Alex Masmej: Showtime – Building the Open Social Graph With NFTs #394

Transcript

[Music] hi welcome to epicenter i'm cyber cinquecio and i'm here with sunny agarwal and today we're going to be speaking with alice masmash or as we like to call him his friends alex mignolet and uh he's going to be telling us all about showtime and we're going to be talking about nfts we'll be diving deep into everything that's going on with nfts right now and i'll probably talk about the alex token as well uh but first i'd like to tell you about our sponsors for today's episode paraswap just came out with a huge update that's even faster and more

liquid it's cheaper than your swap and it comes with a new gas token that can cut your fees by up to fifty percent three swap is also now multi-chain and it's expanded to polygon and finance smart chain you can start trading at paraswap dot io slash epicenter we're also sponsored by solano and next generation blockchain with lightnings fast blocks and uh fees less than a cent per transaction scalability is perhaps the single biggest challenge preventing crypto from becoming the backbone of the world's financial system and today solana might be the best option we have so go to solana.com epicenter to learn more and we're also sponsored by exodus an easy to use wallet which supports hundreds of assets and has native apps for all platforms including ios and android

and it's an on uh fully non-consolidated wallet and they're firmware believers in the not your keys not your coins mantra go to exodus.com and give it a try alex thanks for joining us uh we've been trying to plan this for like a long time and i'm happy that it's finally happening yeah thank you so much guys thank you for having me so you were uh you were in paris recently and you uh just arrived back in in san francisco how does it feel to be back i've just been in the u.s for like four four days i think uh yeah super excited uh it was a long journey and yeah it's kind of like closing the loop on the alex token which was made to move to the us um and so yeah that was uh really exciting to see this ending and so now

i've got my startup and i need to focus on it like 100 so yeah feels great cool i think i think sunny will be disappointed to hear that alex is no longer a thing because he was earlier saying i want to know what my alex tokens are worth so uh but yeah we'll we'll talk about alex in just in a second so for those who don't know you you tell us a little about your journey uh and how you fell into the into the crypto rabbit hole sure um so i got into crypto uh in like 2017 uh frankly because i could i feel like the the bars of entry to crypto as a european because you know you're so french uh it's like it's easier than other industries to enter especially at

the start of my career and so it just made sense that i could enter this field which also happened to be extremely high impact on society in the next 10 years and so extremely high potential low bars to entry for me was a no-brainer in 2017 i got interested in it didn't do anything about it and um roughly like at the start of 2019 i started reading a ton more about crypto and i started being active on twitter like mid-2019 and there's this guy called peter pan from ita cartel who basically like gives me money out of just one tweet of mine saying hey i'd love to go to berlin blockchain week and that's how i got to like meet the crypto community like basically peter pan flew me out uh in berlin and um and there um

i learned a bunch about you know the ethereum uh ecosystem uh all the things that you cannot do without crypto uh dow defy and ft um and then yeah fast forward like i do a project called rocket about nft again um then covet happens we have to reset everything and you know think about like what i should do next i do the alex token as like a way to crowdfund my life so that i can you know spend some time finding a co-founder searching for my next big project moving to sf and fast forward to now i've done all of those things and i just moved to sf and i just started showtime like five months ago and uh it's been a crazy crazy journey so far like people think like backpacking is crazy but like starting a startup

is insane yeah so i'm excited a little little flashback there to reset everything uh which we co-organized uh in the beginning of covid which seems like such a long time ago and it feels like such a different time now like i don't know man like it was um yeah it was great but it just feels like such a different time from you know just whatever it was like it was like 12 11 13 months ago yeah so you launched the alex token i think like a lot of people know you from from the alex token what was the inspiration for the alex token and like why why did you choose to do this um so actually like you know going back a little bit from the time where peter pan gave me money for a tweet

at the end peter pan was like hey like this is a bear market can you pay me back like you know we're not that wealthy um and so we decided to tokenize my date uh it was very easy it was 1500 alex massmesh loan 2019 tokens on ether scan each representing one dollar and i was basically going to give 10 interest on top of the principal a year later and so with we do this like you know it's just in in between us but raw which at the time is like the only social like an issuer like reaches out to me and say hey like you know uh this is crazy like we've been trying to convince people to create their own token uh for a while now and you've done this yourself like why don't you do like a more general purpose

token rather than just a debt token with us and i said okay and so we do the alex token at the time it was yeah end of 2019 but no one really cared because i was not particularly like known in the community or you know there was no use case that could attach to it it was like one hour equal like one token or something or 10 000 tokens but you know no demand for my time at the time um and so yeah fast forward covet where i'm like forced to you know do something that uh gets me out of paris gets me to do a startup and that was the only thing i was like vaguely known for in the community that was like a little bit fun and yeah i happened to be speaking at

like um ecc for a conference about personal tokens that was the last ever conference before covet conferences like became remote um and so i was like yeah like let's announce something let's crowdfund because honestly i had no money at the time uh it was paris i got cut my small side income that i got from like a marketing project in the space that's about it and so they said to crowdfund twenty thousand dollars and yeah like i feel like it resonated with people because it was so simple to understand it's kind of like the nft space today we can talk about it later like it's so simple the digital art uh you know like you buy something and you invest in someone with the alex token and cradle coin and most recently bitcloud so all of those concepts are

very consumer-facing and easy and so that's probably why i did resonate and then i kind of used it for the remaining of the year to do some small projects uh that we can talk about as many small things with it it was quite funny so that like initial loan that you did i remember i think the first time you and i actually got in touch was you know i think we were talking about like under collateralized lending and things like that uh and so i remember you were working on a project as well like i remember i think you have a pretty like really nice blog post about undercollateralized lending that i think i've like linked people to multiple times and stuff so uh what was that sort of like uh what were you building with that that's so interesting it's like we don't

actually talk about this that much about this period of time which was when i was in between the cartel and the alex token i basically realized there is only over clatterized lending and defy uh you know maker is great but it's not very capital efficient and i realize why not do you know unsecured lending which is i think 99 of the market of loans like no one does overclocked rise loan but whales and margin traders and so i did this blog i did i do the thread on twitter that does really well camila russo from the define contacts me to do an article i write an article about it with like maple finance um i think union protocol as well uh

there's also this this startup which i forgot the name of uh i think teller finance because they rebranded that's why i always confused teller finance which is backed by a 16 z cool unsecured lending platform and so from those learnings i was like actually like one way to have co over characterized lending not be too uh you know too friction uh inducing would be to have nfts as collateral and so from this i saw rocket which just is like a more locked out so like a basic dow of lenders that could basically decide okay we'll fund uh x amount of money against this piece of art that we are using a little bit

like a pawn shop a decentralized pawn shop was the idea of a young rocket it didn't do too well honestly i think now there's like more tries with nft and d5 liquidity like nftx or like defy and ft charged particles there's like a few other projects but i felt the market was kind of too tiny i don't think it was my big startup idea so i hold off on it uh covet happens i do the alex took it now on to showtime so that was a funny part of my time though because i think the main reason the main learning for me was like i don't think i'm very good at d5 i'm better at consumer products d5 requires a financial background i didn't have that financial background and so it but it was still a very good learning experiment like i just know a

lot about d5 because of this so yeah the alex token like what what is it so for context i i have a lot of alex token and i think i'm like one of the larger lps of alex token but i so what what what is my alex token you know i just treated it as a uh prediction market on you but like what does that mean like what what do i get by holding this alex token right so it makes sense like today because i'm focused on my startup like the alex together is a bit like a meme coin so like the only concrete usage you can get today is if you hold over 5000 alex not the lp tokens the actual rc20 you get to be in the alex ivory

tower which is like the active group chat where like a bot is checking every minute whether you hold those tokens the minute you sell you are kicked out of the group chat so that's like the only use case which is basically like there's no real use case uh for today for people who buy to the onuni swap but the alex token so started as one hour of my time didn't really do that then did the alex token um income sharing agreement which was what was used to fund raise the 20 thousand dollars it was 30 people so the rest there's right now 600 holders the all the olders don't have this but the 30 people who gave me together 20 000 they are getting an airdrop every quarter for the next three years

of my income um and and so this was the use case for them and then what i did a few months later was something called control my life where um it was this token based voting via simply signing so there was no guest fees to basically just signal like a vote um on my daily life habits um so like people could choose if i was going vegan or like running three miles a day every day or if i was to only live solely off bitcoin or if i was gonna wake up at six a.m and people chose three miles a day and so i did run all of those three miles a day it sounds like a very you know like superficial experiment

but austin griffiths and i when we did this although it sounds like a joke it actually partly inspired snapshot labs which basically is like this engineer from balancer uh the amm who was like wow like this is actually like pretty useful for like signaling voting without gas and i guess these are crazy and so actually alex was one of the very first snapshot labs projects because of this so anyway so like although it was mostly like a gimmick like a joke it still helped like you know push the space forward at least that's like how i portray it so i feel good about this so when you're looking for a flight you go to a flight aggregator to see all the different places where

you can buy the flight to get all the options and make sure you get the best price for your travel plans and when you're making a d5 swap just do the same and use paraswap it beats the market prices across all the major dexes because it aggregates them and thanks to their network of professional market makers you get zero slippage on your trades so they just pushed a huge update that's even faster more liquid thanks to a brand new algorithm pair swap is now multi-chain and has expanded polygon and binance smart chain so go and check it out give paraswap a try at pairswap.io epicenter how does the uh the the income airdrop work like is that

that you is that like handled by a smart contract where your income has to come through like a certain address and then it automatically gets gets distributed as an airdrop or it's like dividends basically uh so no like there is no enforcement on chain i think this was like the main backlash uh there was two main backers of the alex token um and so yeah one of them is like this is not enforceable uh this is uh only my reputation is a collateral uh kind of uh where no like i have to you know send by email i have the emails of everyone saying hey this is the income i made i don't even show my tax returns or stuff like this it's just like i tell them that and and um yeah that was basically like the way we went and i

use like you know a nail drop like multi-send or something uh to send it and that's about it and do you actually do this like do you send people i do this yeah i do this every three months and i've done this like four or five times now because it's been a year so i think i've done this four times so far and i'm going to continue and yeah also like my income is in fiat um and so actually like this very problem is partly what inspired showtime because i was like you know all the backlash around the alex token not being enforceable and being like an ico uh actually makes sense like i'm not saying this is a wrong critic like this is the truth and so it's like okay like what sort of income can someone make on chain

that is a little bit more consumer facing than just you know like software development software development with bitcoin or stuff like this and it turns out that being an nft artist or a creator is the first time you can have you know income on chain going through you and so we can use applications to redirect like maybe super fluid finance which is like a project that that helps like uh do like erc20 distribution or like mirror splits more recently which is splitting for like nfc publications so all of those things are possible with nfts and so i realized this and this was kind of the premise of showtime so so why did you do it only for the like sort of initial buyers of alex instead of like uh doing as this sort of like ongoing with like

cur every whoever is currently holding alex at any given moment i think i i honestly like looking back i should have done it that way uh i think one reason was first i didn't know this was going to succeed like i just did a bunch of experiments in the past four or five months it wasn't really thought out really well um and another reason is that it seems a bit more complex you have to introduce some tokenomics about like so what do i do do i like buy a bunch of alex tokens and then burn them is that the mechanic to uh increase the price i wasn't sure about the exact economics and it was just so much easier to do like a google form uh at the time i was really going for maximum simplicity and making sure people just understand it

but yeah like i think it was confusing over time to know that you know this wasn't uh an income sharing agreement for everyone also one thing is like diluting my income which is like if there's 600 holders like i'm not a multi-millionaire like i'm not going to give a substantial amount of money if there's that many holders so keep it 30 is best and also um also just like being conscious of securities laws and stuff like this i did this outside of the united states uh and so keeping it to 30 people with a very tiny amount is also something that i like because you know it's an experiment i don't want to you know get people uh losing money and i just want to make sure that everything is fine and i'm confident with the royal team and

the legal team and everything but also making very tiny was also nice as well from a legal perspective how do they what kind of income does this get taxed at for the for the token holders so it's so funny because i'm a french president and i paid my taxes in 2020. i had to talk to like one of the most notable like french uh crypto content and he was like so surprised like he was like like yeah like this is such a weird use case i think we text it as uh i think i know who this is yeah alexander it's it's another alex um and so like what we did is it was seen as

free like as like a drop this is how we did it which basically meant like maximum taxes but like i was i was happy with this you know like i didn't want to have any problems and it was free money in a way although i'm giving my income later on like i i still wanted to be and french taxes happen to be quite high uh 30 but whatever yeah so like will alex holders like be like is is it like integrated all into showtime in any way like into your current project so i get this question asked a lot like i'm not sure i can answer i cannot answer any religious showtime i i mean what i can say though is like i'm going to try my best to reward the alex holders because honestly it's it's actually pretty

insane how alex did to my career like before alex i was just you know random guy at conferences uh just like with big dreams but like the alex bridged a huge huge gap here and so those people are partly responsible for my success it's kind of like i created my own teal fellowship for myself uh for those who know about like the tech you know young people and so like it's it it was really helpful and so it seems like they deserve some things but like i cannot legally say anything i don't even know myself uh it will there be any links with showtime but we're gonna i'm gonna maybe try but like i cannot say i really cannot say so yeah let's talk a little bit about

uh showtime then so yeah what is show time to start off with sure so showtime is a nft social media to discover and showcase uh digital art that's like the current version uh because obviously like in nfc space nft art and collectibles is the main the main thing today and so we decided why not build a platform that reads every single marketplaces and instead of buying and selling you can like comment share and do all the bunch of things that basically instagram does so i think a lot of people describe us as like the instagram for nfts and i think that's a that's a fair comment it's like you know nfgs are basically

revolutionizing social media and is like a new way of displaying social media content and creating social media content online so why display them solely as financial assets um especially as nft prices are really high guest fees are really high right now uh most people just want to see them like instagram like you don't buy on instagram all the pictures and photos like advertisers do but that's like a very small persona and so yeah we just wanted to have a kind of like this digital museum gallery social media uh you know instagram such pinterest style uh platform that basically sees all the nfcs from ethereum let's get to our sponsor solana now this is a special ad for me to read because

i've been a deep supporter of this project since meeting the solana team back in 2018 i invest personally in the project and my company course one is super deeply involved in the solana ecosystem including running the biggest validator so what's so cool about solana well we all know that scalability is the single most important issue facing the blockchain industry today and the solana blockchain is an amazing solution for it the network supports thousands of transactions per second with 400 millisecond block times and over 500 validators the special thing about solana is also that it's not a charted blockchain it's a single blockchain hyper optimized for performance so that makes it really easy to maintain

composability between all of the apps on solana so that they work together seamlessly now and forever the solano ecosystem is growing at a rapid pace and it's a great place to build your project or just get involved with the community so go to solana.com epicenter to learn more so maybe we should like uh step back a little bit and talk about like just what is going on with nfts and like you know before we dive into like what showtime wants to do with them so you know i think we've done you know maybe this uh like third or fourth episode now like i think we we did our first one without uh alex from wearable a couple uh months ago and then we had the guy who did the uh

friends with benefits tokens and stuff and so i know literally yeah yeah you know from your perspective you know i think maybe you have a different take uh view of it than you know for example the very world founders do so what do you see as this like current what's happening with nfps and why has there been this like sudden hockey stick growth in the entire nfp space in the last eight months yeah like what i noticed uh which was like the data that was backing the restaurant for building showtime was in july 2020 the nfc space started going exponential in terms of volume and i think one reason is that basically like you know in the

grand scheme of things uh almost no one cares about technology or finance but everyone cares about social media everyone cares about art and culture in all its form and so it happens to be digital art because that's like the most economically viable option right now because art is it can be expensive uh you know you don't buy art every day and so it fulfills all the things that crypto uh with today's limitations uh can handle and so yeah it's like it's it's the first time you know a category is simple to explain it goes outside of technology and finance and thus uh it is quite interesting so yeah

for me the the exponential growth since last summer was like a way of of of thinking this is the start of the the chasm being crossed to early mainstream because for the first time it's just not more about finance and technology anymore it like defy dao ether infrastructure blocked infrastructure those are all like back-end things not consumer-facing things and so as a consumer founder i was literally looking for a consumer use case for the past two years and i was really excited to jump on this trend um and actually like even myself like kind of underestimated it i thought that it would be like roughly 500 million volume by the end of this year but i think it happened like in february or

something like it was so fast and so for me it's a new social media primitive it reminds me of social commerce apps in asia which the west did never really have any sort of equivalent uh right we have instagram but you don't buy anything from instagram like the most equivalent in the west is like fortnite skins however like we don't have like cheap enough transaction fees uh for fortnite skins type prices because it's always like at least a thousand dollars or more maybe pinterest i would say is maybe the closest i feel because i know a lot of people use pinterest to like to buy you know save yeah like you know they're putting together like

wishlist or like you know i i feel like maybe pinterest i know usually linked to like products to buy as well right yeah that makes sense so yeah pictures are some buying function but it's never as as easy like yeah like nft is like these the easiest thing to to buy something online i think like the it's like the alternative from web 2 is maybe like listing something on superfine or ebay nft is even easier it can be a hundred percent margin if you want once guest fees are like you know driving down to zero uh it can be a hundred percent it's like it's entirely yours uh there's there's so many benefits to to this uh thing and also you know like the blockchain space

we talk a lot about cryptocurrencies nfc by definition is everything else right like nfgs that like tokens are cryptocurrencies the financial stuff everything else in this planet that is not fungible is everything is a nft and so i thought the market for it was pretty big the white space is enormous for startups it felt like a nice idea maze to go through and so yeah for all of those reasons i think and especially me like i think looking back i didn't even think about this when i started showtime but like as a french tech outsider quote-unquote like social media was my way of getting into tech and so for me going through the social media lens also made sense as well because i view social media i know how to build

those products social media also is good for word of mouth and so you know for for a company to be successful like i think their users has to talk to the uh to other people about it and so it just felt to me like all the stores were aligning for for showtime uh to to start and so the fc space is growing yeah we just don't know that what will happen from here especially as like layer two solutions or new blockchains will arrive to scale up nfts my guess is that it will be from digital art to all kinds of content whether it's photos videos memes podcasts newsletter all of those things will happen in the future and it's it's very interesting so yeah i'd like to maybe just bounce

balance on that that's my next question is so i mean currently when you go to showtime it looks very much like uh like an instagram right like it's a showcase of people's nfts and there's some like sort of liking and commenting functionality but like what what is the future of showtime like what kinds of things like you know five years from now what would you like that platform to be to represent and you talked about newsletters and podcasts and things like that like where does that fit in in this uh you know in the secret system sure um so yeah there's there's multiple features for showtime i think the five years one is the long term one and it is about

creating a decentralized social network which means that right now you know because we wanted to move and build fast the only disinteresting in showtime are the nfts or the nfts itself right like they like the comments everything else is centralized so that we could move faster and build a product faster and see if people cared about it in the first place and and what we see is that as blockchain scales we would put all of those interactions on chain uh so that really your social identity that you own online with your crypto wallet can be used in any other front end that reads this like showtime social graph infrastructure uh so we will be the open social graph

where any developer in the world can build a new platform on top of so we can have like the newsletter showtime the podcast showtime that will just literally see your followings your followers everything in one place and so you don't have like right now every new social media like clubhouse they had to start from zero you had to start from zero people and and what we did with short time was like since we used the open nfc platform we actually started showtime with like dozens of thousands of accounts and that felt great even to start new social media because now crypto composibility can be used to bootstrap a social graph from nothing and there's so much hidden gems in blockchain data that we haven't

utilized yet and so we want to push this further with not just nfcs which is like the very bare bone 2021 age to the 2025 age of like now all of your data is online it belongs to you any developer can serve you a platform and you know whichever one you choose uh they will make you pay a fee or something for the ux and maybe showtime the protocol will take a tiny fee on top of all of those but that seems like a much more you know like open world that we want to be in rather than all the tiny walled gardens that extract your content and like we know that story already let's get to our sponsor exodus exodus

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little bit deeper what's the open social graph and what does it enable uh you know that is fundamentally different from the current model of you know everybody has their own wallet garden i think what it enables is that like so many social platforms and communities cannot be enabled because the developers do not have access to the social graph like to build the news to some of that product like it's probably better for you to work at facebook and and you know try to lobby uh the the facebook executives into like oh let's do this social media product if you started sonya from scratch well maybe it's not economically viable for a small community it won't be vc

backed uh and so what we you know that we end up with is like tons of very social media giants for verticals but the innovation is constrained by the fact that like it's you you just cannot restart one that easily like you you cannot plug on the social graph you cannot read uh what what like the people want you to access it's it's just really constrained it constrains developer innovation there is no developer sandbox for creating a social media if this social graph was open it would be much more easy it would be just easier and and sure there is things like login with facebook and you know you could do something like this but it's like loading already content that is made

and refactoring to like whatever ux you want is probably more powerful and we haven't really seen anything like this yet like true composability not just okay like starting with facebook to like bootstrap your name and your profile picture here it can be much bigger you can discover new interactions with people that you didn't know where possible and in the previous world garden model like you will have to first convince a bunch of people to send it with facebook go through your own bonding flow so right now they're selling with facebook it's just like uh easy to like bootstrap this necessary graph versus here it's like one main one and it just makes sense like this is how the internet should be you should be able to own your data and owning your data was really theoretical

for a long time but now with nfts it makes more sense like okay like you can make money from your data now you can directly interact with people you can express your support for someone much better than web 2 which was very altruistic based at most like patreon is donation based and so anyway my larger point is that innovation is being constrained uh with with wall gardens this is probably why it would be better to have an open social graph so how do you solve this in showtime so i actually like ran into this a little bit where like you know i opened up showtime and you know i was having trouble finding people that i already knew right like i want to like follow my friends

but like in showtime there's no way right now of like you know saying oh let me find my twitter friends or something right i think right now the only two people i'm following actually are you have the two of you actually uh because those are like the first only two people all right i mean i i kind of like scroll through a list of people i'm like okay i don't know any of these people so i just say all right well i'm sure alex has an account let me i searched your name of course you did and i searched sebastian's name of course he did but like i wasn't sure how to find out which of my other friends also have accounts and that's a bit hard because um you know blockchain like we are the first amongst the first applications ever to try to make sense of blockchain data

in a social way like we don't really even if we have the twitter api like how can we know the etherdress like maybe if you have ens in your username on twitter we would like resolve it and like searching on showtime or stuff like this like it just says we are starting this entire social data from scratch the blockchain has zero social data the blockchain has defy past history transactions so you can maybe know if someone is like a good defy user or not and if you sold bunch of nfcs or not but there's like we are trying to build it like we are trying to know actually with the followers and following like hopefully we'll get to to have a clearer uh picture and right

now i think if you've tried to follow some people we will have like a a nearest neighbor kind of algorithm trying to kind of detect like which people from like your second degree connections you might know and follow but but that's about it for now and yeah i do agree like we are starting this from scratch this is why it looks a little bit like pinterest or the early social media internet uh you know even zora looks a bit of this vibe it's because we are recreating from scratch a little bit like those early social media platforms that had to start from scratch so we honestly don't have that much data is my answer and i'm not sure how to bridge login with facebook and twitter with true ethereum addresses maybe by email because some people link with

magic link by email but yeah it's still it's still not clear to me isn't this something you could use the graph for like could you use the graph to build all of like these interactions between ethereum addresses and usernames or whatever so actually the graph is a team that we spoke a lot with basically every nft team i was part of kind of when i started the another under categorized d5 community i also started this nfc subgraph community where like zora rybal everyone is in this group chat where we discuss how to do the nfc standard and so maybe yeah as part of the standard um we could maybe have some things where

it could link to your social accounts or to like your email address or something that could be cured and we can then use to kind of track your friends if you log in with like social logins like twitter and see your friends that would make sense yeah but so just coming back to the social graph this open social graph idea so i i think it's a really cool idea to want to bootstrap this this sort of thing i wonder though in you know if with within with the ambitions that you have like creating this open social graph the way i see it is like showtime becomes sort of an open platform and anyone can build like uh a podcast network on top of it

or you know a newsletter platform or like whatever you know new type of content platforms would exist in the future you would use short time to do that um you could use showtime as one of the platforms on which you do that and there might be other social graphs that exist and you may have like interoperability so like i sort of see this vision for like you know this um social application platform basically like sort of thing but uh why did you choose sort of crypto art as the the starting point for this because if you're going to try to reach like mainstream audiences it feels to me like you'd want to go with something that's more mainstream like podcasts or newsletters or like you know sharing pictures of your your your brunch or whatever so yeah why

crypto art and you know what where do you where do you start sort of bridging into these more mainstream use cases that aren't reserved to like you know crypto whales or like people with a lot of crypto that can buy nfts so from the nft world uh you know from the crypto native perspective it seemed like crypto art was the most popular one the most decentralized one like we see nba top shots as well or like genies which are applications on flo this other blockchain where they have b2b deals with very famous people or leagues and so we were like okay like in the decentralized ethereum world which will be better to start an open

social graph than another blockchain um it seems like the most popular consumer use case is um digital art and the second thing that went through the decision was you know digital art is visual content and so i'm not saying we will successfully you know achieve this transition but what also is visual content is things like instagram or tik tok which are extremely consumer-facing and very mainstream and you know 1 billion plus users and so it seems like with layer 2 and other solutions showtime could scale to expand from digital art to any videos photos memes the same way

that instagram started with like your friends drinking coffee to like this influencer platform now uh we think we can maybe bridge from the crater uh you know the digital artist as a beach head to a bigger market afterwards and hopefully crypto infrastructure will scale so that we can enable those things right now digital art is just the only economically viable thing you can do this like there's not much other things unless you start your own you know like proof of stake uh you know blockchain or sidechain like this little other use cases than this will arch right now but i think it can bridge to something else because it's the same visual content formats so like the ux that we're building can be reused for other use cases

so yeah this is why and then yeah like something like newsletter or podcast like there is no other uh there is no newsletter nft well there's mirror i guess in some ways and they're doing a wonderful job and uh but that's that's about it like there's no there's no newsletter uh there's no youtube nfts for like longer videos all of those new formats i think are companies worth starting but crypto is maybe too early for this because it's maybe two heavy files or maybe there's just not enough data like newsletter no one is doing newsletter right now like like digital art is here it's on the blockchain it's just for us to take and you know display and put into this visual content so to start like a social media protocol reverse engineering it it seemed like

visual content is like a massive massive part of social media and digital art is that one category that is in this you know uh in this format so that's the rational uh but i don't know maybe it will be uh it will be different uh and so then will be used for not just digital art but another niche and we maybe won't bridge the mainstream i'm not sure it's yeah i think like you know maybe there's some digital odd platform that you know are started by artists or you know really want to remain artists first but we really have this more general vision in the future and so we would

like to appeal beyond art art is just the first step so how does uh showtime sort of compare to like you know there's i i know there's like other similar projects like zora and foundation and things like that or like why would i even use showtime as opposed to like open c right like you can go to my profile page on openc and you can kind of see the somewhat similar information they have a like button as well so what what's sort of the difference here so i would say openc is best at being very exhaustive in features indexing the nfts indexing all the attributes uh really making sure that you can see all the collections

um and so it seems like it's a different use case i would say like openc is more the ebay or the amazon of nfts you know that shows the price like really does show everything and is like the base layer like the ethers kind of nfts and and showtime is more like we are making opinionated ux uh decisions to make it just like something that you browse uh you know more casually that you can see you know your friends in ft you can see your friends brag with that nfts but yeah it's more of like showing your portfolio to the public uh open c is more like okay like detecting every single nft like which one is on sale which one is a bit

etcetera so i would say it's uh it's a different like we could go into a pencil direction but it would make our design like just more cluttered and less appealing and open c could reduce some features to be more like showtime but also they will miss out on some key features of their nft search engine that they spent years building so it seems like we are different enough and both are required honestly like you know a lot of nfts on showtime we have this button like you know view on openc if you want to have more more data and information about the nft so i feel like we're still quite different and then you know foundation uh i guess foundation could be like right now it's like

one gallery for nfc like one auction house and so maybe foundation will be like a very popular account on showtime in the future i'm not sure exactly how they will evolve and and who else well zora is very interesting because it feels like zora is perhaps leading the nfc standard and if we ever have to do our own marketplaces feature uh we may use znfts from zora because it seems like it's a standard that they're improving a lot and that has more features that is composable with other things like mirror is building uh things to like split royalties from from zora nfts and so zora i believe like we are completely complimentary with them

and it's it's very likely that we will use their uh at least integrate uh at best use for our own marketplaces features so i think we're like the layer on top of zoroas the content primitive we are like the social graph like you know interaction primitive one of the things i was actually thinking about last night uh is do you know if there's any like platform for like i was thinking about this in like terms of like fantasy sports like do you think there's something with like fantasy art where it's like i mean i was thinking of like you know can you create derivatives of nfts where it's like hey i want to bet on the next beeple artwork and how much it's going

the next sale is going to go for and i want to create like a derivative on that and like and i was like oh i want to put together this like fantasy art game where i can like you know create my team of artists against your team of artists or something like that do you know if anyone's working on something like that yeah so like fantasy as it like you know you create your outlier own game and like your goal is to beat other people in a game fashion that it doesn't have like the real value yeah there is like sore air which is this french company who does this with soccer clubs there's also this new stuff i just heard of like last week called vision rare which is fantasy startups so like even if you're not a vc you can create your outlier like startup

portfolio and maybe that will help you break into vcs because vccs will just see like oh wow like you got into this company in this fantasy game like super early on uh anyways for showtime i feel like yeah like betting on someone early is something that obviously like as myself who like really alex took in but people could better myself early uh and it seems so far to be paying off for them like uh you know having created one of the first crater tokens like it really makes me wonder uh whether we should do it on showtime i can't talk too much about this but like uh we're gonna probably do something where you know you can you can maybe bet on creators or collectors in the future and that should be something that you'll you'll hear more about soon

how you know can tell us a bit about like the team and the company and like you know how are you guys is there going to be a show token or something or like what's the long-term like roadmap of this for sure so um so the team we are a team of six most engineering right now the face of showtime is really like building like we have a lot of things to build we have you know maybe like scaling and layer two solutions is something that we're thinking about right now so that really we can then do a push on marketing once the product is fully finished although right now marketing wise it's doing pretty well it seems like creators and collectors love their showtime account did they whenever they are on on our trending page they they share it and people follow each

other so it seems it seems exciting for now so since our vision is a um social media protocol uh it won't be an ipo but it will probably be it took an offering uh although i cannot say anything i feel like i'm so scared of of like saying things we just don't know right now like this is the first time of showtime but it's it's something that we are potentially uh interested in and it seems like the natural way of creating a social media protocol like it cannot be a a c corp like ipoint uh the traditional business way so it will be a protocol that probably will be a token like this it's something that we're really interested about

but it's too early to call right it's like when you are a startup that's five months old and just going to y combinator you don't think about the ipo i think it's the same stage right now for us like we just got started i think thinking about a token is too early but it seems like it's the right approach seeing all of those d5 projects get coin more recently it seems like it's the best way to decentralize your protocol and and make sure that everyone who participates in the value is getting fairly compensated for for their work yeah so i mean you know like you mentioned you're you're pretty early stage still you guys recently raised funding uh you know and i think paradigm was your lead investor and so you know paradigm is like you know a really well-known fund in the space but they've always like really

been more on the deep eye uh side of things um and so i feel like this is one of their first forays into this like nft thing and so like what was their whole like what did you do to like pitch them and get them excited about nfts um yeah i'm laughing because i am absolutely terrible at pitching i feel like it was more because you know showtime like we launched very fast and we you know built as quickly as we can and i think that was what built up their conviction rather than my storytelling skills and yeah like i mean paradigm yeah actually this is very true pardon historically only from the d5 projects and we do like you know amm deep research like

participated to like do some v3 designs and so why would they fund the nfc project well first of all uh it was because nfcs were not that important until like very recently one and two they actually funded zora pretty recently as well it seems like zora could be complementary to us because they are doing the content primitive we are the social primitive the curation primitive you know and so there's a lot of improvements on top of this very bare bone nfg structure that their crypto expertise could be very useful first to bridge like you know layer to solution into scale part with like georgios or or other team members will be very useful uh but also you know maybe doing some

smart contract changes uh communicating with the zora team around like what are the latest uh things that you can build on top of nfts i think they will be quite helpful in that realm so yes it's true nfts is something that is very new for paradigm but it's also very new for crypto as a whole and i think their expenses will be very much needed because the nfc standard to be honest right now is is too simple we have to build a bunch of other things we have to build a social media protocol in next few years and so a lot of research will be needed to just implement it and um this is why we kind of chose them as partners it seems like at our stage they are the best partners we can ask for so taking a bit of a step back here and

and zooming out looking at the so the nft space you know what are some of the biggest challenges you think that the ecosystem faces today you know whether it's in terms of you know infrastructure scalability you know dev tools just kind of general use cases and applications uh i i feel like in a lot of ways we're like things here things in this nft craze are a little bit similar to you know how things were in the ico uh boom of 2017 2018 and you know in the end like once the dust settles there will be like a sort of like a new normal uh so what what are the challenges right now and then maybe like to a follow-up question is

like when the dust settles what what what will the ecosystem look like for sure that makes sense yeah i feel like yeah the ico craze obviously like uh mostly scams no dev tools uh no no apps or d apps to plug in um and no infrastructure like blockchain was still like very nascent i feel like this this time around uh there is better dev tools there is also a better infrastructure like well maintenance is still very bad of course and like not scalable but it's it's a problem that's like almost technologically solved right because the value solutions coming out very very soon this summer and a bunch of new improvements with ethereum two like

it seems like infrastructure is about to be solved devtools are much better there are applications already so i feel like just waiting those few next months and we'll see the nft space probably really really boom in popularity and so what comes out of this after the scalability gap is formed and also fiat on ramp and flat off ramp and you know mainstream wallets via emails you know like with layer 2 you can also do like the smart contract wallet vision much better right now you know spock doc wallets is not really doable on mainnet i think like you know uh arjun which is amazing pioneers like they struggle subsidizing the gas fees of course and things like this and so a lot of uh tooling would later to become ready for the mainstream theater becomes

ready and so what will emerge from this is an explosion of social apps and social apps are amazing at propagating word of mouth and so that will be obviously very huge for the entire crypto space because when you're on showtime you start making money well we can plug you know usdc trading on uni swap and you know frame it as savings accounts if it's insured on open for instance like we can do some complex g5 products that we can then in our ui tell you know showtime users so basically uh a newer social media a new wave of consumer facing d5 products uh like a web 3 portal type apps that all of this will be available and so we

just need scalability and fiat on ramp in my mind most of the other things are done we're just waiting for you know like optimism is very exciting stock where it's very exciting arbitrary ethereum 2 a lot of those things like will be very very soon released and that's for me the main blocker this will unleash a lot of innovation and so actually i actually think the cycle will be even shorter like it took two years to to build a bunch of stuff this cycle like sure nft volume has decreased a little bit but like quick very quickly maybe this summer a lot of layer 2 solution will just create so much more new use cases for nfts that are not possible before uh and also like you know more capital

efficient g5 as well that uh the bull market will quickly resume one other thing i've been thinking about here and it's it's basically so you know there i think there's like two types of tokens in the space right you're like native tokens that exist on chain and like their their value is represented solely by their on-chain representation and so you know uh d5 governance tokens you know uh stable coins crypto r nfts are part of this category and then you have like tokenized assets and so you have like uh tokenized you know usd in the form of usdc and for nfts a lot of people um who have entered the space have been

thinking about like tokenizing physical art and like things that don't exist uh on a blockchain um or like they don't exist in in the digital realm do you think that this is do you think that there's actual value here do you think this is actually a use case or is it just sort of like this exuberance that people like just want to build nfts out of everything and like there's not really anything behind it like what what do you think of like this tokenized physical asset being tokenized as an ift i think this is this is good like um it seems like nfc could be the standard for all things like a ledger of of everything like a universal receipt um i i do agree with your

point that well i'm not sure if it was uh you know framed as a point but it seems to me that like you know crypto is still very early digital scales much better so it seems like the market for physical based nfts is basically smaller and less important but yeah i do think that nfts could be the the universal ledger of the world and so it means that physical art could have you know their inception date or royalties or whatever thing like at least encoded in the blockchain and and paid in a blockchain like you know virtual real estate all of those things will bring much more liquidity and access right anyone with the internet connection could like

you know purchase a a part of some real estate somewhere like realty is doing with real estate it just seems like to me those are one a little bit smaller markets and this scale not as fast because you need to have the custody part and all the meat space uh you know constraints so no i think this is interesting uh digital skills better that's just the way things are like you know and and to have like a physical uh space really winning like you have to be really perfect at logistics kind of like amazon is right like they are mid space but like they are so incredibly talented at logistics so maybe some operations like amazon grade of excellence in the physical

world will be required to have like a very big uh idea plan out otherwise i think first we'll hear a lot about uh digital before then the physical can take place i think that a lot of the physical nfc stuff will probably fizzle out and so i guess like with my follow-up question here and maybe you know we can weekend on this is what you what do you expect the killer app to be here and with any new technology i feel like most times someone's getting disrupted someone will win like there are winners and losers basically like in this in in this uh in this craze and like so in the in the long term

once the sort of nft killer app uh emerges like who what would that be who will be the winners and like who will get disrupted it would be the losers so it seems like the winners will definitely be uh the one building in the nft space today a little bit like you know defy is on its way to win and the losers are basically banking because a big chunk of their business is gone and then they will probably be forced to pivot to become like you know d5 front ends and same for the nfc space it feels like nfc space is probably going to eat social media and so when you can make money online social media and e-commerce i guess are like the incumbents there probably will have a very hard time competing

with the ease of transaction royalties giving uh just like the general fees of the applications are just so much lower everything will be more capital efficient transfer will be global and also like compatibility is such a big thing right like you can build one component really well everyone can build on top of you and so we can create really complex social media interactions that facebook will struggle to compete with so i would say facebook uh you know facebook is one cool social media apple way of being disrupted i think out of all the fang ceos like he's mark zuckerberg is probably the one that seeps the less at night i guess because it's it's hard yeah that that and boomer is getting older

and boomers are getting older and and those are the main ones using facebook and i guess instagram is like you know actually like every social media has this kind of curve of like the peak and then it just goes down and instagram is something it's on its way down uh i think the peak of instagram was 2019. tick tock is basically going through their peak right now and they will also go down and and clubhouse 22 tailbone clubhouse seems like to be a great success and i wish them the best but basically yeah it seems like a few social media giants are going slightly down and who are the ones who are going to take over they most likely will be crypto based uh maybe in asia there will be some centralized social commerce

service that could be a little bit similar to nfcs in a centralized manner but but i think in the western world at least nft platforms uh yeah for me social media apps where you know instead of instagram or youtube taking all of your money and sending it to advertisers like what i envision is like your your picture that you upload like if you're a famous influencer like this will be an nft that like uh an advertiser will definitely buy so like no middlemen like you directly like sponsored by on instagram would become like owned collected by coca-cola that will then you know buy themselves the advertising rights on your popular

social media content and they can even buy it in maybe coca-cola tokens that will be a coupon for you know uh buying coca-cola like you can still convert to fiat on uni swap but coca-cola it will just buy more products of coca-cola and to continue with that metaphor maybe there will be a way from the crater to like flow down some of its profits in coca-cola tokens to the users so basically there is no more advertising here because like you directly as a user benefit from the money spent in advertising like there is no advertising is basically like a middle man between like a product and their audience

with tokens and crypto you can directly bridge to the users and there will be some fees obviously to maintain like showtime and other things but they will be minimal uh and so that's very exciting so to me this is what it feels like like crypto will be better than free products meaning that you will get literally paid for for doing actions online even as a user it enables so many more things that facebook just cannot do because facebook either is is as so much infrastructure debt as is too centralized and so that's a liability with the governments and regulations coming after them so too many hurdles obviously i'm sure facebook is a very smart team they're going to pivot to you know hardware uh with like uh you know vr maybe that's

like their way of like escaping and knowing that they will lose this battle but it feels like social media is going to be reinvented and it's going to be uh the nft startups that win speaking of vr like how important do you think uh vr will be to like the success of nfts because i feel like especially when i pitch nfts to like normies i feel they don't get it until i start talking about vr and the metaverse and then they're like oh okay you're right this makes sense i i totally agree this is very interesting i think normies don't do not get nfts today because there is no social layer and so it feels like you're buying something the reason the argument like oh it's

just a jpeg kind of makes sense for normie is because there is no way to showcase your nfts anywhere so showtime is the first answer to this but obviously the long-term vision is the metaverse and so the main evers like has to be economically independent otherwise it's very dystopian so we don't want facebook to own your entire economy just because well that's very bad they will see literally all your interactions your and your data uh and they will own this in the world garden fashion that's pretty bad and two because probably the fees will be higher as well they will just impose their own fees and be like a monopoly of data and also off like the fees and so that's pretty bad and so yeah like for the vr medievers to exist we need so vr obviously and also

cryptocurrencies um nfts as like a real estate space in in a world right where now if you work play live in this vr world well now your nfc has much more utility right everyone in the world can see it everyone in the world can trade it it seems like yeah nfts are as of today because digital skills more than the physical world and they probably will be always more popular in the digital world than the physical world it makes sense that nfts are really well uh suited for for the metaverse and so it makes more sense for people to understand this vision and this will probably be like you know slowly sweeping through our lives and people will understand nfts more

and yeah open worlds you know are kind of pioneering this uh decentralized crypto vauxhall sandbox all of those projects with nfc says real estate and there's like malevolence preppers which is like a kind of funny category of people who like already start buying so much lands so they will be like the rich landlords of this new universe stocking up on canned goods and stuff that's that's really funny so definitely yeah mid averse vr plus crypto max solar sense we need both technologies to work out um and it seems like it'll be the case in 10 years time 15 years time and that'd be very exciting yeah that's a very actually interesting way of positioning i feel it's like you know the reason i think why people understand the vr side is for saying okay this is

how i display my nfps but now what you're saying is with showtime like even pre-vr if you have a way of shut displaying nfts then that will get helpful yeah that is pvr because all worlds right now is pvr like oh well there's still instagram slash tiktok we don't have a vr headset that is very cheap um it doesn't exactly replace your phone so like there's like a ton of things that like are needed for vr there's a cool project called uni that's backed by naval pretty cool french founder as well and yeah like it's trying to take a social media vr headset we'll see where it goes and i'll be happy to look into it but so far showtime is built for the preview world like we have

enough work to do with crypto alone to then think about vr and we'll see if we can plug two vr things but shouldn't be too hard honestly like it's a social media protocol like the vr headset can just like read that data under a different ux and that would be like the mid evers cool alex uh we'll have to end it there thanks so much for coming on the podcast and uh sharing your vision for showtime and for the the open uh social graph and the nft space it's been really fascinating where do people find you what's your showtime handle that we people show my showtime endo is at am because my co-founder is also called alex uh so he got the alex one uh so try time.com slash am

and then my twitter is at alexmusmage and that's where like i basically live right now that's like my miniverse right now as of today showtime and twitter yeah thanks alex cool awesome thank you so much guys thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on itunes spotify youtube soundcloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a google home or alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast go to epicenter.tv subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen and while you're there be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to

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