AMA with Devin Finzer, Co-Founder & CEO of OpenSea

Transcript

are here who is the co-founder of openc and david the topic is the nfts because nfts are absolutely blowing up right now uh talk about nfts what's going on in this world right now david uh sorry to kill you offline didn't go live uh so we are doing it right now now start over okay all right bankless nation we are super excited to bring you this community ask me anything this is your opportunity to ask our guest question we are streaming this live on youtube we usually do this on the second and fourth wednesday of the month this time it's thursday but next time it will be the fourth wednesday of march so check it out you can also get it on the podcast the day after i'm super excited about our guest

today because the subject is topical the subject is absolutely blowing up we're talking about nfts today and there's so much going on in the nft world we've got an absolute expert this is devin finster who is the co-founder of openc david what's going on with nfts why are we bringing on a guest to talk about nfts yeah people would think that like we are done talking about nfts but like nfts aren't done like maturing or being discovered by people so the surface area for nfts is endless and the the news of this week is that uh rob gronkowski otherwise known as gronk pro football player tight end for i'm not a football person

big football player yeah yeah tampa bay um dropped nfts right and so we have now pro sports athletes dropping nfts people as of this morning sold an nft for 69 million dollars what uh so the rabbit hole just keeps on going uh and so a really important piece of infrastructure for nfts is open c uh which is a place that i use to explore and uh kind of view view my inventory of nfts and also see the inventories of nfts that are out there uh but there's also so much more that it does as well so we got devin on to just ask what what's up with openc and so we're going to bring him on in just a sec guys start cueing your questions in

youtube if you have them we're going to start with some questions from david and myself but we will get to your questions as we see them in youtube before we get to devin start talking about openc start talking about nfts we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible synthetics is ethereum's decentralized derivatives liquidity protocol what does that mean synthetics is a platform for creating and trading synthetic assets which are assets that are priced via an oracle rather than bids or asks traders can use the quenta exchange which hosts and trades all of the synthetic assets created by synthetics traders on quenta can trade synthetic tokens like sbtc s oil or sd5 because quinta is powered by

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non-funchable human that means he is unique cannot be exchanged with any other human being devin how are you doing today i'm doing well thanks for having me on well thanks for coming on are you ready for this bankless ama sir i'm ready all right any questions guys put them in youtube let's start with this question because devin it really feels like nfts are having their moment nfts are blowing up right now we've got beeple we had three lao on the podcast [Laughter] we had blau on the podcast yesterday sorry not free loud that that's inside joke dave it's that joke just made out yeah dude i got out blau on the podcast rob gronkowski now dropping nfts it really feels like they

are being uh discovered right i mean they've been in crypto for a while but now they're being discovered why are nfts blowing up do you think i think it's a combination of a lot of things i think i think it's hard to point to one specific application and say this was the reason nfts blow up right if you pointed to people you know you could point to top shot you could point to um you know all these different applications that are coming online at roughly the same time um i think a lot of those added fuel to the fire but i really think that the underlying reason was just the accumulation of a lot of hard work over the last three years from everyone who is involved in the space so if you look at 2017 late 2017 when

crypto could use launch um really the only thing you could do in the nft space was you could buy a cryptic kitty you could breed a cryptid you could sell a crypto kitty and that was that was the entire nft space it was really boring from from that project but over the last three years now there's so much more there's nft creation there's nft marketplaces like ourselves um there's you know uh even brand new blockchains like flow that are devoted specifically to nfts um there's nft indexes there's energy collateralization and all these things are just creating this really cool ecosystem and then you throw some fuel on the fire with things like people selling you know previously for uh four million now for

even even more but you throw that on the fire and then you have this rich ecosystem that people can really dive into and you know i think that's just a recipe for really explosive growth of the space and you know it i think for us from our vantage point it was it was interesting to see because um it you know it was just kind of really slowly growing it was a lot of momentum and excitement from the people who were excited about it but really just contained to that sort of uh early adopter community and now all of a sudden the the curve is just it's insane to see the speed at which these trends evolve in which they go viral right and you're sort of you're also the other the last thing i would say is that you're

building on this foundation of social media where everyone's already hyper connected so these trends can just go you know get broad reach really quickly um through things like twitter and clubhouse and all these different platforms so so on on that note kind of i want to bring this question to the front front of the conversation because uh there's a decent amount of like the core ethereum people the people that have been with ethereum since the bear market right and they are seeing that growth that you are talking about that parabola that you guys are talking about and saying that this is unsustainable and these prices are absurd and you know flashbacks to the ico mania uh it can't continue like this what would you say to people that

are are worried about the sustainable nature of this new movement well i think it's a good point i think there's there's certainly cyclical uh there's cryptocyclical and i think nfts will probably have cyclical uh elements to them um but i do think that this is a very very different phenomenon from what we we saw with icos with icos you know it was about these sort of projects that had this you know maybe nebulous long-term vision and then it was really about investing and flipping whereas you know there is some of that in the nft space today but a lot of it is around creating curating collecting supporting artists directly it's not about sort of

investing in this sort of like hypertherium oh you know a lot of the icos were legitimate but some of them just weren't and some of them were you know felt really scammy and just not and and you know didn't feel like a good thing for the space in this case i think there's there's certainly you know scenarios where there's you know nfts that are are not worth buying or nfts that feel over inflated um but i really do think that this is the birth of a much more interesting renaissance in um in in creator activity and and and and the design space is just so much wider than icos that i think we do actually have um you know maybe maybe there's going to be a little bit of a correction but i think

we have a long way up as you were saying earlier um there's that so much is underexplored right now whereas icos it kind of felt like at some point you know there wasn't much else to do besides just buy the token and kind of hope it was going up here there's just a lot of richness that i think um uh will will sort of evolve over the next little while yeah one thing that uh i i kind of see in ita in the nft space in contrast to icos is nfts almost feel devon like they're more honest than icos because with with nfts you know exactly what you're buying you're buying a piece of culture you're buying a meme there's nothing's pretending to be like a utility token that can be turned into

money right like we know exactly what we're buying we're buying subjective art pieces basically right and there's no um you know here's our business model there's no like um this is how our tokens going to magically accrue value or you know kill ethereum or anything like that it's just these are creator communities that are saying here's our nft you can buy it or not and the market is really giving the feedback as far as what what the value of these things are does that resonate with you no i think that's a great that's a great way of framing it and i haven't i haven't heard that sort of uh exact framing but i think um i think that's yeah i i totally agree so the other thing that i'm saying is um

and i love that you used uh a few kind of verbs because on bank list we always talk about like all of the new verbs that we could do in this open money system you use verbs like creating and and curation and collecting right these are very nft these are collectible verbs and um you know i'm somewhat drawn to that but like getting back to kind of the the waves of interest here do you feel like part of this too uh part of the you know what we're seeing in terms of price and these big sales is we're seeing different communities suddenly discover nfts right so maybe we've seen kind of the the beeple digital art community suddenly discovering nfts and so they fled into the space now maybe we're seeing the beginnings of the professional athlete

community right we had mark cuban on who's talking about this but you've got gronk doing something with open c and now that fan base is starting to discover it so is that what's go is that what we're really seeing here and you mentioned that you still see this as as kind of early in its discovery phase is that just because you know we're going to see wave after wave of community kind of discover this talk to me about that process which communities have discovered this and who do you think is next great question i i think um well if you zoom if you go back in time to even in early 2018 when this was first a thing actually the community they got the most excited about nfts was the gaming community right so cryptokitties was technically a game as a pretty simple

game but there was this idea from sort of the fringes of of the gaming community that maybe you could have games that were more like free market economies versus your traditional game where it's actually quite games are very sophisticated in their uh sort of economic policies and economic structures but they're completely centrally controlled and completely closed you don't have imports exports you don't really you have some entrepreneurial activity but it's kind of looked down upon right um so what if the the idea with the gaming space was like well what if you took these closed economies and you opened them up and you allowed things to move from one game to another game you allowed open markets to exist that was really what captivated a

lot of the attention from from gamers for both gamers and game developers the thing that i think was challenging was that in order to make that work um you know ethereum had a lot of limitations of the user experience you know had a long way to go and then of course what we've seen over the last six months is that gas prices really just made it difficult to support the full range of economic activity from a one dollar item to like a hundred dollar item so gaming um has has done well in certain areas and particularly and kind of maybe we'll talk a little bit about this but the virtual real estate market projects like the central and crypto voxels in sandbox but for the most part things have shifted towards this more a simpler use case where it's these really high value art pieces

and i think a large reason for that is just that the technology that you know that's what the technology can support right now they can support things that are being sold for thousands of dollars but it's hard to support things that are sold for a lot less and i think that will change over time and really enable a broad set of use cases here um in terms of what communities i think will get involved i think you hit the nail on the head i think it's just community after community after community um and and you know goes beyond just uh you know everything from musicians um artists influencers really there's something to be done here for everyone and there's people who want to support

these people who have really had a lot a lot of trouble monetizing in the past and so that's not to say that everyone every influencer should be able to sell millions of dollars in nfts and not saying that's sustainable but i do think that you know once you have the full spectrum of being able to you know buy an nft for 50 cents for example um you know that's that supporting a creator through purchasing their nft when there's you know the possibility of reselling it in the future is is super exciting and super compelling um and so if it's looking at kind of what i think might come next um i think expanding to just lots of different answers small and large um and then also expanding to the gaming use case that was sort of the

early dream of the space i think will happen with um as the technology kind of gets better devin you alluded to this and i want to go back to this uh about the design space behind nfts and drawing drawing parallels from earlier in history earlier in ethereum history uh we had like this early use case of erc20 tokens which were this many different currencies and this turned into the ico mania that was unsustainable we kind of figured out that currency wasn't really the best use case for all of these projects but then we innovated and went through a bear market and then we came out with defy tokens and that's kind of like the new paradigm for erc20 tokens and we we often talk on the bankless program about how ethereum is really

speed running the history of money and finance as fast as it can like in the last five years we've ran through like 2 000 years of human history of money and finance and now we're kind of our where we are at today uh and i think we could draw a similar parallel with nfts and art right and what's unique about nfts and and art is like it's a digital token in the back graphic uh digital art in the front but that back end like hooks into financial apparatuses right financial stuff defy is what we call it and so like this this uh software layer that is inherently a software financial layer can be upgraded and innovated on and so that's you know

artists are going to work on their art they're going to innovate on their art and that's going to be what they do and that's going to be independent from ethereum but the nft is also something to innovate and develop and improve upon and so right now you said like we are kind of stuck in this early phase where we just have these high value nfts like that just represent a single piece of digital art and that to me sounds like the early primitives of something much cooler and much bigger down the line where where do you see this first innovation coming like what is going to be the cool new innovation in nfts at least on the financial and software side that really helps promote this industry and make it sustainable in the same way defy tokens made erc20s uh 20 tokens sustainable

interesting yeah i i guess what i would say or one one thing to kind of think about is um and i don't know if this sort of falls into your classification of like the front-end art or the back-end software but um i do think that at the end of the day these assets can represent all sorts of things in the existing digital world or even the real world so for example like right now you know you have these simple um pieces of digital art that people buy and they're just the provenance is sort of the the main thing about it right the fact that it came from people makes it exciting and compelling and makes people want to spend millions of dollars on it but um there's also just the raw utility of one of these nfts so for example you could

imagine um selling event tickets as nfts and those event tickets could be in a real world event or they could be in a virtual event in the gaming space you can sell swords inside of a video game right um or you could sell courses as nfts or for musicians and creators and influencers you could sell access to exclusive content or access to special privileges um i think there's a whole i think we're starting with just collectibles um but layering utility on top of these things um is going to be really compelling um but i do think that um sort of to what i was saying earlier um i think that in order to have or i think one of the unlocks will be having the full

spectrum of economic uh activity on these assets and i do think that you need to be able to have a scenario where someone can buy something for just a dollar or just two dollars so i think a big unlock and probably you know also a big unlock for defy as well is being able to not have to spend fifty dollars in gas to acquire an nft um and at that point you know you you're not just sort of talking about these super exclusive like high value collector art items then you're talking about things that just are useful because you know digital stuff on the internet is already useful in some context and there's no reason that it can't be traded on open markets and usable in other applications and just a better sort of more open primitive for for digital stuff as an

example like you know anything from like uh you know djs will sell their their snippets of uh samples from their music right and they do that on like a you know some some marketplace out there there's no reason that that could be an nfc as well it'd be tradable on you know hundreds of different marketplaces i like the analogy the analogy i've heard of what you're describing these like so we have the high value transactions going on right now in the nft world and in d5 in general to like soon in the future we'll have the lower value nft transactions and there'll be many of them it's it's very similar to like the bandwidth of the internet right in the early days when we had 56k modems uh we couldn't load graphics we couldn't

stream movies we couldn't have interactive gaming experiences what did we need more infrastructure we needed high bandwidth in order to do that and this is very much what nfts are doing and what crypto is is doing uh more trustless transactions per second that's kind of the one element of bandwidth of this entire space um but devin we've come this far and i want to get into what openc is um because that's important for us and i know there are a ton of bankless listeners who are actually users of openc we've done tactics on openc like how to how to trade uh an es ens name which is a you know a domain name specific to ethereum

it's an early nft case um can you tell us what openc actually is and as you're doing so can you fit it in the context of all the other things like layers that you see are important in understanding the nft market space and what goes on here sure so open c is a marketplace for nfts um so you can think of it kind of like an ebay or amazon um but instead of physical items being traded around we trade these uh digital assets um and these are of course nfts um in terms of how we kind of fit into the ecosystem i think one one kind of way to think about nfts is um when you own a physical item

um you can kind of do whatever you want with that physical thing right you could go and you could give it to someone across the world you could throw it in the trash if you really wanted to you could go and sell it on ebay with digital assets there's never really been a uh digital asset ebay right because um you don't actually you've never owned your digital stuff right so now that you do own your digital stuff um you can go and you can sell any nft that's out there on openc right you can come and you can um you know you can connect your metamask wallet you can see all of your stuff in your wallet um and then you can go and put it on sale or you can go and browse and purchase stuff now i think

david you were mentioning um another sort of role of openc which was that we started so early in the space we actually started like right after cryptokitty's launch that um we uh we became sort of this explorer for nfts so we index every nft that's out there on the market um and uh we allow you to kind of dive in and see the history of the nft so if you click on one of those uh nfts uh in the in the screen share here you can go and um look at all of the events that have uh happened on that nft so when was it created when was it transferred sort of the provenance of it and so we're

sort of like an ether scan but a little more oriented towards um consumers as opposed to developers um so that's another another function and then the last thing i would say is that one thing that we've gotten into recently is just better tools for creators who want to go and issue nfts really easily so um these rob gronkowski uh nfts for example um were actually created on openc um and then just sold directly through our platform so we've been investing in making that easier as well devin i want to dive into something that you said you said open c is an indexer for nfts and this is a subject matter that i've been trying to wrap my head around that i think is really really important so a piece of digital art can go through a

hashing algorithm and spit out a hash and that is what an nft cites when it cites that this is the token this hash is represented by this token and that's how we connect the art to the token the art doesn't exist on ethereum because art is very large in data art can be up to um up to like mega many many megabytes and a single ethereum block is less it's less than one megabyte right so you can't actually put art on the blockchain it needs to cite an alternative database and the way that we solve this problem is we just say that well this token we take that information we take that data run it through a hashing algorithm and append to that hash to the token and that's how we say that these things are connected the

problem is is if that database goes down we kind of lose access to the art but the hash is still persistent so if that image is circulating on the internet as data does on the internet it circulates infinitely copyable that persistency is available but what you'll be saying is is that openc is you guys index all of this stuff which to me represents some sort of redundancy or anti-fragility right so like what if for some unfortunate reason nifty gateway goes down and you lose access to visualizing your nft and your art but at least open c has done some amount of indexing to help retain that sort of digitally native aspect of the art uh talk can you

talk about that and why that's so important yeah i think it's a great point and it actually to to give a couple examples of this happening um this was you know maybe a year ago or something we we saw a bunch of games kind of shut down so they would launch their nfts they'd allow them to be tradable they'd have this really simple game associated with it and then kind of decided like you know this isn't really working out so we're gonna go ahead and do something else and so there were these communities of people who had bought these game items you know that they know that like there's always a chance that the game you know stops stops developing and solving you know an early alpha early beta um but what they what they decided was well all of the game items are still out there on

ethereum you can still look at them on openc um and they decided to go and and rallied the community about around building the game um so they sort of built the game rebuilt the game they um you know took over the website and you know that's possible and without nfts but it's a lot harder right because the database is like very proprietary um you know you might the user login system is probably like some some proprietary system and the assets aren't like you know maybe they're they're like kind of deleted or whatever um and and so doing this where you can um sort of revive the project um but because the assets are still out there and because open seas sort of serving as as you said redundancy layer

is really interesting um and uh so i think yeah there there is this challenge on um on ethereum around the limitations of what you can store on chain and typically you just store the ownership layer on ethereum and then the actual metadata layer is off chain and so what we've provided is sort of a utility for joining those two right so um the ownership layer will always be managed by this decentralized system um but there's these these parties that kind of act as indexers or kind of utilities for pulling in that data and

making it available to users and and providing it even if the original project shuts down devin i got a question from youtube that is specifically about this and maybe you've already answered it in part but i would like to address the question a little bit more directly this is from zeta4 on youtube thanks for the question uh can we please talk about asset hosting which is what we're talking about there was a recent example of someone changing the art asset after an nft was sold on open c ipfs slash r weave support when question mark maybe you could also talk about uh what um ipfs or rweep support and how that can help this whole all of this infrastructure right right yeah i think it's um so to kind of dive into the technical

details um when when nfts first emerged um you had cryptokitties and again they had the cryptokitties ids stored on the blockchain but then the cryptokitty metadata the name description image was stored on their own servers right and so if particularly has ever shut down um you know there'd still be the redundancy of openc but um the sort of original source of truth for their productivities would could disappear um and so now what what people have started doing here you know what a lot of projects do especially these really high value art projects is they store the metadata on a decentralized file storage system like ipfs or our weave and then we can sort of go and pull that

and host it on our own server so that it can be easily displayed but that source of truth is um you know as long as those decentralized networks keep on running you can't really tamper with your the original metadata and you can't mutate it um you can't change it so um in terms of openc we are working on currently when you create an asset on openc we we just use our sort of caching layer and we um post it centrally and it does mean that if if you wanted to go and change the metadata you could um but we are work actively working on um making giving you a bunch of different options so if you want to use a decentralized file storage system to make your entities you're welcome to um and uh i do think that that's a very

important piece of the space to keep the art truly kind of decentralized and not dependent on a third party i will say that i think sometimes um people i think there's an important element with all of these conversations around pragmatism right um and uh i think you know there are often oftentimes i think people overlook how strong the incentives can be to um maintain these sorts of uh platforms and the and and maintain the metadata in a in a way that aligns with the user's interest for example for a game um building assets right like they're incentivized they're not going to necessarily go and um change the assets willy-nilly and if they do openc

will have a record of that right so there's still accountability in place if if you're using a centralized api but i do definitely agree that like as time goes on um especially for these really high value art pieces it's critical to have them stored on decentralized file storage systems as opposed to just on central servers so devin we we often talk about all of crypto as this new digital economy that has suddenly sprung up so we've got the traditional economy on the left and then you've got this bridge uh exchanges are often a bridge and then you've got the new economy the ethereum economy the digital economy the crypto economy whatever you'd like to call it um the cool thing about this new economy is that there is as chris braninsky has

said on the podcast before infinite white space so there are all of these opportunities and on bank list we we make the analogy of it's like heading west uh to a land of new opportunity where we can set up towns and shops and and create california entirely new economies right yeah um can you talk about you we were talking about those those verbs earlier the the curating and the the the creating and the collecting type of verbs what sort of opportunities are there for for laborers for entrepreneurs in nfts specifically that you're seeing who are using openc i i recall the early days of of um you know the internet and suddenly there was a a job you could be a an ebay seller like full time um

how do people make money in this new economy specifically with nfts on on openc yeah well i think it i think there's just so much uh opportunity and i would maybe categorize it into a few different buckets um one is if you're a creator i think um you know he's not suggesting that people do this but we have seen people leave their jobs to just become full-time digital artists and and sort of follow their passion and i think just at a high level one of the really exciting things that's happening is that we're seeing the first instances of sort of the jobs of the future right where we've always talked about like someone being like a vr architect or like just for going and pursuing a creative

passion and being able to monetize it and being able to have an in a sustainable income off of that so i think we're seeing that at the very beginnings of that um and so if you're a creator i think there's tons of opportunities to get involved and again you know it is a little bit challenging on ethereum today because you're you're sort of marketing to these really high or you're typically marketing really high value stuff but i think that will really change over time and really be you'll be able to sell to people who don't who don't have tons of money but want to contribute at least a little bit right and aren't looking to just flip and maybe maybe they do get to benefit from the upside in the future but the main sort of use case is just supporting the artist in a way that's a little that is a

little more participatory than something like patreon where you're just literally donating right um so i think the creator opportunity is huge right now um then i think a second uh sort of class of opportunities is the developer opportunity and here it's anything from um you know an indie developer or you know someone doing a side project to uh to a company that's starting in the nft space and really going after a bigger vision um in the sort of first category i think there's so much opportunity to push the frontier of the programmability of nfts um so most nfts today are just the raw you own it and you can send it around and you

can buy and sell it and maybe it has some utility in the real world maybe it's an event ticket or something like that but at the smart contract player it's super dead simple it's just you know raw erc 721 or raw er c1155 what some developers are doing is they're really pushing the what what's happening at the smart contract level so they're creating generative art projects where the artist sort of randomly generated from a transaction path and you know there's maybe there's two tokens involved there's the nfts and then there's also sort of the erc20 that feeds into the economic system you know creates some incentive system around it and then you know the the art uh you know maybe change over time

depending on playing around bonding curves there's so much there's just so much to do there um if you if you have a little bit of development experience or you're you're interested in acquiring it um i think it's a really fertile ground and i'll i feel like i'm a broken record here but i think it'll really get more fertile as we have uh more scalable solutions where again you're not paying super high transaction costs um so so that's the the second opportunity um and then probably the third one is for companies right i think uh i do think that this is sort of the beginning of the brand new platform and a brand new paradigm um that's been accumulating over the last while you know and it very much intersects with all the stuff that's

happening in d5 so i think there's going to be really ripe opportunities to build uh powerful brands around that um powerful consumer experiences like like the ones the one we built at openc we're building at openc um i think there's there's going to be more of that as time goes on so ton tons of opportunity definitely the wild west you know one thing i was thinking as you were saying that is um sometimes the biggest opportunities can be the synthesis of of some of those things put together right so like if if you are on the the the front lines of this and really understand the nft world you know there's also this speculative nature to these assets these crypto assets but what if you can speculate on interesting communities interesting nfts

and use if you're a developer use your development skills to then improve those nfts and improve that community and realize the value on the other side like there's so much you can plug into as far as like taking existing nfts and even adding them to something that you're doing and uh making it better i'm i'm somewhat reminded of like um your private equity firms who will sometimes come into a company and buy a portion of it they'll invest in that company but they come into that company and turn around their their management for instance and add some value in the process you can kind of do that with nfds because there is this investment nature to them as well if you are actively improving the community and improving the culture

you can realize the upside in some of those gains too so fascinating space um devon we're going to get right back to you with some more questions take some of the questions from youtube i think we've also got some around this this new world of higher economic bandwidth that we want to see with nfts that we've got to get to but uh first before we do we want to tell you about the sponsors that made this episode possible gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange i've been a customer of gemiini since i first got into crypto in 2017 and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide and on gemini there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets including many

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openc i want to get right into a question that we got on the bankless youtube from risky car i think is the username how how is openc helping democratize access to nfts right nfts are this cool new tool cool new financial tool and the power of ethereum is that it's democratizing access to all of these financial tools yet this these gas fees are an issue and really just getting in the way of that democratization of these new financial tools that can really allow creators to create uh how how can we help how how's openc helping uh like provide better and stronger access to these tools to help creators create without having to worry about 100 gas fees that are denominated in in eth yeah so i would say there's sort of the

short term stuff we're doing and then the more medium term stuff which is which is coming on the horizon very quickly actually but in the short run we've done a good number of sort of optimizations around gas usage so we allow you to kind of mint your nft without playing gas in a process we call lazy minting which allows you to kind of get an nft up there and then the gas is paid when it's actually purchased so you don't have the same upfront cost um there is one kind of upfront transaction that you have to do that to get set up but then once you've done that transaction you can kind of mint the free and sell for free um and and but there's still that gas cost burden on the buyer so that's kind of like one of the short-term things we've done

but long-term um openc so we are working very collaboratively with lots of layered two solutions and even lots of the um layer one solutions that are coming online and the way that we see things evolving is that we'll really have a multi-chain ecosystem for nfts and applications like ourselves will introduce people to this more scalable technology but really just benefit um you know for example we're not going to go and build at least right now we're not going to uh we're not launching like open c chain or something like that or building kind of like our own solution um with you know maybe an interesting strategy in the long term

depending on how things shape out but um we're actually just kind of working really closely with all of these different chains and many of them are ready today in production with nfc projects that have been begging us to support them and trade them and today you can actually go and you can explore nfts on the matic uh or polygon network on openc um they they'll show up in your regular ethereum account when you click on one it'll say matic trading is is coming soon so we haven't launched trading support yet but we're already starting to um explore allow people to explore these nfts on openc and then trading is sort of a fast follow and then on the other sort of non-layer 2 side of things we're also

we've been really good friends with the folks at dapper labs for a long time around supporting flow we just announced that um we'll eventually be launching flow support we're also collaborating with taizo so we're taking this pretty broad approach and saying like you know we really want to be a home for user-owned digital assets regardless of what chain they're on of course we have to be judicious about just kind of being spread then across too many chains um but ultimately that's kind of the direction we see things going and a lot of these new blockchains are really just kind of uh you know the biggest thing that they want is user experiences where people can go in and get their hands dirty and

and try out these cheaper transactions uh on you know something like matic devin i want to beat a dead horse really quick because we have so many guests that come on like from l2 uh protocols or defy apps implementing on l2 and and then we have um you know people like vitalik come on and say like sharding is just a few months away um and as a content producer it's always kind of funny because so many people say like oh yeah it's just it's like right around the corner it's just like it's just right there and the thing is the timelines that people are giving are coming closer and closer and closer so like l2s used to be a year away now they're like a couple months away but they're never actually here right they've never actually arrived maybe

maybe you can just give some comments as to that it's like okay sure like cool you can you can do some stuff on matic now but like what's what is this actually going to be in front of the user's face where they are actually meaningfully exposed to literally like almost zero fee transactions or reasonable transactions yeah well i not to give the same answers that you've heard so many times but i actually do think that we're getting really close like i would say in the month definitely the months range like um and and you know i would say a proof point to that just to say to show you that we're not just kind of like speaking about these things without any real um uh meet behind it uh is that you

can go and explore matic acids today on openc right you can go and browse them and in fact you can see them um in your what's what's really cool about these layer twos um even these sidechain solutions not the rollups right is that you use this exact same ethereum account and the exact same private key to interact with matic so all of the tooling all the metamasks um yeah i don't know do you have any matic nfqs yeah so devin i i want to make sure i understand this so right now i'm looking at a test wallet it's like bank dot eth my test wallet right i've got some uh bankless badges in here all of these are on mainnet i don't have anything on matic i have some uh bankless badges on the x die um

we don't do x dividend on it okay if you search in the search bar for neon districts okay uh not non that's required at the top um so do this neon district season one items uh not that one sorry that one's unbeaten um but uh neon districts then go down uh and then click on one of those guys you can see can i click on a demon or a dock yeah i'll do a demon and then scroll down to chain info uh chain info wow this is cool so this is matic yep yep yeah and if you had one in your account it would show up

it would show up alongside everything i have some in my account so that feels like so i have a follow-up question so first of all let me just say uh that feels very seamless as a user right like we're seamlessly moving in in the user experience from something on ethereum mainnet to something on the thematic side chain or layer 2 chain and you could do this with with any i guess chain that sort of supports the the evm can i ask you i guess a bigger picture a question here because a lot of folks are wondering how this is going to uh pan out right so i think um you know if you've been listening to the bank list you know that we're going to move towards a multi-chain future right in fact we would argue we've already

been in a multi-chain future even like um crypto exchanges these are like side chains for bitcoin and ethereum right they're a bit more centralized but they're almost like side chains um but like what is what matters most for an nft right um so if i'm on xdi or a side chain or flow i lose some of the decentralization properties and the settlement guarantees of something versus the ethereum main net right um you know flow is is somewhat more permissioned uh for for example so so are things like like x-die or even even matic in a side chain um how do you see this all

i guess working out and if i'm an nft owner it's very hard to tell whether i have the same settlement guarantees on a matic or a flow versus ethereum and like when should i care is it is it the case that high value items you think will be secured and settled on something like the ethereum main net and lower value items they're fine on on side chains or more you know centralized uh layer one chains what's your take on how this all evolves i guess i think that's right i think um there's a world where sort of lower value items can move around in these environments where the security guarantees are a little bit less stringent um what i would point out is that um i think what user especially in sort of

the lower value category i think what users are going to care about is less about kind of are there these extremely strong security guarantees around your nft and more around how interoperable is it so like for example can i go and move it to can i go and sell it on openc like that's a big deal because that means that there's liquidity for it whereas you know since we don't quite support matic yet there's not really a good marketplace where you can you can buy and sell these things so the the interoperability piece is i think the most important piece um and i think that's um you know one of the things that flow will have to really do a good job of um is promoting an ecosystem around the

blockchain that they've sort of created with this flagship application now can they kind of expand that to other partners like ourselves into other applications and create the magic of nfts which is really being able to move them across things because again we've always had there've always been digital assets right and uh and sometimes you can buy and sell those digital assets in some environment but the new thing here is digital assets that can that can move across any environment and that have these brand new properties um but i i i think you know in terms of that question around um where should assets live depending on how valuable they are um i think you're you're i think that's about right like i think maybe you you can acquire a really

valuable asset in thematic network and then bridge it onto ethereum and store it there like a crypto punk i think you know you may not want to have living in in a side chain for very long um that being said you know uh even when even when you issue things on a on a side chain like um if things go wrong there are still ways to kind of re-mint into ethereum and you know i think it's we'll see but i i think it's it's pretty hard to do like a full attack on nfts where you actually you know um because these things are kind of a liquid right so there are a lot less liquid than years of 20. so even if you like obtained all the nfts from some project well you can kind of just

invalidate those and remint on on a more secure channel yeah i think like the question in my mind too is like when does an nft stop being an nft right you mentioned kind of this interoperability and composability right but like let's say something like fortnite skins had that and they just plugged into ethereum or some other you know side chains could would they be then nfts or is there an element that an nft has to have some level of of permissionless settlement guarantees and like decentralization in order to be an nft and maybe that's really hard to answer maybe the market figures this out over time but that's a question in my mind right is you know uh is fortnite creating nfts we would probably say no

yet we would call something on flow nfts we'd definitely call someone something on um ethereum and nft so where's the line here i don't know if that's a a question anyone can answer at this point but it's something in my mind that's a great point yeah i think because you could say you know fortnite has its own protocol it just is uh you know it's backed by a database and it's fully controlled by one company and they're issuing digital assets on it so you know why isn't that an nft and i think i mean i think the properties that i look for when thinking about an nft is like is it is it um controlled by a single party or is the ownership layer

sufficiently decentralized and in the case of flow like they're moving towards that in the case of matic you know they have a large validator set um and so and then in the case of ethereum you know it's been decentralized uh for for quite some time now right or since the inception um so i think there's a spectrum um but you know i think your intuition is correct is that the market will probably determine you know whether they call something in an ft or not devin i want to pivot to a new question um out of the out of the youtube once again from trulio uh when will it be possible to mint an nft and put a feature into it that you can lend to someone else say you want to lend it out

for 60 days and it will automatically get returned back to you when the time is up and i think what uh to add on my own my own question onto this is what julio's really asking is like again nfts are software and the answer to the question is well you can put anything into software right you can code up an nft and make it do anything but for people like me or ryan who aren't technical or encoders we're going to need to depend on infrastructure like openc to allow some of this expressivity and financial and money logic to get integrated so do you guys have any features down the pipeline about how to make nfts a little bit more programmable in the same way that eath is programmable money yeah we have we have a good number of

features around kind of uh some basic features around adding extra uh bells and whistles your nft when you create it so for example well we allow very rich metadata so you can do images audio um uh movies etc um but then we also have what's called unlockable content so you can create an nft with uh something that can only be unlocked by the user who purchases it right so that's kind of an interesting thing people have been experimenting with um i do think yeah in the future like we want to add things like you know at the sort of smart contract layer being able to customize an nft right so that idea of you know maybe there's some lending mechanic built into it um but uh i also think that um you know at the end of the

day since this is so permissionless you know other projects can kind of come along and and build all of those different um addendums to the sort of raw nft and still be completely interoperable with open season i don't think it's just going to be like you know on us to add all to um experiment here i think it it'll be a community and market effort but certainly we'll be doing a lot of work to like improve the sorts of things that you can build through our no code creator so devin as we're uh we're moving towards the close of this ama we've got just a couple more questions but one i definitely need to ask you is what's in store for the future at openc so there

there's rumors of a raise going on uh we we see other nft um solutions that are kind of tokenizing uh is there anything you can tell us about your future plans in those areas or anything else you want to highlight sure yeah um well yeah i can't mention those specific areas but in terms of our road map um i guess you know as i said before like the the main focus for us as a company is building a really great product and really great user experience that people want to come back to and that people find very valuable um and to that end you know we think one of the biggest challenges is the um situation

on ethereum right now so we're actively working on a large portion of our team at the moment is working on our multi-chain strategy um so that's coming up um in terms of other features that we're excited about um you know adding more sort of curation on top of openc so you know really being able to customize your profile and show off your nfts in an interesting way um better discovery on the platform so being able to kind of quickly come on and find stuff that's interesting early on um so sort of some of those um core marketplace features that we think are really important um and then just continuing to work with more

artists creators influencers musicians as they come and learn about the space so we get a quite a lot of um sort of inbound interest in learning about what is this new space and how did you create something that resonates with um people and so we're we're we're doing a lot of yeah devin this is this is something that blau said on our conversation with him earlier this week he was like um we asked the question our artist coming to this and he said everyone everyone is coming to this and then he named off like halsey and calvin harris all these big names right is that what you're seeing is that what you're talking about i mean you got gronk that's huge is this all coming from inbound interest and do you have any kind of big names that you expect to uh to be issuing on openc in the future

yeah 100 inbound at the moment it's just um you know people kind of learning about it and getting excited and either having a concrete idea or wanting to figure out a concrete idea probably can't disclose any of the ones that are coming up just so that they you know remain um a surprise but uh we have a ton of ton of people who are going to be launching nfts pretty soon i mean i think it should be it should be really exciting um yeah devin i got one question that i got to ask is there room for an open seat token in the future uh uh yeah undetermined um we're definitely not opposed to uh uh

adding a tokenization component we just wanna we've always wanted to be very thoughtful about it um and figure out kind of what is the um strategy that would resonate with with most people um and not feel kind of gimmicky and and feel like there's like a real future behind it as opposed to just something that's more of like powered by ride and speculate very cool devon thank you for uh so much for coming and giving on your time i want to finish off with this last question i think we'll tie things off very well uh say you're in the elevator with uh you know mark cuban or some somebody of his nature and you have just a few brief minutes to explain to him the maximally successful version of openc in one five ten years what is that

pitch well i would say um i think if you think about uh sort of the internet and the four billion or so people that are on it and all the content that's being produced on the internet and then if you layer on property rights on that um the as i said the design space for all of the different things that could be tokenized is just so wide and at the end of the day i actually do think we're talking about the biggest economy on the planet um is going to be fueled by nfts and so then of course for for that economy to be successful you need a powerful marketplace where people can go and and trade these things around and

know that they're getting the right thing um and that that marketplace you know there's probably there's going to be a bunch of them but there are going to be some ones that uh provide what consumers really want and and end up being kind of the winners and i think openc is perfectly positioned uh to to uh be that so um uh you know i think the a future is where um just this this asset class expands um and openc is is that sort of premier marketplace for a brand new asset class it's really yeah it's growing quickly but um it's still in in my opinion it's very early stages an aggregator to the biggest economy in

the world that is the pitch from devon at openc where do i sign my check uh where do i write my check devin this sounds pretty cool um thank you so much for your time today we appreciate you hanging with the bankless nation and we're super excited about nftes so uh you know keep keep keep us um keep us tuned into what's going on what you guys are up to thanks so much for having me awesome all right guys risks and disclaimers we always talk about this but we are of course headed west nft speculation is risky so is eth so is default you could lose what you put in but this is the frontier it's not for everyone but thanks so much for joining us on another ama with bankless and everyone thank you for being on the youtube thank you for your questions

make sure to like and subscribe so we can get devin and open c to the front page of youtube so we can get this revolution in digital culture and digital expression kicked off awesome thanks everyone for being here thanks guys hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience you'll get access to our market analysis our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the bankless token for airdrops raffles and unlocks

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