How Courtyard is moving physical collectibles onchain

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web 3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm jird joined by my co-host Kyle rehead and we believe that realworld assets on chain are going to change the world that's why we're carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3 and today we had nickless from Courtyard and I'll be honest what a relief this episode was first of all but second of all it's often hard to find use cases on chain that are like just so obvious right like stable coins is one of them we always talk about that which technically is a real world asset if

we're talking fiia backed ones but that it's sometimes like iffy like is that better on chain is it not like we always find the reasons why they are this one bringing trading cards or collectibles on chain is so obvious this was one of my favorite episodes and in Courtyard probably is one of my favorite like businesses that are building on chain right now because what they're doing is just like they're using the tech the way it's meant to be used they're abstracting with the tech people don't realize it but the tech just makes using Collectibles just so much better it removes so much friction it extracts a lot more value to the people that have them in terms of they want to sell them Etc it's just it's a win-win win for everyone and I'd love to see that it's really really cool I think this might be

the best use case this might be the best use case for on chain that we have heard and I and I don't just mean Pokémon cards and Nicholas tells a great story of how they initially started uh Courtyard what the focus was how they built cyard how they contacted Brinks and got Brinks involved there's something that I think that you don't understand until you listen to this episode that moving a collectible a physical collectible like a pair of shoes or a watch or a piece of art or Pokemon cards moving that on chain not only does that make that collectible easier to buy sell and trade like I think we all get that it also has the

potential in the future to make that collecting experience way better and way more social and way more engaging and add so much more to that to being a collector which I don't I didn't even really fully get that until this episode yeah but there was a point every once in a while we have episodes where like there's a point where I think both of us are just like oh I see it now and I definitely had that this when I realized like once you put it on chain or once you put it digital but you need to have it on chain to put it digital is the key takeaway here but once it goes on chain of digital it's like an extension of that physical product where now you can do so much more with it and especially when you include AR glasses it no longer

is like it's going in a in a vault and I never see it again when you include tokenizing it and then putting it into AR well all of a sudden it comes back to life again but in a way that is like endless right and you can do so much more with it than even what you could in the physical world if you're not following just watch this episode and you're going to be like whoa this is huge and you can apply this to way more than just cards to basically anything in the physical world so wow I'm bullish if I mean let's just get into the episode because I think Nicholas explains it better than us but whether you're investor in the space whether you're a builder there is so much to understand from this episode and to learn before we jump in we'll just take

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be the highlight of Q3 that was definitely not on my bingo card this year so much to discuss about everything you guys are building at Courtyard before we do though you've such a great way of explaining why is onchain better for physical Collectibles than the current way that we manage physical Collectibles that's a great question it's funny because we initially thought of it as we're going to bring physical collectible and bring them on chain and we recently shifted that to kind of realizing what problem we're solving and what I noticed is with the rise of nfts we' seen what a proper digital collecting experience should be what I mean by that is with nfts you can see

what people have in their collection you can make offers on assets even if they're not for sale you can send an nft within a second somebody at the other side of the world just without having to do a transaction you can just send it to them and so this liquidity and this way of like collecting digitally where you could have communities online that hold different assets and you can only access that Community if you have one of those assets those are really like a a core value and a core thing that I think we want to bring to the physical world because right now in the traditional collecting experience in the physical world you have to buy assets on platforms it takes time for them to come to you you might not be able to buy a collectible from somebody who if you're

in the US who lives in Japan just because it doesn't make sense from a like geographical location to send that assets there's t uh like custom fees to to be sent and so on so we thought of it as let's bring all the good thing that the nft has brought to the collecting world and bring it to the traditional world so that's the the first main reason is it's just a better experience and it feels more liquid you can really manage a collection in your pocket and bring it anywhere with you rather than to leave it in your closet and the second piece is the beauty with blockchain is everything is in the public Ledger and the advantage of of it is anyone can build on top of you that's what I love about it because there is so

many companies that specialize into one specific use case of the technology and you don't need to build everything yourself so there are places that specialize in againg liquidity there's places that specialize in fractionalizing assets some people who focus on like collateralized lending and we can use all of those platforms directly because it just works with the technology we're using and so this interoperability between different platforms I think is key the fact that you can use in different marketplaces as well so you could sell your por chart assets on cchart but you can if you prefer to use another platform you can also trade on those platform access those other liquidities and so because of that I think it's really the next

level of collecting that can be brought by that that new technology that that was not there before and we can really focus on being the best platform at bringing those assets providing the best Market Marketplace experiences but anybody could build technically on top of us so people could even build game on top of us you can just verify that people own those specific Assets in your in their wallet and build a game on top of it so I think that's a really powerful way of approaching it and that was not possible before before web 3 it's like Mike drop onchain is better than online thanks you've solved the problem well done it's so when you say it like that it's so simple and so obvious I mean it just makes sense right just better and when you go to

traditional collectors at conferences or card conference that we focus on cards right so when you go to card conference and you just explain to them like hey actually this is my whole collection and if you want you could give me $50 and I send you the card to your account and now you have it you don't need to carry it everywhere with you it is better it works better and as the world is going more and more digital the the question is like are people going to be more online in 10 years than they are today and if the answer is yes we need to be able to bring that digital that collecting experience into the digital world in a better way and so that's where we are working on to to bring that when when you go to these card conferences just curious what's the

take that people when you go up to them and you say this or you guys are pitching this idea to people that aren't like crypto natives or web3 natives like do they get it or are they like this doesn't make any sense to me the fun story is they get it without having to mention the word nft or crypto right nice there's a a kind of a negative connotation with nfts because of the the rise and fall of nfts and like some people seeing with a lot of like scams that happened lot of Ponzi schemes and so on and so we leverage it web 3 and nfts as a technology more like a backend that allows to do everything I just mentioned before they are not specially interested in that piece but they just see how the platform works and it just works and it's just better and it looks

and feels better and because of that they understanding they just like that makes sense I'm tired of like having those super high feet you get the car sometimes you get lost and so we have a lot of those frustration that have built up in the last few years with people collecting us similar to when web 3 went up a lot collecting went up a lot as well so cards watches and so on have all seen a rise in value and people have seen those as a nice way to to put the money in and collect and so there there's kind of this Resurgence on this yeah you've touched on a bunch of points there that I think we're going to dive deeper into this episod episode The interoperability and composability layer is something I'm excited to chat about

more towards the end of this episode but I think it's something that people don't necessarily see because it's we're still so early we haven't seen the potential yet so we'll talk about that uh but I want to come back to the beginning uh because you guys have a very interesting story at C Courtyard you didn't necessarily find your Niche or your uh inflection point of of growth right away and I think a lot of Founders have that feeling you know you start a business you have a vision you have a mission and you go after it and the market doesn't necessarily respond you don't find product Market fit as quickly as you would like can you just sort of walk us through the origin story of Courtyard what your initial Focus was and how this

shift has happened to finding this niche of currently being Pokemon cards and obviously extending beyond that into physical Collectibles as well definitely great question I keep on mentioning to to my team and in general that launching a startup is like getting slapped in the face every day for like two years until like yeah like two years or more until like you you keep on iterating until you find something that actually people are interested in you you dive deeper into that the way we approach things is really we don't approach those as oh it's a failure there's no interest on it it's more like we're learning this is not thing and so that's a check and so now we can move on because we have that knowledge that this didn't work and so we should focus on something else so

it's kind of like we have all those hypothesis that we get from get filling knowledge of the market and so on seeing what could be improved and we see like is that an interest we've done thata Convention as well like we've done things like selling Digital model of people that we just pay to get their whole Assets digitized in the 3D model and that was a failure like we did something with like different launches and so on that were a failure and so approaching those as kind of like let's see what the market is interesting inating very quickly to find like something that they're interested in so to come back to the the origin story of core chart it was two years ago actually close to two years ago next week it's going to be two years so that's we incorporated the company so I wanted to

launch a company I had different ideas and this is was at the beginning of like really the boom of nfts it was before Bard it was at the time of hash mask so prior to a lot of like the huge boom we've seen and I really saw nfts as a way of like proving ownership anywhere you want so you can really go to any platform and say I own that thing and we thought of it as like why don't we tie it to something physical that would be stored and insured in a very secure place and then you will be able to trade that digital asset in any other platform and whoever owns it can say I own it they prove that they own it in a digital form and then we would allow for Redemption we would use it as kind of like a proof of ownership that you would

destroy if we ship it to you and then you can redeem it anywhere in the world how the the second piece was about trust so we thought of it like who is the most trusted company that we think that we know of that would be like able to store those assets because why would you trust this startup with your highly value Collectibles that you care so much about because they're collectibles so you have a more than it's more than financial right like you have a like sometimes like a a big affection for for those assets and so we thought of it actually I have a a little truck for those who don't know with thought of it as like Brinks the security company you see those this is one with with pchart so we reached out to Brinks explain to them that we we're this team we have a pretty

good Tech background so I came from Google my co-founder from Apple and we're we were a bunch of people from um from Big Tech with this idea of like this is the future for collecting and we want to leverage your facilities for that and so it worked out well brings sended up investing in us some incubator we went through y combinator raise money and then we were off to the start to to start Courtyard walk us through a little bit further of what that looks like so more on like the terms of how the product works at Courtyard before we go go into more things but I have a collectible let's say it's I don't know a rare Michael Jordan rookie card or some Pokemon card or whatever and I want to put it on chain I'm not sending it to Courtyard I'm sending or bricks is

coming I assume to pick it up from my house and then they're what putting it in their vault and then you guys are then tokenizing it throwing it on chain and now you can do whatever you want with it onchain but it always kind of lives in the branks like Vault can you walk us through that a little bit further and help people wrap their head around how this how the physical thing connects to the digital nft definitely so our main focus for the last six months has been increasing the amount of asset on chain because as a Marketplace you need to have assets to be able to get the demand for this right and we we're kind of at that inflection point right now where we have about like a close to 100 transaction a day on the marketplace so a lot more liquidity

starting to come and we have about 200 to like 500 new assets coming in every week by users so it it is not with an armor truck armor truck we we've done some hour truck but then you need to have it doesn't make sense if it's not like a 100K plus of asset so we've done some AR truck pickup it it doesn't make sense on that end so we made it as simple as possible for users so on the platform you can click on the tokenize button and we essentially you provide your collection how many assets you have we only deal with graded assets right now graded cards you have a flow where you say how many assets and so on what's the value we ensure those assets and it's a USBS packaging slip that we create for you so

within two clicks you get the SPs you print it put it on the box send it it goes directly to the Vault facility they have a processing facility to receive packages that separate to the Vault because we don't want to give the address of the Vault of course and so a Brinks employee with a camera opens the package tracks the shipping number and based on the shipping ID we know to what account it relates to takes the card scans the cards we do the 3D model we put it in the vault and then now you have that nft in your account you can do whatever you want with it you can use it in other platform you can trade it you can grow your collection and we're going to do a lot more through that so this is the the main process on how things

typically work I would say like the majority of assets are done either through user sending us cards or we Source cards ourselves and we do things we're going to talk about it but we do those drops which is similar to when you open a pack of cards of Pokemon cards or whatever cards you have you open it and you don't know what you're going to get behind so we use the technology to provide this digital pack opening experience where you have a card inside it's all fairly transparent so there is a randomization on chain through chain analysis chaining sorry chaining random creates a random number that defines which pack you're going to get and we are able to create those digital packs you buy a pack you don't know what about

like what cards you're going to get there are card of various range of value and you can keep it Clos resell it close or open it and so we have a lot of people getting assets through that and so the the last piece as well I forgot to mention it but it's been growing a lot people are buying directly from eBay sending directly to the Vault on this because we have a lot of people from International crowd as well that are shipping cards directly buying from eBay and sending to the Vol so meaning the person selling it someone buys this and then they say hey can you send it to Brinks not to me and then it gets to Brinks then they tokenize it and now it's onchain yeah interesting and what if you want to claim it so the other end of it now I i' I bought it off the

marketplace but I'm like I want this thing in my house do I burn the nft and then it gets shipped over to me or how does that work so we have a whole process for that so you would see the assets in your account so you will see like we notify you when the assets receive it brings and so on it gets to your account then you have the option to list it if you want to list it you will accept offers you will receive the offers that people sent to you and then you have a button that's called redeem where when you click on redeem you select all the assets you want you put the country of where you're located and so what we do we do upon Redemption we do kyc so you need to go through a kyc the first time to make sure you are who

you are and we collect a shipment fee for Redemption and as well as sales tax if there are sales tax so if you buy about an asset we would need to collect sales tax for the last transaction for instance if you live in France there is a vat tax and it doesn't go through customs if we don't pay that VT tax so we collect that from you and we pay it on your behalf for the users but we do redemptions the advantage of working with brins is they have a network of 150 plus countries and they are used to sell actually gold bar anywhere in the world on this and so we are able to scale our operation to do Redemption close to country that most of our users are I think there are a few country that are

not allowed for those type of redemptions and we had Redemption I think in 18 plus country so wow it's an incredible idea and Jay I know you're about to jump but I just have one last question on the brink side of things when you went to them and you pitch the this I know you said they invest in you so obviously they they must have thought it was a good idea but like did they think it was a good idea from the beginning or did you have to do a lot of convincing or were they like what are you talking about you want to use nfts and tokenize Pokemon cards like what's going on what was their reaction I think it's more of you have all those assets that sits in in vaults right uh primarily gold but like you have all those assets that are not moving and

actually there are some Market sale from like large holder that sell to each other and sometimes just move from one place to the other inside the Vault but there's not really a platform that allows for that transaction liquidity happening on top of it right so I think they they saw it as a way of like this is it future when it comes to like owning things and it's a new segment and opportunity for it's a new type of assets right Collectibles and so they saw it and we had like some big Champions at braks that really saw the future of it it was at the time as well where everybody was looking to build things regarding web 3 and so it was kind of this new future of like this is

where the world is going now a lot of it has moved to AI but I still believe like there's a lot going with web but yeah so they were a team that you were able to to take a bet on us and uh and yeah cool congrats it's awesome it's interesting that you bring up this concept of gold bars being in vaults and this extends to many high value items that basically sit in vaults have very low liquidity it's very difficult to buy sell trade them and I'm curious when you first started Courtyard obviously Pokemon cards was not the focus in the beginning I don't believe that was the focus at least what

was the initial Focus that you guys went after what was the initial mission and vision and how has that changed throughout the past two years of building this business so funny enough it was the focus initially so yeah so I thought of it so we saw like our Market was like the nft crowd right and I thought of it that what is something that most of that demographic used to have and I used to have Pokemon card as a kid and it's a lot of nostalgia and now a lot of a lot of those people have disposable income and they love to collect and they learn this passionate for collecting similar to baseball card that are worth now millions and millions of dollars vintage baseball card because

people that not have a lot of money want those and there's less and less of those right and I do believe like Pokemon cards is a similar type of assets where our generation which is I would say like the 25 year old to like the year old person who used to have those back in the day when they were a kid now those assets have appreciated a lot in value and so that it just made so much sense plus it's TCG it's a bit geek key so people that are in this new type of Technology love love those type of assets and so the the way we started I had no money funding at the time I have a very good friend who was an engineer at at Tesla and basically led me $500,000 to buy a card so the way I

did we we made a cont we made a contract that we were like all the cards belong to you if we don't sell out you can get the cars there are liquid assets you can resell them and so on and so I literally got the money and went ahead and bought $500,000 cards so I didn't have that much experience in buying high volume of cars now I do but so yeah we bought those cards and we did a drop at the time so close to two years ago we did a drop of unrevealed card so we got this pack you didn't know what you were going to get it was on polygon we didn't have a Marketplace and I believe the drop sold in like something like an hour and a half or two hours so we were able to sell them all and that was really the

the start of it after that we moved to different type of assets we did something with sneakers we try to work with different brands as well to see if we can provide more of a infrastructure for physically back assets and really the thing that changed the game for us was to realize like we're a consumer brand we are the best Marketplace for cars right now we want to focus on people talking about the assets themselves rather than the technology because the challenge if you focus too much on like we're selling physically back nfts most of the users who will buy it are interested in the tech but they might buy one Pokemon card they might buy two Pokemon cards because it's cool look I have an asset an nft that's

backed but they are not passionate about the Pokemon cards themselves and so now we really move the switch tool let's abstract the tech so if you go to our Marketplace we completely abstracted like you can be with credit cards there's no gas fee everything is in dollar like completely abstracting the tech if you don't care about the tech but if you care about the tech you can bring your own wallet we we provide a lot of feature for like more advanced users on this but moving the focus to that to really like let's talk about what we're selling which is really awesome cool collectible that you used to have before and let's making fun to collect them and that's really when like we saw like a a rise in terms of like traffic or demand and and so on who are the customers are they more crypto

native are they more new customers do you have any data on that we do so so I would say the majority right now I would say it's the majority on traditional nft collectors who have a new f for the cars they had before the interesting piece is a lot of it is happening through credit card because we're we're on polygon maybe they have eth to complicate to Bridge and so on we're working on features so that you can buy everything regardless the the chain regardless of what assets you have like working on features so that anybody can just buy it directly but yeah so the I would say the majority is web PR user but now that we have a lot more cars some cars are really well priced as well we see a lot more Web Two users starting

to get on the platform because we abstracted the whole web free things and they just like the way it use and so we see that when people understand the platform and start using it they're like this is just it works it's better and so they start using so we see a very high retention rate of users when we start on the platform and what's the the business model is it fees in the marketplace like kind of like how openc or something would do or do you guys have some other way of of monetizing this yeah so we see we have a pretty L Redemption rate so less than 1% right and so assets are so liquid that the transaction can happen very quickly so we see much more transaction happening so actually much lower in transaction fee we only take 6% transaction fee that all in all 6% if

you look at the EB it's about like 13 plus percent plus you have shipping costs and so on so we created this place where now you have all of those assets that are staying there and just being traded all in all afterwards so that's the first piece we also have the drops where we sell assets and so we are able to Source assets below market price in bulk and then sell them at market value in a close pack actually and what about the fees to tokenize the I said like if I send it in there's got to be a c cost associated with that I would assume because otherwise I could tokenize it then go to like I don't know openc and sell it and then you guys are making nothing of is there not a fee associated with the tokenizing aspect too so we

would make a fee on openc as well so like there will be like on the royalty side as well so right now and I want to keep it this way like we see that the assets when they get in like people tend to lit them in and so we are lowering as much barrier to entry to get onto the platform so we're not actually making you pay cryto caniz so we taking on all of the C we're VC funded startup of course so there's a cost of acquisition to put assets on the platform but we are limiting as much friction as POS we're creating as as little friction as possible for you to put your asset on chain so that's why we we even get to the shipping label we even get to like the insure piece everything is free on that end and if I may a new user or I

guess maybe actually the better question is how many people coming to Courtyard right now are coming with their own wallet versus how many are setting up a wallet through Courtyard do you have Stouts yes so anyone gets a wallet instantly so regardless if you're a web twer web twer you get a wallet so you log in with Google or with an email we automatically create a wallet for you what you can do is you can link your additional wallet and have two ass two wallets in your account and then you can decide which one you want to set as priority but any assets on either of those wallet will show on your account so if you have two assets on your web three wallet and two assets on your cor chard wallet you will have four assets on your account we do that so that you

don't have to worry about it but you can still bring your whole experience your whole wallet to the platform so right now we have I would say about like 30 to 40 I would need to look at the the data 30 to 40 people percent of the people have two wallets their account wow those new wallets that are being set up are you calling them wallets are you calling them accounts like do they feel like a crypto wallet or it's a noncustodial wallet it's a non-custodial wallet so I'm happy to to show you and do a quick demo if you want but like it's a non-custodial wallet you can receive like usdc from it like you can send usdc to it you can send any sort of currency to it you can only use it within the core chart ecosystem right but you can

easily transfer it to somebody else you guys are using privy Tech to uh build that right that's right yeah we we're using pre Tech which has been awesome to to work with yeah we just had um Henry from privy on the podcast and he went through all the details of how the Walt works and everything and so we're we're very familiar which is super cool we absolutely love it and I think it makes like you said try to remove as much friction as possible from the user from the end user and it abstract away all of the web three related Tech as as possible and that's how we're going to go mainstream so it's really cool and speaking of mainstream how big is the is the Tam of trading card traders or holders or collectors I guess it's called any idea how many people are

using that how many cards are out there like what kind of market share are you guys working with so when you look at Pokemon card only it's about $4.6 billion do trading cards right now is about $22 billion and so it is a big time and then you have so many different categories actually you can have things like comic books you could have sneakers coin is surprisingly bigger than trading cards so graded coins is actually bigger than trading C it's a bit of a older like is it like like a quarter or like a looney like a yeah old collectible coin old coins there's so many different types of coin gold coins and so on like it's a huge market with the different demographic Arts is a huge Market as well so there's just different categories but what we noticed

is somebody who collects Force cards is different than somebody who collects like Pokemon cards comic books sneakers and so on and so all of those have different user base long term we want to add different categories and have those different types of users but if we go to General too quickly which we did initially you will not get those Network effects where you will not have the demand of people because now if you send you Pokemon cards you will actually sell it within a week if you price it at according to the market right and so we won't provide that experience to users for it right the Amazon model right like we'll go all in on books first and then eventually we'll move out to other things you guys know the same thing but we'll start with cards I I like to see that Pokemon is are books from Amazon so

yeah I love that I'm curious if we weren't tokenizing cards and I wanted to sell a card today you said I could sell it on on in your guys platform in Courtyard within like a week as long as it's priced properly how long does that typically take if I was to do it not with like how much better are you guys making this I assume it's only going to get better so that's probably going to go into like it's going to take seconds rather than a week in let's say a year two years from now but right now like I assume there's probably a lot of friction and not maybe not a ton of liquidity currently to sell cards or what's the comparison like so in in terms of it's a good thing right like the bigger the platform it's the traditional Marketplace effect with

network effects right like the more users the more valuable the platform becomes and so we're seeing quite a bit of new users and we see some people already like starting Market making on our platforms today because pricing is getting more and more like readily available again like there's technology to look at like what were the last sold for those cards on eBay and like it's a very standardized model and so some people would start to make offers at like 70% on all the cards and just like making Market Mak themselves and then reselling them higher and making money so we see a lot more people actually making money with card on that and providing just Market making Market making the platform right now I would say like the best bet for people selling cards is eBay but then you have to be like an approved eBay seller you have

like the high fees you need to incure you need to do shipment yourself it's a lot to inventor I mean it takes a long time I have a lot of cards here to show you it's a lot of like you have those those are stacks of cards but like it's a lot of cards that you need like stack up and and so on and so it it takes a long time there's a lot of packaging involved whenever we buy from eBay or something we receive like 50 packages with different like plastic wrap and stuff like that so it is a bit of a grind what a lot of the professional dealers do is they pay tables to go at conferences and open up a shop so they have a table with all their inventory and they sell it at conferences and so those people I have

tremendous respect for because they literally spend every single weekend of the Year fly across the car Tre to go to another show to sell the inventory buy some inventory from user so there's a whole of like hustle culture in that wow the difference from that I mean I actually remember when I was I don't know how old I was maybe 14 or 15 I actually sold uh baseball cards on eBay before they even had like credit card hookup so like you would get a cash in the mail for your poke like for your I think I did some Pokemon cards I can't remember but I definitely did baseball cards and hockey cards and and then my dad started doing it a ton he still does it today in sort of different ways but it's interesting to see how far it's come right first they added PayPal and

then they added like I think you can just pay with credit card now it's crazy it's crazy how things Technologies changed so I mean even like when you look at a fun story that's completely unrelated but a bit similar is like when I was working at YouTube there was this guy who's been working there for like so many years and he actually got his job at YouTube in Craigs List so there was a cly post to get a job at like to tell you how evolved with technology change from it right and was like you're a dinosaur you work from yeah yeah and so similar to like eBay before there was like getting the things in the mail like it's crazy so now it's the next next wave of it so you guys are using Brink to hold everything does this become like a centralization point and maybe I'm

just like going too far on the you know with foil hat Ty thing but like let's say all cards eventually go in here do this become like a bit of an issue or like what do you guys thinking about this long term when everyone starts using because it's one of those products where it's so obvious and so much better like if you're selling anything why would you ever not use this right so you would assume in 10 years from now you guys gain a lot of market share everything's in Brinks I don't know is that an issue or I guess not really it's it's a really good question and there are uh competitor RS that have more of a decentralized approach which I think makes sense in theory in practice if I have a $50,000 watch my watch is either on my wrist in my home or in a very

secure place of a company that's been there for 200 years and I can trust I trust for for their assets I'm not going to trust some person that I don't know of that will enjoy my watch or my collectible in their home that I'm not even certain that they will hold it properly on this right so I think when you talk about physical objects and like storing it's different for like real estate friends because the house is there and doesn't move right right but when you talk about collectible that have like some sort of value in my opinion there has to be some sort of centralization right by a trusted entity to keep them secure and safe because it's an expertise that it's very hard to build up and it's a trust that you cannot get from like anyone right and and I guess it's like there's always

some sort of trade-off if you have a physical thing there's always some sort of risk that someone's goingon to steal so it's probably better in a brings fault than it is in a you know Vault you got on Amazon that's in your you know behind your bed or something like that so I guess it makes sense you gotta have you got to put it somewhere and I guess that's probably one that you would trust more than anything else one thing that we talked about is it's so clear the buying and selling experience of physical assets on chain is better there's no doubt about it especially when as you guys have set up in this system the physical asset is safe secure you don't even have to think about it and you can just focus on having this great digital EXP experience I want to

understand what are the other ways that you are sort of Reinventing might not be the word but improving the The Collection experience improving this experience of being a collector and how are you doing that I know you've talked a little bit about doing drops so maybe you want to talk about drops but how do you think about improving digital collecting as a whole great question so I would say there three elements the first one is is round drops uh as we talked about so because with the blockchain we can put a transparent way of repacking things digitally so when you go to those conferences a lot of people take cards they put it in bags and they have like H bags and they're like buy one I put the the top cards in

it trust me it hasn't been revealed yet and they sell those Max flat out and and it's something that happens quite a bit but like there's no trust the beauty with blockchain is like no you can look at the Smart contract that actually all the assets are there you can verify you can prove that the assets have been assigned in a random way to you and you can prove that your card is actually inside the pack the digital pack and that's really powerful because it brings number one trust and so you have those digital reaking it's fun because people love to open packs and see oh what am I going to get am i g get getting the Charizard or am I getting the the squirtel or and so bringing that in a digital way is fun there's a whole industry about like opening packs

getting the feeling of like what am I going to get and it happens digitally you see like NBA topshot did that only digitally and people still love ripping packs digitally people go on whatnot and just watch people open for them because it's digital they don't have to do it themselves and so creating that feeling and that experience for people is a really really powerful powerful thing the second piece is around we're working a lot on I mean now we have so much to build but working a lot around making it fun with like leaderboards like having like badges if you complete collection and those type of things that are I think going to bring a lot of value for people to have their collection digitally like organize the collection how they want and like find the grills that they were looking for like maybe

there is going to be Bounty where like I'm really want that card and so you know that card is looked for for that and so people might Source it for him that's another piece like making it fun with like points and stuff like that the last piece is around just providing like this visual experience in a 3D so I'm so excited to see apple for instance releasing the headsets because Apple has never failed a product launch and so maybe not next year but think of it five years from now think of like a trade show where you would have your Apple headsets and everybody would receive an headset for the ticket price and it's a digital trade show where you carry around like all your cars that are digitalized and you can just buy and sell on this you could interact with them you can enter people's Vault like

there there's a lot to it that I think we have not seen a quarter it you could build those digital experiences pending licensing like those you cannot do too much on this pending licensing but as Brands get into it maybe you will have your Nike shoes that are digitized in your game and you can redeem them or use them in your avatar anything is possible once you open up that that door and the technology is getting better and better for like digitalization of assets and like interoperability again and the fact that you can prove that you actually own that you could use it in whatever other platform he just kind of blew my mind and where I'm thinking let's say you have a physical card you put it in Brinks it gets tokenized and then you

put on your a glasses and now that card is back in your hand but in the digital format ex do whatever you want and you can lend it to your friend to to have your collection you can have your Vault and you can let people answer your Vault and see your collection this yeah the other thing I think of is it makes way more usability of these cards because like for now let's say you have a nice card you don't want to bring it anywhere especially if it's worth a lot and so let's say you go to an event or you go to whatever you're probably going to keep that thing at home whereas now you get to bring it with you it's on your phone you just go look I have that card here's the proof that I have it and maybe there's digital experiences that

can be unlocked I mean we see this all the time with nfts of opening a private Discord right giving a discount on something because you you are part of whatever like we do an onchain gift shop every week where people that have specific nfts get access to a raffle where we're giving away prizes and now all of a sudden your trading card that was useless in the physical world can do it in digital world now it can start to unlock different experiences and benefits and Bren G exactly so a good analogy that I keep on using is regarding jimy Neutron so it's this little cartoon like the scientist little kid he has a cube that he carries everything around in his Cube so he has all of his object and he can remove them from the cube and put them this is the gim Neutron Cube you can get your colle

get your collection in your pocket literally and like anyone can see I can send it to you within a second and it's like bring your collection with you anywhere you want while keeping it secure knowing you can get it back to your place whenever you want it's amazing the ability to interact with what you own when you can have it be experienced in a digital way because so much art is the best example to me of this only because my wife worked on a project with a very famous art collector who basically has warehouses vaults all around the world that hold his art and this is like millions of dollars worth

of art but it's all in boxes in warehouses it's too expensive to be out on display in his house the risk of somebody you know damaging it is too high right so but nobody can experience it so my wife worked on a project where the objective was to create a digital way to view the art and basically create this digital Gallery but this is not everybody can can afford to do that but we can all afford to send our physical items to Courtyard and then have them be brought on chain and then because you guys are creating this 3D model around and I'm curious who creates the 3D model is that Brinks that does that or is so we we do so brings provide the highr

scanning and then we create a model based on that but yeah to add to to that for art for instance I'm pretty sure there are some pieces you would never sell but everything kind of has a price and so right now these like pieces are not there for sale and maybe there is this specific piece that's like somebody falls in love with that has a lot of disposable income and want to make an offer that's way above market for that that he cannot refuse but he cannot see that piece and so he would never be able to make an offer on this and so opening it up to like the public as well provides a lot of value as well because you can make offers on things and then there's the question of like confin like some people would not want to get the

art displayed and so on that's a beauti of web three you can see what everybody has but you don't need to know who is that person because it's it's a wallet that's like anonymized the only person who needs to know is like the people like holding it when you do kyc Redemption it it really makes collecting a lot more fun right because it adds so much more experiences to it whereas like collecting is it's some a niche there's I mean obviously a lot of people that do it but it's it's still very Niche because again you collect it then you can't do much with it but now with this when you can gamify like you said have leaderboards um you can have way more liquidity where people can buy any time to me and then you can have experiences tied onto it to me it seems like

collecting is going to have a a massive boost in the amount of people that actually collect things because now you can just do more with it right that's my assumption of where the the market goes but definitely that's definitely our assumptions and I think the way we approach this is well the way we will succeed is by limiting the friction and not talking too much about things that people people don't know what madic is people don't know what gas vs are what is this wrapped e things and so the more we make it as simple as possible still leveraging the whole technology and what it enables but putting it in the like under the hood where you don't have to talk about it to fully experience the product that's really where things are going to get to the next level right and

work com speaking of that though our audience does care about the technology so I am I care a lot of I care a lot about it as well yeah uh I I am curious I think you said it was on polygon and you're going to open up to other chains or like what's the current sort of tech stack of it is it polygon for some reason I thought it was on base as well but I don't know why I thought that and then you said you're going to open up on all chains like what's the plan moving forward for this so my view on this is as long as like the thing SEC it's very different than the traditional nft so we started on polygon we moved to e and then went back on polyon because it doesn't really make sense to pay a $15

gasy to trade like a $100 card right no no no it's very different at traditional nft where you could argue that an nft on E is worth typically more it's more premium than an nft and like might get to much higher value than an nft on polygon for instance I still think it never makes sense to trade an nft for 15 bucks when you can do it for less than a penny on yeah how much it's worth yeah the difference there is this nft value is the underlying asset it's not more it's just the under in assets and so as long as the experience is frictionless and like we can use with different platform the chain to me as long as it's a very secure chain and like it's

scalable and so on doesn't really matter from a consumer standpoint we are not for now looking into additional change just from a consumer standpoint because imagine your dad collects baseball card goes there it's like it's this one is on ethereum this one is on Solana this one is on polygon what what does that mean I don't know that's more creates more confusion than anything right um I think we're open and I think there will be a world where we'll be on multiple chain and People based on where they want if they're an expert Advanced feature they can choose which change they want to be they could pay with whatever chain because I think the tech has drastically improved in the last even few month there are things now where you can buy

automatically Swap and I think it's going to be much more multi-chain approach for people who want to bring all their disposable income that they have in crypto to regardless of the chain and be able to buy regardless of where what chain the asset is on so is there any time when it doesn't make sense to bring a collectible on chain clearly I guess if the collectible didn't have enough value then there's probably a you know hey if your collectible is worth less than 50 bucks maybe it's not worth it but I'm but it's still digital experience it still digital experience like if it's cheap like I don't know I think people collect things there's a

emotional association with the collecting right and maybe it's a $20 asset but maybe it's an asset that you grew up with and you love that Pokemon or you love that type of things and that has more value to you that may be true I would say the only piece that doesn't really make sense directly is if you want to wear it and so if you want to wear it regularly like it's going to take more time to send it to the Vault and then get it back and so on and so that might be a bit more difficult so if you have a collectible t-shirt or sneakers that you want to wear a lot it doesn't make sense to have it there and maybe there will be a world where we will have two states where some is volted some is not volted but there's

different we want to make sure it's it's already a hard concept to explain to people that I don't know anything on this and so we try to make it as dead simple and not at complexities to it because otherwise the second becomes too complicated and not like that makes sense you lose them I think there will be a world where we will move towards a more complex things when people are more used to it and making it as clear as possible from a consumer standpoint but it should be as dead clear as possible like you get the digital you don't get the physical and you would be surprised how many people will have to reiterate you don't get both together right I remember when I first learned about cyard I was like wait what how can you do that like it must be in some sort of

alter they're holding on to it then I went on the site I was like oh it's Brinks like what a sick idea so it was actually quite interesting but your saying like maybe in the future you don't have it in inv Vault how would that even work like have you guys even thought that through yet or you're like we don't care yet we'll figure that out in five years from now we haven't figured it out there's a lot of different things right like there's new technology like iyk there's a lot of technology that has been there to put like chips on things or like even heard of those companies spreading Diamond powder That You Don't See but if you look you can find it like their technology keeps on improving on that end there might be just something that is just less valuable because it's not

voled and you could technically fake it that you own it but then it's similar to eBay there's a lot of different things that we will explore I don't think it's it's not going to come next year we have too much stuff to to do but I think there is a world where like the either the technology or like the approach makes sense to get it there it's interesting that you bring up wearing it because I think that's the Dilemma that a lot of collectors face I think about sneakers for example and we had a friend of ours tan a great writer in web 3 on our show about a month ago and he got a first edition pair of artifact crypto kicks and he only got one pair so he's

faced with this very tough decision of does he unbox those pair and then diminish their value as a result they're not going to be as high of a grade or does he keep them in a box and make them more of a collectible and then they become more value over time well here's the thing if you take that physical item and you Vault it but you get a digital version of that item maybe you can wear it but you wear it in the digital world and I know we're not there yet but I could see that being the future where you solve this dilemma for people where they don't have to decide oh do I wear that watch or do I wear those sneakers or do I wear that Supreme hat I can wear in the digital world I'm not damaging

the physical asset but I still get to maintain that so a funny thing I don't know if you guys are familiar with the csgo Counter Strike go this video game there's a huge market for skins so people can wear like this specific gun gold gun or whatever and people buy those for like thousands and thousands of dollar they actually create fake if you use the gun or like the knife or whatever inside the game it's worn once and so there's actually a condition of the digital assets based on how much you use it in the game which is kind of like this crazy crazy way that goes even further even further to that but but I think you're right like I maybe that's a good point that like I spend my money very differently in crypto than I spend in the real world so I have those

off-white UNC Jordan crazy sick shoes I bought them I never wore them I always to myself like I'll wear them when I succeeded enough to get there to make them well like I could spend like five each on an nft like maybe not right now but like five people nft without even thinking and be like hey let just buy this one right and so it's a different way of people using your crypto than the money in the in the real world and that may be an advantage for us as well because those people see that and it's a lot of like capitals that like it's cool assets that you can buy and you can buy with crypto I want to touch on one more thing before we wrap up here you mentioned at the beginning of the episode this idea of interoperability and composability and the power of that

can you give us an example of what that would look like I think you you mentioned a game being built on top of Courtyard what is possible that's not happening yet but down the road so the most obvious use cases are borrowing money uh to play in defi against those assets so anyone could check that you own those assets see the market value and borrow money on this another one is fractionalization some platform that do fractionalization could lock your asset in those platforms fractionalize it and sell fractions of those high value assets another piece is somebody could technically build a I mean those are trading card games right so we're not going to build ourselves but somebody could basically look at like what core chart asset do you have in your account

take the metadata of those assets and build a game on top of it things like you literally play Pokemon but play it with your digital your version well the physical version is in Vault people could do that we need to see like I mean they will need to see like how it works from a IP standpoint because then you start leveraging like some of the IP of the game but like that technically is feasible and so you you could use all those cards and like in Magic like there's a lot of cards that people never play because they are worth so much money that you would never put it in the deck but like here you could play them digitally like so there's a lot that could be done for those and so in the last pieces like what if you could bring your sneakers to Call of Duty and have

your AVR wear those sneakers I don't know like the world is tons of possibilities well I was just thinking with the Apple uh glasses with ar and you're playing let's say you're playing a physical game of magic or whatever and you're like oh I have the expensive one but I leave it at home you just flip on your goggles and boom that card the expensive one shows up right there in the game with you and you start using it along with the physical cards that would be real weird but I could see that why wouldn't that make sense yeah or I think the idea of a trade show where the price of the ticket you get like a AR goggles or something or you need AR goles to to get there and like yeah like 2,000 people going with their car digitally and like there's dealers at the table

and like let me show you what I have and then you have the whole thing and like I mean if you seen the the interview for like I think it was Zuckerberg and Lex Freedman it technology is getting there like it is getting there like a lot of investment is going towards that and so we just bring whatever people love to that world right wow I want to pose a question to both of you before uh we wrap up here is real world assets going to be the big driver of onchain activity in the next Bull Run in the next year what do you think so I think there's going to be a few categories that that bring that like and I think when you talk about real world assets I would

split it in two I mean collectible is it part of the real world assets and I think that's going to be a huge driver uh of it of course I'm biased but I think it's going to be one of the main driver for that I think there is a whole category of real world asset which is like tokenized gold or not especially in nfts but like tokenized like Securities and so on which I think is going to be key as well but there the regulation is still a bit Effy so we will need to see how the regulation plays out on on that front gaming has a lot of companies that raised a lot of money uh in the past and it takes time to build games so I'm I'm really curious to see what the Evol like evolution of those games are going to

play out uh because there's going to be a lot more games being shipped in the next two years uh from those we'll see if some pick up and you don't need like 50 of those to pick up it could be one on fortnite type to pick up and then suddenly everything is just blowing up so those are the type of things that I'm quite excited about I'm very bullish on the real estate on chain I think regulation still needs quite a bit of time for it but yeah so I I would say yes it's going to be one of the main categories to bring those assets yeah I think it's going to be huge I would add one more category to the real world assets coming on chain which is fat back stable coins bringing money on which is already crypto's killer app and I see no

reason why that doesn't continue to grow over the coming years and like in terms of volume stable coins is biggest by far it blows Bitcoin volumes eth volumes any other tokens volumes out of the water and I don't see that changing anytime soon if anything it's probably just going to continue to grow so absolutely I think real world assets are the big thing which is kind of funny I don't think it's what most people thought can I say I'm so happy I'm so happy nobody used the word fidal anymore oh we've say that for like a year this I was like I'm never going to call anything fidal like I'm not launching company with that name well was VI vigal on the potential company name list for

no never ever ever ever actually do you know the story of the name card no no I would love to hear it though it's a cool story so I speak French initially I'm from Belgium and my co-founder at the time when I started Courtyard was also French and he thought that the playground was called the courtyard so in French see and it was like oh it's like cards we're gonna trade cards in the playground when you're a kid those are trading cards and you trade Pokemon cards in the playground let just say it's gonna we trade it in the courtyard it's gonna be called Courtyard it's like the marketplace the place where you trade cards and so yeah therefore pardon my French we're called Courtyard which I prefer the playground though but yeah but I prefer Courtyard than playground

because it really connects with this like Brinks Vault like old sort of very safe very stable so I think you guys you guys nailed it okay before we wrap here Nicholas I wanted to give give you a chance just to tell the audience where they can get involved in Courtyard we've obviously talked Lots about how you guys work but if somebody wants to participate in a drop when are any upcoming drops where can they find out about Courtyard where can they follow you or reach out to you if they want to connect definitely so number one is take a look at our websites it's called cchart that IO so similar to Mar at cour chart but just with that IO instead of that otherwise you'll just book an Hotel so go to the websites you can go to our

social we're very active on Discord like there's people talking 247 about like Pokemon cards about cards in general so I would go there I would look at our Twitter we do a lot of drops so almost every week we have a different drop so those are typically we sell cards at average price you might get more valuable cards or like a lower valuable card but you see the list of all of it so everything is fully transparent and then if you own cards you can either send them directly to the Vault get them in your account you can always at any point in time say I want to redeem the physical I don't like this platform we send it back to you you can sell those on their platform you can also buy from eBay directly to the Vault so those are like the main three things I would take

a look so look at the marketplace there's tons of cards for sale there is a lot of really really rare and cool cards so you would be surprised to see like how Pokemon has done a lot of like super small rare cards as well and so I was just take a look at the marketplace brow give us our feedback we're constantly improving we're going to have a new redesign soon everything keeps on changing we want to listen to your feedback add new features see what you care about because we're building for collectors awesome and we'll include links to all those things in the show notes okay just a couple of fun questions before we finish off here Nicholas what's an nft you'll never sell I have some gold Wicked craniums so prior to so fun story when a board it happened I was like craniums was

literally at the same time on this and so I was like I got some gold we could CR one e for each on this another worth nothing I was like craniums are the thing I don't believe in those bards craniums are going to be the big thing and I was like all in on craniums which was the probably for the price I paid I would have got like probably like 15 boarded for that um and so I took the wrong bet which is fine but yeah so I have those go wied craniums that are worth nothing right now maybe 0.3 or something so I would I would say those ones or I have some Adam bombs that are pretty pretty cool uh is it that you wouldn't sell them or you can't sell them I mean if they go back to T more maybe but like I don't think the value

they are right now are worse and I was I was really like these are like the gold ones it's like the gold boarded like these are the top of the top the rare oh man one thing you bought recently for under $100 that brings you Joy oh super random so if you guys ever have an issue with your bed sheets that always go up I found those trps that you just put behind the bed sheets and it keeps it there the whole time my whole problem is so because you know when you watch the bed sheet it kind of shrinks you put those it's so random but like it's drastically improved my life it's literally like straps for bed sheep billow I actually really like that I GNA message you didn't expect that

answer no no definitely not Nicholas lives in the real world as well not just in the digital world last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it it's a very difficult question if you have a voice and a big message to share to the world like you we need to make sure like that's impactful and makes sense so whatever I would say right now would probably not be thoughtful enough for for that so sorry to not answer the questions but like I like to in everything we do as well at cor we like to be thoughtful in the way we approach things and so I think like I would not say something like just out of the blue like this I would want to make sure like it has the right impact for it but it would

probably be around a positive message for in general yeah you're the first person to do that and that is probably the best answer I think we've got to not be reactionary which like especially in this industry everyone on Twitter this is what everyone does it's just like says what's on their mind even if it's not a good thing but to be like yo I can speak to a billion people that's a big message and that has implications I should think about what I need to say I love that answer nicely done I'm a little bit upset come on man you got question that's not how this [Laughter] works oh Nicholas it's been an absolute pleasure thanks so much for making the time to you and the whole team at

Courtyard thanks for pushing onchain forward and bringing more people into the Onre World very excited to continue to follow all of courty yard's success in the future thank you so much Val this was this was great so keep it up on the great interviews and and building the platform there awesome to see you there thanks for listening in everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to

subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one