The metaverse is expanding and evolving at an unprecedented scale. Nino Saez saw this interconnected virtual world as a chance to monetize his talents and give back to the community through philanthropy work. Joining Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger, the phil-entrepreneur shares his mission of transforming the metaverse into a utopia through his company aptly called Utopia. Nino talks about his partnership with Deepak Chopra, the importance of constant learning and transparency in revolutionizing Web3, and centralizing his work around serving others. He also opens up about his experiences running a virtual team and the role of community ownership in the digital ecosystem he currently builds.
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Nino Saez Of Utopia On Integrating Innovation, Philanthropy, and Transparency Into Web3, Plus: Vikram Bhushan Of Hypermine Labs, And More…
This is Nino, Cofounder of Utopia. I'm a proud philanthropreneur who is bridging the gap between our physical and digital worlds through innovation, philanthropy and transparency. I'm here on the Edge of NFT, the show delivering you Web 3.0 content that's valuable and filled with the values and principles of the best. Keep reading.
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NFT curious readers, read this episode and find out how Deepak Chopra is stepping into the world of Web 3.0, how to say, “Friends are a treasure,” in Espanyol and why the Metaverse is your invitation to create your utopia. All this and more on this episode.
Don't forget, we put together a little 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 and 23rd, 2023. See you there.
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This episode features Nino Saez, the Cofounder and CEO of Utopia. Nino went to IE University Madrid, Spain getting a dual degree in Business and Law. He started his first business in 2014 at nineteen years old. As a student of the world, he decided to jump at the chance to continue school through an exchange to Cuba where the culture forced him to see the need for philanthropy and business.
When Nino return from Cuba, a light bulb went off. He envisioned a new way of helping others through monetizing mobile games, the biggest growing industry back in 2018. With that, he cofounded the eGoGames eSports platform, raising €8.5 million over $8 million US. In 2020, Nino became enthralled with Web 3.0 and founded Ego NFT going on to raise $10 million by February 2022 and create this Web 3.0 project using the connection tangible utilities coupled with the virtual world.
Nino is leading Utopia where he and his cofounder acquired 100% of a powerful metaverse company called Virtual Voyagers. For those readers who aren't yet familiar, Utopia is a Web 3.0 ecosystem brought together by four powerhouse founders, our guest, Nino plus Maria Bravo, Eva Longoria and Javier Garcia. Their collective mission is to disrupt how businesses operate and innovate using the power of Web 3.0 technology.
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Nino, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m pleased to be here. Thank you for having me.
It's great to have you present. I’m very cognizant of the Latin-American/Spanish vibe. I came back from Peru. My wife is working on a film project from one of the first powerful female film directors and producers in Peru who made the film the Contraband and she's very popular in Cuba, this woman who's a filmmaker. Who knows, maybe there'll be a trip to Cuba here in the future. I haven't been there myself but it certainly is a very interesting and magical place. I want to jump right in here and ask you this question, which when one lists all of the things someone like you is up to the questions that got to be in the mind. How do you divide your time between all the different projects and things you're up to?
At the end of the day, all I have is my passion and limited time during the day. I try to be on top of everything that probably some of the topics are more at a high level. Thanks to the incredible team that we've been building all these years. All of these companies, for example, the gaming one are run by a General Manager called Jose Manuel. He leads it in a great way that makes me run into my true passion and what I dedicate most of my time to, which is Web 3.0.
I am most of the time together with the other cofounders that come along with me to this project building this high atmosphere of the new emerging world that we're looking forward to creating and bringing value for good for everyone. That is more of the time that I spend with an amazing team and cofounders. My secret is always surrounding myself with people who are smarter than I am. That's how I manage to do it.
Surrounding yourself with smart people makes it easier for them to feel good about themselves for sure. It's easy to give compliments when you have people smarter than you around you, which is awesome. It's impressive what you've been able to pull together here. A lot of people are trying to do good in the world. A lot of people are inspired by causes, positivity and things like that but bring it into a business structure. Raising the amounts that you've been able to raise and putting together functional businesses based on those principles, especially at a young age. It's very impressive. You deserve a lot of credit for it. Is that something that's come intuitive to you? This integration between doing well and doing good and including philanthropy with business or is it something you had to wrap your head around to get that going?
It was something that I started doing in my previous years when I was focused 100% on eGoGames. We managed to build something that was from 0 to 1 because we reinvented the model or the way model games were monetizing at that time. We did it through an eSport software that once we released it, we became the eSports leading mobile eSport company very soon.
As we became leaders, I believe that sentence or word has a lot of significance and you need to act in accordance. We started doing something which was a pioneer at that time, which was believing in philanthropy as a way of giving back from the value we have given to the world. In that sense, we started working with UNICEF and then later on, started working with the foundation that we keep on which is Global Gift Foundation founded by Maria Bravo, Alina Peralta and Eva Longoria, which we truly believe in them.
It was a way of giving example in the sense that we were sharing part of the revenue that we were making. It was always a fixed percentage that we were designated for philanthropy. We thought that as leaders if we could make that example be followed by big corporations around the world where I don't know which is the amount or the cut or the percentage. Individuals or companies should decide on their own but if we could all make that little effort because, at the end of the day, it's about getting less revenue for yourself but making good at the same time.
That's how I rolled in it. I believe that many things could be done once you know that those funds you have destined, you've done something that is fulfilling for yourself something good and without expecting anything in return. That's what I believe is one of the keys to happiness. That's why we want to keep on with that example in our previous experiences such as the one we're doing in Web 3.0.
I can see it also helps give you that passion and energy and that you can keep up that energy. There are downtimes when you're building a business. Being able to have something to turn to that inspires you is useful. We have an exciting announcement here from Utopia on Twitter, the introduction of ChopraVerse. It's a partnership with Deepak Chopra, which many of us have heard of this fellow and Seva.Love. Congratulations. Can you tell us a little bit more about that partnership and what people might want to know?
We are getting into a well-being metaverse. That's what I can advance. It's something that has never been done before and I believe we've managed to get the magic of Deepak, Seva.Love and all that amazing family represent in this new world, ChopraVerse. They're going to be about experiences for everyone that are not easy to have or easy to value daily. If you are not truly connected to it, we believe it's something that the Metaverse and Web 3.0 experience can provide to the user in a unique way that has never been seen before. It's something cool.
It's about a new world. Imagine if the only limit that we can have in terms of building this well-being metaverse is our imagination. We can advance that we are imaginative as you can think about when you see the whole team that is empowering this project. We are very happy to be sharing what is going to be happening, especially the official release of the ChopraVerse. That is going to be announced by the end of 2022. I can advance that.
We talk about AR quite a bit in addition to VR on the show too. It's interesting the interplay of all this. I remember a movie that came out when I was quite a bit younger, The Lawnmower Man. It was like this guy that got in the VR headset and it put him in this crazy vibe and the weird world and all this stuff. Like sitting on social media or the computer, you’re getting it out of your head and body in not a good way. It's interesting to try to bring those principles of mental health and well-being into the metaverse. Do you find yourself running into any obstacles there like, “It's still this digital false land?” How do we make it something that feels rejuvenating and refreshing?
That's something that we bring along our mission because at the end of the day, doing a well-being Metaverse is focused on doing good for people. Instead of finding those obstacles, get rid of them. At the end of the day, you can be in a place where you can relax, be yourself, get mental treatment and get infinite possibilities that will be coming along without the need of expressing who you are.
You can be whatever avatar and express yourself on a freeway. That's why this ChopraVerse is very innovative because everybody is going to feel the best version of themselves. We're going to empower that all along the way and keep on working for that. Our main ambition is to make this new world a place for everyone to feel good. That's very important.
I wanted to step in here. I’m a little behind here on the episode. I’m trying to get gas in the face of a pending hurricane here in Florida. It took a little longer than anticipated but I shouldn't have been too surprised. In any case, it’s great to connect.
I'm so glad you made it because I know how things are going in Florida. Sending you a lot of power from here. I'm in LA and hopefully, everything gets better soon.
Thank you. I appreciate it. I'll be evacuating soon but all good. We're prepared. You've been talking about these various elements that fundamentally come down to community and this idea of constant learning. This community is built by people who are constant learners. It’s the idea of giving back and allowing this cycle to occur over time. There's this question around community ownership and how it plays a role in this ecosystem that you're forming.
I'm going to start with the constant learner's sentence which is very important and it's part of our DNA. At the end of the day, if you’ve taken a look at Virtual Voyagers, we've developed metaverses for big companies such as Meta, Vodafone, Disney or big brands like that. We are always ready for new challenges and propositions that these brands want to build or they imagine in their heads and bringing them into reality.
I believe that's a key point in our area of being these constant learners. We are constantly trying new things and evolving as I believe everybody's doing in this space. In terms of how we believe in ownership, I always do say a sentence that my mom used to tell me when I was young, “One friend is one treasure.”
I believe that also having one community is a treasure. How do you build that ownership? First of all, we come along from people that we come together all in the business area. We want to use Web 3.0 for providing that transparency in how we build things. How are companies managed? Even the profits and incomes that we're making. You can always alter your company but if you're in the blockchain, there's that transparency. It's immediate for everybody that is watching.
Having one community is having a treasure. Click To Tweet
If we want to focus on that and give you a proper answer to that ownership and how we're building it, it is through the community treasury. I don't want to get very advanced. I need to be careful of the news I gave out because of the timing that we're having this episode. We believe in building community treasuries out of tangible businesses that the community can own in a certain way. If they can have access to this treasury, enjoy it together and have this treasure as a community, that's like having a friend. It’s a real treasure. That's the ownership that we want to empower.
I haven't heard that saying before but I like it. I also love how you've applied it to the broader community.
In Spanish is it, “Un amigo es un tesoro?”
Yes.
It’s very inspiring. I can see how you keep the energy going in the way that you approach things. Much of your work here is centered around moral principles. We've got inclusion and responsibility. How do you approach the concept of smart contracts in light of this principle approach to things?
In my opinion, smart contracts, especially if you're building a community need to have a strong commitment to whatever you apply to write under. How I would believe the usage of smart contracts and everything we do is the transparency and perpetuity, which is very important for us, those two words. I relate a lot of philanthropy with inclusivity because philanthropy should be good for everyone. It’s the same as inclusivity that this world provides, which we love and it's represented in everything we do.
Once we release art related to future drops we make, you will see what I'm talking about. We've taken care of it in every single aspect but in terms of the smart contract, we can provide this transparency that gives you this long-term utility. You'll know more about what I'm talking about when more releases will be announced but we want to show who we are, why we are here and our purpose.
We want to bring all that value to put on the market our first collectibles that will happen by the end of 2022. That is what we do. We want a community built on collectibles. We want people to get it, maintain it and know the value of the asset they're getting. That value's going to come along all their lives, not only for a specific certain time or something like that. We can apply that in a transparent mode to the smart contracts where all these commitments that we're willing to do or that we've been working all these years to accomplish and put out into a community that shares the same values as us will come along the way also with us forever.
It's romantic but we believe that's what’s going to happen. That's how we want to build the smart contract with this transparency and perpetuity of utilities that will make the collectors enjoy it forever. They also will be able to transmit from generation to generation. It’s the same as you when you buy a Rolex and give it to your sons. That's the collectives that we're looking forward to putting out there in every single project that is under the name of Utopia.
You talk about incorporating those into the DNA of the company, smart contracts and how you think about them and build them. How does it impact your day-to-day? When we talk about transparency, sometimes people throw that word around but from what you're talking about, it sounds like it is in the DNA of everybody working within your organization, including yourself. How does that impact your day-to-day life as CEO and the decisions that you make?
I'm an open book, to be honest. That’s why all the time me knowing in my head, I'm all the time saying, “Be careful on the news you’re giving out.” I love talking about everything that is on my mind, brainstorming and sharing my ideas. I'm open-minded, especially with the people on my team. I've built this since my first company. I've been already enrolled in many companies and gone a proper exit in the previous ones. What I told everybody my key is I'm a passionate driver. I'm obsessed with what I'm doing.
I don't know how to get committed in 50% or probably 99%. I always go 120% of my capabilities. I give my life to the products that I provide. I feel that the energy and passion that I have gets contagious among all the team members. In the end, I share with them the vision and strategy plans. I like to do all these meetings. We run a team of over 150 employees and we all got together every month where I share all the plans. Everything that is on my mind, I shouted out there while I make my commitments of my life to the project and all of them. That's what I do.
I believe that transparency is how I try to build it from scratch from the top of the organization to every single part of the company. That's how I do it, sharing everything and trying to make everybody see the whole picture at the same time. We believe that we are reinventing some of the things or the way to do things the same as we did in our previous experiences. We want to bring so much value to the space. The more we educate and start from the people inside our corporation, the better that we are going to be able to transmit it out there when the time arrives and that is going to be very soon.
It sounds fun. I'd love to be on one of those get-togethers. I'm assuming you have some virtual team members or maybe all virtual. How does that look when everybody gets together for those meetings? Is it a big Zoom call? Are you all in LA? What does that look like?
I'm always in between LA and Madrid. We have our headquarters in Madrid and it's a full building called Utopia at the top. It’s home to me because we live there. Everybody is so passionate and driven about the project. On one of the floors, we got this presentation area where all the company goes. We bring by Zoom all the people that are in different parts of the world and are not in Madrid at that time. That's how we do it. I would love to invite you to some of them but I will need you to sign an NDA before.
The transparency stays in the Utopia.
It's all about communication. You know how it is. You have this amazing project that you accomplished to do in a year so you have those agreements but in terms of communication, I’m making people understand all the messages is very important.
It is so important to keep the team abreast of the general plan and be able to share about those things that are in process or maybe it's going to go a little bit in this direction or that list. Let's be fully transparent but let the team be able to know and share freely. It needs to be something that's among the community. As an aside, being able to call yourself the Founder of Utopia, that's a fun thing to be able to say, “I've founded Utopia if you've heard of it.”
You will see once we started releasing our projects and everything that is in both why it is the perfect name and why we believe in that perfect place that everybody can imagine or that perfect state of mind that everybody can think of in their heads. We are going to bring you to the real world somehow. It is going to make sense for everyone that Utopia exists. That's the goal.
You announced your acquisition of Virtual Voyagers. That's playing a big role in that. It’s one of the top five metaverse companies in the world, an impressive organization and they've developed projects for Meta, Disney and other global corporations. Talk about the evolution of Web 3.0, the metaverses and all these things as you execute whatever kind of rebranding or reshaping of Virtual Voyagers and Utopia Voyagers as these things move forward.
I'm excited about the evolution that Web 3.0 communities are having, even though we all know how the market got this regression but I believe it was for good. People are learning that deliverable and being committed to your work is everything you have in your life. If I do this NFT community where one step of the roadmap is this famous world called Metaverse, I'm going to deliver a metaverse but then time passes through. There are no deliverables and that's what people are getting tired of.
If blockchain provides transparency, you should do it from the beginning. That's why before I announced what I'm doing, I'm telling you, “I have this metaverse company, which we have delivered already for Meta, Disney and big brands that everybody knows. We say something and we are capable of making that happen, which is very important in space.”
I believe that's an evolution that the NFT buyers or the people inside the space need to start valuing. It's not about having a negative connotation about the word. It's understanding who the people is and what they've done in the previous experience. What are their buyers? What are they here for? Are they in the need of having money and running?
We've all experienced a project that we're not doing well in that sense, ethical way. Are they here to show themselves they want to be here for the long run and bring value? I believe I’m making the world a better place. If the answer is the second one, it’s when I deep into learning more. That's something that I believed that when we start executing this rebrand, we've gone mutual ways to go to the second state.
How I see the evolution of Web 3.0 is I'm not saying that the metaverses are ready but I believe in having a player with experience at the end of the day where you can go into this metaverse that I can jump into Disneyland, Vodafone and this other place that has ChopraVerse, for instance, I have all these metaverses combining into one single portal instead of having to go into one portal per each activity that I'm doing.
What happens to the Oculus that I'm playing ping-pong and I need to get out of the app? I need to get into another app and play another game. I believe that the technology is not ready for that but it will be ready in a few years. If that vision that we have keeps on doing the same, how we want to evolve that portal, that portal can be inside Utopia. We are going to be saying and announcing, the same as what happened with ChopraVerse and you already have written out there, more big brands that are going to have their approach to the metaverse doing their specific objective of why they want to get there. Always with our mission, values or reputation putting up there.
It doesn’t matter which brand you are or someone that doesn't fit your values or way of seeing how this world should be. This is the last message that I want to throw out there. As cofounders, Maria, Javier, Eva and I and I’m also with an amazing team, we have advisors and people inside the team, it's our mission to build this world in a way that is always connected to the real one that we live in.
I put the experience of the example of Ready Player One but in both ways. On the technology side, that was the way I did it but also, it's not meant to be. You don't want this place where everybody is not living this part of the experience that they can be whomever they want to be. No. That needs to be done for good. It’s our mission to build it connected to the real world.
As long as we can maintain that gap being connected, keep on expanding this metaverse where everybody is competing and as long as they do good, that is the vision we have. We want to show the world and space that this is the same thing that happened with Web 2.0. When we were in the early 2000s and everybody was launching Web 2.0 projects and making money, there were a lot of scams but there were a lot of good people. We all know Amazon and Google. Those are the ones that get to stay.
What I want to say is that is Utopia. I'm not scared about what happened in the market. That's for good. That's going to make the market more exigent. Not everybody can come and say whatever story and we're going to believe it. No. Please prove yourself but once the big companies, the good people and the big minds come into the space that it's happening, Web 3.0 is going to change the future for good and all of us. We're going to be so happy, not only for us but also for the big corporation that this technology is coming to the world.
It's one of those things where we say what's reality or what's not reality. We talked about digital identity and how we call it digital identity but it's ultimately going to be identity, your physical presence in the real world, your digital presence in the metaverse or wherever else. You could choose your name and avatar but fundamentally, it's an extension of you. It’s like these worlds are emerging. What an interesting and exciting time to be alive and see this all evolve. You need to have a hand in it.
I'm a lover of this space so I was seeing Mark and the talk he has given at Harvard. I love how ownership of NFT represent. I love being the metaverse buying this specific bottle that I buy in the Metaverse and it ships it home. How I prove the ownership of this acquisition is through an NFT. All of these things are coming and that's what I mean by the connection between the world that we feel is tangible and that we can touch and the one that we will have when we put on our glasses.
We all know that Apple will release their new glasses so that’s going to be easier in that way that the Oculus is very big. It is going to get better and better. That's something that I was so keen on because that's the value of our company and being in connection. When I saw Mark also expressing something that he was thinking the same way, that's gratitude for the work that we do and seeing that all those people that we respect have the same vision or are following the same path as Utopia's doing.
Speaking of the path that Utopia is on, let's look ahead here a little bit. We've touched on various things that you all are working on or that are forthcoming but what can you tell us about the near-term roadmap here? What else is there that we haven't touched on yet?
In our future announcement that we will do, you will know more about the ChopraVerse because that's already live. It is time of respecting their communication plans for it. Amazingly, everything that will come along the way is big and the next announcement that we will be doing from Utopia is our NFT collection. I can say as well that in this NFT collection we've tried to think out of the box. The same as we are doing and show in our opinion the way that the NFT project should be built. We are probably not going to use very much that term of NFT because of what had happened. They're going to be based on these avatars ready for our metaverse. We own lands on the other side. This avatar is going to be already used in the metaverse.
I can announce that it is going to be amazing the way we're communicating and presenting our roadmap where the utilities got to do with ownership, community treasury and be with perpetuity utilities with things that are probably unimagined that it can happen. It's not going to happen once or twice but it's going to happen as long as our companies leave or the partner companies leave. We've wrapped up everything into one cool project where there are names that are behind it. I truly don't believe that we put all of them together yet. I cannot now but I can't wait for it to be announced.
That’s the future announcement that we will do. I can announce as well that there are going to be two very big ones in the Utopia metaverse site and they're doing metaverse as well. It’s the same as what happened with ChopraVerse and some others that are already public. There are going to be two more that people do not expect or have not said before. Those are the three big announcements but my most passionate one is our Utopia NFT drop. That is going to be cool.
Thanks for being generous with your shares. We can always redact if necessary but it sounds like you're pushing the limit. Before we wrap, we got maybe 1 or 2 more major questions but to give a concept for those folks out online that are still trying to wrap their head around all this stuff and you seem to be someone who can share on this, what makes a metaverse? Is this a concept? Is it code? Is it a game? What does it mean to you?
What it means to me is Utopia. At the end of the day, the question should be questioned by everybody. “What does it mean to you?” At the end of the day, maybe I want to build a metaverse where all I do is sell pancakes and you go there. I put you this cool show where you're going to see my pancakes and I'm going to have an avatar of myself telling you how well I do pancakes. You're going to be able to buy from that virtual experience that I'm providing and you're going to be able to pay that right there, ship it home and use it for breakfast with your kids.
It's something. That's why we've acquired a company that develops metaverse for third parties because if you see all the products that we built, for example, one is a show, one is a game and one is an experience of watching a reality show in real life with the metaverse. I feel like I'm in the club watching David Guetta play but I'm in the metaverse.
In my opinion, the metaverse is Utopia. The possibilities are unlimited. It’s this imaginary place where anything can happen. The look and feel can be different from one another. Inside our metaverse, you will have places where you're going to go shopping. In other ones, you're going to be able to play games, purchase art items, connect to social and have a cool entertainment area or ship items that you want home.
You gave a bunch of specific examples of how you see what the metaverse could be. I appreciate that you left it open and say, “It's up to you. You can make the metaverse what it is and it's a world of infinite possibilities. If you have that, why not make it where you think Utopia is?” I like that.
That's why Utopia was the perfect name.
When you look outside of Utopia and the world that you're operating in the day-to-day, what other projects out there inspire you to be better and seek the next level?
I got to mention World of Women because one of the cofounders is committed and has been supporting them since the beginning. I'm also lucky to know some of the founders of the project. I love their community. I get inspired by how they helped women get more into this space and supported them. There are a lot more like Women and Weapons and Boss Beauties. There are a few more that I love about how they're running and bringing this inclusivity. It’s the same as what we're doing.
At the end of the day, we are four founders, 2 guys and 2 women. I believe that's the best way of building a team that would be diversified. Also in general, we are bringing it into an inclusive space. We need to build it from the beginning. I'm very inspired by them. I love what Logan Paul did with the 99 Originals. I'm also a fan of what he did there. I'm also looking next to Doodles because of their latest financing rounds.
That's something to congratulate the people. Getting financing rounds completed is not an easy task. I'm excited about what they have to announce. Also, it's already public. We work with Digital and Savvy, which is a communication company that focuses on communication. It’s a storytelling company run by Maha. They took a few friends and Gary. That's another project that we have in our circle that we like and we will always support it.
I don't want to say that we collaborate with everyone because that's not true at all. We take it very seriously and we try to make a big look at who approaches us. Everybody's partnering with everybody but we try to partner out with the people that share our values. It’s a must no matter if you're bigger or smaller but you need to fulfill everything that we expect from you. I always will follow. Authenticity for me is very important and the delivery. If you deliver your word and you're committed to your word, I will appreciate you.
You will gain other people's trust if you remain committed to your word. Click To Tweet
I will keep on going. People keep on knowing more about projects. Cool ones are getting into the space, especially the ones that are going to be under our umbrella. We will put a reputation and grant that is done the way we believe it should be done, which is on perpetuity, utility and value for collecting them. Not doing the trading thing nor the flipping thing. It's collecting. Make yourself the value that you will get once you collect it. It is going to be the most out of it. That is what I'm going to always follow.
There’s a lot of inspiration to be drawn from the space. It’s exciting times, for sure. We appreciate you sharing all this info. Many fun things are happening but we want to also get your perspective on some things. A little shift in gears here and it's a segment that we call Edge Quick Hitters. It's a fun and quick way for us to get to know you a little bit better. It's ten questions. We're looking for short, single-word responses or maybe a few words. We might dive deeper here or there. Question number one is what's the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
To be honest, I never purchased things for myself. I'm wearing a Utopia hat and t-shirt. I’m not a purchaser. The first thing I ever purchased was when I first made a bit of money. I was probably 11 or 12 years old when I went to work in my grandma's house. I was getting some tips from the family and I bought something for my mom for Christmas. She loves Christmas and that's the first purchase I remember doing.
Question number two is what's the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
Do companies not apply? I don't sell things. I'm a collector. Everything I buy, I maintain for myself.
What was your first company sale? Was there one after your grandmother's house that you founded there?
I founded a restaurant when I was nineteen years old that I still maintain. I didn't sell it. I started university. I enrolled in a company called Shard that was about jewelry. It was Shard of London and we sold it to a Turkey fund to do Shard of Turkey. I was together with one of my best friends from university. That was our first project together. I have one more for the tech side that I kept on in that area.
Question number three is what's the most recent thing you purchased?
The most recent thing I purchased was on my girlfriend’s birthday. I had to do it. I gave her a necklace. I hope she liked it. I'm not sure but I hope she did.
Question number four is what's the most recent thing you sold?
You know I'm a collector.
You had to sell something. Isn't that the same company?
Company.
Question number five is what's your most prized possession?
I need to say that probably my most prized possession for saying that way is the Utopian NFTs that we do not marry, but probably a little bit because it will be all published but ours is going to be for the team. The ones that I receive in terms of being a team member or cofounder of Utopia is my most prized position. Once you know more, you will understand why.
Question number six is if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service or an experience that's for sale, what would it be?
It's something that we are developing that if it was for sale, I would buy, which is a camera. We've done it before but it's getting better and better. It can represent in virtual reality the same things that I'm watching. Imagine that I could have a camera here and everybody would be listening to me, even breathing and talking to you and a football player or an artist is playing in a show. That's something cool and that's what I would purchase to make this experience better. As it's not been created before, we are creating it.
Question number seven is if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
I would say in the best way is obsession. Be obsessed with what you do. I find a lot of entrepreneurs that are telling me, “I want to succeed in my business and I'm working my ass off.” I ask them, “What do you do for summer?” “I went to Miami.” I go to them and I’m like, “I don't have summer for the last few years in my life.” I'm obsessed with work. I'm not saying that it is the best thing to do. You always need to enjoy your time but if you want to do something, get the commitment and do it. That's what I would like to put on the next generations.
It reminds me of two things. It was a Mark Cuban quote where he was talking about discussing following your passion and if you do something you're passionate about, you'll never work a day in your life but he took a little bit of a different spin on it. He was saying, “Do the thing that you're good at. Over time, that thing that you're good at, if you like performing, you like that positive feedback of doing something well, will become that passion and potentially an obsession. That is a driver.”
I'm going to tell you why you shifted. It’s because sometimes either you're good at too many things, you don't know what you are specifically good at or you don't know what to do. My suggestion is I go for it. If you like it, you can always learn, improve and train yourself. Go for whatever you love or feel passionate about, you're obsessed with doing and enjoying every single minute so you don't need to work. If you find it, that’s the way to be committed. Stay true to your idea.
Here's the flip side of that question. Question eight is if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?
I'm working on it. I believe everybody does. I would say probably worrying about what other people think, especially if you got exposed to following your dreams or you work every day to make this accomplishment. Even though you're doing your best and you're going to always put that effort into having your smile, positive vibe and energy spread all over, there are going to be those people that forever are going to criticize. Sometimes, I've experienced that too as well. Even the people of your hometown do not support you as much as they do or those kinds of things. The most difficult thing in the world probably is humans.
You cannot get upset or sorry for what happened or get your personality or vibe lowered down because of an opinion that doesn't make sense, especially since social media increases every day. That's something to have in mind to always be truthful to yourself. Do what you're doing, keep on with the ones that you love beside you and do not worry about the rest.
Question number nine is what did you do before joining us on the show?
I'm in the office so I was working with the team. What I'm going to do afterwards is keep on working. People here come to us and say, “How do you do it?” Some of the things that we say is we are not smarter than anyone or anything like that. We only work as much as we can. You’ll probably be smarter than I am but I'm going to be working. If not tomorrow, the following or the following would be the day that I will catch you. It’s the same as what you told me about the comparison we discussed before. That's why I enrolled people to work because I believe in skills, training and on improving yourself every day. That's the mentality.
Question number ten is what are you going to do next after the show?
I’m going back to work.
It looks like we have a bonus question that came in here from one of our readers.
You have a special word that describes yourself in your Twitter bio, philanthropreneur. What is a philanthropreneur?
It is a person that believes in giving back as a way of thanking the world for what he has given. I love to work, create and build but one of the ambitions that I have drives me to keep on pushing and pushing. The less rest that I can is the power of making good. For example, you enrolled your NFTLA for the day off tomorrow. You are getting bigger. You know that the bigger you get, the more you can give back to people in need. That's what I believe. That's being a philanthropreneur and that's something that I share with the other cofounders of the team.
It defines who we are because all of us, thank God, come from a position where we work for fun and work to do good. We all got obsessed with what we do but we only do it if we truly believe that it's going to make an impact in the world. That's why we do it. We believe in love and joy as the two words that drive us. If you can give back at the same time, that's the perfect match for everything and to keep on growing.
We'll move on to our hot topic segment for this episode. Our hot topic is all about the upcoming launch of Hypersign.id. We are fortunate to have Vikram Bhushan, Cofounder and Product and Engineering Lead of Hypermine Labs, joining us to talk about the drop of Hypersign Testnet which means it is happening ASAP. Vikram, welcome to the show. I understand you are in Singapore. We found out you are there with some of our team. I have to connect with you live and in person.
I would love to meet them and figure out some time to have a chat over coffee. Thank you very much for inviting me to come to the show.
Singapore is a place to be. There are certainly a lot of people in our circles that were talking to a guest and saying, “You’re in Singapore. I’m in Chicago.” They’re saying, “Everybody is going to Singapore. I wish I could go.” I’m glad you could make it out there and be a part of the excitement. Let’s talk a little bit about Hypermine. This is an avant-garde technology and research organization that is dedicated to building trust and transparency in the real world with a vision to create a special world. Privacy is a fundamental right where data is secured that belongs to us. Can you talk a little bit about why that’s such a central tenet of what you are doing?
In our opinion, in the real world, there is a certain amount of privacy. It means that if you are in a room and your room’s door and windows are locked, probably when you are speaking, no one else can hear it but when it comes to the digital world, the way the internet was built is broken. It means that the foundation of the internet was built around centralized identity providers. It is converted into that and then they are the custodian of everything.
Although we feel that these are very helpful tools, they ended up breaking the whole privacy. There is no privacy on internet technologies. Baby steps are being taken by the Web 3.0 ecosystems or even other developers who are focused on privacy technology. We feel the pain. One of our cofounders, Irfan, has been working in the identity ecosystem business for a long time. He was part of many national ID projects in Europe and Africa. He understood how bad it is in terms of privacy.
It might be helping the users in some way these infrastructures but there is no privacy. We thought since it is close to our heart, probably we can work on it. Initially, it was hackathons. We were participating in multiple hackathons building a simple proof of concept which is being launched as a team.
It’s a super important issue. Privacy is such a flexible concept as so many people are. The strange part about it is it’s private how much your privacy has been invaded. There are a lot of details about us individually that get into the hands of marketers, companies and all this stuff. They don’t want to tell us everything they have access to because it’s going to creep us out more. It’s funny how the information that has been given, looked at, analyzed or accessed is what’s kept private from us whose information it is.
Here's a simple way to understand if the audience is already crypto-friendly. It can be tracked how the funds were transferred. This is not possible in Web 2.0. I’m not exploiting your data but you don’t know if they are exploiting your data or not. The reason being is that you don’t control your data and that’s where the problem with privacy comes because we are letting control of data to someone else. They are the custodian and we have no audit as a user. I’m not talking about the institutions and auditing firms.
Even if they do but there is no transference report. If you look at blockchain, you can audit every smart contract or transaction. What if this would be done for data? Moving forward, user manage their data. All these businesses provide new Legos on how you manage this data. You have a complete audit trail of how and when the data was used. Even if you are extending data with business, they would think ten times before sharing it with someone else without your consent.
We talked about identity and privacy. There is a whole world of creativity and implementation to go on here and how we manipulate privacy and identity. This need for decentralized identity and verifiable credentials in Web 3.0 and the web, in general, is very strong. How does Hypersign solve this gap in the market?
If you look at Web 3.0, there is no privacy. There is pseudo-privacy. The issue is as soon as your wallet is exposed, in a way, it solves the trail problem like storage. It’s moving. How is it moving? Where is it moving? It then created another problem which is everything is public in a public blockchain. That’s where your identity problem starts in the Web 3.0 world. Blockchain does not have any identity. It’s just business and everything is public so you cannot steal private data.
It means that the whole blockchain ecosystem needs another layer of identity infrastructure extracting the private data and somehow connecting it with the Web 3.0 identity that we have in our wallets. Somehow, we have credentials that could define us in the Web 3.0 world and the Web 2.0 world. It is a breach between our private data which cannot go on-chain and our existing Web 3.0 identity.
Hypersign is trying to do that with the help of DIDs and verifiable credentials. There are two different technology on which Hypersign is built. It’s part of self-sovereign identity. What DID does is provide a unique identifier but it has many features related to private data management. DIDs can be verified on-chain. It means that any data that is being issued to you from a business or you issuing some data information to another business can be verified on-chain but kept off-chain.
The way to keep off-chain is called verifiable credential. These are Legos. When you look at a ship, a ship has a container and you can put any type of thing inside the container but it’s all structured. A container is standard so similarly, they travel containers to store private information which can be verified on-chain. That’s when the centralized third-party provider need not have to be a custodian of your data. They are here to provide you with an infrastructure that is controlled by your wallets. You share that verifiable credential with the business that you interact and they can verify that these are authentic data sets by equating the IDs.
I’m getting the analogy. You have a very strong and sturdy ship that is impenetrable. They consider it as some type of a warship. There is not a war going on but it’s very sturdy and secure. You can’t get things out of it that are inside. I want to put my things in there so I can move them around in a secure way. You are not going to ride on the ship or be inside the ship. You are going to provide the ship, “Here’s the ship. You want to take your data and move it around. We are going to make your ship do that easily.”
Since I told you the example of containers, you cannot see inside the container and what is inside. Imagine this. Some data is supposed to be verified by a public blockchain but it’s in the container. Only the container can be verified and since the container is verified, the network thinks that the data inside it is verified data by the right issuing authority. This way, even if you are putting private data, supposed you have a credential and this is a KYC credential, previously, there is no way to do this because if you send your actual private information like your address on a public blockchain, no validators can see what’s going on inside the transaction.
If you containerize this into zero-knowledge credentials and then send a smart contract, the smart contract can only verify signatures. They don’t need to check the private data because this technology can help to verify the amount of data. There is a very simple example. It doesn’t need to verify your data. It needs to verify how old are you. Are you older than 30 years or are you younger? That could be possible using verifiable credentials.
Let’s switch the topic here a little bit. There is a marketing tool that’s been created called Fire and it’s been growing. It was created before the blockchain industry. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? We have a demo video that we’ll make sure the readers will check out as well.
One of the used cases of decentralized identity is airdrops. Airdrop has three problems. It’s huge. It’s a basic marketing tool to create communities. We realized that most of our airdrops were taken over by bots. It means that one developer is going to fill a complete form with 40,000 plus requests and then you end up giving all the airdrops to only 1 or 2 persons. We felt like what if a very simple problem is across the industry regardless of what community you choose?
For example, the cosmos ecosystem. The network boosts up by airdropping tokens to ATOM holders but many VCs and validators have thousands of wallets. They do that because they can get airdrops on the new projects. We saw this thing and we thought that we have to figure out the go-to markets strategy for our DIDs to be utilized and for our SDKs to be tested in production. Developers need to see an existing example of what they can build.
We looked at these problems as a marketing person has in Web 3.0 and built one simple tool where we connected all their social and on-chain and off-chain information like social identity, your wallet's code and KYC. All of these were in one simple tool and it looked exactly like an existing product but it is much more secure. It will give better results in terms of bot verification. We started approaching different projects. If they refuse, we got lucky. If they tried it and some of the Ethereum events, that gave us some community. From there, we see steady growth month on month. We saw 80,000-plus DIDs created on that platform.
If you look at any project in DID and check the numbers, this is much smaller than any existing other ones. Our used case is so simple and it is needed. If your people are trying to solve using the DID, probably, that worked for us. That’s one. The second one is as we progress from the network sites and Testnet is going to be in more light, the whole Fire product moves into Testnet. The authentication is happening to our identity wallet.
By default, we have active 40,000 users on our platform. If you ask Irfan, he might be able to give you all those numbers to go minutes and hourly how many active users are there. These are all using wallet probably on the day one that Hypersign ID already cleared. That was a go-to-market strategy for Hypersign but we wanted to contribute to our partners. Luckily, we have 500 plus partners and many of them appreciated this product.
I wish I could spend all day with you but we only have a bit for our hot topic. It’s been interesting and exciting to connect you with Josh and Audrey out there in Singapore too. You can have a drink and enjoy the evening after the conference or at a meeting or something. That’s exciting. Before we roll out, share with us where people can go to find out more about you.
On Twitter, you can find me as DID intern and my project is called Hypersign. The Twitter handle is @HypersignChain.
Before we wrap, we need to make sure that folks know where to follow you and this amazing vision and company that you all are working on here. Where should they go? What’s the best place to keep track of everything you are doing?
@Utopia_W3 on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. We will be releasing the different social media of the NFT project and also the other one that we have a life out is @Utopia_Vgers. That is already live in media. We will announce more from there.
Check out Utopia and Nino and what the team and he are up to. There are lots of passion, obsession and core values in everything that they’re doing. We will be keeping a close tab as well. We’ve reached the outer limit on the show. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on the starship so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers. It will make this journey all so much better.
Go to Spotify or iTunes. Rate us and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Also, look us up on all major social platforms by typing @EdgeOfNFT to 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
- Utopia
- NFTLA.live
- eGoGames
- Virtual Voyagers
- Global Gift Foundation
- World of Women
- Women and Weapons
- Boss Beauties
- 99 Originals
- Doodles
- Digital and Savvy
- Hypermine Labs
- DID Intern
- @HypersignChain – Twitter
- @Utopia_W3 – Twitter
- Instagram – @Utopia_W3
- TikTok - @Utopia_W3
- @Utopia_Vgers - Instagram
- Spotify – Edge of NFT
- iTunes – Edge NFT
- @EdgeOfNFT – Twitter
- Hypersign.id
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