Blockchains don’t have to be difficult or expensive to use. Today, Jack O’Holleran from SKALE talks with the team about the first interoperable blockchain network fully optimized for Web3 user experience and security. Imagine a blockchain network capable of running an unlimited number of fast, on-demand, pooled-security Blockchains with zero gas fees to end users. Want to learn more? Tune in to discover this blockchain network of the future.
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Listen to the podcast here
Jack O’Holleran Of SKALE, The Blockchain Network Of The Future, Plus: All About Nexus Voyagers Network, And More…
Stay tuned for this episode to learn all about how SKALE is laying the groundwork to scale NFTs gaming and the metaverse to levels not yet seen.
Also, why you can't screenshot NFTs and call them ownership.
Plus, how this Sega slogan is forever ingrained in our minds and NBA Jam is in our hearts. Don't forget. We put together a gathering called NFTLA a few months back that brought out thousands of the world's most innovative doers in the Web 3.0 space. Head to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, bolder, better, but as intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles from March 20th to the 23rd 2023. We will see you there.
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This episode’s guest is Jack O’ Holleran, the Cofounder and CEO of SKALE. Jack is a technology entrepreneur focused on blockchain and decentralized systems. Prior to SKALE, he cofounded Aktana, a leading SaaS sales and marketing analytics platform for our global life science companies. SKALE is an open-source Web 3.0 blockchain network. SKALE Network is governed by the SKALE DAO and is managed in a fully open and decentralized manner. There are over 50 unique companies, business entities, organizations, and DAOS that work to support, run, and govern the SKALE Network.
SKALE is solving the blockchain scalability problem by facilitating processing between blockchains and decentralized applications, helping the ecosystem run hundreds of millions of smart contracts and transactions per second. SKALE is the only blockchain network capable of running an unlimited number of fast, on-demand pulled security blockchains with zero gas fees to end users in perpetuity.
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Jack, welcome to the show.
It is a pleasure to be here. I always enjoy it. It is great talking to you. Thanks for having me.
It is your second time around. We look forward to having you back in perpetuity.
It's been about a couple of months. We were in the lower hundreds when you came on last time. We've blown by 200. Meanwhile, it has been a couple of years in terms of the evolution of SKALE. You have seen massive growth crossing 15 million transactions. Congrats on that. We laid the foundation last time you were on the show. There's still an opportunity to explain to people what SKALE is and how all this has come to be. Maybe you can kick it off by telling us a little bit about the journey that led you here.
I'm going to try to describe SKALE in the absolute simplest way possible, and then we'll go a little deeper. It is hard. Talking about blockchain is difficult. Even hearing the overview, every time I hear it, I'm like, “It could be a little more simply described.” The first thing I would say is one of the biggest misconceptions is there are a lot of words we can use. We can say SKALE is a blockchain scaling platform. It's scaling infrastructure. It's a blockchain network, but at its core, it's a blockchain.
It is like Ethereum. You can mint NFTs on it. You can mint tokens. You can run smart contracts. You can do everything on SKALE that you can do with Ethereum. It happens to be connected to Ethereum and secured by Ethereum, and instead of one blockchain, there are already eighteen. There's an unlimited number. That's the big a-ha. It is scaling by not just performance and technology but by many of these chains. You get horizontal scaling or linear scalability. I’d be happy to dig in here to see how we got here as well. Do you think that would be interesting?
Yeah. The analogy that came to mind for me is Silly Putty, where you can bend it 100 different ways and stretch it far. I don't know if that's the first time that someone's had that visual, but that's what came to mind.
I know your background. You used to deal with a lot of sophisticated consulting and strategy work. A lot of that world is about configuration. I come from enterprise software, and so to stand, my cofounder. It's all about configuration. It's not one-size-meets-all for everybody. It's also about growth. There's another good analogy, too. A lot of people reading this might be sitting in traffic. Everyone sat in traffic.
Equate SKALE to highways. You look at most blockchains like Ethereum, which is one of our partners. SKALE is built on Ethereum. I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion, but it's a monolithic blockchain. It's almost like it is one lane. Everybody is on the 101 or the 10. Everyone sits in the same traffic lane. It takes a while, but it's safe and secure. The police are there. You're going to get where you want to go.
There are expensive tolls, too, but the outcome is very predictable. There are no wrecks. You're going to get from A to B. SKALE is different in that instead of one lane, it is a highway with an unlimited amount of lanes and every car can have its own lane. Instead of each lane needing to enlist its own police force, ambulances, infrastructure, and road crews, they all share the same infrastructure. The police, healthcare workers, and road crews all the lanes share the work and the cost, but they all have their own lanes where they can drive fast. It's a non-technical analogy, but it's helpful to describe the crunch or bottleneck that blockchains experience.
What was the original genesis?
We wanted to create applications. I had a number of ideas for applications. Stan, my cofounder, had a number of ideas for applications. We kept running into this the same outcome. We're like, “If we do this and we ever get a meaningful amount of users, it will be so unaffordable that we can't do it.” That was the outcome I was running into.
Somebody introduced me to Stan. He said, “I'm going to do all four of these businesses.” I was like, “How do you think you could do that?” He's a world-renowned physicist and cryptographer. He has PhD and studied at Stanford and Max Planck Institute. He has a big brain. He had devised a way or envisioned a way to scale Ethereum, which is SKALE.
It wasn't born out of, “Layer 2 is going to be a hot category. Let me design the best mouse trap.” It was, “What would be the best thing for my needs?” It flows into the ethos of SKALE because it's all about usability. Who cares if you're using a blockchain if only an engineer is the technical acumen to use it or a whale has the wallet to pay the fees?”
I appreciate the traffic analogy. Jonah from Manhattan Beach is not in traffic. He's going to be trying to get a piece of lasagna stuck on his dishes while he does the dishes. I'm not sure if you have an analogy that fits that, but we'll let it go. It's fine.
If you have one sink, you can't wash as many dishes as you have twenty sinks. That's a new hot round. That's a hot topic. You're going to come up with an analogy on the spot.
We're all about NFTs and Web 3.0 up in here. You got our attention with the Calypso NFT. SKALE Chain goes live to NFT marketplaces such as NFTrade and MADNFT, spanning both your gaming and art NFTs. Tell us what's going on there.
I want to say thank you for having me on. There's a huge line. Everybody wants to be on this show. To be here twice in eight months, I'm honored. A big piece of that is we're launching Calypso. The SKALE community is launching Calypso. There is a huge multifaceted NFT launch that's happening. There are already hundreds of thousands of NFTs on SKALE, but they are almost all entirely gaming NFTs. There is going to be a huge push into utility NFTs for Web 3.0 social apps as well as pure art NFTs. Those are the three categories that we play in.
Calypso is one of these SKALE Chains or one of the sinks that someone's washing dishes out of. There are eighteen of these or one of the car lanes. There are hubs. Instead of having an NFT marketplace on every single chain, there is one chain that's a dedicated hub that has all the NFT marketplaces. If you have a game or a Web 3.0 social app that you want to plug into liquidity, it's super simple for users to go list their NFTs on that chain for marketplaces like our two launch partners, NFTrade and MADNFT, to then deploy to one blockchain instead of having to deploy to the whole SKALE Network.
The liquidity doesn't get fragmented everywhere. That is going live here in November 2022. It's also awesome because it's a community-run initiative. As the core team, we help build the core tech, but it's all about partners and people in the community who take this tech and build up offerings. It's cool to see Calypso come together.
One of the other elements of it that we talked about briefly before the show was that you have an artist launch coming up on SKALE Calypso also. That's also a pretty wide spectrum. You got some big names in that mix as well as an opportunity for emerging artists. Tell us a little bit about that and how it works.
There's a lot of action in the NFT world. If you're coming live as we are, we have to say, “What makes SKALE or Calypso unique?” There are zero gas fees on SKALE and things are fast. That's nice for a lot of reasons. We talked to an emerging artist out of an art university who spent $350 even in this market on Ethereum gas fees for a mint. It's zero mint costs on SKALE. The NFT is in the same format and secured in a different but established manner on SKALE. With that in mind, we thought, “What can we do here?”
We have a lot of people on the team that love art and that are into art. We know a lot of artists and we have people on the team who are artists. We are wanting to make an artist-first approach. There are a lot of people that take a money-first approach, user second, and then artist third. We're trying to take artists first. It is authentic to the mission and it means a lot to the artists.
A lot of artists want to put food on the table. They want to make money. They want to get their art out there in people's hands. It's not just the most famous people in the world. We're taking two angles. One, these are some established amazing NFT artists. There are two that are initially going forward for launch. There's going to be a drum roll or drum beat after that of others joining that we're excited about. We also have emerging artists.
There's a scholarship program that I won't call a competition because I don't think it fits the ethos of art. We have students that are NFT artists that are submitting. There'll be ten winners selected for ten scholarships. There are 550,000 SKALE tokens that are being given out to drive new artists and emerging artists to produce NFT art.
We're going to have some of your future famous artists that come for programs like this because it helps them do their traffic and help them get started. You could be the 37th millionth NFT on OpenSea on the Ethereum main net, or you can be part of a new environment and a new community that already has a massive community around it in SKALE. We're using that to try to help people achieve their dreams.
It's so important to remember the foundational aspect of art in NFTs. We started, to a large degree, with collectibles based on art to a degree of limited utility. Then, there was this push away from pure art into things that have additional layers of utility and whatnot. All these things can coexist, and they should coexist.
Art is an important part of the landscape of Web 3.0, NFTs, what it can mean for artists, to your point, and also the entire ecosystem for bringing people in, inspiring creativity, and creating opportunity. There is a foundational layer here to what's happening. To a degree, there was pushback against pure art. There is something special about that and the opportunities that NFTs and Web 3.0 provide for these artists. It's amazing what you're working on.
Thank you. I have to say I remember we talked a little bit about this at the last show. We were talking about the Mona Lisa example and how a lot of people don't get NFT art. They’re like, “I could copy and paste and have it.” The reality is people who've gotten it that aren't the younger generation and a higher percentage of people in the younger generation get it.
They live in the digital world. They know digital assets. They’re like, “I have a 1 of 1,” or, “I have a 1 of 10. That means something. It’s certifiable.” In art, there is also utility. Art is holding well in the market in terms of holding its value. There are a gazillion collectible units out there and a lot of them lack utility, ingenuity, and creativity, but the art is holding. This is an age-old thing. It's just a new way of doing it.
Can you announce any of those artists yet or is that information for later?
I want to say thank you to the team here. We know a lot of great artists but also have been introduced to some amazing artists that are part of the launch. We've done a lot of great introductions, but one of the ones that came from this team is somebody who our team is already a big fan of. His name is Wes Henry. He will be putting out a specific release to SKALE. There is a lot of good, authentic fit in terms of mission and this being an artist’s first enclave. He loves to create. He wants to make art. He does cool stuff. He will be one of the artists at the launch. We're excited about him.
He spoke at NFTLA. He's been prolific. He has gone deep into this space, doing a lot of innovative projects. We thought he would be an interesting pick because he crosses borders with the projects he does. He's very open-minded. He's trying to disrupt. That's what we're all about.
There are some other great artists. If anyone here reading this works in coms or marketing and you have the CEO who spoils things, that's me, so I'm going to keep my mouth shut. There is some good stuff coming. There are some great artists that will be creating and putting pieces out. The other thing, too, is that someday, we want to have a Calypso-specific marketplace that's all art or only art.
NFTrade has a cool product. If people don't know NFTrade, they have one of the best technical teams in the whole space. They're based in Israel. They've got brilliant, smart contract developers. They've built this backend that you can white label and then put your own front end on it. Without any coding, backend coding, or smart contract work, you suddenly have an NFT marketplace that has a service.
We can have Calypso art. When you filter, it's all going through the same backend. It's going through the same SKALE blockchain, but the people are seeing a different aesthetic and a different marketplace environment. If you go to a gallery, galleries have a segmented and specific brand and a specific audience. This product will let NFTs be created or marketed in a more agile manager. People can interact with them in a more agile manner specific to their audience. That is soon to come as well.
Congrats. I know this has been a long time in the making. Calypso is going to add another dimension to the space in terms of elevating high-quality art, both existing well-known artists and emerging artists. Thanks for supporting the creators. Another part of this is you mentioned gaming earlier. It is a key component of what SKALE can power, not to mention the metaverse. We would love to understand a little bit about how Metaverse NFTs are building momentum and how they fit into the ecosystem.
This is cool. If it's not, please tell me. My mind got blown when I heard what Metaverse Invaders is doing. It's a cool example of NFTs starting from the point of utility. If you look at the collectible sets, people made these great collectibles. They built a community and said, “What are we going to do with them? Let's create some games.”
These guys are taking a different approach. They are an amazing technical team based out of Romania that is connected to one of the top collectible groups. It's the same artists and the same group. You'll see when you see the aesthetic. What they're doing is they're creating DAO infrastructure in the game.
If anyone here is familiar with DAOs, these are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations where the users are voting and controlling their group. Maybe it's how they spend money or make decisions. It’s how they interact together and how they operate. In this game, there are seven different teams, guilds, or DAOs. In each one of these, to be on that guild, you have to have that NFT. If your character is in that category, then you're in that team. If this were Harry Potter, you're in Hufflepuff Gryffindor. That's your squad.
Within those groups, the way they compete with each other, they have to organize, talk, and communicate. They have to figure out, “Should we tax ourselves? Should we build defense infrastructure? When should we attack the other team? Should we invest more in defense? Should we invest more in the offense?” As a DAO organizes and structures itself better and has better governance and better decisions, it will be better. They win more in-game assets, money, in-game currency, in-game weapons, and other things that are all NFTs.
Let's say, all of a sudden, you're on the team that's getting beaten and you want to join the team that's winning. You can buy your way in. You can go buy an NFT and, all of a sudden, you're in that other team. There are also rarity levels in terms of character power and how they lead. You may be able to buy your way into being a strong player on the top team, or maybe you want to be on the second team. It's an interesting model or gamification element where you have a team environment and DAO infrastructure in a game, all powered and coordinated by NFTs.
Has there been anything like this? I'm trying to think about it in terms of token-gating, NFT use, and social product. There is a lot packed in there.
It's like this coordinated Lord of the Flies battle. It's a bad example, but I've never heard of anything like it. When I heard about this, my mind was blown. It's almost a social experiment in itself. If anyone here ever played Supercell or Clash of Clans, you're in these groups. You're in a clan. It's not an NFT, but you're on a team. You're having to coordinate, plan attacks, and do all this stuff. That is much more rigid. The game devs control everything.
This is a decentralized version that has more fluidity and more ability to jump and move. It has a marketplace component integrated. To anyone reading this, we're giving away seven of those, one of each guild. I don't know which guild will be the most successful, but you may end up being part of the most successful one if you are the prize winner.
That part reminds me, to a degree, of Fan Controlled Football. That crew and what they're doing is so much fun. They're constantly evolving and iterating on their concept. There's something in here related to that that could emerge. It's a ping. We’re hyped about that. We’ll see if there's anything like a DAO forming underneath these layers.
They’re doing some cool stuff with the teams. You can buy NFT to have a say on that team. It's similar to that, but this is this fluid metaverse game.
It is more of a hybrid. It is very cool.
Do the guilds have names yet?
They do. Let me look at the website really quickly.
We did have FCF on the Twitter spaces. They were sharing some of their developments. They're doing some stuff with basketball, which I don't think is live yet. They've been experimenting. They've got a fully lit-up LED basketball court where they're implementing other gamified elements to the game. If you go to this special lit-up area of the court and score a basket, you get extra points and stuff.
That is cool. They seem to get the first basketball game when you'd hit the button and the guy does all the flips. He’s like, “He's on fire.”
It's an OG one. I don't remember the name.
I'm on the Metaverse Invaders website, too. These are some pretty quirky names. We got the Hulud, Starlier, Zims, Dhotons, Ellos, Hydras, and Uldrons. There you go.
I want to be an Uldron. That'll be mine.
I like the Hydras. I envision them floating around, being a little bit more agile than the rest of them. Sean in the background on production says NBA Jam. That’s it. That was the Sega days.
I love that game.
Is Sega still around? I can't believe I'm asking that question. I don't hear anybody talking about Sega.
We don't talk about it a lot here, but yes.
I never hear about Sega.
They have good commercials.
Apparently, I'm not watching many commercials, either.
This is fun stuff. Your enthusiasm is contagious. We're excited about it. As you look around here in the Web 3.0 space, which you've got a lot of perspective of, what other projects are inspiring you out there?
Another cool one is Crypto Colosseum. They're doing this thing with masks. They're also taking a different approach to gaming. They had one of the top ten games on Polygon. They also had a lot of issues with gas fees. They came over and also took a new approach. What they're doing is they're launching this whole series of iterative games that, instead of having one big game, it's a lot of small games. The things that are consistent are the communities and the NFTs.
There's going to be this premise of characters, mass, weapons, and wootgump, which is their currency. It is this psychoactive mushroom that people can eat that gives them special powers. Also, the storyline and the art are all NFT-derived as well. It's AI-derived. The game creators are interacting with AI to come up with cool elements of the plot line and the art. You check it out. It's a beautiful art, but it's a different approach. They're not saying, “Let’s create one super addictive game.” They're saying, “Let's try to create 50 amazing games, but it's all one community and one NFT set that works across this whole set of games.” Check out the art. It is @Larva_Maiorum.
If you search the main term, Crypto Colosseum, it comes up.
It is super cool stuff. They’re inspiring. It’s different. A lot of things have done been before, but they've built a game. They're in the space and they've said, “What do we think is the next thing that's going to work?” This was it. It is always interesting to see when someone has that type of perspective.
This has an ancient Roman vibe, or is it more just about the colosseum factor?
It does. One of the people on our marketing team made a joke that said, “SKALE has a lock on the Greco-Roman warriors.” For some reason, there are 6 or 7 games. There is even a stock trading platform that's cool called Stonk League. It has the same aesthetic. This is deep segmentation.
It's a little more on the humor side, but we had the team on from Krapopolis NFT, which is this project of Dan Harmon from Rick and Morty. They have an ancient Greek NFT-themed show. They're incorporating NFT chickens and things. Maybe there are some interesting collabs there.
It is lots of fun. There are a lot of fun projects out there. There is so much evolution happening so quickly. You alluded to it where the Crypto Colosseum and other folks are taking the best of this latest iteration of what was happening in gaming and the metaverse and bringing those pieces together. That's what's happening so rapidly. It's taking the best of what's happened so far and then evolving and combining these different pieces in new ways to sticky projects that stick. They evolve, learn, and mostly create a lot of fun.
There's one other one I want to give a big shout-out to. You know this one well. It's Fireside. Fallon was going to join us but had a travel issue. Unfortunately, she is probably in the air. They're doing some incredibly innovative things with NFT gating. The other thing is they're creating an invisible Web 3.0 experience, which is one of the scale mottos. It's to create invisible Web 3.0 experiences.
Your users shouldn't be like, “I'm using my blockchain product. I'm using the Web 2.0 product.” They shouldn't know. They should just get all the value and should try to tuck away the security features and the UX issues as much as possible. They're helping amazing creators use NFTs in an invisible manner. The user doesn't even know it's an NFT. They can come and get gated into different interactive experiences through the app.
You can use the app, FiresideChat.com. Mark Cuban is Fallon Fatemi’s cofounder. It is cutting-edge, the number of things that will happen in sports with communities, creators, and different types of entertainers that will be launching. They might have huge audiences wherein they’ll say, “Who are my biggest fans? Who are the people that are closest to me? Maybe I have different tiers of access. People can see different things and I can talk to them.” Instead of just seeing everything on Instagram, they have this interactive experience where if you have this asset, you can gate it in a seamless manner. That is another experience.
I had a chance to run into Fallon and catch up with her up north in California. The key here is that they're letting people be part of the show. If it's a cooking show, you become part of the show. Whatever your version of the recipe the chef is making on the screen suddenly becomes part of the content itself, which is pretty radical immersion.
It is already innovative. It was a perfect way. The nice thing is they weren't saying, “How do I interject NFTs and Web 3.0 into this?” They said, “How can we introduce this feature and this concept? How can we do it in a way that builds more community and more engagement and gives power and monetization back to our creators as opposed to centering it around us?” The answer was Web 3.0. They were able to introduce it in what is a cool manner. Also, being gas-free is important. The fact is that on SKALE, users don't have to pay gas fees. Even if it's $0.20, $0.50, or $1, it’s not a major gas fee, but why are you going to pay that much every time you want to run a smart contract to access something in an application? It doesn't make sense.
You are certainly knee-deep in the ecosystem. SKALE is doing some amazing things out there. We are excited to see this next iteration and where you take things from here. Thanks so much for sharing all the deets with us. We appreciate it.
I get pumped talking about this stuff. For my whole career, I've always been higher up the stack in either middleware or the application layer. At the deeper infrastructure layer, people interact with our partners, not us. It's cool to see our partners shipping awesome stuff. We have over 250,000 transactions a day on Chains. It's fun to see it all come together.
The biggest challenge Jack and his core team are going to have is wanting to play all these games and use all these products that are being built on SKALE while not keeping an eye on the foundational solution. Scaling all this fun is probably going to be one. It's going to be where it's at.
We all got pretty hooked on Delph’s Table for a while, which is a Larva Maiorum mini-game. You can see your colleague. It’s a strategy game. You're trying to beat them. They're chasing you around and trying to steal your assets. They’re like, “We should get back to work.” We're using the product.
That is when you know you got something. That is great stuff. Let's take a minute here and shift gears a little bit. Let’s talk about this hot topic that we have queued up. Eathan, do you want to give us the low down here?
Yes, I would like to. This hot topic is a sponsored hot topic all about Nexus Voyagers and their mission. It is accelerating the resurgence of the NFT market by empowering a global network of creators. A philosophy that built the resurgence and that is woven throughout its very fabric is one of fellowship and helping one's peers. It's about being proactive and leveraging the power of the network and the network's reach and influence.
As a part of this community, each member is encouraged to share tools, best practices, and the best Web 3.0 tech to help fellow creators, pre and post-mint, revamp, revitalize, and re-energize their project, community, and bottom line. The engine powering the resurgence movement is the Nexus Voyagers Network NFT. It is a unique, powerful, and timely initiative designed not for NFT buyers but for NFT creators.
To bring this to life, Nexus Voyagers has launched its world tour. They believe in the power of the network when it comes to creating successful projects in this space. Nexus Voyagers has assembled a super team of ambassadors to represent them in major Web 3.0 cities around the world and host this world tour. It’s starting in New York, and then Miami, Ibiza, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, Medellin, Dubai, and finally, the metaverse on November 11, 2022. The main goal is to bring together the brightest and boldest to network, collaborate, and build the future of Web 3.0 together IRL.
All attendees from any of the world tour dates will automatically be added to the pre-sale list of their upcoming NFT drop on November 17, 2022. Plus, one attendee from every city will be randomly selected to receive one free Nexus Voyagers Network NFT. Our audience can go to learn more about this on Twitter @NexusVoyagers.
Their manifesto Whitepaper can be found. They can go to Bit.ly/NVNWhitepaper. They are doing a giveaway for us as we have the privilege of having so many great giveaways here of several Nexus Voyagers Network NFTs. We'll have some things that you need to complete on our socials, so keep a lookout. Keep active on Twitter and retweet as we select the winners.
We’ve had someone from Nexus Voyagers on the show briefly when we were doing our content from NFT NYC and being there. I know the project had its roots at NFTLA. The founders came together, met at NFTLA, and brought the project to life. The founder that I spoke with said we changed his life by putting him on NFTLA, so he'd put this together.
I appreciate most of the tour stops, but Ibiza? It is like someone decided, “Let's hang out on the beach in the middle of this tour because we're pretty tired.” They have some fun stuff going on, and there is a Web 3.0 community there. With Chicago, why would they pick Chicago?
There is nothing going on in Chicago.
We met an interesting VC in the space that is close to Chicago. I connected them with Eathan, who is not too far from them. It was exciting for them to meet another Web 3.0 entrepreneur that is in Chicago, but maybe they're out there.
I love the particular element of this project. The main goal, vision, and mission is to bring together the brightest and the boldest to network, collaborate and build the future of Web 3.0 together. As we always say, we're co-creating the Web 3.0 future. That's what NFTLA is all about. That's what our company is all about.
I love seeing this from other folks in this space that recognize the power of bringing people together both IRL and URL. With that combination, there's something special about that intersection because there is magic that happens. We saw it live and in person at NFTLA. This is one of those projects that came from it.
Personal relationships, business relationships, and inspiration, all these things happen in these special locations. There are these magical moments that change people's lives, and this is one of them. It is so cool to hear what these guys are doing. We do have another segment. This is the first time Josh will have had to participate in it and also Jack because we weren't doing it back in episode 127 a couple of months ago. We’ve done it a couple of times. It is called Why Is It Viral? Do you want to explain a little bit about what this little section's all about?
Yeah. At its root, I feel guilty being on TikTok. It's my excuse to watch a TikTok video here and there. From the one that we chose, there'll be a pattern if you check out the last time we did this segment. It's interesting to check in on what's going on in the NFT space in terms of what is reaching a wide audience, what people are checking out, and what interests them. We could then speculate on the reasoning behind it. Let's go ahead and check this out. This is the clip, and then we'll say, “Why is that viral?”
The clip said, “You can't screenshot an NFT. You can, but if you do, it's worthless. Here's why. When you right-click and save an NFT, you're left with a jpeg, not an NFT. To turn it into an NFT, you have to mint it on a blockchain. If you did do that, you still wouldn't be able to sell it because your NFT is a fake. It would not be listed under the official collection on the open marketplace.”
Part of the virality of it is the formatting there. It's a continuous loop. I'll make the first comment on this, which is fascinating. We checked out a Gary Vee-focused clip previously. This is pretty basic stuff. When you think about what we cover on the show and what we’re talking about with all the details of traffic, gas fees, and all this stuff with you and SKALE, there's a lot that people that want to learn about the basics.
That's still a very important thing. Particularly, the video had 69,000 likes alone. It had tens of thousands of views. This is new content. We've been in it for months, at least, hitting hard with the show, but there are still a lot of people who are curious. They want that info and they're fascinated. What do you think?
There are a lot of naysayers in the industry that will say, “I can take a screenshot. Why do I need an NFT?” It gets to that core question and explores it in a semi-provocative, semi-annoying way. That checks the boxes for virality perhaps. The comments are funny. They are not spam comments. People are amused by it. For the TikTok attention span, it checks a lot of boxes.
Read a comment. Let's hear what they got there.
Someone is like, “Bro, I can save it.”
The content piece nailed the content. That's the thing that probably a lot of the people reading this are like, “That's exactly what I've been trying to tell my dad or my friend Rick who tells me that NFTs are worthless.” The other piece is there's that cadence. I don’t know if there's an academy where they learn how to do that, but it almost gives you a little sense of anxiety. You want to keep watching it. There's a little bit of a speed to speed up the video.
There's little marketing. I've been part of this little Tiktok marketing group for four years. They're constantly iterating. They've been iterating forever on the tiniest little details of exactly what you're talking about and triggering these little things in our brains.
It is like the stuff MrBeast has been working on for ten years. They're so good at it. It's crazy. You nailed it. That's it.
I should have said this earlier, but shout out to Alex Stemp. It's @AlexStemp.NFT who created that video. We talked about this. We had the BullPerks GamesPad crew on the show. They were talking about how they're putting together some basic intro to NFTs crypto content and stuff like that. It's exactly what you said, Jack. The information is basic, but how you present it in a way that people care about and consume it spreads. That is an art that is underappreciated.
I had an Uber driver. He said, “My son wants to be a YouTuber.” This guy had moved from England and his son grew up an American. He’s like, “He wants to be a YouTuber.” I'm like, “That's a real job,” but it's not an easy job. You need to understand these things. They're science. It's not just art. It's interesting stuff.
How I Built This is another great show. I checked out an episode and they had this guy that's a YouTuber. He bought a computer when he was fifteen. There was some feature that he didn't see people talking about on YouTube. He thought, “I'll make a little video.” It grew from there. He's one of the biggest YouTubers. He has a huge company based around making YouTube videos
MrBeast says he's worth $60 million. That's an understatement. I heard a rumor that someone offered to buy his brand for $1 billion dollars and he turned them down.
It wasn't a rumor. There was another clip where someone was doing the calcs on what a Superbowl commercial is worth. They were equating it to the number of views that he gets. They were like, “His company's more like $8 billion to $10 billion based on the number of views he gets on YouTube.” It is amazing. It is the biggest YouTube channel in the world. It's amazing stuff.
My cousin has 10 million-plus TikTok followers. He was graduating college and he wanted to work. He was in LA. The studios didn't want to hire him. All of a sudden, everyone wants to talk to him because he figured out how to use the media. His name's Matt Peterson. He has this thing dialed. If you watch these videos, there's a rhythm to them. It’s interesting.
They nailed it. Speaking of shout-outs, we do have a segment that we got called Shout-outs. We added it. We should make sure we give some love not just to Matt Peterson, but to anybody else. This is a segment that we created to give a little love to somebody that's moving the needle in your orbit. We want to give the floor to you and let you share.
I’ve got a cool shout-out to give. Calypso is a community-run project. The SKALE core team helped and other people helped, but it is 100% driven by other people. Sawyer Cutler is a lead community developer and project leader. He's done so much work and. He's multifaceted. He's got all these skills. He can do frontend, backend, and smart contract work. He is also pulling the people together on Discord, working with partners, building integrations, and getting all sorts of other developers on board.
These open-source communities are only as strong as the developers and the engagement from developers. I've got to give him a shout-out because Calypso's launching this November 2022. Calypso got started in early spring 2022 and it's ready to ship. He has done a lot of phenomenal work. Everybody in the SKALE community is appreciative of all the time and effort he's put into that. Props to him.
We have a builder track at NFTLA. Let's talk to him about it. That's part of what we're trying to elevate this 2022 with NFTLA. The builders are the foundational layer of this economy. Artists want to create and builders want to build, but it's not easy for artists to create with all this technology if the builders don't do their job. It's a key part of this community cycle of life.
I know he would love to be there and be a part of it. That'd be great
Sawyer Cutler, thanks for all your effort. Much love to Sawyer. Before we break on the episode, though, we have to make sure we're directing people to the right place to follow you, the project, and everything that's happening at SKALE. Where should we send them?
Twitter is a great place to start. That is @SkaleNetwork. You can find me @JackOHolleran on Twitter. The SKALE website will give you links to everything. That's SKALE.space. Go there. You can find pretty much anything you're looking for, like Discord, Telegram, etc.
Thank you for that. Also, thank you for queuing up a pretty killer giveaway. We have a number of different things here we're going to be sharing with our audience to give them an opportunity to win. I want to give you a chance to explain some of what we have in store for them. You alluded to a bit of it earlier regarding Metaverse Invaders, but give us a rundown.
Speaking of shout-outs, I want to thank the team here. You are amazing. You've done unbelievable things to support artists and creators, connect us to them, and also help them. You are truly artists and creators first. I appreciate everything you do. This giveaway is a good example of that. We are making sure that if we are doing cool stuff, we’re like, “Let's get that back to the community. Let's support our audience.”
One is a rehash of this. We're going to be giving away one of each guild on Metaverse Invaders, one Crypto Colosseum NFT piece, and ten pieces from the emerging artist collective in some way, shape, form, or fashion. As all these things launch on Calypso, you'll get them as they go live. They're going to be going live soon. I don't know the exact dates because a lot of it's driven by other people, not me or the core team. The last piece would be we're going to be giving away one of the Wes Henry pieces. We have a lot of stuff and a lot of NFTs. We want to support these artists and also the audience and get everybody in the game.
That is very generous. We appreciate it. Everyone, keep an eye out on our socials for all the deets on these giveaways. We've reached the outer limit for this episode. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventurers on this starship, so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers. They'll make this journey all so much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes. Rate us and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing EdgeOfNFT and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- ALE
- NFTLA.live
- Aktana
- Crypto Colosseum
- @Larva_Maiorum – Twitter
- FiresideChat.com
- @NexusVoyagers – Twitter
- Bit.ly/NVNWhitepaper
- Episode 127 – The Power of Ethereum to Billions of Users + Announcing: Edge of AE – Building, Partnering and Investing in the Edge of Web3
- @AlexStemp.NFT - TikTok
- How I Built This
- @SkaleNetwork – Twitter
- @JackOHolleran – Twitter
- Discord - SKALE
- Telegram - SKALE
- Spotify – Edge of NFT Podcast
- iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
- EdgeOfNFT.com
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