Anthony Georgiades From Pastel, The One-Stop-Shop For Creating, Collecting And Building NFTs To Stand The Test Of Time

|Flexible Ticketing System: The idea of being able to have a permanent decentralized storage solution for both the data and intrinsic metadata could basically stand the test of time.|Flexible Ticketing System: It's important to have both the actual NFT itself and the underlying data to be tightly coupled.|Flexible Ticketing System: The goal was to emulate how a human would view an NFT as being relatively rare from a computer standpoint. So a system was developed that would transform the pixel level NFT data into a fingerprint.|Flexible Ticketing System: This flexible ticketing system is intrinsic to the actual way that Bitcoin functions at its own. You can think about the ticketing system as mirroring smart contracts in some way.|Flexible Ticketing System: There are a lot of problems in the NFT space so solving them will open up the NFT world to any creator. People don't want to risk creating an NFT, knowing that it's not going to get any traction or sell.|||||
NFT 49 | Flexible Ticketing System

 

Anthony Georgiades and his team from Pastel want to provide safe, long-term distributed storage, not only for NFTs, but for the data they connect to. Their system chops stored data into blocks that can be copied and randomly distributed to every single supernode on the network itself. Thus, ensuring that not only ownership is immutable but the digital items that are owned will also last indefinitely. Join your hosts Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger as they speak to the COO Anthony about this system as well as his insights on the NFT marketplace. Learn how Pastel is trying to solve the underlying problems in the NFT marketplace. Also, learn the importance of strategic partnerships and how they can help make NFTs stand the test of time.

Listen to the podcast here

Anthony Georgiades From Pastel, The One-Stop-Shop For Creating, Collecting And Building NFTs To Stand The Test Of Time

I’m Anthony Georgiades from Pastel, a technology platform that provides a better world for NFT creators, collectors, and builders through innovative NFT protocol standards like our new duplicate detection protocol, as well as our permanent storage system. Enjoy this awesome episode with my good friends Eathan, Jeff, and Josh. Thanks.

This is the show that brings you the top 1% of NFTs now and what will stand the test of time. We explore the nuts and bolts and the business side and also the human element of how NFTs are changing the way we interact with the things we love. This show is for the dreamers, disruptors, and doers who are pumped about this ecosystem and driving where it goes next.

This sponsored spotlight episode features Anthony Georgiades, Cofounder of Pastel, which aims to be the world’s most advanced, secure, and decentralized blockchain for NFTs and to revolutionize how creators and collectors interact in a peer-to-peer banner without the high fees or intermediaries that currently impede the physical world and competitive platforms.

In addition to his duties as Cofounder, Anthony is a general partner at Innovating Capital, a technology fund focused on disruptive companies and digital assets that have incubated Pastel Networks since day one. Anthony previously spent time on the investment team at First Round Capital and on the operations teams of various startups. He studied Finance and Management and Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton and Engineering Schools. Anthony, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

It’s so great to have you here and I will throw in robotics, too, because I saw that on your LinkedIn. I noticed that it wasn’t in your profile that you guys share, so that’s pretty cool.

You’ve got to be cool if the robotics gets left off because there’s so much other good stuff there.

Robotics was interesting but I wouldn’t classify myself as a roboticist by any means given that there’s so much talent and people way smarter than me in this space. It was cool to study and immerse myself in computer vision and obviously, a lot of emerging tech that’s become a critical part of Pastel.

It would be cool if you were a roboticist botanist. That would be fun.

Anthony, on your website, it says that your goal is to ensure that even in 100 years, the world does not lose access to a single one of NFTs entrusted to the Pastel Network. I love the clarity of that statement. How did such a bold declaration and a project like Pastel come to be?

In short, our Founder, Jeff, back in 2018, which has only been a few years but in the crypto world that’s 100, had a vision and the wherewithal to see where the path of NFT was going. We had projects like, Counterparty and Colored Coins, CryptoKitties that were coming to market and they were prevalent with a number of different underlying inherent problems, a lot of which are still persistent.

NFT 49 | Flexible Ticketing System

Flexible Ticketing System: The idea of being able to have a permanent decentralized storage solution for both the data and intrinsic metadata could basically stand the test of time.

 

Storage was one of those huge items. The idea of being able to have a permanent, decentralized storage solution for both the data and intrinsic metadata itself of underlying NFTs that could stand the test of time in a fully decentralized fashion. Also, not relying on an external dependency, like IPFS pinning, not reliant on a hyperlink that points to some centralized server.

We’ve seen projects that have been susceptible to rug pulling in that respect as well. That’s one of the core aspects of the platform itself. Pastel was always meant, at its core, to be this Layer-1 blockchain that became the standard for various protocols as it pertains to NFT, specifically one of which being our storage layer itself.

It’s so interesting. We had this conversation on the show that not all NFTs are created equal. People don’t realize that. They go to OpenSea, hit buy, and they think they have an NFT, but what you guys have done is you’ve figured out that there’s a lot of inherent challenges and nuances to building a network that supports NFTs that can last. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that?

Yes. When you buy a smart contract-based NFT, you’re acquiring a token ID and effectively a hyperlink that will point to where that actual metadata is stored and that could be a centralized server. That could be reliant upon IPFS pinning and things like that. For us, it was important to have both the actual NFT itself and the underlying data that it represented to be tightly coupled until we built out a sophisticated ticketing system.

Also, an intrinsic storage layer on the network itself to allow for such. In the storage layer, you can think about it as follows, the best analogy is, you upload an NFT to the platform itself. We take the actual data, we chop it up into a bunch of little blocks, we copy those blocks, and we randomly distribute it to every single supernode on the network itself.

Even if 70%, 80%, 90% of the nodes randomly went down, you could still recover the actual data from the actual remaining nodes on the network. To us, it was an important problem to solve. Since being founded in 2018, it’s been years in the making to develop the system. It’s become a protocol standard as well so it’s exciting to see us when we’re taking this out to market. The number of Layer-1 platforms, existing NFT marketplaces, commercial enterprises that are excited to partner with us, work with us, and leverage some of these protocols such as the storage layer.

I can appreciate that. As we say in our intro, we’re here about standing the test of time as well with the projects we explore so we can resonate with that long-term vision you guys have. Can you talk our readers through the beta launch of the Pastel marketplace? What’s it all about?

To take a quick step back, Pastel Network, at its core, is a Layer-1 blockchain built on the intrinsic data integrity of the core NFTs themselves. For us, it was important to, beyond building out these protocols that other Layer-1s or other NFT marketplaces could leverage, but to also launch our marketplace directly on top of Pastel that would leverage all of our core functionalities. Initially, it was a proof of concept but over time, to solve some of the other intrinsic issues such as network congestion, high transaction fees, storage constraints, lack of proven authenticity, and whatnot.

Even beyond that, some of the frictions of user onboarding. Effectively, for us, it was quite critical to build a marketplace that was as easy as almost swiping a credit card for users to onboard. For us, the focus was always, on day one, having the most user-friendly, user-intuitive platform that would cater not necessarily just to crypto native users but any both existing and aspiring digital creator or collector in the world.

That’s so important. We talked about that over and over again here. The underlying technology is super important and revolutionary, but the folks who are going to help let this stuff stand the test of time are the ones that are going to bring it to the mainstream, the ones that are going to make it easy. Press a button, swipe a credit card, and even easier than that. It’s the future we’re looking at.

The people that helped NFTs stand the test of time are the ones that are going to bring it to the mainstream. Click To Tweet

An important distinction here is that Pastel is not just an NFT marketplace. It’s a network and there’s a lot of different layers of functionality to Pastel that you’ve started to talk to us about. I’m still trying to understand it all because there’s a lot there. One thing that comes to mind is this Near-Duplicate NFT Detection. What’s that all about and why does that matter?

If you think about it, blockchain is an amazing piece of technology. For the first time, users, from a peer-to-peer fashion without any central intermediary, are middlemen that are pervasive in the traditional, contemporary art world, enabling users across the world to transfer digital collectibles, back and forth. With that, though, comes some intrinsic flaws.

I could take an existing NFT off of Solana, rip it, and trade it on any Ethereum-based platform. It’s the same NFT itself or the same actual data itself or I can even take that asset file, I can make an invisible change, crop, or change some of the coloring effects. If I’m reliant on some of the detection standards that we see now to see if the file is the same, which rely on something called a perceptual hash, the computer will think about that file as something different, because I’ve changed, cropped, or changed the pixel on it but from a human perspective, it’s the same exact file.

For us, it was, “How can we emulate how a human would view an NFT as being relatively rare from a computer standpoint?” We’ve developed the system and at its core, we take the NFT data, we go through a number of different deep learning methodologies to transform the pixel level data into a fingerprint.

That fingerprint is a 10,000 plus digit vector. We’re able to then take that fingerprint and assess it against every other fingerprint that exists in the underlying data set. That data set could be defined as all NFTs existing on Pastel, all NFTs existing in the broader ecosystem or metaverse, and even effectively on the broader internet. You can do a reverse image search on Google or whatever you might want to do.

From there, we effectively assign a relative rareness score from 0% to 100%. 100% being this is the first time this computer has seen this level of rareness. 0% being this is an outright duplicate of something else. We’ve obviously seen a lot of scams, outright fraud that’s become a little bit more pervasive in the ecosystem and whatnot. This was a problem that we saw coming. It’s exciting because this particular protocol, which stands on its own, can be leveraged in a number of existing marketplaces as well. For us, we have a lot of the tools and infrastructure. How do we best collaborate with the broader ecosystem and various aspects of the general NFT community?

One thing that fascinates me about this project is that you’ve chosen to base it on the Bitcoin codebase, which some people may find to be counter-intuitive, but I know that’s your secret sauce. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about why you chose Bitcoin codebase as the foundation and how that relates to your on-chain, distributed storage protocols.

Let’s take a quick step back. At the core C-note, as we call it, is effectively a fork of Zcash, which is Bitcoin was a trusted setup, and zk-SNARKs. That’s our core consensus layer. From there, we levered on top of it the concept of these supernodes, which require users to stake a certain amount of PSL and run a very high-powered server or client, which runs a lot of these deep learning methodologies, which has enough storage to help store these blocks that are referred to in the storage protocol.

Those are two core aspects of the system that worked together. Going back to the Bitcoin aspect, if you look back in time, there’s been a lot of research. Over the last couple of years, people have gone down the web three routes of smart contract design and things like that. Smart contracts have a lot of limitations from our perspective in the sense of, they’re good for general-purpose type applications in a world of decentralized finance. In particular, credit markets, even insurance, and lending products as well. For specific, feature-based applications like NFTs, we thought of a better way of a custom, highly flexible ticketing system that leverages the intrinsic UTXO model of Bitcoin. They’re leveraging something called Pay-to-Fake-Multisig.

Effectively, we’ve been able to design this ticketing system that’s intrinsic to the actual way that Bitcoin functions on its own. Each actual Bitcoin transaction or UTXO is transmitting this ticket-level data. You can almost think about the ticketing system as marrying smart contracts in some way but it enables us to bolt on additional features over time as well.

We can create a ticket for a new collection or a new series. We included a ticket for limiting, adding the four or the reserve price, or whatever it might be. Who knows where we’re going to be in a couple of years? Maybe we need a ticket for an NFT that pertains to an apartment building or something in the real estate sphere.

NFT 49 | Flexible Ticketing System

Flexible Ticketing System: It’s important to have both the actual NFT itself and the underlying data to be tightly coupled.

 

For us, it was a lot more of a flexible agile model over time but one other thing I’d like to add in terms of why Bitcoin, Zcash, more than anything, we wanted something that started off with a rock-solid, extremely secure foundation that was reliable, durable. We’ve seen some of the broader network congestion issues and some of the smart contract-based platforms. I’m a big fan of Solana. Full disclosure, I’m a big investor.

We’ve had some outages that have happened. These smart contract platforms are going to solve a lot of problems as it pertains to financial applications that require a drastic, high throughput, high transactions per second, where speed is critical, in the case of NFT applications where it might be less about transactions per second and velocity but more about the actual core functionality, durability, and security as it pertains to storage, proven authenticity.

It’s amazing stuff. Thank you for sharing the details of that. You mentioned partnerships as it’s related to the duplicate NFT detection feature. As you look at the broader blockchain ecosystem, what are some of the other ways that Pastel is thinking about partnering with other key Layer-2 players?

To take a quick step back, what I love about the way that these protocols have been designed is they’re lightweight and easy to integrate. It’s as easy as, “I’m minting an NFT on Rarible.” I make a function call to call it the Pastel New Duplicate Detection Protocol. That passes through the actual data and returns a JSON with a relative rareness score, which then gets submitted on the NFT. Same with the stories that I write. They all reference back to a hash that’s been signed by three supernodes on the network itself.

The way to integrate it is, it’s the level of interoperability where any layer two marketplaces or any application can leverage some of these specific protocols that I mentioned. You can launch your own entire on-chain marketplace directly on the Pastel Network. You can do anything. You can launch your own application or whatever it might be.

It’s been exciting to see a lot of the progress we’ve made with a few platforms that you guys have had on your show in the past which will be announced, as well as even commercial enterprises that are looking to launch on-chain marketplaces directly on Pastel given the very lightweight durable aspect to it. Also, Layer-1 blockchains that are launching their marketplaces that might not necessarily have some of the functionality that we’ve developed or what we prefer to leverage our storage layer, relative readiness checks, and things like that.

Is there any way we can pull out of you any of those partnership names or collaborations right now?

There are a couple that would be coming out. You’ve chatted with some of them in the past. I’ll keep you abreast as things become official and come to market.

We narrowed it down a little bit.

We only have 47 episodes. We’re in episode 48, so that doesn’t help too much.

Fraud is a problem in the NFT ecosystem. People should collaborate with the various aspects of the general NFT community. Click To Tweet

We’ve got some big ballers out there, so that’s awesome. Congrats.

We talked about some of these Layer-2 players you’re partnered with but what about potential commercial applications and partners? In that respect, can you give us any details on what you might foresee in the future or at present?

There’s a couple of talent agencies that are looking to launch white label solutions that are either branded towards specific creators that are trying to tailor themselves towards that creator-specific audience or for their broader base of different creators and entertainers that they represent. On the flip side, there are a couple of players in the actual gaming and sports gambling space who are looking to launch NFT platforms. We’re working with their existing labs to help provide some of these resources that I alluded to, as well.

It’s exciting to see where the markets are going because it’s still early. From a lot of people’s perspectives, NFTs are digital collectibles. They mean a lot more than that. Anything that should be movable and stale will become an NFT in the future. That could be anything from a piece of property in the real estate markets to the credit markets all the way to gaming, even data itself. Think about data that’s being minted from an oil refinery at a certain point in time or even an IoT device.

These are certain applications that are not months or even a couple of years but several years away. It’s exciting to see a lot of the commercial applications that people are starting to explore. I’m surprised that the media has not necessarily garnered as much attention on some of those applications yet but being in the weeds and inner talk with a lot of these enterprises. There’s a lot of idea generation and a lot of innovation in the works.

One use case that I became aware of is these Gambling Apes and Monkeys that you can buy and be part of these decentralized casinos. As I think through that, I think of the challenges with this concept of dripping profits from a casino into someone’s wallet from NFT. There are security issues and a lot of things where your technology would help shore up the hatches.

On a side note, and not to go off on a tangent, but you mentioned Apes. One thing that I do love about what we’re seeing is if you look at the Bored Yacht Club, which to me represents an interesting aspect of the ecosystem. It’s ownership as membership. If I own one of these Apes, I get access to a specific community with other Ape owners. That gives me rights to certain airdrops, memorabilia. The impact that this can have on the broader realm of social media is quite insurmountable as well.

We’ll see where that goes as well but some of the existing social media players need to potentially keep an eye out or play catch up on this. Talking with some of these talent agencies, too, people have been a little bit more reactive than proactive. Whereas the community is moving so fast and evolving in certain ways that if you don’t get on board, you’re going to get left behind.

We talked about how the focus right now has been on these gas wars, who want to pay $800 in gas that costs $500 in speed issues. It was crazy when Solana shut down for almost 24 hours, if not more. I’m not sure but it was shut down for a while. These are the conversations of the day. What do you think the conversations are going to be like tomorrow? What does the future of the NFT market look like?

In terms of, obviously, where Solana is right now, people do forget that this project has been in existence for a couple of years and they’ve made tremendous progress in a short period of time. The team there is incredible. They’ve executed a number of their objectives but at the same time, you’ve had an inflow of different dApps, smart contract platforms living on top of Solana. There’s a trade-off by having a single state, single shard mechanism that’s intrinsically tied to proof of history, and verifiably delayed functions themselves. There are kinks that are being worked out right now. The people also forget that it’s early innings. These are growth pains and the platform themselves.

To tie that back to the world of NFTs, high transaction fees, and network congestion, and things like that, solving those problems to open up the world to any creator around the world getting comfortable, “I don’t want to necessarily risk $100 or $300 to mint my first NFT. I don’t know if it’s going to get any traction or sell. I’m an aspiring digital artist, and this is the first time I can mint my creation.”

NFT 49 | Flexible Ticketing System

Flexible Ticketing System: The goal was to emulate how a human would view an NFT as being relatively rare from a computer standpoint. So a system was developed that would transform the pixel level NFT data into a fingerprint.

 

Solving those problems is critical to reaching a broader audience of adopters worldwide. The percent volume transaction in terms of the NFT environment now is still heavily associated with what I would view as crypto native users. We haven’t necessarily reached mass adoption. We’re far from it. What does the world look like tomorrow? It’s reaching that point of massive scale consumer and enterprise adoption in some of the applications I mentioned. Beyond that, obviously, a handful of those broader applications in the world of credit markets, real estate, and data.

Some of the other exciting stuff that we’re starting to see as well. The dials are spinning up fractionalization, even NFT indices. One thing that’s quite interesting is if you think about it, we’re still early but look at the price of the floor of CryptoPunks or Apes. You’ve already created this intrinsic barrier in a world that’s supposed to be relatively accessible, decentralized, and open to the masses. If I’m a user and I’m aspiring to garner at CryptoPunks, I’ve already been priced out from an economic standpoint.

What’s exciting to me are some of these fractionalization protocols and standards that enable groups to spin up dials, decide what they’re going to require. A thousand people can pull together enough funds to acquire a Punk and they each have a fractional piece of ownership on that. They have the right to display it as theirs. There’s their ownership component of that and it can go out and compete with maybe the whales of the world that would go buy a piece themselves. To me, it’s a little bit more exciting and different than in the world of contemporary art. I can buy a fractional piece of a painting but I don’t get to display that piece. That’s one side of the world in terms of where I see it going that’s also quite innovative.

Are there any particular projects or platforms that we haven’t discussed that stand out to you as movers, shakers, or game changers that will help bring that future here?

You have platforms like ShardingDAO, and a platform on Solana called Burnt Finance that is bringing a lot of protocol standardization around auction mechanisms for pricing. You have NFTX. There’s a lot of innovation going on in the world across all these different mechanisms that I mentioned. Those stood out to me.

It’s been great to learn about Pastel. We’d love to show our viewers, the folks that will watch this on YouTube. If you’re reading you can head over there and take a peek at a demo. Anthony has one that he can share with us. I would love to take a look at that if you’re down.

I’ll show you a little sample of the marketplace itself. This is a quick recording of our actual Pastel marketplace in action. It’s sleek, user-intuitive, and friendly. The general idea behind it was to also emulate, and think back on what I mentioned with respect to the social media aspects of where NFTs can garner a lot of market share and take things over.

For us, it was important to have something that had a significant aspect of social media community engagement associated with it. You can see here a user listing out their specific followers. You can have friends, leave comments, and you have your own comment board precreation, procreator. To us, it was important to have an interactive design that is quite user-friendly and user-intuitive.

This aspect was important for us as well. How can we make it super easy for non-crypto native users who aren’t necessarily super familiar with a private key? With the reliant and redundant security of cryptographic schemes as the backing but also being unable to have a simple password. This here is the input data from going to register an NFT. You can see it here and it makes it superfluid for users to create the title, series, add specific hashtags to the collection, create a series name, create a number of copies, and add a perpetual royalty.

What is super cool is providing a link to the creator’s website, as well as a creation video. It’s like, “This is me creating the NFT. This is me in the process of putting it together.” One thing, too, is you can mint the NFT as a green NFT and what that means is the transaction fees themselves will get sent back to a nonprofit that goes and plants trees to offset some of the carbon emission and be a bit more eco-friendly. In the broader environment, we’ve seen certain issues in terms of sustainability that take place now.

This is our image optimization component for users overall. What I want to show is this rareness score. I’ll walk you through it a little bit more. You can see it here going through the rareness system itself. Here’s what the output looks like. Here’s how rare this NFT is to Pastel. Here’s how rare it is on the internet. This is also an NSFW check. We leverage a lot of innovations to check that this is NSFW safe and, in this case, has a score of 100%. It’s not susceptible to anything that would be NSFW. From there, I’ll flip over to what is cool.

Make something that builds off a very rock-solid and secure foundation that's both reliable and durable. Click To Tweet

It’s nothing too crazy here. It’s demonstrating the contour image of a specific NFT itself. Effectively, this is one of the hardest problems of computer vision for quite some time. It’s like, “How can I identify that this is uniquely rare per se.” The contrary image effect is something that, in the world of computer vision, has been a hard problem to solve for quite some time. We’ve been able to hone down and hammer in on that. This one that you saw briefly demonstrates that at the end of the day, by putting these two images side by side, we know that this is not a relatively rare image itself. Our computer vision outputs a score of about 15%, demonstrating that this is not rare.

It detects those similarities smartly. That’s cool. Thanks for sharing.

Another cool thing, you have the comments embedded, which is an interesting feature and I’m assuming, based on your focus on authenticity, that you’re able to make sure these are real comments. People have bots on Twitter and Discord commenting on their NFTs. If this is all in the blockchain, the way that you’re having people sign in is an advanced feature set that you’ve built up.

Thanks for sharing with us. To our readers, head over to YouTube and you’ll be able to check out that demo over there and see some of the ins and outs of that intuitive slick design. Let’s move over to segment three, our Edge Quick Hitters, if that works for everybody. These are a fun and quick way to get to know you a little better. It’s ten questions and we’re looking for a short word, single word, or few word responses. Feel free to expand if you get the urge. Are you ready to jump in?

Let’s do it.

Question number one, what’s the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?

It’s got to be lemonade in a lemonade stand.

Picking it up and supporting the community like the kids out there selling stuff.

A pretty close second was a Frappuccino at Starbucks. Full disclosure, I had a Frappuccino addiction at one point. I drank 1 or 2 of those a day when I was five.

Flipside, question two, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?

I sold candy at school. We weren’t allowed to buy candy at school. There was high demand and low supply. I buy packs of Jolly Ranchers at CVS for $2 a bag and I’d sell each one for $1. It was pretty interesting.

NFT 49 | Flexible Ticketing System

Flexible Ticketing System: This flexible ticketing system is intrinsic to the actual way that Bitcoin functions at its own. You can think about the ticketing system as mirroring smart contracts in some way.

 

Racking up the big bucks pushing candy. Moving on question three, what’s the most recent thing you purchased?

Pudgy Penguin.

Question four, what’s the most recent thing you sold?

TQQQ ETF.

Question number five, what is your most prized possession?

My Crypto-Keys. No question.

Do you want to tell us what those are?

Keep them safe.

Question six. If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical service, and experience that’s currently for sale, what would that be?

This is a luxurious item. I would love to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers. We were chatting about that. I’ve always thought about a sports franchise and that franchise to me is built on so much integrity having a solid rotation inside and out. It prides itself on achieving the best it can every year. The underlying core and dominance through there, there’s nothing like it.

You can do so many cool things with NFTs for the Dodgers that they probably haven’t thought about yet.

You grab the Dodgers. I’ll grab the Lakers. Let’s take over LA. Question seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would that be?

Anything that is immovable or stale will become an NFT in the future. Click To Tweet

The contrarian side of me, not pessimistic, per se, but a little skeptical by nature and seeing the flip side of things. It’s helped in terms of avoiding certain scenarios in terms of the world, especially with social media, data, access information, and misinformation, it can become a scary place. It’s looking at everything with a third eye.

That’s super valuable. Flipside, question eight, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be, besides your Frappuccino addiction?

Stemming from what I alluded to, overthinking things, being a little too analytical. One of the best phrases I heard is that the only truth in the world is your instinct and your gut. It’s living by that a little bit more and not overthinking and overanalyzing everything too much.

I have to follow that up like I did when that was last given. Are you sure that’s your answer to that one?

Let me think about that.

I love that you have the intuition to buy a Pudgy Penguin so far into it. A lot of people would buy these NFTs in the beginning but clearly, you trust your gut there, too.

Question nine, which is a little bit easier, what did you do before joining us on the show?

I was at a Conference. That was fun.

Question ten, last one, easy, what are you going to do next after the show?

Back to the conference, maybe do some network events. It should be fun.

Maybe some after parties. Good times.

I’m getting too old for that.

It’s crypto. That’s Edge Quick Hitters. Thanks so much for playing with us. We appreciate it. We’re ready to wrap up here. We’re running out of time. Where can our readers go to learn more about you, Pastel, and what you guys are working on?

Our website has a plethora of information. Links are different channels, but I would follow us on Twitter. Join the Telegram to stay up to date in terms of all things Pastel.

NFT 49 | Flexible Ticketing System

Flexible Ticketing System: There are a lot of problems in the NFT space so solving them will open up the NFT world to any creator. People don’t want to risk creating an NFT, knowing that it’s not going to get any traction or sell.

 

Check that out. Also, I heard that we have a killer giveaway lined up for our readers. Do you want to touch base on that? We got some background on that. Josh or Anthony, do you want to touch on that?

Josh, take it away.

We’re going to be giving a lot of Pastel tokens away to our readers to give them a chance to get to know the product better, follow you guys on Twitter, and all those other good things, and become part of the ecosystem. This is revolutionary what you’re doing Anthony, and we wanted to create a contest that gives people a chance to get involved.

Follow us on our socials, you’ll be able to read all about it there. It’s something around 500,000 PSL across five different winners, so 100,000 PSL each. It’s all about celebrating the launch of the platform so keep an eye out. We’ll get you all the details. Anthony, thanks so much again for taking this time to introduce Pastel to all of our readers and to give us all the deets as well as share some personal perspectives in our Edge Quick Hitters.

Thanks for having me.

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. If you want to help co-create Edge of NFT, or you’ve got a guest you want to see on the episode, questions for the hosts or guests, or 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 to the next episode for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.

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About Anthony Georgiades

Anthony is serving as interim COO of Pastel and is a General Partner at Innovating Capital, a technology fund focused on disruptive companies that has incubated Pastel Network since day one.

Anthony previously spent time on the investment team at First Round Capital and on the operations teams of various startups. He studied finance, management, and computer science at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton and Engineering schools.

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