Get the latest on the developments in the NFT and Web3 space as Josh Kriger takes us to the LA Blockchain Summit 2023. First off, Josh talks to Cryptostache about the interesting boom we are seeing in the Web3 gaming space in the middle of a bear market plus an update on what they have in store for 2023. Scott Dykstra of Space and Time talks about how they’re building the first decentralized analytics platform and what that means for smart contracts moving forward. Amyli McDaniel of MINTangible shares how they’re adding sophistication to the space with their work around digital licensing and NFT license agreements. Tune in for more!
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Edge Of LA
We are here with Cryptostache in Los Angeles at the Blockchain Summit 2023. How's it going?
A little rainy here which is a little unusual for LA, but I'm having a good time so far. This is one of the events that have been around LA for quite some time. It has evolved a lot.
It's a staple. We have got some Bored Apes over here and the conversation has evolved what types of companies are here and what the conversation's gone way beyond the institutional side into the trenches of Web3.
That's something you can't avoid these days. At the beginning of this conference, it was very much focused on the investment side of things, and now it has blossomed beyond that. I attribute fully to myself is how I look at it. It was all my doing. All these years of me talking about NFTs here and no one caring, and then eventually like, “It's cool. ‘Stache is right this whole time.” A little credit is due. Come on.
When we were planning NFT LA which was one of the last times we saw each other. Everyone was like, “You can't do NFT LA without ‘Stache. He's been on the NFT sandbox for a long time.” We heeded the wisdom of the elders around us and brought you into the mix and it was great to have you. We are trying to figure out what type of cycle are we in? Where are in that cycle are we? You asked ten people. You get ten different opinions. What do you see happening here and how does that relate to your specific focus primarily which is gaming?
Macro picture like what we were saying, people are still trying to decide whether we are nearing the end of the bear market cycle we have seen or we still have quite a bit of room to go. It’s like the Groundhog Syndrome like is he going to see a shadow, is he not? I don't know. We are not sure. That's where we are at macro-wise, but the cool thing about the gaming side of things is it has not slowed down at all during this bear market. We have seen companies doubling down and trying to make great games that happen to have NFTs and crypto included. Token price maybe not doing so well, but other things and aspects which there's a lot more to a company than a token price.
We have had a lot of gaming shows like Mythical Games. What they are doing is cool. I'm seeing that. I'm curious what you are seeing. An intersection more so between the gaming and some of the other components of Web3, metaverse experience, PFP side, and brand activation. Everyone's thinking about gamification in a more holistic way. Not just a reward mechanism. Using like deep game mechanics to grow community.
Gamification is a great way to grow a community if done right. Sometimes it comes off a little like, “That's cheesy. That's campy. It doesn't seem organic. It doesn't feel like it fits.” Sometimes it works well. One of the ones that I have given when people ask me this is Candy Digital did a good job with Stranger Things. When they did a whole activation using NFTs for this season here, and it was good.
It was engaging. People were in Discord. The game itself like the puzzles. There were puzzles well thought through, but still fun enough and line enough for lots of people to get on board and then you end up getting an NFT. They didn't say, “Great, it's an NFT.” It was like, “You got this cool collectible poster.”
There's a cool way of doing gamification to create communities out there and Web3 enhances that. We are starting to see some great applications about how that's done versus what we have seen in the past which has been a little clunky. Now, we are starting to find a little bit of a stride there when it comes to marketing and entertainment in particular. We’re seeing that stride. This works. Let's do this.
We got to get you over. We are doing a gaming meets entertainment event in Santa Monica. If you are around, you should pop by there. We'll have more of those types of convos, but what specifically are you focused on these days? Any particular projects or collaborations that you are pumped about?
A couple of things. Pushing my whole Secret Agent ‘Stache character, my livestream character. I have a game coming out with The Sandbox with a secret agent theme, which is going to be a lot of fun. You are going to go in and try and rescue or steal back this smart contract that was stolen by the bad guys. The Neon Dusk before they unleash it upon the city. We can't have those smart contract viruses getting out there. You know how devastating those could be. Next bridge hack incoming. That's going to be fun.
That's going to come, hopefully, for The Sandbox Season 4. Season 3 has ended so that will be the next season. I have relaunched my NFT livestream card game which is cool. It's a game that's on the WAX blockchain. It's a way to use NFTs while I'm live streaming to interact with my show while I'm doing it, which is fun. We have been bringing that back. It’s pretty cool to have that. I have the community interacting using NFTs. Can they burn it? I do that action or I change in that disguise or something like that. It’s fun.
What's the technology behind it that you are using?
It's on the WAX blockchain. It's got a whole stepping where you have these random packs. You open the packs, you get random crafting or build cards. There are different pieces of the disguises or the actions, and you got to craft them together to make the final card, which you then play while in live.
If folks don't know, how can they keep tabs on what you are up to and be part of the next quest on The Sandbox?
You can find me at YouTube.com/Cryptostache. I'm on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram and wherever you want to be. I'm there.
I appreciate you coming. Thanks for sharing a little time with us and told us what you are up to. We'll keep tabs on that and see you around.
I appreciate it. Thanks.
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We are here at LA Blockchain Summit with another Los Angelino, Scott. How are you doing? Good to see you.
It’s great to be here.
We were reflecting on your journey. I know it's been busy and we are in the same city and we didn't know each other, but now we do. I'd love to tell the world a little bit about this amazing company Space and Time that you co-founded.
Space and Time is a decentralized data warehouse which means it's a data warehouse that's owned and operated by the community, built to onboard a lot of data to smart contracts on every major chain.
Why does that matter?
Right now, smart contracts feels like a 1980s cold ball mainframes. There's enough juice to power a bank, but not to power like mature social networks. Industries like telecom and energy. We need smart contracts to access much larger volumes of data off chain. If you are building new financial derivatives like financial instruments on chain, you can't do that now in a smart contract. There's not enough data and compute power, Space and Time fixes that problem.
How exactly does it do that?
A decentralized data warehouse that can store petabytes of data. Not gigs or terabytes, petabytes of data.
How much data is that? I'm trying to get the visual.
Like your laptop is like a terabyte, so 1,000 laptops.
One thousand new MacBook laptops.
Imagine all that data and then prepping it and getting it ready to be connected to smart contracts. Your smart contract for your NFT project can ask the question, “Show me all users who've purchased two of our NFTs, and we'll give them an additional reward on chain.” Without space, and. Your smart contract can't do something that simple. Your smart contracts can't ask questions.
What are the conversations you are having within the industry? Some of the partnerships that you guys are cooking up where this is very relevant.
We have got partnerships with Chainlink, Microsoft, and Nvidia on the computer network at Global Scale, and then partnerships with Avalanche, Polygon, and Mysten Labs, the three blockchain on connecting to smart contracts and being the query engine for those blockchains.
These are big partnerships. What's next?
Those are the L1s and the infrastructure providers that we are partnered with. Now it's about onboarding a bunch of users. Cool NFT projects that are building new NFT exchanges and use cases. Here at LA Blockchain Summit, I have been so impressed by the number of different NFT use cases. I never would have even imagined.
Can you give us an example of some of the use cases where your solution is relevant, so people can understand. Why they should reach out to you guys?
Let's talk about a AAA blockchain game. A well-funded and awesome first-person shooter for example. I win the game or I get a lot of points in the game and maybe I want to upgrade my gun. That gun might be an NFT on chain and there's data associated with that gun. How many points did it get? How many games did you win? That data now isn't on chain. It's usually off-chain like IPFS or something like that. It could be in Space and Time and we can manage that in a cryptographically guaranteed trustless way, in a way that it feels like a smart contract.
You guys have an alpha launch coming up, is that correct?
We are bringing on our first set of protocol users and we are excited to early-release of Space and Time. It's going to be a blast.
Right now you are looking for collaborators, but also developers that want to build using your technology stack. How can people learn more, get in touch, and plug into the ecosystem you are building?
SpaceAndTime.io is our website and we are about to launch a whole new version of our website that's much more detailed. We launched our documentation and we are excited. We also have Info@SpaceAndTime.io if you want to email us and get to know more, and Twitter @SpaceAndTimeDB. We are pretty active in the DMs and we get a lot of DMs every day of people like, “I heard what you are building. We want to build on a familiar database. We want to build on what feels like a SQL solution, and we want to connect all of our data to smart contracts. We'd love to chat.”
It sounds exciting. We going to look more into Space and Time and I hope to see you around LA more often now that we connected.
I'm looking forward to it.
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I'm excited to be here with Amyli McDaniel all the way from Virginia. Great to see you and meet you.
Thank you and thanks for having me.
We were talking a little bit and I'm excited about what you are doing to add some sophistication to this space. Why don't you tell everyone a little bit about your background and what MINTangible is all about?
I'm an IT and corporate lawyer, has spent the history of my career in early-stage startups innovating when it comes to digital licensing and monetization. I was involved in eBooks and open-source. When I saw NFTs, I saw this tremendous opportunity for new intellectual property monetization opportunities. I founded a company called MINTangible.
I knew NFTs needed infrastructure to be transformed from mere tokens into actual assets that could hold value. MINTangible is the first NFT IP and rights solution where creators, brands, and companies can digitally bind IP and royalty rights directly to an NFT, have it displayed with that NFT, and transfer with that NFT anywhere. Now buyers know exactly what rights they are getting and not getting, and creators are able to establish and protect their intellectual property, monetize it, and also establish their rights to royalties.
That's exciting and I know because of your background that you did your homework on the competition and what the landscape looks like. We have talked about this topic of IP rights before. We had the Chairman of Filecoin, Marta, on the show. She's an IP rights expert. You should totally check out the show. What have other people tried to do and why is that inadequate?
The biggest attempts to solve this has been do it yourself with developers trying to attach licenses in the smart contract, but that will never be a holistic rights protocol and structure with trust elements and certification, which is what MINTangible gains. Other attempts are now trying to create some of the IP standards are going from the technical perspective into the market. The problem is it requires a deep understanding of how rights are translated into economic value and that is based on the law, which gives you exclusive rights.
All of the other attempts have been very incomplete and too technical for anybody to be usable. The biggest customers that are looking and needing this are existing brands that have IP to protect and they need a user-friendly way and safe way to come into Web3, and they want to come into Web3. We focus on a very friendly user interface and a holistic rights-first solution because our goal is to be that rights protocol for all of Web3.
As I'm reflecting on what you are sharing, I think about the additional complications when you have co-creators, when you are working across metaverses. Have you thought about how that fits into the picture?
Yes. The whole goal of our protocol is to be very modularized so that people can put together both the provenance, which is the proof of what rights are coming into an NFT which could be owned by one IP owner or it could be five different ones such as in some of the examples you gave.
The five different jurisdictions.
Yes. The neat thing about licensing is and I have a consortium of lawyers that are advisors to us. We are trying to create a protocol very similar to how open-source licensing happened in the code world where open-source license agreements were standardized across jurisdictions. We are trying to create that too. The key thing about our rights protocol is it's very modularized with the goal of putting together the IP ownership and having the rights owners be able to prove and declare that they own it. Being able to make decisions over what rights are being granted with what NFT at any given point in time, and all of that gets declared on the blockchain.
At any time, you can see with respect to any type of media asset or intellectual property work, who owns what, who got granted what, and at what point in time. We have a chain of title in our Etherscan for rights that people can see and track. It tries to make it more efficient, scalable, and inclusive for folks to be able to participate in the Web3 economy by monetizing creative things that they each can bring to the world.
Who are your target customers and collaborators for this and what's next on your roadmap?
We have two main customers. The first one is The Global 5000, which are companies that want to come into Web2 that have existing brands and existing communities.
Web2.5 and Web3 inch their way in.
They want to do this right. They know NFTs offer this humongous potential to build their brand, strengthen their community, and make some money, but they also have too much to lose by not doing it right. The Global 5000 companies that want to come in and create NFT initiatives to accomplish purposes, but do it intelligently and smartly.
The second customer demographic are native NFT collection projects that have a sustainable use case they are trying to achieve, which usually means trying to make sure that their NFTs over time go up in value and create the flywheel that Web3 is supposed to do. Then any platforms where NFTs are minted. We want to be their digital rights partner because we make their service better and we protect their customers. That could be an OpenSea, but it could also be a Facebook. Facebook starts minting NFTs. They need their users, when they are minting their NFTs, to be able to tell the public and the other folks on Facebook what exactly people are buying. It could be a Facebook, Adobe, or Dropbox, and anywhere NFTs are created.
What’s next on the roadmap?
On the roadmap, we are coming to market here at LA Blockchain with our product. We are accepting pilot customers and we are developing this API so that in a few months, we'll be able to integrate with few clicks into platforms. Now with existing NFT projects, they can with three clicks bind any IP license agreements that they have and also declare on the blockchain what royalties apply to their NFT projects. Something many of them are finding out now that royalties they thought they had secured when they created their NFTs are not secured with that NFT. By using our protocol, they can now show on the blockchain that a creator royalty of a certain percent is essentially part of that NFT asset.
How can people stay in touch and track what you are up to?
On Twitter, we are @MINTangible_io, and I'm @AmyliMcDaniel, and then our website is MINTangible.io.
Thanks for joining us. I can't wait to see where you are at. Come to NFT LA next year, March of 2023. I'm sure there are going to be quite a lot of updates at that time.
Thank you so much.
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We have reached the outer limit of the show. Thanks everyone for exploring with us. We have got space for more adventures on this starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey also much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes right now. Rate us and say something awesome, and then go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. You can also come and participate in EdgeOfNFT.com/discord and get to know the community. Jessie will be in there with a special show or tag. Be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content and thanks for sharing this time with us.
The views and opinions expressed on the show reflect solely those views and opinions of the show creators and its guests. We are learning as we go just like you. Please make sure to do your own research. Our show is not financial advice. There are multiple strategies, and not all strategies fit all people. We understand that you are using any and all information available on or through this show at your own risk.
Important Links
- Cryptostache - Instagram
- Mythical Games
- Candy Digital
- The Sandbox
- YouTube.com/Cryptostache
- Twitter - CryptoStache
- TikTok - CryptoStache
- Space and Time
- Info@SpaceAndTime.io
- @SpaceAndTimeDB on Twitter
- MINTangible
- Marta Belcher - Past episode
- The Global 5000
- @MINTangible_io - Twitter
- @AmyliMcDaniel - Twitter
- Spotify - Edge of NFT Podcast
- iTunes - Edge of NFT Podcast
- EdgeOfNFT.com/discord
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