Five use cases for renting NFTs

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy a place for entrepreneurs businesses and creators to explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and build thriving communities I'm Jaybird and as always I'm joined by my co-host Kyle reedhead what's up Kai what is up my friends on today's doer Spotlight we are talking with Nick Vale from re-nft and we're talking all about rental nfts this is a super cool new use case happening in web3 we talk about five specific use cases uh where we're going to use or where you might use rental nfts and we also talk about some of the infrastructure and kind of how this stuff all works

um I didn't really understand it uh previous to this but there's a moment where in this podcast Jay and I both go oh now I get it so wait for that moment because that was really when we get now I see where this is going so that was really really cool but excited for this episode it was it was a great one yeah and Nick Nick brought a wealth of background he spent a decade in the gaming world he actually built one of the the number one best-selling game on Xbox indie live previously and I think as well the number three best-selling game there so ton of gaming experience which is really what allowed him to start to conceptualize the idea behind re-nft he also spent before founding

reft two years ago he spent a few years on the marketing team at the sandbox so really deep in the web 3 space really strong knowledge there yeah yeah it's always nice to have people on the podcast who are like oh geez in the space and Nick has been involved in the space I think since 2014 maybe even a little bit earlier than that I can't remember exactly what he said uh but you can tell he's just got a wealth of knowledge he's really in on like the Deep inner workings of what's Happening Here in web3 uh both on just the culture side of it but also the the infrastructure side of it um so it's nice to get big brain and an OG like that on the podcast all right well let's dive into the show but before we do we need to take a minute to hear

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the first you're the first building in the infrastructure space of rental nfts so excited to Deep dive on it I love to hear it yeah there's there's a lot of uh a lot of interesting applications exciting things we're building um and so it's definitely a an underexplored kind of space within mfts that's for sure amazing well before we jump into the use cases for rental nfts love to hear your your rabbit hole story what first got you into this space why dedicate your life and found a business in the space uh what's uh what got nicked down the rabbit hole yeah definitely um so I guess most of my experience is really in kind of traditional game

development world so specifically back when Xbox indie games were all the craze um pre-game engine days we did two games in particular one of which was the first Port of Minecraft to Xbox called Total Miner we grew that to be the best-selling indie game of all time on Xbox went on to do another game that was like this janky early Fortnight is a builder voxel shooter combo some ugc elements uh way early on which is the number three um but then kind of you know I had known about crypto in specifically Bitcoin in like 2011 or so but didn't do much and then in 2014 we were trying to do this concept around sports betting with my brother and you know back then betting in general was you know especially

sports betting was seemed worse than murder in most places right like Roundup on everywhere and so today it would probably work the concept but nonetheless Bitcoin was the perfect way to do it we sort of scrapped that and you know I really fell down this Rabbit Hole of blockchain tech peer-to-peer money from a research standpoint personal thesis standpoint you know the whole slew the Reddit rabbit holes way back um then in 2017 I learned about nfts through crypto kitties and that was really my world's colliding like gaming assets just made sense you know at the time there was very minimal things happening some artworks that kind of stuff right came across a project called The Sandbox way early on if you guys are familiar

um so I ended up actually joining there with Seb and the team super early on built a bunch of initiatives there where ultimately the core re-nft idea was kind of born from so a little bit of a blend of gaming crypto Tech a little bit of everything kind of peppered in there and for me like I saw the evolution of centralized platforms also shutting things down right like the the Xbox indie game Marketplace was shut down on a whim because Microsoft wanted you know more value extracted from the arcade Market places we had all these you know millions of users that were just vanished overnight that had created all this content in our worlds and it was gone effectively right so it really resonated pretty deeply with me when I found out there's there's a way out here you're you're an OG in this space I'm

wondering if you can just give us like a quick like overview of what was it like back in what 2014 2015 when you were first in the space versus versus now because I think it's a very big difference but for a lot of listeners who are fairly new can you give us just a little you know recollection of what it was like then versus now definitely yeah it was it was not even close to the same right like there was really no full-time crypto there wasn't really money to necessarily be made right there was experimentations like Innovative pack happening it was really like research-based group chats like they're much else really happening and I mean like a lot of exciting visions and and like initiatives but there was no like

uh true true full-time right um and then like especially in nfts and in 2017 I I felt like there was probably a hundred of us in in uh on Twitter that were the existence of everything and every project and like you could DM any founder of any project and you probably knew him from something um so it's it's definitely been a been a wild ride but um an exciting one unless to see people actually sort of wake up to what's happening right before we get into you know the use cases of rental entities which is kind of the purpose of this the show I'm just curious you know you founded re-nft what what led you to that obviously you've been in the space for a little while what was the thing where you're like oh that's it I gotta make re-nft uh

and then maybe also just explain a little bit about what re-nft is just kind of short just so so people are have some context definitely so for for me you know I was at the sandbox we were seeing our early days of land sales right they were practically around 40 or so and they would like even hardly sell out right like there was gaming assets didn't even make sense quite yet people didn't see the vision and for for us like you know we're seeing still users acquiring all this land and all these assets with no other intent but to be a landlord and rent them out in the simplest first case right and it was kind of mind-blowing to my my co-founder Naz and CTO and I that like people didn't understand that additional Tech needs to be built to enable any of these sorts of things

right and our thesis always was that nfts are technology right I think a lot of people associate them in a lot of ways but at the end of the day the future is you're not going to know they're there they're just there and you know what you can do with these digital assets right and so we were you know pretty early on and are thinking of hey let's experiment with Primitives that we think will eventually happen right if you believe in nfts as an infrastructure um traditional Financial infrastructure is going to happen it's going to come on chain in some form or another and so we really set out to you know at a hackathon initially we created this concept there's a chain link hackathon and we ended up winning so we went to a couple other hackathons like three or four we won those and we're

like hey maybe there's maybe there's something here right there's more to these assets than just art at the time I feel like you just nailed it with the nfts or a technology line that is we we talk about that so much on the show is so many people are so caught up in the the current use cases of this stuff that it's difficult to understand that we're building infrastructure in order to create who knows what to be honest right I don't think you know none of us can see what it would be like five years from now the example I always use is you know I always talk to like a traditional consumer and you're like do you know what happens when you open a website right or your web browser and they're

like well it's it works it's there a lot happening beneath that from an https protocol to JavaScript or whatever right but you don't need to know that you just know you go to Twitter it loads right 100 it is funny though how many people are so tribal about this whole Space when meanwhile it's it's all about these blockchains and protocols and things that like no one is going to know or understand in the future yet people on Twitter are just going nuts like you're a maxi this and you can't support that one it's like what is everybody's problem just relax it's just a bit of tech like what's going on here absolutely it'll be interesting to look back in 20 years yeah yeah you know they're ingrained in the internet so we

can kind of look at look back on those for sure okay let's jump into nft rental use cases so maybe you can start Nick by just giving us a high level list of them and then I'd love to jump into them one by one yeah definitely so I think um first like I think a lot of people get caught up on the term rental when at the end of the day like it's important to zoom out and take away the term rental and like more than anything what we really are focusing on is like being able to trustlessly um and automatically temporarily borrow and use assets right for people and lend them out trustlessly as well and so like the sharing economy everything is rented

right like in today's date you're renting a car when you're essentially right it's just a glorified rental when you're hopping in an Uber you know you're renting someone's time you're renting Furniture in your house some people even right like all these different use cases um and so our broad vision is really like anywhere there's this some sort of temporary use right rather than just framing it as a rental um but we're definitely gaming focused initially that's where we see a lot of our super exciting and initial cases that get us to those broader ones within gaming there's a lot right even if you're just focusing on that bucket you know there's there's access you know for accessibility in these new worlds there's like token gated levels right like similar to these black markets you

saw spin up within gaming selling accounts like all of these different like potential use cases digital fashion and expression is another exciting one you know when you're playing fortnite you might have 100 skins but you can only wear one at a time right these sorts of things virtual land event tickets just to Rattle off a few as well like we've seen at some of these conferences even in the most simplest cases like nft NYC right you have holders with multiple assets and holders all over the world that might not be attending um and they there's somebody that might want to come check out the community and maybe that will even incentivize them into buying into the community or like you know getting involved in that Community something a lot more like um temporary assets so we kind of even

view these as like subscriptions um almost right like I think over the next bit we'll see a lot of creators spin up like more engaging ways to interact with their fans and anywhere there's that kind of like temporary access subscription flow a lot of cool things can be built off our base protocol to enable that but gaming is definitely our core Focus for the foreseeable kind of bit Okay so we've got gaming assets event tickets virtual land temporary assets subscriptions and I also heard fashion in there yeah a lot uh that's that's that's the six we got six six use cases to break down here everybody buckle up let's dive in okay one at a time so

let's talk about gaming assets can you give us a a sort of paint a picture of a specific use case for renting gaming assets definitely so I guess in the if we just take away like the value extraction portion right so like we saw in the boom of axi infinity we saw these Guild spin up which essentially were glorified rentals to some extent right it was somebody with capital acquiring assets and then lending them out in a manual trust-based manner they were sharing accounts and account passwords is how it was actually happening um to some person in a third world country or someone someone somewhere in the world where you know it's profitable for them to actually play the game and earn and all they were doing there was

giving them a portion of their earnings right and I think that model is is really interesting but we saw it on an extreme level of peer value extraction which isn't sustainable either right but if we just even like dial in on accessibility that's personally my most like exciting is we're seeing all these new worlds spin up these you know digital metaverses whatever you want to call them these gaming experiences some of them have free to play modes and there's interesting ways to still interact rentals there but also like take a look at just like board ape's other side right a land is a few East the last time I checked maybe it's maybe it's less maybe it's more but to even ask a user in a traditional gamer your mainstream audience to even pay five

dollars or fifteen dollars for an experience is insane right like they're used to a model where they can try out a game or there's very you know like largely in their face reasons why they're gonna pay for this experience right and so I think it's important to note that people forget that to ask somebody to come in and pay five thousand dollars to come try out an experience is insane that they can't even interact with right where on the other side you have a lot of these holders they might have a few assets they might not even want to play they might just want access to the ecosystem that could lend them out as a user acquisition cost to new users to try out an experience right um so I think accessibility is huge and it's so underexplored as a whole and

that even applies to games with a free-to-play mode you know there's still deeper engaging um you know game modes within that actual experience you'd like users to be able to try that out and experience it without also devaluing your existing folders that that bought into a more engaging experience well this is one of the problems and this is really nothing to do with gaming but maybe it does and I'm not I'm not big into gaming space but with these nft collections that have come out you know the 10 000 pfps whatever and a lot of them you know like let's say the friends for example you get to go to garyvee's conference right this is I guess more event tickets but I don't know how much of e-friends is now but they're a lot of Youth right and most people are not going to be able to afford that and so

the problem I'm seeing with these nft collections are these like tokenized communities is it excludes like a lot of people if they want to scale or they want to bring more people they either have to launch a new collection I guess or I don't know I don't know how they find a way to to bring to the masses and it seems like renting nfts might be a solution to a lot of these because you can rent it out at a much cheaper price is this kind of the idea that you're seeing here as well yeah definitely and I think like there's a lot of ways even within that but more than ever like what we want to accomplish is being able to separate rights right like essentially when you look at an nft you have a lot packaged into one thing and you can't do you

can't separate that like right you look at like a V friends right and you have an event ticket you have a pfp you have you know maybe an asset you're looking at as an investment or you know you a brand loyalty card whatever it is you know it might even be a gaming asset in the future who knows you can't separate that right it's all stuck together and so what's really interesting about what we're building is like how the protocol Works which I know we'll dive into a little bit later um if there's time but is we're technically separating out that right and in the rental you're delegating that right right so now if there's an event and hey I can't make it but I own a v friend I can delegate that out and maybe even earn some you know earn something from it or if I'm not even necessarily

earning from it I give somebody else a chance to experience this community potentially get excited about it share it around talk about it maybe even buy into it whatever it is right and so like that separation is something we're so focused on um separating out the ability to just take this utility and rent it out and do something with it right because the the the rental infrastructure allows you to assign only part of the nft is that is that what that allows or you are you actually giving access to that nft for a period of time and they get anything that comes with that nft no so we basically we work on a project by project integration

basis so like in the v friends instance they can enable rentals wherever they want them enabled right wherever the underlying utility is so like let's say there's an event thrown in like the it's not by any one project but like board Apes get access um like you know be friends get access or something that event would be the ones that need to like accept our use right and our integration right so like with games they wherever they're currently loading in assets we integrate and we we kind of say Hey how do you want rentals to function in your ecosystem we can tailor anything however you want so if they want rentals for like just land they can do that if they wanted just for breeding they can do that or not give it another place so

it's like that's where it gets super interesting for my like use from a rights delegation ultimately okay Jay before we go into more use cases let's let's flip this I want to go into the infrastructure I think we need to realize how this works that is very interesting can you walk us through the print it sounds like what you're doing is you're not actually renting out the actual nft maybe you're like wrapping it of some sort as my guess but I don't know walk us through how this actually works because I think this might help us understand the rest of what we're going to talk about yeah so I guess it's it's first it's important to note like we've been around for two years right and so we've built over time probably every type of way to do any in existing asset Rental New standards to wrapper Solutions we've

sort of landed on our main one that that we see most projects get excited about and are integrating all over is is our use rights and so how that works the best way to think of it to simplify it is like an on-chain database sorts right so so you as an nft owner come onto the platform or through an integration you put your nft up for rent you're as a lender defining all your terms so it could be in our traditional rentals you know upfront price daily rental price Max rental duration right um on the flip side that well first important of that asset I'm trying not to go too deep is escrow poor contract so it's held there so that there's not a duplicate running around when the renter comes along right then you'd have two

instances of the same asset in an experience when the renter comes along when they actually rent that they're not actually getting the asset they're getting this on chain right in that transaction in our contract acts as a registry that Maps back to the original token metadata ID original owner um in the original rental agreement so it's as easy integratable as on a game side for instance wherever they're loading in assets from their contracts already your you know their nfts so like V friends is recognizing a v-friend as their nft they just need to also ping our contract and we have endless ways to do it more centralized ways more decentralized ways we get as crazy as the project wants

um so they're essentially just recognizing a right that doesn't actually like exist except for on chain um that hey this owner owns this and they've let this person use it for this amount of time and we're accepting that so if I rent Jay's Moon bird for example it's not going to show like I don't have a moon bird in my wallet and I can't like show that on I don't know open C or something like that like it's not going to be viewable there because there's that nft doesn't actually exist on wallet I just somewhere have some rights to it that is associated with my wallet telling X thing event or game or whatever that I get these rights exactly and the reason for that is just the limitations of the existing standards

and there's exciting new standards that are further out I think years out some of them are a bit of a pipe dream um you know wrapper Solutions which could enable that but are still a separate collection essentially are just more expensive but have the same end utility and also can open up some potential like composability that somebody doesn't want right like imagine you're given some wrapped asset and now a lone protocol accepts it and like it'd be like renting out an apartment and then you go and you get a mortgage against it right which is that like I also love to use that example for just rentals right like imagine owning an asset you know you get a mortgage and you own this you

purchase this asset this home and then you can't rent it out like you can't you can't do it you can't do anything but live in it right it makes no sense like your financial Loop isn't completed so let's go back to the gaming for a second still just trying to wrap my head around how this whole thing works if I'm renting out I don't know let's say a character in a game from someone right because it's let's say it's in the form of an nft um I again I don't have the nft itself but I have the rights to it how does that then display like if I want to go into the game and use that and play around with it how am I actually doing that I guess it's not the nft that we're actually seeing in the game it's more the like the data that's

calling and telling the game like show this character and move around with this character right so like even if you have the asset in your wallet right when you go into that game the only thing that's happening ultimately is they're they're reading the metadata right there's other ways obviously depending on the game but nonetheless you're owning the underlying data and so they're just showing it so with us there's just one step which is they're pinging our contract to get the data to show it instead of just pinging the data to show it right is is the easy way to put it so you know like marketplaces people could adopt it like our own platform you'll see it in your wallet as like a hey I'm renting this you can

actually visually see it the user experience is much more fluid marketplaces could do the same thing which we've you know we've been in talks with quite a few to do things like that as well as also allow users to rent out to you know lend out excuse me and rent out right on their marketplaces too so like our vision is infrastructure that can be adopted everywhere rather than like Hey we're The Gatekeepers and you have to go through enft but it's interesting to me that your your customer is the project as opposed to the nft holder the way I was viewing this was that okay I'm a moon bird holder and there's a you know a proof event and I don't live in LA there is a proof event that's coming up I don't

live in L.A I can't go to it right well I would love to be able to make some money by renting out my nft and then somebody else can go but that's not the way this works because unless proof were to agree to this that they are the ones that control that access still right and again that's just because the limitations of the 721-1155 standards right like they're they're great for certain things but for True Financial Primitives like additional Tech like us need to build and innovate right and right that's why I always say like the community should be the ones not complaining but yelling

and screaming from the rooftops what they want right if you want to be able to lend out your asset you know there's essentially no excuse for the project because we have Plug and Play infrastructure that like the protocol fees set to zero even and we tailor all the functionality there's really no sweat off their back we can enable things like very quickly very easily um and also provide an additional Revenue stream for the project is the problem here that the nft holders don't own their metadata and they don't own the data of the nfts so this is why you have to go to the project like the actual like creators of the project no so the the actual issue is that the current nft standards have nothing built on a like ERC protocol level

um to do anything outside of transfer so like a seven two one collectible standard is really good for you know non-fungible unique like a collectible but if you have like you know a title to your home or something you're going to want to do a lot more things in there right and so the problem we run into is it has to be trustless so like we've built Solutions where you do have full custody it's generalized it can work anywhere but you know the the backstop there was collateral which cuts off from 99 of rental cases right if you have to put up and oftentimes over collateralizations assets are volatile um to actually rent the asset you know

it's it's the trust to return it so it's really just the pro it kind of just shows how early we are in the evolution of digital assets ultimately so are you guys looking to build a new standard something outside of erc721 that is an nft but maybe has the functionalities and the features to allow for Lending and renting and all this kind of stuff it's something we've toyed around with a lot right there's some standards out there that are exciting like there's 4907 we've been in an EIP working group for like two years on I think it's 21-15 or I forget the exact number but another one similar some of them we think have downfalls others are exciting for certain assets our thesis with standards is that like as these Assets in a technology are

adopted I think we'll really have segmented a horizontal standards in the same way you're seeing marketplaces evolve right like I think there will be gaming asset dedicated standards real world asset dedicated standards there'll be collectible standards like we have now um so we'll definitely like integrate and evolve with those over time but like there's a lot a project has to do to integrate a standard and think of it like this like you're moving off of where all the volume is like all your users are marketplaces don't support them like right so all your tooling is gone essentially to some degree and also you know existing collections need to now move their users to that standard

and you're never going to get uh you know with existing assets everyone over right because there's probably dead wallets some people might not even care they might not ever do it now you have two collections you have to maintain there's a lot to dive into there so I just want to I'm trying to think about the future of where this all goes and we'll get back to some of the use cases in a second I know we're sort of trying to beat around that but I think there's just so much to unpack here Jay mentioned um the idea of you know maybe he wants to go to an event or he can't attend an event and so you could basically go to like a Marketplace like I want to go to this event but I need a proof pass to do it is there a Marketplace that I can go

and like find a proof pass that is available to rent you know what I mean that doesn't really exist yet um but I'm wondering is that where this goes do you think in terms of renting where like you can just go on and it's like the I'm gonna say Blockbuster I don't know why that's the person that came to mind but basically you can go on and find a marketplace where you can start renting event tickets or gaming things and it's just like it's this free Open Marketplace is that eventually like obviously you can't do it now because what you're saying but is that where you see this eventually going or is that just not going to be possible 100 like um so we're we're in fact already like well on our way there so all we have a Marketplace on our side right a front

end it's it's not buying and selling it's strictly renting and lending right and we have dedicated custom Pages for each integration um so like we'll touch on one in a second we just did with castle crash which is seeing quite a bit of activity on a gaming side um but absolutely like what's exciting though is like re-nft we were white label integrating everywhere so like we're integrating directly into gaming marketplaces that are their own Market we're integrating into like broader aggregator level marketplaces those Integrations like are the key that unlock all of that right so you know how the re-nft platform itself will evolve over time is actually an aggregator of rental assets like in a way a blockbuster of all kinds of different

assets and then on the protocol side we will also be white label integrated into everyone's Marketplace so be it an in-game be it like an event specific side like you know every project is starting to spin up their own marketplaces but we can also enable this functionality pretty easily right in them if they're accepting that use right yeah and I guess we need you need the projects to also have the marketplace for this type of activity because I don't know that like that's where the users are going to be right the users are going to say okay I want to play Castle Crush they're gonna go to Castle Crush that's their user experience and then they're gonna say okay how do I

play this oh well I have to own an asset okay well I can't own an asset it's too expensive so it does need to be through that the own that ecosystem of the project at least for this to scale out to you know millions and billions so let's talk about Castle Crush for example you mentioned them there briefly what are you guys what are you doing for them and what do you I'm really curious to know what what are the numbers that you're seeing how much activity is there on the rental side totally yeah so uh castle crash is actually really exciting because it's the first time we've seen in the space the reverse happen which is castle crash is a very successful mobile game right they're about 100 million downloads

million and a half active players um and they've added nfts and it's developed by Wildlife Studios one of the largest mobile games to goes in the world um and so it's cool to see that right because they're they've started experimenting in enabling nfts on some of their cards instead of putting out an nft to raise to build the game right the products there ahead of time um they're they're live on Avalanche and so still like very minimal nft integration but it's it's sort of them stepping in getting their feet wet and then it will evolve over time so what we actually rolled out with them is our reward share solution so it's thinking of your traditional rental as the rental you all know right like I pay this much per day or per month and this is what I

get right in the reward share case which we're seeing a lot of in gaming Integrations is the reverse so no no upfront price they can enable one if they want but predetermined splits of some in-game rewards could be nfts could be erc20 like actual earned tokens could be like tournament payouts could be anything right it depends on the the actual gaming environment but with castle crash they their ACS token which isn't even live um like there's no real liquidity pool but it's you know there's there's people uh still playing you know to actually earn these payouts they're done daily every 24 hours there's a prize pool and so people are actually renting cards um with predetermined splits so like

your traditional guilds you know an 80 20 split and it's all automated completely trustless through reality so like whereas your traditional guilds are essentially you have a manager in between that takes anywhere from 20 to 30 percent manually tracking and sharing account password like it's a mess what what happens there we essentially like solve that scaling headache for them we allow like also democratize the ability for just people like you know myself who I own a bunch of gaming assets I might support the projects but I can't play every game right I also don't have time to run full-time business you know as a guild just to generate some yield on them right and like I'd also just like you know to give somebody else the

opportunity to experience it because otherwise it's just sitting in my wallet anyway um so that one's really exciting we're seeing um it went live just about a month ago um we're nearing just about 20 000 transactions on that integration um which is which is cool to see because it's also the ux isn't great yet and it's improving daily and there's very minimal nft integration in the game right now so like especially as that evolves it's going to get exciting very cool let's let's jump Kai do you have any more questions on the technical side or should we go back to the use cases let's go back to the use cases for now if we have any more questions in the technical we'll start all right okay so

we talked a bit about event tickets that one seems we've sort of covered that one seems pretty straightforward uh anybody doing that um with actual renting out or yeah like anybody is anybody actually like you know we brought up examples of like you know be friends you know are proof all these tons of nft projects are doing events but has have you seen anybody offer create a rental Marketplace for yeah I think we'll see we've talked with a lot of different like pfp projects like yeah that kind of thing anyone throwing an event the biggest thing has been the the actual because like your pfp project got an event it's kind of like well how are they reacting how are

they token dating how are they recognizing holders at the door is it a physical Hardware right being like really really Innovative companies like token proof kind of took over in it yeah we see with this like we've talked with a lot of those projects and their biggest thing was we haven't figured out yet how do you get the token getting right yeah so like I think over the next year you'll see that come alive with us um it's it's a little further out for sure because that's the token getting is just getting solved right so we can solve the actual like we just have to integrate with the token gating platform right for sure we were talking about that with I think it was ECC where it was unlock protocol I think did their tickets and they had to use these like QR codes and email the tune I was like I

see what they're trying to do but it's just it's not quite there it doesn't seem like you really need an nft for this but I think it will get there and it will be really good but I don't know I don't know who's gonna fix that but it's needed especially if it's if it's painful you're not going to do it if it's painful right yeah yeah unless unless your web 3 Enthusiast and we'll we'll do anything it doesn't matter what the ux is we're in okay what about virtual land that's that's really interesting one to me paint us the picture of how somebody might rent virtual land totally so obviously like you know I spent almost two and a half years at the sandbox in like the early days and I saw a lot going on there virtual land and I think there's a lot

of opinions around open ecosystems paid land all these different things but nonetheless like there's going to be these mini Manhattans within virtual environments and even if the land was free initially there's probably going to be some owner of something you know building where the experiences are is is my personal thesis right like you're going to have more traffic to certain areas you know like there's there's different if you look at like what brands have done in a Roblox right like Vans world is the most popular brand experience in Roblox some absurd amount of like tens of millions of active users on it playing right so what's that actual underlying land where the experience is built worth um you know to be determined but uh

virtual land I think is very exciting because on one hand it's it's essentially taking what you know in the modern world translating it digitally you have a landlord or you might um you have somebody that owns underlying property and they rent it out to people and if it's in a more exciting area a more you know active area it's going to be worth more you know if you're out in the country it's probably worth less you know and so these kind of things within virtual environments I think will take shape over time as we you know it might be five years but as we spend more and more time in these environments hubs are going to be set up and places that people want to spend their time and naturally that digital land or area or whatever you want to call it the experience is going to

become more valuable and there's going to be like rental cases within that like you know like digital Billboards even on that land um you know the land itself different items on the land um you know maybe there's an entry fee charged to the land and you know there could be a creator that wants to set up an experience on the land we could integrate our reward share product where they're paid out a percentage of their earnings if it does well if it doesn't there's sort of no sweat off anyone's back so I know that's a lot but I think we haven't seen the full evolution of digital spaces but we're living in the midst of it and right now your digital space is Twitter Instagram Facebook uh you know Zoom but eventually it will it will become much more compelling we

gotta rent out a little space in our Zoom too for this podcast I am right yeah yeah can we tokenize this zoom and then rent out access to it how do I do that we could assign some nfts to time slots and then yeah there you go yeah I like it so you'll be able to rent land and then basically you can either like you said you can either choose like you know you pay a certain amount a month or a certain amount of year just like with the real world or you could program it so that whatever revenues are made on that land you could just share it with the owner and instead you could do it that way I guess as well right exactly and then that's all done on chain right and right exactly and then it becomes also exciting for

creators right to actually earn income for what they're contributing like you see this in Roblox to some extent and some of these metaverses where you know it's different currencies they don't actually own anything can be shut down in a heartbeat but there's real businesses being built in these spaces I just got to pick your brain because I feel like you're someone who's really dove into this I this idea of virtual land being worth a lot of money do you think that this is long-term going to you would you would yeah do you really think that this is going to be a thing that plays out in the future or like I see some places potentially but I think that we're going to be teleporting all over the metaverse

we're not going to be like walking along because that's the one thing everyone hates in the real world is you're wasting time walking from one place to the next like why would we do that digitally when I can just type in a location or click on a location and just like teleport there right so that really removes I think a lot of the idea of land having having value except for in specific experiences I do see that what are your thoughts there I'm just curious it depends on the experience I think the the short and honest answer is it depends what's happening on the land do I think they should all start off valuable no okay right like I think value is created like and again like my background is in a lot of boxing games

like Minecraft style like right and so in Minecraft take that as a perfect example everyone has land like it's fast it's open it's free but if you create a compelling server you could charge people memberships just to have a a username like a purple in the experience right and so I think that's how it evolves personally like we've seen it a few times over and it then your planned whatever it is becomes more valuable because of what you built on it because people are attracted to it it's fun it's engaging it's exciting maybe Snoop Dogg popped up and performed in it whatever right like that is how I think people drive value is from like actual use rather than hey it's here but I think

also there's a balance we had like if it is a the top game or metaverse that everyone wants to be in and they have finite land in certain places it's gonna have a value because they have the best experiences right you might have a bunch of free land over here but nobody really cares because like they don't know how to build something engaging right right okay interesting appreciate that I had to pause the uh the idea of renting and just get that off my chest uh okay we talked about two other use cases we gotta we got I think we got enough time to dive into them or at least a little bit you mentioned temporary assets and subscriptions is that the

same or as those two separate use cases yeah I think we can kind of bundle them like temporary assets is a rental as a whole um but for time's sake I think we kind of bundle them together okay okay so let's talk about subscriptions then because that's pretty interesting yeah so I think subscriptions we're starting to see some evolution of this and we haven't built too many ways of doing it at nft yet like in the past we have way back like we built at a hackathon for instance say nft with a a recurring payment flow that you know you the nft is revoked if you don't have if you don't pay your bill essentially okay um and I think we're going to see a lot of those like Patron Style patreon style like Creator engagement methods like one

of the things nfts are allowing is to actually put a value on like creativity content and culture right because it's the first time you've been able to assign something to that and as a Creator be it a YouTuber Instagram influencer whatever like they want more ways to engage with their dedicated fan bases and those dedicated fan bases are willing to pay more to have ways to engage with them like look at like you know even like as bad as it sounds even like only fan style models right like hey for gated content to feel more personable with somebody they look up to or follow or enjoy to whatever extent um and I think subscriptions within nfts

get really exciting there and we'll see more and more creators spin up these communities where their users can take their membership and sell if you know it's not exciting to them anymore and they're actually paying for subscription to even have that nft right like we're seeing the royalties debate get really interesting subscriptions is a different uh Revenue generation model right where you still have an underlying asset that the user sure they don't like outright own it but they do as long as they're paying this description and there has to be some incentive for the Creator to keep creating like people have to pay their bills right so it's it's definitely like nuanced and it's very infant stages but I think it's a different take on a rental

um another one I'll touch there quickly is subscription pools so like this is something we're experimenting with take a gaming case and a subscription pool combine it together say I have 10 skins in fortnite well I can pay to have access to a pool that a thousand users all put a skin into and maybe there's different tiers if I put in 10 skins it's really cheap or it's free and anyone has access to those where they can actually use them and wear from the pool right to kind of kind of like Rent the Runway style model which is doing billions a year just or using other people's fashion right so with subscriptions it's something we've been talking about a lot uh because our marketing agency works

completely with subscription-based uh customer subscription-based businesses and we're we're really excited about this in web 3 as well where you can have an nft so you actually own your subscription and let's say you pay for an entire year but you're done with your subscription you can just sell it and otherwise in web 2 you can't do that you're kind of screwed right how how does lending make sense here or are you just saying that something you guys have built with re-nft enables these nft subscriptions are you saying that I could also have an entity subscription and then also lend that out to someone else or how does that work yeah so yeah I guess I'm thinking more like we talk about it more as a different take it's like a glorified rental of sorts right you're like renting use that you're paying it's sort of a backwards rental

almost so like we focus less and less on like defining use cases and more on building the tools for to enable cases for people to experiment with like I think subscriptions there's a lot of different ways to take it but you could right like maybe you want to maybe you you want to take a month off of your podcast subscription right like there's probably somebody that's like hey I kind of want to check this out I want to see if it's worthwhile right but they also have to make money that that actual podcast um so there's different ways to frame it but but yeah we we don't think of it like your traditional rental if I bought like an Amazon Prime for you know membership for a year and I'm like

I'm actually gonna be out of the country I can't even use my Canadian Amazon Prime and I go hey you want to rent it for me for like half the price or something like that that way I'm not selling it I'm not getting rid of it I'm not giving away my nft or even selling nft but I'm just like you can use it for a couple months while I'm gone that's actually kind of sweet I like that I never thought of it before think about it like this how many people do you know that share Netflix accounts yeah right yeah or they usually add six profiles right like that right there it like they on the surface you might think well you're taking away from a lot of their revenue because they just earn on idle time which to some extent might be true but there's probably a case to be made

that more people that that consumers are smarter they're you know they're leveraging things like that where hey I'll just put my whole family on one account hmm I still use my parents Netflix 50 years old I'm still using it I I use I use my best friend's Netflix I've been on it forever I don't even know why he still pays for me to be honest with his family like everybody has to contribute a Hulu account yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah but what's interesting too is okay so like let's take that a step further you might say well okay if the project is the one if Amazon has to decide if they're going to allow their users to rent out their

subscription you probably say well why the heck would Amazon do that right like they want profit but what about if we think of it from the perspective of retention well we are Amazon says yeah we'll let you direct we'll allow you to rent it out once a year maybe one month a year or something like that as a retention tool so you feel more ownership you feel more tied to us and maybe you're more likely to bring a new user on because you're now a sales person basically going around being like okay I got this nft for rent anybody want to rent it so I could see I could see interesting marketing tools and retention tactics at play totally it's

it's a different take on a free trial almost exactly and also that also like incentivizes your users and keeps them happy right versus just canceling because you don't care anymore or whatever yeah so there's a lot to dive into there some make a lot of sense some make no sense but um that's the kind of exploration that we're excited about okay I gotta ask uh Kai You Gotta you got a question go for it Jay go for it okay I gotta ask about uh the crypto Punk rental leasing I believe it's called um protocol or standard that you created because this is very interesting because it's you made this for the crypto Punk ecosystem it seems to be it's being used uh so tell us tell us a little bit about

about this yeah so actually I think we built that a year and a half ago maybe a bit more now and it it started as a marketing stint in a marketing tool so like super close with a lot of the punk OG guys specifically actually um a guy named Capricorn on Twitter very popular punk collector um he had this idea and he went to another friend you guys might be familiar G money on Twitter he was a friend of ours he came to us and said hey there's this interesting concept could it be built on for free nft we're like hmm that's that's interesting right this notion of delegating rights right so like what is the kind of like thesis and the question was well what is a vouch worth from

somebody notable right like g-money's you know it's like you're in the space if he's delegating a punk to you in a way it's like more powerful than a blue check mark right some to some regards so is this kind of like social experiment that went nuts and uh let me tell you like stirred up quite the controversy on both sides right people on one hand are like why the hell would I ever rent this like renting a Lambo it's like well that happens and then on the other side people were like wow this is interesting like you know we did to give an example we did a competition Fuji money where he gave rights to his alien crypto Punk which is worth what you know 10 million dollars or whatever at the time for somebody to actually use it as their pfp and give those IP rights

for it was like a week or 10 days right and so like that person's follower account actually skyrocketed because they were like being accounted for buying money right and so uh it wasn't necessarily like us trying to show this is how rentals should be used but more so there's there's rights attached to nfts whether you know it or not and like social credit and identity is very valuable and important and nfts are putting a value on that for the first time ever and so we saw like some some interesting experiments compliment you know some of the punk guys still use it and uh it was it was a fun one for sure like hypebeast picked it up a bunch of like random Publications and it was like the new digital Flex uh narrative it's

interesting to see how would one see that you like let's say G money rents or lends me out his crypto Punk how does someone even know that like or is it because then I can go and can I go and make my Twitter profile and make it verified that I have that that one so that wasn't even around back then yeah right true um but the so what it is is we built a platform and the the crypto punks contract is very old like it's predates 721 right and so we couldn't you know you also don't want to Escrow a 10 million dollar asset if possible especially us at the time so we what we built is like a we actually utilized the sale function in the contract it gets fairly technical

but we basically made a um like a a code of sorts that like shows you put it if you put it for sale like this like it was putting it for sale for like nine trillion dollars but what it was actually doing is then like it's an on-chain right of saying like this address is giving it to this address for this amount of time and you could decipher it based off the price and so then on our platform it was just reading all that and deciphering it and you can see on that platform is crypto Punk rent crypto Punk dot rent was the domain still up and you could see like kg money gave it to this person for this amount of time so it's like it's really IP the first case of delegating IP rights it's funny that you guys are building

not not you guys specifically I'm sure what re-nft is doing is is very sophisticated and incredible now but it's just funny that you know these are like 10 million nfts and you guys are building this like janky code to like do these different things just this space is just it blows my mind yeah yeah exactly it's so cool um I'm curious as we start to wrap up here is there others in this space that are doing this tell me a little bit like our re-nft it sounds like you know you guys are on a per project basis this isn't like a scalable product yet sounds like you're trying to work on that other others that are also trying to to do this and um maybe just talk about the space right now in terms of rental entities yeah totally um we've so I guess like we're the first

and oldest right and we've been doing it the longest we've seen the problems we recognize them and we like we understand them well right like I think we're starting to see a lot of newer competitors spin up which we welcome like there's I think plenty of market share to go around and like people should be innovating at the core of this but like we the biggest thing an advantage of us is we recognize that rentals are a one size fits most in current state and they will be for the foreseeable future and like we get deep down and dirty with each project right like we build functionality for them use Dev resources tailor different things there's some protocols that are building and saying hey use it that doesn't really work uh I think it's a little bit of a dream especially in these kind of

times we're seeing a lot of those people reevaluate their their thesis and and whatnot but in general like we we definitely support you know the standards like you have rentable who's creating the four um 4907 standard we welcome it like we'll adopt it as it makes sense as well in different cases um and um but yeah like we we're probably definitely the only protocol that recognizes and will tailor functionality for each project and like that's ultimately what they want is we've talked with games like down the ladder to pfp projects like in everything in between on what actually makes sense for them I gotta say I really appreciate your your openness to work with others and

it's such a it's such a unique part of the of the web Theory space is just this belief in and maybe it's because we're early and there's a lot of blue ocean but I hope it's also because we're we want to create a more open source technology and we want to work with each other and we want to collaborate and there isn't so much of this uh mind mind uh view that leads to have more I think a lot of people forget that like uh we all need to make this there's so few of us working on this technology relative to the rest of the world that it takes us all to make anything meaningful and actually have users for any of us to survive right so true uh any anything else around

re-nft you want to tell us about uh maybe where can people find you uh any exciting projects you got coming up that you want to shill or you want to let people know about I would love to hear about that definitely yeah check us out our website's re-nft renaft.io um I encourage like any project Founders that think there's exciting rental applications like we are the Plug and Play infrastructure we can do essentially anything we get a centralized decentralized as a project needs reach out to us uh we're also on all chains eth Avalanche polygon Solana down the list um as well like encourage community members to get involved we have a mission Astro program where you can earn rewards nfts get involved in gaming

projects all kinds of fun and exciting things so yeah the the typical check us out get involved reach out and we'll let you know how we can we can hopefully help you awesome we'll put uh all the links in the show notes we'll link to your Twitter as well uh or your DMs open if somebody reaches out on Twitter yeah definitely all right there you go you heard it first yeah not you spam Bots get out of here not white listing you okay uh love we love to wrap up with a speed round uh so let's jump into that first question what's an nft you'll never sell that's a good one well like one of

definitely my my rare Kongs from Rumble Khan it's a it's a double life of mine and then um also I have some some crypto kitties from way back um so I know that's expected too but definitely those two you're not gonna sell the crypto kitties because they're valuable or because they're sensitive so it's a Sentimental thing I don't even know if I could sell them quite honestly I was gonna say I don't think there's much liquidity there yeah there's like five million or whatever it is now um but uh and then the green ft Genesis card Astro cat like the people in our community know uh what's going on there and so those are those are my three never never cool I thought your answer

was gonna be that you'd never sell any because you can just rent them all out with three nft these hours in this opportunity I'd like to change my mind you can tell like Kyle's a marketer uh any upcoming projects that you're excited about a lot like we're seeing so many compelling games finally that we're pumped about the next six to eight months in gaming are going to blow everyone's Minds out of the water in maybe a year we'll call it but um true game like development Studios not your D5 ponzis with the skin are coming they've been coming and uh like it's it's a it's an as an exciting times ever

like just to throw one in the mix that I'm I've been playing I recently played the pre-alph of fable born which is coming to Avalanche I think that one's really cool they actually have a fun product that's a different spin um so yeah but a lot of a lot of cool games finally sweet yeah super exciting I feel like we've been saying six to 12 months for for now for a while but I believe you I hope it actually is six to 12 months this time okay last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it if I took re-nft out of it for a second yeah I'll lead with that I think I would put uh and if nfts are just Tech like oh

yes I like that powered by Rihanna at the bottom yeah yeah nice nice and her teeth are just bad I say that every single week and I roll up and uh I love that well done yeah more people need to realize so yeah stop getting mad at nfts they didn't do anything to you they're only helping awesome Nick this has been a blast thanks so much for stopping in it's been really enjoyable learning all about the use cases and re-nft and yeah really excited to see where this goes because there is certainly millions of use cases that will be coming for this Tech so thanks for thanks for building infrastructure for

the space we need we need more Founders like you appreciated and likewise like thanks for having me really really appreciate the time shout out to your guys's Community as well and um you know I think we need more education in this space and I think this is the best outlet for it so uh thanks for having me on thanks Nick thank you have a great day everybody thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 Journey if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do

that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one