Proof of Ownership & Identity with Tokenproof Founder & CEO, Fonz | Overpriced JPEGs #41

Transcript

[Music] hello everyone gmgm welcome back to another episode of overpriced jpegs i am here with the one and only fonz the founder and ceo of tokenproof if you are in the nft space you have probably been hearing all about token proof of late i can say personally it feels like y'all just like almost came out of nowhere and then took over the space and every event you go to now like everything is in partnership with you and with token proof so uh feels like one of those overnight success stories to me but i'm sure there was more work behind the scenes that went into it really excited to dive in i'll i'll give the brief summary in case somebody's been under a rock token proof

is technology that allows you to prove ownership of an nft or and you can there's probably other use cases we can talk about without having to actually expose your wallet to connect your wallet to a site or connect it if you're going into an event awesome technology we'll get into how it works and why it's important if you didn't fully follow that but that's what tokenproof does and fonz welcome to the show dmgm thank you for having me carly gmgm okay i want us to dive into how this works and then verifiable credentials broadly which is really the category that this this fits into which i'm fascinated by but before we dive into all that really good stuff we need to hear a word from our sponsors coin shift is a leading treasury management and infrastructure platform for dows and

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mobile wallet so check it out at metamask dot io buy hyphen crypto okay so i heard an interview in which it sounded like in many ways the origin for this idea and for you building this product came from your time working on a proof of vaccination product when the the pandemic first hit can you give us that story a little bit in that that that origin yeah and maybe even before that um i'm i've been in technology my whole life i spent 12 years in the oil and gas industry um i'm liv i'm originally from mexico city but i live in texas and i spent 18 years in houston i'm now based out of boston but i

developed technology for the oil and gas world and the industry and then i had a successful exit in 2017 worked for the company that bought my startup for about three years and then the pandemic happened and i got connected to a group of ex microsoft folks led by paul moritz and so paul used to be the number three guy at microsoft uh in the 90s and i got connected with him uh because of a relative that used to work with him and still is good friends with him and so they had the idea that eventually as the vaccine came out it would be useful for people to carry their vaccination status in their phone and through a mix of cryptography and qr codes we would be

able to prove our vaccination status in a tamper-proof and verifiable way in order to restart the world's economies faster and so what that means is we would be able to get back into concerts and sporting events and airplanes because we would be able to prove who was covet-free or not and we were one of the earlier iterations of this technology which we all now know as vaccine passports um i was tapped to be ceo and founder of that venture along with paul and uh my uncle and you know we went at it for about a year we grew the team we developed the technology but then we quickly realized

that we were walking into a political minefield and there was all this controversy around vaccine passports and whether they would be used for surveillance purposes and whatnot just crazy conspiracy theories and so getting that business off the ground was hard but we had the technology developed and so we decided to shut down that business in may of last year and and at that point i i had seen nfts i think the first time that i was exposed to nfts was when people had his big sale uh back in january of last year and i got very interested in nfts but i was doing cpr on this business and so i couldn't really devote any time to nfts

but now that i had shut down the business i had a lot of free time on my hands and i decided to take a break from work because i had been grinding for the last 15 years non-stop and so i said let's see what these nfts are all about and that's when i bought my cool cats and my board ape and a bunch of stuff that is probably going to go to zero but that gave me a lot of knowledge and um you know experience in this world and i became a part of the community because i was fortunate to be early on not like an ogog early but definitely early enough where i was able to form these really cool and valuable relationships

and then i had the idea for token proof which we can get into but uh token proof is really a pivot from the original venture uh from vaccine passports and at some point i thought that maybe we could use the same technology but instead of using it for proof of vaccination it would be proof of ownership of digital assets like nfts amazing so let's dive into token proof you launched when when did you officially launch we officially tweeted out that we existed on february 3rd of this year we actually started the pivot in january like the very few early days of january so that's when it started

and walk us through exactly the process if you went to eight fest you experienced this right i'm going to ate fest what's the process to get in using token proof yeah so the first thing that the user has to do is they come to our website tokenproof.xyz they connect their wallet to us once and they sign a message with that wallet once because we have to make sure that the user that is registering a wallet is really the owner of that wallet right we need to know that they're in control of the wallet that they're registering and so that's the only time where we're going to ask somebody to sign a message with their wallet and after that we have them download the token proof app and now the token proof app is going to be

the key to unlock all of these different things whether it's an event or an e-commerce shop or something else i think there's tons of use cases for token proof but we basically pair that registration of your wallet with the token proof app and by the way we never ask the user for any personal information we want to be as crypto native as possible and so we never have access to their name their email their phone number none of that but once they have their registration paired with the tokenproof mobile app if you're going to a-fest you will be able to have a ticket within your wallet you go to a website and claim a ticket for that event and that ticket shows up

in the tokenproof app and it has a dynamic or animated qr code and the reason why these qr codes are animated is to prevent somebody from sharing that qr code through a screenshot or even a video because the qr codes are constantly time stamping and regenerating themselves um so that they're only valid for about 10 or 15 seconds right and so that's some of the fraud prevention mechanisms because we know that people will try to game the system and and and at all these events uh like the ones we just had at nftnyc we want to make sure that it's the real holders and the real members of these communities that are going to enjoy these events

we also have use cases where tokenproof is going to be used online and instead of the user showing a qr code they will be presented with a qr code on the screen that they will scan with the token proof mobile app so the tokenproof app is going to be what uh gets you to unlock or go through all these token gates in a safe way because you're using the app you're not using your wallet directly so the big concept around token proof is bringing safety to the space by allowing you to go through these choking gates without interacting with your actual wallets you're not connecting your wallet and you're not unnecessarily exposing your actual tokens

am i trusting you so i signed tokenproof i signed with my wallet on the tokenproof site wants to verify who i am is that something where down the line god forbid if you all got hacked there would be a lot of hell to pay no i mean you are trusting us because you are interacting with your wallet once when you register with us and you are signing a message but that message is pretty much it's pretty much useless that message is pretty much useless it's just your signature on a mess human readable message eip712 for those technical folks out there but we can't really do anything with that signature that message uh and so even that's just proving carly owns this

wallet and then i can go and you can go and look and see what's on that what what's held in that wallet so you can go see oh okay aboard ape is held there you're eligible for eight fest yeah and who's really trusting us is ape fest and all these events because we're vouching for the user and we're basically telling the event organizer carly owns this wallet and she should be able to get into this event and so from the user's perspective even if we were to get hacked there's absolutely zero uh exposure to their actual tokens and there's no private data or personal data that is being captured so yeah i joked about this with you uh before we kicked this off but this it's just like

such a no-brainer idea that's so clearly helpful and needed working that it's like cool interview don thanks so much fonz it's been great having you all like that's it like that like there's you know it's it's almost um it's a funny situation because usually when i talk to folks i'm like well maybe i want to push back on something or this and that and i i'm like here i'm just like this is such a wonderful needed thing in the space and i think the key to this was when i thought about doing this pivot from the original vaccine passport venture i went up to my board and i said guys let's just try this out but the technology is not rocket science we've executed very well on the technology front but we knew that this was going to be a partnerships

and a momentum based business where the the thing that we really had to care the most about was building all these relationships with people like yugo labs um and all the other projects that used us for nft nyc because that's how we're going to be able to defend our solution somebody else could do this is doing this yeah but that's the most that was gonna that was a question i was gonna have was it's it strikes me the other moat is getting people to download an app and and actually like have an app on their phone is that right i never saw it as a challenge because yes i think it is a mode once we have people with their uh token proof app in their phones we can send them

notifications we can say hey carly there's this event that you're eligible for because you hold uh xyz token and so i think that that is going to be very important in the future but i never thought it would be a challenge to get people to download the app because people just hate interacting with their wallet directly right people hate connecting their wallet to discord people hate going through all of these different token gates and kind of praying that it's not a malicious side that that empties your wallet and so we want to provide safety to the space by allowing you to enjoy your entities and unlock the utility of your entities both online and in the real world without

actually putting those tokens at risk it's a moat to me in part two yes it's a moat because you can now send maybe notifications or say here the other things you're eligible for but it's it's like i don't have the eventbrite app on my phone because i can just show it on my email and i don't want to have to download six apps so the next event organizer who's looking to who they're gonna go to from a consumer perspective i want you to go with the thing whose app i've already freaking downloaded because i'm not downloading like seven different ticketing apps for like at a certain point like as a consumer i'll get fed up with that so if you're getting the network effects early in this case network of access you know users who have your app it feels like all these future events

are just going to naturally want to use that too because people that are attending their event already have have the app in place i hope so and i think that as as we roll out our online verification where you're going to be able to prove that you own a token to get a role on discord that that's going to create further stickiness to people that already have the app because i'm sure there's people that uninstall the app after nfp nyc they're like you know i'm not going to a crypto event or an nft event for a couple of months so why keep this in mind in my phone but i think that as we provide additional utility especially in the online use cases people are just going to keep it in their phones

is there a simplified way to do this could this could an apple wallet be leveraged for something like this where it could become something it's a qr code that's moving around in my apple wallet i think so i think there's ways to do it and there's ways to do it with nfc for example where you don't even have a qr code but you're just tapping your phone on a reader at the entrance of a and that is definitely something we want to explore uh qr codes in apple wallet and then the google version of apple wallet are a no go for us because we can't do that animation uh and and also keep in mind that

the entire payload of that verifiable credentials and we'll get into verifiable credentials all of that payload is encoded in the four or five different frames of that animated qr code and what that allows us to do is the consumer can be completely offline and still prove ownership of their nfts even if they don't have connectivity or sell signal so to me that's very powerful and it's something that we couldn't do if we went the apple wallet route i want to talk about some of the additional use cases you see for this or the use cases down the line and also um even use cases today i think you say in in some of your

documentation we believe that users particularly early adopters of platforms and services in the web3 space should be rewarded with token-based benefits is this a reference to your po-ap partnership for example we have a great partnership with pro-app i love poep and i think we're just barely scratching the surface of what po-app can do in the future because i always say this is imagine that i don't know the houston rockets or the chicago bulls or the dallas mavericks use poep and every time you go to a game you get a po app well now because the blockchain is public you can see who the most loyal guests or fans are and you can start segmenting your customer base based on

how many poeps they have and there's also token proof that can validate whether somebody has three of the co-apps or five of the co-ops or whatever that threshold is and that applies to like live music um and a lot of other use cases so i think that's super powerful the way that we've been using pro-apps up to now is when you go to apes when you go to any when you go to an event that uses token proof and they have implemented a pull out for that event uh just by scanning in your qr code we will automatically airdrop that co-op to you so that you don't have to do anything else the plot will just show up in your wallet i think people and event organizers are very pleased that that is

an option it sounds like you are fully anticipating this to be used for ticket events in the future outside of the web 3 space you mentioned like maverick games i know you were mentioning that in the context of poe apps but i'm imagining you're also thinking about this as being used like to get into a maverick game or into a beyonce concert absolutely 100 i i think that's where the puck is going to go but there's more to tokenproof than just events i think events have been low hanging proof for us i think events are going to get bigger and more complicated and there's going to be more logic next year i think nftnyc is going to look completely different next year i

think what you're going to start seeing and this is just my personal prediction is events are going to be bigger and events are not going to be super exclusive just to the community right the the holders of that community i think what's going to happen is you're going to have big events that are going to be open to everybody uh and i think there's projects that have hinted at this um but the event will be bigger it'll be open to everybody maybe they'll they will have a revenue stream from that event because they will charge for the ticket but the holders of the community will get free or vip access i think that you're going to start

seeing that as a common theme next year but leaving events aside one of our biggest focal points in the future is going to be retail how can we connect the web3 consumer to retail and e-commerce and so we're going to start working on this but what i always say is imagine that somebody like sephora or victoria's secret wants to offer a discount holders of boss beauties or world of women because we know what you're holding in your wallets because the blockchain is public and because you've registered that wallet with token proof we can suggest that that promotion is available to you because you're a holder of world of women or boss beauties and when you go to a sephora

brick and mortar shop we can do the token verification there before they give you the discount and so i think that unlocks massive potential for us and for the space and everybody in that chain benefits from it because the holder will get more value out of their nft sephora will start reaching a new audience and then obviously token proof benefits um by that so i i think it's such a no-brainer i i totally agree and and i've talked about that here as well as i i think that'll be really interesting as we start to see brands want to reward holders of certain nfts um whether because they want to benefit certain demographics or women or you

know whatever audiences they want to try and connect with does this mean that sephora or victoria secret need to have the token proof app or some version at their register to to verify and scan your qr code i think the way that we approach is by integrating with point of sale systems whether it's their proprietary point of sale system or you know you have point of sale systems like shopify and square and so that's where we would uh want to build integration so that it's seamless and they don't have to purchase any additional uh software or hardware um in order for them to do this are those conversations happening now

yes absolutely nice what are the obstacles or what are the reactions you're getting from these point of sale systems about integrating token proof are they open to it are they skeptical i don't think they're skeptical in fact there's these companies like shopify and square and others who are very much interested in stepping into the space and having a presence in the space i think it's going to be more on the retailer side are we going to get them comfortable in establishing another mechanism for somebody to gain some sort of benefit whether it's free product or a discount things like that and so i think we approach it the same way that we're doing events is you go to the crypto native uh community initially and then you

start opening up from that so no it's conversations that it's still very early on for us uh in in how we're approaching those conversations and i think it's going to take time to materialize but we're excited to be working with some of these partners um and just testing stuff out and see if it sticks there is a brand new staking feature in the ledger live app today we all like staking the assets that we're bullish on and now you can stake seven different coins inside the ledger live app cosmos polka dot tron algorithms tezos solana and of course ethereum with ledger live you can take money from your bank account buy your most bullish crypto asset and stake that asset to its network all inside the

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these things have gotten stolen it can token proof be a a middleman so to speak in that dynamic 100 but we need we need support from the projects and we need to get the entire space used to the following theory or notion the following notion which is you prove ownership of your tokens that make you eligible for a mint using token proof but you also have your cash wallet where you're going to pay for the mints and pay gas for the mint um and the mint will actually land on whatever wallet you decide either the cash wallet or your cold wallet does that make sense we need to decouple

these two because what usually happens is you meant something with the wallet that you're proving ownership and that makes you eligible for that mint and i feel like we need to have two completely different wallets one is you're proving ownership of your tokens using one and you're paying for the mint using the onion well so let let me even decouple let's say that anybody's eligible there's no like you have to have these tokens to be eligible and and you know i'm thinking this through in real time like maybe i'm just describing creating centralization out of a decentralized system right but instead of somehow connecting my wallet directly to a site uh token proof is acting as a conduit that i trust to connect my

wallet to that can then maybe give the information required to the free mint site and i can still end up with a token in the end i don't know no i i think it makes sense the question is who pays for gas because yeah sure if the user is the one that needs to pay for a for gas then there needs to be an actual transaction executed in the blockchain is it a double gas system where i'd have to pay for no no i i think it would still be single single point of gas statement i what i'm saying is somebody needs to pay for that mint gas right even if it's a free mint and token proof never wants to execute a

transaction on behalf of the user in the blockchain we're completely off chain we're completely gasless but the moment that we're actually facilitating and executing transactions on the blockchain for the user we become a wallet and we never want to be a wallet i'm just trying to wrap my head around it but i don't want to belabor it too much more because i feel like there's probably people who are understanding it better than i do um so i feel like you had this huge success at nftnyc it was like 80 plus events or something that that token proof was involved in do i have that number right yeah about 80 80 events yep what were your biggest learnings takeaways what are you improving about

the product since that experience i think we learned that different organizers and different projects have very different ways to approach on-the-ground logistics and how they physically assemble folks to get into the event and we need to make sure that we're aligned with those projects and making sure that everything flows properly not only from a technological standpoint but from a logistics standpoint and how like how many people you're going to have scanning the qr codes how are you going to have your waitlist line versus your confirmed guest line um is there going to be a physical guest list with names names and and phone

numbers because we had instances where we had events that had a guest list and they also had token proof so i think we need to be very much aligned with these projects and these event organizers and we need to be vocal about what we know works and what doesn't uh because i mean you saw us at apefast apes was absolutely awesome for us because we play and by the way yoga is the best partner that we could have ever hoped for and they embraced us early on and we had a ton of meetings with them to make sure everything went as smoothly as it did so having that planning time with the projects and the

events is very important especially if we're implementing a technology the token proof where the users are not really used to this this is the very first time that we're using this type of technology at wide scale and so it we have to make sure that everybody's trained properly that we have boots on the ground if the event is big all in all i think it was a great success there were learnings and and there's things that we're going to improve upon uh as we continue to to develop the product but it was just amazing to see people coming into the different venues and showing their qr codes and everything working very well we obviously had a couple of exceptions and a couple of issues here and there as

you would expect with any technology but it was just amazing to see it come to life and and being used and the response from the public has been amazing i mean if you do a twitter search for token proof everybody is raving about us so i'm really happy that we were able to provide value to the space and that people are embracing what we're doing how big is your team right now uh we have 11 people in the team oh that's pretty good i guess you are you're like five months old again i feel like it felt like you i i didn't know about you and then suddenly you were like the the company in the space uh which again when you're living it you you know all the grindy bits behind the scenes are you looking

to to scale further over the next seven months six months the rest of the year yeah i think we we have a development roadmap that we need to tackle and the sooner we get to it the more opportunities we're going to have and so we're going to be hiring more engineering talent and i don't want to make this a huge company with a huge head count we want to take it slow whenever we were working on the vaccine verification business we had to grow head count very very quickly and i'm talking like zero to 40 employees in two months i don't ever want to do that again and the the way that we've acquired talent has been super organic we want to hire from within the space if we can uh one one of

our very talented product managers came to tokenproof because he had the same idea and he was working on something very similar on his own and when he saw what we launched he was like oh i'm i'm not gonna i'm not gonna come out with my own stuff i'm just gonna go to tokenproof and see if they want to hire me and we did and so um it's been very spontaneous and very organic and i absolutely love the rockstar team that we have and obviously some of the faults that are working in token proof came from the previous venture so i want to talk more about your business model but before we go there i do want to dive into this broader topic of verifiable credentials

it's actually funny i'm i was remembering that vcs were actually one of the things that first drew me into this space at the beginning of last year looking at how they could be used for vaccines for example uh i come from a political background like voting identity like representing your your citizenship your political self all these things um and finding that really interesting and then really forgot about it as i entered the world of like pfps and all the rest of this and it feels like it's coming back into the conversation in a bigger way bankless recently did an episode with um evan mcmullen and and vitalik buterin talking about soulbound nfts and verifiable credentials so it's such an important topic uh can you maybe define for folks verifiable

credentials generally speaking and what they are yeah you can think of a verifiable credential and especially if you're in the nft space you can think of that credential to be an off-chain non-transferable nft it still has all the cryptographic properties that makes them fully verifiable to where if anybody tampers with that credential you would be able to verify uh that that happened or that it did not happen obviously and so these credentials can be used for a wide range of use cases and it could be your driver's license your birth certificate uh your college diploma it could be i don't know your membership to

a gym and so it's things that don't really benefit from being unchained and honestly there's a lot of private data that i don't want on chain and but you can still have in an app like token bruce app and you can prove to somebody that that credential is valid and that that credential came from the source that issued that credential without the issuer and the verifier having any connection between them whatsoever i think that's what's very important um i i like the notion of uh soul-bound nfts uh i'm sorry vitalik but i think it's a terrible name i think it's just like dystopian i i don't know that that it's the right name for it but i honestly

don't think that they need to be unchained i think you can still achieve the same result by them being off chain and by them not being tied to a particular blockchain it makes them even more interoperable so the way that we're using verifiable credentials is when you come to us and you sign a message with your wallet we're basically creating a verifiable credential within the token proof app that says this user is the owner of this digital wallet and that's a verifiable credential that maybe in the future somebody else verifies and not just token proof verifies because if you think about it we're in a closed loop system we're both issuing that credential and verifying that credential

when you show up at one of these events maybe in the future somebody else is going to want to verify that credential but the other use case that comes to mind especially as we come out of nftnyc is you could have other types of credential within the tokenproof app like your h verification so if we're able to verify that you're over 21 you can have a credential within the token proof app in the future that says that and so when you're showing up at the event with one single qr code you're showing that you have a ticket to the event and that you're over 21 so you don't have you don't have to have as many boots on the ground checking for your id and giving you that wristband it can all be done in one

single step this is the example that i always gave back when i was talking about vcs more more commonly in the beginning of last year was like the privacy piece of this if you're going to a bar you don't have to show your id that's also going to give somebody information about your your your specific age your height your you know your name all of that information yeah exactly you can just give them something that verifies you're over 21 and therefore eligible to get into the bar and that that privacy piece is really appealing you mentioned the soulbound nft thing for folks who maybe haven't listened to the bankless episode or or read vitalik's paper about this or understand this um this is a friendly debate between verifiable

credentials which as you said typically or necessarily are off chain are verifiable credentials necessarily off chain like by definition they could be stored on chain they could be on chain as well um but but you know how uh oftentimes are off chain and then slow down nfts which would be on chain i think vitalik's central point about why he's in favor of sold-out nfts and feels it's important for them to be on chain is it allows you to prove a negative like i don't have other loans outstanding uh when i'm applying for this loan and you can prove that because if they did you'd be able to see it on the blockchain whereas if you you know have all of these kind like if you have past loan things that are issued as verifiable credentials you can

hide that and so you can't prove that negative so i understand there's some very specific use cases in which you may want these non-transferable nfts to live on chain but i think i'm also somewhat persuaded by by folks like yourself who feel that there's just a lot more functionality when you you also have things that are that are off-chain like this my central total noob question is where are things i guess there's nothing fundamentally being stored it's the storage piece of this when things aren't on a block that has been breaking my brain can you walk me through that

well in the world of verifiable credentials you do need some sort of ledger that keeps track of the hash of the credential because when you're verifying a credential that does not live on chain it just lives on that user's device um you need to compare it to something else right and you you have to make sure that the hash of that credential matches the hash that is in that ledger and this this ledger doesn't necessarily have to be a blockchain but that's particularly useful um when it comes to verifiable credentials and so you store a hash which is basically a digital footprint or a digital fingerprint of that credential and make sure that it

matches when somebody presents you with that credential and the other important item is you need a ledger that says whether that credential is revoked or not because somebody could revoke your driver's license for driving drunk and so you need some sort of register that establishes whether the credential that you're scanning or verifying is still valid or not and so that's where you need some sort of uh revocation ledger revocation registry so for example for token proof where what is the ledger you all are using where are those what does that look like so every time that a token proof credential is created we send the hash

of that credential and its revocation status to ipfs we want to be gasless for as long as we can and so we decided that ipfs was the right spot for that um eventually we might migrate to a particular blockchain but uh i don't have an opinion on that just yet and that allows you to stay decentralized uh in in terms of your ledger usage you're not going to like a centralized service correct and so if somebody else wants to validate or verify a token proof credential they'll be able to do it as long as we agree on the schema or the format of that credential and they'll be able to go to ipfs and check

for that credentials hash to make sure it matches with the one that is being presented to them so you addressed my next question in some ways already which is i was going to give the the bar example and ask if you could ever see token proof moving into this space where it's not about necessarily events but it's more about other identity things you know the the the being over 21 makes sense since you are dealing in events but could you see yourselves going into you know if i credit scores right like that's that's an interesting use for verifiable credentials where you can send a future apartment or a future landlord verification that your credit score is over 700 without them having to

see specific details or you know whatever the case may be do you see you going into those directions ever or are you staying very commercial and uh partnering with brands no i think that there's a lot of work that needs to be done for verifiable credentials to be implemented at a wide scale and to be adopted at a wide wide scale but i'm super bullish on the technology and i want to make sure that we do our part in making that technology uh a reality at a wide scale i think you're already seeing it with vaccine credentials i think vaccine credentials were the reason why verifiable credentials grew in the mainstream because a lot of people don't know it but

verifiable credentials are being used by apple and a lot of state governments and held in healthcare providers and how they issue you that proof of vaccination on your phone i think apple is also moving into very valuable credentials when it comes to state ids and driver's licenses so we want to continue interacting with credentials and we want to be a leader in how these credentials are issued and verified so i don't think it's in our very immediate or short-term goals to push that space forward at a wide scale but i think that if everybody does their part we can actually make make this a reality in the next couple of years

are there opportunities in this landscape for entrepreneurs and builders that you want to call out where you're like hey this is an opportunity to build a business we're not going to do it right now but we'd love if somebody else wanted to make our jobs easier or help us advance faster yeah i mean i think what we need as an entire space is how are we going to onboard the next million billion users and that's on the on ramping uh front and i know that there's a lot of work being done so that my mom and my grandma are able to purchase an nft without going through all the hurdles that we go to through like opening your wallet and a new metamask wallet and then transferring money from

uh centralized exchange to that wallet and then it's it's it's still very technical there's a lot of friction and so i think there's a lot of opportunity for somebody that can solve that puzzle uh because it there's still no clear way of how we're going to do it i think there's really great startups uh doing work there but it's still an opportunity i think the wallet space everybody uses metamask i like metamask but there's more to be done there and so i i want to see an incumbent and i want somebody to challenge metamask if possible um and yeah i think the reason why we're here and i tweeted this out a couple days ago

is because we have a spirit of number one humility we don't think that we have all the right answers we think there's tons of improvement in what we're doing and tons of room for improvement in what we're doing and number two a spirit of collaboration which is probably even more important the reason why we're here is because we were able to uh contact projects contact people in the space and they were down to have a call with us because they could have very well said i don't know who these token proof guys are i'm not having a call with them but it seems like the great thing about our space is that everybody is still open to collaboration and that's how we acquire talent that's how we've acquired customers

and relationships is probably the most important thing so there's tons of opportunity and there's tons of problems to be solved so if if you have an idea and if you identify a problem i'd say let's just have you get your hands dirty and come up with a solution and just hit folks up on twitter and i'm sure that most of those people that you look up to are open to a conversation one way or another is that how you did it did you dm folks on twitter did you um yuga on twitter or was this oh i'm a member of the community and i'm messing with them in discord it was twitter yes for us it was interesting because i was not planning on building in the space

i was not planning on launching token proof or a business at all i was just having fun i was in love with the technology and the community and i just started posting on twitter and i just starting like building relationships with fellow apes and you know the cool cats and all the different communities that i'm a part of and i was just having fun and when i had the idea that definitely came into play and it was a i was privileged because i already had important relationships hugo was not one of them by the way um the the yuga story is interesting because what what we said at the beginning when we built uh the very first proof of concept is let's get to south by

southwest and if we if we make it out alive uh from south by southwest we'll talk about potentially becoming a real company but we put together this very basic mvp and we hosted a small event at south by southwest where we invited maybe 100 150 people and we airdropped an nft to ever it was actually a po app we are dropped a pull up to everybody that rsvp to the event and so we weren't really using proapps as proof of attendance we were using co-apps as tickets and we had people download the app and go through the registration process and when they got to the door they showed their qr code that proved that they owned a pull out for the event they had that poep yeah

and so i was the one um and so you made it out of south by southwest alive yeah well what happened is i was scanning people's qr codes at the door and this person comes up to me and and and she goes hi i am so and so from yugo labs and i was like what like we have yoga labs in the building are you kidding me where's this like tiny startup that was just doing a proof of concept and they came to my event and so that was just amazing that's how the relationship with yugos started they liked the technology at that event and we started exploring opportunities for us to partner up and we did and they've been an amazing partner ever since that's amazing so had they seen you on twitter is that how they first learned

about what you were doing i think that was it i still can't pinpoint exactly how that happened but uh but yes i think twitter was definitely a part of it are you all making money right now uh we're not and so i think that's going to change very quickly we wanted to make sure that we built enough traction momentum and relationships and we wanted to make sure that we optimized for adoption at the beginning and we have now completed our seed round and so we did raise venture capital that is going to give us runway um to continue developing the product but we also realize that people

are ready to pay for the service and i think it's important that we start having those conversations and so we are just now focusing on what the right business model is and what the right pricing structure is and there might be different types of pricing models one for events one for other types of use cases we're still figuring it out but i think soon enough um or sooner rather than later we're gonna have a pricing model because we can't just give out the the the product for free to everybody for forever um in perpetuity we know that we're not gonna monetize yeah we know that we're not going to monetize the consumer uh anytime soon i don't know that we'll ever do

but i never say never but for now the consumer is not going to have to pay for token proof and i think that's the right approach at this point yep that's what i was going to ask and that that that feels right to me as well so it would be like hugo would pay to use token proof for an eight fest event or you know et cetera et cetera eventbrite how do they monetize it similarly is it on like the enterprise side or like do they take a cut if i pay for a ticket how does that work i think that's what it is is if your event is paid so if you're charging people to come to your event they're going to take a transaction fee uh for every seat or every ticket that is sold so that's one way to look at that when

you when you give the prediction of like hey i think next year's gonna be opening more people and uh and they're gonna be selling tickets to them or monetizing more than events did this year is that a little bit where your your head is going for that prediction are you a little bit rooting for that from a business monetization perspective i'm rooting for that not just for that reason although that is one of them but i think people want to hang out with different people and people want to go to other communities events and like if you have a group that goes to nft nyc you don't want to go through the hassle of making sure that all of your friends have the same nfd that all of your friends made it into the same party um so i'm i'm rooting for it because i

think it's the evolution of events in the space and i think there's also other really cool stuff that can happen when you're at this event that is maybe even bringing in different communities uh in one single space and how you approach like paying for drinks paying for merch we could be the ones facilitating unchained payments for that type of stuff and so maybe you're paying um i don't know and full disclosure i haven't talked to the cool cats i haven't talked to them about this specifically at all but maybe you pay for your drinks using milk and maybe that's something that we facilitate so just just an example of what i'm thinking about us as we come

out of nftnyc and and look at what the next evolution of web 3 events is going to look like can you explain how would y'all help as like a payment provider for milk in exchange for merch i think the the way that you do it because again we don't want to directly execute transactions on behalf of the user but maybe what we do is we set up some sort of smart contract where you deposit money in just whatever you feel like you're going to spend at that event and we're able to deduct from that balance uh using token proof that's one idea and i think we want to we want to find partners uh to to

test that and to build that out as well so similarly that would then is that how it would work if you were going to mint an nft and didn't want to connect directly with your wallet you could deposit something into an account via tokenproof and then you all could deduct that for example to pay the gas for an nft if you didn't want to connect to a site to meant to getting back to that earlier conversation that was frying my brain yeah no i think that that no that's an interesting approach yeah it's it's totally doable so we're going to give you credit for that one if if it does materialize amazing i love it yeah i'll take my i'll take my commission you know we'll offline about uh what i charge for that um well thank you so much fawns i have this funny reaction here where

my ins like my instinctual response to this since i first learned about y'all which was i don't know a few weeks ago at this point probably for me i was late to this party i guess is like how did how did this not happen sooner and then on the other hand i'm like this space is a year old like i mean we're not actually we're a little older than that but in reality we're like a year old so you know it's it's um you are so early to this this did happen so quickly but it's just such a no-brainer given both the scam side of the industry and then also i have done the thing where i i went to an event that was supposed to be gated per something and was just like easily able to get in by just having a friend like text me a

picture of the invite and they were like okay sure we accept that and i was like how are we in crypto and this is our this is our security system for getting into events that are supposed to be private like this is ridiculous so on all levels i think this is a no-brainer here he'll be my closing question how could you mess this up [Music] what could go wrong i think what could go wrong is there's always a vulnerable vulnerability for any system right it doesn't matter which system but every system has a vulnerability i think on our side that vulnerability is never going to be access to tokens so that's one thing that i'm 100 sure will never happen even if we get hacked there's no way somebody

gets access to your tokens no way but there is the risk of downtime we get hacked our service is inoperable for a period of time and maybe now we have thousands of people waiting outside of ape fest that that that is one thing that could go wrong right um other than that it's just going to be continuing to build partnerships continue building out the product what could go wrong market i mean if for any reason we have an apocalyptic event in the crypto space and this all dies because we have to remember this is all still an experiment i'm super bullish on our collective experiment in a crypto and web 3

space but it still isn't an experiment and the jury's still out and so i i don't think the space is dying by any means but the risk of negative macro events happening is definitely a risk for us my actual last question you spurred something in me as you said that do you all have user projections like you're thinking about brands entering the space big mainstream brands onboarding the next billion users do you have projections around that or or timelines around when you think will hit certain numbers of users of vcs or or nfts honestly i don't like making those types of predictions because i've been proven

wrong time and time again and i feel like anybody that has like hard numbers on these predictions is probably going to be wrong we've all seen the volatility in the space and and who knows um i am super bullish on this phase though and um i really hope that this is really the new frontier and that uh we're gonna be in a in a completely different scale a year from now just like we were a year ago awesome thank you so much for joining me fonz i really appreciate it i cannot wait to see what you all do moving forward i think uh i think you're awesome i think you have an awesome product not to show too hard again obviously whatever i'm not even it's not financial advice people know i'm not asking anybody to

invest in anything but um but yeah really really appreciate your contribution to the space thank you so much for having me this was really fun [Music] thank you so much for watching this episode of overpriced jpegs if you liked this conversation if you liked this episode please go ahead and hit subscribe it helps me out it helps the show out and it means you will get alerts and updates when we post new content thanks again