SKALE is a groundbreaking blockchain network capable of supporting an unlimited number of swift on-demand pooled security blockchains, all while ensuring zero gas fees for end users. It is currently the only blockchain netwo$rk capable of doing so, and the use cases that we have seen so far are astounding. In this episode, CEO and co-founder Jack O’Holleran returns on the Edge of NFT podcast to discuss how SKALE Network is scaling Ethereum with a lightning-fast gas free second layer solution. Plus, we are joined by Shira Lazar to talk about the JOMO Effect, an innovative platform that helps Web3 citizens find peace and happiness while still pursuing their most ambitious best selves. And learn how Sotheby's is making both an offensive and defensive platform play that also empowers creators.
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Listen to the podcast here
Jack O'Holleran Of SKALE — The Platform That AllowsYou To Create Invisible Web3 Experiences, Plus: Shira Lazar Of The JOMO Effect
This is Jack O’Holleran of SKALE, a unique blockchain network that can support an unlimited number of rapid on-demand pooled security blockchains without any gas fees for end users.
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Stay tuned for this episode and learn how SKALE Network is scaling Ethereum with a lightning-fast gas-free second-layer solution.
Explore the JOMO Effect, finding peace and happiness while still pursuing your most ambitious best self.
Learn how Sotheby's is making both an offensive and defensive platform play that also empowers creators. Finally, Outer Edge of LA, our awesome community-centric gathering, returned to LA in March 2023. If you think you missed out, you can catch up on all of the interactive experiences, discussions, presentations, and more by heading over to Watch.OuterEdge.live and sign up with your email address to get a full recap of over 60 captivating conversations and performances.
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In this sponsored episode, we are honored to have Jack O’Holleran back on the show. The CEO and Cofounder of SKALE. It is a groundbreaking blockchain network capable of supporting an unlimited number of swift on-demand pooled security blockchains, all while ensuring zero gas fees for end users. Jack is a seasoned tech entrepreneur from Silicon Valley with an impressive background in machine learning, AI, and blockchain.
He cofounded IncentAlign, which is now Aktana, and held executive roles at Good Technology and Motorola. He has been involved with digital currencies since 2008 when he played a key role in developing a digital currency platform for enterprise resource allocation. SKALE represents a network of interconnected blockchains designed to deliver speed, decentralization, and security to a wide range of user-friendly Web3 applications. Developers can easily deploy their own interoperable EVM blockchains without compromising security or decentralization. It is an open-source community-owned project. Jack O’Holleran, welcome back to the show. It is great to see you.
It is great to see you. I’m excited to be here. We are going to have some fun.
It has been like a minute since Outer Edge LA when you are hanging out talking about the future of the macro gaming economy, and here we are now. I'm sure you have been in 5 or 6 countries since then.
I have been in a few. I have been to Japan and Portugal. That was an awesome event. Props to your whole team and everybody that came together. If you are tuning in and you weren't there, I highly recommend you go in 2024. In terms of the quality of the conversations I had, it was the best event I have been to in a long time. Great work, and we had a blast. I met a lot of great people.
If you are tuning in and weren’t there, you can go to Watch.OuterEdge.live to catch the recorded content, but you will probably miss some of those conversations Jack got into while being there.
This is a perfect teaser for the next segment. The goal here is for you not to have FOMO as you are tuning in to this but to have JOMO. We will talk more about that later on in the show. What I enjoyed most was the hackathon that we did together, Jack. We had 21 teams and over 100 developers and builders, half of which were women, deploying some cool technology and showing what the LA ecosystem is all about. We had some folks come in from all over the world. That was a lot of fun. Thanks for helping with that.
It was a good mix. You got to get the builders involved, especially at an NFT-focused conference where there are a lot of creative people, agencies, designers, and artists. It was great to see also the developers and engineers well represented.
We are at the outer edge of all emerging tech at this point. That is why our partnership is quite special because you guys are putting together a world-class experience, not just for NFT platforms but games and other Web3 applications. We’ve had you on before. Our audience can tune in for a deeper dive into what SKALE is. For this episode, can you give us a quick elevator pitch and more importantly, talk about the direction you are taking SKALE?
I'm going to take a step back and try to hit this from a high level so it is understandable. A lot of times, people talk about blockchains. Maybe 2% of the people know what the person is talking about. Most people are familiar with Ethereum. SKALE was purpose-built to help Ethereum scale. We were one of the original Layer 2 before Layer 2 was a term. That term has morphed over time, but we were app builders.
Stan Kladko, myself, and my cofounder had 3 or 4 different ideas of applications that we wanted to build on Ethereum. We kept running into the same issue like cost, speed, latency, and all these issues that made it impossible to create highly scalable applications. Stan, my cofounder, is a world-renowned physicist and cryptographer. I designed a scaling infrastructure for the applications he was looking at building. We decided to take that idea and bring that to other builders like ourselves. Both of our backgrounds are more in middleware and infrastructure as opposed to on the application layer. It was a better fit for us.
SKALE was built to bring the power of Ethereum to billions of users, not tens of thousands of users. It is built to work in tandem with Ethereum. It has Layer 1 and Layer 2 security qualities. At the end of the day, many Ethereum blockchains are connected to Ethereum and integrated with Ethereum. That enables people to build and launch NFTs on Ethereum, run games and applications adjacent to the SKALE network, and launch NFTs on SKALE. That is it in the simplest form. It is designed to help users use blockchain applications without the complexity and in a way that is more we are used to within the Web2 world.
Ethereum gas prices were sky high in the $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 to $5,000. Since the merge, they have come down considerably. I was doing some trading and some exchanging. Ethereum was popping back up to the $30, $40 to $50 range again. It is important to understand products like SKALE allow for much more efficient sustainable transactions.
A famous chef in Napa called me. He is a SKALE holder. He is trying to restake rewards. I was walking him through this. I was walking to the office. I'm jumping on a call and doing some tech support for high-value community members. The gas fee was $265 for him to claim the staking reward and then re-stake it. A few weeks ago, I did the same thing and it was $10. It is good news. Whenever Ethereum gas fees are high, it means a lot of people are using Ethereum. You get a lot of market sentiment. It is a leading indicator of market activity when those gas fees go up. It also makes platforms like SKALE more useful when it is not $5, and the same $5 and $10 transaction is $265. It makes a lot more sense why you are using Layer 2 or Ethereum scaling platforms.
I’m looking up Stan. He has impressive background here. Directors’ Fellow, Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory for 25 years. He has seen a lot of cutting-edge technology in that particular role.
Stan got some crazy stories about Los Alamos. There is this protected area that is defended by machine gun turrets. He couldn't even access it. He was like, “There is some stuff going on. There are some smart people living in the desert doing things under highly secure environments.” Stan also has a funny story. When he was in high school, he won the math competition for the entire USSR. He grew up in Ukraine. He was the top math student.
He ended up winning a scholarship to go study abroad for one year in Maine. He said he only had $50 when he moved to Maine. He was a dishwasher. He wash dishes, and then he would do this advanced theoretical math. That was his introduction to America. Eventually, he moved here. He was a researcher at Stanford and accomplished a lot of cool things at Silicon Valley.
Was he from Russia?
He is from Ukraine back when it was part of the USSR. He won this USSR Soviet Union math competition.
You got an impressive variety of use cases there with SKALE. There are experiences that are engaging games to get to large-scale frictionless Web3 integrations. Can you tell us a little bit more about those applications you are facilitating and why SKALE is the special infrastructure for that?
Let's look at the NFT market in general. Even the NFT LA rebranding to Outer Edge LA is probably a sign of this. The NFT market is not just about trading collectibles. NFTs are going to utilize this entire spectrum of technical applications. NFTs are going to be interacting with generative AI with applications in gaming, Web3 social media applications, creator economy, gating, and ticketing. There is this whole field where having nonfungible tokens is highly valuable in all these areas of practice.
If you think about SKALE and you think about this as a product market-fitting strategy, you think, “Why does SKALE add value to a developer?” The developer can have zero gas fee transactions for the end user. Dartmouth Blockchain did a study and they analyzed the top blockchains out there. SKALE, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, and Near. SKALE was the fastest. It is faster than Solana. It had a faster time to finality than Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, and the other chains I mentioned, which was amazing to see. If you look at that, you say, “How do you utilize the zero gas fees and those strengths of speed and time to finality?” The answer is in utility, not just in the collection.
We’re seeing a lot of success where NFTs are utilized in applications and this broad spectrum of technologies. If we talk to a developer who says, "I'm launching a 10,000 NFT set. It is going to live on Ethereum. The only activity of transactions will be people trading it with each other." If somebody is selling an expensive NFT, they don't care about $10 or a $50 gas fee. Somebody who is using NFT hundreds or thousands of times in a day cares if they have to spend $5 or $10 a time or even $0.10 a time. That is where we are finding our sweet spot. Anybody who has been watching the blog has probably seen a lot of these announcements of different applications joining SKALE.
If you look at what Richard from Manifold is all about, he envisions a world of NFTs where it is equivalent to buying a cup of coffee. If a little coffee spills out of the mug, you don't cry. You buy another coffee. The idea of easy and seamless transactions for small goods and services, especially in music with Sound.xyz, it is critical that those transaction costs are low to create a liquid and vibrant ecosystem. Ideally, we get to under the same cost as credit card purchasing transaction fees. That would be a win if we can seal that deal. Jack, you can use that tagline if you want for SKALE in the future. That seems quite relevant to what you are up to.
That springs up an interesting conversation I had where we were talking to someone who was enabling a credit card fee out ramp. We were comparing that. There is a little user friction if I take my credit card and I'm going to buy an NFT and start doing events and convert a bunch of instantly credit card dollars into USDC, for example. We then start talking through it. The partner said, “There is a huge percentage fee. We are going to pay multiple percentage points to do that, and a gas feed to bridge over or a direct ramp fee is a dramatically better solution.”
There are some ramps going live on SKALE. The wire ramp is live. There are other ones going live. We have exceeded credit cards already, but we still need to get that user friction down because credit cards are easy. It is what it comes down to. Across the industry, there are a lot of huge strides being made there.
Recognizing how closely you guys align with Ethereum, where do you see the future of Ethereum scaling and its potential in tandem with SKALE supporting some of these faster and more frequent transactions?
I'm excited about SKALE Connect. It is something we are going to talk about. I don't want to jump the gun, but that is an interesting use case. If you think about the value of Ethereum, you can't use SKALE without Ethereum because all the staking for SKALE lives on Ethereum. The SKALE token lives on Ethereum. That secures the SKALE network. Staking rewards are all paid out on Ethereum.
The networks are intertwined. From a usability perspective, they are intertwined for an end user. One interesting area that we are excited about launching, and you will be hearing more about this, is something called SKALE Connect. Any NFT on the Ethereum Mainnet can be utilized instantly within the SKALE network as soon as SKALE Connect is turned off.
What happens is there is an oracle that natively lives on every SKALE chain. It is because of the component parts of how SKALE functions. There is a trusted execution environment which is an Intel SGX chip. There is a threshold messaging feature. There is messaging where the different nodes can talk, interact quickly, and sign off. There is a consensus mechanism. These things together are the component parts of an oracle if you look at Chainlink and other oracles. Those component parts are already in each SKALE chain.
We realize, “Let's turn the skill oracle on.” It was not a lot of coding for the community to get that together. The skill oracle existed. Its goal initially was to provide standard oracle value in terms of reading data inputs like, “What is the price of a token for the DeFi platform? What is the sports score? What is the weather?” Things that oracles do.
One other use case is that the oracle could look at the Ethereum Mainnet and validate which address own has which token at any given time. Let's say, Josh, you have your APE. You decide this game developer has enabled APEs to live over on the SKALE chain. The APE user knows he doesn't need to lock that in any contract, put it in any risky environment, part ways with it, or lock it up at all.
By owning it in an on-chain manner that can be validated, that user can have special access to whether it be in a game, mint other NFTs, utilize that character, or have special roles and access within that game, all in an on-chain seamless gas-free manner without any risk to NFTs on the Ethereum maintenance. That relationship is exciting.
I want to drill into that a little bit. There have been conversations around interoperability in terms of teleporting assets. In this case, what you are saying is you don't have to teleport your assets. You can keep them right where they are and be in two places at once.
Yes, exactly. If someone comes up with a name for that, tell me.
Being in two places at once is called bilocation. If that is what is happening, that is bilocation.
That could be great. The thing is you can bridge NFTs on SKALE. You could take your APE and lock it in an escrow contract. What happens is it bridges over through threshold encrypted messaging. The SKALE chain validates that you have that. It gets brought over. The custody could change. You could sell it to somebody on SKALE. Somebody else could have it, come over, and be able to claim that. What you are doing is putting your NFT at risk. If you have a $1 million NFT or whatever valuable NFT and you don't want to do that, you can utilize it without any risk or cost. The main thing is for developers to leverage and utilize this.
We are excited. I can't announce them yet because of NDAs, but our partners will be announcing them, where cool use cases of Ethereum Mainnet NFTs are being utilized over on SKALE. New NFTs can be minted within the gameplay and assets. New privileges can be garnered by the carriers or the holder of the NFT. Let's say Josh passes it to Eathan. The oracle will recognize that. If Josh goes over to try to use the NFT, he no longer can. The new owner can validate it. He can go over and utilize it because your 0x address on the Ethereum Mainnet is the same 0x address on SKALE for a contract. Smart contracts are different, but for addresses, only that user can claim that on the other EVM chain.
Let’s say I buy something on Ethereum and it is now affiliated. If I go to Etherscan, my address says that my address owns that item. If I sell it to someone through SKALE, does Ethereum still say it is affiliated with my address, but it is inaccessible to me?
That is a great question because it calls out some of the complexities. It gives me an opportunity to clarify. Let's say you have 0x896B. You own a Pudgy Penguin. We are not working with Pudgy Penguins. I'm using them as an example because they got these adorable penguins. You can go over to SKALE. Your 0x address over here is the same one on SKALE. You don't need to pass your Penguin. You don't have to do anything. The SKALE chain knows, “This address has a Penguin over on the Mainnet.” It can validate that in an on-chain manner without any centralized trust mechanisms.
If the Penguins had a game or licensed their IP to a game on SKALE, without any custodial risk or security risk to the user on the Ethereum mainnet, that user could be utilizing that asset on the SKALE chain without any transfer. Let’s say you sent it to another 0x address. That 0x address would be the only address that could have those rights for this. You got this similar version walking around on the SKALE side that can be transferred because it is mirroring. It is almost like a mirrored NFT. Maybe that is a better way to put it.
You mentioned a little bit about the gaming implications here, which is useful. Anything else to say about opening up these possibilities in gaming? Do we cover the use case there?
Another interesting use case is gating or ticketing NFTs. There are a lot of high-value social access NFTs being sold. You have this NFT. You might get access to do A, B, C, or certain things. A lot of those things you can do and privileges are off-chain. They are people that are running a business. They have an AWS server that validates that this user's email address is the same user back in the access, and they get these privileges because they have the NFT.
There are also unchain mechanics and values where people want to run applications for gated NFTs, but when they do that, the user has to have a native currency. The user is paying gas fees, and things are slow and cumbersome. On SKALE, you can have this Web2-like experience where you can utilize on-chain mechanics for social NFTs and gating NFTs. It doesn't necessarily have to be a game. It is also the other use cases, whether it is B2B, social media, greater economy, or music. You can open up smart contract execution on the SKALE side without any custodial risk or security risk.
At the end of the day, Ethereum is the number one place for any NFT trading volume, ownership value, and activity. Ninety-nine percent of the value of the entire NFT market is on the Ethereum Mainnet. The gating factor is if you want to use those NFTs, it is expensive and cumbersome. Our goal is to help the best of both worlds come together. People can keep minting NFTs on the Ethereum Mainnet but use them on SKALE without any complexity, risk, or cost.
With the increasing market dynamics, things are at least looking a little brighter than they were six months ago. Where this all goes, we will see. That is a different topic for a different show, but with these broader use cases for games and enterprises come a lot of new possibilities in terms of partnerships, collaborations, and features. We love to peel that onion with you a little bit and unpack whatever we can around what is next for SKALE. We love Alpha, Jack. Try not to hold back on us.
One thing I want to say in that line of thinking is looking at my role. SKALE has grown and flourished from a developer and community perspective. A lot of these features and ideas are community-built. They are brought to the table by the community. I am here as a spokesperson on behalf of this open-source effort. None of this is any investment or trading advice. We are all about the tech and utility world. Thankfully, we have this great decentralized group of devs building.
An example of that is when somebody brought up in the APE’s channel, “Instead of thinking about starting your own chain, you should rent a SKALE chain. You get all the validators instantly. You get everything out of the box.” Someone said, “These are $1 million NFTs. I feel more comfortable having $1 million NFT secured by the security of Ethereum as opposed to any other Layer 2.”
That is why you don't see APEs flying all over the place. That stemmed from this whole conversation among people and developers in the community. That was the genesis of SKALE Connect. It was cool to see that come together. There are some other things we can talk about in terms of protocol development if people are interested in hearing more about what is coming.
I'm interested. Let's cover that.
Let's talk about the future of scaling. When you look at methodologies of how to get more of a blockchain, one conversation that is happening now is the future of scalability. Ethereum is this foundational force, stores value, and a base layer that is not going anywhere, and it is getting bigger. We need a place to run smart contracts and run transactions that are connected.
Some people think that the best way to get scalability is with a monolithic Layer 1 blockchain, one big blockchain. That philosophy is far less popular than it was before. You look at all these new projects that are getting funding. The vast majority of them are called infrastructure projects for scalability. The vast majority of them have shared security models or pooled security models, where you have lots of chains. They share a validatorship and security among them. It is called pooled security.
You get these performance buckets that are unlimited. You keep growing them. They don't bifurcate their security. If you have ten chains and you add an eleventh, that eleventh chain doesn't have one-eleventh of security. It has one of one security because of the way security is shared and passed through the blockchain. That is what SKALE has been doing since 2018. We are excited that this is coming together.
One thing that these newer projects have that SKALE doesn't have now is zero-knowledge proof. There has been an announcement, and it is another community-driven effort from the developer community at SKALE to say, "How can we integrate zero-knowledge proofs into SKALE?” If we do that, all of these zero-knowledge-proof projects are trying to figure out a way to build app chains.
SKALE has app chains. The question is since we already have done the hard part, the zero-knowledge-proof technology is open-source, what libraries could be taken and plugged into SKALE? We are pumped about zero knowledge proofs being accessible within SKALE and pluggable. My feeling is there are going to be hundreds of companies that are successful that monetized by selling computation and throughput for zero-knowledge proofs
The goal for SKALE will be to be a home for all of those zero-knowledge-proof technologies where they can plug into SKALE, provide their technology, and monetize through a decentralized system as opposed to a centralized sequencer model where someone runs this mirrored blockchain technology on Amazon and submits some fraud proof to try to say they are trustworthy. I will stop. It is probably too deep on the tech, but those are a couple of exciting things that I feel are being worked on in SKALE.
What we are talking about here could be a metaphor for society as a whole. The more heterogeneous we are, where there's this rich diversity of projects and ecosystems that connect to each other, the more rewarding and meaningful society as a whole, and the more flexibility people have to create their own adventures in life. The same applies to using all this emerging technology in the right creative way without that rigidity.
We have talked a lot about smart decentralization. What we hear on the show and what came to life at Outer Edge is some creative building going on around like zero proof and ZK rollups where it is the right amount of information sharing and sharing of assets at the right time with the right people. With that type of capability, we can build a more vibrant ecosystem. It is exciting to see how SKALE is on the cutting edge of that level of disruptive innovation in the blockchain space.
I was talking to someone who said, “Betamax had way better technology than VCR, but VCR won.” The way that relates to this world is EVM is VCR, Ethereum Virtual Machine, and Ethereum. The competition is who builds the best mouse traps leveraging Ethereum Virtual Machine and connecting back to the Ethereum Mainnet. I know there are some other major Layer 1 chains that are getting traction, but the vast majority of build use cases and action is on Ethereum. We are excited about that. I do think there are going to be a lot of different heterogeneous models but in this homogenous viewpoint of EVM.
Ethereum is looking interesting at this moment in time. I'm surprised about those gas fees that you are mentioning, especially considering the change to proof of stake, but we have seen it.
Those same fees after the merge were around $5 to $10 for a while. If you look at the end of 2022, those same gas size computations for SKALE staking were $5 to $10 in December. It’s $265 in USD value now to execute the same transaction.
Even $5 or $10 is still too high.
To wrap up the segment, I want to know what projects you have been following in Web3 outside of SKALE. It is always interesting to see what experienced entrepreneurs and thinkers like yourself are watching and keeping their eyes on.
You are traveling around and meeting interesting people. What are some of the stories that have unfolded on these journeys of yours?
0xBattleground is launching one of the first implementations of blockchain gaming that feels like a Web2 game. It is downloadable on a computer. It is a first-person shooter. It is super high-end graphics. The whole time the users are performing functions and doing things. MetaMask isn't popping up. They are interacting with a blockchain. This is a smart team with people in both Dubai and Switzerland. It is a massive team. They know how to market. It is a pure gaming company that is doing something cool. That is in gaming.
Another would be Ultimate Digits. It is a cool product where anybody can claim their phone number on Ethereum. That is an NFT that becomes your identity. It is your gateway into utilizing Web3 through your phone number. There is an incentive for your phone number. I better claim my number. That is the tip of the spear. There are all these things you can do with that in terms of your digital identity. If you look at the Ethereum name service, it is an awesome product, but it is a little complicated. The phone number is a little more simple.
Another cool thing I have seen is Revel is launching a creator economy product. NFT Labs, who was sponsoring Outer Edge LA, have a cool product they are launching with the Major Global Soccer League, which is part of FIFA. I don't want to front-run their announcement, but a fan gating and ticketing mechanism all driven and powered by NFTs. That is cool. Millions of non-technical users who don't own a computer are going to be interacting with blockchain entirely through their phones.
How we have achieved such dramatic global changes with the internet, in general, is being able to move these things to the phone.
We had a Redeem.xyz interview in Consensus. They are an addendum to ticketing where there is now a text-based ticket purchase and communication mechanism for all ticketing companies in the space. That type of middleware is helpful. It is interesting connections with texting in mass adoption that there is room for additional innovation.
Keep your eyes open for a lot of the advancements around account abstraction. It is a decentralized custodial wallet with social recovery mechanisms and different mechanisms that will make Ethereum more usable while not giving up on security. That is a hot topic in the Ethereum developer community, which is nice to hear.
I wrote this blog post called The Blockchain Hierarchy of Needs. As humans, we have a hierarchy of needs in terms of food, shelter, and safety. All of a sudden, we want ego gratification, love, and eventually self-actualization. In a blockchain, the only thing anyone would ever talk about was security, and then it was security, performance, and decentralization. People are finally saying, “What about usability?” A lot of us have been talking about it for a long time, but it is good to see we get more of the lion's share of the conversation amongst the more serious Ethereum developers.
This is the end of our conversation generally about SKALE. Typically, we do Quick Hitters, but we have had you on the program a few times. We have done Quick Hitters.
I'm excited for the next phase here. We are going to have some fun conversations. Let's roll into it.
I came up with one Quick Hitter that is particularly appropriate. We will transition to Quick Hitters briefly, and we will go to our Hot Topic. We know Quick Hitter is a fun quick way to know our guests a little bit better with some personal questions. We got one here. You will see why I'm asking this in a moment. Jack, you are a hard worker and doing a lot of cool stuff. Do you ever have any time to recharge? How do you do it?
I was talking about how I was working. I had been working 15 to 18 hours a day for the last five years. I was like, “If I keep this up, I'm going to die. I better start taking care of myself.” I go to yoga three days a week. I completed a full-distance Ironman. I started taking care of my body again. I'm still working hard, but you got to take care of yourself. I have been getting back into the gym and yoga studio. I’m training for a half Ironman. I’m making these things come together and figuring out a way to strategically schedule them into my day. It is a marathon, not a sprint when doing any sort of work regardless of who you are.
Is it a marathon or an Ironman?
Thankfully, this one is half Ironman. I don't want to do a full Ironman ever again. It was painful. I have some nightmares about that.
Thanks for sharing a little bit of a peek into your personal approach there. We now have our Hot Topic guest. We will find this transition quite interesting. Our Hot Topic guest is Shira Lazar of the JOMO Effect. Shira, let's talk about her for a minute and start the conversation. She is an Emmy-nominated leading voice around digital culture and emerging trends. Shira took the internet by storm with her web-first news brand, What’s Trending. She has spoken at conferences, including South by Southwest, VCON, NFT NYC, Outer Edge LA, and NFT LA.
She was named among Fast Companies’ Most Influential Women in Tech. She is also the Cofounder of Peace Inside Live, a wellness community and platform offering virtual classes, workshops, and retreats. PIL is consistently working to break down the barriers of entry and make tools for well-being accessible for all via Web3 community experiences and innovative workplace programs. Shira, welcome to the show. Namaste.
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It is great to be on. I have heard so much about this show. I feel like I'm friends and family here. It is an honor.
Shira, myself, and Jordana share as cofounder go way back predating our blockchain and Web3 adventures together. Shira, in the early days of getting into Web3, I remember how passionate you were about elevating consciousness in the emerging technology world, which we talked about a little bit with Jack. I know Jordana, your partner and a dear friend of mine, spent years diving into the art of healing in Nepal and Thailand. It is all now coming together in this special way. I would love to unpack that with you. We missed Jordana.
Jordana Reim is her full name, in case you want to look her up. She is in Thailand now. We are holding down the fort here.
I got the Simple Habit meditation app. I'm checking that out. I try out different meditations when I'm trying to sleep. I found one and listened to it. I was like, “That is Jordana,” who was working with all of this stuff. You can find Jordana on Simple Habit doing some meditations.
Also, on Peace Inside Live, where we have 30 of her one-minute meditations as well on our platform.
I know you guys have been working hard on helping the world transition from FOMO to JOMO and inject some additional mental health energy into society. Can you explain a little bit more about that?
We are working on a project called The JOMO Effect. We are starting a movement around the Joy Of Missing Out. What better place to begin this than with the Web3 space, NFT, and the crypto world that is about FOMO. It is pervasive. It is an industry that is led by volatility and supply and demand. If this is a new movement and the space we are all moving into and the technology that things are building from, we all believe that we should be integrating mindfulness, mental health, and wellness into the foundation versus having it as an afterthought or an add-on as we saw in previous industries and corporate cultures. That is our passion and commitment. Whether Web3 or AI, our world is moving quickly with technology. We can't lose ourselves along the way if we want to make sure that we maintain a conscious and ethical world for us all.
Can you tell us a little bit about artists that are getting involved in the JOMO Effect jam?
I went into more of the idea of what we were building, but to give you some context, Jordana and I have been working on Peace Inside Live. We had an idea for this journal in 2022. It has been a bucket list for both of us. We got started on the Jomo Journal, the Joy of Missing Out Journal. Because of our background working with NFTs and NFT artists, we thought, “Wouldn't it be fun to have art in this?”
There are a lot of prompts. The journal helps you cultivate inner joy daily through different exercises, but we thought it would be cool to integrate that part of us. We are inspired by artists as well. We ended up reaching out to twelve artists in the NTF space who created unique pieces of what joy means to them. We thought, “Wouldn't it be cool for you to buy art and it goes to mental health charities?” It snowballed. From twelve artists, we ended up getting 40, and it became an entire collection.
We decided to launch this for Mental Health Awareness Month, which is in May 2023. This is all happening on May 10th, 2023, through Magic Eden on Polygon. We are making it accessible. It is going to be a blind mint and an open mint. We do have a joy list like an allow list that we are calling it, where you can get a discount. We want to make this as available to as many people as possible because we are trying to raise money here. All primary sales go to five mental health charities. Not only do you get an amazing piece of art.
Some of their art is also worth 1 ETH plus. Some of them are their first time on Polygon. We are doing a lot of work here. You are also giving back to charities. As holders, we have amazing perks, including sessions with the Chopra Foundation, Deepak Chopra, and Seva.love, his Web3 project which we are partners as well as through Peace Inside Live, our platform.
That is a bit about the project. Upon starting this, we realized this is much bigger than we thought it would be. We never meant to have a mint or an NFT project. That was not our goal. We know how stressful it is, and we are in the industry of trying to create less stress. There is a bit of a dichotomy and irony there.
We ended up getting some folks who have minted out projects. We thought, “They could help us along the way because we don't want to do this on our own.” It became a bit more of a decentralized community project. We have TIMEPieces involved and House of First. Outer Edge is a partner as well. If you go to our allow list link or joy lists, you can see all the people from HUG, BFF, Adam Bomb Squad, and 9dcc.
We got many communities who have decided to say, “We are committed to mental health in Web3.” They are pushing this out to their holders and communities. It has become bigger than us, and that was the hope. We have a goal. We want to create action, but the whole point is also a conversation about what it means to exist in this space and digital culture, and how we take care of our own mental health and others in the process.
I got my own developing theory here. I'm not an expert on stress. They got the eustress versus distress. The eustress is good stress. We need a little bit of stress. It is like you are about to give a talk and you got butterflies. That is good because it gives you a little bit of lift and energy. The distress is when you are overstressed and you are taxed.
My approach is to seek eustress. Seek the certain type of stress that ideally has an ultimately positive effect, like going for a run, lifting some weights, or putting your body under some stress, but that is good stress because it leads to better health. There is something there that hopefully will be developed over time here around choosing your stress. On the same philosophy, no stress is bad because you begin to atrophy. If you don't lift weights, you don't get stronger. If you don't give your mind a little bit of exercise, you get dumber. Hopefully, we get to incorporate a little bit of that.
You brought up many interesting things because what you are talking about is stretching yourself and challenges in life or doing things that are uncomfortable, but we know it makes us feel better like getting out of our comfort zone and working out in the morning or working on a project that is challenging, but it is not toxic and unhealthy to us. We learn and there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We gain a lot of experience and wisdom.
Life is not easy even if we learn all these tools. There is no perfection like this idea that everything is going to be perfect because you learn this or there is ease and flow. Human existence can be difficult. Life can be hard. This is me talking about my own lived experience and what I'm learning. It is about accepting that there are these highs and lows. One is not better than the other. It’s just all is.
The more we accept that and find peace in that and are present in that, the more joy and peace we could have. That creates possibly a successful life because you could be present in what it is and create more from that. When you are present and anxious, how can you create anything? You are not going to hit your max possibility because you are thinking from a limited perspective and from limiting beliefs.
There is so much to unpack here. I appreciated you all teaching a little bit about this in our workshop at Outer Edge and doing the wellness event on Community Day together. It was epic. I have heard great feedback from the community about all these Zen experiences that we were able to co-create together and with your leadership. Shout out to our friends at HelloVacay for providing such an amazing home base for that experience.
As I reflect on the year in the journey of Edge, space, and society, this is such a critical topic. Jack, I'm thinking about some of our conversations in terms of the challenges you had with your developers in Ukraine and in all the things I'm sure you have faced as a steward of such an important Layer 1 solution in such a dynamic market. What resonates with you from what’s shared?
There are a lot of good perspectives. I will speak from my life's stress being in my position. I also have three kids that are under six. That adds to it. You hit the nail on the head when you share the word acceptance. I got to a point where a while ago, I said, “Any job is going to have pieces of it that are stressful.” In the morning, I try to get up and say, “I'm thankful I have these challenges ahead of me.
At night when I'm going to sleep, and I have all this stuff, I'm like, “I'm thankful I have all these problems to work on.”
If you didn't have a job and goals, what are you doing? The vast majority of people would not be happy. You are not going to be happy sitting on a beach somewhere. You are going to want to do something. For me, I was like, “What am I going to do next?” I try to be grateful and have acceptance. There are things that are out of your control, but you got to have a little bit of framing and recognize, “This isn't that big of a deal.”
The developers in Ukraine, our engineering team, a lot of them are on vacation for the weekend. You can't go home. They haven't been home in several years. Their homes are being bombed. There are always lesser and greater challenges than you are experiencing. Embracing and accepting them is a great starting point. I'm sure you are teaching other skills. There is a lot more to it than that.
This is the tip of the iceberg to a bigger conversation of movement that we want people to think of instead of leading with FOMO. Think about how you want to exist in these spaces, and not just be reactive to it, but choose how you want to exist, like making it work for you versus you working for it. That could support how we each navigate in these industries.
You don't need to approach something like everyone else. If something works for someone else, it doesn't mean it might work for you, and that is okay. The more we get to know ourselves and do that in our work and find out, ask that question, “What does joy mean to me?” The more that becomes a filter for how we navigate our personal and professional lives. We can make better decisions for ourselves. We feel more of a sense of self-worth. We are leaning into something that is good for us. We feel happier. We treat people the way we treat ourselves. We treat ourselves and other people better. It becomes more of a domino effect. That is a good entryway to get started.
We are doing this mint on May 10th, 2023. We even have a gallery show at Superchief Gallery New York on May 11th, 2023. Our hope is to take this all around the world to events. Even in 2024 at Outer Edge, we take this gallery show and continue this conversation. We have this FOMO to JOMO workshop that Jordana and I do.
We now have the JOMO Journal. If you are a holder, you get 15% off to continue your practice. It was a whole ecosystem that we were building. It is cool to be able to build it not just in the wellness world or what would be considered like the woo-woo world but to be built in spaces that might surprise people, where it is like, "I didn't think about this, but I should be because I'm stressed out and I'm burnt out." We don't need to live like this. It doesn't need to be the default. We are trying to find an alternative and offer that to people.
I'm honored to be one of your partners and to help create a platform for this incredible work you are doing in this space. I’m excited about future collaborations. It has been a great long-term partnership and all sorts of interesting and stressful times in the last few years. Break it down for us specifically, what's the minting date, the details on how people can participate, and what do they have to do?
If you go to @PeaceInsideLive, we have our joy list and the allow list. Sign up and let us know if you are a holder of one of the projects. We will put Outer Edge or Edge of NFT so we can know you came through this show. When we go live on May 10th, 2023, from 9:00 AM Eastern to 1:00 PM Eastern, that is the allow list. You will get early access to the mint at a discount. It will be 20 MATIC from 9:00 AM Eastern to 1:00 PM Eastern. At 1:00 PM Eastern, we go public at 24 MATIC for 24 hours. We are going to be raising money and getting this as much out there as we can.
I will do some extras that we have as part of this or some perks. For every five that you hold upon Snapshot, Adam Bomb Squad created a unique Adam Bomb Squad for this. They created a JOMO Atom Bomb Squad that will be airdropping the people who collect every five. If you collect ten, you get two. If you collect the entire collection, even though it is a blind mint, it is in numerological order. You have the ability to collect the entire collection. You get Access 1 to a private TIMEPieces or TIME IRL event. Deepak Chopra’s team is going to be also doing this for the collectors of 40 plus a virtual gathering on Zoom. It is like a private event where you could do a private Q&A. It is going to be a small group of us with Deepak that we are going to be setting up for those collectors.
We have perks for people that hold even one. The reveal happens on May 11th, 2023, at 1:00 PM Eastern. We will be doing a reveal party. Sign up and be there on May 10th, 2023. It is on Magic Eden. You can find all the info at Peace Inside Live. We hope to see you there. A lot of people talk about how important this is, but this is your chance to talk the talk, walk the walk, spread the word about JOMO, and share it in your timeline. Let's move the needle together.
SKALE has some super fun teleporting features for low transaction costs. Maybe Jack will join the tribe and give you some opportunities to teleport into SKALE.
Before we wrap your segment here, Shira, make sure people know where to follow you, the social stuff, and the websites to reiterate.
I'm @ShiraLazar everywhere, even on Telegram and @PeaceInsideLive. You can check us what we are up to. PeaceInside.Live/JOMO is where you can find out more.
Thanks so much for joining us, Shira. We will see you on the flip side and in our meditations.
I appreciate it. Thank you so much for supporting. See you soon.
Josh, should we hit maybe other hot topics real quick?
Let's hit one if that works for you, Jack.
Let's do it.
Sotheby's is launching an on-chain NFT marketplace for secondary art sales. Sotheby's took its years-long embrace of Web3 a step further here. They launched a portal on their Metaverse platform with secondary NFT artwork sales that are conducted peer-to-peer and fully on-chain in addition to Sotheby's Metaverse platform, which went live in October 2021. It features support for NFT artwork minted on Ethereum and scaling network Polygon which Sotheby's described as the networks of choice for NFT creators and collectors.
It has been fun since the beginning to as media “following” these stories to see Sotheby's jumping in here and getting involved deeply from early on, and having them have a marketplace is also interesting considering what else we have out there. I wonder if there are going to be people who are way more intrigued to head on over to Sotheby's NFT marketplace than OpenSea because it feels more familiar and accessible.
There is a key component here that I honed in on in the article, which is that there will be a specific approach to secondary sales. It is automatic for the artists. We know with the increase in royalty-free shopping experiences induced by Blur and the optionality that OpenSea has created that, there has been some pushback in the industry. It hurt a lot of the creators that got this industry to where it is now. One of the most promising aspects of this is that creators have an outlet now. It is a smart move by them to do that.
I look at this as both a defensive and an offensive move. If you look at Sotheby's, they are a middle man of selling stuff. The best is selling expensive things, whether it be art or real estate. They are at the high end. If you look at the role of escrows, smart contracts, and websites, you know what they do. It disintermediates these middlemen, auctioneers, or sales entities.
In a way, it is a smart defensive move to be able to step into this what could be a ten-year Kodak moment for them. At the same time, they are playing offense. They are beating everybody to the punch who are smaller and versatile companies that are intuitively tech savvy. It is brilliant. Whoever is running innovation there should probably get a raise.
It is accessible but not done well for various reasons at various times for a company or an organization that established itself in a certain domain to upgrade with technology. A specific example that I encountered is piano rolls. I'm in the piano industry. The old piano roll is a paper roll with little notches or holes in it. It would go through these player pianos that you crank or pump with your feet back in the bar rooms. The company that created those is QRS. They evolved along with the industry. They started to make the electronic version of that. It is now a player piano like a MIDI system. These companies and organizations don't do that.
It seems to be some of the higher ends for whatever reason. Maybe because of the talent they attract that they are able to do this. When you look at great universities like Harvard or Stanford, these places are maintaining their prowess in their domains regardless of the shifts and changes because of the fact that they may get something wrong here and there. There are these names that you trust. That has a lot to it. A name that you can trust, attracting the appropriate talent, and making things work.
If I were spending a Sotheby's size portion of the money to buy NFT, I would feel a lot more confident about buying it through Sotheby's than the majority of other brands out there. Even though, at the end of the day, smart contracts are making these things move. There is validation with their brand.
We got through the Hot Topics, and we covered a lot. It is time to about wrap up, but before we do, we want to make sure we check back in with you, Jack, and let the audience know where is the best place to follow you, everything SKALE is up to, and anything else you want to shout out there.
You can follow me @JackOHolleran on Twitter or go to SKALE.space to get access to Discord and Telegram and to join the SKALE project. It is an open-source project community. If you are building NFTs and are an enthusiast, we love to talk to you and have you be part of the community. Please join. It is going to be a big month in terms of announcements and action on SKALE.
From the outside, it seems like this never-ending winter, I'm sure, for a lot of people, but from the inside and builder's perspective, we are at a 10X load in terms of where we were six months ago in terms of volume of things happening, deals, projects going live, and applications. It is an exciting time. That is indicative of the success of SKALE, but also the market in general. There is growth. This industry will not be stopped.
I know that we are planning to do some giveaways together, but it is probably TBD. We will have the audience look out on the socials for that.
Take a look at that because I was waiting on that too. There are a lot of moving parts right now. I’m excited to promote, get our partner's NFTs out there, and help subsidize that delivery to this community. Keep your eyes open for that.
We have reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFTs for today. Thanks for exploring with us. We got space for more adventures on this starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes, rate us, and say something awesome. Go to Edge of NFT to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing EdgeOfNFT and start a fun conversation with us online. Be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- SKALE
- JOMO Effect
- Sotheby's
- Outer Edge of LA
- Aktana
- Motorola
- Dartmouth Blockchain
- Sound.xyz
- 0XBattleground
- Ultimate Digits
- Revel
- NFT Labs
- Redeem.xyz
- Consensus - Past Episode / Apple Podcast
- Shira Lazar
- What’s Trending
- Peace Inside Live
- Jordana Reim - LinkedIn
- Simple Habit
- Magic Eden
- Chopra Foundation
- Seva.Love
- TIMEPieces
- House of First
- HelloVacay
- @PeaceInsideLive - Twitter
- Adam Bomb Squad
- @ShiraLazar - Instagram
- QRS
- @JackOHolleran - Twitter
- Spotify - Edge Of NFT
- iTunes - Edge Of NFT
- EdgeOfNFT - Twitter
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