It may be a bearish market right now but that doesn’t seem to preclude innovative creators in the Web3 space from thinking of cool new projects. This episode features the Edge of NFT live from ETHDenver 2023. We interviewed three different companies about how they’re looking to shape the Web 3.0 industry and beyond. Stay tuned to learn how NEAR Protocol is a blockchain creating without limits, how Cronos is a blockchain combining both the Ethereum and Cosmos Ecosystems, and from our final guest whose interview got cut short due to technical issues. We’ll learn more about how the blockchain Arbitrum‘s suite of scaling solutions provides faster speeds than Ethereum but with the same level of security. Tune in for all of these and more!
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Edge Of NFT At ETH Denver: Interviews With NEAR Protocol, Cronos Labs, And Offchain Labs
This episode features the show live from ETHDenver 2023. We interviewed three different companies about how they’re looking to shape the Web 3.0 industry and beyond. Stay tuned to learn how NEAR Protocol is a blockchain creating without limits, how Cronos is a blockchain combining both the Ethereum and Cosmos Ecosystems, and from our final guest whose interview got cut short due to technical issues. We’ll learn more about how the blockchain Arbitrum‘s suite of scaling solutions provides faster speeds than Ethereum but with the same level of security. Stay tuned.
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I’m so excited to be here with Illia, the Cofounder of NEAR Protocol. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for inviting me. It’s great to be here.
It’s been an exciting few days for us and I know you had a big announcement about NEAR and where you guys are going. Why don’t you tell our readers about what you talked about? It’s exciting stuff.
If you remember one thing from this show is that NEAR is the BOS. Let me unpack that. Overall, we have always been building mass adoption toward giving users the control they need, the assets control, the data control, and all of these things. The problem is you always start from building foundational infrastructure and it’s a very developer-focused and centric view. At the same time, we have a pretty big ecosystem.
There are thousands of projects building but they all are still very fragmented. They’re building different pieces of experience. There’s no single place where users can come and start experiencing navigating. There’s another part which is most of the blockchain is not very decentralized because you are still at the end at UniSwap.org website. You have Curve that got hacked. You have the front nds that are developed by the centralized team and are highly susceptible to issues.
What we have launched is a new layer that allows us to build composable front ends that are decentralized that are served from the blockchain. This is then built on an already existing data stack we have on top of any blockchain. With that, you can start building applications and user applications extremely fast that are fully decentralized. The front end and back end are decentralized. You can use any smart contract on any blockchain. You can have new apps that use Ethereum smart contract and NEAR smart contract at the same time in one application, one experience. Users will not know about it. They’ll log in and start using it.
They’ll launch a lot more things like search, notifications, and all of the experiences that users are used to in one package. That’s what we call in Blockchain Operating System. It’s a place where developers get all of the tools and services they need to build. The users can come in and use applications and not think about hardware or the blockchain behind the scene. All this we released at Alpha.Near.org. This is where the preview of this is happening. There are already over 2,000 users there and a lot of developer activity as well. It’s going to be rolling out over the next few months wider.
You guys have been busy. This is a massive announcement. Can we rewind in terms of who you are and how we got to this moment and how much preparation went into this?
I’m from Ukraine. My background is in machine learning. I’ve been doing machine learning for a few years. I was at Google Research working across natural language understanding. I contributed to a paper that right now all of the ChatGPT-3 stuff is based on. I left Google and partnered up with my cofounder Alex. We were starting to work on how to use some of these models to generate code. We wanted to automate software development.
As part of that, we ended up building a crowdsourcing system. We had people around the world, mostly students working on small tasks for us and we needed to pay them like micropayments. It’s hard to do with the traditional financial system, especially when you’re paying into China, Russia, and Ukraine back then. We started looking at blockchain as a solution to our problem while we were doing something else. The more we got into the rabbit hole, the more we realized there is a problem in the blockchain that is very not solved.
When was this?
This was in May 2018. This was after the hype of the ICOs, etc., but there is a technology that’s supposed to be a global payment network but when you start trying to use it, it’s super complicated. It’s super clunky and expensive. It doesn’t scale. We had a few thousand people a day, for example, and it was not scaling. It was more expensive to pay people on Ethereum than how much we were paying them. We were like, “That’s a problem.” We started digging on what are our alternatives, approaches, protocols, etc.
We did not find anything that was approaching from base principles of how we sell scalability but maintain usability. How do we keep the experience of using the blockchain as removed from the user as possible? That’s what NEAR started with. How do we make it simple to use and build for developers? It should be secure and it needs to be scalable. It’s simple, secure, and scalable.
Blockchain was piece number one as a foundation as a structure, but we always were building user tooling, developer tooling, and focusing on end-to-end experience. This announcement is tying it all together. It’s because we started as layer one but in reality, it’s not about layer one. Layer one is the component you need to build this enabling experience for the users. That’s why we’re calling it a Blockchain Operating System.
I could have used BOS back in college. Had we met back then maybe ten years earlier, you would’ve gotten started earlier because I was working remotely with a company doing optical character recognition processing with a team of college students at my own college and other colleges all over the world. I was trying to figure out how to do these micropayments to get them compensated for taking these characters and processing them. It was difficult back then too. I totally get it. I think there are a lot of micro-economies that can benefit from this technology.
In the end, what blockchain is good at is opening up markets and everything in our life is a market. We don’t usually perceive it that way. Right now, it’s so hard to even when you do have it on the chain to access it. We are making it easy, cross-chain available, and the liquidity to flow. At the same time, the user experience is you don’t need to think about any of the blockchain details.
With the big announcement that you did, which I think is quite remarkable. You were starting to get into Alpha.Near.org which is the BOS which you all are bringing out. It’s very timely as Josh was alluding to how back into college he was starting to build. He was trying to create these things. People call it a bear market. We’re in a builder’s market. It’s time for people to build and you all are creating a process for people to be able to do that. Why would more and more people enter your ecosystem to participate in this latest drop?
A quick note on the bear market. We started in pretty much August 2018. If you remember, this was on a full-on steep dropdown. We built through 2019 and launched in 2020. 2019 was great. There were so little distractions. You could focus and build a reputation. It was amazing. For us right now, it’s an amazing time. We are building and shipping. Our team started shipping faster.
Your team isn’t trading crypto as much. They’re just working.
It’s really exciting and we see similar things happening to our developers in our ecosystem but what this BOS platform allows you to do is develop faster. It’s not only developing faster in Web 3.0. This is a faster development environment for frontends already in Web 2.0. We see some people building Web 2.0 applications on this as well. You don’t need to do hosting, identity, have payments embedded, need a stripe or anything. You can compose from existing pieces quickly new experiences. What we already see is this is going to be a better developer experience and that’s always what we were trying to do.
Web 3.0 should be better than Web 2.0. It should not be like, “We should be matching the Web 2.0 experience.” No, it should be 10X better. It should be building faster. You should be attracting users faster. There should be better network effects because users have control. They don’t have issues and the onboarding should be easier, not harder. You should be coming with your social graphs. If you’re using a new app and you already have your social graph, you don’t need to re-onboard and refollow everyone. It should be really quick. That’s what we’re getting right now. We have a social graph already on chain. We have all these pieces coming together now and we see people like building new experiences that are possible to do with Web 2.0 but it’s going to take you so much longer.
Here, you can ship things in 1 or 2 days. That’s why I’m citing here for the Hackathon because we have a bunch of bounties. We have a bunch of things for people to build. After this, we’re going to continue rolling this in. We already see a bunch of people coming and I’m sure there’ll be more and more. Even from Web 2.0, we’ll see the power of this.
Your ecosystem is off also quite robust. I’m in LA and there are a lot of NEAR builders and projects that are spawning from the NEAR ecosystem. We have Chris Gale coming on our show. He is the founder of the new NFT marketplace on NEAR. What is some of the existing projects that everyone should know about that are being built on the NEAR ecosystem that you’re excited about?
I will name a few but then I’ll get a lot of shit for not naming somebody else. I’ll apologize. The ones that I think are exciting. There’s a whole host of NFT marketplaces that are amazing so far. There’s Mintbase and Paras. There are a few others that are de-aggregators. All of that is powerful because NEAR is always been designed for utility first. A lot of these folks are working on cool experiences like utility enablement and working with existing companies to create some experience around NFT and not only drop and not have anything from this.
I think that’s exciting. There’s a lot of gaming that’s built around these communities. It’s a cool game set. They take time to build. They are way more way longer usually than one expects. We have cool financial applications. I’ll name Orderly because it’s solving the problems that we’ve seen with centralized exchanges by having a decentralized order book where the order book itself is off-chain.
You still have the performance of centralized exchange but all the custody and settlement happens on the chain right away. You cannot do things that we have seen centralized changes do with this model while you still have exactly the same experience as centralized exchange. They’ve been growing and they’re launching more products. Keep track of that. There’s a lot of exciting stuff in DAOs. People keep experimenting and the social IP ownership spaces are interesting.
The social niché as well in LA. Check it out. Its mini-communities and NFT-enabled but also creates niché communities. I think it’s where the social interactions are going anyway and IP ownership spans from SailGP owning a team with a DAO through, for example, Kino where the community fund the movie and interacts with it. You have a very big range of what IP ownership means but that use case is extremely powerful. There’s a ton of other stuff. There’s infrastructure and tooling but the end-user experience is where it’s getting exciting.
As you’re looking at this, more and more builders are coming to your ecosystem. You have a lot of different pieces of your ecosystem that are making it more possible for users to onboard and become part of that mass adoption. The mass adoption word is something that people like to toss around or talk about all the time. Right now, during this builder time and as you launched BOS, you’re trying to help bring that out by allowing your developers to come and be able to build easier and bring on those devs over into Web 3.0. Also, for your end-user experience to be more fluid. What is it going to take to keep moving mass adoption forward?
BOS is not only the developer platform. It’s similar to Windows back in the day and right now the iOS and iPhone. It’s important that the platform itself gets enough audience so that it becomes the distribution channel and then developers want to come to it because it’s a distribution channel. People started wanting to build for iOS early on because they knew there were enough iPhones out there.
What we are doing with BOS and with Alpha.Near.org is starting to build distribution and audience. There are few core primitive social interactions and engagement that start a lot of this. We’re still starting with our community. Right now, it’s Superfans are still Web 3.0 users but we are dropping, boarding, and making sure that we’re going to be using biometrics for creating private keys behind the scene so that users don’t even see that.
You look at your phone and you’re in. You have your private key. It’s self-custody. It’s synced. It’s in iCloud or in Google password but you don’t even need to know about that. As soon as you have the engagement, you have followed and we’ll have gross engines on top of this. This is a two-sided market. Developers are building new experiences and then we bring in more and more users into these experiences and match them.
What we’ll need to figure out is how to build better and better matching with the discovery part. I think that’s where the network effect is going to start because everything is on the same platform. Users have control over their data and can interact with any of these apps and experiences. They’ll see that, “I’m going from here to here. I still see my friends but now they’re interacting with music.”
We have music applications as well, the Tamago endless. You can go, “I see this new person that I saw listening to this music. They’re organizing a DAO to go to a concert together.” You can join that. You can have these interesting flows and interactions between different experiences. We don’t have this in Web 2.0 and on Web 3.0. This is what we’re trying to put together and a lot of growth behind it. We onboard a lot of users from Sweatcoin and from other already existing audiences. Right now, it’s still logged on to one application to give them a lot of engagement.
It’s exciting to hear how all this is coming together for NEAR and where you guys are going. When we talk about mass adoption, there’s the hockey stick analogy and it feels that you guys are trying to push this whole industry forward, not only what’s happening in NEAR itself. What’s the timing in terms of where we are in the hockey stick and not having rose-colored glasses on? When do we hit that inflection point based on how you see the acceleration growth within the NEAR ecosystem?
There’s still a lot to build. As I said, we’re launching for example easier onboarding. We’re launching a lot of better recovery methods and all of those pieces. Understanding every drop-off point for users is extremely important. Similarly, Sweatcoin, for example, has 120 million installs. They have the user base but that user base is not activated yet. They’re not fully engaged with all of the experiences on the blockchain. We need to do both. We need to drop the onboarding lower and lower but then test and try the engagement. This is normal product work. We’re talking about stuff that everybody does but we’ll need a lot of experiments and see. Our goal is to have it coming together for NeoCon.
When’s that this year? We’re not trying to trick you but that will be coming up in what quarter of 2023?
In the first quarter. I think we’ll see pretty nice growth from that and more cohesion between all these applications. Again, not just the NEAR Protocol blockchain but another blockchain as well. We already support MetaMask log-in. You can use the Sender as well. We can see how the whole Web 3.0 ecosystem is going to be coming together on a bus.
That’s pretty incredible and a lot of people reading this right now are excited. They’re like, “Now is the time. I’ve been waiting for that moment to try to get with NEAR.” How can people start to engage and learn more about BOS and everything that’s going on?
You can start with NEAR.org. If you are interested in diving in, that’s where to go. We are working on onboarding. There are still some kinks. That’s why it’s awful but that’s been an engaging experience already. As I said, 2,000 people are interacting there. There’s a whole real live feed that people are following. There are applications and games that are already built there. Some other experiences, financial experiences, and NFT experiences. The NFT marketplace is built inside the BOS already. There is a lot of stuff to play around with and give feedback on. If you’re a developer, build some more stuff and see it grow as more and more stuff gets launched.
We appreciate your time with us, Illia. I know there’s a lot going on at ETHDenver. I hope it’s a meaningful process from here in terms of getting those builders to get pumped about what’s going on. We’ve got Outer Edge LA and we are working with some of your companies on that. We look forward to maybe seeing you in NeoCon and being part of that and getting some updates. Thanks for your time.
It sounds good. Thank you.
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We are here with Ella Qiang, the VP of Ecosystem and Partnerships at Cronos Labs who’s creating an open source of internet value. It’s so great to have you with us Ella. Thanks for taking some time out to hang out.
Thanks for inviting me.
It’s been fun here. How’s your ETHDenver been so far?
It’s been very interesting. There are a lot of valuable conversations are happening but also a bit overwhelming.
I also want to tap into your background a little bit more because I think it’s cool. Cronos is a public layer one blockchain that inter-operates with both Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems backed by Crypto.com and more than 400 dApp developers and ecosystem partners. A veteran in the Web 3.0 industry since 2016. You are the Director of Partnerships at Stellar Development Foundation followed by various roles in investment advisory DeFi.
It’s cool to see you come and be a part of ETHDenver. As you said, you came out here and you’re seeing all of these people and it feels a little bit overwhelming as this is one of the first big events that you’ve been to. That’s a pretty bullish sign to see how many builders are here right now. What’s your take on seeing this many people here?
Throughout the past few years working full-time in this industry, we’ve seen the bear and the bull cycles but this time, it feels different. We’re in the bear market but everyone is talking about interesting ideas and innovative projects that they’re building. I haven’t entered into any conversation so far at ETHDenver where people are talking about the price. Everyone is talking about the project they’re building. It shows that as an industry, we find a certain product market fit and people are excited about what they’re building.
It’s interesting how you guys form that partnership with Crypto.com in terms of bringing together Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Can you tell us more about that partnership and how it came into being where it’s at right now?
To talk a bit about the origin of the Cronos Chain. It started with Crypto.com‘s early support. As a centralized live exchange, Crypto.com also want to continue this journey of onboarding this massive user base that they have over to the Web 3.0 world. Over time, we believe that the Web 3.0 world is going to start to capture market share. Maybe at some point, it might surpass decentralized platforms.
With that idea in mind, Crypto.com start to become the early supporter of Cronos Chain. The way that Cronos Labs partner with Crypto.com is it has a huge user base of 75 million KYC users. They probably bought their first Bitcoin or Dogecoin on Crypto.com maybe because of seeing some sports advertisements like F1. They sell Crypto.com at different F1 World Cups and got curious about crypto. Crypto.com provides good products and an easy and smooth experience for everyday users who don’t know much about crypto to buy their first crypto.
However, the journey doesn’t stop here. There’s so much to do about crypto and blockchain technology that they wanted to continue this journey. You can see from their product suite from the NFT marketplace that they also have a non-custodial DeFi wallet. The journey continues. When the users spot their first crypto on Crypto.com and they start to play around and see, “There is an earn function. Where does APY come from?”
They then discover that there are different DeFi projects that are powering those APYs and earnings. Crypto.com also provide a lot of educational content to them and they start to learn more about what is DeFi, what is NFT, or what is Web 3.0 gaming. They then venture to the non-custodial experience using the Crypto.com DeFi wallet. We partner very closely with the DeFi wallet where Cronos ecosystem applications are quite highlighted on their interface.
People start to play around with DeFi and it’s very interesting to see that a lot of our users had their first DeFi or DEX experience on Cronos. They probably have never heard of Sushiswap or Uniswap. We do a lot of educational content onboarding them onto this Web 3.0 journey. That’s how we work with Crypto.com‘s team with their full suite of products and services.
As you’re talking about that, building a cool ecosystem landscape and you’re alluding to how to bridge that gap from people that are coming from Web 2.0 over to Web 3.0. Cronos is partnering with Crypto.com to be that on-ramp and to provide a lot of utility that provide users with things that they don’t even necessarily know that they’re using Web 3.0 like the DEX and other things that you explained. What are some of the other things that Cronos is building to continue to expand and create things during this builder’s market?
We’re not there yet. It would be overstating to say that users won’t tell the difference if they’re using Web 2.0 products. I don’t think there is yet in terms of user experience. Us, as a whole industry, are trying to figure it out. There are a lot of new innovations happening to provide a better wallet experience, get rid of seed freezes, etc. It’s baby steps. For now, we are working on a few things. One is to provide better exposure and visibility of what you can do on Cronos Chain.
It involves having a dApp store via Crypto.com DeFi Wallet. Users can easily see what they can do with DeFi projects, NFTs, gaming, and what kind of earnings they can get. That’s important because the Web 3.0 space is so massive. You need to provide that visibility and education to guide people through what they can do on Cronos and Crypto.com non-custodial wallet.
The second thing is education because our users are mostly very new to Web 3.0. We work with a lot of the applications who come to build on Cronos on educating them about the one-on-one on DeFi and on DEXs. On the first DEX VVS launch on Cronos, a lot of people don’t even know what AMM is. It’s very exciting. Those partners that are working with us also find that a lot of those applications are cross-chain or multi-chain approaches but when they come to Cronos, the feedback that we’ve been getting is they’re able to onboard new users who have never interacted with them in the past.
It’s not that we’re trying to fight the same user pool with other chains. We’re trying to be this hub to onboard new users over to Web 3.0. I know we are very pro-multi-chain. Through Cronos, users can discover chains or other applications as well and then sitting in between the EVM, the Ethereum ecosystem and the Cosmos ecosystem gives us this unique position to facilitate those cross-train experiences as well. However, right now our focus is still on making sure the user experience for you through Crypto.com is smooth and we’re getting there.
Every great ecosystem in addition to education has some type of accelerator program to onboard new developers and new founders that have big visions and help them tap into what you guys are doing. Can you break down the Cronos Accelerator Program for us? What are the details? How do people get involved? What’s that process look like?
With the Cronos Ecosystem, a lot of builders at the conference ask me, “What are the programs you guys have to support builders to build applications or infrastructures?” We have two programs. One is the Grants Program and then the second one is what you mentioned which is the Accelerator Program, which I’m super excited about.
The Accelerator Program is twelve weeks long program. In every cohort, we recruit about 6 to 8 projects. Every single week, we have masterclasses and workshops. Each project will be matched with several mentors as well. There will be an upfront investment with Cronos with a potential follow-up of up to $300,000 investment after the event. By the end of the program, we will have a massive demo day where we will invite 100 NGOs and VC partners that we have to view the project’s presentation. We also support the projects with the follow-on fundraising journey.
The program is set up with the purpose to support very high-quality elite projects that we believe will be the future star of Cronos and also the Web 3.0 space in general. We don’t limit them to be within Cronos, but to foster the future stars that can onboard billions of users onto Cronos. A few verticals that we’re focusing on are DeFi, especially advanced DeFi. It means that projects that have new DeFi primitives that don’t exist in the market yet and projects that are focusing on onboarding retail users and then gaming NFT infrastructure.
I think this is still a massive building design space for that. It can easily onboard Web 2.0 game developers to add Web 3.0 elements to their games. The third one is infrastructure and tooling. Also, ZK solutions, DID, account abstraction, etc. These are the focus of our second cohort. The application is open right now. If you are building interesting projects, I encourage you to apply.
It sounds like a great program. You’ve done one cohort so far that’s graduated and now you’re on the second. It’s still an early and great opportunity to get involved. It sounds like it’s a robust ecosystem that you get to tap into through this accelerator program.
From our experience from the first cohort, some of the builders have been successful entrepreneurs in the Web 2.0 space and they told us this workshop gave them holistic training on the Web 3.0 elements. Not only on the technical side but also on how you do community building, how you do marketing, economics, design, or legal. We then match them up with different partners. They get perks from all the infra partners. We have discounts and free credits. People enjoyed it.
It’s cool that you all have these accelerators and it’s great to see the early success of these cohorts but as you look at Cronos, I’m sure you have a roadmap ahead for 2023 and some cool things on the horizon. On a couple of these things that you have on that roadmap, what do you think are things that people should be excited about that you can talk about?
With Cronos, this year is exciting because in 2023, there are going to be a lot of new primitives coming up. We are observing and we’re talking to all these projects as well. With us, there are two focuses. What does it look like in terms of the future technical scaling route for Cronos? We’re exploring different routes in terms of rollups as well as working with other projects in the Cosmos ecosystem to explore. There is not too much I can share at this point, but stay tuned as we will announce it in the coming months.
The second one also on the technical side is being more interconnected to other chains. As I mentioned, we are the first EVM chain that’s built on the Cosmos SDK. This allows us the ability to connect with other EVM chains as well as Cosmos Chains. Up until now, we formed a lot of bridges, especially within the Cosmos ecosystem, but primarily focused on building within Cronos to now. However, our ecosystem has grown to a space where there are a lot of interesting use cases.
Cross-chain used cases can be explored. In 2023, we’re going to start to partner with other blockchains and with other cosmos chains. There are a lot of exciting things that are happening at Cosmos. dYdX is building an app chain. Circle is building an app chain on Cosmos. We’re excited about these potential opportunities as well to facilitate and be at the forefront of facilitating this cross-chain experience for users.
How do non-fungible tokens fit into your point of view and how are you integrating non-fungible tokens into the ecosystem?
NFTs always have a ton of activities on Cronos. I think if you look at Crypto.com user preference, they’re very much into NFTs and gaming. A very interesting aspect that we’re looking at is Crypto.com have partnerships with big brands like sports brand entertainment brands. We are exploring using Cronos as a foundational technology as a chain to power some of the use cases that Crypto.com‘s partners are looking at. One example is during World Cup, Crypto.com has this partnership with Coca-Cola where they dropped NFT on the Crypto.com marketplace and those NFTs are living on Cronos. Those are one example, but we’re exploring a lot of those high-profile partnerships.
This has been educational for me in terms of what’s going on in Cronos. I hope that this is a meaningful experience being here at ETHDenver for you. I’m excited to stay in touch about everything happening at Edge of NFT and Outer Edge LA coming up. We love to talk about the intersection of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 and mass adoption. It seems like you guys are doing a lot to move the industry forward. I appreciate all that. If people want to stay in touch with Cronos or get involved, where do they go?
Follow us on Twitter @Cronos_Chain. We have our regular updates there. That’s the best place to find us.
Thanks for spending a little time with us and I look forward to being in touch.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
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This is an exciting place to be in this builder’s market. I am here with Harry and Bharat, the Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer at Arbitrum. Harry is responsible for partnerships. Richard will go into their bios a little bit more.
Harry leads the engineering team. Before the company, he attended Princeton as a PhD candidate where his research explored economics anonymity and incentive compatibility of cryptocurrencies. Bharat worked in the crypto space in 2017 and is growing Arbitrum’s DAO community. He’s a graduate of the University of Southern California and is based in Los Angeles.
Arbitrum has been doing some exciting things around giving Ethereum more capacity and taking off those breaks if you will. Tell us more about what that looks like and how this came into being.
Arbitrum is a layer two blockchain. It’s an optimistic roll-up that’s secured by Ethereum. It has around seven times the capacity of Ethereum, but the same level of security. It provides a massive amount of additional use cases and additional lower prices. It’s faster. It’s easier to use and it’s where Ethereum usage is moving.
When did it come into being, and what was the genesis story?
The original idea came from one of my cofounders, Ed Felten, who was a Princeton University professor. He came up with the idea in late 2013 before Ethereum had even launched. It’s like seeing the Ethereum design and thinking about this. He left and went to the White House and was the Deputy CTO under the Obama administration for a couple of years.
The idea went dead at that point and it was too early but when he came back, Steven Goldfeder and I along with him basically brought the project back up. We worked on it as a research paper and Steven and I were grad students working on it. We published it as a paper in 2018. We raised a seed round in early 2019 and then in August 2021, we launched the chain. It’s been a long time coming.
Right now, we’re in a builder’s market and you’re seeing a lot of people wanting to look and explore other types of ecosystems that are out there. For things that are being built right now within your ecosystems, what are some of the things that you can tell us about and why should people be excited about participating in Arbitrum?
The reason that scaling Ethereum is so important and should be important to everyone is because gas fees are going to be getting 95% to 99% cheaper on a chain like Arbitrum than they will be on Ethereum. I know if people were around in 2021 and trying to buy NFTs on OpenSea, if you were buying $100 NFT, you were spending about $150 on gas at that time.
It was absolutely insane and it’s not sustainable if we’re trying to get mainstream adoption. Something like Arbitrum, which also has OpenSea support now on Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova, those same gas fees are sub-$0.10 now or sub-$0.05 sometimes. With Arbitrum Nova, it’s sub-$0.01. It’s the same NFT and experience for the user. You’re also using ETH as your currency, which most people have and are using to buy NFTs.
It’s important to scale Ethereum and we’re continuing to lower those costs every year. We’re excited about that. In terms of the ecosystem itself though, when Arbitrum first launched in August 2021, we saw the growth of a community called Treasure. Most people that bridge over to Arbitrum were excited about things like DeFi and more traditional crypto stuff but what we found is that people started to come over to Arbitrum because of Treasure in their NFT and gaming ecosystem.
Looking back at the data, most people’s first transaction using blockchain was NFTs. Treasure opened us up to a mainstream audience that was maybe a little bit intimidated by DeFi, but excited about stuff like NFTs, gaming, and stuff like that. Now, the Treasure ecosystem has done over $300 million of volume and they have a massive ecosystem of games, whether it’s free to play or their NFT collections as well.
They pioneered the strategy of earning a whitelist spot and not only knowing insider connections but doing work in the community to get a whitelist spot. If you promoted the Treasure DAO Ecosystem, you would get a whitelist spot. This grassroots energy that Treasure DAO had is what we feel as well at Arbitrum. They had to find product market fit because there were no other incentives and they did well. Now, Treasure DAO is killing it and we’ve seen the growth of a lot of other ecosystems too pioneering different strategies to get organic adoption. We’re excited about the NFT ecosystem.
Do you have any AAA games that have come out or are in the works?
There is a lot of stuff in stealth right now, but we can’t talk about it quite yet. We are excited about the next quarter or two. We’re talking to some exciting games, whether they’re crypto native and using a lot of on-chain activity. A chain like Nova is perfect for them because of the cost. It’s sub-$0.01. In terms of AAA games, there’s some exciting stuff being worked on right now, but we can’t say too much in the show.
We got Outer Edge LA coming up and it’s the intersection of entertainment and technology. Is there anything going on in the entertainment space that you could talk about?
There are a couple of interesting things happening. On one side, Arbitrum was at New York Fashion Week. We sponsored the Creature World, which is a cool collection.
Jake is speaking at our event.
Danny Cole was a super innovative artist. Arbitrum was a part of that. They launched their mint on Arbitrum to promote their New York Fashion Week Show. That was a cool intersection with entertainment because Arbitrum is great for crypto-native audiences. We’re starting to branch out to the mainstream audience as well. That’s an exciting time and I know me being in LA and seeing the LA NFT community get active, I’m very excited about this intersection as well. Another cool thing that happened was Pudgy Penguins bridged over one of their collections, the Lil Pudgys, over to Arbitrum.
We’ve reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFTs for this episode. Thanks for exploring with us. There’s always room for more voyagers on this Starship so invite your friends and any cool extraterrestrials by going to Spotify or iTunes where you can rate us, share the show, and leave a comment. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing @EdgeOfNFT with no spaces and start a fun conversation with us online.
Finally, NFT LA 2022 was a blast. 2022’s amazing event was an ascension into the ever-expanding world of Web 3.0 and beyond through an educational and fun event focused on NFTs, blockchain, and other immersive mind-bending tech developments. 2023’s event theme is the Outer Edge dedicated to all of you building with us on the final frontier of tech forming the future.
This amazing community experience returns to Los Angeles in March 20th to the 23rd, 2023 organized by the Edge of Company and us, the founders at the Edge of NFT Show. This year’s conversation surrounds a decentralized web and its ever-expanded connection to the worlds of artificial intelligence, extended reality, and more from workshops and presentations to out-of-this-world experiences. This networking event will boldly transport participants into the future now. Register to attend or learn how to co-create an experience with the Outer Edge team by heading over to OuterEdge.live. We can’t wait to see you there.
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