Ben Lakoff : NFTs: More than just Art

Transcript

let's go well in French okay hi everyone can you guys hear me okay I think so perfect actually how do I switch slides up here foreign I'm going to be talking to you about nfts I'm with charged particles and it's nfts so much more than just art

all right what am I going to talk about today first who am I I'll give you a little intro who the hell I am next uh nft market update so what's happening out there there's a lot of hype a lot of information I'm going to talk about some of the trends that are happening and then this will lead into what's next for nfts which Shockers the financialization of nfts overall and then a slight intro into charged particles and what we're doing all right Ben lakeoff I have a background in finance which means I get to put these three fancy letters after my name uh chartered financial analyst I'm based in Los Angeles which if

there's anybody from La come check out crypto Mondays we meet up every Monday in Venice there's a good group of us I am the business lead co-founder at charged particles I'm an advisor and Angel active angel investor in the space and a mentor at the Lao and get coin kernel all right nfts nft stands for non-fungible tokens tokens that are non-fungible they are unique tokens people tend to forget this but they offer true um true digital unique ownership which is secured by the blockchain so now these infinitely replicable

digital items are now provably scarce and the world is starting to take note oh that got really bad um all right so what's been happening in the nft market we started back in 2018 with crypto kitties we had this massive run-up with the culmination of this uh around the people time um and then it feels like the bottom has fallen off and perhaps we're coming up a bit on the other side the media narrative is that the nft market is dead the reality is actually quite different so I don't know if you

guys saw the news today but openc just announced a 100 million dollar funding round at a 1.5 billion dollar evaluation led by a16z openc actually had their best month ever in June and the reality is these avatars there's a new one popping up every day and the the volumes on these things are absolutely insane so you have dogs cats polymorphs uh Apes everything however all of this is still very much focused on Art and collectibles but the reality is nfts are these unique tokens and they're so much more than just art but first let's talk about nfts as art

this is this is what everybody thinks they are right um and look at the headlines recently there's constantly a new headline about nfts and and what's going on Jay-Z now has a profile picture of a punk Genies have raised 65 million which I thought was a big number until I saw Open Seas 100 million so there's there's big big numbers and big companies getting involved with nfts still within this art or collectible area so art and collectibles these things are easy to understand we get it it's it's a bit of a trojan horse to get more people into the crypto World which is probably good

um but the next progression of this probably is into in-game items so the numbers here are quite staggering as well um Gamers like to spend money in games there's a lot in 2025 the market value of in-game purchases is projected to be 70 almost 75 billion dollars that's a lot and if you've been paying attention at all in the last couple months play to earn is is a massive Trend so axi Infinity has 500 000 daily active users their Discord is bigger than fortnite these numbers are just outstanding all right what about the metaverse so in short it's coming it's very hard to

define the metaverse everybody kind of has their own little explanation of what this looks like whether it's a complete digital world where we live work and play or it's this AR thing that happens overlay over the actual physical world we're not really sure but ideally nfts play a very important part of this metaverse this utopian world where you have the opportunity for True ownership of these virtual Goods within this metaverse um these were some of the favorite ones that I saw there's actually a new publicly traded ETF meta m-e-t-a so in your brokerage account you can now get

exposure to the metaverse plays that are publicly traded and then epic has raised a billion dollars to support their long-term vision of the metaverse these are big big numbers hopefully they won't be this Walled Garden you know from these big companies but you know we we can all dream what else access tokens uh token Gates so what this is is an nft as your as your access token so you can access private content Perhaps Perhaps gated on a private part of the web page Community membership this has the potential to replace traditional login methods

providing you this unique nft that gives you access to these these gated areas some of the numbers around this access management economy is projected to be 30 billion by 2021 the subscription economy is 240 billion and Global loyalty programs are expected to reach 216 billion dollars nfts as a token as access tokens are going to be a crucial integral part of this story now the financialization of nfts so we believe that there'll be the continue

blurring of nfts and financial products and or defy what does this look like so first one on my list is fractional ownership this is nothing super new Masterworks has been doing it for years but it's the ability to have a token fractionalized and owned by multiple people This falls into the the overall benefits of digitization when you have a physical painting it's very hard to break it into little pieces and give it to your friends when you have a digital piece of artwork or collectible or nft that could be any of these other things it's very easy to do these these these things like fractional ownership

renting what about renting so I own these digital assets they sit in my wallet I'm also able to rent them out to somebody that I know perhaps somebody that I don't know and do this in a completely decentralized trustless manner a crowd favorite mine as well is nfts as collateral so you think of this as a HELOC which is an American term I guess home equity line of credit or better known within the D5 Community is overclock collateralized loan you take your nft you put it into a smart contract and you pull out a loan on it so it's you're able to capture the value of that nft without ever actually having to sell it so I think that this is a key

play in nfts in general actually having a higher value Than Physical Goods it's a lot easier to do this with digital items nfts as identity so identity on the blockchain a web 3 passport a D5 passport this on-chain credit scoring all of these things kind of mixed together you can notice some of these things might be similar to something like an access token we can start to see how these things play together in a very very unique way that paved the way for web 3.0 so combining all of these into actually new categories so you have Financial

products as nfts these things combined with DVI this is the world that we envision so charged particles is a protocol that allows users to deposit tokens so erc20 721 and 1155 nfts into their nfts this is nft agnostic so we're not just art any sort of nft which we've talked about can be a plethora of different options and then you have customizable token mechanics around those assets that you're depositing into your nft so if you want the principle the amount you've put in there to be time locked you can if you want the accrued interest if your

token the assets within your token are earning interest to distinguish something else you can so all of these things are very customizable we have a Dap that went live on mainnet in February and we're actually live on polygon and I met my first team member uh in person we're completely remote team we've been working on it since July of last year first time ever meeting a guy on the team which was great so the DAP is live uh all the things that I mentioned on the last slide we are adapt we are a protocol our dap has over two million dollars in nft sales and it's important to note that every nft created by charged particles is

still a standard ERC 721 you can sell and I don't open C you can transfer to your friend you can do all of these fun things like financialization it's still a standard ERC 721 but it's able to hold other tokens which is pretty cool all right so what does an nft owning other assets look like um Jennifer in this case owns an nft and within that nft it has its own wallet that's able to hold other tokens so that nft is then a basket that holds other tokens in a completely programmable it's important to note again that the nfts that you can create are not just art it can be any sort of nft it can be

a financial product that's holding other tokens and this is where things get very very interesting one such one is an nft gift basket so you have your nft that acts as a basket owning all of these different types of assets so you can have social tokens you can have interest bearing assets we have an integration with Ave and compound you can put uniswap V2 or V3 tokens inside of there and you can also put other nfts all containerized within this nft all right one interesting use case is now picturing the ease of transferring this

this entire portfolio so you have this gift basket this basket of all these different assets that I can transfer with one click an arc 721 transfer and the entire basket can be transferred to another party and then whoever you transfer to obviously can unbundle that nft and do with with it whatever they would like another fun one is an nft index fund so there's lots of these out there index funds they're clearly a security at this point so this is very like early stages we're using laws from the 1930s to Define these things I get it I'm now a lawyer I'm definitely not your lawyer

but um one such thing you can do is can using this nft as a container fill it full of whatever you would like say you want to create an index fund for the nft world well you can fill it full of your favorite art nfts your favorite collectible nfts some crypto voxels land nfts you can fill it full of governance tokens from all of your favorite nft protocols all containerized within this nft like a basket and then take it to one of these fractionalization protocols such as niftify or nif text and fractionalize it into erc20 tokens that are tradable these things all are possible they all can be done today with tools that exist

but keep in mind the whole legal aspects when talking about access tokens well what if you have an nft as a basket holding other tokens holding interest-bearing assets and the accrued interest unlocks different categories within that gated community so maybe you get access to this channel just with your nft if you have X amount of Interest accrued within that nft you unlock another level level of access within that community so the ability here to be very very flexible and creative with what you do and how you design your economy with these gated token access is really up to you

so going Live this week actually is no longer you do you have to Mint your nft on charged particles you can use an existing nft so if you've minted an nft on wearable or openc you can take that nft bring it over to charged particles and start depositing tokens inside of it at the protocol level nearly all nfts can be charged or add have tokens added to them we're taking your nft we're giving it a smart wallet we're allowing it to hold other tokens other assets all of these are programmable configurable it's a very very malleable protocol

right now the protocol is but right now the DAP is free to Mint uh the marketplace is free it's free to deposit where we've charged zero percent everywhere we're also in polygons so it's super cheap and easy to uh experiment around with these things and it really offers Limitless possibilities with all of these nft categories so when thinking about nfts not just as art as in-game items as tickets as virtual real estates as Financial products the ability for these nfts to hold other assets in a programmable manner your mind just kind of explodes with these so if anybody ever wants to jam on these come find me DM me or whatever I'm

always happy to happy to talk about these crazy ideas going back to timeline so charge particles we've been around uh January 2020 Rob Secord came up with the idea he became obsessed with the idea of an nft holding interest-bearing assets uh we met in July of 2020 um in Bitcoin kernel which if you guys haven't heard of Bitcoin Kernel check it out it's highly highly recommended we went live on mainnet Eric joined us actually one of the first employees in late 2020 uh and then we have gone live with our governance token in June liquidity mining

polygon and then we're planning to launch additional dapps and a number of other things can't go on forever on our roadmap that's for sure our team uh we have Rob meet and a bunch of amazing rock stars on the team so Eric is here I'm here we both have charged particles shirts come find us if you want to chat we're we're here to we're here to talk uh our investors we've got some ones that you probably would recommend I'll skip through these okay what's next uh this weekend actually there's a hackathon uh we're a sponsor so uh check it out if you're

interested um I I'm happy to give you information if you haven't heard of it already um we've also launched our adap accelerator program so part of the whole protocol development is funding and incentivizing helping other dapps build using charged particles uh technology and protocol so that is live and we're really really excited about using all of these things and pushing nfts to the next level and really pushing the limits of what's possible with nfts so that's charged particles that's a little bit overview of nfts where we are where we've been and where I think we're

going and how charged particles will be a key part of this story going forward so what we like to say with charged particles is what's in your nft because every nft can now hold other assets thank you okay any questions does this I have a question on the legal aspects like how do you actually deal like with some of the complications because when you go from a erc721 to an erc20 this is

kind of what happened to Masterworks where um they never got approved by tscc to do that yeah so we don't do fractionalization it definitely is a legal not even a gray area right that that and yeah so that's what I was saying there's definitely legal uh implications of doing these things uh we have our own legal implications right if you take an nft and you fill it full of security tokens and you transfer that to somebody or or open c facilitates a sale so there's a number of things like that ultimately I mean with all of these um protocols and it's Unstoppable and censorable we we can only control what

we're showing on our website there's some things we can do with like severing the content but um no yeah it's it's a difficult decision or question to answer for most protocols in the space but we don't do fractionalization specifically big fan of fractionalization it will be solved Novo questions cool thanks everyone [Applause]