceptance of nfts in the
business world uh frank i’m just going to start reverse order and start with you yeah sure um and i actually
i’d probably agree with gartner that we’re at a peak of inflated expectations right now with nfts i mean there’s been
a broad crypto bull market for the past you know two years and we’ve seen a lot of
innovation and a lot of investment and a lot of ideas uh and we need a lot of follow-through to come from those
there’s been a lot of projects that have been raising a lot of money a lot of brands are wouldn’t have touched crypto are now
talking about launching nft projects right so there’s a lot of attention on the space and that’s really good and i think there’s going to be a lot of
building that happens but there’s also a lot of froth out there in the market so i would agree with uh gartner on that one
when i look at kind of where the cycle goes i often relate it to that 2017-2018
time period when i got into crypto uh when the the big thing driving the hype at that time was the ico boom and bust
so this new innovation came out where anybody can launch their own token and it became this good uh method for
fundraising and a lot of money flew into the space before there was actual uh community
movement around it or product development actually happening we didn’t really know how we were going to use
these the smart contract blockchains and these ability to to create new tokens and we’re kind of at that same place in
the nft world where we know we have this digital native property right and we can
link ownership to unique digital assets and we see some initial use cases we see
the profile picture nfts we see some early attempts at gaming
we don’t know really exactly how it’s going to go and there’s not um
a playbook so to speak so i think kind of as the the broader markets have been selling off at crypto
especially um in the nft space we’ll see some consolidation and and uh
you know some of that froth will die out uh but in probably it’s hard to put an exact time frame on but in the two to
three year time period you’ll see kind of the the fruits of these big ideas that are being talked about now actually
come to fruition because some of these ideas like um you know we’ve we’ve launched this board ape collection that has all of the
social capital around it and all of this community value uh that’s trying to build a triple a video game well aaa video games aren’t
built overnight that will take time and so in in that like multi-year period we’ll see
some of these come out and more uh companies kind of getting getting along the bandwagon as we go um that’s
generally how i see it okay nick i’m gonna shift over to you and ask the same question but i’m gonna
add on to that uh so nfts collectible uh investment or other
yeah it’s a good tack on question here because what we think is happening is this blending or i guess you know
this mix between investment and consumption which has not historically you know been
something that you would see at least you know in the digital realm but now we’re starting to see because of
this idea around digital ownership you can buy something that is a consumable but also a long-term or even
a short-term investment uh when it comes with you know when it comes to the nft space i think just to you know think
about where we are today and where we’re going a lot has been you know built around as
frank said these pfp projects these profile pictures or the digital art space i think a lot of times when people
hear nft they think of digital art and i think that’s really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what is
going to happen over the long term i like to rewind the clock even to you know 0809 when the app store was just
launched and you had you know this massive shift in the way that people consumed and interacted online because
of the app store and if you had asked someone at the time you know what is the app store going to enable i don’t think
anyone could have told you you know there would have been uber and lyft and all of these multi-billion dollar
companies that would arise because of just this simple shift from you know desktop to mobile and the ability to
create for mobile specific use cases and i think that’s now where we are in the
nft space where we’ve just basically launched this app store this ability to create
utility around digital ownership and over the next you know five ten years we’re going to
have this massive boom in applications and utility that are going to arise from just this simple idea
around digital ownership where we are today i think is in a very frothy environment
where you’re starting to see the expectation of utility being priced
in today but with no real road map of how you get to that utility so when you
look at these projects of you know board ape and some of these other very high profile
nft uh projects they’re they’re trading for hundreds of thousands of dollars and
if they’re going to push into a certain type of utility with whether it be the board cape board ape case which is
gaming um if you think you know there’s going to be assets in that game worth hundreds of thousands of dollars i would
point you to you know the traditional gaming space where that’s just simply not the case utility usually follows
what you’re actually or the price of utility the price of these nfts will follow utility
and the utility i doubt will be you know hundreds of thousands of dollars worth so i would say we’re in a i we’re in a
market where you need to be very careful um because all of these projects need to start building utility instead of just
this you know social value that they provide today and as that utility gets priced in i
think the pricing where we’re at today for a lot of these projects comes down significantly to match that you know
expected utility great i like the uh the reference back
to kind of the anchor back to the app store i think that’s uh that’s uh important
however with an app store i could try an app and try dozens if not hundreds uh
could determine the utility without really spending anything or maybe spending 4.99
and then stopping a subscription if that was available at the time you know now the price to entry just to experience
the utility uh is much higher uh angie you kind of brought up the skins and the
gamification and kind of the early adopters based on that so let’s pivot over to you
and you know get your thoughts on the hype cycle as well as nick’s comments
about you know where we are in this progression towards utility and what are going to be the
tipping points you know a a beeple piece of art was a utility to one person maybe
uh you know now we’re looking at a much broader market and a lot of other offerings and so much to choose from
where are we going yeah sure so i just think that this um
if it’s a hype cycle it’s a little teeny mini hype cycle in the very early days of a big innovation so um i think that
you know our mantra is that gaming is the trojan horse to the metaverse
digital art came first in the form of nfts because they have a faster time to
market an artist can create something and get it out into the world as an nft um and
really just demonstrate this use case of property rights uh for the owner and
programmable royalties for the artist so for us it was it’s been exciting to
watch digital art get going because it’s just mass experimentation now
typically when new technologies are in experimentation phase there’s
what’s what’s new here is there’s this other layer of speculation that’s layered on top of it and i think that
has led to a hype cycle i think the speculation is a hype cycle but the technology
itself is just now proving itself through digital art uh a good example on the gaming side is we got involved in
mythical in 2018 on the seed you know when they were they were seated around company and the founder had left he ran
call of duty and shipped three of the largest revenue games in history and he brought with him
what uh guys from world of warcraft club penguin um you know the guy who uh jamie
jackson chief creative officer who created dj hero guitar hero some mass market hundreds of millions if not
billions of users in those games and you know they they they’ve been working
aggressively but it takes time so four years later they’re finally rolling out their content because and and all of
these games will be enabled you know with nfts but it just it takes a lot of time it’s really complicated it’s almost
like these individual pieces of art that have come out would be just one game piece
in a game think of you know the game backdrop i think of i think of the game as um or
the metaverse as kind of a neighborhood and within that neighborhood
you know fortnight as an example or any game might be just a street in that neighborhood but then you also might
walk down the street and go watch a movie you might you know and and so if you’re in this online neighborhood
um everything around you looks like art um and so and that’s another you know
another reason why you know netflix and a lot of other you know old older generation companies are losing
talent because um in the metaverse build out uh 3d artists um you know graphic
designers game engines as kind of the underlying technology will be really important the other thing that i would
add on that on the hype cycle piece is that i feel like you know
this initial kind of early inning one yes it got really hyped up but it’s
limited by the fact that we don’t even have interoperability yet in these
in these you know nft platforms and we’re seeing some really good signs on that front but it would be
so it’s it’s good to remember or good to go back to web 2. so in our current web 2 world the world the internet world we
all know we’ve never thought we’d ever gone to a website and wondered if we can get to another website because we have these
protocols that operate invisibly behind the scenes like tcp we
don’t even talk about tcpip right because it’s it’s just there and it allows us to move around freely
in web 3 it’s it’s been built in the opposite way which is silos so specific communities
and uh have solved specific problems and built specific applications and in
which are expressed in blockchains but those blockchains don’t necessarily talk to each other so we’ve seen some
really good um we see some really positive uh indications that were that we’re moving forward opencm had a big
announcement yesterday um you know we’ve been involved in polkadot network they’re working on interoperability so i
think the next wave will be much more um you know much more
interesting to the hundreds of millions and not just these few people who are speculating
i love that uh you know i’m an infrastructure geek so i love the enterprise glue that brings all this together so let’s talk a little bit more
about the picks and shovels what’s missing today and what are going to be some of the enablers those tipping points that make
this more enterprise friendly that make this these things more uh interoperable if you will so i’ll open that up to
anybody i don’t need to go in order every single time but let’s talk about the picks and shovels because we are talking about futures here we are
talking about making the utility not just an extension of gaming and i do want to get back to that later but an
extension of enterprise infrastructure so what are you seeing out there as far as projects what are you seeing out there
as promising new um pieces to the puzzle that are going to bring this all together and make it
at least a little bit more like our web to experience where we didn’t have to think about things
yeah i can i can start because i think there’s been some some interesting updates on that front recently i think um one of the biggest impediments um to
to moving from a web 2 world into a web 3 world is this user experience and
if you’re trying to buy an nft right now you need to you know first pick an nft you like and find your way to open c you
need to download a browser extension or or a wallet app on your phone right you
need to download metamask and then you realize you need to fund that wallet somehow so you need to go to coinbase
maybe and if you don’t have account there you have to make an account there first and then buy ether which you use to buy the nft and
send that to your meta mask which is this like copy and paste of a of a very long string of numbers and
letters that you’ve never seen before hope you get it right and there’s a gap in the middle where it’s like i don’t
know if i did this right did i lose all my money or does it show up in metamask and then you need to buy the nft and pay
you know 100 transaction fee uh it’s very cumbersome right now and you know
god forbid you lose your your phone or your browser extension wallet because then you actually lose access to your
nft altogether right there’s this fear of losing your private keys and losing access to your crypto um so this kind of
wallet experience and user onboarding has been a big point of friction especially for new users the existing
power users that are into this stuff like they’re more likely to be engineers and kind of you know figure it out you
know they’re the early adopters uh so to speak but for the new users that are coming in that just want to play a game
and don’t want to really understand the you know the tcp ip layer um we need to
have big advancements there and so i think uh coinbase had an announcement last week that’s pretty interesting on
this front uh which is integrating directly into their coinbase app
a uh defy and web3 wallet that allows you to interact in these protocols in a
hybrid custody manner and in one pane of glass so in the native coinbase app so
rather than having a separate wallet that you need to fund and you’re really at risk if you lose your key uh right
within the coinbase app uh you’ll be able to interact with uh decentralized finance or nft is buying it from openc
or coinbase’s nft wallet without the same level of risk and the way that they do that is
by taking a private key that normally either coinbase would custody for you or you custody on your behalf and that’s
where you have this risk of losing your key and they split it off into three separate shares coinbase has one you
have one and they keep the third one in an air-gapped cold storage or with a sub-custodian and this creates this
hybrid model where if you lose your key or coinbase gets hacked you still can recover that key as long
as you have two of those three parties uh in a in a safe state and so this allows people to get access to kind of
web three in a much more native way in a coinbase app you already are used to using there’s customer service there’s
two-factor authentication um you know there’s kind of this traditional web 2 support wrapped around web 3
that i think will go a long way to bringing the the incremental new user uh into the space
i agree and i i think that even the engineers uh out there have had those sweaty palm moments of buying things and
moving things between chains where they thought they lost everything uh i know that it was uh
it was not an easy one-step process when i bought some so uh nick you want to add on to that or angie as far as the
infrastructure and what you’re seeing as far as good projects out there that might move us in the right direction
i can just i’ll add a bit and it’s really just to emphasize some of frank’s points and just you know on the user
side you have if if this is going to reach mass market adoption i think it has to
end up being as easy as e-commerce um on amazon or shopify you
know you have to enable purchases uh and make that you know happen within fractions of a second um you need to you
know ha you need to take out all of the the scariness that’s involved with
owning your your keys and and you know transferring and having that ability or
that you know that that potential loss of of assets and i think you know what
what frank just described in you know recreating some of the web 2
infrastructure in web 3 i think is going to be greatly appreciated by consumers because that’s
what people are familiar with it’s about you know bringing this into a realm of familiarity like we need to bring it
into that space before it can reach mass market and that that gets into a different debate between centralization
and decentralization and this is something we argue about all the time at arc in our brainstorms and i think
more centralization in this space is going to lead to more adoption um but
more centralization also comes with other issues of isn’t this going against you know kind
of the central idea of nfts and digital ownership when you have all these centralized points of point of failures
and so that’s something we need to be very careful with over time in building because with centralization comes
convenience but also points of failure so that’s you know it’s a double-edged sword in in
that in that way yeah i’ll just open it i’ll just add a couple of uh developments recently so
again just back on this interoperability and kind of the space layer of tcp um uh
as i mentioned we’ve been working with polka dot um gavin wood founded polkadot in 2016 after he left um ethereum and
really just to solve this problem of being an like behind the scenes invisible layer that operates under
block chains and they just rolled out in early may a technology called xcm
and we’ve been saying send me an xcm like send me a dm because xcm stands for cross-chain uh or cross-consensus
messaging or cross-chain messaging and it just means that you know if you have uh you know disparate change tote chains
totally different chains potentially even coded differently for different purposes um you can send messages
between them so i think that was a big advancement and just uh yesterday
openc released a new protocol called seaport which will basically um
it’s a new thing i mean openc is a centralized company but they will be using their marketplace
will be using a new protocol level again i always think of protocol as operating in underneath that will enable this
interoperability it’s decentralized and completely open source so it should enable other marketplaces to just take
this open source code create their own marketplaces and again
the more of this kind of movement that you can see in a way that maintains your rights
because what’s happening now with nfts is like two two bad things are happening
one there’s a couple there’s typically a couple of guys who create some assets and then create a token that’s publicly
traded they pump up the value of that token and then they sell it to people who don’t know what what’s going on like
that’s not good um the other thing that’s happening is people are buying these nfts thinking that they have ip
rights forever but if those nfts like up until now move
around those ip rights are not necessarily protected so
all of this i think technology that we’re seeing happening now in various forms uh makes us believe
you know leads us to believe that we will have new pathways for interoperability and completely
different pathways than we saw in web two and that is probably gonna it’s probably gonna
roll out over the next 12 months and then we’re going to be set for the the real wave i would say
okay the real wave okay angie i’m going to start right back with you because you brought up rights multiple times
and uh you know one of the things that always gets discussed is how web 3 is going to benefit artists creatives um
authors musicians and all that that whole crowd and i’m still on a distribution list
from you know several decades ago uh around the napster and and the music sharing
boom that happened a lot of the folks that are on there are managers and attorneys and rights uh folks inside
hollywood they’re looking at web 3 with great disbelief
uh and don’t really trust that it’s that it’s right for them or that it’s ready for them
how would you convince those folks not the people creating nfts or the people that are already leaned
into it but a lot of the people that are very very concerned about intellectual property that are concerned about rights
management and have burned been burned a number of different times both by the tech industry and by their own industry
frankly how how do we have that discussion with them to tell them that it it will be safe
and also when it will be safe for them to participate well actually i have advised some large
media companies and one of them i advise to wait now that was back in you know
2019 but um you know this wave uh i understand where they’re coming from uh
in terms of their trepidation now there are companies like mythical that are building this base layer infrastructure
there are companies like you know well all of a lot of you know the ones that we’ve just all mentioned here uh are
building this infrastructure that is going to work but right now uh i would take a
i guess i would maybe just now start i would now i would start dipping my toe in the water so we started advising
companies in 2018 late 2018 and at the time we just felt that you know one
ethereum as a protocol or as a layer one blockchain
wouldn’t work over the long term as it was because it gets more expensive the more people who use it because of the
token uh and the gas fee and so um to us we just felt that you know for a big
media company that has that makes billions of dollars on their assets it it really wasn’t ready for prime time
now i’m seeing some really exciting what i would point to them to now is some really exciting projects like um cyber
brokers which is built by josie bellini um a pretty well-known nft artist
she has built these this nft collection that is
provides people with very beautiful metaverse experiences um which and these
nfts are completely unchained it’s very early for this um and completely
decentralized it’s very early for this because of technology um you know kind of um gates but i would say
i would advise them now to just start you know kind of
taking what they have and figuring out what is even suitable for nfts what is
even suitable for a blockchain and i think that for me identity status and social
capital are no-brainers and so an example of a company that i was
working with that i have been working with um who’s dealing with luxury brands um
imagine you know decades of advertising dollars that have just been poured into television 160
billion dollars gets poured into television a year and it hasn’t gone down any and it’s and it maintains this
level even though people are like nobody’s in that living room watching tv and historically
they have those advertising dollars haven’t been able to get into games because gamers didn’t want them they
they said i don’t need your money making thing i don’t i don’t want your advertising and so gamers and other
online communities that the users are very skeptical of nfts because they see them as a money making scheme
and it’s like i just i’m here to have fun i don’t want your money making thing and so
i think what’s interesting though now is you’re seeing brands like gucci and burberry that are inhabiting these nfts
and almost you can you can say to the brand hey guys remember the nft or the tv screen
you know there’s nobody on the other side of that window the nft screen is in an online universe where there is
engagement and there are millennials there and gen z and and and all of your
kind of really exciting um potential users uh are there to consume that
content and if you embody nfts as characters as as uh art as clothing
you almost become a part of the social capital capital and the identity of the users
which is viewed as more authentic so there’s a huge opportunity 160 billion
dollars um gartner is projecting per year over the next five years that it will be spent on tv and and literally
like viewership is plummeting as we know okay well that leads into my next question frank i’m going to pivot to you
if nfts win who loses ooh um well i think like generally nick
would be the good person to talk to this but we see as we see kind of consumption shifting from the physical world to the
digital world you see the the lower value and monetization rate of physical retail
spaces and experiences like i see this transition happening as we spend you know you feel
that you’re spending much more time online and as you spend more time online you value
the things that you do and the things that you own in the digital space more than in the physical space
and like i think of there’s a few brands that are if you know if you buy a physical bag like a birkin bag you get
an and this isn’t a real example but you know you buy a bag you get a you get an nft as kind of like this collect
collectible memorabilia of your bag right um and that’s great and actually drives a lot of adoption like there’s a few
shopify supports this now and there’s a few like coffee shops that sell coffee and if you buy the coffee uh they have
really cool artistic bags they give you an nft that represents it and that actually drives a lot of sales just in
and of itself because people like to collect these things um and you can picture a world where if you buy the
physical bag you get the free nft bag and you can use that in on your character in fortnite or in you know
whatever metaverse virtual world you’re in i think we’re headed to a world where that will someday flip where you buy the
virtual bag and then you have an option to get the physical bag if you want uh because people value that digital item
more than the physical uh item because that’s where they’re spending their time and that’s where they see the value so i see this kind of shift from
the physical world to the digital world and everybody who operates in that traditional physical world or even the
traditional advertising world like angie mentioned are at risk so if it’s just a shift to the virtual
world is that just another place to drive ads i mean are we still just leaning back into what i call the organ
donor business model like here are my eyes for the next couple of hours so you know where’s where’s the utility in
that nick i’m gonna i’m gonna pivot to you for this yeah i think in in terms of i i might
bounce around here because there’s a lot i want to touch on but you know in terms of that question around advertising i think
one these virtual worlds or these virtual experiences are going to look organic in
that you’re going to enter a virtual world that’s hosted by a company so it
won’t it won’t be the traditional banner ad or display ad that you’re used to it’ll be an entire world that you’re a
part of and walking through and and experiencing in vr and ar that’s hosted
by a nike or an adidas we actually have you know
use cases today in kind of the web 2 space but you can see how this will be replicated in web 3. company roblox um
is actually working with nike to create an entire virtual experience around nike
and you know this athletic facility that will be recreated in this virtual space will you see display ads and banner ads
for their shoes probably not but will those avatars be walking around in virtual representations of physical
shoes i think that’s absolutely going to be the case so it’s going to feel very organic in the way that you’re being
advertised to um in a way that we’re not really used to um or
in in a way that we are used to but only in the physical world right i’m wearing a you know a nike polo now and that in a
way is advertising or you know your brand recognition and that’s really what you’re going to see in these virtual
worlds as we push more and more towards the metaverse and i think back to your prior question around who wins if you
know nfts uh reach mass market and who loses it’s really going to be those companies
that adopt nfts and use them in the right way and use them not as cash grabs
but a way to um interact with a community and build a community and that’s you know when you
look at the projects that do well today it’s really about community building and it’s about brand building and ip
building and so if you think about the companies that are going to be set up to do extraordinarily well
in this new space it’s actually going to be the companies that already have worldwide brand recognition and
worldwide ip because building that level of ip and brand recognition is extremely
hard to do i’ll give you know one example if you think about you know in in terms of the entertainment space what
is the largest brand i p today i would probably argue in terms of movies and tv
it’s probably the marvel cinematic universe marvel was founded in 1940 so
it’s taken you know 80 years to get to this point and it takes that long to build ip that
reaches a global audience and so you’re seeing these brands pop up in the web 3 space whether it be you know the board 8
project is probably the best known and it’s going to take years and years
and years for people at a global level to really start caring about it because you have to have people interact with it
or you know look at another example in the traditional space with nintendo that’s another company that’s a hundred
plus years old and it’s had 50 plus years of you know building on pokemon
and the mar and like the mario universe to really get to a point where they can now start to monetize at an extremely
efficient level um and so it takes decades and decades to build build brand
ip so those companies that already have the brand ip and the in the you know the content
if they shift now and and and do it in a way that is about community building and
interacting with their audience and not just a cash grab they’re going to be set up extraordinarily well one because you
know a lot of these companies sell physical goods margins on physical goods you’re talking about you know with a
nike or adidas 30 to 40 gross and when you get into the virtual space
you’re talking about 80 or 90 percent gross so it’s a it’s it’s a monetization shift for these companies that operate
in the physical world as they can transition to the virtual world and that’s going to be a huge boom for some
of these traditional uh traditional companies
go ahead yeah i totally agree with nick that these brands that already have uh you know
strong brand recognition but most importantly um brands that people want to associate themselves with
are going to be the real winners because you’re in you’re you’re you’re wearing these brands these are part of your
identity now and so if you’re making a brand part of your identity you know i always say that epic games is showing us
the way they’re they’re kind of our north star in terms of the metaverse build-out and tim sweeney the ceo and it
was it was really uh fortuitous because i happened to be in times square when their balenciaga um 3d billboard uh came
out it only came out in three cities but um you know the character leaned out of this billboard over time
square and i happened to be there and was just people were looking up and wondering what is this
and he was wearing a balenciaga sweatshirt and you could go to balenciaga uh you know on the upper east
side and get by the 795 dollar sweatshirt um that was the fortnight blenciaga sweatshirt or you could get it
in the game at the store in the game to once you had a store and um you know so once you buy that
item you know that’s amazing for brands but you it has to be brands that people want to wear or people want to you know
associate themselves with because it’s basically building social capital in the online space i think there’s going to be also also in
addition to that brand new ip mainly due to speed to market um board
ape is a really great example i just was speaking to the ceo of animoka on friday uh yatsu he’s he’s a really um i think
he’s a visionary in the space he runs an operating company that’s built a lot of the these digital assets and he said
you know and i’ve seen this also in working with media companies we were talking about this idea that it’s really difficult still still i mean it’s early
but it’s still really difficult to work out uh deals with traditional companies and
luxury brands whereas some of these other you know brand new web 3 native
brands can explode very quickly and so his view is let’s lean into both let’s keep
working on the old world but these new markets are just never been seen before markets that
could come where you don’t where there are no losers it’s just there are actually there’s just brand new markets
being built okay great well yeah and um you know i’ve been following a couple projects and gone down the rabbit hole and joined
a couple of discords so i’ve kind of uh um been getting a lot of invitations to
some of these new communities uh it seems like there’s an exclusivity
mainly based on price but also based on you know technical capability for getting into some of these projects and
does that and so nick brought up the cash grab i’m going to bring up the land grab that’s happening right now i got
invited to a project last week and the base i think the floor for the nft was
15 eth now you know that been might have been a complete scam but i’ve seen other projects that are trading at that those
same levels so what happens when the average person can’t afford to get
into some of these projects is there going to be downstream some granularity of this land grab and kind of a you know
subdivisions sold inside some of those properties how are the how is the average person going to participate in
some of these uh these communities or is this just again as nick said a cash grab
and it’s going to be a short-term investment for those people that can get in and get out quickly
yeah i can add to that just or i’ll just quickly answer that i think that what you just described is the christie’s and
sotheby’s market and that’s why christie’s and southerweeds are getting so involved in some of these high-end artists like people and josie and a lot
of the others because um you know that is that is uh where we’ve seen the early experimentation and but
but the average person is not going to be able to afford that um obviously but as these new uh you know kind of worlds
build out there will be atomized digital identity social capital that you
can take on that is going to be smaller and also uh have the ability to add to it as a user
you know so um and so it could they they could grow in value over time but i
think that what you described again is just the high-end art market uh well yeah it was it was high-end
metaverse property uh but i think you’re right it’s probably the same people chasing those those virtual assets uh
frank any comments on that as well yeah i would say yeah the the virtual land is very
interesting um you know we’re trying to use this um you know digital property the concept of
nfts to represent physical land uh which there’s a the finite limit of and when i look at the digital land
anybody can create a new land project or expand their you know their digital land footprint right as needed as the
community grows or as they’re getting ready for the next fundraising round uh to be frank so i see you know
a lot of froth there for what looks like you know buying domain names or something like that uh if you look at um
uh well i would say like one one analogy that uh somebody told me that i that i like about this is like
there’s you know there’s a few very valuable blogs or very valuable
domain names on the internet but there’s an insanely long tale of things that may be interesting maybe not interesting
aren’t that valuable that you can also experience and enjoy if you find and i think you know the nft space will kind
of look like this where there’s a few big brands and big projects that have this large kind of social capital that
people are willing to pay a large amount for or you know the one digital land sale that you want to be in uh but at
the very long tail you have lower value but easier barriers to entry um yeah
okay nick go ahead yeah just to maybe add on and uh provide kind of caution
here right picking if if you think you can pick the you know one virtual land project
today that’s going to be around in the next 10 to 15 years you know you you might be a prophet of
some sort right like i don’t think that you have that ability and really we
don’t yet know which project is going to have that lasting power um and you know
you could point to and and we’ve brought it up a few times now board yacht club and say you know this is going to be the
long-term winner but there’s no guarantees there but people are already pricing it in as you know this is going
to be you know the big winner in the web 3 space and that may be the case it may not be the case it’s really way too
early to tell um i think you know you have to be extremely
wary of where we are today in the market and that’s right at the very beginning and a lot of this stuff is untested a
lot of this stuff is very new and with that comes froth when you talk about 15 eat that’s
a crazy amount of money uh for virtual land and that virtual land you have to
then you know probably use a traditional calculation of you know how is this going to be valued in the future and
that is just you know a simple supply and demand question how much land is there going to be and then how much is
you know how much demand is going to be out there for that land and that’s going to drive the price up and i would say
you know to find the projects that that’s going to have that high amount of demand today
in five years is nearly impossible so i think it’s it’s a losing it’s a losing you know strategy to be
trying to find those projects today um instead i think you wait and you you
kind of let this you know cycle pass before you really begin to look into
this and i think again not to maybe be pessimistic about the space but the
companies that are going to do or the projects that are going to do well are going to be those that are extremely
well capitalized and i think a lot of those projects are going to come from the web 2 space
because they already have the technical know-how they are set up to you know move fast and break things
and so that is going to put pressure on the new web 3 space because they’re not
as well capitalized there’s not going to be you know 100 million dollar token sales every few months like there has
been over the past year or so that’s that’s going away um and you know the companies in the traditional space have
access to capital and they can they can move quickly enough in this space to
build something that will last long um and so that’s you know something i would caution around um with you know
what we’re seeing today i want to add to that ken because what i was talking about earlier when i said
you know christie’s and sotheby’s was the high end art but i want to double down on what nick just referred to
because these land sell sales are also the prices are inflated because they’re
being used as fundraising activity so there are investors and there are
founders and they’re you know that are kind of bidding these up and then marketing them and again a lot of this
is not um you know the efficient markets theory that i learned at university of chicago
let’s just say that i gotcha growing up in new york in the 60s there was a psa commercial that would come out
every once in a while warning people not to buy swamp land in florida i think we’re there again i mean it it’s
you know it was a rainbow city and if you know i wish i could find these these old
commercials on youtube because they were just hilarious but it was basically warning people in new
york not to fall for these investor schemes and buy what ended up being swampland in florida and here we are you
know now i live in florida so who knew uh anyway um so
i’d like each of you to kind of give us your uh an example of bad behavior that you’ve seen i mean we kind of just talked about
this and nick you already you’re great at leaning into my next question what’s the worst behavior you’ve seen in the
nft space in the last couple of months not necessarily calling out names but what are some of the cautionary tales
that you’ve seen that are you are just basically an eye roll that uh
you wonder how they even got online i’ll give maybe just a broad you know
what i think is a red flag and this is this idea that you know the price of the
nft itself is a function of continued promise
of new nfts and i think we see this across all of
the big projects today where if you got in early if you got in on the you know genesis nft
a lot of those holders are holding on to them because the project and you know
the team behind the project are promising that if you hold on to this nft we will give you a new nft in the future
and then you get that nft and there’s value to that nft because if you hold on to both of them or the new one then
you’re going to get another nft and eventually what happens is you oversupply the market because the nft
space is not growing as fast as some of these projects are and some of you know what the pricing is telling you and so
that’s that’s where i’ll you know go full circle here that’s where it comes back to utility and so all of these
projects are going to eventually have to provide some utility or they’ll die out
and so you have to think about the price as a function of utility not as a a
function of you know new nfts because eventually you just you
know this is there’s a great documentary on hbo about the beanie baby mania right
it’s just like that what we’re seeing today is what happened with beanie babies beanie babies were you know they
became this phenomenon and what did the company do they just kept printing and
creating beanie baby beanie babies because why not they’re making a killing doing it and these projects are thinking
the same thing i can continue to release nfts because there’s this demand and why wouldn’t you um well you don’t because
eventually you reach oversaturation and then you crash the market and i think we’re getting to that point
with some of these top tier projects where you know there’s not that next leg of growth in terms of users coming on
there’s not millions of people signing up and and wanting to buy these nfts there’s not millions of people that can
even afford some of these nfts at this at this level um so the pricing has to
come down and so that’s you know the cautionary tale of just
what we’re seeing broadly across all of the top tier nft projects just this continued promise of let’s deliver more
let’s deliver more let’s deliver more so that the value continues to hold up that never ends well that sounds like a ponzi
scheme to me so okay before before i pivot over to frank i just want to say if anyone has
uh uh questions we’re coming up on an hour right now so i want to uh move over to doing a little bit of q a before we
release the panel but if you have questions uh put them in the q a uh tanya’s in the background filtering the
questions uh and uh uh we’ll uh we’ll ask a couple of questions before we’re letting everybody
go but frank same question to you what’s the bad behavior that you’ve seen out there when is it going to be safe for
grandma to buy an nft yeah so what what keeps me up at night is kind of the growing amount of
phishing scams and hacks that we’re seeing um because you know a crypto wallet
sitting out there with highly valuable nfts it’s just a giant honeypot for somebody to try and attack and you’re seeing all of these you know varying
levels of sophistication of ways to get people to give their private key out whether it’s uh swapping for a fake
asset you know i copy and pasted a uh an nft and i say it’s a crypto punk and i want to trade my crypto punk for your
board ape and i get your board 8 but you get you get a fake crypto punk or if it’s getting you to type in your 12 word
c seed phrase somewhere uh or you know there’s there’s actually somebody i would recommend uh taylor monahan is a
very og crypto developer who built one of the first major ethereum wallets uh back in
2015 2016 called my ether and she wrote a twitter thread uh that
was probably like 20 tweets long of all of the recent phishing scams that are out there that get you know gets really
detailed if somebody sends you a word doc and you open it and press enable macros and your wallet gets drained uh
and it terrified me but it also highlights kind of the need for better
custody and security practices uh kind of around the entire um space of private
key management yeah i’ll just add to that um axia infinity was a big
eye-opener for me um i think it was november of last year it
peaked daily active users or players was something like 2.8 million i think um
and maybe 2.3 million monthlies um and at one point there were headlines that axey infinity was seeing more revenues
than ethereum itself so this was a big game and a lot of people were looking into this game thinking wow is this it
is this the big game on ethereum the consensus mechanism that it relied on
was a side chain of ethereum which means that the underlying security was not ethereum itself was not ethereum name
net and i don’t think people really understood that um it was holding at one point a billion dollars it got hacked
for 625 million dollars so to attack that uh ronin network the attackers only had
to compromise 50 51 right there were only nine validators
they only had to compromise five and four of the five were run by the company
so that’s a centralized that’s a centralized operation and i don’t think anybody realized that um that plus
wormhole uh added up to a billion dollars uh which was attacked and i think that
these uh again like a lot of this is um this technology is is moving forward and
i’m really excited about what’s gonna you know be happening over the next 12 months but it just shows how early it is
okay got a couple questions coming in um so let me wrap up with a couple of my questions
um let’s see um do you mind sharing what projects you’ve
already leaned into uh you don’t have to if you want to um punks apes mutant apes
owls what’s uh what what are your favorites these days and again let me just emphasize these this is not
investment advice this is just people talking about their collectibles
um i can go first just because i think like getting into the nft space you hear
a lot about these big name projects you just mentioned and you think oh you know the way to get in is to buy this one and
the reason for getting into any nft project can’t be i’m buying it because everybody else likes it and it’s going
to go up in value it’s like a very personal thing because nfts and web3 is much more about culture or should be
more about culture than it is about investing and so i kind of had my dabbles in
projects that i didn’t really know well or feel aligned to uh and then i found one that i really like and i’m a big
like soccer fan i’ve gotten into it over the past like three or four years and there’s a project called so rare that is
basically like soccer trading cards that you can collect and they have um to your point of ease of entry different levels
of rarity just like there are different levels of rarity in physical trading cards where there’s the unique cards
that are super expensive and then there’s the uh lower tier cards that are just you know 10 15 bucks to get in and
so you can buy cards that represent players that you like and then you can use them to compete in a fantasy
football league and if you players do well your score your cards do well and you can earn new
cards or even ether if you’re a really high placer um so that’s something that it’s like i follow soccer anyways i can
collect digital trading cards i used to collect physical trading cards as a kid that just makes a lot of sense for me and it’s something that i like and i
collect i don’t invest in it okay no uh good distinction nick
yeah i’ll give i’ll give two that i um in that i am involved in and then one i’ve
been watching um and uh the the two that i’m involved in one
is uh adidas into the metaverse um it’s a nft that is
currently it just gave access to holders to get exclusive um
adidas clothing which i think is you know talking or going back to frank’s point where you buy this
virtual asset that then maybe yields you physical assets um i think that is you
know quite intriguing and again this is about community building or you know you know having an ability to interact with
your already loyal fan base um and so that’s one and then the other one so they’re actually two clothing companies
the other one is um called the hundreds and it’s the same idea where you own this nft and it gives you access to
exclusive events um and physical clothing so i think you know that to me
is like hey there’s actually utility here um and the prices on those haven’t gone you know sky high because people
understand you know what this nft represents is just the ability to have access to
um you know future drops of you know exclusive clothing so that’s something i’ve been you know that i was
familiar with before because i’ve always been into sneakers and streetwear so it’s something that you know just kind
of crossed over into the web 3 space and then the third one i think is interesting also in the same realm
more so in the collectible space is a company called stockx which operates
a a marketplace for collectibles they started with sneakers they’ve now moved
into a bunch of different collectible spaces pokemon cards trading cards you know all different types of stuff
and what they’ve done is actually built out an nft marketplace such that when you buy the nft all it
really represents is just the physical asset um and so if you think about this
it’s you know you’re buying this physical or this virtual ticket to redeem a physical
asset and they just hold on to that asset for you so they’re you know putting it away and locking it up in their vault which i think for a lot of
people when you’re buying expensive collectibles that’s actually you know a nice to have where you know hey we’ll
we’ll take ownership of this if you want it just you know let us know and we’ll ship it out to you
so i think that’s a really innovative way to use nfts um to build upon what
people are already familiar with which is you know collecting physical um you know items
yeah yeah i’ll add to that so i saw a question in the chat about creating our own nfts and um you know or are we just
speculators and um actually sigmund growth capital is a funeral registered broker dealer um in the securities
business and so i literally have never sold an nft i’ve been buying them since the early days um and my logo is an nft
that was created um by jeff davis uh we we created it together actually we did we used his algorithmic um kind of you
know let’s figure out what we see and one of them came out and looked a little bit like an s and so that’s that’s now
our logo he’s the chief creative officer of art blocks now but i also wanted to um mention signum arc gallery which
about a year and a half ago nick kathy and i hosted uh almost like a bus tour
of metaverse spaces um and our space is called signum art gallery in decentraland and cryptovoxels and i’ll
put the link in the chat so you can go visit um but all of the assets there are and you’ll see art on the walls which
are all nfts um my favorite is a lot of money is my favorite artist he’s sadly
passed away but he created a beautiful piece of kathy which is just inside the gallery on the left um
and uh but the whole the whole space is full and then um the assets branding
assets on the building are also nfts as well so i’ll post that in the chat i was gonna say someone just asked if we could
post the link to that gallery so if you could do that that would be great or i’ll make sure that it uh it gets
included in the youtube when we post that so that’s just one but um i’ll send you the others okay so you know there’s
questions about when when does this stop being the wild wild west uh and so that leads into what i’ll call
my final question and then we’ll take some of the viewer questions of we’re in an area overall with web3 where
there is little if not any consumer protection or any policy or regulation
what do you predict or what do you suspect that we need to add some level of safety in addition
to the protocols and infrastructure we talked about before which is always valuable what do we need to see what
don’t we want to see from a regulatory perspective that will um help make this marketplace
safer not necessarily for the early adopters that are taking the risks of wild wild west but for the mass market
and angie go i’m going to go in reverse order and just start with you okay great yeah we spent a lot of time
thinking about regulation and um you know having a public markets background of 20 years and dealing with taking
companies public and and and just general securities laws i think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in the
behavior that public companies display in terms of their communications
disclosures um you know and frankly transparency
and respect for retail investors and respect for this idea of their that there’s an
imbalance of information uh so as long as these nft projects you know are a few
guys pumping up a token as i was describing before that if there is a publicly traded asset
attached to their behavior and if they have more information i think they should treat the public in a very
respectful way in the same way that a public company you know dan shulman i would say you know ceo paypal is not out
pumping pypl he might be branding paypal he might be describing what they’re doing he might be disclosing information
in a very um you know kind of or disseminating information you know at the same time for everyone i think
there’s a lot of behavior that the crypto world can adopt that isn’t that hard and could actually uh make great
strides in protecting investors cool thanks frank
yeah i think angie hit on a few very good points um and i think in general
there’s a lot of education um of getting regulators and legislators up to speed
on crypto and and web3 and helping them understand there’s the nuances of the technology
there’s also the potential for the future and the places where crypto can actually lead to um or
you know public blockchain based uh assets can lead to more transparent markets and more fair markets
uh that can actually you know justifies a new regulatory standard versus uh the
traditional format and i think there’s going to be a lot of kind of head-butting around this idea of um that
nick talked about in the beginning of investing and consumption blending uh because
it’s a very gray area whether my so rare trading cards are securities or not you know traditional trading cards are uh
are collectibles they’re not securities uh but if you buy a trading card and it appreciates in value and you sell it you
technically you should pay capital gains on it it’s the same here and you know tax law is different from securities law
but with a much more liquid market and a higher velocity that you’re seeing which is kind of a both a feature and
something that needs to be considered with blockchain-based marketplaces uh regulators i think where we would like
to see them go is is having a new framework to take advantage of what public blockchains offer to govern these
assets rather than trying to force fit traditional uh regulations on top of it uh but i totally agree with what angie
said where there are common sense measures uh that the traditional regulations uh
encompass that can also be applied here yeah nick uh what about you uh
you know people parking capital in virtual assets what happens
i think i’ve i’ve touched on it already again it depends on the project it depends on you know if you trust
i think a lot a lot of times we forget that there are people behind these projects right and
people get greedy and you know that doesn’t ever end well um so you
have to really do your due diligence if you know there’s anything people can walk away from
uh at least from my portion of this uh call is just you know exercise caution
right now because you know there’s still a lot of froth out there um and you know that that is you know
something to be extremely careful of okay so some questions from the viewers
is there a need for an nft custodial service to combat fraud
that comes from doug hill i would just yeah i’ll kick it off i think you know
what’s interesting and this is a highly debated topic because this gets back to centralization versus decentralization
and we’ve seen it a few times on openc which is you know the largest marketplace today um where they’ve had
to kick projects off for a variety of reasons um and you know the nft purists
out there or the crypto purists are saying this is terrible for the space because this is this goes against
decentralization there shouldn’t be one entity that controls what can and cannot be bought in the nft space
but you know that i think there’s a balance there because you need to end up having to protect the
consumers at some level you know if you think about you know what nfts allow they actually allow for you know
one of the easiest creation methods um in you know any sense of creation
right there is really very low cost to creating an nft project um and so what
does that mean i you know i think that just means counterfeit and you know fraudulent activity if there’s a you
know highly regarded project 10 of those projects exact replicas of those projects can pop up and you know
for a new a new user to the nft space that’s
something that they can easily be tricked into buying and saying oh look it’s you know the board 8 project and it was really just a knockoff version of
the board 8 project so you need verification at some level that’s why openc actually
has a verification process for these top rated projects so there is kind of already that mechanism in place
but you know that does end up uh i think leaving a bad taste in some people’s mouth that are saying you know no this
needs to be totally decentralized otherwise we’re just going to end up replicating what we’re already used to
in the web 2 space right right and this this is why i’m really excited about the hybrid custody model being able to take
a private key and share responsibilities across multiple parties uh depending on how you want to set it up whether it’s
you know yourself and coinbase and a coinbase cold cut cold storage or myself
coinbase and nick as as my recovery uh coinbase is launching that already which
i think is really exciting and you will be able to hold nfts in this hybrid custody wallet uh another really good
example is argent which is an ethereum based smart contract wallet that allows you to pick basically they call them
guardians that can help you recover your key so you can maintain uh self-custody while also having some
safeguards of friends and family or you know argent can act as a counterparty to help you recover uh if you need to uh
and this is you know how to preserve that ethos of decentralization uh without the you know the extra burden of
having to actually manage this and have that risk of doing it yourself cool angie
yeah i mean i’ll go back to behavior i think that uh well i would say decentralized technology
is important but that will roll out in time and that will i think a lot of
the tech issues will sort themselves out what is harder is decentralized operations
uh decentralized communications or i mean i guess uh you know communications
in a way that protect the public so these behavioral things i think they’re they’re we need more
training on that because that’s that’s why gary
we lost you angie
no no audio no there you go we’re back you can hear me now yep
okay sorry i was just saying that this is why gary gensler is is saying a lot of these are decentralized in name only
because they’re using decentralized technology but they’re not at they’re acting like centralized
companies basically so that’s that it’s that education around um that shift in mindset that i think
will make you know a big stride in terms of these becoming more um
you know ready for prime time i guess from mass market yeah i agree it’s an adoption cycle it’s it’s something we’re
going to go through we went through this with web too i mean everyone said in the beginning of web two you know any author can sell a book directly to any user and
what do we end up with amazon so you know it it goes in cycles so on uh the other
question that we had from our audience was why do you lean towards traditional players owning this space i’ll open that
to anybody john reynolds go ahead yeah i can maybe kick it off because i think i’ve been the one leaning towards traditional
players i was gonna say that’s for nick yeah um i i think i’ve been bringing it up
one because you know when i interact with the nft space a lot of people just
assume that there’s going to be this birth of all of these new projects and and great companies to to come out of
this and i just wanted to give some recognition to the fact that you know traditional players are still going to
have a say in what happens here um because you know that often gets overlooked um again if you go and look
at frank i i’ll just bring up a bit of an inside joke between frank and i but it’s this idea that you know if if um
um if nintendo wanted to recreate pokemon go but instead of you know there
being infinite amounts of you know these pokemon to to go out and capture and they created all of these pokemon out
there in the world they were only a finite amount and they were nfts could you imagine how popular that game would
be um you know there’s a lot of ways i think for traditional companies to use this new monetization method to interact
with their um with their with their you know existing user base um and the
greatest companies in the world are always very adaptable um so that’s why i just wanted to give some recognition to
these already very amazing companies out there that are being adaptable and understand
you know this is a prolific shift in the way that you can monetize and interact with your user
base and customer base and again those those companies are in an advan
they have an advantage right now because they already have all of the the users and customers and
content and ip they just need to you know understand and and
integrate the new technology that comes with nft so i just wanted to give some recognition for the traditional players
not that there won’t be you know great companies to come out of the web 3 space that are web 3 native that’s absolutely
going to be the case there will probably be more companies that come up out of web 3 than you know
traditional players doing well in the web 3 space but there will be those traditional players
and is that something we see on the other side of the hype cycle after the uh it bottoms out or do we see that sooner
than later i think we’re already starting to see it i think you know the companies
you’re seeing a lot of traditional companies kind of just tiptoe into this space you know experiment here
experiment there see what works no one’s really diving into it yet um that needs
to dive into it yet they’re just kind of experimenting seeing what works seeing what doesn’t um and so i think they’ll
you know kind of slow play and they’ll wait and they’ll wait and they’ll wait and then you know something will just kind of organically rise for them um
because you know people are already so loyal to some of these these these brands and and and and you know content
out there angie did you want to say something i’ll just i’ll just add that um so i made the
mistake early on of um somebody came to me and said you
know i want to introduce you to the founders of openc and i met them and and they were saying
we’re going to be the ebay of digital assets and first mistake in in
you know kind of exploring researching the space i thought why wouldn’t ebay just be the ebay of digital assets
and so we called ebay and they were like yeah we’re gonna be the ebay we’re gonna we’re gonna be we’re gonna be a digital
asset marketplace not them yesterday they announced uh that they are going to be working
with one of to roll out nfts meanwhile openc is 16 billion it should you know
valuation like it just shows and dominates the market it just shows that in these um you know
new innovative spaces speed matters speed to market matters and i think that
um you know by the way i went on the open i went on the ebay application yesterday to try to buy a couple of nfts i bought
a wang gretzky like you know card you know like trading card for 10 bucks it was so boring like
there was nothing it did there was it was totally web too and i don’t i don’t really see why you would ever do that so i’m just
saying there’s there’s i i agree with a hundred percent with what nick’s saying in terms of these
brands and and and a lot of the established ip uh having a leg up but
tech companies that can move quickly to to to establish a foothold are gonna i think
will surprise us in the future at least i was i was wrong on open city nearly there yeah and maybe i should just make
a distinction by you know who i think in the traditional space will do well it’s exactly what angie is saying it’s the content and ip
owners i don’t think you know these tech companies are going to come in and disrupt the web free space by building
out a better marketplace that i don’t think will happen i think the web 3 players are going to dominate
that they’re going to dominate the infrastructure and technology side but the companies that do well with content
and ip and brand recognition are i think going to be the traditional players but they will to angie’s point have to
partner with web3 native companies to to to i guess utilize the technology um and
we’ve already seen that you know nike went out and and and bought artifact um you know so we’re seeing you know the
partnerships already um between brand and content owners
and then technology players in web 3. that’s like the i would say like the
the the perfect kind of merge is like content and brand ip owners in the traditional space
working with technology providers in the web 3 space i think that that’s kind of a maybe a secret formula to success here
and a whole lot of m a activity yeah well i mean this is this is a clayton christensen discussion about
incumbents versus innovators and that’s a whole separate tech talk so i won’t go into that right now we are coming up on
90 minutes so let me just thank the panel any closing remarks that you folks would like to make
um i’ll just add on to kind of the same thread of the conversation of just how early this space is and how much there
is uh to go ahead of us i everybody uses this analogy but i think it is accurate
that crypto right now feels so much like the early days of the internet and if you think of the early use cases for the
internet the internet wasn’t defined by you know traditional newspapers publishing in a digital media it wasn’t
you know physical mail moving to email those were the first like kind of logical things that we can do with the
connected internet but the defining characteristics and the value that grew out of the internet was facebook and
youtube and uber these things that weren’t possible in the traditional medium and i think we’ll see that same
uh effect play out in the crypto space uh for a long time to come we’re still very
early i love that net i love that frank because i am very um you know i get
asked a lot because i have a traditional background about traditional applications converting to blockchain
based applications and i i think that’s not the big opportunity here it’s the
white space it’s the totally new so i like that and i’ll just end with one
last closing remark from my end and it’s be optimistic about the future of nfts
and be cautious about the current state of nfts um that’s i think kind of maybe
the general uh point i was trying to get across today and i think we all try we’re trying to is be very optimistic
because this is a prolific change in the way that you can interact online but
exercise caution today and understand it’s still very early like frank just said
uh that is a great way to close this discussion so thank you all uh for participating in the panel i appreciate
your expertise and your generosity of your time i’d like to thank kathy wood for joining us and for supporting this
effort with her team and company thank you kathy i’d like to thank chris paradise who is the chairman of the
tampa bay innovation center kathy did you want to say something no i just uh as i said i knew that we
would all learn a lot every time uh angie and nick and frank get together
as we brainstorm and we brainstorm every friday uh we learn something new and i
and i i learned something uh lots lots new this time so i’m seeing lots of comments saying that they found it very
helpful so i also want to thank uh angie uh nick and frank
and to thank you tampa bay innovation center for helping to educate the world about
innovation well i think in the future sessions we just need to call brainstorms because this was a great discussion and a great
back and forth on this topic so i want to thank the audience for joining us and for their questions and comments i will
post this to youtube in about let’s say about a week or so uh depending on how slow my mac is operating i’d also like
to point out that we’re in the fifth cohort of the accelerator program and in july we’ll be having a showcase event
featuring the five companies that are going through that program and i’d like to make sure that everyone knows about
the showcase and is invited to that event we are very much leaning towards doing this as a face-to-face event so
the venue and the timing of that are to be determined uh but uh please stay tuned to other programs that we’re
running here at the tampa bay innovation center if you are a founder contact us we’re here to help you if you’re a
community member that is uh interested in the growth of our tech community contact us we’re here to help you
connect with those folks and to uh to join us on that journey but with that my name is ken evans i’m very happy that
you were able to join us today and i’ll see you in a month or two when we host another tech talk on a topic to be
determined thank you very much thank you again thanks everyone