The use cases of NFTs are expanding every day and a time may come where identification will become purely digital. Keith Kowal, Director of Product Management at Swirlds Labs, catapulting development and progress for Hedera, the world's most used sustainable enterprise-grade public network created to make your digital world exactly as it should be—yours. In this episode, he joins hosts Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger to discuss what they’re doing to create a decentralized digital identity and the potential threats and solutions that come along with it. Keith also talks about how they’re implementing a carbon neutral baseline and other environmentally sustainable efforts to help preserve the planet. Plus, stay tuned for our Hot Topics discussion with Dominique Mitchell Co-Founder of Crypto Money Records and Lil Bitcoin, a decentralized avatar rapper. Don’t miss out!
---
Listen to the podcast here
Keith Kowal Of Swirlds Labs On Accelerating Hedera’s Bright Future, Plus: Dominique "Mitch Mula" Mitchell Of Lil Bitcoin / Crypto Money Records, And More…
NFT curious readers, stay tuned for this episode and find out how our guest is working on making your future digital identity as safe and secure as Fort Knox, what foreign substance powered our guest through the most intense dev sprint of his entire life, and how Lil Bitcoin and Crypto Money Records are making sweet Web3 music with some of the most iconic players in hip-hop. All this and more on this episode.
Don't forget that 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, and better but just as intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles from March 20th to 23rd, 2023. See you there.
---
This episode features Keith Kowal. He's the Director of Product Management at Swirlds Lab with a focus on supporting the development of Decentralized Identity on Hedera. For those who aren't familiar, Hedera is a proof-of-stakes, sustainable, and enterprise-grade public network for the decentralized economy that is dedicated to building a trusted and secure online world that empowers people. Prior to joining Swirlds Labs, Keith produced Decentralized Identity at Workday and Trusted Key.
Before that, Keith held product management roles at Dolby and VIA Technologies, making him a key player in rallying teams to create successful and top-tier product life cycles in tech and beyond. Hedera is owned and governed by 25 companies, including Google, IBM, LG, Ubisoft, and Deutsche Telekom. It calls itself a third-generation public ledger that builds on the ideas and technologies of those other systems and has its own features. Keith, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much, Eathan.
If we could jump right in here, I want you to explain what Swirlds Lab is for the reader and how it is related to Hedera. It would be great.
Swirlds Labs was spun out from Hedera in May of 2022. The main mission of Swirlds Labs is to propel the Hedera network. We support the maintenance and development of Hedera and growing that ecosystem. In the future, we will also be developing public open-source libraries to also support the development of ecosystems on Hedera.
One of the things we always like to understand is how folks got to work with these amazing organizations and what that path looked like. One of the things that stood out to us about Hedera that we value very highly within our organization is core values. Things like integrity, ethics, service, excellence, and teamwork are some of the core values of Hedera. I'm curious about your journey to Hedera. We would like to learn about that. How do these core values play in? Is this something that was on your mind as you were thinking about working with such an amazing organization?
My journey speaks to a lot of the things that are so great about Hedera. My journey on this started when I was living in Hong Kong. I joined a startup called Trusted Key that was working on Decentralized Identity. That was Ethereum-based, smart contracts, and all that great stuff. This was before the time of even some of the new standards we see. I worked for Trusted Key for about two years and transferred to California, and then they were acquired by Workday.
I spent the next three years at Workday building out Decentralized Identity. For those of you who don't know, Workday is a large HCM provider. For the backend, they do things like payroll, HR, hiring, and all those backend systems for companies. Workday is one of the largest company providers. I worked for them for three years building out Decentralized Identity and integrating that with the Hedera backend. In that journey, I was building out Decentralized Identity both on Hyperledger Fabric and then later on Bitcoin.
My perception always was is that for a company building out technologies that are anchored on blockchains or distributed ledgers, which is very fundamental to the needs of decentralization but often, it was heavy lifts. Building out those stacks on ledgers took a lot of resources and effort. Often I felt like it was a distraction to probably the core products that a company like Workday or other companies building Decentralized Identity want to build, which are usually around things like issuing services, verifying services, wallets, and the consumer or the customer side of it.
When Hedera approached me, they were already aligning to my value proposition in that I always saw that the need for a large enterprise was more like blockchain or distributed ledger as a service. Large companies want this as another piece of infrastructure. A large company uses AWS or Azure. Often they don't want to have to learn a whole new technology stack. They don't want to be having to hold crypto. That's a big problem for a lot of companies. They want the value of distributed ledgers or blockchains.
I saw the opportunity because I thought, "Hedera is a service where you have all the fundamentals in place. You have a network with great performance, uptime, and governance layer. It's environmentally sustainable." It was all the checkboxes that enterprises are looking for. I thought, "If my vision is correct that this is what companies, large enterprises, or medium-sized enterprises are looking for, Hedera seems to be the right network for that type of requirement."
I can relate. You bring me back to my consulting days. I can think of so many companies that have this guy that is the only guy left that knows this old system from years ago. He's a curmudgeon at this point. He gets to do whatever he wants because he is the only one who knows how to do this little bit of programming. That type of legacy cost gets expensive. It gets in the way of them focusing on their core business, which is what they all want to do.
Companies want the value that they can get from distributed ledgers and technologies like NFTs. They don't necessarily want to have to ramp up an entire engineering team on it. They don't want to deal with holding crypto. That's a big problem. They don't want to deal with some of the pain that's so outside of their normal IT mindset for IT infrastructure.
There's a lot of governance there. There are a lot of barriers to using this technology that intrigues them. When you look at the future of Hedera recognizing that a lot of NFT communities are adopting it as one of the faster-growing areas of adoption, where do you see Hedera and NFTs going? To what extent are they aligned?
Hedera has been working on NFTs for quite a while. It started using NFTs you could mint on our Hedera Consensus Service but more recently, we did launch the Hedera Token Service. We are also having broad compatibility with EVM networks, which allows things like wrapping more standard Ethereum tokens. From our customers, we hear that there's a very strong path forward and a lot of amazing use cases for NFTs.
The requirement becomes around from a Hedera perspective, "How do we create the best network for minting NFTs and managing NFTs, the entire lifecycle of an NFT, and all the other third-party services that go along with that? How do we create the best network to create those ecosystems, whether they are around the tokenization of assets, gaming, or whatever you can imagine? What are the base-layer infrastructure requirements to make all of those ecosystems happen?"
What's your outlook on NFTs in general? You chose Hedera because you saw the long-term potential. What's the potential you see with NFTs that is additive to what Hedera brings to the table from a token blockchain perspective?
The core of Hedera is Hashgraph, a consensus service, but then we have built many services on top of that like our consensus layer, which allows you to do immutable messaging or the crypto service. We have a file service, most excitingly our Token Service, and also our Smart Contract Service. These are all different ways that you can leverage the core Hashgraph consensus but it's not just offering a token service.
We also realize that there are a lot of pieces that go with that. There's support from wallets. You have to create a whole ecosystem of support around that to make it as easy for developers to develop on that side. It's a package of stuff that you need to deliver but it's ultimately deriving from the core value of the Hashgraph consensus layer.
It's interesting to hear your perspective on how everything is integrated and also how the intention here is to support the infrastructure and help people do what they want to do. That's the main goal. You pick the best tools. That makes a lot of sense. We have been talking about it in the show a little bit and hearing about this buzzword Web3 identity of Soulbound tokens. We have heard a little bit about it. Tell me about Soulbound tokens, any debates around that product, and what that has to do with Decentralized Identity.
Maybe I'll back up and talk about a little of the history of Decentralized Identity on distributed ledgers. Years ago, some of the core technologies that started to be developed around Decentralized Identity were things called DIDs or Decentralized Identifiers, which were ratified as a new standard. The last identifier to be ratified was URL. It was pretty momentous.
You have this thing called verifiable credentials. The last few years of my work have been focused on those types of standards. Those all revolve around you having an identity wallet, receiving credentials in that wallet, and then being able to share those credentials with anyone you want but all in a very privacy-preserving way.
We have heard this new buzz around Soulbound tokens. Some people don't like that naming. It was coined by Vitalik pertaining to a gaming reference. It was then expanded upon in a white paper called Finding Web3's Soul. Other people called that nontransferable and non-fungible tokens because that's what they are. They're an NFT that's not transferable but it's a cool name attached to it. It has created a lot of discussions.
When I think about Soulbound tokens, and I wrote some notes on this on our blog, the number one thing I think about is privacy. A Soulbound token, typically in most instantiations, is something that you're attaching to your account. It's publicly discoverable on a chain. That has certain implications. To me, that puts it in the realm of your LinkedIn profile or your Facebook. The information that you would want to put into a Soulbound token then aligns with that. I personally would not put my driver's license on my Facebook feed. Maybe some people would. I wouldn't.
There's a scale there of people that are happy to share everything about themselves on the internet and some people that live in a Faraday cage and want to share nothing. Where do you fit on that scale? That's my first analysis point about Soulbound tokens. These are, at least in their current form, public displays of information. As an individual, what are you comfortable with being out there on a public chain?
Here's a quick interjection there. When we talk about Soulbound tokens, we know there's a token that's associated with one individual. By that definition as well, you wouldn't have multiple Soulbound tokens. Is it different Soulbound tokens for different systems? What would you think about that?
This is where we get into some complexity with the terminology of Soul. At the end of the day, these are nontransferable and non-fungible tokens tied to an account you have. In this world, you could have one account or many accounts. You could have one nontransferable token or many nontransferable tokens. The vision that most people have is that you have many of these tokens.
If you go into some of the thoughts on Decentralized Society, the way I understand it, you would have maybe thousands of tokens, which creates other kinds of problems around discoverability, how you manage them, and how someone can find something but that aside, the vision as I understand it is that you would have potentially many tokens tied to probably a single account. That account is your identity. You have many tokens associated with that identity but people do have multiple accounts, so that makes things more complicated.
Let's talk about that implementation. What do the actual implementation, uptake, and use of Soulbound tokens look like in your eyes?
When thinking about the implementation of the token, we can leverage a lot of the past work done on Decentralized Identity to describe the steps. This does not need to be Hedera-specific. This could be generic. The first thing you would want is that somebody could issue you a token or something that says something about you. You are a podcaster on Edge of NFT. Someone would issue you that token.
The next step would be that the receiver of that token would need the ability to either claim that token or reject it. Maybe I want to issue you a token that says you're a member of the Mickey Mouse club but you have no interest in that token. You don't want that associated with yourself. You need the ability to either accept it or reject it. Once you've accepted it, then potentially that token could have an expiration.
Maybe someone issued you a Costco card that has a one-year life. Your membership expires in one year. You would also want the ability to disassociate that token from your account. You accepted a token that said you're a member of the Mickey Mouse club but then you're embarrassed by that. You want to get rid of it. You want to disassociate that token from your account.
This is where you get into a more controversial territory depending on who you talk to. Typically, you also want the ability for the issuer of the token to be able to take back their token, burn it, or wipe it from your account. That's because often this is the issue where we're making an assertion about you. If they later find out that assertion was not true or was made under false pretenses, typically an issuer wants the ability to remove that token from your account.
That gets more controversial. Should issuers have that ability? You probably want discoverability so you can scan a chain and see who has that token. That makes an identity assertion. You also want someone to make a query on your account to see what Soulbound tokens you have. That's the holistic feature set that I see for Soulbound tokens regardless of what chain they may be implemented upon.
On the security front, we talked about some of those elements there but it seems like that's a pretty big bridge we still have to cross around security features that make people comfortable that their digital identity is safe.
Privacy is one of the concerns. Overall, one of the largest issues facing NFTs, whether they're nontransferable tokens like Soulbound tokens or not, is key management. In my life when I worked in a Decentralized Identity, that was my biggest headache in having wallets, when you're talking to a Web3-native audience, they're much better about key management, yes and no. You can find many examples of not but they're more willing to put a securely-stored seed phrase or something like that.
Tokens, at least in their current form, are a public display of information. Click To Tweet
I found personally that when we got into more generalized consumer environments, which is where we see things going, team management becomes much more difficult. It's one thing to be issuing someone identity assertions. It's another thing for them to lose control of their key material, and then they lose control of their account. What happens to those identity assertions? Someone hacks them and somebody takes over their identity assertions. That's all problematic. I bet that all comes back to, in my mind, how you deal with key management.
To a large degree, it's making it easy to use because that's the problem with the mass populace that isn't as familiar with key management, "What am I doing with that? Where am I storing this?" The next thing you know, it's exposed to the internet, and they're compromised. An easy button would help.
There are a couple of paths that we see. There's the path where users manage their keys. I'll let each of you weigh in on what you think of that. There's a model that's gaining popularity around social recovery in that if I lose control of my key material, I can reach out to X, Y, and Z people in my community, and they can support me in recovery. That's a model.
The third model, which I don't think is talked about as much, is something like custodial key management. You delegate a trusted entity. In this world, that might be a bank or something you trust. They can recover your key material on your behalf. You show up at their office, go through a KYC process, and show your driver's license. They're able to restore your keys for you. Those models are needed. When people talk about Soulbound tokens, they have recognized that like a lot of NFTs, we see the grand vision but this is certainly one of the problems that we have to confront.
I couldn't help as you're talking about receiving these tokens and wanting to reject all of the gifts that Vitalik has received over the years. He suddenly becomes a key stakeholder in a project that he has nothing to do with. There was a meme coin phase back in early 2021 where all these famous people were inheriting large portions of token allocations. Suddenly, they're a key voter in a bad wedding gift or anything. You want that ability to say no. It's important.
You could take the Tornado dusting, which is very similar. This could go from being humorous to being very malicious if you don't have the ability to control what you want or don't want to be associated with your account.
It still comes down to self-sovereignty, which is important. One thing that I learned from having you at NFTLA, thanks for being part of that, and getting to know you is the astoundingly low carbon footprint that Hedera has. Tezos seems to get a lot of the spotlight time but according to a study from the University College of London, you are leading the charge here. Congrats on that. I would love to understand where you see this ESG or environmental sustainability side of things going with cryptocurrency, especially in light of the changes to the Ethereum network.
A lot of this comes out of the proof-of-work algorithms that have gotten a very dirty reputation. In working in a large enterprise when you tell someone that you're using, in that case, it was Bitcoin, you have a lot of explaining to do regarding the bad image around carbon footprint. One of the great things about Hedera is that we're doing the offsets. We're environmentally sustainable.
Beyond that, Hedera has been doing a lot of exciting stuff in the ESG space. We have a $100 million fund through our associated HBAR Foundation for environmentally-sustainable initiatives on a blockchain. We have a very exciting project called Guardian, which is trying to do carbon credit auditing. There's the baseline of making the operations of your chain environmentally sustainable and carbon-neutral. That's the baseline. There are all the other exciting initiatives we have trying to make the world a better place in terms of environmental sustainability by being able to anchor this information on a public ledger.
I would love to switch the conversation a little bit to Hashgraph consensus and have it be a blockchain alternative but without the limitations and security risks that we might find elsewhere. Can you give a little bit more details on that for the readers?
Hashgraph was originally invented by one of our cofounders, Leemon Baird. Initially, it was patented but since then, we have been making big strides. The patents around that were all open-sourced. Hashgraw is now open-sourced. We're taking steps to make the governance of that more decentralized. It's moving in stages. We have started introducing staking. We're going to be taking new steps towards things like community nodes and things like that, allowing others to participate in a consensus.
You have the hash itself, which is the best consensus layer in terms of ABFT. It's a very strong consensus. I've always been impressed at Hedera and how much they are thinking about the role of malicious actors, how you build a 100-year chain, scalability, and future threats. We're always trying to look ten years in the future about what's coming.
There's an amazing consensus layer and then a governance framework. We restrict governance like to our council governing council members, which is made up of tier-one companies. You know who's operating the network. It allows for trust and consensus. You know that all of these people are making decisions in the interest of moving the chain forward. It's pretty amazing.
I remember when we were in Davos getting to chat with someone else from Hedera. What he highlighted was that there's a more centralized governance structure at the moment but a vision of decentralization so that you have folks with a vested interest in making things work there and committed to having it functional. That's a lot of responsibility, to be honest. They're going to want to create a decentralized network where the responsibility, as well as the rights, can be distributed.
Our governing council takes those responsibilities very seriously. They're not looking for the short term. They're looking at what are the things we need to do to first encourage ecosystems to develop on the network but also a lot of the stuff I work at from the project management perspective is what are the things we can do to make sure that we have a 100-year change and that we are addressing scalability issues that we don't have now but we think we might have five years from now. A constant part of the analysis is malicious actors. How can we make sure that the consensus is always fair and that no one can ever come in and disrupt the network? These are things that we're constantly looking at.
There are lots happening over there. I'm sure there's a lot more on the roadmap. Give us a little insight. What should we expect from your side of the world, Hedera, and all the fun things that are happening within the network here in the coming 3 to 6 months?
There's a lot of exciting stuff happening. I'm always amazed. Every day is a learning venture. You meet a new customer that's doing something incredible on the Hedera network. In the scope of this show around NFTs, we continue to see a lot of progress on things like asset tokenization and exciting stuff around gaming. One of my favorite movies, which is not everyone's, is Ready Player One. That inspired me, "What could it look like to have own assets within a game environment and be able to trade those assets?" That's all pretty incredible.
Some of our other initiatives are around non-fungible tokens but there are exciting initiatives around also that I'm excited about around fungible tokens, particularly central bank digital currencies, which to me is a very fascinating area, stablecoins, and things like this. It's all exciting stuff. In the coming months, we will be having a lot more announcements about people that are doing amazing things on the network.
There are lots of building continuing to happen across the world of blockchain. We're excited to keep an eye on what you are up to and where you go from here. On that note, one question might be this. As you look outside of your immediate world and other projects, what inspires you these days? Where are you drawing inspiration from?
My focus and passion are around Decentralized Identity. I truly believe in the vision that in the future, it's not going to be like you have a paper diploma and you have a plastic driver's license in your wallet. You are going to have your identity in a digital form or a digital wallet and all the amazing new opportunities that it will enable, whether it be around things like easier KYC, job applications, or things like that. I am still very anchored to that vision. A lot of my time is spent within that community that's building up those technologies, whether that be in the W3C or other organizations like DIF and things like this. That's where I still spend a lot of my time. I get a lot of my energy and passion there.
Is there anything that you've seen outside of Hedera that feels like it's going in that direction where you're like, "These guys are doing something cool."
This gets a little bit techier but one of the problems in the Decentralized Identity space is like a lot of developing ecosystems, there have been a lot of different standards. The standards themselves can be implemented in many different ways. You didn't see a lot of great interoperability. Within the last couple of years, we have seen groups of companies and individuals getting together, starting to focus on the interoperability problem, and trying to make sure that wallets can talk to each other and their credentials can move between wallets.
This is all tech and geeky but it's so we can enable that world where in the not-so-distant future, you can get a driver's license from your state in a digital form. Think about all the amazing things you could do with that if you were able to share that as part of your interaction without having to scan your driver's license or talk to some human being and hold up your driver's license. It's interesting all those things that could happen when you can have those types of high-value credentials in a digital wallet.
The two things that have hit home for folks are one, during this bull run, there are a lot more activities on change that weren't as predominant as in the past. People wanted to experience moving around. Similarly, with the metaverse, it has been exciting to see all the different metaverses come out. That immediately begs the question, "How do I go back to the future and get from metaverse A to metaverse B because I want to do both? I want to bend time if I could." Interoperability is key to that. It has been a forcing function for the whole industry to think about these things.
You need the ability to either accept or reject a token. Click To Tweet
The other thing that is almost certainly coming, and nobody likes, is regulation, particularly regulation around KYC. In the not-so-distant future depending on how things go, there will be a KYC element to a lot more of your interactions regardless of what chain it is. We may not like it but it's something that's going to come. A lot of my energy is in working with some of the different groups to think about how would KYC be implemented in Web3 in a way that's as least painful for users as possible, and also privacy-preserving and all that other great stuff that we think we need.
There's so much happening over there. It's great to chat with you about all the ins and outs of those amazing things happening on the Hedera end and your end. We want to take a step back though and get your personal perspective on some questions to give our readers a little insight about you. They're called Edge Quick Hitters. There are ten questions we ask every single guest of our show. We're looking for short answers, single-word or few-word but we may dive a little deeper here or there. Are you ready to jump in on these?
Let's go.
Question number one, what's the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
In my generation, it was my first bicycle. I remember purchasing that nice red bike when I was about ten. That was the big first purchase I remember.
Question number two, what's the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
My father had us doing a number of different businesses. We used to collect fence rails and sell them out of our front yard. That's what I remember selling. We were collecting money to buy a boat for the family.
What is a fence rail? What does that mean?
They're Cedar fence rails. These were the weathered ones that are used almost as decorative things.
Where would you find them? Are they laying around?
We had a farm. They had cut down a bunch of trees years earlier and let them sit around. They had weathered. We pulled them out of this old pile, hauled them out, and then sold them in our front yard.
That's the first appearance of fence rails on this show. We like our firsts. Question number three, what is the most recent thing you purchased?
I have the boat bug, so I purchased a boat not that long ago.
Powerboat and sailboat, is there anything you can tell us about?
A trailer sailer is a sailboat that goes on a trailer.
Question number four, what is the most recent thing you sold?
When I bought that boat, it had an outboard I didn't want anymore. I had to sell the outboard that was on it and get a new outboard. That was probably the most recent thing I sold.
That's an outboard motor for anybody that is wondering. Question number five, what is your most prized possession?
I have changed countries every three years. In that, I've always carried around three suitcases. I'm not a good one to answer this question. I don't have a lot of possessions that I couldn't walk away from at this minute. That's part of my personality.
Follow-up question, what's the most surprising thing you could walk away from in a minute?
I do like my truck but I could walk away. At the end of the day, it's not that important to me although I do like it.
It sounds like Keith has given us his truck.
There it is. Question six though, Keith, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, or experience that's currently for sale, what would it be? What do you have your eye on?
I'm into the van life stuff. I keep on looking at those nice Mercedes Sprinter vans like the four-wheel drive. They're kitted out. That's what I got my eye on. I need that $200,000 to buy one.
It's very expensive. I was driving to Legoland. I'm in Florida. On I-4, there's this stretch where it's like an RV and camper van central. We're talking about thousands of them on this little stretch of I-4. For the first time ever, I noticed that there were also hundreds of those Sprinter vans completely built out. For a long time there, you had to find a crew that would take them, buy one, and then build it out for you but there were hundreds of RV Land completely built out. Maybe that price point will come down a little. That would be nice.
Everyone bought one during COVID but I was waiting for them to sell now.
That's the move. Question number seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
Understanding. I'm someone who is very empathetic. When someone freaks out at me at a stop light, I'm the kind of person that says, "Maybe they're having a bad day." I personally think that's a positive thing to take a step back and think about what other people are experiencing. That's something that would be great to pass on.
Question number eight, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would it be?
I'm overly critical sometimes. It's always great to be very positive. In half glass full or half glass empty, I'm probably on the empty side. It would be great to be a little bit more on the full side.
Bring some more optimism out there. Question number nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?
Don't tell my wife but I took my daughter out. We got a birthday present for my wife.
The last one is question number ten. What are you going to do next after the show?
I'm in Canada. All my children are off school for the Queen's death. I have some babysitting duties after this.
It's a definite day of mourning across the world for the queen. Much love to her and her family. That's question ten but the word on the street is we have a bonus question in here.
This is something I'm curious about, Keith. You've done a lot of things in your career. You're quite modest in that regard. What's the most intense product sprint that you've ever been part of in your life? What was the main food to drink that sustained you during this epic launch?
I started my career working in PC semiconductors. That sounds very boring but it was in the gaming chips and gaming processors. I used to attend a lot of LAN events. We used to launch products at the LAN event. I remember being at LAN events in Sweden or something and drinking whatever energy they were all drinking. There were a lot of pretty crazy weeks doing that stuff.
That's it. Take note, devs. That's Edge Quick Hitters. Thanks so much for sharing with us. We do appreciate it. We have another segment that we want to queue up here. Dominique, if you can join us, that would be awesome. Eathan, I'll turn it over to you.
This sponsored Hot Topic is all about Dominique, AKA Mitch Mula, a multi-platinum and Billboard Top 10 record producer, engineer, songwriter, and artist who co-founded Lil Bitcoin along with the meta label, Crypto Money Records. Dominique, welcome to the show. It's good to have you here.
Thanks for having me.
It's awesome to have you. I've known your cofounder for over a year. We met at Bright Moments back in the day. I heard about Lil Bitcoin. I was like, "There's something special going on here." It was only natural that we get to meet you as well. It's great to have you on the show.
I appreciate it.
We have to break it down for our readers. Who is Lil Bitcoin? What is Crypto Money Records all about?
Lil Bitcoin is the centralized avatar rapper created by Satoshi to protect the centralization from a dark force called the Fi-Opps. That makes Lil Bitcoin a superhero. He is also a rapper. I came up with a little phrase, "Lil Bitcoin is if Superman wants to change. Instead of changing into Clark Kent, he will turn into Drake." Lil Bitcoin is Superman and Drake.
That's amazing. When we think about Crypto Money Records, what's on the agenda? What are you all doing over there? What are you working on? What should we all be excited about?
Without going too deep into history, we like to see that we're responsible for bringing hip-hop to the blockchain and the metaverse in the most organic way possible. Joshua, you met Tilla. I don't know how deep that conversation went but Tilla's background in hip-hop is twenty years plus from producing to doing visuals. I am a music producer. We feel like there's no better way to bring hip-hop into the culture and the metaverse than what we are doing.
We did a collab with Death Row Records on Crypto.com, which was successful for us. It was a great opportunity to work with a legacy brand such as Death Row. It also stamped our project in this space. A meta label is a lot different from a traditional record label existing in Web2. There aren't many record labels in Web3. With a lot of the things that we are doing now, and whether others call themselves meta labels or record labels, or whatever they like to title their selves as, we're laying the blueprints of what a record label could be and how that looks.
The way we roll out our project is in chapters. With Lil Bitcoin being a superhero, we do comic books. This is the Chapter 1 comic book. Next on the agenda is Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and so on but now, we're figuring out a way to distribute the publishing royalties in Web2 to our collectors in Web3. That's something that's next on the agenda for us that we're excited about.
That was a limited edition comic that sold out.
It sold out quickly. The floor price on it is great. For this comic book itself, to get the physical version, you have to hold our Access Pass. Once you hold the Access Pass and buy the comic book NFT, this will be moving forward from Chapter 1 until we run out of chapters but if you buy the comic book NFT and hold Access Pass, you will get a real comic book autographed by the creators. The next one we have is a super limited edition that was going to be a holographic cover. We're finding different ways to entertain and please are collectors.
Keith, your wife cannot get the first one because that's sold out. You're out of luck there but you have a chance to get her the next one for her next birthday.
It will be on our list.
The physical comic is part of that utility. What else as an Access Pass holder do you have available to current holders? What are you planning for the future on that front?
We like to super-serve Access Pass holders because they're the first ones that bought into our launch on Crypto.com using that platform. They get not only first dibs on whatever project we're putting out. I explained earlier about us distributing the royalties among the collectors. That will be solely for the Access Pass holders. If you hold the Access Pass, you have a chance to not only purchase the NFT but now, you will be getting royalty, real-life money fiat when these songs come out, and different things like that.
We have a video game. I wish I could share it with you. We've got a video game rolling out. The Access Pass holders will get first dibs on playing that and testing out the beta. When Call of Duty or a new video game launches, they send it to the biggest guys that are on YouTube. We're doing the same thing. All of our collectors we look at as family but the Access Pass holders have a special place in our hearts because they're the literal first supporters of Lil Bitcoin.
That's great. The theme I'm seeing there is rewarding the most faithful. That's something that we're getting to see more of in the Web3 space. That was lost out in the past. There's something there to support that. Can you tell us more about what attracts you to the Web3 space? Being a musician that has produced records for quite a while, why do it in Web3? Why is it so exciting?
Honestly, Tilla and I started the concept within 2 or 3 hours of our meeting. We came up with the concept of Lil Bitcoin. This was in 2017 well before Web3 was what it is now. Back then, we couldn't release it the right way because it wouldn't have served the right purpose. It wouldn't have had the right platform. We held off on it. Due to sheer luck, Web3 emerged. It served as a place where we could launch a digital rapper. With this rapper being digital, it takes that stardom out of the one individual who would be a human and distributes it among the team.
As Josh said, he met Tilla. That's the cofounder of the project. It's me and Tilla. We have Deontae who's the writer. We're taking what would all go to one person on the label and distributing it. For me, the most important thing for a music artist interacting in this space is that you have the freedom to create. That goes for any type of artist or anybody on anything when it comes to Web3. There are no rules or constraints on what you can create. What do your collectors want? What does the community want out of you?
I enjoy that freedom, especially coming from hip-hop where if you turn on the radio, you hear the same thing every time. You're in a space where your favorite song might be from somebody that's not even an actual human being. It might be an AI. It's not to say one is better than the other but it gives different. As a creator, you love to see opportunities for more creation and innovation. The direct relationship we have with our "fans," consumers, collectors, or whatever you want to call them is beautiful. I can jump into Discord and know exactly what our fan base wants and super-serve them.
Ultimately, we put out these projects. Our main thought is, "What would we want if we were the ones consuming this project?" That helps us come up with innovative ways and different ways to keep the ball rolling and push forward because there's no blueprint on how to do this. We all got here in Web3, one way or the other. It's up to us, everybody on this show, and anybody that's operating in this space. To some capacity, it's up to us to set the standard of what Web3 looks like for this genre, this category, or this type of art, whether you're a chef or whatever it is.
As a follow-up on that, you mentioned being one of the leaders, which is incredible. Some other folks have come up with creating things in the music industry. Are there any favorites? Have you created any collaborations? Is there anything you're seeing in music outside of what you're doing that you find interesting?
I love what Snoop is doing. What Snoop Dogg is doing is amazing. He's utilizing his Web2 stardom and brand recognition, implementing it in Web3, and aligning with the Bored Apes. He has brought a lot of cool events and things to Web3. It's exciting to see that type of adoption. Snoop Dogg is probably the most popular rapper of all time. It's to see him come into his space and do what he's doing. I'm from a younger generation. I look up to Snoop Dogg and those older guys. To see that is moving for hip-hop at least. We don't have a lot of representation of hip-hop in Web3. To see that is cool.
We did a collaboration with Death Row. That was amazing for us. I'm 30 years old in 2022. There's no way that I could work with Death Row from the capacity of which I know Death Row, Tupac, Snoop Dogg, and Suge Knight. To get the opportunity to work with them in 2021 in Web3 is like if somebody told me I would be working with them or do anything in relation to them, I would be like, "Oh," but Web3 shows that there are no limits on what can be done here.
It's about opportunities.
Speaking of the intersection of entertainment and Web3, that's one of the things we like to showcase at our event, NFTLA. We did that in 2021 in a big way out in LA. We're doing that again in 2023 from March 20th to the 23rd. We would love to have Lil Bitcoin out there and show what's up to our audience live in person. Any way for us to make that happen, we would love to do that. That would be cool.
We can figure it out. We did a house party. I don't know if you heard about it. It was a mansion party out in NFTLA. We showed a Kanye NFT that ended up never coming out but it was packed. There were about 300 people there. It was the talk of Web3 to some extent for a while. We would love to come out, perform, and link up with you.
That would be amazing. Overall, the theme of this show is digital identity. We talk about it as it pertains to an individual that's putting their current identity or some form of it on the blockchain. We're talking about crafting one that's an amalgamation of a number of different people but it's applicable to what we were talking about before, all the security concerns, all the validity concerns, and all that stuff. Keith, it's all still applicable.
That's one of the greatest uses of NFTs. It's about allowing artists to bind their art to themselves. That's amazing stuff.
Dominique, we've got to make sure that folks know where to follow you and everything you've got going on with Lil Bitcoin. Where should we send them?
First and foremost, follow Lil Bitcoin. It's Twitter.com/LilBitcoinCMR and Instagram.com/LilBitcoinCMR. You can follow me as well on Instagram, @MitchMula. On Twitter, it's @MitchMulaCMR. Join our Discord. Lil Bitcoin's Discord is in his bio as well as mine. We're on YouTube and Spotify. We're everywhere.
It's so awesome to have you on the show and meet you, Dominique. We look forward to what's to come for your whole team and Lil Bitcoin. The word on the street is that you are going to do a generous giveaway with us for some ten Lil Bitcoin comics. Is that the gist?
That's true. I stand by that.
I'm making sure because it sounded pretty damn awesome. There's no rug pull. This is about $1,000. We will talk about it on our socials and give you all the deets on how to score one of these bad boys. That's something to look forward to. Thanks so much, Dominique. We appreciate your generosity.
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
That's good stuff. We're excited to see where things go there and have Lil Bitcoin out at NFTLA. We wanted to jump into this next section, which is a shout-out section that we added. Keith, we wanted to turn the floor over to you to give a little bit of love to an individual or organization moving the needle in your life.
I would love to give a shout-out to Katryna Dow. She's the groundbreaking CEO of a company called Meeco that's creating products for both Web2 and Web3 around identity, tokens, an amazing vision, and amazing products. Here's a big shout-out to Katryna.
Katryna, much love. Thanks for your contributions. You're a big needle mover. We appreciate it. Keith, we also need to make sure that our readers know where to follow you and everything you've been working on. Where should we direct them?
I'm on Twitter. The great thing is there are not that many Keith Kowals in this world, so I'm not that hard to find. We have the Hedera Blog and the Hedera Podcast. That's where you will continue to see more effort from me. I'm talking about the identity ecosystem and then what identity looks like on Hedera. Stay tuned.
That's amazing stuff. Thanks for sharing everything with us. We do appreciate it. Keep an eye on Hedera and Keith. There are many big things to come. We have 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 all so much better.
How? Go to 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, Keith, for sharing this time with us.
Thank you.
Important Links
- NFTLA.live
- Swirlds Lab
- Hedera
- Hedera Consensus Service
- Hedera Token Service
- EVM
- Smart Contract Service
- Finding Web3's Soul
- Tezos
- HBAR Foundation
- Guardian
- W3C
- DIF
- Lil Bitcoin
- Crypto Money Records - Instagram
- Bright Moments
- Tillavision - Twitter
- Death Row Records
- Crypto.com
- Bored Apes
- Twitter.com/LilBitcoinCMR
- Instagram.com/LilBitcoinCMR
- @MitchMula - Instagram
- @MitchMulaCMR - Twitter
- Discord - Lil Bitcoin
- YouTube - Crypto Money Records
- Spotify - Lil Bitcoin
- Meeco
- Hedera Blog
- Hedera Podcast
- iTunes - Edge of NFT
.png)
.png)
.png)
.svg)
