ConsenSys has emerged as not only one of the leading contributors to blockchain technology and the ecosystem of Web3. They have also, emerged as global thought leaders in technology and beyond. Today’s guest, Johnna Powell boasts a PhD from MIT in Electrical Engineering and brings a wonderfully fresh and intelligent perspective to what’s going on with NFTs today. Listen in to hear what she and ConsenSys are up to–a plethora of wonderful endeavors. Keep listening for hot topics where we interview Anthony Duca Of Cavrnus and find out about his passion for creating beautiful metaverse capabilities that are simple and frictionless to engage with across a diversity of device types.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Johnna Powell Of ConsenSys NFT, Providing Next-Level Leadership In Web3 & NFTs, Plus: Anthony Duca Of Cavrnus, And More…
NFT curious readers, read this episode and find out how ConsenSys has spent almost a decade enabling developers, enterprises and people worldwide to build next-generation applications, where named Satoshi Nakamoto and Ethereum intersect in the history of our guest, and how Cabaniss has built a metaverse for the ages with seriously realistic and seamless visualizations. All this and more on this episode.
Don’t forget, we put together a gathering at NFTLA that brought out thousands of the world’s most innovative doers in the NFT space. Head to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, bolder, better, but also as intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles on March 20th to the 23rd, 2023. See you there.
—
This episode features Johnna Powell, Co-Head at ConsenSys NFT, the world’s largest pure-play blockchain company that enables developers, enterprises and people worldwide to build next-generation applications, launch modern financial infrastructure and access the decentralized web. Johnna, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here.
It’s a pleasure. You have a cool backstory. We’d love for you to take a minute and share about it with us and lead your way to how you’ve found your way to ConsenSys.
I have a bit of a mix of technical background and business background when I did my PhD in Electrical Engineering at MIT. Before jumping over the dark side of consulting at McKinsey, my PhD was in Millimeter Waves Circuit and Antenna Design for High-Frequency Imaging. The work was very deep and classified. I wasn’t able to share it with a lot of people.
I began feeling as though I was looking for something that was going to give me breadth versus depth. It was enabling me to climb out of a deep technical rabbit hole. Not that that’s bad. A deep technical rabbit hole is wonderful, but at the time, I was looking for more breadth. McKinsey, at the time, was recruiting heavily at MIT. I was finding that a lot of my peers, whom I respected a lot were taking the route of consulting to get a stronger business background.
I wanted to take the leap and luckily, I got a job there. While I was there, I got a lot of experience in business acumen, analytics and solving a lot of hard business problems. That stuck with me throughout all the roles that I’ve had since. I ended up finding blockchain in late 2016 or early 2017. I still feel like I was super late to the game, even though it seems a bit early.
At the time, I was working for GLG in corporate strategy. I was there because McKinsey’s partner had recruited me to come over there and help build up his business unit. At the time, I was familiar with Bitcoin because it was discussed at MIT. When everyone first hears about Bitcoin, dismiss it. They think it’s imaginary money and doesn’t make sense.
While I was familiar with it, I hadn’t embraced it until I started seeing it featured in news articles. That was targeted toward people who were investing in gold. At the time, I was following gold markets. It was right around the time it had passed this major gold boom. I became more intrigued by Bitcoin and blockchain. I signed up for this Bitcoin conference at MIT that year.
At that point, I locked myself in the heightened library at MIT and read this book. You are probably familiar with it. It’s Andreas Antonopoulos’ book called Mastering Bitcoin. From there, I was convinced that this was going to be a super enduring breakthrough in technology. It was much like the internet. Reading through all of the technical details and making sense of the math resonated with me. I decided right then and there, at that Bitcoin conference, sitting in my old grad school, that I have to commit myself to find a way to work in this field.
Around the same time, GLG had Joe Lubin as a guest speaker. He was speaking about Ethereum, blockchain and all of its various use cases. People were going into this talk like he was this huge celebrity and he was, but everyone was super excited about him being there. At that point, I was so inspired. ConsenSys was still a fairly young company at the time with this beautiful utopian vision of decentralization. I decided right then and there that I needed to go work for Joe.
That’s how I came to ConsenSys. I didn’t approach Joe and ask for a job. I took the old-fashioned approach and applied for an advisory partner position at ConsenSys. I felt the job description was written for me. It required a mix of consulting and technical background. It didn’t require a substantial amount of blockchain experience. It was understood that these were the early days and they weren’t going to get a ton of experts in blockchain at the time, so you would learn it on the job.
I was fortunate enough to get a response right away from ConsenSys’ recruiters, had a whirlwind of interviews set up and fortunately, got a job offer. I haven’t looked back since. Since I’ve been at ConsenSys, I’ve worked with a number of Fortune 100 clients on various parts of their blockchain journey from ideation to product build, worked on securities issuance company, lifecycle management platform, carbon credit trading platform and a bunch of different things. I got excited about NFTs. A few years ago, I started doing a number of things in the space, including partnering with Palm and HENI and Damien Hirst on The Currency NFT drop. That was exciting. I don’t know if you are familiar with that.
Yes, that one’s cool. Did you get one?
I got 3 and redeemed 2 of them for the physical. That was one of the most successful NFT initiatives of its kind. It was six times oversubscribed with a price appreciation of 10X to 20X. Believe it or not, it had a market cap of $600 million at its peak. After that, ConsenSys decided we needed to have a presence in NFTs since we didn’t have a presence in NFTs.
I spearheaded the acquisition of Treum. I don’t know if you are familiar with Treum, the Founders of EulerBeats. This is a groundbreaking platform in the generative arts and music rights and royalties space. I co-lead the NFT business unit along with Tyler Mulvihill. The team is wonderful, phenomenal and extremely talented. That’s my path into ConsenSys.
Great telling of that story. It’s such an open-ended question and it’s great to have a well-played answer to it. Thank you.
I can certainly relate. I also cut my teeth in management consulting for about twelve years before looking for something a little more disruptive and tangible. All those skills from consulting are very relevant, in my opinion, to the world of decentralization NFTs. Let’s face it. Similar to consulting, we’re building the boat while it’s on the ocean.
That’s essentially the nature of this industry at its current state. It’s pretty amazing how much of an impact ConsenSys had in the space for a very long time. I would love to get more perspective from you on how ConsenSys is enabling people to build on Ethereum and collaborate worldwide and how you look at the space and your role within this space.
It’s been wonderful being at ConsenSys because the ethos is so strong. We’ve very much embraced Web3. We don’t see ourselves as a centralized company. We like to believe that ConsenSys is one of the major leaders in enabling people to build on Ethereum and also collaborate worldwide. Essentially if you’re operating in blockchain and particularly on Ethereum, the chances that you’re working with one of ConsenSys’ products are high. We highly value and prioritize collaboration.
We liken ConsenSys to a flywheel. One end is focused on developers and the other end is focused on users. The developer end is powered by Infura and other services that help developers build Web3 apps. MetaMask is our consumer gateway for many of those apps. On the consumer side, MetaMask is the world’s largest gateway to Web3. They have tens of millions of active users. We have Quorum, which you might or might not be familiar with. That’s the number one DLT private and permissioned blockchain used by enterprises. Also, we use that to build the Palm Network. We also have a billion plus in tokenization projects, launches, digital assets and currencies as well.
On the developer side, we have Infura, which is over 350,000 developers using the managed infrastructure. This provides API endpoints to the Ethereum main net. They have a higher volume of transactions on Ethereum than any other provider, with multiple millions of downloads of our blockchain software. We have over 100 companies using our Smart Contract Audit services. We have Truffle, a dev environment for Ethereum with millions of downloads.
There are a ton of products that enable development on Ethereum, but also, in terms of collaboration worldwide, we partner with virtually all of the large EVM-compatible chains. You name one, we’re probably partnering with them and all of the ones that we believe are going to be winners. That’s through our Programmatic Enablement Program.
In addition to all of the partnerships and focusing on developers to build on Ethereum, we’re also backed by JPMorgan, MasterCard and UBS. We work with the largest global banks. We have a large consortium across the board. We like to think we have expertise up and down the stack through L1 Ethereum.
No shortage of impact in the world. That’s for sure. This inflection point right in front of us here is going to enable your reach to expand that much further, probably exponentially, I would say. That’s the merge. It’s upon us. It has started and should be completed if all goes well. It has a massive anticipated impact on sustainability, security and scalability. What does it mean for NFTs overall and also for ConsenSys?
This is the culmination of so many years of work. Our transition from proof of work to proof of stake is a fundamental restructuring of the world’s largest purpose, blockchain. In an instant, the energy requirements of the Ethereum network are going to drop by 99.95%. The importance and impact of this are so tremendous. It’s like you’re flying the plane and changing the engine mid-flight. It is very difficult.
This is the culmination of years and years of work. This is a network that powers thousands of applications and millions of daily transactions. It underpins hundreds of billions of digital assets. This is the first time a system of this size will essentially eliminate its carbon footprint through innovation and redesign alone. NFTs are a piece of this massive puzzle.
What does that mean for the world of NFTs? The most obvious one is environmental sustainability. That’s been one of the largest pushbacks across the ecosystem but importantly, security and scalability. With respect to sustainability, you can think about it as proof of work. If you were to think about how energy is used and how much we’ve reduced it, proof of work uses approximately the same energy needed to power a US house for a week, whereas proof of stake uses the same amount of energy as making a pot of coffee.
It’s a world of difference. You’re not going to have all the pushback that I’ve seen. When we run corporate NFT projects, you usually see a lot of negative sentiment from consumers saying, “This is not sustainable. How dare you? This is so irresponsible.” That’s gone. You’re not going to see those kinds of arguments anymore, but with respect to security, the merger is going to make Ethereum five times stronger in terms of security.
The cost and difficulty of attack are going to increase by fold overnight. That grows as new validators are going to stake ease to protect the network. It is 90% more cost-effective. With respect to scalability, the merger is one piece of an overall series of activities that are going to help improve scalability. It lays the foundation for all kinds of innovations that are going to make Ethereum faster and more affordable.
The reason all of this is so critically important for NFTs is that it helps Ethereum become future-proof. What do I mean by that? Many partners that our teams and I talked with are looking for something that is going to be future-proof. They ask, “Where is Tezos going to be? Where is the x-chain going to be? Why do I want to take the risk when Ethereum has next to all of the liquidity, but some of the main pushbacks have been around security, scalability and sustainability?” This is going to enable it to be future-proof, which is great.
It’s exciting and long-awaited. A lot of people are watching the price of Ethereum go up and down and hedging their bets on which chains to use for NFTs and how to plan for the future. It will be exciting when this happens.
I don’t know that people realize, especially in general, how many NFT projects are on Ethereum that are built on Ethereum. It’s well over 90% still or 95%.
When you include EVM-compatible chains, it’s almost that. It’s gone down a little bit with Solana and a couple of the other chains, Axie Infinity as well. It’s well over 90% when you include EVM-compatible chains.
Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain
It’s aligning so many things there on why wouldn’t we build on Ethereum? Why would we not launch this project on Ethereum? You’re starting to take those, “Yeah, but.” “Yeah, but this. Yeah, but that.” We’re eliminating those. It’s such a big thing. I’m honestly surprised that the mainstream media isn’t talking about it more that it’s happening right in front of us. It’s a monumental shift, but I think they’ll look back on this moment and be like, “This is a major inflection point in the world of Ethereum and crypto in general.” It’s amazing stuff.
You don’t see a lot of mainstream media talking about Bitcoin happening. You see the effects of it much later, maybe six months plus after the Bitcoin halving happens, every single time almost. Maybe that’s the same thing with Ethereum. People are sleeping on it and don’t quite get the impact of it. It is a complex concept to grasp, especially if you’re not familiar with blockchains. It is a long learning process to understand all of the implications and appreciate the difficulty in implementing all the changes.
Public perception moves slowly. It’s almost like a guarantee. It’s interesting to watch how it falls out. We’ve been impressed with the way that the mainstream has adopted and talked about NFTs over the past couple of years since we’ve been involved. That’s been impressive, from starting this podcast and seeing people not know a thing about it to sitting in a bar and watching some sporting events where commercials are talking about NFT. It’s fascinating. ConsenSys is trying to honor and reward core developers who worked on the protocol upgrades that led to the merge. I understand there’s a special NFT involved that they would receive and would mark the milestone. Can you tell us more about that? That sounds very appropriate.
We’re excited about recognizing all of the core developers who made the merge possible. It calls for celebration. It’s a landmark moment in Web3’s history. It’s a testament to decentralized software development. We want to do this to thank the open community of developers, researchers and so on who put in seven years of dedication and innovation to make the transformation possible.
To commemorate their efforts and share this moment with the community, we’ve commissioned a series of NFT illustrations. They depict these elaborately detailed worlds that embody the benefits of the merger. The themes are sustainability, security and scalability. The first one that you mentioned is the limited edition drop. This is minted specifically for the devs.
ConsenSys has a gift to them, many of whom work for ConsenSys. It’s a token of our appreciation. Their names are going to be included in the metadata of the NFTs and this is going to be airdropped to their wallet. We hope they appreciate it and save it. We thought about doing it as a sole bounded token, but who knows? They might want to give it to their kids one day, so we wanted it to be transferable. We’re excited about that one.
Is that something we could take a peek at or is that art to be rebuilt? We didn’t get that deep in our review.
You should be able to look at the art on ConsenSys.net/merge and see a sample of all of that art.
With the giveaway, everyone worldwide that appreciates Web3 and the momentous nature of this event can also mint free NFT. It’s a green NFT on the Mainnet. How do they go about doing that?
You would go to the same website, ConsenSys.net/merge. You should see everything. There’s a countdown. I believe the merge is scheduled for September 13, 2022. You’ll see a countdown towards the launch. You can click on Remind Me To Claim My NFT. We’ve already had 400,000 signups, believe it or not, for this NFT launch. We wanted to be very careful about not creating complications here or gas wars.
This is going to be open mint for 72 hours. We wanted to make sure it’s going to be accessible to everyone and easy. Anyone who might not necessarily understand, you still have time to download and ask people, “How do I get this NFT?” You can mint as many as you want. If you want to gift some to your grandma, you can. It’s meant to be not something speculative. It’s meant to be something that’s commemorative and it’s for everybody.
It’s a momentous occasion that people will look back on and be like, “That was a moment.” There are only a few of those here so far in the history of crypto.
It’s a good litmus test for ConsenSys to know what Ethereum wallets are active with people that are paying attention to what’s going on in the world versus wallets that someone forgot about a few years ago.
Who knows how many wallets have been forgotten? With Satoshi Nakamoto’s wallet, he’s probably not going to be claiming this merged NFT, but it’ll be interesting. There’s also one other. We’re minting a one-on-one NFT to commemorate the merge. It’s going to be minted on merge day. It’s an attempt to leverage the moment for a greater good, mint the snapshot of the moment. What we’re going to do with that one is auction it off to a cause that can extend the climate and sustainability impact of the merge. That’s another one you can watch out for. We’re going to be auctioning it probably on OpenSea and you’ll be hearing about it later.
This is going to open the door to so many different things here for ConsenSys in the future. What do you have in the pipeline coming off the heels of the merge like collaborations, partnerships and new features? What’s going to be going on?
There are so many partnerships. I’m not of liberty to speak of it yet. Some of them are in the music space. We’ve got a lot of cool musicians that we’re looking to partner with. Some are in the sports space, so we’re extremely excited about it. We can’t speak publicly about it but suffice to say, the world is bright. It’s incredibly exciting, even in the depths of the bear market.
People are still excited about doing NFT projects and thinking about the next phase of everything where we get to incorporate utility, brand engagement and fan engagement. Think about it as an augmented, supercharged loyalty program. We’ve been involved in a bunch of exciting projects. I mentioned Damien Hirst and Eulerbeats. We’re working on a luxury blockchain platform that features multiple brands. Some of them are launching. Some of them are launching soon.
We partnered with Estée Lauder, MAC Viva Glam and BBTV. You’ll be hearing about some of the launches from BBTV. Our white label platform is Robust. We have a lot of user-desired features that a lot of leading products don’t have. It’s a little bit under wraps. We have plans to speak a lot more about it in the future.
We’ll be all ears waiting patiently for those.
There’s a ton of stuff going on. I appreciate your understanding of the scope of everything and being able to share it. We got the right guest here and probably a lot easier though, than your PhD dissertation in terms of answering questions. What other projects have you been following closely in the NFT space as someone who’s pretty enthusiastic? I’m curious to hear what you’re impressed by.
I’m going to sound maybe generic because I’m always following Yuga Labs. I love Yuga Labs. They’re a genius team. I love everything they’ve done in this space. I’m a collector. I love their metaverse partner. Improbable as well. I find their CEO, Herman Narula, to be incredibly inspiring. I love Yuga labs. I V1 CryptoPunks. It’s a true piece of history like the original punks. It’s a little bit controversial to say that, but I follow it. NFT Worlds is another interesting one of mine. With what happened with Minecraft and Mojang, deciding not to support NFT development on their platform, this project suffered a major setback but it seems the devs are dedicated to their communities.
I’m following what they’re doing. I’m interested to see what their response to this is going to be. I like projects that are very community focused, don’t care about the floor price and aren’t following it because they’re just doing their thing. Women-led projects like World of Women are deeply connected to their communities. I’m leaving a whole bunch out. I used to follow maybe 20 or 25 projects. In the bear market, you stop following all the superfluous ones and hone in on the ones that you’re passionate about. I’d love to hear what you’re interested in.
First of all, it’s interesting. We hardly have time to follow individual NFT projects because we’re producing a show and the conference. It’s surprising, but we do have NFTs that are very accessible. There are opportunities. We have to access things that don’t run across people’s plates every day.
The other part of it, though, to be honest, is the community nature of the projects that we support. It’s the nature of this business where you meet a founder, connect with them on a one-on-one basis and appreciate their passion and desires in the space. You know how hard they’re working. Buying the NFT is like this badge of support. It’s a special thing.
A lot of those friends come from the show. We’ve stayed in touch since then or we met before the show. Shout-out to Ed Mason at Frogland. He started with the PFP project, very creatively done and turned it into a robust metaverse that takes all of his knowledge of AR VR in that world into a super high vivid reality metaverse. I’m a fan of Ed. Anyone that’s going to go to a conference wearing a green suit gets a green check mark in my book. I’ll share that one since you asked.
I’ll share one that I don’t think is on many people’s radars. We had the privilege to work with them for a little bit with this young guy named Gilbert Pacheco. We got him working on our social media assets and things like that for a bit, but he’s got a Giraffe NFT project called Tower Squad. We met him through our discord. He’s a super fan. I loved the art, so I picked up a few of these Tower Squad Giraffe NFTs.
We also have some other people in our community creating Giraffe NFTs. For some reason, it’s very fertile territory. We’ve got folks that went touring around the country. I don’t know if it’s a giraffe-themed gratitude bus or a gratitude theme giraffe bus it’s spreading gratitude through their giraffe NFT project. They brought it to NFTLA and all over the country.
Everyone’s looking for the next animal that’s going to catch on virally.
I have one more to check out. Have you heard about Boss Fighters?
I have not.
You didn’t read an episode of the show, but that’s okay. You’re very busy. It’s a pure game designer, born and bred, super passionate about developing games that are engaged for the long-term. He took a shot at a special AR VR game that you can play on your phone or computer. You can move around and your fighter moves with you. You can start to beat up other fighters by moving your body. It brings so many different concepts together into one game. I have a warm feeling in my heart for someone that committed to a great gaming experience. I wish him the best.
I have about 185 others here, so let me rundown the list. There’s a lot. All the guests are doing amazing things. We have a lot of respect for builders and creators. We want to talk to you about some questions we like to call Edge Quick Hitters. These are ten questions we ask every single guest of our episode. They’re looking for short, single-word or fewer responses, but we can dive in a little bit more here or there. Let’s do it. Question number one, what’s the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
ConsenSys: The ethos is just so strong at ConsenSys. We’ve very much embraced Web 3.0. We don’t see ourselves as a centralized company.
Honestly, I have no clue. It might have been candy or some toy that I got from my allowance money when I was five years old. I’m not sure. I don’t have a good answer for you there.
Question two, what’s the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
I do remember this. I tried to be quite entrepreneurial. It was probably a lemonade stand outside my front house. I would raid my house and sell my mom’s makeup, nuts and random things we had around the house. Neighbors would come by probably because they felt sorry for me and buy my random stuff. Probably the next one was Girl Scout cookies.
Question number three, what’s the most recent thing you purchased?
It was new Mexican bean burritos because I am visiting my family in New Mexico. This is where I was born and raised. I have an obsession with green chili, as any native New Mexican would. I’m also vegan. It’s the vegan way to get my green chili fix.
Question four, what’s the most recent thing you sold?
It was my USDC, so I could DCA into ETH and other alts.
Question number five, what is your most prized possession?
Aside from my family and friends, probably my dog Toshi, a mini golden retriever mix.
Question number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service or experience, that’s currently for sale, what would it be?
If I’m assuming money is no object, it would be all the ETH in the world.
Question number seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
Maybe conscientiousness, extreme ownership and honesty. A lot of those are highly underrated, especially in our political environment.
Question number eight, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?
This is a double-edged sword, but I would eliminate being, what they call at McKinsey, an insecure overachiever. They say hire for that personality type and sometimes it doesn’t necessarily serve you well.
Question number nine, what’d you do before joining us at the show?
I’ve been working on a cool NFT deal. Fingers crossed, hopefully, we’ll have some good news to share.
Last one, question ten. What are you going to do next after the show?
I am going out with my family. I’m visiting my sister, so I’m looking forward to a time with my niece and nephew.
I might have a bonus question. This should be like a softball here but I’m curious. Why double conversion superheterodyne down converter blocks operating around 77 gigahertz and 94 gigahertz might have been realized in 0.13 µm SiGe BiCMOS technology?
They’re asking about my PhD thesis. Silicon-Germanium technology had a higher resistivity. Therefore, you could run much higher frequency applications on that technology rather than regular silicon.
Beyond the bonus question, we also have a hot topic to get to. Eathan, what do you say?
Our sponsored spotlight hot topic features Anthony Duca, CEO and Co-Founder of Cavrnus Incorporated. Anthony is a technology visionary pioneering the development of emerging software technologies covering early internet marketplaces, intuitive data management and 3D visualization, but the focus is on human-machine experiences that drive revenue and brand opportunities.
Early in his career, Anthony held a variety of influential management positions at General Electric, where he completed his two-year management training program. In 2002, Anthony Co-Founded Bunkspeed and helped revolutionized 3D workflows and processes for automotive design. In 2022, Anthony is CEO and Co-Founder of Cavrnus, an extended reality technology company enabling enterprises, brands and creators to build immersive metaverse experiences across teams, partners and customers for connected growth and shared experiences. Anthony holds a BS EE with high honors from Rutgers University. We’re looking forward to talking to Anthony. How’s it going, Anthony?
I’m doing great.
Anthony, we were talking with Johnna. I assume you were reading her thesis.
I was trying to understand what you said at the very end. My Electrical Engineering degree gave me some insight but not a lot.
It’s good to see you again. Thanks for being part of the first NFTLA. We got 2.0 coming up. You’ve been busy building.
That first NFTLA was amazing. I’m super looking forward to the second one.
Thanks. We can’t wait to have you back. We’re planning to make it bigger, better and special. Meanwhile, you’ve been building this ultimate metaverse builder platform that’s pushing the limits of creation, which is what we like to talk about here on the show. I will love to learn more about it and how you got here.
I am a creator at heart. Everyone loves an origin story. I’d like to give you a little bit of the journey of how I got to this point. I think of myself as an outlier and I say that with humility. Not that it’s something special, but it correlates to a book written by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers. It’s phenomenal. I’ve put in my 10,000 hours times 10 because I’ve been doing this for many years.
I also had a set of circumstances when I grew up that gave me the fortune to be able to do what I’m doing. I happen to have a father who started a computer store back in 1978 and had one of the first RadioShack TRS-80 computers. That set of circumstances led me to get into the computer field. I fell in love with games.
ConsenSys: This is the first time a system of this size will essentially eliminate its carbon footprint through innovation and redesign alone.
The first adventure game I started with was one of those that was text-based that they give you a question. You’re in a cave. You can get a knife or a glass of water. What do you choose? It starts to traverse you down to a set of things that eventually either you win or die. An example is if you take a glass of water, you may wind up getting eaten by a bear because you didn’t have a weapon to kill the bear. That was my first foray into games.
I got into Asteroids, Pac-Man and The Arcade where you had to put quarters in but one of the eye-opening experiences for what a game could be was Dragon Slayer, which is 1983. It was a cartoon that was interactive. For me, it was amazing to experience that level of graphics. What always stood out in my mind is graphics and visual quality matter in the world of computer graphics.
Fast forward to Bunkspeed, we took game technology and said, “What happens if we bring that to the enterprise where they’re visualizing CAD data looking flat? Can we make it look real, interactive and dynamic so engineers and designers can make more educated decisions?” It turns out that in 2002, you could take gaming technology, take an engineering CAD file and bring it into that environment and make it look real.
Our first customers were in the automotive industry. We targeted automotive visualization. For them, it was like magic, which is any great technology that is indistinguishable from magic. A designer could take a CAD file and drop it into our product. We automatically recognize the wheels. We made it drivable and they could see their car with a PlayStation two controller and drive it around. It was amazing. That experience opened my eyes to how to enable creators. You make things easier and high quality. Decisions can be made.
My Co-Founder Nick Gebbie, who’s here at Cavrnus, I met him back at Bunkspeed. He was the genius that wrote the rendering engine. Bunkspeed got acquired by Deco Systems that are in SOLIDWORKS. Cavrnus came out a year later. Once we discovered the Oculus DK1, we were like, “VR and 3D are going to change everything.” We want to build this new metaverse platform that has high-quality visuals, runs on any device, enterprise-ready, but also can be consumers ready. Here we are.
To say it in a few sentences, makes it sound like, “We wanted milk, eggs, bread and some broccoli.” Especially mobile-ready, that’s ambitious.
Tell us about where you’re at and where’s this all led to.
The focus at Cavrnus is we’re empowering creators to create what we call the high-quality metaverse experience and deliver that to any device at scale. If we break that down, high-quality visuals mean you have accurate high-quality lighting. You have great effects, particle effects, great animation, skinned and rigged types of animations with lots of interactivity. The metaverse becomes alive. We are building a set of creator tools to allow creators to do that. That’s been the focus. Even behind me, I’m in the metaverse.
I thought that was your Zoom background.
At the window, there are some trees here, Eathan. I can think those are some trees that you might want to talk about.
Eathan, those look familiar.
I’ll tell the readers what’s going on because they don’t see it. Instead of a virtual room where he’s Zooming around, we’re a little bit surprised because he showed us that he could do this before we started the episode, but we gave him some quick through over some GL but B files of the Living Tree NFT collection and ask if he could throw them into his metaverse. We said, “Sure.”
I’ll tell you what. I’ve asked this of several people in various situations and it’s not as easy for everyone to do as you might think. They might want you to convert it to a different file type. It might make their engine run slowly so they can only add one. He’s got a handful. He planted a little forest and put one on his desk as decoration. That’s pretty impressive. Everything is working very well.
Are you going to have an ETH merge party in the metaverse, Anthony?
We can have a blizzard.
That’s amazing and cool. We may have a little screensaver for the show on the computer screen there in the background, which is awesome. I appreciate that love.
ConsenSys: We’re really excited about recognizing all of the core developers The Merge possible. It’s definitely cause for celebration. It’s a landmark moment in Web 3.0’s history.
I happened to be in here with several people from my team, so if I unhide some of the UI here, you’ll see I’m here with eight other people. One of the great things about our product in this new release is we support third-party avatars and everybody’s got their ready player on.
I’m sorry. The only thing you’re missing, though, is your VR dog interrupts the session, which typically happens.
I have a blue and gold parrot. I had to leave my house to do the show at my office because my parrot was screaming and that wouldn’t go over very well.
Toshi might make an appearance here, Johnna. Is Toshi with you? He’s got to be with you.
No. Unfortunately, I’m in New Mexico. Toshi is in New York, where I live. I’m visiting family. Unfortunately, I can’t bring my dog, but I will show her to you.
Johnna, you see a lot of technology in your role. How does this compare to some of the other metaverse technology?
It looks amazing. I would love to explore more. It looks super cool and immersive. It’s comparable. I would love to hear about what differentiates it in your mind, Anthony.
Our focus is on delivering this very high-quality visual experience. That means that it can’t just be Web3D, which is amazing. It’s got low friction, but you have a lot of limitations to what you can deliver in the Web3D experience and the future is super bright for WebGPU, but it’s not here. We’re trying to deliver the quality that people expect for certain experiences. Some things are better in Web3D than here, but we built an application.
We also support the Unreal engine, but this application is our creator tool. This is built with Unity. We have ways of deploying it to any device. We support VR, AR on an iPad, desktop, Mac, PC and mobile. We also have a streaming system as part of this release so that we can stream this experience to all the devices that don’t have the compute but have decent latency that we can stream them in a great experience like a game would be extreme. Our focus has a differentiator. We’ve made a decision that we want to deliver the highest visual quality experience and that’s my background and co-founder’s background.
It’s worth noting why we’re geeking out here. Anthony is moving around this virtual metaverse, but everything is crisp. It quickly coverts over. There’s no flip flash. It doesn’t hurt your eyes to see it. The speed of the movement feels graceful. These are nuances that I’ve learned to appreciate from demoing a lot of different products in this space.
That was so cool. The blizzard that you were magically able to create almost feels real. I feel like being in a snowstorm. I’m going to do it.
I can turn it back on.
This is beautiful stuff. We know you’re super focused on creators, which is another smart play. Unfortunately, we have to wrap up the segment soon here, but we want to know where people can go to find out more, follow you and keep up to date with the project.
We are very active on LinkedIn, so you can go look up Cavrnus on LinkedIn. You can find us on Twitter. Our URL is Cavrn.us. It’s our company name.
Lots of fun things coming up. Also, one thing that we do want to call out is we got a little giveaway. Anthony, do you want to share with our readers a little bit about that? It’s very generous, though.
We’re going to provide to your reader base. Three people are going to win a one-year subscription to the creator tools where they could create experiences like this pretty quickly. That’s a $1,200 value per person, so that’s a $3,600 value. Three of your lucky readers are going to be creating, sharing and deploying these at scale.
ConsenSys: Any great technology is indistinguishable from magic.
You’re super generous. I’m sure much more value will be created from those individual subscriptions. We appreciate it, Anthony. Thanks so much for joining us and sharing everything that’s happened over at Cavrnus. We’ll keep a close eye on you.
Thank you.
We are ready to move to the next segment, which is an important one for us. This is a little section where we would like to give a little shout-out to people that are important in our world or the world of our guests. Johnna, we wanted to give you an opportunity to do exactly that and give a little love to an individual or a group of individuals that are moving the needle in your life.
Thank you so much. There are so many people. We have an incredible team and leadership at ConsenSys. Off the top of my head, Tyler Mulvihill is an incredible co-leader. He co-leads this business unit with me. He’s amazing. I couldn’t do anything without him. We’re a fantastic team. Constantin Kostenko, Charles Lightoller, Gabriel Dantas, Mia Gougisha, Kuba, our guru of biz-op, Dan Zider, Jacob, our Creative Lead, Gus Barta. I’m sure I’m missing people, but this team is so wonderful. We have an amazing culture together. Joe Lubin is fantastic and so inspirational. We are inspired by him every single day along with our leadership team and amazing support from our marketing team as well.
It sounds like you have an amazing team over there and we appreciate you sharing a little bit about how you all operate and giving them a little love. Before we wrap the whole episode, Johnna, we want to take a minute and make sure folks know where to follow you, the project, and everything that’s happened there.
You can certainly follow me on Twitter. I’m @JD_Powell_. That’s my Twitter handle. You can look me up there. My name is Johnna Powell. You can probably find me easier that way. Instagram, @JD.Powell. More importantly, look up ConsenSys.net. You can navigate to our NFT side and see everything that we’re doing in NFT and across the product suites at @ConsenSys on Twitter. That’s probably enough.
It should be sufficient. Not hard to find. We appreciate you joining us and sharing so much of the goodness that’s happening over there.
Likewise. Thank you so much.
We’ve reached the outer limit at the show. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on this starship, so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey also 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 with no spaces and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to read next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- ConsenSys
- NFTLA.live
- Mastering Bitcoin
- Palm
- HENI and Damien Hirst
- Treum
- EulerBeats
- Infura
- MetaMask
- Quorum
- Smart Contract Audit
- Truffle
- JPMorgan
- MasterCard
- UBS
- Solana
- Axie Infinity
- ConsenSys.net/merge
- OpenSea
- Estée Lauder
- MAC Viva Glam
- BBTV
- Yuga Labs
- Improbable
- V1 CryptoPunks
- NFT Worlds
- World of Women
- Frogland
- Tower Squad
- Boss Fighters
- Episode – Past Episode
- Cavrnus Incorporated
- Outliers
- SOLIDWORKS
- Living Tree NFT – Twitter
- LinkedIn – Cavrnus, Inc.
- Twitter – Cavrnus, Inc.
- @JD_Powell_ – Twitter
- @JD.Powell – Instagram
- @ConsenSys – Twitter
- Spotify – Edge of NFT Podcast
- iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
- @EdgeOfNFT – Instagram
.png)
.png)
.png)
.svg)
