How creators use NFTs to have better conversations

Transcript

all right uh well thank you very much everyone for uh being here with me in the the heat of probably what's going to be the hottest day in uh in Paris this year uh so it's uh the fourth year um that I present this uh this presentation with some updates for sure uh but so started with atcc 2 uh really talking about how uh brands use nfts uh four years ago I still had a few people looking at me somewhat weird uh last year I remember that uh but um is it really happening and I feel like this year you know every time I talk about what we do uh and what brands with nfts and they're all like oh that's so obvious I mean everybody's doing that now uh so the evolution is

really interesting to see uh so maybe a little bit of background on me first um I am origin the co-founder of ariani which we started this in late 2017 doing really nfts for luxury Brands the idea was really at the time to use nfts which I don't know if you remember 2017 it was the early craze of you know crypto kitties crypto punks there was already kind of a hype run nfts uh and uh our thing was to use this technology was really only used by DG um to uh actually bring some value for a population that did not really know about crypto did not really want to learn about crypto before who really thought that nfts could bring something really really strong and that was the luxury industry uh and we really started working really early with the brands like brightling panry and I I'll show a few examples

what we've done with nfts with them uh and uh now I just actually uh left the operational side of arani um we just closed a a big funding raise with Tao Global and the compan is doing very well uh but I wanted to kind of go do something else and I've just joined xange exchange to um which is a a top VC in France um as a partner to launch really their crypto fund uh so they they're they're dedicating a a fund to crypto um with the same kind of idea um that we had with ir at the beginning really using to solve problems um that are across the chasm between the degens like all those cool technologies that D Jens have developed and applying them to quote unquote the real world or like

problems that you know my grandmother would have which are not necess the same as def5 Farmers or nft Flippers uh and we already made a few Investments really early xange actually invested in Ledger in 2015 really led the the seed round um coinhouse and more recently the gami and request network uh and uh if if you have you know a cool project we'll be very happy to talk about it of course uh so let's go into um into really how brands use um use nfts uh so with ariani what the three main ways that um brands have been using nfts originally was really the idea of digital twins so really at the B beginning we would um use nft as a digital passport for your physical product and it was really a way for you

if you had a physical wallet online be able to prove online that you own a real product product uh we'll see what what this is useful for but think really of any token gated solution um that you can have if you can prove that you own an object in real life the second thing that's actually been developing quite a bit uh recently um are collectibles on the right of course you've all heard of them here you see the my ape Gucci F and it's a it's it's it's an interesting things um Gucci has done a lot of work on this a few brands have done very well on this most of the brands we work with actually kind of scared of Collectibles because of the you know nft flippers the kind of speculative aspect so we haven't done much Collectibles we've done a few that

are that are tradable but the main thing that's really developed in the last 18 months for for arani was really the the loyalty programs uh and loyalty programs nfts it's really nfts that you give away so we here you have the the nft that was done for IWC that distributed to 1,800 of their best customers um to really enable them to go onto a VIP group which was toen gated you had to you had to connect with your with your wallet uh to get onto the the chat um but that for us has been the biggest growth digital twins is still something we do a lot and we keep on doing but loyalty program is probably the big winner because usually they're they're they're given out for free there's not that aspect of trading that brands are kind of scared of because yes you can

make a bun of money with right now what happens in uh you know 6 months 12 months 24 months if all of a sudden there's the price goes to zero that's seems obvious now of course um I think that was a a big uh topic of vitalik's talk last year um but that was really at the core of our idea at the beginning as I said we distributed nfts U with with Brands uh because we really thought it was a way for people to connect uh in a different way to different experiences being able to prove not just not who they were and we'll see a few examples where you do not need to give any personal information to have access to certain services that Brands give just you connect with your wallet and depending on whether you have you know which nfts

or def fible tokens you have you can just uh um get straight in uh so that's really the idea that with web 3 we're going from you know web one we had user and username password extremely linked only to one platform Web Two introduced some kind of interoperability for all the wrong reasons of course um with the Google Facebook and Twitter logins um the idea here was of course you share some information from Google to the platform you you're logging in with but also the platform is sharing a lot of information with Google uh on the other side and now with web 3 just connect your wallet you're actually the one that is the true owner of your wallet and its content and you decide also what you share with a solution like sismo for instance it really creates a a little um

ZK proof um that you own an nft with honestly revealing everything that you have under underlying all right so that's the core of really what we've what we've been doing with r for almost 5 years now uh let's let's get to a few examples like practical so one of the first implementation with we did with brightling back in 2020 and really launched early 2021 uh was um here a digital twin so every brightling watch now comes with an nft uh that is a digital passport like a digital twin uh digital identity for your physical product which enables you to prove that you own a real a real brightling that you are actually the current owner of that brightling uh and record a bunch of information now the

question once you have this nft is not just how you hold it it's how you use it and the first implementation Thea that was really interesting was to integrate it in within their e-warranty system uh and their e-warranty system basically just a system when you have an issue with your watch um the traditional way of doing it is you log in you give your you you create an account with email password a bunch of personal information to prove who you are with your address your the the your date of birth and the name of your grandmother um nobody knows why but they recall this information because they've been told that it was important and that you needed this information uh what implemented was really the idea that you claim your nft just by scanning C code with with a a non-custodial wallet uh and once you

have it you can actually go on the system either do the the classic um uh you know login with password and and email if you'd like you can still do this or you can just scan your C code and sign with your wallet and prove that you actually owned a a product and get into the E warant system and they're actually for them this is a sufficient data point because really why they ask for all this personal information and kind of this hurdle is to make sure that you're not a bot or someone that is that is trying to just clog their system uh and so that was one of the first implementation really showed the utility of owning an nft with your product um to log into a a token gated platform um that's why they like to call Anon Anonymous uh client telling and for them

it's really a a prolongation of this tradition in luxury of um discretion meaning it's it's it's about when you get out of a fancy place like vome here where you have like those you know jewelry you get out with a little black bag that doesn't really show that's unconspicuous doesn't really show like look like anything U because they don't necess want they don't want to show it to to to everybody and same thing here they're saying it's funny how we're really careful about people's identity when we are in store but when you're online we try to get as much information about them let's try to figure out how we can get the same utility the same need that we have to prove this person is really a person without having to get all this personal information which both is not very nice for the person but also

puts them at risk because then it means you know gdpr compliance and a bunch of other uh risk when you you store all this data um second a bit bit more recent uh uh application we did with IWC um and here that's what I was talking earlier is that the Black Diamond that they distributed to 1,800 of their best customers like their VIP customers uh earlier this year uh and here they really create an entire slew of experiences around this nft and it was not just the the e system um it was really as well um different um kind of token customized experiences so you had a token get chat which is something that we developed in house uh and um then you

had of course the membership NF that you that you claimed uh you could get both um you could link your your VIP uh nft with your your product of course digital twin for for IWC and um you also had a a um web three website which you you had to log in you had to to sign with your wallet to log in and depending on whether you only had or if you had both a loyalty program and an n and a a digital twin you would have actually a customized experience on the website so the website would actually have different path depending on what you had in your wallet so you can really create customized experiences without giving any other information

than just the content of your wallet all right next uh example something we've done recently it's really this idea of the link of course to the to the metaverse uh and that's something we've talked about really early especially with fortnite we're quite interested in how fortnite you know was able to sell sell skins uh and we were always talking about that to the the brands being like hey why don't you do digital fashion uh now it's starting to actually be and especially have a physical product come with a digital version of your product um that's something that's we have a little video here that shows kind of the experience of a hoodie we created with with sandbox distributed at a party uh

which was during U was in April and with which you so once you had the nft you would claim the nft of the product and then you'd go on that website and you could claim so you select the product you had uh with the digital twin and then you could uh connect to metamask and claim a um an nft was a little Avatar in the sandbox that wore this t-shirt that you had in real life uh it's early stage of course uh and uh and it's it's it's somewhat gimmicky today but I I do think that um this is something that will be interesting we're of course spending more and more time online the metaverse is not quite there yet but um it will be places where we'll we'll have interesting experiences uh and you'll want to be able to wear uh

stuff there and so why not wear that pair of sneakers that you don't wear in the real world because you don't want to destroy it because it has resale value at least you could wear it in a the send box and other metaphors uh so if I I want to just leave you with a one um one tweet that I did and and kind of like one perspective of where I think things are going in the future um and it's really um exemplified I think by this uh this tweet and and that that showed something really interesting about uh this nft so the the Adidas did a collab with the board ape where um you had those this this merch or there was this entire idea that you could get an nft with a um that gave you access to merch um so there was like a a

tracksuit a beanie and and a hoodie I think uh and that sold for point2 E uh and you and at some point you were going to be able to claim it uh and it went up to yeah about 1.4 at the moment of the claim so that was this this moment here uh is really the the moment where you could claim and burn your nft to get the the the clothes uh to get the merch and get another nft which is uh the one on the so you would burn the one on the right and get the one on the left uh and you had only three weeks to do that uh and the the one on the right is the one where you can claim the merch uh and the one on the left is the one that does not really promise you anything else then

there might be something else later there's a continuation of the experience uh and I and the price difference you can see is only 0.1 e so it's like less than than 10% meaning the merch itself like the physical product is valued at Point at less than 10% of the value of the original nft the continuation of the experience the fact that you'll have something else you don't know what you don't know if it's merch or something else is valued much more than the actual physical product and that was really something that we thought of you know back in uh in 2017 was the idea that the NF at some point the nft will maybe be more valuable than the physical product it comes with you might buy a physical product just to get the nft because that's really what you want because what's important is not the physical

product it's all the experience or the continuation of the experience the relationship you have with the brand that comes with the nft and to set another way it's like if you buy a product doesn't come with an NT means you're missing a bunch of the value because you don't have all this continuation of the experience and to me that was really interesting because it really showed that we finally have an example where that happens the physical product is less important than the the digital experience that it comes with uh and uh and I think that's where we're going I think really tomorrow when I'm asked like what do you think are going to be nfts in the future it's like well I think tomorrow if you buy a product and there not an nft with it is you're not going to want the product because

you're missing a bunch of the experience and the nft is part of the product so that's for the the physical product uh and uh and I'm really excited seeing this more of this because I think also it changes the way Brands interact with their customers and think of their products it's not just a transactional way of interacting with them it's not just come to my store I sell you a piece of clothing and then bye-bye or maybe we talk next time you need another piece of clothing it's hey come in store or or buy online I give you a piece of clothing but it also comes with an experience and the relationship that we're going to keep on building and so buying a product is just a first step in a much larger experience and so we we're we're really enhancing products and making it much less about just selling

products and and and shipping product uh and much more about how do I actually create an experience in relationship with my brand thank you very much guys if you have a few questions I'll be [Applause] here uh thanks Luke uh is there any any question as I said I think now everything I'm saying is obvious it's uh everybody's doing it oh what do you think is coming next after this a lot of big brands have uh now get you know been getting into this nft game and testing it but what do you think uh what what do you think what are

you like proposing to them next right they're all testing more or less similar things but why are you trying to push the boundaries with them yeah so most of what we do with them really is on the not selling nfts don't look at openc and don't don't think about the trading it's more like how do you distribute nfts to your customers so first in an easy way for customers that are not crypto native like definitely if you have one of those nfts and you're a crypt native you you you know how to use metamask you know how to use this is not the way of the future for the majority of the population and so a big question is how do you create you know non-custodial wallets that are easy to use for my grandmother basically so that's one thing and I think we're really lacking

still on the wallet side I mean a has a wallet that is really easy to use for final customers but it's far from being perfect and we keep on building and and making it more easier to use as I said really my my Benchmark is can my grandmother use it my grandmother if my grandmother cannot use it then it's not no good um the the second part is going to be much more around token gating like right now token gating always resol revolve around the same ideas of you can have a token get a chat you can have kind of a customized experience in a in a website starting to talk about metaverses but I think will mostly agree that metaverses are still quite a few years down the road Mass adoption for for for metaverses so the question is what are the other utilities you can

build and here we have some experience like in like physical experience like VIP parties which are token gated so it's really all this that they are exper experimenting I don't have the killer application because if I had it I would be selling the hell out of it to all the brands but um that's that's what we're exploring it's like how can owning an nft open a bunch of different utility Beyond just number go up you all right if there's another question I think we have one minute how how do Brands like uh deal with the the coupling of the nft and the actual product that they are selling behind like because if if you you have this merge you can like uh how you you it you redeem it and and then you burn the nft to get the real

product yeah but like in some cases where it's coupled like how so so different ways um first there is a there is the burning mechanism like kidas did but there are also mechanism we we actually always we have an nft format that is upgradeable so you it's like a composable nft basically so you can add an event say oh this nft was burned or was upgraded was changed um so that is possible like you can actually upgrade your nft even like oh this this uh this product that came with this nft was lost or destroyed could be one way of doing it um now there is a question as when it comes to you know physical good plus nft what happens if I sell my physical IAL good without the nft or others and maybe there's someone that just says I just want the the digital nft not the

physical one um there's no perfect answer to this um but there are plenty of different little things that we can talk about later on but quite honestly if someone wants to buy the nft without a physical product I mean I find that fascinating and I don't see why we should be against it thank you very much