These conversations at the FWB Fest bring us to an engaging exploration of various topics, offering insights into our guest's experiences in the world of NFTs, collaborations, and the evolving landscape of Web3. In this episode, streetwear pioneer Jeff Staple shares his initial encounters with NFTs, revealing his journey from tentative exploration to full immersion. Jeff discusses his authentic approach to collaborations, emphasizing the importance of careful vetting and meaningful partnerships. He delves into the concept of merging physical and digital goods within the NFT space, acknowledging the challenges while highlighting the exciting possibilities. Meanwhile, CryptoKitties co-founder Benny Giang, talks about the evolution of NFTs, the challenges and opportunities in different industries like sports collectibles and fashion, the concept of "token-bound accounts," and how this new standard could empower NFTs to have greater functionality, including co-creation and interactions with AI models. He also discusses use cases across gaming, DAOs, infrastructure, and social platforms. Tune in for more!
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Edge Of NFT At FWB Fest - Jeff Staple & Benny Giang
We are at FWB FEST. It's day one. I already meeting some awesome folks like Jeff Staple, who we're going to chat with.
Thanks for having me.
It’s good to have you on the show. Most of you probably know who Jeff Staple is, but a little bit of background. He's a creative visionary with work encompassing graphic design, fashion design, footwear design, and brand marketing. He's the Founder of Reed Art Department and has worked on creative projects ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies.
He founded STAPLE in 1997, the New York-based pioneering streetwear brand and the infamous Pigeon logo that we all know and love. Mike Tyson loves it. He founded the lifestyle boutique, REED SPACE in 2002. He's also the Creator and host of Hypebeast’s most popular podcast, Business of HYPE. He is one of the most prominent teachers on Skillshare. There's a lot more, but let's jump into it. I haven't asked this question for a while, but it's a question I like to ask you in particular. I'm curious. What was your first encounter with NFTs and what made you decide to jump in?
It is more widely like Web3. My first experience was I encountered through a friend Steve Jang, who's a dear friend in San Francisco. He's a partner in Kindred Ventures. He introduced me to a guy named Jacob who was starting a thing called Zora. That was my first interaction. He was trying to explain to me what Zora did, and I was having a hard time understanding it. I said, “Let's drop something on Zora.” After I released a physical shoe on Zora, I began to understand the power of what Zora was doing.
You jumped right in.
That's still in my mind like a pinky toe in the water because I have all these different things that I do. Doing one item release on it was a fairly low lift on my part and experimental. After Zora, my first experience with an actual NFT project was Gary Vee's VeeFriends. In his VeeFriends collection, he has a couple of Pigeons, a Perspective Pigeon and a Persuasive Pigeon. When he posted the Pigeons from his VeeFriends collection, many people were tagging me like, “Your Pigeon needs to meet Gary's Pigeon.”
That night, Gary and I got on a FaceTime call. We talked about how could the Staple Pigeon and the VeeFriends Pigeon do something together. We released what I think is probably one of the first physical apparel drops with an NFT project. Holders of the Persuasive and Perspective VeeFriends Pigeon got exclusive access to a Staple collection that we created that had both of the Pigeons on. That was bananas. As you know, Gary has an incredible community. They all flocked to us. It was crazy.
I'm an early VeeFriends holder and a big fan of what he's done. I missed the memo on that. When did that go down?
2021.
I had the Bold As Fuck Bat. That's so Gary. It's definitely a favorite.
Those are my shepherds, then I have to shout out the one immediately after that, which is the Artifract guys. Right after the VeeFriends drop, I got in touch with Artifract, literally through the DMs. We began working on what would become the Meta Pigeon, which is where it stopped being like, “Am I going to do this? Should I trial and error this?” I went all in after that.
You had some great collaborators based on your pedigree and background, but I thought there might've been a little bit of apprehension, “Is this going to work?”
I went for it. I believed enough in the technology and the promise of the future. I've mentioned that in my talk. Creator royalties were a big part of it as well. As Benny was saying, everything on the blockchain is the present. It's the now. It was scary. I was trepidious going into it. I'm a fairly cautious person in the sense that I didn't dismantle my physical world stuff to go all over. I didn't announce to my entire staff like, “Everyone, drop your t-shirts, sweatshirts, and hoodies. We're going in.” I did it strategically, but by and large every month that I see this experience go by, I know more and more that I made the right decision to go in.
The word phygital has some lovers and haters. Your reaction was pretty visceral. I get it. What do you call this world of mixing physical merchandise and digital collectibles?
I'm down to keep them separate, to be honest. I don't like to say NFTs. I'm trying to train myself to not say that because when you say NFTs to certain people, you get, to me, two reactions outside of people who love NFTs. It's either like, “I don't know what it is. I don't get it,” or like, “That's a scam.” I'm trying to reverse out of saying that and more so calling it digital goods and physical goods. I don't need to necessarily link them together with the word like phygital because I know what I'm seeing is that we're going to do projects that are digital only.
There is no physical component to it. We're obviously going to continue to do physical-only things, and then we're going to do projects that are fun where there's a digital component first and then a physical component after. I did another collaboration with Gmoney 9dcc. That was physical first, digital after you get the physical. I love the malleability of all of that. That's what makes this super fun. I don't need to be like, “We're doing only physical projects from now on.” It's dumb.
I try to force these two worlds together with some words that don't make sense to anyone but the person who came up with the word.
Also, sounds terrible.
Let's take a little bit of a broader perspective. The Staple Pigeon, I did a little recon on you. I was curious about it. It has to do with grit. I'm a Boston guy. You're Jersey. Grit is such a critical part of the entrepreneurial journey. They don't tell you how much grit you need in the good and bad times. I'm particularly curious how grit has influenced your creative process, independent of your entrepreneurial perspective.
It's probably one of the biggest fuel contributors to what I've been able to accomplish. Sometimes I wish that I came from a family that had more money or more access. I wish my mom and dad made smarter investments when they were growing up and it would've been easier for me, but it is what it is. What I gained from that is what you call grit, what I often call hustle. It's the ability to know that if you don't work and get out of bed, you don't eat.
Some people can stay in bed and eat. We're not blessed to be in that situation so we have to hustle. A pigeon, strangely enough, was not only was it the same in the sense that it had the hustle to survive and eat, but by and large, most people hate pigeons. They're pests and nuisances. They want to get rid of them. They want them to stop. When I was starting out in streetwear, creating my own line or painting sneakers and stuff, most people in my circle were like, “You are wasting your time. Stop. This is stupid. Why are you doing this?” I felt that dynamic of what a pigeon was going through. That's why I adapted it as my mascot.
I can totally relate. I was the first guy in my family to go to college. I lived in a poor neighborhood outside of Boston when growing up. I went to a public university.
It's all about public school.
People have said over the years, “You've got a lot of hustle and grit.” I didn't know if I felt like it was a compliment or not, but I appreciate the word grit now more than ever because this is a bear market. The people that I relate to the most are the people who are still pushing boundaries in spite of market conditions.
I don't think we're in a bear market. I know this is a crazy stupid hot take, but where we came from at its height, it is down obviously. What's Ethereum now in the US?
It is $1,800 or $1,900.
If there was a country in this world that gave you $1,800 of its dollars to $1, you'd fucking be on a plane to that country now with the things that you can consume in that country.
Bitcoin is hanging out at $30,000 for a long time. It was not at $30,000 in the previous bear market. It was at $3,000, $5,000 or $6,000.
We came from an era for the last few years where no one went outside. We were inside the whole time. The only thing we could consume was literally digital goods. Guess what? Your restaurant opened back up. You're going to want to go out and eat, take a road trip, and go on vacation. All of that time and energy that you spent consuming and learning about digital goods is now being diversified and spread back out into the real world. This is not a collapse. This is a normalization of what it would've been if we didn't have COVID. That's my theory. I could be totally off-base and wrong. What I see is that if COVID didn't happen, we would be right here it would've grown gradually to this point.
I appreciate the take. I have not heard that perspective, but it makes a lot of sense. I'm going to process that.
Think about the currency thing. If the Yen offered me $1,800 to $1, I'd be in Japan, living there and eating great sushi now.
I'm going over to Korea and Singapore soon for Career Blockchain Week. I’m heading over there. Let's talk a little bit about STAPLEVERSE. You started a long time ago. How has your vision of STAPLEVERSE evolved over that time based on what you've seen and what you personally have done in the space?
I always try to push the envelope and innovate. When I see everybody making a left, I try to make a right. I try to zig when everyone else zags. One of the things that I over-indexed on was a need to push the envelope and innovate where if I dropped a $10,000 Pigeon project at the height of the market, I probably would've made a shit ton of money, but instead, I tried to do innovative and different things. We did a burn toss mechanic.
We had different tribes and storylines in STAPLEVERSE. We're doing it again. Frankly, with doing this ERC-6551. We're the first project to ever embody that and have token-bound accounts. What I've learned is it could have cool technology, but the way you market it and story tell it needs to be dumb and simple. One analogy that I always think about that I tell my team is even though the iPhone has all this crazy new tech and built-in ability when you look at a billboard for Apple, it says, “Yellow. We dropped a new color,” even though they did all this crazy R&D built-in. All they talk about is yellow.
Yellow, the color or the thing is the low-hanging fruit to get you into the community. After that, you start watching YouTube videos like, “Did you know if you triple tap the Apple logo on the back, you can activate it to do certain things?” “I didn't know that.” You start going into the wormhole. What I've learned with STAPLEVERSE and our project SAPIENZ is that we have to make it desirable to people who don't have a wallet and don't currently have an NFT. It's something that is cool that they want to be a part of. Once they're in, they can learn about token-bound accounts, ERC-6551, and all the goodness. We got to put a cherry on top of that cake before they get in.
You got to spark the curiosity.
It's marketing 101.
Speaking of lessons learned, you've done many different collaborations with We2 and Web3 brands. I remember you talking a little bit about this at IRL Alpha in Venice, my hood.
That was fun.
That was a good night. A lot of good conversations and good people. I wanted to ask you. When you're working with many different people, there's always this potential collision with authenticity and what authentic means to you. I'm curious. If you've ever gone down a path with a brand or a collab that didn't feel right and you had to hit the brakes, what was that like for you?
It hasn't happened. I can tell you why because my early stage vetting process is quite long and drawn out and deep. I know other friends that shoot first, then ask questions later. What I mean by that is they're like, “Let's do a collab. Let's do it. Let's get in there and start doing it,” then six months in they're like, “You're like an asshole. I don't want to work with you. Let's back out of this contract.” Instead, I spend the six months having coffees and lunches with you to see if we can vibe then it's like, “We should do a collaboration.” I have friends that are, “I've known you for years and we haven't worked on something together.”
There might be a reason.
It's like, “I love hanging out with you too. We are collaborating. We're doing it over dinners, but when the timing is right, we will lock in and figure out how to do something.” Another streetwear NFT legend in the game is Bobby Hundreds. I 100% respect everything he does. We get along great. We are in the same world, but we've never done a collaboration. When we do, it's going to destroy the internet, but until then we're trying to figure out how we lock in. I take a long approach and figure out partners before we get into a relationship.
I appreciate that. I had another question around the long perspective on Web3. You talked a little bit about how it's impacted your perspective on how you would launch projects and how you're going to be launching projects but has your thinking on the potential of Web3 evolved in particular around this creator royalties thing, which is a real drag for all of us? Did that shift your perspective on the potential here that we're working with in any way?
It was a real drag and I feel for artists that rely on that for their livelihood.
The ones that jumped in because of that possibility, It was one of the biggest. It's the rug full of rug poles.
I happen to be in a place where the creator royalty for me is more the tip jar money and not the pay-the-rent money, but it still sucks. In terms of Web3, what I would try to do is be much more open-minded to the prospect of collaborating with people. I rely on my team a lot because they tell me like, “This guy's legit. This guy is in it for the right reasons.” We did a Magic White T-shirt Project with literally a no-name guy from New Jersey and now he's collaborating with Jeff Staple, where I think if I only had my web2 brand on, I'd be like, “Who are you? What's your brand? Call me in five years and we'll see.”
Be much more open-minded to the prospect of collaborating with people. Click To Tweet
Give folks a little backstory on this because it's pretty cool how this got set up.
This is the power of SAPIENZ. We dropped essentially a blank white T-shirt NFT. This white T-shirt could be equipped with SAPIENZ, which is our PFP project. Your SAPIENZ could now be wearing a blank white T-shirt. We dropped it for $10. We sold over 900 of them in a very short amount of time. We said, “Those who own the Magic White Tee are now eligible to design the shirt.
You could take a pen, a silk screen, or AI. You can do whatever you want and design the shirt as you wish. Submit it on the internet and social media. Tag us.” We got hundreds of submissions of incredible art. I narrowed it down to my top 32. All of the community Discord, Twitter, and Instagram voted on Sweet 16, Final 8, 4, 2, and 1, champion. That one champion we were able to change the metadata on the blank White Tee. All those hundreds of people who own the blank White Tee, overnight, their shirt turned into the winning design.
What's the tech behind that?
ERC-6551 token-bound account.
It’s all connected to the actual shirt.
The shirt is an NFT owned by your NFT, the SAPIENZ. It's sick. I don't want to confuse people with that. I don't want to talk about that shit. I want to talk about this Magic White Tee versus the ERC-6551 token-bound account. Do you wake up one day and it's like, “My shirt is now the winning design?” If you're the creator of that design, your design is now on 900 bodies overnight. You also get the revenue from that as well. The big kicker is now that guy, JRR, and I are going to design the next thing together. Overnight that guy's now doing a collaboration with Jeff Staple.
You should check this out. That's awesome that that type of co-creation, which Web3 Is all about. One last question for you. We start a new show, Edge Of AI. This is the Edge Of NFT. We're curious about AI and want to learn together with some of the leaders and pioneers in that space. You're a curious guy. To what extent have you dabbled with AI personally and then how are you looking at it from a creative perspective in the types of projects that you work on?
I am less using it for art. I'm playing with it in the art space, but not doing anything that I would release. I'm basically learning the language on the more ChatGPT text-based side. I'm using it much more to help with improving my writing, helping with responses, and things like that. The contract is awesome. Also, I'd be like, “Can you write this speech in the style and tone of Jeff Staple?
How does it do?
It does it too good because it almost takes bites of information that uses it too much and it makes it cringe. If I say one catchphrase in a talk, it'll keep using that. I'm like, “Stop doing that. It's corny.” I have been using it for that. Even though some people might think that the things that I do are innovative. I'm a middle-to-late adapter. I'm not bleeding edge first to market to stuff. I've been into NFTs for a few years, but not many years ago when the first ever thing was on the chain for the Ethereum network. I like to wait, see people jump in first, make sure it's not a complete scam, make sure I'm not endangering myself in everything I've created, and then dabble a little bit, and be strategic about it. I'm proud of the mini-empire that I've built in fashion footwear and creating creative weight.
I don't know if it's mini. Everyone knows what you're up to.
I'm very cognizant of not dismantling the whole thing that I've built because of one knee-jerk reaction to some shiny new object that I encountered.
You are still dabbling. While we were talking, I asked ChatGPT, which I'm in love with, “What is one question you'd ask Jeff Staple that never gets asked?” I don't want you to get bored here.
What ChatGPT asks?
“Throughout your career in designing streetwear, you've had a significant impact on the industry. Looking back, is there a particular lesser-known or behind-the-scenes moment or decision you made that you believe had a surprisingly profound influence on your brand in the streetwear culture as a whole?”
One thing that rarely gets asked of me that has nothing to do with street culture, and I know this is going to sound weird, I've had the honor and blessing of going through two separate near-death experiences. One, very fast and instantaneous. Meaning I got hit by a truck in Japan while I was in a bike head-on collision. The other one was very long and drawn out. I was on a six-hour hike in the Chilean Andes Mountains and I got lost. a rescue team had to come to get me.
I thought I dug my own grave and I laid in it. I thought it was done. I was able to experience what it feels like to have a drawn-out mindful understanding of the end of your life and then a flash-before-your-eyes moment at the end of your life. I feel blessed about that because I think particularly with the mentality of Web3, speed, and lack of patience and when utility and stuff, people lose perspective of what matters because I was able to gain those two experiences, that is always going to be locked in my core of no matter what we're dealing with here, it is not you on the side of a mountain digging your own grave.
That's as profound a way to end this conversation as there could be.
Thank you.
It has been an amazing time getting to you better people should check out @Stapleverse pretty much on all social. It's not hard to find you.
@JeffStaple. You don't click a bad link. Sapienz.xyz or Stapleverse.xyz. Don't click on those weird links that you see. You don't want to get your wallet drained.
Thank you very much. We’ll learn more about what you're up to and thanks for your time.
Thank you.
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I’m excited to be here at FWB FEST 2023 and meet some awesome people. I got a chance to attend Benny's talk. This is a conversation we've wanted to have on the show for a little while in terms of the new ERC standard that you forged slightly before Outer Edge at East Denver. Now we get to dive deep and it's great to meet you in person, Benny.
Thank you. It’s good to be here and we are excited. It's super-hot here but it's been incredible. There are many amazing people here.
Let's start off with your bio. Normally for doing a normal show, we would read the bio anyway. I think yours is pretty amazing. Benny is a Founding team member of CryptoKitties, the first NFT project to launch on Ethereum in 2017. Everyone should know what CryptoKitties is at this point. Since the formation of Dapper Labs, he has taken on many different roles from building the earliest NFT community in Asia to launching several core projects like Cheese Wizards, Dapper Wallet, and a little projects some of you may know as NBA Top Shot.
During his tenure at Dapper Labs, he also helped release the most iconic digital fashion project, Iridescence in collaboration with the Fabricant. Benny has made several angel investments in Web3 music, fashion, gaming, and design studios. Since leaving Dapper in 2021, Benny co-founded Future Primitive with Steve Jang, a protocol company for token-bound accounts. You've been busy.
It's been a busy many years. It flew by. I still remember as if it was yesterday we were crammed into the office like launching CryptoKitties and getting it ready for ETHWaterloo. That's where we launched it. It's incredible to see the span of NFTs grow from a small place, a small city of Vancouver and now it's global. The NFT medium is representing digital objects in all forms in very interesting ways. We're here talking about on-chain media and NPCs. It's incredible to see the expansion.
I feel like we're kindred spirits in some way. A story I haven't shared with you yet is that one of our Outer Edge LA cofounders, Zach Sekar, has been doing meetups around tech in LA for a long time and that's how we met back in my first days in LA. He did a very casual meetup with one of the cofounders of CryptoKitties’s Mac after you guys launched and broke Web3 temporarily. You and Mac go back and your worlds have intersected in a lot of different ways.
He's amazing. He was the one who brought me into Axiom Zen. He's my spiritual mentor. The creative wild side of me is from Mac. I learned from him many different lessons about building products and pursuing creative ideas that may make people squint their eyes a little bit. Mac is a kindred spirit and is an awesome guy.
Another way our past crossed is we started Edge of NFT in March of 2021. We've been blockchain for many years prior to that, but we were looking for a real-world use case that culturally fits the zeitgeist of the moment. Jeff, one of my Cofounders had been dabbling with NBA Top Shot. He bought a bunch of packs. One of his early victories in the world of Web3 was getting a LeBron card and making an incredible return. For us that was an a-ha moment about something is here and it's different. You were part of that. Thank you for getting me into Web3. It's been a wild ride ever since.
Thank you for taking the leap of faith and buying NBA Top Shot packs. I'm sure Dappe, the team, and myself, owe to everyone here who believed in digital sports collectibles, that they had a life beyond highlight reels on IG that they were worth collecting, and that it was exciting to collect these moments. Part of building that product was to onboard new folks, to show people around the world that even though we started with a tiny project like CryptoKitties. That may not have been to the taste of everybody at least for NBA Top Shot. The focus on a broader mainstream audience would be another way for people to engage with NFTs.
When you look at where NFTs have gone since there as an investor in the space and a student of a practitioner, what's your perspective on sports collectibles and fashion culture as a digital moment? Has it shifted since those early days of NBA Top Shot?
I think it's challenging. I come from a startup background. I have been working in startups since 2015 and I still adhere to a lot of the first principles of building a product, product-market fit, crossing the chasm, and all these types of things. The way I think about it is it all comes down to human behavior in human psychology or sociology and how groups of humans already interact. I believe in building products regardless if it is NFTs or a normal Web2 app, that aid that behavior or it amplifies it.
All these verticals of fashion, sports, and on-chain media, all these things, have different timing in the market. It's reliant on overall education and overall understanding of what is the crypto wallet that allows you to take the next step. We're in a period of on-chain media and digital classrooms. Those two areas are the correct timing, sports collectibles with Top Shot in 2021 and 2020 at its moment. I have a lot of opinions about how that direction should head around sports collectibles. In the model, I believe that Top Shot created or the team that I was leading needs some adjustments and refinements for version two of what it could look like.
Let's cover that and then we'll go on to the other areas you mentioned. What's the type of refinement that you see? There have been other folks that have dabbled in that area from DraftKings to Autograph. That market has slowed down from day-to-day usage. Top has also done some things in the space. What are the refinements you'd like to see?
The key is the fan in the community. Going back to human behaviors and patterns. The NBA's official account on Twitter would post the highlight reels of the games that were being played. You can see in the comment section with the NBA Top Shot community, that people were like, “Mint this moment.”
That was the conversation for a while. Why can't they be real-time minting?
The challenge that I see right now is that the Top Shot team has a small team that watches all the content in partnership with the NBA. They curate and select the moments that are to be minted in a pack. They are great curators. They're basketball fans. They pick great moments. What's more powerful is imagine that the community through social media can comment on a highlight reel that's posted by NBA like, “Mint this moment,” and there's a social leaderboard where people vote and let's say, you end up getting the most vote on a highlight reel and we mint that moment and now it'd be like, “This moment was curated by Josh.”
That whole co-creation aspect of Web3 is part of the great hope. This opportunity to be part of the editorial team makes sense. There are a lot of conversations we have on the show about co-creating stories and written forms. Neil Strauss has been on the show. He did an Alien-themed novel on the blockchain, one of the earliest examples of that. That's one of the great use cases of course other folks are doing that. TuneStars is doing that with its animation series. How do we create that extreme level of interactivity?
The last thing is incentivizing the curators. If you use the marketplace of Top Shot, there's a fee collected by Dapper, albeit that's helping to fill the company on that, but I think a portion of that should be allocated to the curator network. It creates a cycle of an empowered community of thousands of curators who are watching the best moments, voting for the best moments, and getting incentivized.
That could be pretty powerful. That application is interesting for any founder to think about in terms of whatever use case they are for Web3. Let's pivot the conversation a little bit to fashion On-Chain Media. First of all, these are two industries that can be defined in a lot of different ways. When we think about fashion, I'm curious if we're talking about traditional physical fashion going digital fashion going, and physical mixed-use cases. Where do you see the biggest opportunity there?
I've been thinking about this a lot. I have a conceptual idea of how I wrap my head around all of these things and then I have a practical way of seeing how it could be executed. The conceptual idea is water can be ice and steam. It's different states of matter. When it is about digital fashion or fashion, what we're talking about is transitory states that clothing or fashion can be in. In the future, it should be as fluid as water can be in these different states with a little bit of temperature changes, albeit for fashion it wouldn't be temperature. It would be like, “This fabric is made up of cotton, which is atoms, but it should have a digital representation that is made up of bites or 0s and 1s.”
The key thing is to blend the two so that depending on your use case, and how you want to use it or show it off, you can determine how you want to do that. That's the conceptual one. The practical one is a project that we worked on with Jeff Staple’s SAPIENZ. I'm an advisor investor of Fabricant, I've been following digital fashion since the beginning of 2018 prior to Artifract and all these other companies. Now I've realized after a few years that making hyper-realistic digital fashion is super cool, but it's expensive to do and distribution is a hard problem. You can use Snap AR or AR kit to address that, but it doesn't look that good. It's still a bit choppy.
Sometimes it fits crooked on your head and it might not be the right size for your body.
We've arrived at SAPIENZ. It's like, “We know the biggest distribution is the profile picture. It's the circle that is in all social media that has an audience. Why don't we launch a character-based NFT Project, SAPIENZ, where you can change your clothing 10, 20, 30, and 50 times a day without paying gas it's on Ethereum main nets. It's fully on-chain, and in that circle frame, which is a distribution, you could have different aesthetics changing every day if you'd like to or even have a hand that pops up to float like a shoe or something like that?” That's in my mind the practical execution of digital fashion.
How do you do that without having to spend an absorbent amount of time messing with your profile instead of doing other things like touching the grass?
The thing that's powering it is a new Ethereum standard. It's not a token standard. That's usually what people get confused with. It's ERC-6551, also known as token-bound accounts. This was a discovery that we made when we were at a Hackathon at ETH San Francisco. We were like, “SAPIENZ, we know we wanted to do this character-based NFT project and we were stuck. How do we do this?” We looked at Artifract, Doodles, and all these other projects. In Artifract, you had to pay for the gas every time to equip the vial. We didn't want to go to L2 or another blockchain. We think a lot of the value accrual should be on the main net. The light bulb moment we had was like, “What if every NFT or SAPIENZ had its own smart contract account or wallet?”
If it had its own accounts, then it could own the NFTs, like the clothing items. Once it owns these items inside of its account, when you equip these clothing, all we have to do is sign a message. You don't have to pay gas to prove that the character or the SAPIENZ owns the clothing, and then you could equip it right away. You can reflect it on other social media. That's the whole process of how we came to this new standard through trying to build a project that is focused on digital fashion.
That happened at ETHDenver in February 2023. That's exciting. One question that immediately pops up for me is the security component of this relative to having to connect your wallet. This would seem like it might be a little bit more secure and safer for the consumer. Is that accurate?
There are a few things. 1) You still need a wallet to own the NFT. That wallet can be any wallet you want. It could be a MetaMask Rainbow, Ledger, or Gnosis Safe. It still needs to own an NFT. The difference now is that the NFT has its own wallet. It's like an inception thing going on. You in fact could have an NFT that owns an NFT. You could have an NFT that owns $1 million of USDC or ETH. You could put any tokens inside of an NFT. That gives three new properties to every single NFT on Ethereum and EVM chains.
1) Asset ownership. Any NFT could own assets or tokens. 2) Social identity. You know most Dapps, OpenSea, or Uniswap. You click connect wallet then you select MetaMask. You can connect it as your NFT. You can imagine like, “I want to log in as my Zuki on OpenSea. I want to log in as my doodles on Uniswap.” You can do that now using WalletConnect. It works. I've done some trades using my NFT rather than my MetaMask. That's the second one is social identity. The third one is where it goes into AI is action potential because you now have an NFT that has its own account.
You can link it to an AI model and then now you have something that we call a Networked Playable Character or NPC that can perform on-chain actions on your behalf. Most of the NFTs sit in cold storage. YOU keep it there and then they don't do anything. The only thing you can do is wait for the floor price to go up and down.
Some of my points earlier are that when you have a rare NFT that you prize, you're a little bit more protective about what you do with it because you don't want it to get stolen.
You can link it to an AMM model and have it do things. The other thing that's fascinating that goes into the security standpoint is a few things. Because these are smart contract accounts or smart contracts, they're highly programmable. In the future, there's something that we call extensions. You can turn on extensions for your NFT that give it additional utility such as staking, wrapping, burning, and all these types of things.
One thing that we think about a lot is the majority of the NFTs, 98% or 99% are what we call creator-controlled NFTs. That means you're reliant on the creator to launch new smart contracts or a utility for you to have functionality. If the creator decides to rug or run away, well good luck. They still have access to the contracts and they couldn't modify it. They could update the metadata. Creator-controlled NFTs have been for the last few years, we see a bigger movement towards owner-controlled NFTs where you as an owner own let's say a moon bird. You don't have to wait for proof to ship a staking thing. You could go to the extension store and turn on a staking thing or a wrapping thing and now your moon bird has those abilities. That's the big difference in owner-control NFTs.
Self-actualized traits. People are excited about this back there. They're having fun, but that is profound. What are some of the use cases that you're excited about that have been created far outside of the SAPIENZ project where you're directly involved? Let's put you in dad mode, you and the team, founding fathers. Are there any children that you see growing up that you're excited about?
There are four categories of use cases. Gaming is a big one. I count SAPIENZ in that area because it's a dress-up game. The other one's DAOs. The 3rd one is infrastructure and then the 4th one is social. For gaming, there are a lot of people like FewoWorld, which Manifold is working on. It's in collaboration with FEWOCiOUS. FewoWorld Parallel is 1 of the top 20. They have something called Parallel Colony that's super cool.
We have a few other people who are building blockchain games. Two is DAO, station DAOhaus, Yield Guild Games. A lot of them are thinking about NFT membership cards where you can earn stickers and badges based on your engagement. Normally right now for DAOs, all of that stuff sits in your EOA or your MetaMask. When you sell the membership, all those badges stay there if they're sold on tokens. Here, you can put them inside of the membership and accrue a better picture of that member. That's DAOs.
Airstack has built the first indexer for token-bound accounts. We have Piñata. We're talking to OpenSea ZOA, WalletConnect, and all these different platforms. Fourth is social, Lens Protocol. They announced that in ECC That Lens Version 2, the profiles will all be token-bound accounts. That means your Lens profile can collect follows, likes, and other content pieces. What it does is convert an NFT from a static asset to a dynamic asset that can own and have relationships with other tokens. That's why the social side is going to become a huge thing.
I want to bring this back to the use case around AI that you mentioned earlier. We have a new show Edge Of AI. I think the intersection between Web3 and AI is profound in terms of what might be possible here. What immediately comes to mind for me is using AI to give your NFT even more life and choice more fluidity on its own fruition, where you can give it a sense of your identity and what you want it to do. Is that accurate?
An AI model in a simple way can absorb data, and it can make sense of it. AI models can prescribe a personality and we've done some tests at ETHWaterloo where we had a CryptoKitties with all its traits. We fed it into open AI API and it created a personality for the CryptoKitties. You could feed Metadata. You can also answer a few questions or upload your own data and now the NFT can absorb your personality. The third part is you can have the NFT access all of the data points that are already accessible in the API of all these AI models.
We see it on two fronts. One is using AI models with NFTs for entertainment, personality creation, and content creation realm. The other side is productivity. Having an NPC or an NFT helps you perform on-chain actions like you could talk to your NPC, which is an NFT, “I want you to do the weekly quest on Rabbit Hole.” It'll do it all and earn you tokens or, “I want you to curate the coolest music NFTs on sound.” You give it a budget and it goes and picks it for you. It could be for productivity or entertainment purposes.
You mentioned on-chain media. I would love my NPC to help me curate great questions for my guests so that we have interesting conversations. There might be something there and maybe we can wrap up on the topic of on-chain media. What does that mean to you and how does that fit into what we discussed?
I did a talk here fully focused on that area. The way I see on-chain media is media where it sits or lives in terms of storage. Is it with a private company, a social media company that has AWS servers of which you are liable for it shutting down and that type of content disappearing, or what I call more private industries in relation to the ownership of the content or on-chain media is using public infrastructure, like Ethereum or other platforms that are on-chain where the media will live on forever. The key thing is beyond all the speculation, I don't think on-chain media will have a lot of speculative value. Instead, it should have more humanity value than it'd be referential. In 100 years, it's like going to the library reading books if we are looking at on-chain media.
A lot of folks are trying to understand history based on a limited amount of media information that's available but what if all media was readily available and you can understand history and the stories from different perspectives? I listened to a pretty cool BBC podcast about Putin. It was told through the lens of five different journalists who had covered his life in different ways. They battled it out. I could think of this on-chain media AI battle for truth and it would be fascinating. You've given me so much to think about. I'm going to have trouble sleeping tonight, trying to integrate all these ideas. I'd like to talk to you a little bit more about this at some point in the future and stay in touch. Where can folks follow what you're up to?
Twitter @BennyGiang. For Token Bound we have a token-bound Telegram for the working group. We have nearly 1,100 developers there from OpenSea ZOA, all the Protocols platforms. The Telegram is @TokenBound and Future Primitive is the Protocol company. On Twitter is @FuturePrimitive.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Important Links
- Reed Art Department
- Business Of HYPE
- JRRtoken.eth – Twitter
- @Stapleverse – Twitter
- @JeffStaple – Twitter
- Sapienz.xyz
- Stapleverse.xyz
- CryptoKitties
- Future Primitive
- Neil Strauss – Past Episode
- @BennyGiang – Twitter
- @TokenBound – Telegram
- @FuturePrimitive – Twitter
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