Onchain Storytelling

Transcript

foreign [Music] hey Dennis how are you I'm good how are you I'm doing great um we've known each other for some like five years yeah but I've only seen you since before covet that's right yeah we cut that out outside the great venue great opening thanks for having me we're gonna catch up on stage basically live so let's start off with something uh that's been on my mind our nft is dead I'm gonna need a sip of water so I I mean there seems to be a belief that sort of nfts are sort of fizzling out we kind of don't think anybody cares

about 10 000 kind of mints of a profile or looking cool or flipping jpegs um what do you think kind of nfts look like now and and kind of where we'll do they play in our ecosystem yeah maybe to start to place it a bit in the broader context you know just just like what this conference is all about I think there's this typical you know kind of media Narrative of the the you know all technology waves kind of come in cycles and there's kind of hype and you have booms booms and busts and I think the kind of economic Financial nature of crypto because you know program money scarcity ownership underpins everything I think it really magnifies those booms and busts but you know we all know the meme that you know kind of starting with

Bitcoin there's been you know over like 100 proclamations you know Bitcoin is dead yet again then we have you know smart contracts are dead D5 is dead and of course you know nfts are dead you know in the same narrative uh the cycle repeats itself I think you know again like all the headlines all the stories throughout the years uh uh unfortunately you know focus on the price action primarily and I think a lot of the Nuance of like the most interesting things happening um is not captured there but I do think obviously you know the markets are down the prices are down and a lot of the early use case and again for better for worse I think the early use cases of crypto that kind of blow up very quickly tend to be more speculative and nfts are no different so um kind of the framework I have is that

we we've kind of only uh been through the first chapter of nfts and it's been very kind of uh Commerce trading driven I think like the the canonical platform representing this chapter is open C right it's a Marketplace it's kind of this um eBay um you know Beanie Baby trading paradigm and you know these cases we've seen is obviously the pfp is you know the crypto punks the board Apes uh all about um you know high prices and the framework I have for this is that the first chapter was Commerce driven but there's another analogy I really like um there's a turn of the century uh uh 19th century uh Economist close uh thirsty and veblen does anybody know veblen and uh uh he wrote this cheat is called uh

the theory of the Leisure Class uh has anyone read that he talks about this idea of conspicuous consumption so so in that world kind of coming out of the Industrial Revolution another technology wave that people uh you know demonstrated their status in society by by what they consume so you you purchased expensive things luxury goods you know you you owned an expensive house expensive car you demonstrated your role in society through buying expensive things and kind of showing off to other people and I think you know crypto starts and it kind of mirrors that you know in very primitive ways we had the pfps that were very expensive um you bought them you traded them you tried to you know profit off off of the Commerce around them and again like you if you change your PFD people knew you had a lot of money it

was about this uh status through the price around it and I think uh there's a economists since have actually identified different forms of capital that was you know Financial Capital but we also have uh social capital and cultural capital and I think nfts are actually amazing technology for for the latter two and we're seeing a lot of interesting use cases there so just to continue that kind of economic Arc as the 20th century has commoditized you know uh wealth you know we have way more equality and uh just you know access to Goods in society today if you want to have a nice house you can get uh you know you can get a mortgage if you want to drive a fancy car you can probably lease it you know and then today there's like Services if you want to uh take out a twenty thousand dollar handbag to a

party like you can rent it overnight so uh to show your status in society it is no longer actually you know it becomes kind of ostentatious to have very expensive things it's no longer High status and the way you show off you know your values your knowledge today is it's it's through investment so it of you know in culture in information it's a uh what I what what things do you value you know do you value you know organic food do you do you work out you know we're in New York City you know kind of a fashion capital of the world you know maybe 20 years ago if you're in SoHo people were wearing very expensive clothes today you're seeing a lot of you know workout clothes and like what does that say about people it's that health is uh important you know uh I exercise I

work out I value these things so basically that and it's very with the objects we use to express those things are our cultural artifacts you know so it's what brands do we align ourselves with you know what what music do we listen to what do we read I think another New York example is the New Yorker magazine right this kind of um uh cultural uh institution you know uh doing great cultural analysis um if you subscribe to New York they've actually sent you a free tote bag and if you kind of walk around the city if you keep an eye out for it you see people wearing the New Yorker toe bag and like what does it represent about you you know probably you have a certain level of Education Nation you have a certain kind of a you know political views you you find certain topics interesting so

to tie it back to nfts I think a lot of our cultural identity is built around the objects that we own so you know if we're I think in tech for example it's you know if you work at a company you work at coinbase for example you're very proud of you know being part of the coinbase mission you wear that uh object proudly you know at conferences we have laptop stickers representing the Technologies we believe in uh things like that you guys probably know very well the the culture of the ethereum community versus the Solana Community uh is very specific so uh our thesis for chapter two of the nft ecosystem is that it's going to be a lot more of a these are going to be social artifacts Community artifacts and through collecting things uh it's not about

price it's not about scarce Supply it's about participating with Brands uh you believe in uh communities whose values mirror yours to show to other people that you are participating the same things our belief is that nfts are a new technology to basically give us native digital objects to to connect people uh much more closely and I think this builds up a lot on top of you know so many subcultures exist on social media blogs like you know Instagram Tick Tock and the our bet is that if nfts truly work like actually being online will be more meaningful more exciting you will make closer connections with Traders with the communities we want to be a part of if you can actually own these Community artifacts so that was a lot I mean that was that was a great setting because I have like

40 questions from from all that so we'll dive all uh deep into all of these okay so it's a very interesting context and I think that that economical analogy works really well so it's kind of my most obvious question here is uh is there like a single test that kind of works for all of these cases where you know that you're now in the second era of something or or did you mean to kind of only imply that uh where we are now is simply that the speculation piece is over because now it's not about how much money you're spending to get some status and that's always the first step into that second transition uh where does that kind of think which happen there's just as basically the these big multi-million dollar uh nft drops we're no longer seeing them anymore you know all you

know if you look at Open Sea trading activity kind of the volume wise it's down a lot we're actually over the past years there's this new technology has emerged which is the the open Edition nft and also over the past few months kind of the rise of free nfts and I think that's a good great parallel where you know it's not about price this is not an investment this is more of like a community artifact so I think we're just all the interesting things that we're seeing happening today is much more social use cases around free and abundant nfts that serve as more of a community artifacts got it so so obviously it's no longer about collecting the the most expensive image uh especially with kind of Freemans and open editions you kind of get to effectively commoditize that the price being like the the key

factor what changes in this definition on like how do people then kind of converge like are we we're effectively coming up with new different subcultures now because you're signaling what you care about totally is that just uh we just now map what we do in person to online or is there something different about web3 yeah I think it's I mean in the you know in 2021 2022 I think we've seen some of the early use cases and uh like a big a big kind of uh you know application has been uh when you mean NF tick what do you do with it like it would uh uh there was Discord Bots uh tools like collab land for example that you were able to create like a a space for the

community for the members in there to uh enter uh to meet each other and the object was really kind of this like unifying thing you know like like an algae uses like you know like if you're like a teenager into skateboarding you probably wear you know there's a magazine called Thrasher you probably wear some merchandise from like some skied Brands you have baggy jeans you have you know skate shoes on you know if your parents are dragging you to Thanksgiving or whatever to visit Grandma and like you see another skater kid across the room like you know your people through these like physical uh artifacts that they're bringing onto this I think nfts give us a similar thing that you know if there's some kind of movement event happening like I think a lot of the l2s have been leveraging nfts in really

interesting ways like if you believe the values of optimism if you believe in you know retroactive funding to the open source ecosystem optimism has a really cool brand and you can collect this object you can show it off in your wallet and I think what's interesting is because everything is on chain everything is public the way kind of Brands and movements propagate through through these objects you know showing up in your on-chain activity there's interesting blockchain activity nft activity aggregators emerging like interface tools like mdap fund so all these details you don't know what's interface just so we can give them the interface is uh it's a it's an application that you connect your wallet and you can see basically the actions you take on chain kind of visualized and you know focus on nfts so if I follow

cardic and he's collecting nfts I can and I can see what's he's collecting I think what's so interesting is that kind of your your mint action becomes it's it's kind of an active curation so I'm like oh cardic is cool what is this weird thing he collected today I better check it out you know maybe this you know I'm into the things he's into maybe I wanted to write a cafes as well uh something for everyone um so to me the most interesting thing about what you were just saying is that um from your perspective you're analyzing what's happening and and I'm curious about whether you believe that everybody else knows this already and we just haven't verbalized it or is also that we got to point that out so so the kind of question I have is

how much of do you think this is like conscious decision making from people who are collecting this thing because they really care about others knowing what they're known for and being able to kind of publicly look at uh the cultures they're part of or the values that they represent or do you think this is kind of just we have to actively point out this is why it's going on and how much of that is like synthesis versus kind of prediction yeah I think it's I mean a lot of a lot of his observation of emerging Behavior I think like regarding a common pattern we keep seeing is if you collect an nft and you tweet about it so again it's like you know what is Twitter about it's you know we we we say things we share things and we kind of try to um get

engagement from people interested in the same ideas as we try to be influential we try to build a following and I think nft science is a really really interesting phenomenon where you know you kind of combine the web 2 social distribution of Twitter with this you know ownership Community participation Commerce aspect of nfts and this one specific case keeps emerging where you mint something and you share that you minted it and you at mentioned the Creator and there's this kind of really interesting flywheel opens up where oh the Creator gets notification they respond maybe they follow you back so it feels like this kind of patronage relationship where you're connecting with the Creator maybe the Creator retweets it and you become one of many retweets by the creator of The Collector sharing it and then the collector

because they follow the Creator they see the other collectors on they're like oh you awesome into this you're one of my people so it's again it's like social connections but not through you know social graphs not your interest groups but it's through this like ownership uh Commerce artifact and we think that's that's the Innovation well I mean that's a really interesting point so does in this case this change or we're going to adjust what the definition of Storytelling is because because this is still now a more direct way of following somebody or something you care about but how do you kind of overlap this with like how do you tell stories now that you have access to this wider audience that cares about these subcultures totally it yeah I think it's you know obviously Brands and you know businesses um you know in order to differentiate

from all the competition like how do you uh how do you become seen as different in the marketplace I think the the history the backstory is really important like when we were preparing for this we were talking about white papers right like Bitcoin white paper the ethereum white paper these kind of founding documents of these technology movements written before the technology was even built but painted a future of you know uh things are gonna be different we we want things to change and it was kind of a a document that rallied the community together so I think kind of where where mirror fits into that is we're a publishing tool where I think inspired a lot by this is you can share your story with the world a lot of builders in the space user you know developers companies also creators

but that story can also be collectible so imagine like I'm sorry it was it imagine if the Bitcoin Bitcoin white paper was an nft imagine like um what that would mean to the people there they could connect with each other by being early adopters but then you know 15 years later 10 years later it kind of becomes um you know the Declaration of Independence some kind of like founding the manifesto kind of coming yep uh I do want to talk about mirror a lot but I want to just kind of check one more thing so you made a really interesting kind of observation around the optimism ecosystem around the Retro pgf and people caring about a specific cause um we kind of saw this whole on chain summer campaign by base and a lot of that was also driven by kind of different launches of various nfcs or

just signaling and sort of overall just free men's kind of becoming more and more accessible um does that kind of fit the same narrative that you're kind of talking about like how would you kind of analyze what happened with Basin last month yeah I think base has been really awesome like we've been we've had the privilege of them being kind of a mere power user their whole philosophy is they want everything they do in the world they want to be on chain and obviously like they're trying to bring an L2 in the world from scratch and kind of build a you know brand identity on et cetera and their kind of Genesis announcement started with the base logo and this is kind of like a Playbook we're seeing you know if you're putting yourself into the world you can make your brand collectible and the first touch point

with your audience isn't just you know in web 2 it's not just getting likes or followers on Twitter you can actually ownership on day one yeah exactly give something and place in your wall I think it's it's very interesting it's yeah it's this active ownership but then base is building a connection with their audience on chain they're they see their users as you know ens names as well it's everyone who owns that nft is kind of connected to each other through being a one of the collectors there and I think like the meme kind of propagates because again if I follow cardiac on one of these like nft social platforms I can see oh wait what base what what is that you know let me check that out let me let me dig in deeper so I think it's again I think it's like it's like

putting on your favorite band t-shirt and like you know signaling what you believe I think there's kind of like you know in group algorithm and Tech all together if you are in the Bay Area you'll see people wearing t-shirts of what their companies are and that's a point for them to hey what does this company do or why are you kind of there why are you so proud of so it's the same behavior is now kind of minted on chain and trackable too um in a good way um obviously I'm sure a lot of people here know what mirror is um if you've used any debt and heard about any of the updates that they've done on their protocol or company or products uh you've got to see the blog post that's published on mirror um so my kind of first question here is is

mirror a blog publishing platform and if not what's kind of the the new best definition that people should know yeah totally I think Mira started off as kind of an experiment you know can we build uh we we always believe that the next big thing will begin as a story and I think it's you know tons of crypto examples I think like you know you know Tesla you know as an example like Tesla has like uh there was this the secret master plan I think from like 2007 or something this like kind of like canonical tenure tenure plan again like kind of like a white paper for the future like you know all the Fanboys um you know really rallied around around that document and we think that you know the next big thing again the storytelling is is so important to it so

the the initial goal of here was to build a tool for that that was completely Unchained so you log in with an ethereum wallet it uses ens names all the data stored on chain on our weave but then uh this was end of 2020 kind of before nft took off and then as NFC stick off we were like wow story is really you know catalyze people they get them really excited uh they bring people together and to share an idea but then now that we have nfts there's a way to make that idea ownable make make give ownership a way to you know interact with it and kind of plan to stake that you know I believe in this I follow this so basically from the beginning we've made all content on mirror collectible and Mirror Has evolved into deeper nft integration so today you can embed any

NFC across the space on ethereum so what's cool is that like while bass uses mirror for publishing they also experiment with a lot of other nfts ft tools mirror allows them to aggregate all of their nft creation uh it's all mintable in line I think that's like another beauty of openness is can we talk about certain examples of which which tools and how does that flow work yeah absolutely you know they they they wanna again they have this Unchained first strategy so they're trying to spread the love use all the tools so they use Zora nfts you know they collaborate with MnDOT fun and you know because everything what is nft it's a smart contract on the blockchain with you know publicly accessible interfaces we make those uh interactive in the mirror tools so you know just like you can embed a YouTube video on any website

you can embed any nft into mirror and you know use mirror storytime tools to give the context to explain like what's happening here but then in bed you know this this collectible object that anyone can mint in line we also provide subscription tools so I think we've also noticed that you know I think what three Builders build and uh you know they try to build everything on chain and I think uh missed some of the kind of classic you know re-engagement mechanisms that web 2 is really good at we it's no mailing list or no-brainer for publishing I think it's like you know kind of newsletter functionality so mirror lets you subscribe with your wallet but also with your email so if you want to get the next update next announcement uh if there's a new drop coming from a project you love mirror

integrates with email functionality and we it's been very successful to give our users you know more distributions ways to re-engage so I you know if an nft drop is kind of like a point in time we want Merit to be more of like a line you know that your your journey as a project can be um all chronicled down mirror all your Collectibles can live here and just again a much better way to retain your audience and continue engaging them but this is still touching largely it's kind of Storytelling through text and and kind of nfts are collecting those stories is sort of different than minting an nft that's specific to what an embed is it is that a fair assessments yeah so we're what we're working on uh an hour and over the past few months is leading into more making

nfts kind of first class objects So Stories give the important context but we think that nfts are the kind of community artifacts that glued things together and basically increase you know if you have multiple nfts how can you get a sense of like who's the biggest fan in your community like who are the top collectors that keep coming back you know I think like there's you know very kind of gamified element to everything in in crypto uh you know we're you know exploring you know leaderboards like what would it look like to you know highlight your top collectors who who collects everything who collects everything first you know who's been the earliest Community participant so we think that this is a great way for you know the community to not just feel like they're collecting

kind of you know in private but that you know they they have a presence uh uh in the community that everyone can see they're standing and also adding ways to engage more deeply you know comments uh you know discussion again I think uh we see that minting is should feel like uh it's it's the beginning of a journey it's the beginning of participating in you know interactions of being part of a community by definition the starting point for them to kind of now get into a subculture I think today minting has felt like you know you you meant a JPEG and it's kind of the end you know like what do you do now you can't really uh connect with the other collectors you know I mean the experience still feels like you know it's like ether scan you know we're kind of seeing a list of

transactions list of wallets uh you can't engage with people you can't communicate I think that's going to really open up this the social use case like for all of these uh cultural you know effects to to emerge I think you need ways to connect socially and I think you know like a lot of assumptions I've talked about you know like the beauty of New York you know as kind of a subculture Capital it's you know the density of people Everyone see you know conferences like this you know you guys are within proximity to each other it's about the conversations we have here uh uh connecting with other people and I think um like Unchained transactions like a an analogy I use it's like it's as if we you know everyone got a phone number but like there's no phones like we can't communicate you know we

all have IDs we all have wallets and people talk like wallet says these like social identifiers but we can't really communicate with each other yet and I think like once that opens up um nfcs will be a much more of these social Community assets it is kind of your belief that that you know with those lines being installed to communicate between those two addresses something that mirror should be taking on or is that just to help that this kind of helps accelerate that or can I where does that mirror come in we're excited to play a big role there because we think like actually like a big question we've been asking like why why would you collect something you know especially if it's not like a financial use case and I think it's it's exactly my next question it says social interactions and I think you need to

kind of build them into the minting action that you know can you can you meet with a comment to give your take on that you know can it be kind of a you know I think long form is is a great conversation starter can people that are minting the thing be also engaging through conversation like uh what do they think about this if they meant an artwork can they say you know what they felt about it and you know give the collector more of a presence you know that it's not just you know a list of buyers but it's actually people with you know the reactions they care about this the workloops and it makes them feel a certain way and again creating a space for for people to connect does this change the definition of mirror from a kind of publishing

platform to more of a social network or kind of do you not want to kind of cross that line how do you see the the social aspects of here kind of becoming more prominent in the future yeah I think I think we we our goal is to expand to be more of a nft Community tool where stories are at the core of it and I think that you know there's so many ways to make nfts you know there's tons of addition tools and I think what makes more different is there's a much richer context so I think it's nfts with context with Community presence so a couple more questions on just as that piece unlocks how do you kind of take best advantage of all these things in and sort of use that to anyone do better so we tell them to come up with a

better kind of culture for what you care about how in your kind of mind does that enhance storytelling for kind of collectors or Community Builders and sort of what do you think some unique things going to end up now becoming possible yeah I think we have this framing of um I think an earlier title for the stock was kind of like like what does an on-chain brand look like and I think it's you know the beauty of it I think it's this strategy works for big creators you know public companies like coinbase can leverage on-chain brand strategy by introducing uh brand assets that are digital Collectibles but also you know a small Creator a small artist you know whether it's a musician playing with

music nfts playing with artworks that can be collected um I think we'll see more and more creators uh take on this Playbook and I think it's you know it's both a new business model but again it's a way to create deeper engagements with community and if it wins and if it's successful I think it's people will find that you know this way of engaging participating like basically spending time online is becoming more more interesting more exciting and um and kind of helps you earn um I didn't fully understand how that's a new business model I'd love to kind of dive deeper into this yeah I think like a a big bit of ours is like actually thank you what I mentioned before is that what is an nft it's a program on the blockchain

with publicly public interfaces that anyone can interact with I actually think like the thing that disrupts a Marketplace like openc won't be another Marketplace like getting players and a lot of cool things but they actually a social experience where you you know you connect through communities through you follow collectors you're interested in you discover projects through kind of the social graphs around nfts that platform will have very strong Network effects just just like you know Instagram has running but because it's nfts Commerce will be native to those experiences so every time you see a pretty jpeg there will be a mint button in the corner I think the platform that's able to build the social graph around nfts will dominate Commerce

because Commerce would just be right and effectively kind of going back to the very first thing you said on how kind of cultures and economics sort of uh uh progression sort of follows you're effectively saying that at the end of the day curation is is kind of key and as people get better at that by either following somebody who they respect or just kind of having somebody come up who is better than whatever professional curator is or critic is you get to sort of unlock a whole new sort of era uh it was that okay I think a way of putting it is like we think that collection is a form of creation if if you make it public so if cardiac has is really interested in you

know interesting subcultures he has great taste every time he collects he is sharing what he's interested with the world and if you're an early adopter of some you know weird Niche with weird subculture you're worth following and you you you influence because you connect all of these different projects and now you become you know a taste maker and you become worth following I think what's interesting with all the value flows being programmable you can be in the value flow so I think there's like potential for Revenue sharing and rewards to flow to the Creator but but I think in the eyes of the creator that you're collecting from you become a valuable kind of uh distributor you know what I mean I know it just to kind of you you problem access yeah it's just an observation we had was there's just way

more collectors than creators and like who can help the Creator spread the word and get distribution I think it's the collectors I think they're if you can create networks of collectors following each other again these kind of you know taste groups interest networks based on collection activity it increases the reason to collect you know because because collecting kind of gives you back to the the point you know that all the analogies you know are around Social Capital cultural capital like what what you collect gives you status you know and I think it's just building on top of you know 20th century Behavior you know what what are you reading what clothes are you wearing you know is it all birds or is it or is it Nikes you know all of these things through you know the physical obvious where you know what does driving a Prius

say about your you know values no you know are you buying putting solar panels on your house to save money on energy or are you trying to make a statement about you know your values your politics Etc I think again digital objects let us do this in a much deeper way at the scale of the internet I know this this is excellent framing um my kind of last question would be just sort of dig a little bit deeper into this comment again which is kind of turning that back on to you what is some practical advice it can kind of give whether it's a collector or Creator here to kind of best take advantage of this uh this new model and and get better at building their own chain brand yeah absolutely I think I think it's what's exciting about this era in the market is

price the price Point's a lot more accessible so you know the free events um you know so there's a dollar fee usually across this platform so just trying it out and participating is a lot more accessible and I think you know explore some of the cool platforms we just launched a new uh explore and Discovery experience on mirror if you've gone to our homepage so you can discover interesting projects their school projects like Zora manifold um in-depth fund where you can discover a lot of cool nft system in but I think I would say as a collector try minting try to try joining some of these communities and I think as a Creator as a brand as a company think about how can your brand your project live in your community's wallet right we're all trying to get users of our protocols platforms on chain I think what better

way to raise awareness is you know kind of you know like what is the you know unit probably need a lot of laptop stickers uh to today at this conference how can you what is like a digitally native laptop super how do you get your brand in in your potential user's wallet I think free nft is a really good way to activate your audience increase your brand awareness spread the word and like mirror is a great way to do that you know you can publish your hello world post but also submit your first nft build your subscriber base and we've seen you know tremendous success uh with just way more engagement when there's something to collect from the audience awesome well thank you so much for kind of being here and it was an excellent discussion hopefully we get to think about building our own content brand

thank you for having me thanks everyone thanks everybody