Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Alex Masmej: Showtime – Building the Open Social Graph With NFTs

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are tokens that we can use to represent ownership of unique items. They let us tokenize things like art, collectibles, even real estate. They can only have one official owner at a time and they're secured by the Ethereum blockchain. And they have taken the crypto space by storm is recent months. Showtime is a NFT social media network where creators & collectors showcase their digital art. It reads all marketplaces and instead of buying and selling, you can comment, share and like. It's been described as the Instagram for NFTs.We were joined by Alex Masmej, Co-founder and CEO of Showtime, to chat about why he got into NFTs and in particular crypto art, how Showtime works and its purpose, and the future of the platform.Topics covered in this episode:Alex's background and how he got into cryptoThe story behind the $ALEX tokenUncollateralized lending and why it's importantThe vision for ShowtimeAlex's views on the NFT crazeWhat is the open social graphWhy Alex chose to focus on crypto artHow Showtime compares to similar platforms like Opensea and ZoraThe Showtime business model, funding sources, and 5 year planEpisode links:ShowtimeShowtime on TwitterAlex on TwitterSponsors:ParaSwap: ParaSwap’s state-of-the-art algorithm beats the market price across all major DEXs and brings you the most optimized swaps with the best prices, and lowest slippage - http://paraswap.io/epicenter Solana: Solana is the high performance blockchain supporting over 50k transactions per second to power the next generation of decentralized applications. - https://solana.com/epicenterExodus: Exodus the easy-to-use crypto wallet available on all platforms and supporting over 100 different assets. - https://exodus.com/epicenterThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/394

Hi, welcome to Epicenter. I'm Sybacquitio, and I'm here with Sunny Aguilar. And today we're going to be speaking with Alice Smash, or as we like to call him as France, Alex Masmesjean. And he's going to be telling us all about Showtime, and we're going to be talking about NFTs.

We'll be diving deep into everything that's going on with NFTs right now. And I'll probably talk about the Alex token as well. But first, I'd like to tell you about our sponsors for today's episode. Paraswap just came out with a huge update that's even faster and more liquid. It's cheaper than new swap. and it comes with a new gas token that can cut your fees by up to 50%.

Paraswap is also now multi-chain, and it's expanded to Polygon and Binance Smart Chain. You can start trading at Paraswop.io slash epicenter. We're also sponsored by Solana, a next generation blockchain with lightnings fast blocks and fees less than a cent per transaction. Scalability is perhaps the single biggest challenge preventing crypto from becoming the backbone of the world's financial system.

And today, Solana might be the best option we have. So go to Solana.com slash to learn more. And we're also sponsored by Exodus, an easy-to-use wallet, which supports hundreds of assets and has native apps for all platforms, including iOS and Android. And it's a fully non-consular wallet, and they're firm believers in the not your keys, not your coins mantra. Go to Exodus.com and give it a try. Alex, thanks for joining us. We've been trying to plan this for like a long time. And I'm happy that it's finally happening. Yeah, thank you so much, guys. Thank you for having me.

So you were in Paris recently, and you just arrived back in San Francisco. How does it feel to be back? I've just been in the U.S. for like four days, I think. Yeah, super excited. It was a long journey. And yeah, it's kind of like closing the loop on the Alex token, which was made to move to the U.S. And so, yeah, that was really exciting to see this ending. And so now I've got my startup and I need to focus on it like 100%.

So, yeah, it feels great. Cool. I think Sonny will be disappointed to hear that Alex is no longer a thing because he was earlier saying, I want to know what my Alex tokens are worth. But yeah, we'll talk about Alex in just a second. So for those who don't know you, tell us a little bit about your journey and how you fell into the crypto rabbit hole. Sure. So I got into crypto in like 2017, frankly, because I could.

I feel like the barriers of entry to crypto as a European because you're also French, Seb. It's like it's easier than other industries to enter, especially at the start of my career. And so it just made sense that I could enter this field, which also happened to be extremely high impact on society in the next 10 years. And so extremely high potential, low barriers to entry. For me, was a no-brainer. In 2017, I got interested in it. Didn't do anything about it. And roughly, like at the start of 2019, I started reading a ton more about crypto.

And I start being active on Twitter, like May 2019. And there's this guy called Peter Pan from a tech cartel who basically, like, gives me money out of just one tweet of mine saying, hey, I'd love to go to Berlin Blockchain Week. And that's how I got to like meet the crypto community. Like basically Peter Pan flew me out in Berlin. And there I learned a bunch about, you know, the Ethereum ecosystem, all the things that you cannot do without crypto. DAW, Defy, NFT. And then, yeah, fast forward. Like, I do a project called Rocket about NFT again.

Then COVID happens. We have to reset everything. And, you know, think about, like, what I should do next. I do the Alex token as, like, a way to crowd fund my life so that I can, you know, spend some time finding a co-founder, searching for my next big project, moving to SF. And fast forward to now, I've done all of those things. And I just moved to SF. And I just started Showtime, like, five months ago.

and it's been a crazy, crazy journey so far. Like people think like backpacking is crazy, but like starting a startup is insane. Yeah, so I'm excited. A little flashback there to reset everything. We co-organized in the beginning of COVID, which seems like such a long time ago. And it feels like such a different time now.

Like, I don't know, man. Like it was, yeah, it was great. But it just feels like such a different time from, you know, just whatever. like it was like 12, 11, 13 months ago. Yeah, so you launched the Alex token. I think a lot of people know you from the Alex token. What was the inspiration for the Alex token?

And like, why did you choose to do this? So actually, like, you know, going back a little bit from the time where Peter Pan gave me money for a tweet. At the end, Peter Pan was like, hey, like, this is a bear market. Can you pay me back? Like, you know, we're not that wealthy. And so we decided to tokenize my debt. It was very easy.

It was 1,500 Alex Masmesge loan 2019 tokens on EtherScan, each representing $1. And I was basically going to give 10% interest on top of the principal a year later. And so we do this, like, you know, it's just in between us. But Role, which at the time is like the only social token issuer, like reaches out to me and say, hey, like, you know, this is crazy. Like we've been trying to convince people to create their own token for a while now. And you've done this yourself. like why don't you do like a more general purpose token rather than just a debt token with us? And I said, okay.

And so we do the Alex token at the time. It was, yeah, end of 2019. But no one really cared because I was not particularly like known in the community or, you know, there was no use case that could attach to it. It was like one hour equal like one token or something or 10,000 tokens. But, you know, no demand for my time at the time. And so, yeah, fast forward COVID. where I'm like forced to, you know, do something that gets me out of Paris, gets me to do a startup. And that was the only thing I was like vaguely known for in the community.

There was like a little bit fun. And yeah, I happened to be speaking at like, um, ECC for a conference about personal tokens. That was the last ever conference before COVID conferences like became remote. And so I was like, yeah, like let's announce something. Let's crowd fund because honestly, I had no money at the time. It was Paris. I got cut my small side income that I got from like a marketing project in the space. That's about it. And so they decided to crowd fund $20,000. And yeah, like I feel like it resonated with people because it was so simple to understand. It's kind of like the NFT space today. We can talk about it later. Like it's so simple the digital art. You know, like you buy something and you invest in someone with the Alex token and creditor coin and most recently BitCloud. So all of those concepts are very consumer facing and easy. And so that's probably why it did it resonate. And then I kind of used it for the remaining of the year to do some small projects that we can talk about as like many small things with it.

It was quite funny. So that like initial loan that you did, I remember I think the first time you and I actually got in touch was, you know, I think we were talking about like under collateralized lending and things like that. And so I remember you were working on a project as well. Like I remember you have, I think you have like a pretty like really nice blog post about under collateralized lending. that I think I've like linked people to multiple times and stuff. So what was that sort of like, what were you building with that? That's so interesting. It's like we don't actually talk about this that much about this period of time,

which was when I was in between a cartel and the Alex token, I basically realized there is only over-claturedized lending in Defi. You know, Maker is great, but it's not very capital efficient. And I realized why not do. unsecured lending, which is, I think, 99% of the market of loans. Like, no one does over-colleterized loan, but whales and margin traders. And so I did this blog, I did this, I do the thread on Twitter that does really well. Camilla Russo from the Define contacts me to do an article.

I write an article about it with like Maple Finance. I think union protocol as well. There's also this startup, which I forgot the name of. I think Teller Finance, because they rebranded, this way I was confused. other finance, which is backed by 16Z, cool unsecured lending platform. And so from those learnings, it was like, actually, like, one way to have over-claturized lending not be too, you know, too friction-inducing would be to have NFTs as collateral. And so from this, I saw rocket, which just is like a Moloch DAO, so like a basic Dow of lenders

that could basically decide, okay, we'll fund X amount of money against this piece of art that we are using, a little bit like a pawn shop. A decentralized pawn shop was the idea of a young rocket. It didn't do too well, honestly. I think now there's like more tries with NFT and defy liquidity, like NFT or like DFI-NFT charged particles. There's like a few other projects. But I felt the market was kind of too tiny. I don't think it was my big startup idea. So I hold off on it. COVID happens. I do the Alex token. And now I'm too short. time. So that was a funny period of my time, though, because I think the main reason, the main learning for me was like, I don't think I'm very good at defy. I'm better at consumer products. Defy requires a financial background. I didn't have that financial background. And so it, but it was still a very good learning experiment. Like, I just know a lot about defy because of this. So, yeah. The Alex token, like, what, what is it? So for context, I, I have a lot of Alex token. And I think I'm, like, one of the larger LPs of Alex token. So what is my Alex token?

I just treated it as a prediction market on you. But what does that mean? Like what do I get by holding this Alex token? Right. So it makes sense like today because I'm focused on my startup. Like the Alex token is a bit like a meme coin. So like the only concrete users you can get today is if you hold over 5,000 Alex, not the LP tokens, the actual the RC20.

you get to be in the Alex Ivory Tower, which is like a selective group chat where like a bot is checking every minute whether you hold those tokens. The minutes you sell, you're kicked out of the group chat. So that's like the only use case, which is basically like there's no use case

for today, for people who buy today on uniswap. But the Alex token, so started as one hour of my time, didn't really do that. Then did the Alex token income sharing agreement, which was what was used to fundraise the $20,000. It was 30 people.

So the rest, there's right now 600 holders. All the holders don't have this. But the 30 people who gave me together $20,000, they are getting an air drop every quarter for the next three years of my income. And so that was the use case for them. And then what I did a few months later was something called Control My Life, where it was this token based. voting via simply signing.

So there was no gas fees to basically just signal like a vote on my daily life habits. So like people could choose if I was going vegan or like running three miles a day every day. Or if I was to only live solely off Bitcoin or if I was going to wake up at 6 a.m. And people chose three miles a day. And so I did run all of those three miles a day. It sounds like a very, you know, like superficial experiment. But Austin Griffith and I, when we did this, although it sounds like a joke, it actually partly inspired Snapshot Labs, which basically is like this engineer from Balancer, the AMM, who was like, wow, like this is actually like pretty useful for like signaling voting without gas. And I guess he's all crazy. And so actually Alex was one of the very first snapshot labs project because of this. So anyway, so like although it was mostly like a gimmick, like a joke, it still helped like, you know, push the space forward. At least that's like how I portrait so I feel good about this.

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So go and check it out. Give Paraswop a try at pariswop.io slash epicenter. How does the income airdrop work? Like, is that you, is that like, is that like me handled by a smart contract? your income has to come through like a certain address and then it automatically gets gets distributed as an air drop or is like dividends basically uh so no like there is no enforcement on chain i think this was like the main backlash uh there was two main backlash of the alix token um and so yeah one of them is like this is not enforceable uh this is only my reputation is a collateral

uh kind of uh where no like i have to you know send by email i have the emails of everyone saying hey this is the income I made. I don't even show my tax returns of stuff like this. It's just like I tell them that. And yeah, that was basically like the way we went. And I use like, you know, a nail drop like multi-sand or something to send it. And that's about it. And do you actually do this? Like do you send people? I do this. Yeah. I do this every three months. And I've done this like four or five times now because it's been a year. So I think I've done this four times so far. And I'm going to continue. And yeah, also like my income is in Fiat. And so actually, like, this very problem is partly what inspired Showtime.

Because it was like, you know, all the backlash around the Alex token not being enforceable and being like an ICO actually makes sense. Like, I'm not saying this is a wrong critic. Like, this is the truth. And so it's like, okay, like what sort of income can someone make on chain that is a little bit more consumer facing than just, you know, like software development with GitHub or stuff like this? And it turns out that being an NFT artist or a creator is the first time you can have, you know, income on chain going through you. And so we can use applications to redirect, like maybe super fluid finance, which is like a project that helps like do like ERC20 distribution or like mirrors splits more recently, which is splitting for like NFT publications. So all of those things are possible with NFTs. And so I realized this and this was kind of the premise of showtime.

So why did you do it only for the like sort of initial bios of Alex instead of like doing it as this sort of like ongoing with like every whoever is currently holding Alex at any given moment? I think I honestly like looking back, I should have done it that way. I think one reason was first I didn't know this was going to succeed. Like I just did a bunch of experiments in the past four or five months. It wasn't really thought out really well. And another reason is that. that it seems a bit more complex. You have to introduce some tokenomics about like,

so what do I do? Do I like buy a bunch of Alex tokens and then burn them? Is that the mechanic to increase the price? I wasn't sure about the exact tokenomics. And it was just so much easier to do like a Google form. At the time, I was really going for maximum simplicity and making sure people just understand it. But yeah, like I think it was confusing over time to know that,

you know, this wasn't an income share agreement for everyone. Also, one thing is like, diluting my income, which is like if there's 600 holders, like, I'm not a multi-millionaire. Like, I'm not going to give a substantial amount of money if there's that many holders. So keep it 30 is best. And also, also just like being conscious of securities laws and stuff like this. I did this outside of the United States.

And so keeping it to 30 people with a very tiny amount is also something that I like because, you know, it's an experiment. I don't want to, you know, get people losing money. and I just want to make sure that everything is fine. And I'm confident with the role team and their legal team and everything, but also making very tiny was also nice as well from a legal perspective. How do they tax? What kind of income does this get taxed at for the token holders? So it's so funny because I'm a French resident and I pay my taxes in 2020. I had to talk to like one of the most notable like French crypto account.

And he was like so surprised. Like he was like like yeah like this is such a weird use case. I think we taxed it as. I think I know who this is. Yeah, Alex Langelland, it's another Alex. And so like what we did is it was seen as free like as like a drop. This is how we did it, which basically meant like maximum taxes. But like I was I was happy with this.

You know like I didn't want to have any problems. And it was free money in a way. Although I'm giving my income later on like I. I still wanted to be, and French taxes happen to be quite high, 30%, but whatever. So, like, will Alex holders, like, be like, is it, like, integrated at all at the showtime in any way, like, into your current project? So I get this question asked a lot. Like, I'm not sure I can answer. I cannot answer any ridiculous show time. I mean, what I can say, though, is, like, I'm going to try my best to reward the Alex holders, because honestly, it's actually pretty insane how Alex did to my career.

Like before Alex, I was this, you know, random guy at conferences, just like with big dreams. But like the Alex bridged a huge, huge gap here. And so those people are partly responsible for my success. It's kind of like I created my own till fellowship for myself, for those who know about like the tech, you know, young people. And so like it's, it was really helpful. And so it seems like they deserve some things.

But like I cannot legally say anything. I don't even know myself. Will there be any links with Showtime? But I'm going to maybe try, but like I cannot say. I really cannot say. So, yeah, let's talk a little bit about Showtime then. So, yeah, what is Showtime to start off with? Sure.

So Showtime is a NFT social media to discover and showcase digital art. That's like the current version because obviously like in an NFT space, NFT art and collectibles is the main. the main thing today. And so we decided why not build a platform that reads every single marketplaces. And instead of buying and selling, you can like, comment, share, and do all a bunch of things that basically Instagram does. So I think a lot of people describe us as like the Instagram for NFTs.

And I think that's a fairer comments. It's like, you know, NFTs are basically revolutionizing social media and is like a new way of displaying social media content and creating social media content online. so why display them solely as financial assets, especially as NFT prices are really high, gas fees are really high right now. Most people just want to see them like Instagram. You don't buy on Instagram all the pictures and photos like advertisers do, but that's like a very small persona. And so yeah, we just wanted to have a kind of like this digital museum gallery, social media, you know, Instagram slash Pinterest style platform that basically sees all the NFTs from Ethereum.

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So maybe we should like step back a little bit and talk about like just what is going on with NFTs and like, you know, before we dive into like what Showtime wants to do with them. So, you know, I think we've done, you know, maybe this is like third or fourth episode now. Like I think we did our first one with Alex from Rarable a couple months ago and then we had the guy who did the Friends with Benefits tokens and stuff. And so I know. Literally? Yeah, yeah.

You know, from your perspective, you know, I think maybe you have a different take, a view of it than, you know, for example, the very well founders do. So what do you see as this like current, what's happening with NFTs and why has there been this like sudden hockey stick growth in the entire NFT space in the last eight months? Yeah, like what I noticed, uh, which was like the data that was Becking. the rationale for building Showtime was in July 2020, the NFC space starting going exponential in terms of volume. And I think one reason is that basically, like, you know, in the grand scheme of things, almost no one cares about technology or finance. But everyone cares about

social media. Everyone cares about art and culture in all its form. And so it happens to be digital art because that's like the most technical. economically viable option right now because art is it can be expensive uh you know you don't buy art every day and so it fulfilled all the things that crypto uh with today's limitations uh can handle and so yeah it's like it's it's the first time you know a category is simple to explain it goes outside of technology and finance and thus uh it is quite interesting so yeah for me the the exposure growth since last summer was like a way of thinking, this is the start of the chasm being crossed to early mainstream.

Because for the first time, it's just not more about finance and technology anymore. Like, Defy, Dow's, Ethereum, infrastructure, blockchain infrastructure, those are all, like, backend things, not consumer-facing things. And so as a consumer founder, I was literally looking for a consumer use case for the past two years. And I was really excited to jump on this trend. And actually, like, even myself, like, underestimates. it, I thought that it would be like roughly 500 million volume by the end of this year, but I think it happened like in February or something, like he was so fast.

And so for me, yeah, it's a new social media primitive. It reminds me of social commerce apps in Asia, which the West did never really have any sort of equivalent, right? We have Instagram, but you don't buy anything from Instagram. Like the most equivalent in the West is like Fortnite skins. However, we don't have like cheap enough transaction fees for Fortnite skins type prices because it's always like at least $1,000 or more. Maybe Pinterest I would say is maybe the closest I feel because I know a lot of people use Pinterest to like to buy, you know, save. Yeah, like, you know, they're putting together like wish lit or like, you know, I feel like maybe Pinterest I know usually link to like products to buy as well.

right yeah that makes sense so yeah Pinterest has some buying function but it's never as as easy like yeah like NFT is like these the easiest thing to to buy something online I think like the it's like the alternative from web two is maybe like listing something on Shopify or eBay NFT is even easier it can be a hundred percent margin if you want

once gas fees are like you know driving down to zero it can be a hundred percent it's like it's entirely yours there's there's so many benefits to this thing. And also you know, like the blockchain space, we talk a lot about cryptocurrencies. NFTs by definition is everything else,

right? Like NFTs, like tokens are cryptocurrencies, the financial stuff. Everything else in this planet that is not fungible is everything is an NFT. And so I thought the market for it was pretty big. The white space is enormous for startups. It felt like a nice idea maze to go through.

And so yeah, for all of those reasons, I think, and especially me, like, I think looking back, I didn't even think about this when I started Showtime, but like, as a French tech outsider, quote unquote, like social media was my way of getting into tech. And so for me, going through the social media lens also made sense as well, because I've used social media. I know how to build those products. Social media also is good for word of mouth. And so, you know, for a company to be successful, like, I think their users has to talk to other people about it. So it just felt to me like all the stars were aligning for showtime to start. And so the FC space growing. Yeah, we just don't know that what will happen from here, especially as like layer two solutions or no blockchains will arrive to scale up NFTs. My guess is that it will be from digital art to all kinds of content, whether it's photos, videos, memes, podcast, newsletter.

All of those things will happen in the future. And it's very interesting. So, yeah, I'd like to maybe just bounce on that to ask my next question is. So, I mean, currently when you go to Showtime, it looks very much like an Instagram, right? Like, it's a showcase of people's NFTs, and there's some, like, sort of liking and commenting functionality. But, like, what is the future of Showtime? Like, what kinds of things, like, you know, five years from now, what would you like that platform to be to represent? And you talked about newsletters and podcasts and things like that.

Like where does that fit in in the secret system? Sure. So, yeah, there's multiple features for Showtime. I think the five years one is the long-term one. And it is about creating a decentralized social network, which means that right now, you know, because we wanted to move and build fast, the only decentralized thing in Showtime are the NFTs,

are the NFTs. like the like the comments everything else essentialize so that we could move faster and build a product faster and see if people cared about it in the first place and and what we see is that as blockchain scales we would put all of those interactions on chain so that really your social identity that you own online with your crypto wallet can be used in any other front end that reads this like showtime social graph infrastructure so we will be the open social graph where any developer in the world can build a new platform on top of. So we can have like the newsletter showtime, the podcast showtime that will just literally see your followings, your followers, everything in one place.

And so you don't have like right now every new social media like clubhouse, they had to start from zero. You had to start from zero people. And what we did with Showtime was like since we used the open NFC platform, we actually started Showtime with like dozens of thousands of accounts. And that felt great even to start new social media because now crypto composability can be used to bootstrap a social graph from nothing. And there's so much hidden gems in blockchain data that we haven't utilized yet. And so we want to push this further with not just NFTs, which is like the very barebone 2021 age to the 2025 age of like now all of your data is online. It belongs to you. Any developer can serve you a platform.

and whichever one you choose, they will make you pay a fee or something for their UX and maybe showtime the protocol will take a tiny fee on top of all of those. But that seems like a much more, you know, like open world that we want to be in rather than all the tiny world gardens that extract your content. And like we know that story already. Let's get to our sponsor, Exodus. Exodus is a fantastic cryptocurrency wallet that strikes a right balance

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buy up to $500 worth of crypto through their iOS app and pay just $1 in fee. So go to Exodus.com slash Epicenter and check out their wallet. We want to thank Exodus for their amazing support of Epicenter. So open social graph. I mean, this is a concept that I recently sort of became familiar with. Ben Thompson talks about this as well. And he talked about it like in the context of Clubhouse, which, you know, was like an interesting thing that they did,

which was just basically bootstrapped their social graph by breaking EU GDPR loss. But potentially breaking EU GDPR loss. Yeah, maybe let's dive into this topic a little bit deeper. What's the open social graph and what does it enable, you know, that is fundamental? different from the current model of, you know, everybody has their own wallet garden. I think what it enables is that, like, so many social platforms and communities cannot be enabled because the developers do not have access to the social graph.

Like, to build a new social media product, like, it's probably better for you to work at Facebook and, you know, try to lobby the Facebook executives into, like, oh, let's do this social media product. if you start a social media from scratch, well, maybe it's not economically viable for a small community. It won't be VC-backed. And so what we end up with is like tons of various social media giants for verticals, but the innovation is constrained by the fact that like it's, you just cannot restart one that easily. Like you cannot plug on the social graph.

You cannot read what, like, the people want you to access. it's just really constrain it constrains developer innovation there is no developer sandbox for creating a social media if the social photograph was open it will be much more easy it would be just easier

and sure there's things like log in with Facebook and you know you could do something like this but it's like loading already content that is made and refactoring to like whatever UX you want

is probably more powerful and we haven't really seen anything like this yet like true composable not just, okay, like sending with Facebook to like bootstrap your name and your profile picture. Here it can be much bigger. You can discover new interactions with people that you didn't know where possible. And in the previous World Garden model, like you will have to first convince a bunch of people to send it with Facebook, go through your onboarding flow.

So right now the sending with Facebook is just like easy to like bootstrap this social graph versus here. It's like one main one. And it just makes sense. Like, this is how the internet should be. You should be able to own your data. And owning your data was really theoretical for a long time. But now with NFTs, it makes more sense. It's like, okay, like you can make money from your data now.

You can directly interact with people. You can express your support for someone much better than Web 2, which was very altruistic-based. At most, like Patreon is donation-based. And so, anyway, my larger point is that innovation is being constrained. with World Gardens. This is probably why it would be better to have an open social graph. So how do you solve this in Showtime? So I actually like ran into this a little bit where like, you know, I opened up Showtime and, you know, I was having trouble finding people that I already knew, right? Like I want to like follow my friends. But like in Showtime, there's no way right now of like,

you know, saying, oh, let me find my Twitter friends or something, right? I think right now with only two people I'm following actually are the two of the two. review, actually, because those are like the first only two people. I'm like, all right. I mean, I kind of like scrolled through a list of people. I'm like, okay, I don't know any of these people. So I just say, all right, well, I'm sure Alex has an account. I searched your name. Of course, you did. And I searched Sebastian's name. Of course, he did. But like, I wasn't sure how to find out which of my other friends also have accounts. And that's a bit hard because, you know, blockchain, like we are the first, amongst the first applications ever to try to make sense of blockchain

data in a social way. Like, we don't really, even if we have the Twitter API, like, how can we know the eth address? Like, maybe if you have ENS in your username on Twitter, we would, like, resolve it and, like, searching on Showtime or stuff like this. Like, it just says we are starting this entire social data from scratch. The blockchain has zero social data. The blockchain has defy past history transactions, so you can maybe know if someone is, like,

a good defy user or not. and if you sold a bunch of NFTs or not, but we are trying to build it. Like we are trying to know, actually with the followers and following, like hopefully we'll get to have a clear picture. And right now, I think if you've tried to follow some people,

we will have like a nearest neighbor kind of algorithm trying to kind of detect like which people from like your second degree connections you might know and follow. But that's about it for now. And yeah, I do agree. Like, we are starting this from scratch. This is why it looks a little bit like Pinterest or the early social media internet.

You know, even Zora looks as a bit of this vibe. It's because we are recreating from scratch a little bit like those early social media platforms that had to start from scratch. So we honestly don't have that much data is my answer. And I'm not sure how to bridge login with Facebook and Twitter with true Ethereum addresses. Maybe by email, because some people link with Magic Link by email. But, yeah, it's still. It's still not clear to me. Isn't this something you could use the graph for?

Could you use the graph to build all of like these interactions between Ethereum addresses and usernames or whatever? So actually the graph is a team that we spoke a lot with. Basically every NFT team. I was part of kind of when I started the undercutorized defy community. I also started this NFT subgraph community where like Zora, rival, everyone is. in this group chat where we discuss how to do the NFT standard. And so maybe, yeah, as part of the standard, we could maybe have some things where it could

link to your social accounts or to like your email address or something that could be curied. And we can then use to kind of track your friends if you log in with like social logins like Twitter and see your friends. That would make sense. Yeah. So just coming back to the social graph, this open social graph idea. Yeah. So I think it's a really cool idea to want to bootstrap this sort of thing. I wonder, though, in, you know, if with, with the ambitions that you have, like, creating this open social graph, the way I see it is, like, showtime becomes sort of an open platform. And anyone can build, like, a podcast network on top of it or, you know, a newsletter platform or, like, whatever, you know, new type of content platforms exist in the future, you would use Showtime to do that.

You could use Showtime as one of the platforms on which you do that. And there might be other social graphs that exist and you may have like interoperability. So like I sort of see this vision for like, you know, this social application platform basically, like sort of thing. But why did you choose sort of crypto art as the starting point for this? Because if you're going to try to reach like mainstream audiences, it feels to me like you'd want to go with something that's more mainstream, like podcast or newsletters or like, you know, share. pictures of your, your, you know, brunch or whatever. So, yeah, why crypto art and, you know, where do you, where do you start sort of bridging into these more mainstream use cases that aren't reserved to, like, you know, crypto whales or like people with a lot of crypto that can buy NFTs?

So from the NFT world, you know, from the crypto-native perspective, it seemed like crypto art was the most popular one, the most decentralized one. Like, we see MDA top shots as well, or like genies, which are applications on flow, this other blockchain, where they have B2B deals with very famous people or leagues. And so we were like, okay, like in the decentralized Ethereum world, which will be better to start an open social graph than another blockchain, it seems like the most popular consumer use case is digital art. And the second thing that went to do the decision was, you know, digital art is visual

content. And so I'm not saying we will successfully, you know, achieve this transition. But what also is visual content is things like Instagram or TikTok, which are extremely consumer-facing and very mainstream and, you know, 1 billion plus users. And so it seems like with layer two and other solutions, showtime could scale to expand from digital art to any videos, photos, memes, the same way that Instagram started with like, your friends drinking coffee to like this influencer platform now, we think we can maybe bridge from the creator, you know, the digital artist as a beachhead to a bigger market afterwards. And hopefully crypto infrastructure will scale so that we can enable those things. Right now digital art is just the only economically viable thing you can do.

Like there's not much other things unless you start your own, you know, like proof of stake, you know, blockchain or side chain, like this literally. other use cases than digital art right now. But I think it can bridge to something else because it's the same visual content formats. So like the UX that we're building can be reused for other use cases. So yeah, this is why. And then yeah, like something like newsletter or podcast, like there is no other, there is no newsletter NFT.

Well, there is mirror, I guess, in some ways. And they're doing a wonderful job. And, but that's, that's about it. Like there's no, there's no newsletter. There's no YouTube NFTs for like longer videos. All of those new formats. I think our company is worth starting, but crypto is maybe too early for this because it's maybe too heavy files or maybe there's just not enough data like newsletters.

No one is doing newsletter right now. Like digital art is here. It's on the blockchain. It's just for us to take and display and put into this visual content. So to start like a social media protocol, reverse engineering it, it seemed like visual content is like a massive, massive part of social media and digital art. is that one category that is in this, you know, in this format. So that's irrational.

But I don't know. Maybe it will be, it will be different. And Shodem will be used for not just digital art, but another niche. And we maybe won't bridge to the mainstream. I'm not sure. It's, yeah, I think, like, you know, maybe there's some digital art platform that, you know, are started by artists or, you know, you know, really want to remain artists first, but we really have this more general vision in the future.

And so we would like to appeal beyond art. Art is just the first step. So how does Showtime sort of compare to like, you know, I know there's, I know there's like other similar projects like Zora and Foundation and things like that? Or like, why would I even use Showtime as opposed to like OpenCy, right? Like you can go to my profile page on OpenCy and you can kind of. to see the somewhat similar information. They have a like button as well.

So what's sort of the difference here? So I would say OpenC is best at being very exhaustive in features, indexing the NFTs, indexing all the attributes, really making sure that you can see all the collections. And so it seems like it's a different use case. I would say like OpenC is more the eBay or the Amazon of NFTs, you know, that shows the price, really does show everything and is like the base layer, like the ether's kind of NFTs. And Showtime is more like we are making opinionated UX decisions to make it just like something that you browse, you know, more casually that you can see, you know, your friends NFTs.

You can see your friends brag with that NFTs. But yeah, it's more of like showing your portfolio to the public. OpenC is more like, okay, like detecting everything. single NFT, like which one is on sale, which one is a bit, et cetera. So I would say it's a different, like we could go into OpenC direction, but it would make our design like just more cluttered and less appealing. And OpenC could reduce some features to be more like short time, but also they would miss out on some key features of their NFT search engine that they spent years building. So it seems like we are different enough. And both are required, honestly, like, you know, a lot of

NFTs on Showtime, we have this button like, you know, view on OpenC if you want to have more data and information about the NFTs. So I feel like we're still quite different. And then, you know, foundation, I guess foundation could be like right now, it's like one gallery for NFT, like one auction house. And so maybe Foundation will be like a very popular account on Showtime in the future. I'm not sure exactly how they will evolve. And who else? Well, Zora is very interesting because it feels like Zora is perhaps leading the NFT standard. And if we ever have to do our own marketplaces feature, we may use the NFTs from Zora because it seems like it's a standard that they're improving a lot and that has more features that is composable with other things. Like MIR is building

things to like split royalties from Zora NFTs. And so Zora, I believe, like we are completely complementary with them. And it's very likely that we will use their at least integrate at best use for our own marketplaces features. So I think we're like the layer on top of Zara. Zara is the content primitive. We are like the social graph, like, you know, interaction primitive. One of the things I was actually thinking about last night is, do you know if there's any like platform for like, I was thinking about this in like terms of like fantasy sports?

Like do you think there's something with like fantasy art where it's like, I mean, I was thinking of like, you know, can you create derivatives of NFTs where it's like, hey, I want to bet on the next people artwork and how much it's going, the next sale is going to go for. And I want to create like a derivative on that. And like, and I was like, oh, I want to put together this like fantasy art game where I can like, you know, create my team of artists against your team of artists or something like that. Do you know if anyone's working on something like that? Yeah. So like fantasy as in like, you know, you create your outlier own game and like your goal is to beat other people in a a game fashion that it doesn't have

the real value. Yeah, there is like So Rare, which is this French company who does this with soccer clubs. There's also this new startup I just heard of like last week called Vision Rare, which is fantasy startups. So like even if you're not a VC, you can create your outlier, like startup portfolio.

And maybe that will help you break into VCs because VCs will just see like, oh wow, like you got into this company in this fantasy game like super early on. Anyways, for showtime, I feel like, yeah, like betting on someone early is something that obviously like as myself

would like create the Alex token but people could bet on myself early and it seems so far to be paying off for them like you know having created one of the first creator tokens like it really makes me wonder

whether we should do it on showtime I can't talk too much about this but like we're gonna probably do something where you know you can maybe bet on creators or collectors in the future and that should be

something that you'll hear more about soon How, you know, can tell us a bit about like the team and the company and like, you know, how are you guys, is there going to be a show token or something? Or like, what's the long term like roadmap of this? For sure. So, so the team, we are a team of six, most engineering. Right now the face of showtime is really like building. Like we have a lot of things to build. We have, you know, maybe like scaling and layo two solutions is something that we're thinking at right now.

so that really we can then do a push on marketing once the product is fully finished. Although right now, marketing-wise, it's doing pretty well. It seems like creators and collectors love their short-time account. Whenever they are on our trending page, they share it and people follow each other. So it seems exciting for now. So since our vision is a social media protocol, it won't be an IPO, but it will probably be a token offering, although I cannot say anything.

I feel like I'm so scared of like saying things. We just don't know right now. Like this is the very start of showtime. But it's something that we are potentially interested in. And it seems like the natural way of creating a social media protocol. Like it cannot be a C-Corp like IPOing the traditional business way. So it will be a protocol that probably will be a token. Like it's something that we're really interested about.

But it's too early to call, right? Like when you are a startup that's five months old and just going to Ycombinator, you don't think about the IPO. I think it's the same stage right now for us. Like we just got started. I think thinking about a token is too early. But it seems like it's the right approach seeing all of those defy five projects, get coin more recently. It seems like it's the best way to decentralize your protocol and make sure that everyone who participates in the value is getting fairly compensated for their work. Yeah.

So, I mean, you know, like you mentioned, you're pretty early stage. still you guys recently raised funding, you know, and I think Paradigm was your lead investor. And so, you know, Paradigm is like, you know, a really well-known fund in the space, but they've always, like, really been more on the defy side of things. And so I feel like this is one of their, like, force forays into this, like, NFT thing. And so, like, what was their whole, like, what did you do to, like, pitch them and get them excited about NFTs? Yeah, I'm laughing because I am absolutely terrible at pitching. I feel like it was more because, you know,

Showtime, like, we launched very fast and we, you know, built as quickly as we can. And I think that was what built up their conviction rather than my storytelling skills. And, yeah, like, I mean, paradigm, yeah, actually this is very true. Part of them historically only funded Defy Projects

and really drew like, you know, AMM deep research, like, participated through like, you have V3 designs. And so why would they fund the NFC project? Well, first of all, it was because NFTs were not that important until like very recently. One, and two, they actually funded Zora pretty recently as well. It seems like Zora could be complementary to us because they are doing the content primitive.

We are the social primitive, the curation primitive, you know. And so there's a lot of improvements on top of this very barebone NFT structure that their crypto expertise could be very useful. first to bridge like you know layer two solution and to scale parliad with like georgios or other team members will be very useful but also you know maybe doing some smart contract changes communicating with the Zora team around like what are the latest things that you can build up of NFTs I think they will be quite helpful in that

realm so yes it's true NFTs is something that is very new for partime but it's also very new for crypto as a whole and I think their expertise will be very much needed because the NFT standard to be honest right now is too simple. We have to build a bunch of other things. We have to build a social media protocol in the next few years. And so a lot of research will be needed to just implement it. And this is why we kind of chosen as partners. It seems like at our stage, they are the best partners we can ask for. So taking a bit of a step back here and zooming out and looking at the so the NFT space, You know, what are some of the biggest challenges you think that the ecosystem faces today, you know, whether it's in terms of, you know, infrastructure, scalability, you know, dev tools or just kind of general use cases and applications?

I feel like in a lot of ways where, like, things here, things in this NFT craze are sort of a little bit similar to, you know, how things were in the ICO boom of 2017, 2018. And, you know, in the end, like, once the dust settles, there will be. like a sort of like a new normal. So what are the challenges right now? And then maybe like to a follow-up question is like when the dust settles, what will the ecosystem look like? For sure. That makes sense.

Yeah. I feel like the issue of crazy is obviously like mostly scams, no dev tools, no, no apps or the apps to plug in. And no infrastructure like blockchain was still like very nascent. I feel like this, this time around. around, there is better DevTools. There is also a better infrastructure. Well, Maynett is still very bad, of course, and not scalable.

But it's a problem that's like almost technologically solved, right? Because of laborious solutions coming out very, very soon this summer and a bunch of new improvements with Ethereum 2. Like, it seems like infrastructure is about to be solved. DevTools are much better. There are applications already. So I feel like just waiting those few next months and we'll see the NFT space probably really, really boom in popularity.

And so what comes out of this after the scalability gap is formed and also Fiaton ramp and Fiat off ramp and, you know, mainstream wallets via emails, you know, like with layer two, you can also do like the smart contract wallet vision much better. Right now, you know,

Sparktock wallets is not really doable on main net. I think like, you know, Arjun, which is amazing pioneers. Like they struggle subsidizing the gas fees, of course, and things like this. And so a lot of tooling with layer two become, ready for the mainstream. Seattle becomes ready.

And so what will emerge from this is an explosion of social apps. And social apps are amazing at propagating word of mouth. And so that will be obviously very huge for the entire crypto space. Because when you're on showtime, you start making money. Well, we can plug, you know, USDC trading on uniswap and, you know, frame it as savings accounts. If it's insured on open, for instance. Like we can do some complex DFI products that we can then in our UI tell, you know, Showtime users.

So basically a new wave of social media, a new wave of consumer facing DFI products, like a web three portal type apps, that all of this will be available. And so we just need scalability and FiatonRamp in my mind. Most of the other things are done. We're just waiting for, you know, like optimism is very exciting. Stockware is very exciting. Arbitrum 2. a lot of those things will be very, very soon released. And that's for me the main blocker.

This will unleash a lot of innovation. And so actually, I actually think the cycle will be even shorter. Like it took two years to build a bunch of stuff. This cycle, like, sure, NFT volume has decreased a little bit. But, like, very quickly, maybe this summer, a lot of layer-to solution will just create so much more new use cases for NFTs that are not possible before. and also like, you know, more capital efficient defy as well, that the bull market will quickly resume. One other thing I've been thinking about here, and it's basically so, I think there's like two types of tokens in the space, right?

You're like native tokens that exist on-chain and like their value is represented solely by their on-chain representation. And so, you know, defy governance tokens, you know, stable coins, crypto art NFTs are part of this category. And then you have like tokenized assets. And so you have like tokenized, you know, USD in the form of USDC. And for NFTs, a lot of people who have entered the space have been thinking about like tokenizing physical art and like things that don't exist on a blockchain or like they don't exist in a digital realm.

Do you think that this is, do you think that there's actually? value here. Do you think this is actually a use case or is just sort of like this exuberance that people like just want to build NFTs out of everything and like there's not really anything behind it? Like what do you think of like this tokenized physical asset being tokenized as an NFT? I think this is this is good. Like it seems like NFT could be the standard for old things like a ledger of everything like a universal receipt. I do agree with your point that well, I'm not sure if it was, you know, frame it as a point, but it seems to me that like, you know, crypto is still very early, digital scales much better. So it seems like the market for physical-based

NFTs is basically smaller and less important. But yeah, I do think that NFTs could be the universal ledger of the world. And so it means that physical art could have, you know, their inception date or royalties or whatever thing, like at least encode in the blockchain. and paid in a blockchain, like, you know, virtual real estate. All of those things will bring much more liquidity and access, right? Anyone with the internet connection could like, you know, purchase a part of some real estate, somewhere like realty is doing with real estate. It just seems like to me those are one, a little bit smaller markets.

And they scale not as fast because you need to have the custody part and all the meat space, you know, constraints. So no, I think this is interesting. digital scales better. That's just the way things are. And to have like a physical space really winning, you have to be really perfect at logistics, kind of like Amazon is, right? Like they are midspace,

but like they are so incredibly talented at logistics. So maybe some operations like Amazon grade of excellence in the physical world will be required to have like a very big idea plan out. Otherwise, I think first we'll hear a little. lot about a digital before then the physical can take place. I think that a lot of the physical NFT stuff will probably fizzle out. And so I guess like with my follow-up question here and maybe, you know, we can, we can end on this is what do you, what do you expect the killer app to be here?

And with any new technology, I feel like most times someone's getting disrupted. someone will win like there are winners and losers basically like in this in this in this in this in this craze and like so in the long term once the sort of NFT killer app

emerges like who what would that be who will be the winners and like who will get disrupted or who would be the losers so it seems like the winners will definitely be the one building in the NFT space today

a little bit like you know defy is on its way to win and the losers are basically banking because a big chunk of their business is gone and they will probably be forced to pivot to become like, you know, D5 front ends. And same for the NFT space. It feels like NFT space is probably going to eat social media. And so when you can make money online, social media and e-commerce, I guess, are like the incumbents there probably would have a very hard time competing with the

ease of transaction, royalties giving, just like the general fees of the applications are just so much lower. Everything will be more capital efficient. Transfer will be global. And also, like, compatibility is such a big thing, right? Like, you can build one component pretty well. Everyone can build on top of you. And so we can create really complex social media interactions that Facebook will struggle to compete with. So I would say Facebook, you know, Facebook is one cool social media app away of being disrupted. I think out of all the thing CEOs, like he's, Mark Zuckerberg is probably the one that sleeps the less at night, I guess, because it's hard. Yeah, that, that and boomers getting older. And boomers are getting older. And, and those are the main ones using Facebook. And I guess

Instagram is like, you know, actually like every social media has this kind of curve of like the peak and then it just goes down. And Instagram is on its way down. I think the peak of Instagram was 2019. TikTok is basically going for their peak right now. And it will also go down. And, Clubhouse truly to tell, but clubhouse seems like to be a great success, and I was done the best. But basically, yeah, it seems like a few social media giants are going slightly down, and who are the ones who are going to take over? They most likely will be crypto-based. Maybe in Asia, there will be some centralized social commerce service that could be a little bit similar to NFTs in a centralized manner.

But I think in the Western world, at least, NFT platforms, yeah, for me, social media apps, where, you know, instead of Instagram or YouTube taking all of your money and sending it to advertisers, like what I envision is like your picture that you upload, like if you're a famous influencer, like this will be an NFT that like an advertiser will directly buy. So like no more middlemen, like you directly like sponsored by on Instagram would become like owned, collected by Coca-Cola that will then, you know, buy themselves the advertising. rights on your popular social media content. And they can even buy it in maybe Coca-Cola tokens.

There will be a coupon for, you know, buying Coca-Cola. Like you can still convert to Fiat on Uniswap, but Coca-Cola, it will just buy more products of Coca-Cola. And to continue with that metaphor, maybe there will be a way from the creator to, like, flow down some of its profits in Coca-Cola tokens to the users. So basically, there is no more advertising here. because like you directly as a user benefits from the money spent in advertising. Like there is no advertising is basically like a middleman between like a product and their

audience with tokens and crypto. You can directly bridge to the users. And there will be some fees obviously to maintain like showtime and other things. But they will be minimal. And so that's very exciting. So to me this is what it feels like like crypto will be better than free products, meaning that you will get literally paid for doing actions online, even as a user. It enables so many more things that Facebook just cannot do because Facebook either is so much infrastructure debt as is too centralized.

And so that's a liability with the governments and regulations coming after them. So too many hurdles. Obviously, I'm sure Facebook is a very smart team. They're going to pivot to hardware with like, you know, VR. maybe that's like their way of like escaping and knowing that they will lose this battle but it feels like social media is going to be reinvented and it's going to be the NFT startups that win. Speaking of VR, like how important do you think VR will be to like the success of NFTs?

Because I feel like especially when I pitch NFTs to like normies, I feel they don't get it until I start talking about VR and the metaverse and then they're like, oh, okay, you're right, this makes sense. I totally agree. This is very interesting. I think normies do not get NFTs today because there is no social layer and so it feels like you're buying something. The reason the argument like, oh, it's just a JPEG kind of makes sense for Normie is because there is no way to showcase your NFTs anywhere. So Showtime is the first answer to this. But obviously the long-term vision is the metaverse. And so the miniverse like has to be economically independent. Otherwise it's very dystopian. So we don't want Facebook to own your entire economy just because, well, that's

very bad. They will see literally all your interactions and your data and they will own this in the world gallon fashion. That's pretty bad. And two, because probably the fees will be higher as well. They will just impose their own fees and be like a monopoly of data and also off like the fees. And so that's pretty bad. And so yeah, like for the VR maneuvers to exist, we need. So VR obviously and also cryptocurrencies, NFTs as like a real estate. space in a world, right? Where now if you work, play, live in this VR world, well, now your NFT has much more utility, right? Everyone in the world can see it, everyone in the world can trade it. It seems like, yeah, NFTs are as of today because digital scales more than the physical

world, and they probably will be always more popular in the digital world than the physical world. it makes sense that NFTs are really well suited for the metaverse and so it makes more sense for people who understand this vision and this will probably be like slowly sweeping through our lives

and people who understand NFTs more and yet open worlds are kind of pioneering this decentralized and crypto box or sandbox all of those projects with NFTs as real estate and there's like metaverse preppers which is like a kind of funny category of people who like already start buying

so much lands. So they will be like the rich landlords of this new universe. Stocking up on canned goods and stuff. That's very funny. So definitely, yeah, Maneverse, VR plus crypto, Mexico, makes full sense. We need both technologies to work out. And it seems like you'll be the case in 10 years time, 15 years time.

And that'll be very exciting. Yeah, that's a very interesting way of positioning. And I feel it's like, you know, the reason I think why people understand the VR side is just saying, okay, this is how I display my NFD. But now what you're saying is with Showtime, like even pre-VR, if you have a way of displaying NFTs, then that will get help. Yeah, so then is pre-VR. Because All World right now is pre-VR. Like, All World is still Instagram slash TikTok. We don't have a VR headset that is very cheap. It doesn't exactly replace your phone. So, like, there's like a ton of things that, like, are needed for VR. There's a cool project called Uni that's backed by Naval. Pretty cool. French founder as well. And yeah, like it's trying to like a social media VR headset.

We'll see where it goes. And I'd be happy to look into it. But so far, Showtime is built for the pre-VR world. Like we have enough work to do with crypto alone to them think about VR. And we'll see if we can plug to VR things. But shouldn't be too hard, honestly. Like it's a social media protocol. Like the VR headset can just like read that data under a different UX.

And that will be like the Midevers. Cool. Alex, we'll have to end it there. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. podcast and sharing your vision for Showtime and for the open social graph and the NFT space. It's been really fascinating. Where do people find you? What's your Showtime handle that people showtime handle that people show?

My showtime handle is at AM because my co-founder is also called Alex. So he got the Alex one. So tryshadine.com slash AM. And then my Twitter is at Alex Masmej. and that's where I basically live right now. That's like my metaverse right now as of today. Showtime and Twitter. Thanks, Alex.

Cool. Awesome. Thank you so much, guys. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.com.

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