What will be the impact of NFTs?

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