Today’s episode features Al Morris of Koii, A scalable peer-to-peer network that aims to help decentralize the web for the good of all. A lot has happened since we last checked in with Al. Listen in as co-hosts Eathan Janney, Jeff Kelley and Josh Kriger learn about Koii’s mission, and how it relates to promoting free speech and fairness. Stay tuned for quick hitters, where Al flips the script and asks our co-host Eathan this series of fun quick questions usually reserved for guests. Finally, catch the latest in NFT news. You’ll learn how Adobe is working with Polygon to integrate NFT into Behance. You’ll find out if the NFT hype could really be fading or if NFT energy has staying power. All this and more on today’s episode!
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Al Morris of Koii – A Scalable P2P Network Decentralizing The Web, Plus: Adobe Polygon Behance NFT, Fading NFT Hype, And More…
This episode features Al Morris, Chief Architect and Cofounder of Koii.network, which stands for Knowledgeable Open and Infinite Internet. Koii is a protocol focused on infrastructure to bring true decentralization to all depths in the Web 3.0 space. Koii has a fully self-sustaining ecosystem driven by the Koii token. As an innovator and tech leader, building an operating system for decentralized digital storage, Al formed Koii.network in 2020 to broaden the range of possibilities for the future of Web 3.0 with an emphasis on creating decentralized storage systems as a way to create an unbiased and transparent network.
Al Cofounded Blockchain Institute Chicago, WeTeachBlockChain.org to help educate the public and promote the adoption, development and use of blockchain technology. Outside of his core responsibilities, Al is an Adviser at XYZ Technologies as well as other projects within the blockchain and crypto community. He is an avid NFT collector, which drove his passion for creating atomic and dynamic NFTs at Koii.network, the fundamental building block of fair community-owned internet. Al Morris, welcome back to the show.
Thanks, Ethan. That’s a hell of an intro. I appreciate it.
It is so great to have you back. We gave some background on Koii and what it is, but for our readers who aren’t familiar with it, in your own words, please share with them the story of Koii and how it came to be?
The short version of this story is we’re trying to solve this problem of speech on the internet. The internet is this incredible tool that allows us to transmit information around the world very quickly, but it’s mostly owned by a few major companies. As a result, most of the important information and nuances to the discussion tend to exist on private service.
We’re trying to provide the tools that will enable people to build a new generation of web products that are going to have all that information be public so that everybody has access to it. Hopefully, this will allow people to make better judgments about what they believe online. Hopefully, this means we can get out of the rhetoric cycle that we’re seeing around the world. It doesn’t matter where you are right now.
There’s a lot of craziness in the news. It seems like it accelerates every week over what was happening. We’re committed to working towards making that an easier and hopefully less mythical problem. Everybody sees this as something like that’s how speech has always been, but we think we can fix it. We’ve got 20, 30 people working around the clock trying to make this problem a little bit more tangible and pick away at one piece at a time.
It’s a big problem to solve and tackle, that’s for sure.
You guys have had an ambitious plan since the jump. Our first episode was in the 30s of the show. I’d love to learn a little bit more about how your vision has changed since we originally spoke and how these tracks that you’re laying now are impacted by what you’ve learned over the course of that time, and the industry has shaped your perspective?
The first thing I’ll say is we realized that there’s a lot more out there than we knew about before. As we started to put together this toolkit for people, we’ve come across all kinds of products like decentralized UPNs, decentralized hosting, and all these toolkits that we didn’t know were there. We’ve been able to start integrating a lot of those things into this bouquet of toolkits that quite perform well. The best part of all of this and still the core of the ecosystem is that as a content creator or an app developer if your content gets attention, you get to mine the Koii token. Once you have these Koii tokens, you can use them to pay for all these other services. We provide this one-stop-shop for people who want to create something that’s going to change people’s minds.
We’ve had lots of great discussions. One of my favorites was when we had a group discussion, talking about the creator economy and all that’s going on and tokenizing different forms of value. It’s great to have you back here. You have a very metatheoretical perspective on all this, which is always great to hear. We were all excited about having all the world’s information accessible online.
It’s all there now, including all the BS. The problem is filtering it. Where do people’s attention go? As we alluded to before, it’s an issue. We’ve got lots of information. The attention goes from one thing to another, and you don’t always know where to put it. How do you view the state of what we might call the attention economy?
That’s a hard question. To give you a meta answer, how do you look at the attention economy? It’s all about capitalizing on attention like a commodity. We have wars that were fought of oil and gas extraction, but the next war is we fought over basically attention extraction. That’s probably where we’re headed. We have to keep people’s attention on one thing so that we can have a democracy that goes the direction that people want it to go. What we’re hopefully starting to see is that people are learning that they can fight this game and build things.
If you start a Shopify store and start selling a product, you’re selling an idea and trying to capture people’s attention. They come and buy from you instead of buying from Walmart. That’s part of the attention economy. All of these things are part of this. What we’re starting to notice now, which is exciting, is that a lot of people are motivated to start diverting attention from some of the crazy stuff towards some of the things that everybody shares that are more important. We’re getting a little bit closer every day, but people seem to be starting to wake up towards this, which is exciting.
As I look at it back in my lifetime, it’s like a counter evolution, a battle of resources you might see between two ecologies in biology or something where there have been generations that were surprised by the ability of corporations and parties to pinpoint how attention is garnered and do it in a very calculated way. The people who were affected by that didn’t necessarily know how to manage that or account for that, or battle it.
Sometimes the people who are creating those kinds of attention hacks couldn’t defend against it. As you’re indicating, there’s a generation that’s coming up where we’ve got enough information out there about this. It has been accessed enough, and people have that awakeness awareness that they want to do something about it. There are these tools to battle it.
There’s a conscious power that comes from being able to channel your attention to yourself. If you can prevent other people from diverting your attention, you have a little bit of a superpower. We’re starting to try and create tools that cater to that audience more so than anyone else.
When we look at the future of the attention economy, we know where we’re at now and some of the problems around it. You mentioned tools that Koii is developing to help address the problems underlying the attention economy. What does that future look like, say over the next year or so?
Hopefully, a lot less radical rhetoric would be great. Every time that there’s a conflict in the world or has a chance to pull on people’s heartstrings, there becomes almost an escalation of pulling on those heartstrings. Someone might have their heart in the right place trying to rally support for something they care about. Someone else comes along realizing that person has created a platform for themselves, and trust is still the stage.
You’ve got Kanye West bursting into the Oscars and yelling at Taylor Swift thing, but on a political agenda scale. I hope that people start to see this as what it is. They start seeing these arguments that people are making more as arguments vying for the attention of the masses, as opposed to rhetoric that’s meant to be taken seriously. If we take everything that a lot of these politicians are saying seriously, we will end up fighting so many wars in so many places. It’s terrifying.
In thinking about the dynamics of communication, you’re under the hood on a lot of this stuff. You’re seeing what’s happening on a lot of this. We hear stories of bots doing things, coordinated efforts to push one agenda or another. Do you see that as you work under the hood in this space? Is that part of the problem? Is it happening at a large scale, like the movie, The Social Dilemma, all those different elements to it? What’s your view on that? What’s happening behind the scenes?
I can only speak to the part that I’ve seen but having worked in ad networks and working in the digital marketing space for a while. You start to see that a lot of the people that are beating you with the game are doing so because they’re less ethical. There are a lot of people out there who are very good at the marketing game. They’re terrifying to go up against. From their perspective, they’re doing the right thing, but they might be undermining the social order on some level. They try to radicalize people and engage them with thoughts that potentially are fear and greed-motivated as opposed to something that brings people together.
Decentralizing The Web: We’re trying to provide the tools that will enable people to build a new generation of web products that are going to have all that information be public so that everybody has access to it.
The exciting thing about this, though is that those arguments are easy to dispel. If you can identify them and show them to people, most people don’t like to be manipulated. They’re pretty quick to turn around and say that they don’t want to be part of this. The movie, The Social Dilemma, was a good one to bring up. For those that haven’t seen it, it’s on Netflix. It’s easy to access, but a lot of the early people from Facebook and Google have now quit and left their jobs and are outspoken critics of these systems. At least in Facebook’s case, they’re being basically investigated for election meddling in a lot of countries.
It’s not Facebook themselves, but it’s the platform that Facebook created that didn’t have certain safeguards in place. It made it easy for people to take advantage of. We hope that over time, more and more of these people will come out, more whistleblowers. Hopefully, that will lead to the public opinion shifting to be a little bit more critical of these platforms. It’s all a little step at a time. It doesn’t happen very quickly. You have to change a lot of hearts and minds.
As we think about the tools that you have in your arsenal, what do you have? What is the toolkit at Koii to help address some of these underlying issues?
We spent 2021 developing the core attention tracking system, which allows us to verify that you looked at something in a cryptographic way. That was the first piece of this puzzle, as we started to look at that more and try to scale it up to a global web adoption level, which for us, means hitting around 100 billion fruits of real traffic per day, being able to parse through all of those and come out with a list of things that receive traffic. That was the first step. We’ve put that work all in and built all of that technology stack. What we’ve built on top of that is a system of templates and actual kits.
Somebody who has very little developer experience can come to the system and deploy their own crowdfunding portal, social media app, social leaderboard, content system, messaging app, VPN, anything like this, trying to arm the rebels, so to speak, if we can take all these disenfranchised people who are upset about this and give them either a tool that somebody else has built that will allow them to engage or the tools to build those things themselves that can trigger some evolution from that.
As an example of this, since we started seeing what was happening on the ground in Ukraine, we developed a Snapchat-like toolkit that allows you to post decentralized storage. You take a quick video on your phone and can post it out to a bunch of decentralized storage networks and make sure it can’t get taken down. You can also earn some crypto for that.
It’s a nice way to make some money, document what’s going on, and make sure that this decentralized network of computers will take care of that for you. You never have to worry about the information being lost. You can also stay very private and pseudonymous in the process. There are a lot of these little pieces that we’re trying to put together for people.
Was that a spontaneous project that you developed based on what you felt was a need in the global landscape? Is that tied to some of the other major milestones that you already have coming up or tools that you built?
We call this tool kit the Mobile Toolkit for Koii. It’s called a progressive web app. You can install it without even going into an app store. We already have this as part of the stack we’ve been developing for a long time. As we put it together, we had an early prototype of it and saw what was happening over there. We saw the need to capture some of this content and be able to say like, “This firsthand account is real versus this one that made it not be,” and try to capture that nuance. We’ve started to deploy it with a number of our community members. We also have a very large community in Ukraine and Russia.
We’ve been trying to talk to those community members and see if there’s something that we can offer that might help. We can give money to lots of organizations working on that. We’re trying to help a few people with crowdfunding portals through different food banks and things like that. If we can provide something that fixes the speech problem as well, I think that has a lot of power to change things. Ultimately, those of us outside of that situation can’t say a lot that’s going to shift the narrative, but if we can help people there talk to each other, that might help.
You get the word out. These folks that are in your Discord and Telegram, and you’re communicating with Twitter. How do you go about marketing an app in such a dynamic environment as the case in Ukraine now?
In a hostile environment, it is very difficult. We had luckily a lot of people from our community that reached out to us asking if there were toolkits that they could use for this thing. As an example, with Telegram, the founder of Telegram is apparently fairly close with the Russian leadership. A lot of people were skeptical of using that service. Some people have moved over to Signal because of this. We had a lot of people asking us for tips on what they could do to communicate in a decentralized fashion that was going to be secure. We tried to accelerate the development and release of this toolkit in order to respond to those needs.
As a result of that, we are talking to a lot of people who we’ve been brought into contact with, who are contacts of these folks. We’re starting to interview a lot of different people in all kinds of places and see what we can do to make it easier for them. What we’re hoping to do in the next little while is to fund somebody who’s Ukrainian or Russian to build out an extended version of this. We had a grant pool that we’ve announced. Hopefully, we’ll get to put a lot of that money towards that initiative.
That leads me to my next question. What are the next major milestones for Koii? I saw Al briefly at East Denver between a lot of different meetings and interviews and whatnot. We shared a bad coffee together at the only place around where we could find any coffee. It was good to see you. What have you been cooking up while you’ve been on the road? What are you guys building?
We spent most of 2021 building a concept for all these systems that I’m describing. What we’re trying to do is to fine-tune the details to get to a global scale. One thing that we did was create our own layer one network that does payments settlements between our nodes. It means that now our nodes can take on a much larger amount of work than they would have previously been able to.
We can do things a lot faster than we could before. We’re up to about 2,000 transactions per second. That also means that as a result, we can track more attention. Instead of being able to track around 1 million to 2 million proofs of real traffic per day, which is our cap before, now we’re on the order of 100 billion.
We’re trying to extend the system to get ready for that influx of people coming in. At the same time, we’re also releasing these app toolkits that I’ve been talking about. A lot of those will hopefully help developers to onboard into the system. We’ve been building out a grants program. We’ve allocated a couple of million dollars towards grants. Those will all be going to projects that are built on top of this framework that I’m describing.
With regards to this framework, to what extent is it going to be compatible with developers that are building on some of the traditional social networks like Twitter, for example, versus building their own technology and networks? What’s your perspective on supporting those two different paradigms?
That’s one of the best things about Koii. We’ve been talking to folks like Google and Amazon about how we can make their services more well-integrated into Web 3.0. What we’re trying to do with these Koii nodes is that the Koii note can read from many different networks. It’s not just from our reading file plan, but also Ethereum and Bitcoin, and from a Web 2.0 API like Twitter. One of the main advantages of what we’ve built is that it’s able to have this interoperability.
As a side effect of that, we also can now track attention on YouTube or on a website or something like that. You can come to Koii and register content that’s not even stored on decentralized networks, which hopefully down the road means that you can start to monetize almost any piece of content anywhere on the internet using Koii.
We’ve been learning so much about this because we’re in Web 3.0 and media. We’re building a community and a conference. It’s incredible the opportunities here. People are doing this over and over, like organically rewarding people for being a part of the community and giving their attention. Attention itself can be a reward. People want to be seen. That’s part of why they want to be part of a community. It’s definitely the next wave rewarding that integration. The community is a big part of it too.
Decentralizing The Web: The internet is this incredible tool that allows us to transmit information around the world quickly, but a few major companies mostly own it. As a result, most of the important information and nuances to the discussion tend to exist on private service.
The Koii token itself is only one form of reward. If people are looking at your content, you can get Koii. There’s a social media renowned incubating on top of Koii, and that’s going to pay people for looking at content as well, which is pretty cool. If you have a higher reputation, people who look at your content will get more of this new token. It’s a product called Tree Space, but I’m sure people will hear about that pretty soon.
The other thing we’re excited about though, is performance incentives around the NFT side. I know we haven’t talked about NFTs much. All the stuff that we’ve been talking about is NFTs are the core element of all these systems. In order for it to be a decentralized network, everything gets stored as an NFT. We also do have the Cryptofish NFT collection, which is coming out shortly.
That’s somebody in the community that has been drawing pixelated fish. They’re very cool and unique. Some of them have baseball caps, funny-looking eyes or an anchor next to them, or a treasure chest, giving you like a profile pic collection. We’ll be dropping a few of those for people that are participating by reading this as well.
We dropped that almost like under the radar there. Thank you for that. Before we wrap up the questions, you’re not only about sharing information about the space, but you’ve got your ear to the ground and networking with the coolest people in the most powerful projects. What other companies in NFT land are inspiring to you these days outside of Koii?
I’m excited about the adoption of gaming platforms, Axie Infinity and similar products. Those are going to spur a lot of people to start understanding what it is to have a wallet and how to use these things. I have also been enjoying talking to the Filecoin folks lately. They have the initiative to decentralize Filecoin now. They’re working on taking Protocol Labs which is the parent company, and decentralizing it into a whole bunch of subsidiaries.
All of which will be basically governance-managed by NFTs or government circuits, which is exciting. There’s a lot of the DAO evolution of NFTs. That’s cool. Even if you look at the Bored Ape Yacht Club and other groups like this, they’ve now started to act more like organizations than art collectors, which is neat. It’s almost like an evolution to the next wave of what’s happening.
Al, you’ve been up to a lot since we last talked to you. Amazing progress, so many cool things were happening on the Koii front. It’s great to get the update here.
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We always go to segment two at this point. It’s a section we call Edge Quick Hitters. We did it last time with you. I’m assuming the answers haven’t changed a ton since most of it has to do with your life in the past. We wanted to flip the script a little bit and do a special thing, which we’ve never done before in 117 plus episodes. That is, turn those questions around and ask one of our hosts those questions. What we wanted to do, Al, is have you asked the Edge Quick Hitter questions to our very own Eathan Janney.
What is the first thing that you remember purchasing in your life?
Whenever this question comes up, I think about how I saved a bunch of money. I was a big saver when I was a kid. I didn’t know necessarily what to do with it. I just knew that it was good to save it. I had all this money piling up. My family encouraged me to get something. We were at the mall, but I ended up at Foot Locker.
The creative and creator economy is the future. Click To Tweet
It’s one of those mini basketball hoops, the ones that you hang on a door and comes with a tiny little basketball. I got that. That’s the first thing I ever remember purchasing in my life. Even though it’s like a fun toy, I remember that was also my first buyer’s remorse. I was like, “I spent all of that time and energy earning all that money. Is this what I wanted to do?” That’s my first purchase.
Hopefully, you’re good at layups then.
Yes, I’m pretty good. I could do a solid reverse layup.
What is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
This one’s fun. The first thing I can remember is having a band in high school and selling CDs for the band. I’m so glad I got a chance to have that experience, having a high school band. I realized everybody has a high school band to a certain degree, but it comes in stages. You either talked about having a band and came up with a name that counts for your base level of being in a band. The next level is you’ve got together with your friends and strummed your guitars a little bit and had a name. It goes deeper until you get on stage and perform. I’m glad I got the level and sold some CDs to people’s parents who felt sorry for us.
Follow-up question, what genre of music and how many CDs were sold?
I’m going to guess it under 100. We played jazz. We fancied ourselves to be jazz-rock fusion musicians. The name of the band was Free Bop.
I feel like there are some NFTs coming. What is the most recent thing that you purchased?
There are probably some things since then, but I got a new gaming level computer, to serve the fact that we’re doing all these shows and things like that to make sure it worked. I got a router, a computer and a modem to upgrade my system.
What kind of computer?
It is a Dell Alienware m15 R5.
What is the most recent thing that you sold?
We’ve been selling Spirit Seeds like crazy. We’re almost sad to let them all go. We sold out of Spirit Seeds minting on the website. It was an incredible milestone. We do have a few in our back pocket that we might put out on the market in the coming days so that people can get back in on the action, get a VIP pass to NFT LA, and all sorts of other perks. Thank you so much for giving me a chance to plug that. I did not even plan that.
I still have to get one of those. What is your most prized possession? This is the one I was excited for. Hopefully, it’s one of those CDs from circa 2005.
I don’t know if this counts, but it first comes to mind for me, my uniqueness, like who I am. It’s not always easy every day. You got your ups and downs but having who I am and all the uniqueness of it, I treasure that.
I certainly can agree with that sentiment. Eathan is one of the most unique individuals I’ve met in my entire life.
I have to say Josh is pretty close as well. We’ve got quite a crew here, quirky unique guys.
If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, or experience that is for sale, what would it be? Hopefully, not my uniqueness. It’s not for sale.
I should have had some forethought on this one. We’ve asked it so many times. I feel like I’ve come up with the answers before that were good.
What do you have your eye on prompt?
Decentralizing The Web: All the stuff we’ve been talking about has NFT as the core element of all these systems. For it to be a decentralized network, everything gets stored as an NFT.
My favorite answer from previous guests is purchasing something that can better the world. We have been talking about Ukraine here. I don’t know if I don’t have the answer, but at this very moment, I would be searching for something to quell this drama and fear that people have to live in during this time. Bring to light the foibles of human psychology that allow crazy stuff to happen and bring mental health more into people’s lives. That would be a powerful thing.
If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be? If you could eliminate one of your personality traits, what would that be?
Thanks for throwing them together there. It’s a personality trait. We’ve brought it up a few times here. The creative and creator economy is the future. That willingness to let go of a little bit of what you call factory industrial, a corporate history that we have around what does it means to contribute to society.
Bring in like, “Let your brain go wild,” and give all this cool stuff to everybody that only you can give. That attitude is what I would pass along. Which one would I eliminate? I’d try to bring a little bit more focus into things. I can get in zones of focus, but to be willing to zoom in and make something happen at the moment immediately. We’re getting rid of getting lost or not knowing what the next step is. That would be that.
What did you do before joining us in the show? What are you going to do next?
I prepped for the show. I got my computer set up, got ready to go, checked over the notes, and set up everything. I’m like the curator of the content here. I also had a fun meeting before this with Jesse Tevelow of Praise. He and I are going to do an AMA on the Praise Pal’s Discord channel. We’re going to put people on a whitelist and give them a gleam contest, lots of cool stuff going on with Praise. Was he the one in the conversation that we had?
Yeah.
What a great coincidence.
Right after this, what are you up to?
I’’ look at my calendar and go, “What’s next?” I have to be responsible for making sure I’m patient enough to let the whole recording download, upload it so that we can publish it, get all the details together so that we can roll on the publication of this very fine program. That’s what I’ll be doing after this. I do have some posts of my music that are on Koii.rocks. I posted at least one song called Mars that I’m quite proud of that I wrote during a people’s everyday project, but I only did it for 3 or 4 months. I would write a song a day. Check out Mars, my song on Koii.rocks.
I will love to get that in front of all kinds of people if you send me the link. I can’t wait to see that. That is the end of our Edge Quick Hitters. Thank you.
You’re welcome. Thank you so much. Thank you, Eathan. I appreciate it. Let’s tackle a couple of hot topics.
First on the line, Adobe taps Polygon to scale NFT functionality in the Behance social platform. That’s pretty cool when two things together. Adobe has got a lot of wonderful things going on in the design world. It has been an interesting project and company for many years. It looks like they announced their work with Polygon, which is a leader as well in providing tokens that are easily exchanged without high gas fees.
You could use them in gaming and all sorts of cool projects. They want to integrate the Ethereum scaling program into the Behance social media platform. Integration, according to Polygon, will allow creators to showcase NFTs to the world while minimizing their carbon footprint and transaction fees. I did not expect this, I’ll say that, but it does sound pretty awesome. I want to know what were the dominos that came together to make this happen. It sounds like a cool story.
I know Adobe had been doing some stuff in the realm of NFTs and trying to stay ahead of things. It’s great to see a company that’s existing, big, and oftentimes very slow-moving starting to make some moves there to try to stay up with what’s happening because the train’s left the station on that front. There are a bunch of companies sitting tight. That’s a mistake. You got to move and adapt. Otherwise, you get replaced. They’ve always evolved. I feel like over time, as I’ve seen us go from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and so on. Kudos to them for continuing that path.
I will say it’s exciting to see more integration with the creator toolkits. When I first learned graphic design several years ago, it was on Adobe. There are so many new people coming from that ecosystem. If we get them all to get crypto wallets, and they all understand what NFTs are out of the door. Everything that they create as an NFT by default can’t be anything but good for the rest of the ecosystem.
We’ve seen this before with Render, integrating the creation process and the accounting process of who made what. It is great. It does hold a lot of promise for keeping track of things in a better way and giving good credit where credit is due.
It’s an example of the Web 2.0 legacy companies being very creative and partnering with Web 3.0. That’s what we’re going to be talking about a lot at NFT LA. There are some exciting companies that you would be surprised to see in this place and companies in the traditional crypto space that you’re going to be surprised to now see in the NFT space. The melting pot of ideas and innovation is where we’re at as NFT Web 3.0 economy. It’s a great opportunity for mainstream adoption. Everyone can be part of that process.
NFT hype fading, market value touches the lowest value since July 2021. We did have a story about quite a rise in value. That was back in January 2022. Bitcoin in the wider crypto market has continued to bleed. NFT token sector has also seemed to have suffered. Decreasing values of the volume suggest the NFT market activity is going down, implying that the interest in these digital collectibles may be declining.
That’s a biased point of view. We’ve seen ups and downs in the overall market. Clearly, there’s a threshold. When the crypto market goes down to a certain amount, it is going to impact ancillary markets like NFTs at some point in time. What’s more interesting is the NFTs held their own during most of the battle.
It’s like a boxing match. If you keep getting punched in the face, you are eventually going to get knocked down. The NFTs were in the ring for a long time, holding their own against some goliath boxer and being the downward pressure on not only the crypto market but the overall global markets now. I don’t look at this as necessarily a “trend” on a macro level.
Looking at the micro moves and by that, even over the course of a full year in NFTs, as much as things change in that time is totally short-sighted. This is a long game. The things that are going to happen and are happening in real-time are going to be impactful for the rest of our lives in some form or fashion. It’s the beginning of it. It’ll take different shapes and forms over time. To look at it as even a market based on the value of certain individual NFTs is missing the point. There’s so much more happening here. It’s sensational media. We were talking about some of that before. To me, when I see that stuff, I’m looking for headlines and clicks.
Most of these headlines around things going up and down are very much about capturing human psychology. At least for me, when we got into the podcast, what was fascinating to me was to look back and be able to learn about all the things that had been going on in NFTs before March 2021, when we first launched our first episode. I was like, “There’s a lot of cooking here for quite a while.” I also think what’s illustrative is that even though cryptocurrencies and NFTs are connected, they’re totally different worlds about what they’re for, what they do, and how they connect with communities, economies, and stuff like that. It’s like a non-sequitur to talk about the NFT market.
Anytime that somebody talks about a whole market, it’s always fun. You can’t ever refer to something on that. It’s like a stereotype. Stereotypes are never 100% true. The nice thing and the parallel with the crypto market are that as crypto markets have shown, because the price of a token goes up or down doesn’t dictate what the underlying value is or whether the underlying value is growing. Most of the founders that I know have got 2, 3, maybe even 10 years of treasury stocked away. Polygon, we mentioned before, has a huge fund. They’re acquiring people and building up gigantic technology stacks.
Decentralizing The Web: If the price of a Picasso at Sotheby’s goes up and down, it doesn’t mean that artists are not creating more art or that the auction houses are going bankrupt. It means that the latest price went up or down, and somebody is trying to get on the headlines to make the front page.
They’ve got developers working around the clock building the technology underneath that. There’s Koii. This is parallel to what we see in the public market. The public market was going up and down. There are the actual people who walk into work every day and do their jobs. The cool thing about NFTs now is that we have these art platforms that are going to work the same way.
If the price of a Picasso at Sotheby’s goes up and down, it doesn’t mean that artists are not creating more art or that the auction houses are going bankrupt. It means that the latest price went up or down, and somebody is trying to get on the headlines to make the front page. You see a lot of this stuff, but it’s very frustrating how much of it gets on to the headlines. It’s good to fact-check it sometimes a little bit.
Eathan, you got your finger on the pulse. What’s happening?
As you put on a conference, I’ll try to put this in the most vague and friendly way possible. You find out all of the intricate ways that people try to get involved in the governance because they want to be a part of it, “Why don’t you give me a free VIP ticket? That’d be cool. I’ll hang out because I’m great.” It’s fun to see the things people come up with. We’ve been having fun with it and also being appreciative of all the wonderful people that show up and want to lend a hand. Here’s a heartwarming story for us to share that came up in the Discord. I’ll read it because it tells the story.
Vicky is in a Twitter space with a member called Almaden Finance. His real name is Cal Brinkman. It’s inspiring stuff. He’s the host of Photos.eth. They did a great AMA together. It was their first time doing a good job. There was an artist friend who was speaking, and she said she could not go to NFT LA due to the price. They’re having this AMA. She said she couldn’t go to an NFT LA because of the price. He demanded her wallet address and forwarded the price of the ticket to her. It was a great, inspiring, personal story all around, she said, but the topper was that she found out that Almaden also split the amount.
The two of these guys, out of the kindness of their heart, feel like somebody deserves a ticket to NFT LA. They put their funds together and made it happen. I’ll give people a project he’s started, which you might want to check out. It’s called Trading Tokenomics. It seeks to demystify what cryptocurrency ownership means. It’s important to understand the difference between currencies and stocks. Therefore, their goal is to lead you to ask the right questions before considering a cryptocurrency as a store of value. Shout out to those folks. Thanks for being part of this community. We appreciate you hanging out.
That’s totally something I could use. It would cause me to maybe use less ape behavior on such a regular basis.
There it is, hard to avoid. That’s a wrap on the core episode. It’s awesome stuff all around. Al, thanks again for joining us. It’s been great to have you back on. It’s rare that we get a second visit. It’s great to see you again. For the readers who don’t know, where do folks go to follow you, Koii, and all the amazing things that are happening?
Our Twitter is probably the best place. That’s @KoiiNetwork. You can also go to Koii.network, very similar, which is our website. You can sign up for our mailing list, where we have pretty good updates coming out regularly. Thanks again for having me on. It’s always great to round up the latest goings on in this space. Thank you, Eathan, for sharing your personal life with us.
We mentioned it earlier, but again, we do have a fun giveaway that’ll be happening. Keep an eye on our socials. We’ll get you all the details. It’s going to be fun. You’ll learn all about it here very soon. At this point, we have reached the outer limit. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more ventures on this starship, so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes, rate us, and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole.
Remember, we always invite you to co-create and build with us at Edge of NFT. We are unlocking a whole new way to collect and collaborate with us through our NFT drops, Spirits Seeds, which is sold out, leading the Living Tree NFTs, which light the way to our event, NFT LA, a one of a kind immersive and unforgettable experience at LA Live in Los Angeles, March 28th to the 31st 2022.
Check it out at NFTLA.live and move quickly on early tickets because they are selling out quickly. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for great NFT content. One little piece of advice, if you do see a Spirit Seed for sale on the secondary market, you may want to pick that thing up. It’s packed full of value. We can talk more about that later. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- Koii.network
- WeTeachBlockChain.org
- EdgeOfNFT.com/Masterworks
- Masterworks.io/Disclaimer
- Koii.rocks
- First Episode – Keith Montogomery on NFTs, what’s “mine,” & if NBA Top Shot is legit, plus: Coinbase IPO, a16z invests in Open Sea, John Cleese’s NFT Bridge, and the $500,000 NFT house.
- @KoiiNetwork – Twitter
- Spotify – Edge of NFT Podcast
- iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
- NFTLA.live
About Al Morris
After working in the automation and digital marketing sectors, Alex found his passion in decentralized and distributed systems. He leads technology at the Institute, and produces content and systems aimed at increasing privacy and autonomy for individuals online.
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