Bankless - AMA with Devin Finzer, Co-Founder & CEO of OpenSea

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

Devin Finzer is Co-Founder & CEO of OpenSea, the largest decentralized NFT marketplace for buying and selling digital goods. Like all our AMAs, this was streamed live and incorporated questions from our Inner Circle Discord and live YouTube Chat. These are hosted the 2nd and 4th Wednesday each month, so mark your calendars, tune in, and ask your questions! ----- 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: http://bankless.substack.com/​​​ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/​​​  ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: ⭐️ AAVE - BORROW OR LEND YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave​​​  🚀 GEMINI - MOST TRUSTED EXCHANGE AND ONRAMP https://bankless.cc/go-gemini​​​  💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS https://bankless.cc/monolith​​​  📱 DHARMA - MOBILE ONRAMP DIRECTLY INTO DEFI https://bankless.cc/dharma  ------ Resources: OpenSea https://opensea.io/  Devin on Twitter https://twitter.com/dfinzer?s=20  ----- THIS WEEK ON BANKLESS: 📈 Market Monday (3/8): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/eip-1559-on-the-horizon-market-monday  🎙️ Podcast | Bankless 2.0 (3/8): https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-welcome-to-bankless-2021-edition  🛠️Tactic | Synthetic Stocks (3/9): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/how-to-trade-synthetic-stocks  🏴State of the Nation | 3LAU (3/9): https://youtu.be/5KY9W3Ybmdc  🐦 Follow Bankless on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Right, Bankless Nation, we are super excited to bring you this community. Ask Me Anything. This is your opportunity to ask our guest's question. We are streaming this live on YouTube. We usually do this on the second and fourth Wednesday of the month. This time it's Thursday, but next time it will be the fourth Wednesday of March. So check it out. You can also get it on the podcast the day after.

I'm super excited about our guests today because the subject is topical. The subject is absolutely blowing up. We're talking about NFTs today, and there's so much going on in the NFT world. We've got an absolute expert. This is Devin Finster, who is the co-founder of OpenC. David, what's going on with NFTs? Why are we bringing on a guest to talk about NFTs? Yeah, people would think that, like, we're done talking about NFTs,

but like, NFTs aren't done, like, maturing or being discovered by people. So the surface area for NFTs is endless. And the news of this week is that Rob Gronkowski, otherwise known as Gronk, pro football player, tight end for, I'm not a football person, big football player. Yeah, Tampa Bay. Dropped NFTs, right? And so we have now pro sports athletes dropping NFTs. Beeple, as of this morning, sold an NFT for $69 million.

What? So the rabbit hole just keeps on going. And so a really important piece of infrastructure for NFTs, is OpenC, which is a place that I used to explore and kind of view my inventory of NFTs and also see the inventories of NFTs that are out there. But there's also so much more that it does as well. So we got Devin on to just ask what's up with OpenC. And so we're going to bring him on in just a sec.

Guys, start queuing your questions in YouTube if you have them. We're going to start with some questions from David and myself, but we will get to your questions as we see them in YouTube. Before we get to Devin, start talking about OpenC, start talking about NFTs, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. AVE is a borrowing and lending protocol on Ethereum and just recently released AVE version 2, which has a ton of cool new features that makes using AVE even more powerful. With AVE, you can leverage the full power of defy money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. On Ave, there are a ton of assets that you can deposit in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have deposited collateral.

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This is Devin Finster, who is the co-founder of open sea. He's also a non-fungible human. That means he is unique. Cannot be exchanged with any other human being. Devin, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on. Well, thanks for coming on. Are you ready for this bankless AMA, sir? I'm ready. All right. Any questions, guys, put them in YouTube. Let's start with this question because Devin, it really feels like NFTs are having their moment. NFTs are blowing up right now. We've got Beeple. We had three Lao on the podcast. We had Blow on the podcast yesterday. Sorry, not free loud.

That's the inside joke, Dave. That inside joke just made out. Yeah, dude. I got out. Blow on the podcast. Rob Gronkowski now, dropping NFTs. It really feels like they are being discovered, right? I mean, they've been in crypto for a while, but now they're being discovered.

Why are NFTs blowing up, do you think? I think it's a combination of a lot of things. I think it's hard to point to one specific application and say this was the reason that these flow up, right? If you pointed to people, you know, you could point to Topshot, you could point to, you know, all of these different applications that are coming online at roughly the same time. I think a lot of those added fuel to the fire, but I really think that the underlying reason was just the accumulation of a lot of hard work over the last three years from everyone who is involved in the space. So if you look at

2017, late 2017, when CryptoKitties launch, really the only thing you could do in the NFT space was you could buy a CryptoKitty, you could breed a CryptoKitty, you could sell a Crypto kitty. And that was the entire NFT space. It was really born from that project. But over the last three years, now there's so much more. There's NFT creation, there's NFT marketplaces like yourselves.

There's, you know, even brand new blockchains like Flow that are devoted specifically to NFTs. There's NFT indexes. There's NFT collateralization. And all of these things are just creating this really cool ecosystem. And then you throw some fuel on the fire with things like people selling, you know, previously for $4 million now for even more. But you throw that on the fire and then you have this rich ecosystem that people can really dive into.

And, you know, I think that's just a recipe for really explosive growth of the space. And, you know, I think for us, from our vantage point, it was interesting to see because it, you know, it was just kind of really slowly growing. It was a lot of momentum and excitement from the people who were excited about it, but really just contained to that sort of early adopter community. And now all of a sudden, the curve is just, it's insane to see the speed at which these trends evolve and in which they go viral, right? And you're also, the last thing I would say is that you're building on this foundation of social media where everyone's already hyperconnected. So these trends can just go, you know, get broad reach really quickly through things like Twitter and Cloud House and all of these different platforms. So on that note, I want to bring this question to the front of the conversation because there's a decent amount of like the core Ethereum people, the people that have been it with Ethereum since the bear mark. market, right? And they are seeing that growth that you are talking about, that parabola that you

guys are talking about, and saying that this is unsustainable, and these prices are absurd, and, you know, flashbacks to the ICO mania, it can't continue like this. What would you say to people that are worried about the sustainable nature of this new movement? Well, I think it's a good point. I think there's certainly cyclical, there's crypto-cyclical, and I think NFTs will probably have cyclical elements to them. But I do think that this is a very, very different phenomenon from what we saw with ICOs. With ICOs, you know, it was about these sort of projects

that had this, you know, maybe nebulous long-term vision, and then it was really about investing and flipping, whereas, you know, there is some of that in the NFT space today, but a lot of it is around creating, curating, collecting, supporting artists directly. it's not about sort of investing in this sort of like pipe dream, you know, a lot of the ICOs were legitimate, but some of them just weren't and some of them were, you know, felt really scammy and just not, and, you know, didn't feel like a good thing for the space. In this case, I think there's,

there's certainly, you know, scenarios where there's, you know, NFTs that are not worth buying or NFTs that feel overinflated. But I really do think that this is the birth of a much more interesting renaissance and in creator activity and and the design space is just so much wider than ICOs that I think we do actually have you know maybe maybe there's going to be a little bit of a correction but I think we have a long way up as you were saying earlier there's that so much is under explored right now whereas ICOs it kind of felt like at some point you know there wasn't much else to do besides just buy the token and I hope it was going up here there's just a lot of richness that I think will sort of evolve over the next little while.

One thing that I kind of see in the NFT space, in contrast to ICOs, is NFTs almost feel, Devin, like they're more honest than ICOs were. Because with NFTs, you know exactly what you're buying. You're buying a piece of culture. You're buying a meme. Nothing's pretending to be like a utility token that can be turned into money, right? Like we know exactly what we're buying. We're buying subjective art pieces basically, right?

And there's no, you know, here's our business model. There's no like this is how our tokens going to magically accrue value or, you know, kill Ethereum or anything like that. It's just these are creator communities that are saying here's our NFT. You can buy it or not. And the market is really giving the feedback as far as what the value of these things are. Does that resonate with you? No, I think that's a great way of framing it. And I haven't heard that sort of exact framing, but I think that's, yeah, I totally agree. So the other thing that I'm seeing is,

and I love that you use a few kind of verbs, because on bankless, we always talk about like all of the new verbs that we could do in this open money system. You use verbs like creating and curation and collecting, right? These are very NFT. These are collectible verbs. And, you know, I'm somewhat drawn to that, but like getting back to kind of the waves of interest here, do you feel like part of this too, part of the, you know, what we're seeing in terms of price and these big sales is we're seeing different communities suddenly discover NFTs, right? So maybe we've seen kind of the people digital art community suddenly discovering NFTs. And so they fled into the space.

Now maybe we're seeing the beginnings of the professional athlete community, right? We had Mark Cuban on who was talking about this, but you've got Gronk doing something with OpenC, and now that fan base is starting to discover it. So is that what's going? Is that what we're really seeing here? And you mentioned that you still see this as kind of early in its discovery phase. Is that just because, you know, we're going to see wave after wave of community kind of discover this? Talk to me about that process.

Which communities have discovered this and who do you think is next? Great question. I think, well, if you zoom, if you go back in time, to even early 2018 when this was first a thing. Actually, the community they got the most excited about NFTs was the gaming community, right? So CryptoKitties was technically a game as a pretty simple game. But there was this idea from sort of the fringes of the gaming community that maybe you could have games that were more like free market economies versus your traditional game where it's actually quite, games are very sophisticated in their sort of economic policies and economic structures.

but they're completely centrally controlled and completely closed. You don't have imports, exports, you don't really, you have some entrepreneurial activity, but it's kind of looked down upon, right? So what if the idea with the gaming space was like, well, what if you took these closed economies and you opened them up and you allowed things to move from one game to another game, you allowed open markets to exist? That was really what captivated a lot of the attention from gamers, from both gamers and game developers.

The thing that I think was challenging was that, In order to make that work, you know, Ethereum had a lot of limitations of the user experience, you know, had a long way to go. And then, of course, what we've seen over the last six months is that gas prices really just made it difficult to support the full range of economic activity from a $1 item to like a $100 item. So gaming has done well in certain areas, and particularly and kind of maybe we'll talk a little bit about this, but the virtual real estate market projects like the Central and Cryptovoxels and Sandbox. But for the most part, things have shifted towards this more, the simpler use case where it's these really high value art pieces. And I think a large reason for that is just that the technology, that's what the technology can support right now. They can support things that are being sold for thousands of dollars, but it's hard to support things that are sold for a lot less. And I think that will change over time and really enable a broad set of use cases here.

in terms of what communities, I think, will get involved. I think you hit the nail on the head. I think it's just community after community after community. And, you know, goes beyond just, you know, everything from musicians, artists, influencers. Really, there's something to be done here for everyone. And there's people who want to support these people who have really had a lot of trouble monetizing in the past. And so that's not to say that everyone, every influencer should be able to sell millions of dollars of NFTs and not saying that's sustainable. But I do think that, you know, once you have the full spectrum of being able to, you know, buy an NFT for 50 cents, for example, you know, that's supporting a creator through purchasing their NFT when there's, you know, the possibility of reselling it in the future is super exciting and super compelling.

And so if it's looking at kind of what I think might come next, I think expanding to just lots of different users, small and large, and then also expanding to the gaming use case that was sort of the early dream of the space, I think, will happen with as the technology kind of gets better. Devin, you alluded to this, and I want to go back to this about the design space behind NFTs, and drawing parallels from earlier in history, earlier in Ethereum history. history. We had like this early use case of ERC 20 tokens, which were this many different currencies. And this turned into the ICO mania. That was unsustainable. We kind of figured out that currency

wasn't really the best use case for all of these projects. But then we innovated and went through a bear market. And then we came out with defy tokens. And that's kind of like the new paradigm for ERC 20 tokens. And we we often talk on the bankless program about how Ethereum is really speed running the history of money and finance. as fast as it can. Like in the last five years, we've ran through like 2,000 years of human history of money and finance. And now we're kind of where we are at today.

And I think we could draw a similar parallel with NFTs and art, right? And what's unique about NFTs and art is like it's a digital token in the back, digital art in the front, but that back end like hooks into financial apparatuses, right? financial stuff, defy, is what we call it. And so like this software layer that is inherently a software financial layer can be upgraded and innovated on. And so that's, you know, artists are going to work on their art.

They're going to innovate on their art. And that's going to be what they do. And that's going to be independent from Ethereum. But the NFT is also something to innovate and develop and improve upon. And so right now you said, like we are kind of stuck in this early phase where we just have these high value NFTs like that just represent a single piece of digital art. And that to me sounds like the early primitives of something much cooler and much bigger down the line. Where do you see this first innovation coming?

Like what is going to be the cool new innovation in NFTs, at least on the financial and software side that really helps promote this industry and make it sustainable in the same way defy tokens made ERC 20s, 20 tokens sustainable? Interesting. Yeah, I guess what I would say, or one thing to kind of think about is, and I don't know if this sort of falls into your classification of like the front end art or the back in software, but I do think that at the end of the day, these assets can represent all sorts of things in the existing digital world or even the real world. So for example, like right now, you know, you have these simple pieces of digital art that people buy and they're just the provenance is sort of the main thing about it, right? the fact that it came from people makes it exciting and compelling and makes people want to spend millions of dollars on it. But there's also just the raw utility of one of these NFTs.

So for example, you could imagine selling event tickets as NFTs. And those event tickets could be in a real world event or they could be in a virtual event. In the gaming space, you can sell swords inside of a video game, right? Or you could sell courses as NFTs or for musicians and creators and influence. you could sell access to exclusive content or access to special privileges. I think there's a whole, I think we're starting with just collectibles, but layering utility on top of these things is going to be really compelling. But I do think that sort of to what I was saying earlier, I think that in order to have, or I think one of the unlocks will be having the full spectrum of economic activity on these assets. And I do think that you need to be able to have a scenario where someone

can buy something for just a dollar or just $2. So I think a big unlock and probably also a big unlock for DFI as well is being able to not have to spend $50 in gas to acquire an NFT. And at that point, you know, you're not just sort of talking about these super exclusive like high value collector art items. Then you're talking about things that just are useful because, you know, digital stuff on the internet is already useful in some context, and there's no reason that it can't be traded on open markets and usable in other applications and just a better sort of more open primitive for digital stuff. As an example, like, you know, anything from like, you know, DJs will sell their snippets of samples from their music, right? And they do that on like a, you know, some marketplace out there. There's no reason that that couldn't be an NFC as well and be tradable on. you know, hundreds of different marketplaces. I like the analogy, the analogy I've heard of what you're describing these, like, so we have the high value transactions going on right now in the NFT world,

and in Defi in general, to, like, soon in the future, we'll have the lower value NFT transactions, and there'll be many of them. It's very similar to like the bandwidth of the internet, right? In the early days, when we had 56K modems, we couldn't load graphics, we couldn't stream movies, We couldn't have interactive gaming experiences. What did we need more infrastructure? We needed high bandwidth in order to do that.

And this is very much what NFTs are doing and what crypto is doing. More trustless transactions per second. That's kind of the one element of bandwidth of this entire space. But Devin, we've come this far and I want to get into what OpenC is because that's important for us. And I know there are a ton of bankless listeners who are actually users of OpenC. We've done tactics on OpenC, like how to trade an ENS name, which is a domain name specific to Ethereum. It's an early NFT case. Can you tell us what OpenC actually is?

And as you're doing so, can you fit it in the context of all the other things like layers that you see are important in understanding the NFT market? space and what goes on here? Sure. So OpenC is a marketplace for NFTs. So you can think of it kind of like an eBay or Amazon, but instead of physical items being traded around, we trade these digital assets and these are, of course, NFTs. In terms of how we kind of fit into the ecosystem, I think one kind of way to think about NFTs is when you own a physical item, you can kind of do whatever you want with that physical thing, right? You could go and you could give it to someone across the world, you could throw it in the trash if you really wanted to, you could go and sell it

on eBay. With digital assets, there's never really been a digital asset eBay, right? Because you don't actually, you've never owned your digital stuff, right? So now that you do own your digital stuff, you can go and you can sell any NFT that's out there on OpenC, right? You can come and you can, you know, you can connect your Metamask wallet. You can see all of your stuff in your wallet. And then you can go and put it on sale or you can go and browse and purchase stuff. Now, I think, David, you were mentioning another sort of role of OpenC, which was that we started so early in the space. We actually started like right after CryptoKD's launch that we became sort of this explorer for NFTs. So we index every NFT that's out there on.

on the market and we allow you to kind of dive in and see the history of the NFT. So if you click on one of those NFTs in the screen share here, you can go and look at all of the events that have happened on that NFT. So when was it created? When was it transfer? Sort of the provenance of it. And so we're sort of like an ether scan, but a little more oriented towards consumers as opposed to developers.

So that's another function. And then the last thing I would say is that one thing that we've gotten into recently is just better tools for creators who want to go and issue NFTs really easily. So these Rob Gunkowski NFTs, for example, were actually created on OpenC and then just sold directly through our platform. So we've been investing in making that easier as well. Devin, I want to dive into something that you said. You said OpenC is an indexer for NFTs.

And this is a subject matter that I've been trying to wrap my head around it. I think it's really, really important. So a piece of digital art can go through a hashing algorithm and spit out a hash. And that is what an NFT cites when it cites that this is the token. This hash is represented by this token. And that's how we connect the art to the token. The art doesn't exist on Ethereum because art is very large in data. Art can be up to many, many megabytes, and a single Ethereum block is less than one megabyte, right?

So you can't actually put art on the blockchain. It needs to cite an alternative database. And the way that we solve this problem is we just say that, well, this token, we take that information, we take that data, run it through a hashing algorithm, and then append to that hash to the token. And that's how we say that these things are connected. The problem is, is that if that database goes down, we kind of lose access to the art. hash is still persistent. So if that image is circulating on the internet, as data does on the internet, it circulates infinitely copyable, that persistency is available. But what you're saying is that open-see is you guys index all of this stuff, which to me represents some sort of

redundancy or anti-fragility, right? So like, what if, for some unfortunate reason, nifty gateway goes down and you lose access to visualizing your NFT and your art? And, but at least OpenC has done some amount of indexing to help retain that sort of digitally native aspect of the art. Can you talk about that and why that's so important? Yeah, I think it's a great point. Actually, to give a couple examples of this happening, this was maybe a year ago or something, we saw a bunch of games kind of shut down, so they would launch their NFTs, they'd allow them to be tradable, they'd have this really simple game associated with it, and then kind of decided like,

you know, this isn't really working out, so we're going to go to do something else. And so there were these communities of people who had bought these game items. You know, they know that there's always a chance that the game, you know, stops developing and solve it's an early alpha, early beta. But what they decided was, well, all of the game items are still out there on Ethereum. You can still look at them on OpenC. And they decided to go and rally the community around building the game. So they sort of built the game, rebuilt the game.

They took over the website. And, you know, that's possible and without NFTs, but it's a lot harder, right? Because the database is like very proprietary. You know, you might, the user login system is probably like some, some proprietary system. And the assets aren't like, you know, maybe they're like kind of deleted or whatever. And so doing this where you can sort of revive the project, because the assets are still out there and because OpenC is sort of serving, as you said, redundancy layer is really interesting.

And so I think, yeah, there is this challenge on Ethereum around sort of the limitations of what you can store on chain. And typically you just store the ownership layer on Ethereum and then the actual metadata layer is off-chain. And so what we've provided is sort of a utility for joining those two, right? So the ownership layer will always be managed by this decentralized system, but there's these parties that kind of act as indexers or kind of utilities for pulling in that data and making it available to users and providing it even if the original project shuts down.

Devin, I got a question from YouTube that is specifically about this. and maybe you've already answered it in part, but I would like to address the question a little bit more directly. This is from Zeta4 on YouTube. Thanks for the question. Can we please talk about asset hosting, which is what we're talking about? There was a recent example of someone changing the art asset

after an NFT was sold on OpenC, IPFS slash are we've support when, question mark. Maybe you could also talk about what IPFS or RWeave support and how that can help this whole, all of this infrastructure. Right, right. Yeah, I think it's, so to kind of dive into the technical details, when NFTs first emerged, you had Cryptokitties, and again, they had the CryptoKitties IDs stored on the blockchain, but then the CryptoKitty metadata, the name, description image, is stored on their own servers, right? And so if CryptoKitties ever shut down, you know, there'd still be the redundancy of OpenC, but the sort of original source of truth for the CryptoKitties could disappear. And so now what people have started doing, or what a lot of projects do, especially these really high value art projects, is they store the metadata on a decentralized file storage system like IPFS or RWE. And then we can sort of go and pull that and host it on our own server so that it can be easily displayed.

But that source of truth is, you know, as long as those decentralized networks keep on running, you can't really tamper with the original metadata and you can't mutate it. or you can't change it. So in terms of OpenC, we are working on, currently when you create an asset on OpenC, we just use our sort of caching layer and we host it centrally. And it does mean that if you wanted to go and change the metadata, you could.

But we are actively working on giving you a bunch of different options. So if you want to use a decentralized file storage system to admit your NFTs, you're welcome to. And I do think that that's a very important piece of the space to keep the art truly kind of decentralized and not dependent on a third party. I will say that I think sometimes people, I think there's an important element with all of these conversations around pragmatism, right? And I think, you know, there are often, oftentimes I think people overlook how strong the incentives can be to maintain these sorts of

platforms and maintain the metadata in a way that aligns with the user's interest. For example, for a game building assets, right, like their incentive, they're not going to necessarily go and change the assets willy-nilly. And if they do, OpenC will have a record of that, right? So there's still accountability in place if you're using a centralized API. But I do definitely agree that as time goes on, especially for these really high-value are pieces, it's critical to have them stored on the centralized file storage systems as opposed to just on essential servers.

So, Devin, we often talk about all of crypto as this new digital economy that has suddenly sprung up. So we've got the traditional economy on the left, and then you've got this bridge. Exchanges are often a bridge. And then you've got the new economy, the Ethereum economy, the digital economy, the crypto economy, whatever you'd like to call it. The cool thing about this new economy is that there is, as Chris Berninski has said on the podcast before, infinite white space. So there are all of these opportunities. And on bankless, we make the analogy of,

it's like heading west to a land of new opportunity where we can set up towns and shops and create California, entirely new economies, right? Can you talk about your, we were talking about those verbs earlier, the curating and the creating and the collecting type of verbs. What sort of opportunities are there for laborers, for entrepreneurs in NFTs, specifically that you're seeing who are using OpenC? I recall the early days of the Internet and suddenly there was a job. You could be an eBay seller like full time. How do people make money in this new economy specifically with NFTs on OpenC? Yeah.

Well, I think there's just so much opportunity. and I would maybe categorize it into a few different buckets. One is if you're a creator, I think, you know, not suggesting that people do this, but we have seen people leave their jobs to just become full-time digital artists and sort of follow their passion. And I think just at a high level,

one of the really exciting things that's happening is that we're seeing the first instances of sort of the jobs of the future, right? where we've always talked about like someone being like a VR architect or like just going and pursuing a creative passion and being able to monetize it and being able to have a sustainable income off of that. So I think we're seeing that at the very beginnings of that. And so if you're a creator, I think there's tons of opportunities to get involved. And again, you know, it is a little bit challenging on Ethereum today because you're sort of marketing to these really high,

you're typically marketing really high value stuff. But I think that will really change over time and really you'll be able to sell to people who don't have tons of money, but want to contribute at least a little bit, right? And aren't looking to just flip. And maybe they do get to benefit from the upside of the future. But the main sort of use cases is just supporting the artist in a way that's a little that is a little more participatory than something like Patreon,

where you're just literally donating, right? So I think the creator opportunity is huge, right? now. Then I think a second sort of class of opportunities is the developer opportunity. And here it's anything from, you know, an indie developer or, you know, someone doing a side project to a company that's starting in the NFT space and really going after a bigger vision. In the sort of first category, I think there's so much opportunity to push to the frontier of the programmability of NFTs. So most NFTs, most NFTs. today are just a raw, you own it, and you can send it around and you can buy and sell it,

and maybe it has some utility in the real world. Maybe it's an event ticket or something like that. But at the smart contract, they're super dead simple. It's just raw EURC 721 or raw EURC 1155. What some developers are doing is they're really pushing the what's happening at the smart contract level. So they're creating generative art projects where the art is sort of randomly generated from a transaction path. You know, there's maybe there's two tokens involved. There's the NFTs, and then there's also sort of an ERC20 that feeds into the economic system, you know, creates some incentive system around it.

And then, you know, the art, you know, can maybe change over time depending on, and playing around bonding curves. There's just so much to do there. If you have a little bit of development experience or you're interested in acquiring it, I think it's a really fertile ground. And I feel like I'm a broken record here, but I think it'll really get more fertile as we have more scalable solutions where, again, you're not paying super high transaction costs.

So that's the second opportunity. And then probably the third one is for companies, right? I do think that this is sort of the beginning of the brand new platform and a brand new paradigm that's been accumulating over the last while, and very much intersects with all the stuff that's happening in DFI. So I think there's going to be really ripe opportunities to build powerful brands around that, powerful consumer experiences, like the one we built at OpenC, or we're building at OpenC.

I think there's going to be more of that as time goes on. So tons of opportunities, definitely the Wild West. You know, one thing I was thinking as you were saying that is sometimes the biggest opportunities can be the synthesis of some of those things put together, right? So like if you are on the front lines of this and really understand the NFT world, you know, there's also this speculative nature to these assets, these crypto assets, but what if you can speculate on interesting communities, interesting NFTs and use, if you're a developer, use your development skills to then improve those NFTs and improve that

community and realize the value on the other side? Like there's so much you can plug into as far as like taking. existing NFTs and even adding them to something that you're doing and making it better. I'm somewhat reminded of like your private equity firms who will sometimes come into a company and buy a portion of it. They'll invest in that company. But they come into that company and turn around their management, for instance, and add some value in the process. You can kind of do that with NFTs because there is this investment nature to them as well. If you are actively improving the community and improving the culture, you can realize the upside in some of those

gains too. So fascinating space. Devin, we're going to get right back to you with some more questions, take some of the questions from YouTube. I think we've also got some around this new world of higher economic bandwidth that we want to see with NFTs that we've got to get to you. But first, before we do, we want to tell you about the sponsors that made this episode possible. Guys, we've entered a bull market. Now is the time to start building your crypto empire, and you should do it on Gemini. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. It's available in 50 countries, supports more than 30 crypto assets, including defy tokens like Dai, Abe, Uni, and YFI.

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or the coffee at your coffee shop. Go to monolith.xy Z to sign up and get your monolith visa card today. All right, guys, we are back with Devin of OpenC. I wanted to get right into a question that we got on the bankless YouTube from a risky car, I think is the username. How is OpenC helping democratize access?

to NFTs, right? NFTs are this cool new tool, cool new financial tool, and the power of Ethereum is that it's democratizing access to all of these financial tools. Yet, these gas fees are an issue and really just getting in the way of that democratization of these new financial tools that can really allow creators to create. How can we help, how's OpenC helping provide better and stronger access to these tools to help creators create without having to worry about $100 gas fees that are denominated in ETH. Yeah. So I would say there's sort of the short-term stuff we're doing and then the more medium-term

stuff, which is coming on the horizon very quickly, actually. But in the short run, we've done a good number of sort of optimizations around gas usage. So we allow you to kind of mint your NFT without playing gas in a process we call lazy minting, which allows you to kind of get an NFT up there. the gas is paid when it's actually purchased. You don't have the same upfront cost. There is one kind of upfront transaction that you have to do that you get set up,

but then once you've done that transaction, you can kind of mint for free and sell for free, but there's still that gas cost burden on the buyer. So that's kind of like one of the short-term things we've done. But long-term, open-sea, so we are working very collaboratively with lots of the layer two solution and even lots of the layer one solutions that are coming online.

And the way that we see things evolving is that we'll really have a multi-chain ecosystem for NFTs. And applications like ourselves will introduce people to this more scalable technology, but really just benefit. For example, we're not going to go and build, at least right now, we're not launching like open C chain or something like that or building kind of like our own solution, with maybe an interesting strategy in long term depending on how things shape out.

But we're actually just kind of working really closely with all of these different chains. And many of them are ready today in production with NFT projects that have been begging us to support them and trade them. And today you can actually go and you can explore NFTs on the Matic or Polygon network on OpenC. They'll show up in your regular Ethereum

account. When you click on one, it'll say Maddoch trading is coming soon. So we haven't launched trading support yet. But we're already starting to explore, allow people to explore these NFTs on OpenC and trading is sort of a fast follow up. And then on the other sort of non-layer two side of things, we're also, we've been really good friends with the folks at Dapper Labs for a long time around supporting flow. We just announced that we'll eventually be launching flow support. We're also collaborating with TASO. So we're taking this pretty broad approach and saying, like, you know, we really want to be a home for user-owned digital assets regardless of what chain they're on.

Of course, we have to be judicious about just kind of being spread in across too many chains. But ultimately, that's kind of the direction we see things going. And a lot of these new blockchains are really just kind of, you know, the biggest thing that they want is user experiences where people can go in and get their hands dirty and try out these cheaper transactions on something like Maddo. Devin, I want to beat a dead horse really quick because we have so many guests that come on from L2 protocols or DFI apps implementing on L2. And then we have people like Vitalik come on and say like sharding is just a few months away.

And as a content producer, it's always kind of funny because so many people say like, oh, yeah, it's just like right around the corner. It's just like, it's just right there. And the thing is the timelines that people are giving are coming closer and closer and closer. So like L2's used to be a year away. Now they're like a couple months away. But they're never actually here, right? They're never actually arrived.

Maybe you can just give some comments as to that. It's like, okay, sure, like, cool. You can do some stuff on Maddoch now. But like, what is this actually going to be in front of the user's face where they are actually meaningfully exposed to literally like almost zero fee transactions or reasonable transactions. Yeah. Well, not to give the same answer that you've heard so many times, but I actually do think that we're getting really close.

I would say in the month, definitely in the month's range. And, and, you know, I would say a proof point to that just to show you that we're not just kind of like speaking about these things, not any real meat behind. it is that you can go and explore Madic asset today on OpenC, right? You can go and browse them. And in fact, you can see them in your, what's really cool about these layer twos, even these side chain solutions on the roll-ups, right, is that you use this exact same Ethereum account and the exact same private key to interact with Maddox, all of the tooling, all the metamass. Yeah, I don't know. Do you have any Maddox in use?

Yeah, so, Devin, I want to make sure I understand this. So right now I'm looking at a test wallet. It's like bank.eath, my test wallet, right? I've got some bankless badges in here. All of these are on Mainnet. I don't have anything on Madik. I have some bankless badges on the X-di. We don't do X-Dy. But let's see. If you go to, like, if you search in the search bar for Neon District. Okay. Not in that search by the top of them. So do this neon district season one items? Not that one. Sorry, that one's on the main net. But Neon district, one item, then go down, and then click on one of those guys. Can I click on a demon or a doc?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll do a demon. And then scroll down to chain info. Chain info. Wow, this is cool. So this is Maddick. Yep, yep, yeah. And if you had one in your account, it would show up, it would show up alongside everything. I have some of my account. So that feels like, so I have a follow up. question. So first of all, let me just say that feels very seamless as a user, right? Like, we're seamlessly moving in the user experience from something on Ethereum Mainnet to something on

thematic side chain or layer two chain. And you could do this with any, I guess, chain that sort of supports the EVM. Can I ask you, I guess, a bigger picture question here? Because a lot of folks are wondering how this is going to pan out, right? So I think, you know, you know, if you've been listening to the bank lists, you know that we're going to move towards a multi-chain future, right? In fact, we would argue we've already been in a multi-chain future, even like crypto exchanges. These are like side chains for Bitcoin and Ethereum, right? They're a bit more centralized, but they're almost like side chains. But like what is, what matters most for an NFT, right?

So if I'm on X-Dye or a side chain or a flow, I lose some of the decentralization properties and the settlement guarantees of something versus the Ethereum main net, right? You know, flow is somewhat more permissioned, for example. So are things like X-Di or even Madik in a side chain. How do you see this all, I guess, working out? And if I'm an NFT owner, it's very hard to tell whether I have the same settlement guarantees on a Maddo or a flow versus Ethereum and like, when should I care? Is it the case that high value items, you think, will be secured and settled on something like

the Ethereum mainnet and lower value items? They're fine on side chains or more centralized layer one chains. What's your take on how this all evolves, I guess? I think that's right. I think there's a world where sort of lower value items can move around in these environments where the security guarantees are a little bit less stringent. What I would point out is that I think what you... user, especially in sort of the lower value category, I think what users are going to care about

is less about kind of are there these extremely strong security guarantees around your NFD and more around how interoperable is it. So like, for example, can I go and move it to, can I go and sell it on OpenC? Like that's a big deal because that means that there's liquidity for it. Whereas, you know, since we don't quite support Maddoch yet, there's not really a good marketplace where you can buy and sell these things. So the interoperability piece is, I think, the most important piece. And I think that's, you know, one of the things that flow will have to really do a good job of is promoting an ecosystem around the blockchain that they've sort of created with this flagship

application. Now can they kind of expand that to other partners like ourselves and to other application and create the magic of NFTs, which is really being able to move them across this thing. Because again, we've always had, there've always been digital assets, right? And sometimes you can buy and sell those digital assets in some environment. But the new thing here is digital assets that can move across any environment and that have these brand new properties. But I think, you know, in terms of that question around where should assets live depending on how valuable they are, I think you're, I think that's about right. Like I think maybe you can acquire a really bad.

valuable asset in the Matic network and then bridge it onto Ethereum, and store it there, like a crypto punk, I think you may not want to have living in a side chain for very long. That being said, you know, even when you issue things on a side chain, like if things go wrong, there are still ways of remint into Ethereum. And, you know, I think it's, we'll see, but I think it's pretty hard to do like a full attack on NFTs where you actually, you know, because these things are kind of illiquid, right? So, or a lot less liquid than a year's of 20. So even if you like obtained all the NFTs from some project, well, you can kind of just invalidate those and remint on a more secure change.

Yeah, I think like the question in my mind, too, is like when does an NFT stop being an NFT? Right. You mentioned kind of this interoperability and composability, right? But like, let's say something like Fortnite skins had that and they just plugged into. Ethereum or some other side chains, would they be then NFTs? Or is there an element that an NFT has to have some level of permissionless settlement guarantees and like decentralization in order to be an NFT? And maybe that's really hard to answer. Maybe the market figures this out over time. But that's a question in my mind, right? Is, you know, is Fortnite creating NFTs? We would probably say no. Yet we would call something on flow NFTs. And we definitely

call someone something on um ethereum and nfts where's the line here i don't know if that's a a question anyone can answer at this point but it's something in my mind that's a great point yeah i think because you could say you know fortnight has its own protocol it just is uh you know it's backed by a database and it's fully controlled by one company and they're issuing digital assets on it um so you know why isn't that an nft and i think i mean i think the properties that I look for when thinking about an NFT is like, is it, is it controlled by a single party or is the ownership layer sufficiently decentralized? And in the case of flow, like they're moving towards that. In the case of Maddick, you know, they have a large validator set. And so, and then in

the case of Ethereum, you know, it's been decentralized for quite some time now, right, or since the inception. So I think there's a spectrum, but, you know, I think your intuition is correct because the market will probably determine, you know, whether they call something in the next year or not. Devin, I want to pivot to a new question out of the out of the YouTube once again from Chulio. When will it be possible to mint an NFT and put a feature into it that you can lend to someone else? Say you want to lend it out for 60 days and it will automatically get returned back to you when the time is up. And I think what, to add on my own question onto this, is what Chulio's really asking is, like, again, NFTs are software. And the answer to the question is, well, you can put anything into software, right?

You can code up an NFT and make it do anything. But for people like me or Ryan who aren't technical or on coders, we're going to need to depend on infrastructure like OpenC to allow some of this expressivity and financial and money logic to get integrated. So do you guys have any features down the pipeline about how to, to make NFTs a little bit more programmable in the same way that ETH is programmable money? Yeah, we have a good number of features around, kind of some basic features around adding extra bells and whistles with your NFT when you create it.

So for example, well, we allow very rich metadata so you can do images, audio, movies, et cetera. But then we also have what's called unlockable content. So you can create an NFT with something that can only be unlocked by, the user who purchases it, right? So that's kind of an interesting thing people have been experimenting with.

I do think, yeah, in the future, like we wanna add things like, you know, at the sort of smart contract layer being able to customize an NFT, right? So that idea of, you know, maybe there's some lending mechanic built into it. But I also think that, you know, at the end of the day,

since this is so permissionless, you know, other projects can kind of come along and build all of those different, addendums to the sort of raw NFT and still be completely interoperable with OpenC. So I don't think it's just going to be like, you know, on us to add all to do experiment here. I think it'll be a community and market effort. But certainly we'll be doing a lot of work to like improve the sorts of things that you can build through our no code creator.

So Devin, as we're moving towards the close of this AMA, we've got just a couple more questions, but one I definitely need to ask you is, what's in store for the future at OpenC? So there's rumors of a raise going on. We see other NFT solutions that are kind of tokenizing. Is there anything you can tell us about your future plans in those areas or anything else you want to highlight? Sure. Yeah. Well, I can't mention those specific areas, but in terms of our roadmap, I guess, you know, as I said before, like the main focus for us as a company is building a really great product and really great user experience that people want to come back to and that people find very valuable. And to that end, you know, we think one of the biggest challenges

is the situation on Ethereum right now. So we're actively working on, you know, a large portion of our team at the moment is working on our multi-chain strategy. So that's coming up in terms of other features that we're excited about, you know, adding more sort of curation on top of OpenC, so you know really being able to customize your profile and show off your NFTs in an interesting way. Better discovery on the platform. So being able to kind of quickly come on and find stuff that's interesting early on. So sort of some of those core marketplace features that we think are really important. And then just continuing to work with more artists, creators, influencers, musicians as they come and learn about the space.

So we get quite a lot of sort of inbound interest in learning about what is this new space and how did you create something that resonates with people. And so we're doing a lot of. Yeah, Devin, this is something that. Blow said on our conversation with him earlier this week. He was like, we asked the question, our artist is coming to this. And he said, everyone, everyone is coming to this. And then he named off Halsey and Calvin Harris, all these big names, right? Is that what you're seeing? Is that what you're talking? I mean, you got grunk. That's huge. Is this all coming from inbound interest? And do you have any kind of big names that you expect to be issuing on OpenC in the future? Yeah, 100% inbound at the moment.

It's just, you know, people kind of learning about it and getting excited and either having a concrete idea or wanting to figure out a concrete idea. Probably can't disclose any of the ones that are coming up just so that they, you know, remain a surprise. But we have a ton of, a ton of people who are going to be launching NFTs pretty soon. And I think it should be really exciting. Yeah. Devin, I got one question that I got to ask. Is there room for it? an open-see token in the future.

Yeah, undetermined. We're definitely not opposed to adding a tokenization component. We've always wanted to be very thoughtful about it and figure out kind of what is the strategy that would resonate with most people and not feel kind of gimmicky and feel like there's like a real future behind it as opposed to just something that's more of like powered by speculate. Very cool. Devin, thank you so much for coming and giving on your time.

I want to finish off with this last question. I think we'll tie things off very well. Say you're in the elevator with, you know, Mark Cuban or somebody of his nature, and you have just a few brief minutes to explain to him the maximally successful version of OpenC in one, five, 10 years. What is that pitch? Well, I would say, I think if you think about sort of the internet and the 4 billion or so people that are on it and all the content that's being produced on the internet, and then if you layer on property rights on that, as I said, the design space for all of the different things that could be tokenized is just so wide. And at the end of the day, I actually do think we're talking about the biggest economy on the planet is going to be fueled by NFTs.

And so then, of course, for that economy to be successful, you need a powerful marketplace where people can go and trade these things around and know that they're getting the right thing. And that marketplace, you know, there's probably there's going to be a bunch of them, but there are going to be some ones that provide what consumers really want and end up being kind of the winners. And I think OpenC is perfectly positioned to be that. I think a future is where just this asset class expands. And OpenC is that sort of premier marketplace for a brand new asset class. It's really, you know, it's growing quickly, but it's still, in my opinion, it's very early stages. An aggregator to the biggest economy in the world. That is the pitch from Devin at OpenC.

Where do I sign my check? What do I write my check, Devin? It sounds pretty cool. Thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate you hanging with the bankless nation, and we're super excited about NFTs. So keep us tuned into what's going on, what you guys are up to.

Thanks so much for having me. Awesome. All right, guys, risks and disclaimers. We always talk about this, but we are, of course, headed west. NFT speculation is risky. So is E. So is Defot.

You could lose what you put in. But this is the frontier. it's not for everyone, but thanks so much for joining us on another AMA with bankless.