NFTs: Where to from Here?

Transcript

all right so I think our our next speaker is ready to go it's about nfts where to from here and you're going to hear from the developer EV evangelist at pinata Kelly Kim give a huge round of applause for Kelly [Music] Kim righta um very happy to be here in Barcelona my name is Kelly develop evangelist here at pinata um just a show of hands if you've heard of pinata before okay let's get started so 2021 at the peak of the nft boom total volume of

nft sales was 25.1 billion following year it decreased to 24.7 this year it's projected to be 22.7 so nfts as an indust indry at least in terms of sales seems to be contracting and you've probably heard people say nfts are dead nfts are ngmi nfts were nothing but a hype the numbers are down sentiment is negative so you know where to from here so for those of us who still believe in The Primitives of nfts who are you know relentlessly building every

day towards the future and you know we know they're here to stay where do we look to now uh what does a post nft boom future look like and what should we be as excited and as passionate about just as the majority of people were inside the hype so for those of us who are not familiar with pinata we are a Content Distribution Company with one of the leading IP Fs infrastructures in the industry and for this reason we think a lot about nfts the following presentation is a parallel of our reflective process um

the things that we go through on a day-by-day basis to make business decisions and also uh facilitate our community uh the next 15 minutes I'll be taking on a journey from the past to the present and finally the future all right before we head on our merry way to the Future Let's get some context and take a quick trip down memory lane ask ourselves where have we been I'm sure some of you are very familiar with the history of nfts so please bear with me but we'll begin at 2014 with Quantum hosted on the namecoin blockchain created by Kevin McCoy it was

the world's first nft a pixelated OCT gone um it changed colors and it moved around like an octopus and it was auctioned off at soube for 1.47 million so a major lawsuit ensued and it brought to light the importance of ownership in nfts 2015 spells of Genesis by ever Dre soft and it was an nft trading game hosted on the Bitcoin blockchain uh and it ended up being the first ever onchain game game and now we discover that nfts actually have a place in gaming 2016 rare pepas it was the first semblance of onchain

art here we are at 2017 we have a double whammy with Crypt punks by Laval laabs um it was the first generative art collection we start thinking about identity and scarcity in the context of digital Collectibles we also have crypto kitties um an onchain game that allowed you to purchase and breed really cute cats uh it Incorporated interactivity and also started to Garner widespread attention 2018 axi Infinity the first online video game and say hello to play to earn 2020 we have dentaland the first metaverse or virtual world you could buy

land trade everything you own and also talk to other people inside the game uh NBA Top Shop uh transformed cultural moments into nfts so now nfts could immortalize pivotal cultural moments Brandon Sports also enter the chat and then finally we arrive at the boom 2021 which feels like so long ago uh covid-19 firstly forged the importance of digital connections and then be people and artist turned nft Pioneer um basically brought nfts to the prestigious world of Fine Arts after selling an nft for uh 69 million uh in the middle we have our favorite uh

monkey digital monkey yugal laabs board AP yor Club transformed the pfp nfts into somewhat of a pop culture and status symbol all right what a ride so here we are today um in the now and to get my head around the present where we're standing right now I've broken it up into four quadrants all right so number one is industry infiltration we're seeing a lot of different Industries get really creative with nfts and what they can do for example the Arts are finding ways to

expand the different types of digital art creations and also sell in different forms gaming slowly warming up to them um there's also music Sports fashion uh wearables luxury goods real estate and even nonprofits or charity organizations so nfts are slowly finding themselves as tools in the stacks of multiple Industries number two build it like you mean it and what I mean by this is that the nft Builders of today are really getting back to their technical Roots which is exactly what we want we're seeing

advancements at the very token level so first most ERC 6551 token bound accounts I'm sure you've heard of it in previous hackathons and conferences um they give reg regular ERC 721s the power of a smart contract wallet so nfts are coming alive ERC 721c is making onchain royalties enforcable so zero fee exchanges now BRC 721e is a protocol that turns ethereum based nfts into Bitcoin nfts without the need for a developer to personally inscribe it there's also brc2 which is uh short for

Bitcoin request for comment 20 um it basically enables funable tokens like the erc20 token to be minted and traded via the ordinal protocol on the Bitcoin blockchain lastly is another Bitcoin standard I know it's funny it's an ethereum conference but it's known as secure tradable Arts maintained securely I.E stamps uh it's the Bitcoin equivalent to ERC 1155 so as you can see we have plenty of advancements at the token SL technical level happening right now with nfts all right the third we're going into the

mainstream what this means is that left right center we're seeing celebrities Major Brands and different artists playing around with the concept of nfts as a stack in their personal portfolio so think of Nike Tiffany Paris Hilton and even Grimes and the these diverse use cases of nfts are being recognized by the rest of the world whether they like it or not and the final quadrant nfts are being used to proliferate culture now that's another way to say to I guess expand on what we already have as culture so nfts can be used as tools

to proliferate culture through digital ownership uh Arts and Technology and also online communities nfts are used as digital ownership as they revolutionize the world of monetization and also the trade of online Commodities so in other words nfts make monetization and culture tangible they're also at the intersection of Art and technology which is an Inseparable and I guess Unstoppable Duo last last ly online communities nfts can be used as social tokens that represent memberships or similar um in digital communities so

think of FWB uh disclosure I am a member and I love it so we've come a very long way and I guess I kind of like where we are uh we're not in a helpless place I think we're in a very hopeful place we're at a point where nft technology can be steered in the right direction and it's it's up to us as cheesy as it sounds so as we enter this new turn in the road uh we can we can leave behind all those unproductive and unhealthy paradigms that we've accumulated in previous years and it's very clear that the underlying Primitives of NCS do have the potential

to leave a positive impact on the world so finally to answer the question where to from here um I've narrowed this down again into four Target groups to make things a little simpler firstly for the future of Brands um and businesses in general for the natively offchain brand or business um nfts allow a very unique way to build digital experiences something that was not previously I guess Allowed by existing technology so as a result Brands businesses can forge closer

relationships with their audience or customers for example Starbucks Odyssey um also Reddit which had huge success and then for the natively onchain brand nfts presents uh an abridge Journey from Brand Inception to community growth so the paju Penguins collection um and their web3 IP company is a really great case study for this for the creators where to from here creators have always been at the mercy of platforms uh musicians content creators Tik Tok creators uh writers and

much more but with nfts C creators can now own their relationships with their audience um on or off chain so they can either Escape platform jail or you have platforms like Instagram which are actually endowing ownership onto their creators as well and of course nfts make it extremely easy for creators to monetize uh whether it's utilizing the technology to create V valuable digital experiences or even using uh nfts to obtain better insights into their audience pinata's newest product submarine allows you to do both so you can create

linkables of your nfts and then gather all of the uh audience insights on your very own uh content on ipfs so thirdly for the technologist I think this is not a very common segment but I thought it was definitely needed in this presentation so technologist is someone that loves Frontier technology and is with it day in day out whether it's AI machine learning um a VR nfts are adjacent tools so it's not a nfts or AI it's a nfts and AI they can think provide things like

Providence interoperability and ownership amongst many others the this combination of nft in AI opens up so many possibilities for not only metaverse or immersive virtual weals um you know AI generate generated Collectibles and even AI powered storytelling experiences so together this this symbiotic relationship can really Propel The Innovation or creativity and the inclusivity that was always meant to happen with web 3 so recently the pinata team have been playing around and Diving super deep um

into how ipfs which has been the backbone of nfts can be used alongside AI so I highly recommend you check out our content for how to do this yourself and then lastly for the people so for anyone who's not a Creator does not have a business or a brand or is perhaps not even PL into the depths of Technology like your grandma or your friend who refuses to be on Instagram nfts are very unique in that you don't actually need to understand any of these things to benefit from them um they're going to become much more

sustainable uh we have technical imp implementations like lazy minting uh proof of stake Layer Two that make them just a more sustainable technology in general they can also be used to push forward acts of environmental act activism for example they can be used to fundraise for nonprofits offset carbon emissions or just increase the morale of communities by giving them a chunk of the pie nfts can also redistribute wealth to less affluent so socioeconomic communities so unlike stocks nfts lower the barrier to entry

um and also increase the ROI so they can reap the benefits of a single investment in a shorter time and at a larger scale so to wrap up I want to leave you with this quote very cheesy one from Arthur C Clark any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic so where to from here and nfts have to feel like magic at the moment it doesn't feel like that just yet nfts have to achieve the unimaginable they have to just work and

they also need a very clear and astounding why so during my time at pinata um I've been there since December I experienced the full you know grunt of the boom as the main ipfs pinning service for nfts but I've also had the privilege to watch pinata transition from you know a company really just writing the momentum of the boom to just a media company stripping away all of the hype um drowning out the noise and then building a top that fundamental philosophy that made nfts so exciting idic and great in the first

place so where to from here I urge you all to really distill nfts down into their purest form and soon you'll see them as tools for Humanity um the road ahead for nfts is being built as we speak at hackathons um in focus groups or you know just amongst your little developer circles I know I have many friends who are uh thinking about this day in day out it's very inspiring and so yeah it's ultimately up to us Builders you know thinkers innovators to to pave that road uh for the future of

nfts all right thank you very much