Did you know that there’s a way for you to earn from the meat fact of people looking at your work? Underlying all our interactions there is an attention economy and methods to quantify and capture the value of attention are continuously expanding. In this episode, Al Morris, the CEO and Founder of the Koii Network, shares how he’s working to decentralize control within the attention economy and build an infrastructure for content creators to earn directly from the attention they receive. He joins hosts Eathan Janney, Jeff Kelley, and Josh Kriger to discuss details relevant to Koii including atomic NFTs and the Finnie wallet. Al’s goal is to build a better internet that embraces openness of ideas and fair distribution of revenue. All this and more in this episode of The Edge of NFT podcast! Stay tuned for our regular hot topics and find out the latest NFT with Axie Infinity, Messi’s Soccer NFT venture, and NFT artist Pplpleaser’s Fortune Mag cover.
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Listen to the podcast here
Al Morris Of Koii On Building The Infrastructure Of The Attention Economy, Plus: Pplpleasr Fortune Mag NFT, Axie Infinity $1B In Sales, Messi Soccer NFTs, And More…
Welcome to this killer episode of Edge of NFT brought to you by Koii. Our guest, Al Morris, the CEO and Founder of Koii, is offering two huge giveaways including 500 Koii tokens for 1,000 listeners and secondly, 5,000 USDT, a stylus pad and lifetime access to Koii for one talented artist.
Stay tuned to learn the ins and outs of Koii and how they’re building an infrastructure for creators to easily earn from the attention they receive.
You’ll also find out how our guest, if given the chance, would destroy the telecom industry and finally, create an internet service that works.
Plus, find out how NFT artist pplpleasr is still making waves by partnering with Fortune Magazine for a special NFT drop.
All this and more on this episode of Edge of NFT. Don’t forget to go to EdgeOfNFT.com to sign up for our newsletter and stay on top of what’s next.
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This episode’s special collaborator episode features guest Al Morris, CEO and Founder of Koii Network, a new ecosystem and an economy based on attention rewards. Besides leading the Koii team, Al is an advisor to a number of other projects and actively works within the community to make a better internet through decentralized media. Al also co-founded WeTeachBlockchain.org, which helps others to learn and love blockchain. Much of Al’s work is centered on openness to new ideas and bringing decentralized projects to life. Al, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. I was surprised listening to a few previous episodes to see how many references to Burning Man popped up.
Do you have your own reference?
No. I hear a lot of similar stories in this space that it’s fascinating how this keeps popping up.
Have you been to Burning Man?
No, we’re going to save that for after Koii’s long successful life.
Al, it’s great to have you here. We’ve been looking forward to this for a long time once we got you on the schedule. We want to dive in and start at the beginning. Let’s lay the foundation for our readers of what is Koii and why is it important.
The product that we’ve created with Koii is something that’s come together as a solution to a number of different things that we encountered along the way. First, we started looking at ways to build larger capacity systems on blockchain. That got us looking at storage systems. Storage led us to NFTs being an interesting thing that we could play with. That’s led us to build the Finnie Wallet, which is a cross-chain NFT wallet.
We’ve snowballed a number of these things together into a framework that anybody can use to make efficient low-cost blockchain apps. It is something that hasn’t existed in the past mainly because everyone’s very focused on using one blockchain. We can piece together a number of them and get the best pieces out of all the ones that you use in the right way. We take the best little elements from each one.
Let’s dig a little deeper into what Finnie Wallet is all about and its role within the Koii ecosystem.
There’s that saying that if you seek revenge, you’re supposed to dig two graves. If you want to build cross-chain apps, you have to have a wallet that can hold multiple keys. You have to have as many keys as you have blockchains often. We built one wallet that contains all of your keys for all these different systems. The neat thing is that we also have popularized a new standard called Atomic NFTs which standardizes across all the different blockchains. In addition to holding the keys that own these assets, we can also visualize them and show you all the different elements in a standardized interface, which for a lot of people is very helpful. Some people get stuck with that thing.
That’s what’s profound about what you’re doing and why we took a liking to this project. We’ve had a lot of opportunities to collaborate with different teams on what they’re doing. As one of our first collaborations, we wanted to pick a company that is forward-looking as the Edge of NFT is and as we like to be in. What you’re doing with interoperability is so interesting. It’s not a surprise to us that CoinList took a liking to what you are doing and put you in their accelerator program as a result. What were some of their feedback and how’s the community responded to what you’re building?
We got good feedback from the CoinList Seed Day. We’ve been through three accelerators. We’re in the third one in Sanctor Capital accelerator, which is more of a launch phase. We’re working on more communications at this point. Earlier on, we were in the Outlier Ventures accelerator as well, which is their base camp. They helped us put together a lot of the tech behind this project. They introduced us to the Arweave guys along with a few other people. That’s how we coalesced the team around us.
The CoinList process has been interesting because it opened us up to a lot of the retail investment crowd which we hadn’t been working with too closely before. We very quickly went from being an artist and technology-focused product to trying to explain it as a tokenomics model, which we knew was a useful thing, but putting it into investor language is an interesting experiment. We’re getting a little bit better at it now.
In terms of the DNA that you have, it’s showing the core values that you have of openness and iteration. It’s something that we’re seeing from the most successful projects. Things are moving so quickly that if you get laser-focused on one particular path, you’d get left behind. It’s great to see you evolve and hear the story.
Our goal is to help the user as much as possible, which means being flexible to wherever they need to go. If there’s a network that’s a better solution, then we have to incorporate that product eventually.
To piggyback on what Josh said about our enthusiasm about the project, we’re about co-creation when it comes to the NFT space. This particular project makes us feel good to be helping something to grow long term by collaborating with you and working together. We’re bullish on what you’re doing. The next question on the block here is, what are Atomic NFTs? There are various ingredients in what you do. We talked about the Finnie Wallet. We’ve talked about the infrastructure that you’re building. What role does Atomic NFTs play in all this?
I mentioned with the Finnie Wallet that the Atomic NFTs allow us to standardize the display of all of your NFTs across all these platforms. What that means is if you look at OpenSea or something Ethereum-based, they have 1155 or 721. They have these standards that explain what an NFT is in that context. If you go and look at Tezos’ products like Hic Et Nunc, that’s a different NFT standard. Making these interoperable is really complicated.
We thought we need to back us up to Arweave because most of the media files are not stored on-chain otherwise. We take the media file, we back it up along with a special smart contract we’ve created. It’s a lot more efficient. We put that on to Arweave in a storage medium. Now we’ve got the storage medium containing the media file along with the smart contract. We incorporate all of the data from whichever chain it started out on.
We mint this Atomic NFT, which is one single thing that exists wherever you needed to go. You then can take it through our bridges, which are compatible with this new standard of Atomic NFTs and you can take it to another chain. You could take something from Tezos, put it onto Arweave, and then move it back over to Ethereum and list it on OpenSea. The best part is you can do this all inexpensively because the way that we structured Koii is to batch all these transactions together. It makes your NFTs not only interoperable but permanent and hard to destroy.
Plus everyone in DeFi likes leverage. In a sense, you’re giving people leverage on their NFTs because they can sell their NFT but they can also earn tokens by just people liking their NFT, wanting to see it and sharing it with their friends.
That’s the best part. Without actually setting it up as an Atomic NFT, we can’t track the attention on it. Once you registered as an Atomic NFT, then Koii starts tracking and every single time that somebody looks at this individual file, you’re going to get your Koii tokens. We give out 1,000 per day and it’s going to be one million a day. These tokens enable you to control our computers, resources or our network just like Ethereum does with gas.
Attention Economy: Our goal is really to help the user as much as possible which means being flexible to wherever they need to go.
Let’s go a little deeper on that. The attention economy, we’re seeing it start to take form throughout the industry. You are well-positioned to go deep on that and evolve the entire ecosystem around attention and rewarding attention. Can you share your thoughts on that? What was the inspiration for it? Where do you see it going from here?
Where it was inspired by is the fun part of this because we accidentally added this to the whole system. We’re just looking for a good way to distribute the tokens. We didn’t want to create one of these systems where you have the node operators own the entire network. With Ethereum, if it grows, the people that get rewarded are the node operators who mostly own server farms. They’re not everyday people. They’re certainly not content creators. They are the furthest thing from content creators most of the time.
You create these networks that are at odds. That means that if you build a dApp on Ethereum in a very real way, you’ve created another oligarchy of tech giants that own the system that everybody else is publishing content into. We wanted to create the opposite of that. We wanted to give the token straight to the content creators, and then we had to create a couple of spam prevention mechanisms. That’s how we came up with proof of real traffic.
Where do you see the attention economy going from here like token rewards where you’re getting those rewards, and then spending them within these economies or NFTs? We’re seeing all kinds of different NFTs coming in about access, admission, and the IP behind it. What’s the next phase here that we don’t see now?
The simplest way to think about this is it’s a distribution tool. It’s useful for incentives for growth, for the most part. Imagine if you could tell people, “We’re building a new Twitter and if you come now, and you get a lot of followers, you’re going to get a seat on the board of directors. You’re going to be able to help us make the decisions that are going to shape this platform.” That’s a very real possibility now in a digital asset sense that it wasn’t a few years ago.
This is going to lead to the fragmentation of the current attention economy, which is mostly owned by Facebook, Twitter and Google. It’s going to ultimately lead to a lot more of us having more equity on the internet where we publish all our content. The cool thing about that and that equity that we get to own from an ethical standpoint is that it also will probably translate into digital assets which will trade very similar to equities in the stock market.
Nodes are at the centerpiece of all this in terms of the creator developing nodes and those nodes launching to power this ecosystem. When will these nodes launch and put the foundation in place, and what will that look like?
We’re on testnet number three. The nodes that we operate are mainly designed to batch transactions together. They require a customer. Right now, we’re the main customer because we’re building all these dApps on the network. We’re going to be open-sourcing the developer toolkit that will allow people to build their own applications. That’ll probably coincide with our launch. Following that, we’ll start to allow large token holders to run their own nodes progressively. We want to let 1 or 2 at a time to make sure that we are not overwhelming the network with potential bad actors. If one of these operators gets hacked, for example, and their tokens are stolen, then it could unsettle the network temporarily. Our plan is within about a year of the launch, to have it be more than 50% decentralized.
What do some of these potential applications look like? I don’t want to reveal the ideas that have already been presented to you and give those people an opportunity to create a new network, but what are the themes that you expect to occur in terms of applications that people build on to Koii?
It comes in a few different forms. There are certain types of apps where people are willing to pay to get a better quality experience of viewing content. Those tend to fall into the category of Spotify or Netflix. There are a lot of people looking at doing that on decentralized systems, especially for copyright protection, but also for indie artists that don’t want to go through the publishing hoops. If you wanted to just publish to a decentralized SoundCloud, you should be able to do that and earn Koii tokens. We have a project looking at doing that. The other side of it is on the more social side. That seems to be a lot more ad-driven. Social signaling seems to be very much an influencer game.
We have no problem with people running ads on Koii as long as they are transparent. We can see who’s paying for them and where the value is accruing. In fact, the proof of the real traffic system that we’ve designed is probably an industry-leading solution to tracking attention without having spam. If you wanted to build an influencer network or an advertising network that’s completely decentralized and transparent, we can help you do that right away. We’ve also talked to a handful of people about possibly doing a decentralized search but that’s a little further off.
It’s interesting that you brought up ads, and I’m thinking, a lot of people strive to make ads that you want to watch regardless of the kind of product, “That’s an entertaining ad. That’s cool to look at.” It’s very interesting to see the possibility that somebody could make an ad that earns them money on the back end, and people signing up for something or purchasing something. At the same time, they could earn Koii because they made a cool ad. That’s pretty fascinating.
It’s funny, you should bring that up. That’s in the Atomic NFT website that we have, AtomicNFT.com. There is a standard that we’ll be releasing, which is a slight tweak you can make to the NFT to turn it into an ad, where somebody can pay a bounty that gets released to the creator of the NFT each time it’s viewed by a certain demographic. You can get very specific with it too. That’s the cool thing. Our goal is mainly to publish these standards so other people can come and then play with them.
Which are great ideas.
I could use three more standards that we can publish. A rapid-fire.
The cool thing about what you are doing is you’re putting the time, the forethought and the care into building the foundation of something that’s going to be powerful. We’ve talked a bit about the Koii token itself. You can earn Koii through these NFTs already and it drives this creator-developer node economy but people want to know about the launch. What’s the latest on the launch of the Koii token?
We’ll be launching on a handful of exchanges in mid to late September 2021. There’s this talk of trying to list on some of the larger ones. We’re working on bringing in a couple of key partners. The only hold up there is whether we can get more growth. If everybody wants to list on a larger exchange, we need you to get your Fannie Wallet. We’ve gotten about 2,000 in about a week and that’s doubled our numbers. We doubled our Twitter account as well. We’re in very good shape. It’s odd. We were almost in stealth mode until we suddenly started promoting and we went from like a couple of thousand followers to about 5,000 almost immediately.
Word on the street is there is an AirDrop coming and we all have AirDrops. What’s the scoop on the AirDrop campaign?
Tons of AirDrop. The number one way to get Koii tokens is to publish some content on Koi.rocks and get like a few hundred every day or two. If you want more Koii tokens and you’d like to cash in, we’re going to be doing an AirDrop with you guys for about $5,000 worth of Koii tokens along with some NFTs and other prizes. In about, a week or so we’re going to announce a number of other major AirDrops and other campaigns so people can get in on.
If you’re following us on Twitter, now is the time. We want the Koii Network to be very decentralized. People who are stakeholders in the community early on, we want to take on the role of being able to run the network, earning a bunch of tokens, running a node. We want this to be for you. Our node will be able to run on a smartphone. Ideally, this is where you can get your tokens now, and then you can set them up on your phone. You can do a yield farming sort of thing. You have that little savings account that keeps growing and every morning, you wake up and your phone was scraping the internet while you’re sleeping.
We had an opportunity to get a demo of your product. Hopefully, we’ll make it a little less intimidating to take your suggestion to get into this. What’s your advice for creators and potential creators that maybe have been apprehensive to get into the NFT side of things? I’m sure a lot of them come to you and they’re like, “I don’t know. Do people want this? Should I post it?” You have a blockchain education background. How do you have those conversations and what should those people be thinking in terms of going about this journey?
It all depends on motivation. I know of two main groups of people. There are the ones that find it technically intimidating, and then there are the other ones that are just thinking, “Why would I do this? Why does it matter? Whatever.” To the “Why does this matter?” group, the best thing about Arweave is that it’s permanent and it’s decentralized across thousands and thousands of computers. Once you put your media in there, there’s a very good chance that it will survive beyond my lifetime, and probably beyond all of our lifetimes. The goal is that Arweave will exist indefinitely into the future and it’s designed as an economic engine to achieve that goal. That means that you’re making a mark on history. If you do it with Koii, it costs a 1/10 of a penny to upload your files.
The second side of it would be if you don’t think people like your stuff and on that front, I would say check out my profile. I make all kinds of weird stuff for my NFTs. I just throw them out there. I sent my sister one. I made her piece of graphic art. I put it on an ice cream cake and I had it delivered to her for her birthday. That was fun because now she’s a part of history and she got this ice cream cake. It was a big exciting thing at the office.
For her brother’s graduation, my girlfriend put something based on a digital pizza from a guy on Fiverr. That could have been an NFT that people could enjoy forever.
It still could be if he wants to mint it.
You always hear about the original person that bought a pizza with Bitcoin or whatever back in the day. There’s this tide of pizza in the history of blockchain.
We’re going to throw some Edge of NFTs onto Koii and have some fun here.
By all means. We also have a white-glove service too. If people aren’t feeling up to the challenge themselves, we can help them do all the uploading. Our goal is to help people make their mark like this. The only thing I should say too is in the very near future, copyright law is going to start incorporating blockchain as a very big form of trademark protection and that kind of thing. There’s a real possibility that if you trademark things now using a blockchain, even if it feels very loose and not meaningful, it could matter in the future and it might protect your assets as well.
These are great things for people to think about and hopefully, we’ll get people to take the next step and take the leap. Al, you’ve been in the space for a while and you’ve been very methodical about creating something that adds value to the ecosystem. When we take a step back, what are the NFT projects and platforms, either existing or yet to be formed, that stand out to you as game-changers that’ll be here in 3, 5, 10 years or more, assuming that Koii will be right by their side?
On the platform side of things, what they’re doing on Tezos with Hic et Nunc is pretty great. I like that they’ve curated this cool community over there. The other side of it is with the tech side of things. The funny thing that people don’t realize about this is almost all of these ecosystems will probably be here in ten years. They might not be incredibly active and people might not remember the names, but they’ll all be there on a blockchain, very likely. It’s very unlikely that Ethereum goes anywhere. Probably all of it will still be there, I would imagine.
In terms of game-changers, you mentioned Tezos, any other game-changers in the NFT space? If you’re a closet NFT gamer, you can reveal yourself now.
I haven’t gotten too much into the NFT gaming side of things. Some of the stuff that’s happening with the Cryptovoxels metaverse is very cool. One of our artists/visors, Kevin Abosch, had a gallery that someone created in the metaverse for him. You could go around in 3D and use this metaverse gallery to view the art. If you turn to your right, you could hear the person that was over there. If you turn to the left, you could hear the person over there. It’s a very interesting experience. It’s nice to go to an art gallery, and I haven’t been to one since COVID started.
You can be like us and listen in to all the people admiring your art and say, “Actually, that was not what I intended to state with that piece of art.”
That would be fascinating.
If you’re out West, you got to check out Bright Moments. The IRL NFT gallery in Venice. This has been great, and for our readers, please do check out that demo. It’s super easy to use Koii to upload and share your NFTs. Spend some time there. A couple of minutes and it’ll be off and running in no time. We would love to learn a little bit more about you personally and in some of your experience in buying and selling things and some other fun stuff. We call the next segment Edge Quick Hitters. It’s a fun quick way to get to know you a little better. There are ten questions. We’re looking for short, single, or fewer word answers but feel free to expand if you get the urge. Number one, what’s the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
I bugged a family member to give me money so I could buy a pizza with friends. We’re watching a movie or something like that. I remember ordering a pizza. It was a whole experience of trying to remember where I lived and I had to give them the address and I was ten.
I hope you didn’t use Bitcoin to buy that pizza.
No, thank God. I don’t think my parents knew about Bitcoin. I was also quite a bit too young at the time.
That’s a great foundation for fundraising for companies, bugging your family members and others to give you money.
Number two, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
Landscaping services to neighbors and so on. I was going around with the lawnmower when I was ten. Around the same time as the pizza incident.
Putting in some elbow grease.
You’re Canadian, right Al?
Yeah, I grew up in Halifax.
Attention Economy: If you build an app on Ethereum, you’ve just created another oligarchy of tech giants that own the system that everybody else is publishing content into.
I’m trying to read a Canadian bent to these answers.
It’s pretty normal up here. It looks like suburbia. Some maple leaf stuff is pretty much everywhere. We get a lot of maple syrup.
I’m waiting for the hockey answer.
Number three, what is the most recent thing you purchased?
I bought a bunch of breakfast for the office. The Koii company bought lunch for everybody.
I’m in Venice and it’s all about the breakfast burrito. Is that what we’re talking about here?
No. This was a fruit platter, some cupcakes, and some grapes. We’re very light in the mornings here.
No Tim Hortons over there.
No Tim Hortons that morning but we do often get the Tim Hortons in the morning. That’s a staple in Canada.
Breakfast cupcakes.
They had red velvet cupcakes.
Let’s not lie and call them muffins. Just go straight for the cupcakes.
Number four, what’s the most recent thing you sold?
It’s probably something to do with Koii. I sold someone an NFT.
You just sold me on the idea of a cupcake for breakfast.
Number five, what is your most prized possession?
I’ve got this teeny tiny little Buddha that my dad brought back from a trip when he was in India when I was 4 or 5 years old. It’s the same size as my thumbnail but it’s made of bronze so it’s completely indestructible.
That is very cool.
It’s like an NFT on your platform. You should mint that.
That’s an interesting point. I will have to make it doubly indestructible.
Number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service and experience that’s currently for sale, what would that be?
If you could simultaneously buy up all of the supply of all of the telecom services in the world from the raw providers, you could lock out all the telecom carriers, get rid of Comcast, and replace it with a reasonable company.
It’s like AT&T’s monopoly of the past.
You take over all their bad monopolies and replace them with one good monopoly.
Number seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
I couldn’t say. I don’t know if they’d want them. They’re mostly tinge with too much concern. It’ll probably be good to get some people that don’t litter. I’d like to pass that one on. No littering.
That’s very Canadian. The next question is if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?
Writing software until 5:00 AM. I will axe that one entirely. My children will go to bed by midnight.
Number nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?
I was waiting to talk to you guys because Kayla was on. I was talking to Kevin Abosch about his NFT bridge that we’re working on for him. It’s one of our white glove advisory service types of things. We’re working on helping him bring a collection over from Ethereum where he’s fractionalizing all of his NFTs, and then he doubly fractionalizes them. We’ve got two layers of fractionalization, and then they go back and forth across these bridges. Some of them get minted on one side and some of them are on the other side. They have to all talk to each other but we figured that out.
How does that white-glove service work? I wouldn’t mind someone helping me with some white gloves.
“Tell us about the cool projects you’re working on and we’ll try and help you.” That’s the gist of it. The list gets long sometimes, but we’re here and happy to help. We’ve built all these tools so that people can try them out. Talking through what someone is trying to achieve with them is how we learned. I was on Darren Kleine’s Cointelegraph podcast, and we were talking about some dynamic NFT type of stuff. I don’t know if he’s announced anything yet on that, so I’ll keep quiet. Every time that we talk to somebody that got a new idea, and then we get to work on how we can build that, that ends up building the whole ecosystem quite a bit bigger. We create that into an open-source template that we can give out to people.
Last question, number ten, what are you going to do next after the show?
Maybe a coffee and then a nap. The caffeine nap always works nicely. You get the espresso shot, twenty minutes of sleep, and then you wake up and you’re ready to go.
That is a growth hack that we’re familiar with. The Sleep Doctor, Michael Breus, is a friend of ours. That is his favorite hack to help people get to sleep during the day. It sounds counterintuitive but it works amazingly.
It’s miraculous, especially if you’re doing stuff in the evening. We’d like to frontload the week so we tend to do 12 to 16 hours on Monday and Tuesday, and then the rest of the week, we just wait for everybody else to get back to us.
I’ve got a hack for everyone. Breakfast cupcakes all day long.
There we go. Red velvet.
It’s going to work.
You get that cheesecake frosting on the top. It’s delicious.
Thanks for sharing that with us.
We have Hot Topics coming up next. We’re going to talk about what’s the news of the day and maybe get a little bit of input from Al here. Here’s someone I’ve interviewed for a convention, a little headline about the NFT Artist Pplpleasr. She wrote an article about how crypto changed her life. She was as excited. She was able to make a bit of money while also learning about DeFi. Through word of mouth, her reputation for making cool animations quickly spread. It’s a nice little overview of what’s going on in art and NFT.
When I got a chance to interview her for a panel for the DeFi Summit, what is cool is how this whole space is integrating artists and finance. There’s been a bit of that in the past, but as someone who came from a musical background and hung out with bandmates that didn’t care as much as I did about thinking about finance, investment and so forth, it’s cool to have a specific platform in NFTs where there’s a natural desire to learn about finance, as well as practice your art and get involved.
It’s cool to see pplpleasr continue to crush it and be in such high demand for her art and her style. It’s also a great role model for people that are interested in translating work that they have been thinking about doing or have done in the past that they didn’t know how to distribute or maybe even couldn’t distribute without the platform of NFTs in the entire ecosystem that’s evolving. She’s excited. I’m excited to see her continue to crush it and see who follows in her footsteps.
Attention Economy: It’s going to lead to a lot more of us having equity on the internet where we publish all our content.
I love that story, too. The concept of just gradually getting into this online publishing thing. The neat part is if you can get into it like that, you might get in on a few AirDrops, get a couple of lucky breaks, and maybe you end up earning a crazy amount of money in a short period of time. This has happened to a handful of people I’ve talked to. They start publishing and start participating in the ecosystem, and then it’s a career.
We had Ellie Pritts on the show. She said she had to do it and not overthink it too much. Now she’s helping other artists do that as well. It’s easy to grip the wheel and not realize that inertia is your biggest enemy.
Let’s hop on to the next hot topic here. By the way, that last article we mentioned was at Fortune and written by pplpleasr. It’s cool to read through that if anybody’s interested. The next headline here is NFT Game Crosses Milestone: Over $1B In Sales. “The play-to-earn game Axie Infinity features colorful NFT characters which gamers purchase to engage in battle with others. According to NFT analytics site CryptoSlam, the game has recorded over $1.04 billion in all-time sales with over 2.4 million transactions.” We talked about it on Hot Topics and it wasn’t a passing fancy. Axie Infinity is huge and it’s the go-to call out when you’re talking about NFT gaming and what kind of success can happen there. Have you been following Axie at all and what’s going on there?
Yeah. One thing that they did amazingly is they made the game suitable for lower bandwidth locations and also for people that don’t necessarily have $200 or $300 that they want to put into an NFT. Both of which had been outside of the ecosystem for a while. You had people starting big files in IPFS, and then they’d go to visit OpenSea and it would take forever to load. That absolutely kills it if you’re talking about any Indonesian country, and then a whole swath of Africa. If your file size is more than a megabyte, you can’t do it. It’s great that they have managed to succeed so quickly too.
I heard a similar concept that you’re talking about. It is a book by Peter Diamandis. It’s making this note that people look for markets where the individual transaction size is particularly large because then you have to have fewer customers and it seems easier to build a business around that. That’s why often these markets that you’re mentioning get neglected like Africa or developing countries where people don’t have that much money to spend.
He made this interesting point which is that in some, if you can onboard a bunch of people who don’t have a lot of money to spend but you find a way for them to be able to spend it. You can sometimes make even more than you would in a project that seems like it would be more lucrative. That’s a great point. In general, we’ve seen in the projects that we look at, the folks who are making it easier are the ones that are going to explode things.
Axie is a great story also as we were talking to Yat Siu of Animoca about how those guys were almost entirely out of Vietnam. There wasn’t a lot happening out there. People weren’t sure about the project or the team necessarily. It’s not a hotbed for a lot of projects. With great work, hard work, great design, building community, and creating a narrative that jives with people, it wins out in the long run in a lot of cases. It’s cool to see these guys succeed.
What they’ve done is incredible. We have to get to know the story more, so that’s a nice tangent to the fact that we booked them as a guest on an upcoming show. I’m not even sure if Jeff and Eathan knew that yet. Things move quickly in the world of Edge of NFT. We got them coming on the show. We’ll announce that date in the future. I know a lot of our audience have wanted to know more about Axie Infinity so your wish is our command.
We’re so lucky to have such great guests but then I was like, “We’re not lucky. Josh just hustles. He gets us, awesome guests.” We’re both lucky. We have a great team here. We’re so privileged to be talking to great folks like you, Al, who are working on groundbreaking projects. The next item on the agenda here is Messi has an NFT of his own: One-of-a-kind art for a one-of-a-kind player. “Lionel Messi, who himself is one of a kind, an artist of our time, and who’s playing contracts continue to deal in silly money, is coming out with his own.”
For those unfamiliar with Messi, he is a soccer player. “‘Art, like football, is eternal,’ Messi said in a statement provided exclusively to ESPN. ‘Art is also evolving, and digital art (NFT) is another way to connect with the fans. That’s why I’m happy to be launching my first official NFT.’” That’s great. It’s spreading farther and wider. The folks who already have the name are beginning to say, “I got to jump into this.”
Messi is one of the most popular, high-earning athletes in the world. For people that have that following and that community already, making the jump into NFTs and doing so successfully is easier. That built-in base is there. I would expect nothing less though from these folks. They’re role models and have a massive group of people that follow every single thing that they do. It’s important for those folks to get out there and do that, and maybe inspire other people to do some cool things and follow in their footsteps. It’s definitely different. We’re talking about Messi launching something versus an artist that’s just getting on their feet and trying to figure things out. There had to be platforms for both. As part of what we’ve been talking about, it’s an important step to ensure that other undiscovered people get a platform as well.
I’ve been noticing how folks that are in sports, for example, are able to move into this type of tech space quickly. It’s because maybe they have the support of connections that they’ve built through their fame or something like that. Clearly, Messi is not looking into NFT technology itself too deeply. He’s probably got people that he’s working with on a team that are helping him. That’s a great point though, Jeff. There are these platforms where you don’t necessarily need a tech team or connections to get started, make something happen, and get your feet wet.
It’s interesting with this story as well is. I’ve followed a number of these pro athletes and musicians who’ve launched their own NFTs. There’s an interesting philosophical alignment that most people don’t notice, which is that the person who plays a sport as a professional doesn’t play one game at a time. They’re not trying to win each game. They tend to be in it for the long term. As you said, the game is infinite.
That’s probably one of the main reasons that memorabilia in sports is so significant because people think of it more like history than a competition. There’s this interesting alignment there. It also is a neat thing. Back to this idea of being able to make history. We all get to write history now and it won’t be lost. Whereas 100 years ago, you could have written anything you wanted down, but it probably would have been destroyed. There’s little chance that your great-grandchildren would have kept your scrapbook, but now we absolutely will. It can be done.
I keep thinking of this example, especially when I think of Koii, people paying attention to things, and having them monetized. Football or soccer is a great example of something where the monetization strategy has been figured out. People like to watch this for whatever reason. Guys running around in the field, kicking a ball around, and running into each other. They like to watch it. There’s this whole monetization strategy that’s been built around it like the stadium, managers and all this stuff.
I always think of the example when I lived in New York. There’d be breakdancers out on the street. They do this cool stuff. They’d even be on the subway and everyone are watching intently and clapping and supporting, and then they’d wrap up their act. They’d have to make this awkward thing where they walk around and ask people for money, “You were paying attention, right? How about if you give a couple of bucks out?” I love how there can be an automated way to reward what people think is interesting. Their eyes are on it, so let’s reward it in an automated way that’s not awkward or uncomfortable.
The last thing on that note, we’re excited about this as a way to fund NFTs as well. Some NFTs, if you create something that you want to last forever, it might require some maintenance or it might require somebody to take care of it. Maybe it’s a dApp if you want somebody to take care of it. The attention rewards accrue with the creator of the content, but the creator of the content can delegate them to a DAO or something like that.
One of the ideas that we’re excited about that we’ve implemented is the forever flower called the Narcissus. The Narcissus, as it gets attention, refills its own bounty pool, which incentivizes somebody to come along and call a smart contract spending Arweave tokens to update the latest state. This flower can exist on the internet and will consistently earn Koii tokens so it can pay out a bounty to somebody who does something for it. It’s going to live there by itself now and forever.
It’s fascinating. I love the creativity.
You can do this for just about anything now. You can accrue these rewards and you can make something that lives forever.
I’m so glad we’re able to cover it. For our readers who weren’t familiar with Koii before have a real opportunity to dive in and know a little bit more about it with you. I appreciate you joining us here and spending this time. Before we wrap up though, a couple of things, first, where can people go to learn more about you, Koii, and other projects that you’re working on?
I don’t have many other projects at the moment. Koii takes most of my effort because we’ve put it together in about 6 or 8 months. We’ve put everything that you could possibly want on our Discord though. You can get the Discord link from Koii.Network. Discord is probably also the most active place where you can meet our community. It’s probably usually 300 or 400 people active in there at any given time. There are about 3,000 members or so. I’m also on there. If you ever have questions and you want to come in, you can usually find me and I’ll try to reply to messages as much as I can. Aside from the actual website, there is also a blog. There’s a lot of content in there. We try to update the news page with things like this. If you’re staying abreast with us and you want to catch the latest podcast or maybe you prefer videos, a lot of that is in there as well.
We appreciate that. Word on the street is we do have some sweet giveaways for our audience as well. We got a couple of things happening. Do you want to give the scoop on that?
Koii has been generous and doing an engagement campaign with us for some Koii tokens that folks can earn in a number of different ways. There’ll be a contest link that we’ll share on social media after this show that will go into the details. Folks will have a chance to experiment with the ecosystem to earn some extra Koii. Al, anything to add there?
Not much, except that the more you interact, the more Koii you’ll also earn for your interactions. Do more stuff, get more tokens and stay tuned because there’s a bunch more of these coming.
Thank you for letting us be on the edge of this opportunity with our readers. I’m sure our readers will appreciate it as well. You guys will have a chance to get in there and get an AirDrop before a lot of other folks will even know what Koii is. We like to keep you guys on the Edge of NFTs and this is just another example of that, so thanks, Al.
I love the pun too.
We’ve reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFTs for this episode. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on the starship, so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to iTunes, rate us and say something cool, and then go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Do you want to help co-create Edge of NFT? Got a guest you want to see on the episode? Questions for the hosts or guests? An NFT you’d like us to review? Drop us a line at Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com or tweet us at EdgeOfNFT to get in the mix. Lastly, be sure to tune in next episode for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links:
- Koii
- pplpleasr
- Finnie Wallet
- MetaMask
- Chrome Store – Finnie Wallet
- OpenSea
- Arweave
- WeTeachBlockchain.org
- CoinList
- Tezos
- AtomicNFT.com
- Koi.rocks
- Twitter – Koii Network
- Cryptovoxels
- Bright Moments
- Cointelegraph
- The Sleep Doctor
- NFT artist pplpleasr – article by Fortune
- Ellie Pritts – past episode
- NFT Game Crosses Milestone: Over $1B In Sales – article by Yahoo! Finance
- CryptoSlam
- Peter Diamandis
- Yat Siu – past episode
- Messi has an NFT of his own: One-of-a-kind art for a one-of-a-kind player – article by ESPN
- Discord – Koii
- Blog – Koii
- iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
- Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com
- EdgeOfNFT – Twitter
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