Episode 205: Curating JPEGs with JPG

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge i'm your host anna rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online in this week's episode tarou and i learn about the jpeg project with founders maria paula sam and trent we chat about the art nft intersection the role of the curator algorithmic curation and the meaning of combining digital art we also learn about where jpeg fits into

the ecosystem the problems they are aiming to solve and where the team sees the space evolving at the end we get a chance to brainstorm about the potential for zk nfts a project close to my heart but before we kick off i want to remind you to check out the zk hack online event it's happening now and consists of weekly workshops about key zk tools as well as having an advanced weekly puzzle competition if you want to jump into the space professionally or even just for fun this would be a great event to join it runs for seven weeks every tuesday going until december 7th there is a fantastic community forming around this event so do jump in also if you're looking to get into the space professionally you may want to check out the zk jobs board there you can find ads from top zk teams looking

to hire i've added the link to the zk hack and the zk jobs board in the show notes i also want to thank this week's sponsor enoma enoma is a multivariate and multi-variable bartering protocol that enables bartering among n parties of arbitrary assets including nfts all with zero knowledge privacy enoma removes the requirement of a double coincidence of wants or direct matches between very different asset types i've added the link to co-founder owa's twitter thread in the show notes if you want to find out more about this project quick note the zk validator was an early investor in the project and anoma is also one of the partners on zk hack be sure to stay tuned for noma's first public test net in which you'll be able

to play with enoma's proof of stake intent gossip matchmaking layer and custom validity predicates you can check out anoma's codebase on github and quick note the noma is currently hiring so if you're interested in finding out more check the link in the show notes for their jobs or look for them on the zk jobs board so thank you again enoma now here is our deep dive into the jpeg project today taruna and i are chatting with the team from jpeg i want to welcome maria paula sam and trent to the show welcome guys thanks so much for having us thank you very much hey thanks for having us all right i think before we kick off i want to learn about all of your

backgrounds but i also want to first define like what is jpeg what is this project maybe one of you want to take it yeah jpeg is a curation protocol um so we're really looking at building some more cultural infrastructure for the space that looks at these nfts as cultural objects as opposed to kind of foregrounding them as financial assets and so how does that process help create a more sustainable long-term value system for the space and now let's find out a little bit about each of you like so we're we're going to be talking primarily about nfts in this episode but yeah i'd like to hear a little bit about what led you to this because i mean i'm going to maybe

start with maria paula i've known you for years we actually started in blockchain around the same time at almost the same organization you were at web3 i was at parity back in 2017. tell us your journey to jpeg right so when we met i was actually working at a protocol at a polkadot and i've been working in communications for a very long time i quickly switched to golem and in golem actually i was you know giving out grants at the first edition of the ethereum community fund when by chance and in the tokyo hotel where they shot lost in tokyo i met a lost guy that was actually matt condon er who is you know the so-called

grandfather of nfts um since i am a culture addict and i love art you know after hearing some of the use cases for nfts i was like this is something that i actually really like and finally you know a use case that i can actually relate and maybe work in a less abstract way than you know my my work with infrastructure so you know i started doing little things in the space continued to communicate things about nfcs with matt also with billy renekamp at clover's network then through the first nfc conference in san francisco which was fabulous and after that i founded uh east berlin and the department of decentralization

in berlin which is a grassroots organization that does a bunch of stuff including a hackathon and we have a strong art department uh through the art department we started exploring a little bit more nfcs and blockchain art um wrote a paper i organized a bunch of shows you know both digital and nfts actually i had to rooney in one of my shows in osaka and yeah we kept on exploring and you know our second paper was published in february 2021 i had a lot of trouble making it timeless because the nft boom was sort of blossoming by then and after that i felt that you know this was an opportunity for me to leverage everything that i had learned in the

past years of uh free labor to around dynasties and uh i just met trent via dms you know we bonded about blockchain art um since he's an art historian and he invited me to this discord where you know they were setting up um gallery with a very awkward name that we have deprecated so i'm not gonna even gonna mention it and yeah then i met some uh honestly on the first call we absolutely vibed and we conceived one of the funnest parts of the protocol which is the gift shop and yeah the rest is history very cool you mentioned you just

mentioned eath berlin for anyone like this is very much a legendary event i was there it was great so many teams met there i know it's just like in the lore of the bear market eat berlin and eat berlin too we're like the legend so yeah just to give some context to some of our listeners all right now i think it makes sense for us to learn a little bit about you trent trent how did you kind of get into the space and then cross paths with maria paula yeah so my educational background is in art history as mp mentioned and then for a few years after that i worked in advertising i've always really loved being like at this intersection of kind of the economic layer of society and the

cultural layer of society and in kind of early 2019 my brother brock and i kind of teamed up and started working on various defy related stuff so we built some yield optimization protocol um ended up moving into some mev related things in august of 2020 we along with will price dan eltzer clinton bembry launched an algorithmic stable coin called yam which is a kind of legendary saga in its own right i stayed on with that community for about uh six seven months just kind of like building up those contributors getting the community back on its feet after all of the kind of shenanigans that that occurred there and as i was scaling back my time

at the beginning of this year 2021 in kind of january and february i just fell in love with some of the nft space i think it was really packs the title drop that showed me how nfts can be this like really interesting conceptual investigation into value and like questions about what nfts even are and so that was kind of my entry point at which i fell down the rabbit hole and just started having so much fun with nfts it was like that was the first time in a long time the internet had just provided this kind of unbridled weird source of entertainment um and so anytime that's that's happening it feels like there's something something really special so i started kind of casually

thinking about what i could potentially do i was having conversations with mp and twitter dms i was having conversations with sam and twitter dms and we were all kind of focused around this idea of noticing some things in the in the blockchain space or the nft space i guess that just felt a little off to us in terms of again like how financialized these things were and like the the foregrounding of that some of the presentation and display of these nfts and so we just started jamming on uh various things and jpeg is is what came out of that cool that connection between this d5 background and nfts i mean this has been a theme that's come up a few times with previous guests that tyrone you and i have interviewed

why do you think there is that connection i can't speak for everyone but i think for me at least it was like i got into d5 because i love some of the ideology around crypto and it's this extremely exciting kind of like formerly fringe uh industry to work on that that was just where all the like cool weird smart people were were hanging out but i'm like not actually a finance guy at heart but that was the only way you could work in crypto was like to do the finance stuff and so as nfts have come about it's all of a sudden oh my gosh we can actually like play at the cultural layer of society and that's just for me personally where i want to be spending

my time interesting at tarou and i want to throw this to you do you have any theories as to why there does seem to be that connection yeah actually one of our previous guests wrote a twitter thread this morning about that which is louise from fingerprints but uh i think it's sort of similar where i think a lot of people first not shitty crypto products that were decentralized were usable because i think like prior like everything from 2017 and before was mainly a centralized service that had like good ux right otherwise it was you using a wallet that would half the time brick itself or you would lose your funds or there's tons of

negative user experiences but i think like uniswap and the lending protocols were the first time that you actually had like usable you know not not like for the masses but you know if you cared enough uh ux that was not crappy and i think that like opened people's eyes to things but then i guess once you kind of got into that you realize hey there's like something more palatable about this world when there is attachment to objects versus like strictly purely speculative meme coins although you know look people still love that people still love the speculative mean coins it's not like that's going away um

interesting all right sam let's hear a little bit about you tell us how you got involved in this space and how what led you to jpeg i'm very curious to hear if you have a d5 background too i do not have a d5 background at all i don't understand the first thing about d5 uh at all and have been meaning to learn more but just can never find the time now because i'm too busy with nft stuff it's funny like trent i my educational background is uh in art history i actually come from a kind of quite academic background but we we both come at this from completely different directions starting at that point and then trent comes from d5 and then i come very much from the traditional art world my background is

as a curator and an art historian and a writer working in london in the traditional art world in the sort of modern contemporary art space largely working for the last few years freelance doing bits and pieces for a number of different organizations some of them uh non-profits some of them private but largely working in there in the sort of like a museum sector and non-commercial gallery sector i remember sitting down for dinner in 2019 with a friend of mine who's been very deep in crypto for a very long time and him handing over his phone to me and saying you know i just bought this piece of crypto art i was like what's that and it was this you know image of like a

lion or leopard or something and i was like oh cool and he was like yeah it cost me 20 bucks and he explained to me what an nft was and he bought it on super air and he kind of suggested that we look into it together and so i spent the weekend looking at super rail like scrolling through it and i was like this is clearly really interesting but i just don't have the time i was like finishing my masters at the time and i was like applying for jobs afterwards and it just you know wasn't wasn't the time for me to get deep in it fast forward two years and beginning of this year like the first week of january i remember having a conversation with somebody about something completely unrelated and it triggered this memory of the gap conversation i'd had and of nfts and i

was like oh i want to check out how that's going so i did i went on to super rare and started looking around was like what's going on now there i wonder if it's grown at all yeah i wonder what's good i started looking around and like you know clearly it had the prices were considerably higher than they had been when i'd looked before and i just became really interested in it and my background is really like academically working on conceptual artwork and there was something about nfts and the kind of division or distinction within an nft between sort of the tradable or kind of exchangeable like a token and the associated media and the way in which you know there was something kind of very immaterial about

it that just resonated with me and made intuitively a lot of sense um so i kind of appreciated it on that level and wanted to get more involved so i started working with an artist who i knew whose work i thought was sort of conceptually aligned in some way with the technology while being completely you know it was digital photography but it was a conceptual digital photography started helping him produce work and and sell his work market his work and and while i was doing that i started meeting people in the space trent was one of the first people i met luis from fingerprints dow was one of the first people i met a number of other people who you know are now doing really exciting things in this space were really welcoming with me and my first impression after a couple of

months was okay you know this is clearly a very exciting market to be in at that time i wasn't buying or selling nfts but like there was no kind of like culture other than that other than the market and it especially was seeing a lot of people who were big collectors calling themselves curators and it was very clear that the idea of curation was completely conflated with the idea of private collection and actually historically that is a relationship that is interesting and many important private collections running back through to the 17th century have actually become some of the most important museum collections today but um you know obviously curation is more than that it's more than just buying things yourself and so trent and i and then and then mp on that first call we started

trying to think about how we could kind of facilitate that you know people should be able to express their interests or their expertise and things without necessarily having the means to own those things themselves and i guess this brings us to jpeg itself which you define just before it's it's more of a curation platform maybe we can dig a little deeper into what that actually means so i think people are familiar with marketplaces nft marketplaces where you buy and sell nfts you can mint nfts there often you can add you know percentages you can like choose sort of the attributes of the nft mint it there sell it there in a marketplace but how is jpeg and curation different from that i think one of the

early kernels of a of an idea or an insight that we had around around jpeg was looking at the way in which the nft market was functioning you know and still functions largely today but particularly kind of in the in the first half of this this year was seeing this mimicking of the traditional legacy art markets value systems kind of being crossed over into this this nft ecosystem in which the taste making apparatus is essentially uh comprised of massive collectors who have you know both the capital and the reach to determine value and the large auction houses that have the reputation built up that you know everything that they put

out is considered to be of quality so you see that you know particularly probably with like our blocks curated and super rare right reminded us just of you know of gaussian and pace and david swerner and uh you know sotheby's and chrissie's sachi and you know this this system in which it's only this kind of small gated community that is able to actually determine what's cool and what's valuable and interesting in the in the space and we just thought that that didn't align with a kind of crypto native approach to culture um and that rather than these very few kind of high signal data points that we had the opportunity to create infrastructure that allowed anyone to

participate in this process of meaning making and of taste making so with jpeg we want to kind of make that process permissionless and decentralized such that everybody has the ability to express their opinion and to make these connections between nfts that this piece and this piece when they are put next to each other create this this new form of meaning and this new context for for understanding them and so i think in the in the long term that's really where we see some of some of this going that it's really the community as a whole that starts to form these connections and and form these kind of new systems of cultural value

would you say i mean is the problem that you're highlighting here the idea that like during the sale of any of these nfts there would be like publicity about them and people would see these images but once sold and once just like in a collection they kind of just sit there is this sort of like well what what happens to them then is it is that in any way something you're trying to tackle well we have to think of jpeg in the context of you know what we want for the future of nfts and as terun mentioned as well i think we're beginning to see that nfts are you know one of the use cases that really are you know able to scale and to make an impact and so a jpeg of course we're focusing on you know what gives value to those nfts in the long

term you know everything right now is very shortly this you know we're living in the moment uh you know you you take a flight and you miss like how many drops um it's insane so we're trying to you know add a little bit of pause and contemplation but at the same time we're creating you know on-chain records which will hopefully derive in more value to the nfts this is a very sort of like i don't want to say visionary because i don't consider us visionaries but you know this is an idea that comes from the assumption that we really believe that nfts are the future of culture and we want to create the different you know records archiving and other the other

infrastructure tools towards supporting that value yeah and i i do really like this idea that um kind of both of you are talking about that once something is bought and it's just sitting in a wallet like the kind of interaction potential with that nft really goes down unless you're just like looking at someone's entire like wallet collection on openc or um if they've made that wallet available through something like gallery or something like that but providing more opportunities for interaction with these these nfts um and allowing anyone to to kind of have that interaction regardless of whether they actually own it or or not another thing to add is about you know the way that the mind

operates as well which is you know as i mentioned you know very like short attentions from everything happens you know at the same time and we want to make them understand that there is you know there's a certain narrative and a certain value around you know all of these universe that's happening and that we also you know come from a different place um as trent said you know he comes from defy i come from you know infrastructure we have been building uh with the values of the centralization permissionlessness and other different elements in mind and the nft people don't really understand those values just yet because they are just coming in

flocks and if you know they don't understand the the content they don't have to to as well you know collecting nft is a lot of fun but trying to educate these people around you know like no world gardens you know like a job might be a drop but you know you can still access things you can you know you can create galleries in a permissionless way i think that's also really important yeah i guess one thing that is different when you have sort of like grouper crowd curation versus um sort of institutional curation is the notion of provenance for like you know like when you go to an artist's website right like they'll

talk about their pieces and they'll talk about like which collection the piece was in and like what theme that was kind of curated by and try to show that their portfolio has sort of this like tree structure of like these are the things that are all related in one line these are the things that are all really another line so things are all really in another line in a kind of socially curated art world it seems like it'll be messier so how do you view sort of like an artist being able to convey provenance or like thematic things they've worked on when it might be like a little more messy at least like you know i don't know enough to know if if it will have sort of the same sort of like lineage where like you present

at the same types of museums or the same sort of festivals versus um you know it's out there in multiple places i don't know if that totally makes sense but i wonder if sam given your curation background if you have any thoughts on that one yeah sure i mean one thing about jpeg is you know if an artist wants to display the work that they have made in the context that they wish it to be seen in that that's possible for them they can be the curators of their own work but on the kind of provenance question the concept of provenance is obviously spoken about a lot in the blockchain art space and the nft space and obviously you know blockchains uh provide this means of having its record of ownership and ownership

history but obviously as you say provenance is much more than ownership in the traditional art world traditional cultural world provenance is also the history of the entire lives of those objects everywhere that they've been displayed what they've been displayed alongside all of these things and at the moment there is no means to track that and that's one thing that we're really trying to facilitate and the fact that it's maybe more casually done in some instances online and on jpeg uh compared to just purely institutional the fact that that provenance history may not necessarily be just you know that it was displayed first kagozian and this show and then 10 years later in this retrospective at

moma it's just i think a byproduct of the different nature of these kinds of things but also the beauty is that i think there's potential for both things to happen i mean you know looking at some of the sort of traditional institutions that are organizing nft art exhibitions are beginning to explore that i think the hermitage museum in st petersburg for example is putting on a digital art exhibition which will include nfts those tokens will have been displayed there but then maybe you know two months later they'll be displayed in somebody's gallery on jpeg by you know by an anonymous collector or by an anonymous enthusiast and so it's quite nice that you have this much more kind of variegated uh history of these things and i i think that's just yeah an

inevitable byproduct of things being online right and this fundamentally being kind of internet culture so you know it is inherently more democratic and more distributed in that way one thing i guess maybe is and this this is sort of a very hazy course analogy so apologies in advance but one thing is i feel like the search engine problem for online art is much harder than it is in reality right like i do feel like people in in normally right they'll go to a festival or they'll go to like a certain set of exhibits and they'll kind of have like be able to at least like find roughly what they want to look for whereas i feel like there isn't really a particularly good way of finding new art right like i mean for instance

for on openc the things featured on the front page get like almost like a million times more views than everything else right which is just kind of like this weird thing because they don't really do great curation they just kind of like pick i i actually have no clue how they pick those but like it feels like the features are like not super thought out and so like i guess that my question is like how do you how do you feel like you can get around that if people can't there's not really like an easy way to search for you know search for certain themes or search for certain things you're looking for other than following individual artists because i think it's like it makes sense if you're like following an individual artist they have a gallery in in say jpeg or like some type of

curatorial provenance and jpeg versus like hey i want to find everyone who is doing these types of things right now right there's not really like a an easy way to do that and i guess my question is do you view your role as somehow in helping in that yeah i mean to some degree the open c thing is a phenomenal testament just to the power of curation in in some ways which i think is kind of worth worth highlighting right there there is this massive impact that when someone with super high reach and high credibility says go look at this thing then like a lot of people end up end up doing that which is interesting i think

one of the things we're also we've also been toying with is the kind of way in which we encounter curation in our daily lives like almost constantly right like whether it's the morning brew newsletter curating news or like google page results like curating information right there are these different ways in which you see curation showing up as human generated and is algorithmically generated and i think in so much of our digital context today like it is mostly algorithmically generated in which um you know it's taking all these data inputs and taking your personal data and then finding things that that fit that kind of match

and i think there's an interesting potential for decentralized social networks and decentralized information systems in which that curation starts to be much more human driven across the board with algorithms starting to kind of help at the edges as opposed to the reverse in which it's like mostly algorithmically driven with human data helping at the edges and so i think there's some really powerful elements to search and discoverability that start to emerge as curators come onto the jpeg platform and start to create connections and exhibitions according to specific themes adding that context of

you know this is what i'm seeing in this piece and this is why i like it and you know pulling out things like keywords from those descriptions that can potentially be used to start to create this kind of second layer of categorization as well as again this this idea that you know sam is a conceptual nft art connoisseur and so you can just basically subscribe to follow his conceptual art gallery that he curates on jpeg and adds to consistently to essentially you know find those new pieces that that sam is discovering because he's putting in that kind of cultural labor to track that

part of the the market and i am someone who's interested but is unable to kind of put in that much work to it what you describe there about that front page of open c i mean it reminds me a lot of like when youtube first started and youtube had this front page and it would highlight these videos i actually at the time worked in music and a music video i had worked on was highlighted and the impact was insane right like it wasn't mtv wasn't a big music channel it was youtube but actually i think the impact culturally might have been deeper like it really got into people's eyes and that was actually done i later met the person who had by chance i met the person who had been the curator at

youtube putting that there like was going through all the stuff was finding cool stuff it was like one or two people at the you know very early on and then there was always conversations about creating sort of these like video dashboards and i know that like there were people who created lists and stuff like that but i feel like at least on the youtube example like it fully became dominated by the algorithm why do you think and and this i mean i don't know if you can answer but like do you think that in this decentralized version it doesn't also become replaced by an algorithm just possibly an open source algorithm that we all like agree to i don't think that's necessarily bad you know if algorithms can help us you know sort of determine

value and you know we can collectively decide on you know what we define as valuable than you know if it's a human or an algorithm you know i work in tech so i i won't say no to the algorithm obviously you know as jpeg we would really like to create some kind of labor stream that brings awareness towards the people doing the work and the curation and i think this is really important because uh oftentimes in nfts you actually hear a lot from the collectors and the creators but you don't hear about you know the people like the people that are also in the art world that you know

the the curators the galleries the events organizers you you don't hear from them you know in in our nft world so our intention is also about raising awareness about different kind of labor around the cultural industry as a whole and around nfts as new cultural industry that we're seeing so both things can coexist but i won't say no to the algorithm okay got it so this idea of the human creation this is sort of like step one it doesn't mean that it's gonna like only ever be that yeah you know when when we were actually deciding what were we gonna do about jpeg who we were as an organization as uh co-founders as well

which ones were our goals we first had to define what is curation and curation to us is second order creation so this is very connected to the question that you just asked because as we see it's so valuable and we see it has so much future then we definitely want to you know make sure that we give attention and intention to the whole process yeah and i think i think the algorithms their purpose in in something like jpeg's protocol is to really empower and allow for then human curation to occur right one of the great things about algorithms is like they can take in

massive amounts of data and like data far into the past right like i think a lot of the ways that people are discovering nfts today is like in a twitter thread or on twitter which is just so ephemeral and so that element to which through a immutable source of provenance what someone has curated and discovered in the past can continue to play a role in what is being kind of determined as interesting or valuable today is i think a really powerful thing that allows us to hold this history in a certain way and not just like always be moving on to the next thing is there any project that you would call comparable to what jpeg is or do you

feel like it's a sort of a new class of conceptual projects i think we're building a new class but also you know a strength mentioned uh just now and i was actually you know gonna connect to his point um what we're building a jpeg is only one of the pipes from the cultural infrastructure that we actually want to see and we hope to be able to be complemented by other groups building different stuff as well i think that you know the people that are building you know the museums of this new cultural industry are absolutely fantastic mocha is doing a great job um they're also you know doing curation but it's about you know decoration within their community and

it's about the creation of the assets of each community member ah so that's complementary what was the name of that project you just mentioned it's museum of crypto art okay i think yeah nice so i think they're doing a fantastic job we are also really you know of platforms like on cyber that are not doing the kind of curation that we're doing but they're you know they're allowing curators to create fantastic galleries with you know like great vr experience as well so we're hoping to you know be one of the building blocks and we're also hoping for all of these platforms to come and test our work and you know obtain this record of punching provenance from us

sort of like what we were what we were building and what three you know and that sort of diagram uh that you see very often everything should be stackable and the modules should be combined uh but you know there's no monolithic solution because we otherwise we would go back to centralization doesn't it doesn't really make sense that makes sense just a question though now i kind of want to understand how this actually works like how does i think i understand conceptually what this is basically i'm guessing you have like a site or some web element which like collects a bunch of nfts but are you actually doing anything on chain to collect them are you just going to get them from like ipfs and like bringing them into one place

because i mean they are public in a way like the links to the images you could technically track down yeah so the way the the protocol works currently and we have some very fun updates kind of planned in the near future which you know we won't we won't talk too much about right now but essentially right now the protocol exists on ethereum l1 and so you show up to the jpeg website we have a allow list for some kind of alpha curators who are creating exhibitions currently those users show up to our curatorial tooling interface and they upload nft token data to a subregistry that essentially functions as this curated exhibition and then they push that

exhibition on chain writing all of that data to ethereum l1 and so that includes you know the contract address the token id any sort of curatorial notes that they want to include for kind of you know their additional context that they want to uh want to record very cool and so this is where like art being displayed together it's not just that it's displayed together on on a website but it's actually linked somehow together on an on-chain commitment exactly and so in the future as these kind of exhibitions stack on top of one another we're really building out this social and interest graph in which you can start to look at the connections between curators who have these nfts coming off

of them can look at the the relationships between the curators between the curators and nfts and nfts and nfts such that in the long term the the vision is to then be able to actually have on-chain reputation for these curators on-chain scoring for the nfts themselves based on you know how many times has this nft or this collection been curated was it all in one week and around launch and then never curated again or is this collection getting curated consistently you know every week for a year who was the first person to curate this collection who who was in there before it was cool so having that

data set on chain permissionless and accessible to anyone i think just just is really starting to lay some of the groundwork for how a future of decentralized social networks can can start to look and can start to to play out on chain and i think that that idea is one of the things we're most excited about one of the coolest elements of this whole nft thing is the degree to which we've started to put culture and put social networks on chain right the whole board ape yacht club group is essentially a social network that that exists on chain and like you see the relationship of these human beings existing on the on the blockchain which

is just such a fascinating shift in the last 12 months 12 months ago when you were interacting on chain it was like you're interacting with this kind of nameless address there was no feeling of a human being on the other side and now we're living in this world in which it really feels like when you're interacting on the blockchain there's kind of a human being on the other side one interesting thing i think of like what you just said was and perhaps this is sort of kind of like the principal agent thing that you're hoping changes is that the sort of backdrop of the current art industry doesn't emphasizes like the donors and the museums and not really the curators themselves right you don't walk into a

gallery and you see like the curator's name right you mainly see like funded by the xxx foundation and like this museum's first attempt at yyy theme i'm just making up placeholders but the description you're saying also makes it sound like part of the goal is to actually make the curator sort of the principal agents versus like the museum or donors would you say that's a reasonable characterization yeah i would say that's reasonable although it doesn't need to focus in at the individual level right i mean you know it could be more cooperative could be cooperative broken down into those constituent individuals i suppose you

know so the idea of having like five people co-curating a show together and like obviously you know uh putting those those five identities at the four or a dow curating from their multi-sig or whatever it is and then the reputation is occurring to a sort of organization um of multiple individuals so it is and it's an interesting point it's true i mean from my background like i do actually know who a lot of those curators are and you know i notice their names on the wall but it's true that they're smaller than the vp name or the whoever it is who sponsored the thing and and um we do definitely want to put the focus on the people who were performing

the labor as well as on those things that they're curating um but it doesn't have to be sort of necessarily as individualistic for sure yeah i i guess i meant you know the entity whether it's like a dao or an individual or whatever there is some notion that you have to have a identity to the entity that's during the curation the entity could be made up of many people but it's it's just somehow that it flips the narrative from like hey it's like whoever provided the capital gets like the biggest sign which maybe in in britain it's less obvious but here i feel like in the us the museums definitely put like the donors at like 10 times the size for sure we're definitely more

interested in like who's doing the work right um and i mean it crosses over into some of the like retroactive public goods funding conversations that have that have been going on basically um i think uh vitalik talked about at uh ecc in relation to some of this um decentralized social media stuff as well that like you can actually look back at what someone did in the past to figure out whether they did a good job and so less focused on you know who the individual is and more in terms of like what they're contributing to the network is i think a really a really interesting element how do you imagine sort of those that reward system though

because so far what we what i've understood it as is a it's a curation space for people to make this thing but i don't really understand like other than the glory or the fact that they can point back on the chain and be like i put this i was the first to find it what else did they really get from this action and maybe this is the future of your protocol and you don't want to tell some of it i don't know that's also okay i think there are a number of potential systems that were that we're still considering i mean one of the ways in which we're definitely oriented towards the future is tcr type models um token curated registries which were a huge meme in kind of the 2017-2018 time frame they were they were

going to be the thing that is what ethereum was used for pre pre-defined why have i not heard this word in so long oh my god can you define it again i actually don't know if i remember token curated registries so essentially they're the systems in which you know it's just a registry so a list the way to get on that list is through some combination of like staking and challenges and you know proposal periods and very governance heavy type stuff that also back then was all curating off chain things and so it like became a total nothing burger i mean they just went nowhere because it felt like this like business maintenance task i mean we have

so much better context for you know how governance is is actually acts in this space now and like we know that if you're asking a community to do something like monitor a spreadsheet assuming that they're economically rational actors like it's a lot of times not going to be super super effective and then of course like back then we didn't have anything on chain to curate so it was all this kind of like necessary disconnect of off-chain on-chain stuff whereas now i mean there are like 25 million nfts probably more now that exist like there's stuff to curate on chain these days and so that's kind of one avenue that we're looking at in terms of like how some of this reputation that you build up on chain

kind of actually interacts with the the protocol and kind of how you interact with that that system um i also think like the glory is also a very powerful motivator especially in what is kind of fundamentally a cultural and social space right um i mean people have an innate love of curating and showing off their their expertise and their knowledge yeah yeah exactly that not only just gives them kind of an internal satisfaction but also uh you know helps grow their their following and notoriety um so i think kind of at this stage we're really more focused on empowering

people to kind of experience and reap the benefits of of that more social curation for curations sake elements with some of this more classical crypto incentives in the background and kind of in development it has to be added that we do have royalties for curators um i think that we have so many good ideas for them that we forgot that tiny thing but yeah we have royalties for curators um but we also have like huge ideas like princess what kind of how do you get royalties though like how does that work because like to me like where's the where is there a monetary exchange you're basically just saying like here's a bunch of things that i think are cool

boom like that's the thing i'm not completely clear on like are people paying to see your curated collection rather than royalties it's really more like commission fees so currently in the protocol there is like marketplace functionality i think in doing some soul searching and you know looking at the space it didn't make sense for us to try and build an aggregated marketplace um on top of building a curation focus layer um we really believe that like the proper way to to build a crypto native kind of platform and protocol is to focus on one layer of the stack do it really well and integrate with other players who are doing that that same thing and so most of the

you know most not all of the marketplaces that that exist today have the ability for curator splits and we think that that trend is is only going to to continue such that if you are curating a thing that is for sale on a marketplace that we have integrated and a sale occurs that a commission will then flow through to you as the curator of that of that thing got it okay that makes sense that was the little piece that i didn't fully get there okay that makes a lot of sense but as you said mp there may be many more ways to incentivize people to be these curators i i mean one thing i think i've started to see which i'm not sure exactly if it's a form of monetization is that a lot of

daos will do in-person or like real-life events with some sort of gating from membership and i'm sure that curators could effectively do the same thing where there's like events that they throw for all the people who who follow them and stuff like that and and those events could be online they could be irl but it does feel like the curators can have their choice there's like a lot of ways once they like have the infrastructure to not have to like think that much about it that's interesting i mean in the case of what we've been talking about the form of the jp the the nft not the jpeg you guys are jp the form of the nft the form of the energy itself no gif or svg hate allowed

here all right this is a judgment this is a judgment freeze judgment judgment free zone um but what i was trying to say is um nfts the nfts that we're thinking about they are relatively simplistic right still like nfts erc721s maybe erc what is it 1155. yeah yeah so like just on a previous episode i interviewed this group uh they're over on kusama they're building this like really like a very different kind of nft project with all these other characteristics like it's basically like a little bit advanced as itself like the possibilities the characteristics the associations and i'm wondering like

right now you guys are very focused it sounds like on l1 ethereum but are you looking around at other types of networks basically where you could potentially do more like the nfts themselves do you see them growing in their own functionality like themselves i would say we're clearly in a multi-chain world now right um and that's definitely something that like we want to to support i mean some of the artworks and culture that we're seeing emerge on on other chains are really exciting and clearly have a lot of traction great communities um and we absolutely want to support like where that culture is happening and making

sure that we're properly kind of tracking and recording that history as well i think in general we do view that like ethereum l1 is kind of a focal point or like headquarters of where all of this stuff is happening and we don't really see that likely changing in terms of the kind of other nft standards that that you might see popping up um that's a little bit of a harder question to answer when you start to introduce things on like outside of this this kind of cultural home base that don't conform to that it has the

potential to be a kind of weird outlier situation and so i i think in general we do view and mp can probably talk a little bit about this that there is a kind of need to conform to some of the standards that have been established within ethereum so you know basically when you're thinking of the artists they want to show all of their legacy if you have to actually refer to the website to see all of what's being minted around different chains it introduces a huge problem you know because they really don't have a way of indexing anything that's why i think that you know everyone should start

adhering to the ethereum standards instead of reinventing the wheel because there's already an overflowing market in ethereum a slash polygon and maybe optimism and whatever solana solana is you know part of the problem so okay it's different is i mean solana is it a very different code or is it in any way emulating the erc no it's totally 721 yeah it's completely different i can imagine because it's obviously different standard to the point that uh ftx had to make their nft marketplace support like transfers between the two and they were like oh we're gonna do it in a week and then they'd never happen so oh so imagine if that's you know if that's one of the problems and right now it's

mostly you know generity pfp projects going on in solana imagine the problem that it brings to uh you know creators and to the whole ecosystem you might like right now we have a huge problem with opencv being like a huge garage imagine when the other you know when the artists are trying to gather you know their collections from hand their collections from super rare they're like it's a compatibility mess and you know it's gonna be like the problem is gonna just like blow out of proportion and that's why you know i believe that they should be trying a little bit harder yeah because it really doesn't serve the the creators if the creators are minting assets according to token standards that don't

have longevity and it becomes this like they have this work that for this brief period of time was according to this standard that never got any traction it's like that work ends up just being lost so it's like there's some really careful consideration that kind of needs to happen around there for the creators and like of course something like solana probably has the capacity to create their own kind of ecosystem and standard and like it you know it's it's not going to be a huge issue but as those things proliferate it's you know it's that old comic of like oh we have 14 standards we need one standard to unify them all now we have 15 standards

i have a weird question for you do you know if the original cryptokitties are actually listed on openc can they be listed because they're not erc 721 they are an open c yeah you can view them i'm not sure how or how they breach them but yeah they're definitely there okay i i feel like they they just made custom support for them because of like the historical context not it's because of how famous they are well also like in the bear market it was like there was no other nfts for a while right like so like what else are they going to do like they're building their platform they need someone to trade something and then wait i thought i also thought that cryptokitties were the first cryptokitties are the first erc721 crypto punks won but i'm pretty sure

crypto kitties were at least that's what is awesome yeah yeah i always understood it not as or maybe it was done before formalization but i i i've always been under the impress i'm sorry we're just gonna like leave this on air someone out there knows um i i do have four against one right now saying that it's it was erc721 yes it is it is it was it was definitely a 721 i was just looking at the source it's it's definitely i mean actually in fact the eip for 721 mentions cryptokitties yeah but i always thought i thought it had been slightly different yeah no i think in fact cryptokitties is what led to the standard because the 721 standard came from dieter and like the dapper or now

dapper labs people the earliest ones were not i think based on this because basically basically they tried implementing it and then they needed to make the erc that's like what the erc suggests but then maybe another example would be something like flow what dapper labs ended up doing so they have their own blockchain and it's an incredibly popular nft blockchain but just so removed it feels like do you know are they using an erc 721 well i mean they're using move right so they're using a totally different programming model so like for instance you don't need like storage in the same way and stuff like that but but no no there's they they have their own but

you know they don't really have a bridge yet and it's its own it's its own extremely segregated ecosystem i guess would be how i would describe it that was my actual follow-up question to what you were saying trent which is this idea of like mmp it was this idea that like if you are only on one chain obviously it's a lot more simple but if you are on multiple chains would it be important then that bridges and bridging systems also are taking into account some of these differences because maybe they're not right now they're focused more on like simple transfers or something like that but yeah is this something you're kind of paying attention to the bridges between the different ecosystems yeah some of my intuition is that most of the time you don't actually need

to except in the case of transfer or sale actually move an nft from one place to another to do you know a thing with it to play a game with it right all you need to do is prove that that asset is owned by the the user uh so i think there's been some interesting work being done for kind of cross protocol ownership one of the the early contributors to jpeg samba is is working on something called like 0x essential which does some of this cross protocol ownership tracking so i think there's something potentially

interesting there it ties into what we're doing in that all we're concerned about is the the data the nft token data right like the asset doesn't need to be attached or included in in anything it's just like we're just trying to chronicle this this data history as opposed to you know actually interacting with the the assets themselves got it do you picture the curator having a dow of its own we sort of said a dow could be a curator but like in this model that you're proposing like would it be possible to like do a fractionalization of that one curated show like would you basically take these different pieces make this collage basically of of different kinds of art

that reference each other like i don't know if this is something you're kind of considering i'm just sort of trying to understand the ways that this role could actually develop its own community potentially like or does it have to have a community that is then curating we've definitely thought about the idea of like okay you could create an nft of this particular yeah exhibition um yeah yeah which is super interesting super fun that's one of the big ways in which we diverge from you know some of the other kind of companies doing anything related to displaying nfts is that we have this on-chain component which does offer these interesting possibilities in terms of dows being curators in terms of

smart contracts being curators um it does just open up a really interesting kind of dynamic there as tyrone was alluding to earlier this degree to which you know a curator could have some sort of kind of curator social token that gives that community some access or role in the decision-making process ownership in that nft that of the exhibition that's created i i think we're at a stage where i mean there's like a million fun things to go do yeah experiments to go to um yeah we're focused on getting kind of some of the the most essential uh kind of like beta product things in place now and then as we as we will

build up that community kind of seeing where people want us to to take this things because there's so much fun stuff to to do here it's it's interesting because you know like a few years back or maybe just like last year you know the the meme of you know we're opening everything to the community was like a sign of you know the the core team being a little bit lazy or not knowing what to do but right now actually you know you see how you know people are building on top of certain things and loot is probably you know the best example you have of that so you know if people can create this sort of like meta meta verse a i don't want to use that word right now anymore

or anymore uh you know if people can build on top of you know what like this crazy idea of a dominic then there is the capability of you know people creating different universes based on you know someone else's creation or their own you just brought up something mp what what do we call it if we can't say metaverse anymore we really need to brainstorm some new ideas facebook no i know what that is you know what that is she's saying i mean it's culturally appropriate us so we country exactly okay we call ourselves we're working in the facebook i am working on facebook i feel like we're

helping their brand more than hurting their brand with that though i just think we need a new world and word for the world that we're working in i don't love web 3 world either i say it but i'm always like web 3 is terrible as well it's terrible the internet people have been throwing out ideas on on twitter like cyberverse hyperverse hyperverse hyperverse is is it's very late 90s i like it look i i get that everyone loves neil stephenson for for coming up with this but we should just find a new like sci-fi novel instead of like literally regurgitating the same boring

stop my novel over and over and over again for all the words it's like i just read snow crash like last year just but because i've been it's been on the list i finally got to it it's not a great book it's got some great ideas and sorry i'm gonna like i hope i don't hurt anybody's feelings but like it's not what i expected i just don't get why why have we just like decided that this person gets like to choose the name for everything and i honestly all their names just sound like they took some acid and and listened to um carl sagan on like 2x speed while driving around on skateboards which were which would be a great experience right um it has to be said that this guy neil stephenson actually tweeted that he has

no connection to this i respect that i i respect him for that you know that was badass yeah what do you think we should call it uh i have no real horse in this race i'm not good at naming things but like i just really hate the fact that we've basically made shitty portmanteaus of like astronomical objects and very pedestrian concepts and somehow we just like keep doing the same thing over and over like there's got to be something better than that like people are more creative than that hopefully unfortunately those people don't have marketing prowess so we're kind of stuck back in the enterprise metaverse

but by the way that that is a real phrase that was used in a company call quarterly call and microsoft microsoft's quarterly call said they're going to make an enterprise metaverse just think about being awesome um i honestly i i'm full support that's hilarious looking forward for the memes so good i'm surprised people have it didn't mean that but it's like maybe like slightly too obscure but like i i yeah okay i have one last point i really want to talk to you all about and this is

actually i i don't know if you have ideas on this yet but something you were saying earlier talking about all like kind of every activity you do on chain is even more written and immutable than every activity you do online i think people don't always realize that like online yes it's there forever but it kind of isn't there are ways to get things offline but once it's immutable on the blockchain maybe you could hide the images if they're somehow changeable but a lot of things are like your actions the things that you're doing are very much written and recorded for posterity forever so i mean this is where zk privacy and like the topic that we bring up often on the

show comes in this idea that like if all of your activities are so fixed and and potentially like searchable sometimes it's awesome because you could say like i was there first or this was my idea or something like that but other times mistakes or bad choices or like what if you do curate something and the art that you choose changes meaning after some time you know like it gets used in inappropriated in ways that you didn't want to and now there's a record that you curated or or even minted some something that's not good or not acceptable or something like that so one of the thoughts and this is something that we've been in the zk community and in our chats and like we did a sessions where we talked about this as well this

idea of privacy and nfts zk and nfts doesn't have to be zk but i did want to sort of throw it out there if i don't know if this is something you guys have started to think about or if you know of groups within the nft space that are thinking about it or do you think it's like we're gonna go ahead with this kind of phase and then later like have to sort of incorporate some sort of privacy i'm not aware of anyone that's building a privacy solution for entities and that was actually one of my concerns around february like i was not really into collecting energies just because i felt that it was exposing me more on chain and at this point you know like being aware that i also took part

of you know 2020 defy summer and what else you know like all of my mistakes people can look them up but also they can look up really interesting stuff you know like they can look up you know how long have i been in the space they can also look up my mistakes which are many um they can look up as well the directions that my life has taken because you know i joined a multisig then i joined the other one and that is really really daunting and that was wearing me um i thought about this problem i was i was wary of collecting nfts because of these but it's so much fun in the end that i ended up collecting it anyways i think that actually you know it's very hard to solve that problem but the very friendly

solution that we have around is actually just go a nunn and started a good brand new wallet uh make sure you follow everything to not doxx yourself jesus christ and it's not that hard to not talk to yourself although it's getting harder it is harder because it's like it really is like emails and it's harder to to sign up for things without some reference to yourself yeah i also i also just assume every single thing i've ever done on chain is is doxxed and that it's just all out there um because if any normal human being wanted to look hard enough they could probably figure it out and i know chain analysis

and the government if they wanted to work hard enough to figure it out they they they could i think that's just kind of like one of the realities of this space and it's hard to get around i mean some of the the zk stuff i think is like going to very clearly be important frontier that like comes next i think we're right now in this period in which like okay like we're kind of explicitly trying to do a social thing here in which like identities and on or otherwise like are explicitly tied to these actions that like the whole point is like yeah if you curate a pump and dump pfp project that becomes a part of your kind of on-chain legacy and

like we don't know how that kind of thing is is going to work out we've seen it a little bit in the last couple weeks just in terms of how many people have been getting doxxed for their mal behavior 12 months ago it's like if you did a lot of this stuff that people have been getting kind of more or less canceled for nobody would be able to figure out who who they were but the number of doc's addresses has just like exponentially increased even on a relative basis it feels like wow but we should also take a slight like maybe anthropological lens of like why this current boom is different which is that it's about flexing in a lot of ways and so people don't want privacy for that they want to be like

hey look it's me you i own five million fidenzas or what i don't know whatever like i don't understand the hypebeast subculture but like that's clearly was like a very big early driver before it became more broadened in terms of the user base in which case you you're actually very antithetical to privacy you don't want privacy and like the problem is like somehow when the movement seated itself with this kind of like that type of persona it can't really escape that so i feel like you need another thing that like triggers the private movement and i don't know what that is well here's i want to share a few ideas that have already been like in our community been discussed so i think so

far when when you hear zk and nft you think or private and it's like that the nft ownership would be private that the address connected to the nft would somehow be obfuscated but it's like what if instead the nft is like securely in the wallet in an address but the use of the nft could be done like you could use it in a zk context so potentially like you could submit the fact that you have the thing but not submit what it is or that like maybe it like gives you the membership into something and it's not on the minting side or the trading side where the zk part is but rather in the this use when you talk about curation or

something like this anyway this is just this is what i'm getting kind of excited about so i just wanted to bring it up i've been thinking about it for a while i hadn't mentioned it on the air on the show but uh since we're talking about all these different ideas i thought maybe i'd throw it out there it's a super fun idea to have like the owner be mysterious of something i mean to tarun's point it's like part of this flexing and stuff and like the antithesis of privacy is like the only way nfts are getting value is as a result of who owns them right so something like jpeg potentially in terms of uh creating this more cultural culturally based community-based value system like would allow for

value to not be so tied to individual identity it's not that you know vincent van doe has this thing bought this thing so it must be it must be good it's that all of these people have thought it's cool and you know included it in one of their one of their exhibitions um and so i i think it's a really interesting point that for some of the zk stuff to around nfts gain prominence there does need to be a different kind of value system associated with them privacy has this hard part that bootstrapping it does not really provide people immediate value it's always like they're betting on some future like counterfactual that someone will

find them and like they want to avoid that right it's almost like buying insurance no one wants to buy insurance right everyone want everyone like only buys it because they're forced to or they've been right there's only two options and so somehow like flipping that narrative becomes important i suspect my sort of vague thesis is that if you have say daos or groups curating where individuals do not want their votes to be public even though the dow's whatever like the final mechanism for doing curation or picking doing something related to the nft is public such a mechanism might actually make sense where like dow members don't want to influence each

other on their curatorial decisions right because like that there's obviously going to be bias if everyone can see things yeah but that's like also kind of a bit of a niche application right it's like the bassy hypebeast people are never gonna they could never care about that no i just think it's a very interesting conversation in relation as well to compensations have been taking place in sort of arts and culture for many decades now there's questions of authorship the importance of authorship things um you know when a work is finished when it's not when it's part of an artist's body of work and when it's not and also you know obviously the whole discourse around identity being either performative or mutable in various ways and so you know campaigning for like a

fully on chain culture with no privacy provisions flies in the face of i think a lot of what people would have seemed to have been achieved uh in those areas in the arts um artists shouldn't feel pressured for example to mint everything they make and when they do mint it what does that mean about the work right can you mint a sketch can you mint something that isn't like you know part of that top tier of things you really feel were complete you know obviously having everything traced back to these identities and addresses really foregrounds like the signature right and it does foreground that kind of individual entity and also like i think there are some artists who reinvent themselves um either metaphorically speaking i know some artists who have three completely

discreet identities they make completely different work as three different people and you know how does that translate to this context right all of these things which is really thinking i think very laterally to how the space works and things at the moment are interesting things to explore i don't have answers to any of them yeah as you were saying before experiments this is what we are doing we are trying yeah and my the one i want to sort of seed to the audience and in general is this one where we try to experiment with ck i think in in some sense we probably need privacy preserving d5 first before we could actually imagine the nft use case being palatable to people because like people can't even transact without

giving out their email or like effectively right now right like okay yes i want to sell something on open seat what am i gonna do like hit refresh and like stare at the page 500 times like right so like we still got a long ways to go in that world i totally agree but i think there is an interesting idea here of experimenting with some of the zk stuff in terms of like maybe it's a minting contract where like the minter is totally anonymous anyone can utilize it and like you try and get big artists and like imitations of big artists like all doing this thing such that there's like speculation around like is this actually x copy or is it like one of you know x copies kind of followers or

yeah yeah exactly um or or or a gan that's trained on x copy that's auto generating x copies yeah and so like where's the potential for like the fun of nfts to allow for some experiment an early experimentation around zk that gets people who wouldn't use it otherwise to go kind of like play around and understand the the technology i think it's a really cool idea cool thanks everyone for coming on the show big thank you for this conversation yeah thank you for having me great thanks so much for having us this was super fun thanks cool all right so i want to say a big thank you to the podcast producer tanya podcast editor

henrik and to our listeners thanks for listening [Music]