On The Brink with Castle Island - Jamil Dhanani & Nick Sainato (Gamma) on Building a Trustless Ordinals Marketplace (EP.408)

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

Jamil and Nick, co-founders of Gamma.io, join us on the show to discuss: Lowering the barrier to inscribing NFTs on Bitcoin Why creators and collectors are excited about NFTs on Bitcoin Designing a trustless Ordinals marketplace that aligns with its unique culture The emerging collecting and trading culture on Bitcoin and it's key differences  

Welcome to On the Brink. This is Ria from Castle Island. In this episode, I was joined by Jamil and Nick, the co-founders of Gamma, an inscription service and newly launched marketplace for ordinals. Jamil and Nick tell me about lowering the barrier to inscribing ordinals. There are considerations in designing a marketplace that's purpose-built for, and upholds the ethos and culture around ordinals, and much more. So let's turn it to our conversation. Hey everyone, this is Ria. Welcome back to another episode of On the Brink. Today I have Nick and Jamil from Gamma to talk to us about ordinals inscribing on Bitcoin as well as trading on Bitcoin via their new ordinals marketplace. But before we get into all of that, Nick and Jamil, could you start off by giving us a quick

introduction, tell us a little bit about yourselves. What were you doing pre-Gamma, pre-stacks, NFT? How did you guys meet and end up deciding to work on this project together? Yeah, thanks so much, Ria, for having us on. Yeah, it's been an eventful 18 months working on on gamma. We started off basically with this idea that, you know, in around mid-2021, we saw all the activity that was happening in the NFT marketplaces and in the digital asset space. And we noticed that although there was a lot of activity on chains like Ethereum and Solana and others, and there was a relative lack of attention on Bitcoin. And this was really interesting to us because we saw Bitcoin as the best store of value for your fungible assets. You know,

institutions all over the world, people all over the world trust Bitcoin as their store of value. And yet there was barely any attention being put on Bitcoin as a source for NFTs or as a source for digital assets. So we've basically spent the past 18 months focusing on trying to make that dream of Bitcoin digital assets come true. First, through creator tools and making it more accessible for people to create NFTs and create assets on Bitcoin and then eventually launching a marketplace. And we did all of this on the Bitcoin L2 stacks. over the past month or so, it's been incredible to see all of the traction and opportunity around digital assets on Bitcoin on L1 through Ordinals. And we've basically just been focusing on building infrastructure and building tools

and building ways for creators to get started on Bitcoin as quickly and easily as possible. So you can right now drag and drop images or text on your computer. instantly inscribe it directly onto Bitcoin. And by the time this podcast goes out, we'll have also launched a marketplace where you can actually trade these inscriptions with others and list them for sale. It'll be the first one to do it in a truly trustless way. So we're super excited about that. Briefly, before starting a gamma, I was mostly in the traditional tech world, I'm focusing a lot on AIML, but as is a pretty common story in tech, crypto was always my side projects and hobbies.

And it was a similar story for Nick, which is actually how we met. I can pass it along to him. I'm really more on the op side of things. So most recently in digital marketing, so paid media and SEO. And I also kind of found my way to this programmable Bitcoin, that I like to kind of call it. And that was, you know, initially through, through stacks, Bitcoin L2. And, you know, I was just kind of found my way to this, to this amazing community of people who were aligned with this vision of Bitcoin doing more than just being a store of value.

And I think that there's, you know, tends to be this perception that there's this, this huge Bitcoin maximalist community that that wants Bitcoin to do absolutely nothing. But I think what we found is that this is really a loud minority. And I think that, you know, most people want to see digital assets, including, you know, Bitcoin itself, to be doing doing more than just being like digital gold and nothing else. And I think that, you know, finding this, this ecosystem of people, and of course there's Bitcoin builders elsewhere as well, but this kind of gave me a little bit of inspiration to start an NFT project of my own, which was, you know, combining just some of my, my creative outlets and a little bit of storybuilding and things like that. And I had this idea, but I didn't know how to actually go about creating the smart contract.

Like I'm relatively technical, but not a developer. And so I actually found Jamel quite early on in his days of what was originally called STXNFT, which is now Gamma. And he was building creator tools and helping creators launch smart contracts. And so, you know, he helped me get my contract up and running. I was one of the first several collections that launched on the STX NFT marketplace. And then pretty soon thereafter, you know, I mentioned I come from digital marketing. And, you know, this early website kind of like MVP was very capable, like feature-wise.

but it was quite basic. And so I, you know, offered some assistance in terms of creating content and certain CRO kinds of things. And Jamil was super receptive to that. And then, you know, very quickly thereafter, I think we just realized that there'd be some synergies, you know, working together and some complementary skills. So, yeah, the rest is history. I think it was probably about a month or two later that we both.

we both around the same time left our full-time jobs and went all in on all in on web three and all in on gamma. It's been a been a total blast ever since. It's been really impressive to see how quickly you guys kind of hopped on the Ordinoles bandwagon and how quickly you shipped features and how quickly you kind of just emerged as the premier platform for inscribing NFTs on Bitcoin. Before we get into that and get into kind of maybe understanding your aha moment around ordinals, could you guys just level set for the audience? You know, we've done a couple episodes on ordinals on Bitcoin, but maybe for audience members,

listeners who haven't heard those episodes, just talk a little bit about what are inscriptions versus ordinals and how is it? possible for us to have NFTs on Bitcoin. Maybe Jamil will start with you. So I think what makes this so interesting and so exciting is really two parts to this. Before Bitcoin was basically just treated like any sort of fungible currency. And what that means is like one BTC, it's kind of indistinguishable from another. Like just when you pay for your coffee with your debit card or your credit card, you don't really care which $5 or $3 or whatever. it takes it out from it's just $3 off your balance and people sort of saw Bitcoin in quite the same

way with Ordinals what it does is it actually assigns a unique value to every single unit of Bitcoin that's out there and so what that allows you to do is to treat each BTC each unit of BTC each Satoshi differently from the other so you can actually like do a lot with this actually you can see trace back the history of all your Bitcoin in your wallet right back to the block that it was mined. So for example, you might have some BTC in your wallet that was mined all the way back in 2009 by Satoshi or something. Or you can have BTC that was mined just in the last block, and you can actually trace back the history of your wallet and see where all your BTC actually came from.

The second part is the inscriptions part, and that's what allows you to put the data, your images, your text, your books, directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, and associate it with one of those Satoshes or one of those units of Bitcoin. So what this allows you to do is not only have a wallet where you can trace back the history of each one of those SATs and volume of your Bitcoin, but actually a way to hold stats that contain data or that reference data that's actually put directly on the blockchain. I think this is what makes ordinals and inscriptions so unique.

You know, you're using, you've found a way to basically put data that you care about or data that you find valuable or assets that you find valuable directly on the longest running, most secure, most decentralized blockchain. And I think that's what's really magical about this opportunity. Never before have we seen a chance to basically put these valuable assets directly on what we see as the most valuable blockchain out there. That explanation kind of laid out why a creator might want to create a, an inscription on Bitcoin versus another chain.

And we can maybe talk a little bit later about the similarities and differences of inscribing on Bitcoin versus an Ethereum or something like that. But what in your experience kind of operating this initial inscription service and working on the marketplace have you seen as like the key reasons why individual creator, or entities that are dropping individual NFTs or collections on Bitcoin, what's kind of attracting them to this opportunity? Yeah, I'll let Nick expand on this a little bit too, because I know he has a lot of thoughts on the creator side of things.

But I'll mention one thing that we found really interesting when we first launched our inscription service. When we launched, we had really no idea what to expect or what we'd see from users in terms of how they'd use our inscription service. One of the most fascinating things that we saw was people actually starting to use our inscription service in a way that doesn't really match up with how you use ETH Creator Tools. They were inscribing books, they were inscribing poems, they were inscribing personal photos. They're inscribing things that they really, you could tell they wanted it to last the test of time. They weren't just doing it to speculate on prices going up or trying to speculate on the value of an asset.

they were doing it because they wanted to preserve that information and because they trusted Bitcoin is basically that that long-term store of value, store of information, store of basically their non-fungible assets. And I think this kind of gets the root of why people trusted, why people find ordinal so unique is it's the way that they trust their, the way in which they trust their assets to be stored. And so we followed up with that and we saw even artists saying, you know, I was looking for years for a place to basically put this artwork. I didn't really feel comfortable putting it in an NFT on ETH or on any other chain. And this really feels right.

You know, this is what deserves to hold my work, to hold it as an asset, to trade it in the future so that I can be sure that it gets the respect that it deserves, both on chain and on this most decentralized blockchain. I think you kind of, you know, summed it up to the key points. I think maybe just to expand it a little bit, you know, I kind of, in thinking about this, I think, you know, you kind of have these first few components of like, really what is unique about, about ordinals and inscriptions. And so like, I think, you know, you have a Satoshi, which is basically, you know, kind of like the equivalent of like a cent to a dollar, uh, for. for Bitcoin. And so you have this digital scent. And now you have a way to track it, as Jamal's explaining. And now you have a way to associate stuff with that. And it's like those first three things are really like the technical unlocks. It's like you have a small unit. It's trackable. You can inscribe stuff with it. But that is not actually what is valuable. Like the thing that makes it valuable is a very kind of, uh, in some ways seemingly basic concept, which is just that once you do that, you have the scent,

you track it, and you associate stuff to it. The single differentiator that Bitcoin provides that really adds value here is that it will just never change ever. And so, and like that is what it makes it valuable. And I think like to kind of drill down a little bit, it's like, you know, if you are, you know, a creator and you are putting your blood, sweat, and tears into this creation, you want to know that this work is going to live on. You want to know that it's going to live on, you know, perhaps beyond you as a creator, perhaps beyond, you know, all of us right now. And I think that what's kind of like, you know, an interesting almost thought experiment here is that, you know, Bitcoin might not be here forever.

I certainly am bullish on Bitcoin's long-term potential. But even if it's not here forever, it has a better chance at being here longer than anything else because it's spread out across 20,000 machines, probably even more as a result of ordinals, all across the world in all different means by institutions, people, smaller businesses and mining rigs and basically every different type of person or individual can, I'm sorry, or entity can be running one of these nodes. And so I think that's really like the key unlock here. And that's why you see people willing to spend meaningful amounts of money to inscribe data

directly onto the blockchain. Like it wouldn't be worth paying that if you didn't think that that settlement was valuable. Then I'd say just as a final mention, from a collector side or from someone who's purchasing one of these inscriptions on a marketplace, for example, it's equally as important, just from the flip side.

If I purchase this, it's a digital asset. It's not a given that that digital asset will always exist forever. And so if I'm investing maybe a significant amount of money to purchase something that I view as unique and as a digital asset, I want to know that it's going to continue on. And so, you know, I could go on about this, but I think like that's really the key difference, and that's what Bitcoin uniquely provides. As a collector and aspiring creator, of NFTs, I definitely see that as one of the core value propositions. Nick, you mentioned something that I think is a good segue into talking about the inscription service that you guys kind of started

off with. But you said as a result of ordnals, you know, the number of nodes, you know, validating the network has potentially grown. So, you know, talk about the inscription service and the experience for creators inscribing an ordinal NFT pre and post gamma? Yeah, so I do want to like preface this by saying, I think the goal long term is to try to have as many people like set up a proper Bitcoin node for themselves and kind of fulfill that promise of, you know, complete sovereignty and, you know, controlling, controlling your own destiny, so to speak, with respect to Bitcoin. But I think the reality is that the average person is not going to go from having no exposure to Bitcoin or having very minimal exposure to Bitcoin

to now, you know, just spinning up a machine to run a node and make sure that it's set up in a reliable way or maybe use a cloud-based service and pay, you know, a couple hundred dollars a month to keep this running. So it's like there's, there's a lot involved with running a, a Bitcoin full node, not to mention specialized software on top so that you can operate with ordnals. So I think that we saw what was a pretty clear need to make this much more accessible to, to the average person who just wants to kind of get their feet wet and experience this for the first time. And so Basically, what the inscription service does is it takes all of the complicated steps in the process, and we handle all of those. And it basically takes a process down.

I think we saw somebody tweeted about how they had set up a node, and I think it took them a couple of days to get the nodes set up and synced and configured properly with the ordinal software. and then, you know, a week later, Gamma was launched with the inscription service, and then they were actually able to record a screen recording in 38 seconds, actually creating a inscription. And what that means is basically they are providing some text that they want to inscribe, or maybe they're uploading an image, and then we basically give somebody just a Bitcoin address, and all you have to do is send the... amount of Bitcoin to that address that it costs for your inscription.

And then we handle all the rest. So we'll handle getting the nodes synced, getting all that set up, we'll inscribe it for you, and then we'll transfer that to you. And what's kind of nice about this is, you know, if we really go to like the hardcore, like philosophical side of trustlessness, you know, there is a very small amount of trust in this process in sending us Bitcoin and trusting us to inscribe your actual, your inscription. But that's basically where the trust ends, because as soon as we send you your inscription, you know, as as Jamil mentioned before, it's just

a Satoshi, which is Bitcoin. And so as soon as you have Bitcoin, you have possession over that Bitcoin, it's yours forever, and Gamma has no ties to it. So I think it's kind of this this really great opportunity to lower the barriers to entering and provide a really good experience for creators. I think I came across Gamma quite a few weeks ago at this point, and you have added a number of different features and functions to make it even more useful for creators and collectors. Can you just talk a little bit about for listeners how the product has evolved from when you first launched it to where it is now and how maybe easy or difficult it was to get from

there to where you are now? I think the main thing that we wanted to get done at first was to provide an easy way to go from a file on your computer, an image or some text to an inscription. that you have on the Bitcoin blockchain. And that was the first product that we launched. That basically took the time down, as Nick said, from like three days to 30 seconds in terms of getting that functionality available. But creators generally want to do a lot more, right?

They don't want to just inscribe their own work. They want to be able to let other people mint their work or provide stuff for sale that other people can mint, sort of like on Ethereum or on other blockchains. So we quickly realized that there was a new, need for to provide something like this because the way that people were doing this right now was it would be inscribing some work and then they would be setting up a Google Sheets or like some manual Discord Discord system that would then try and allocate which inscriptions go to which

collectors and doing over-the-counter trades. And so the second thing that we launched was a way to do collection minutes. And in this way, the creator can just upload a bunch of images. They don't have to pay directly to get them inscribed at first. And they just share a link to their users. And basically what happens is that their collectors can now mint or inscribe those inscriptions with some fee going to the collector, some fee going to the minor to pay. But the key point is is that the creator doesn't pay anything up front. Their collectors can mint their work. The creator gets paid. The collectors get their inscriptions. And it's a really seamless sort of Ethereum style or you know a process that is people are used to on other chains instead of sort of the

creator paying for all the inscriptions and then having to distribute them so we really tried to make it as easy as possible to go from for a creator to go from a collection to just getting their work out there into the world and I think a natural corollary of this is then allowing for secondary sales which is where the marketplace comes in which is what we were we're announcing now and they'll allow people to continue that life cycle. Say now once I've minted something, once I've inscribed something, how can I now trade it with other people? How can I now, you know, buy an artist's work after the mint has closed and continue on

that process? That's a good segue to talk about the reason we're all here today, which is the Ordinals marketplace that you're announcing and launching. And, Jamil, you alluded to this just now. but maybe talk about in maybe a little bit more detail, logistically, how most collectors have been trading ordinals today and, you know, maybe how roundabout of a process or antiquated of a process, it has been to date.

Yeah, I think the majority of the trading that we've seen on ordinals has been basically over the counter. You know, Degods had a successful mint, just a few days ago where they basically minted out some Degods at I think 0.3 BTC, so quite a substantial amount. And almost all of the trading that's going on, they have a Degods trading desk that's basically an air table or spreadsheet of bids and asks. So it's really, really manual because there isn't a great marketplace solution up until Gamma that provides you a trustless way and an easy way to trade inscriptions with each other.

So a lot of the trading that's been happening has been very manual, very over-the-counter, requires trusted third parties who charge high fees to escrow trades. And what we're really aiming for, and I think what we've delivered is this OpenC plus Metamask style experience where you just go to gamma,

you click on the collection you want to browse, you can buy any for sale, you just sign a transaction, and it appears in your wallet when the next block confirms. And likewise with listing, just like on other marketplaces, when you create a listing, it's completely gasless, no transaction fees. You just sign a listing and anybody can buy it. And crucially, this requires no trust on the marketplace side.

We don't take your private keys. We never custody any assets. It's a completely decentralized process of basically trading these things where any seller can list their inscription and any buyer can fully. fulfill that order without us sort of mediating it in the middle. And I think that's really doing things in the spirit of Bitcoin as well. You know, we're building this future financial system and this future paradigm of trustlessness of, to get away from a lot of these, you know, corrupt institutions or trusted ways of doing

things before. And I think we're delivering very much in line with that ethos. you know, you've clearly been very fast to market. And usually when you're fast to market, you kind of launch a minimum viable product that maybe has tradeoffs around permissionlessness, trustlessness, but to see you guys launch a suite of products that kind of minimizes trust while also being so fast to market, that has been really, really impressive to see. when it comes to actually facilitating this trust list trading and inscribing of assets on Bitcoin, can you talk a little bit maybe around the technical aspect of how you're actually facilitating that?

Yeah, for sure. So on Bitcoin, you can actually create what's called a partially signed Bitcoin transaction. And what this allows you to do is actually very simply. say something like, I have this inscription, it lives at this transaction output, and I'm only willing to transfer it to someone if they can provide me with, say, one BTC, if that's the listing price. And so you basically create this incomplete transaction that says, I'm willing to transfer this NFT, this inscription, if you're willing to give me one BTC. And any buyer can basically take that partially signed transaction and just fill in the rest of the input.

So the buyer will say, okay, here's the one BTC that I have, and in return, I'll take that inscription from you. And so what this allows the seller to do is basically specify those set of conditions under which they would like that transaction output to be spent. Now, crucially as well, what we're doing at gamma on the marketplace is we wait a little bit to actually have the infrastructure for web wallets to also allow you to sign these transactions and to interact with the marketplace in a way where we never see your private keys. So when you sign these transactions, we're not the ones doing the signing. You can see exactly what you're doing.

You'll see a window that comes up that says, here's the input you want to spend, here's the inscription you want to spend, here's the amount of BTC you expect to get back. And basically all the outputs will be, will be clear. And of course, as well, that UI's improved and as the ecosystem gets more mature,

I think you'll see the quality of the infrastructure get a lot better as well. But I think that in principle, it's actually a much more elegant and much more safe system than what you see even on Ethereum, where if you go to OpenC, the first thing it asks you to do when you list something for sale is you have to give it access to all of your tokens.

So you'll say, like, I'll give you access to all of my board apes, or I'll give you access to all of my pedenses or something like that. Whereas with this marketplace on Bitcoin, all you're doing is committing to exactly what you want to see. I'm going to transfer, you know, one inscription to the buyer, and the buyer will give me X amount of BTC back. And I think this allows for a great experience, both from a user experience perspective and from a trust and safety perspective as well. Yeah, that is such an important point. I get really freaked out when that message pops up on OpenC saying, you know, you're giving OpenC access to all of the NFTs by, you know, this marketplace, this collector. And especially with the amount of scams and fishing that novice and, you know, technically savvy collectors have faced.

It's such a scary experience. So I think that's a really important point. You know, one thing, Jamil, that you mentioned, and I want both of your opinions on this, is this idea that people are attract, or creators have been attracted to inscribing on Bitcoin because, you know, for the first time they feel like, okay, this is going to give me the assurances, the guarantees that I kind of need for this piece of work to live on. And maybe they have an emotional connection to it and plan to hold that piece of work or maintain it for themselves for the foreseeable future. So with that in mind, you know, how do you kind of

foresee the collecting slash trading experience evolving on Bitcoin versus the more speculative nature of collecting and trading within other ecosystems like Ethereum or Polygon or Solana. Yeah, I think this is a really good call out. I think we've had this kind of long-term view, you know, as Jumel mentioned, we've been building the space for about 18 months now. And I think what's kind of interesting is that even from like the collections and the individual, you know, one of one pieces and things like that that have arisen on in kind of this, this programmable Bitcoin ecosystem, it tends to be, you know, it tends to attract a,

kind of like longer-term thinking individual. Like one kind of like fun tidbit here is I recall one of one of the larger projects. They're actually the largest project on the L2 that we started on stacks. It's called Megapont. They had their their stacks collections. And then they they wanted to kind of, you know, welcome some Ethereum community members to kind of to kind of try. out, you know, Bitcoin secured NFTs. And so they launched an Ethereum collection. And all of the Ethereum people that found their way over were, like, shocked that only, like, 2% of them were

listed on OpenC. Like, they were just like, this is unheard of. Like, you know, you, you, you normally see, you know, people just trying to flip these things, like, on day one. And I think that, you know, they kind of saw this like long-term, you know, there's actually like, you know, a community I want to be part of. There are, there are, you know, events that I can attend, like, you know, Gamma sponsored a fun event actually of theirs at NFT, NYC last year, and the holders were able to attend. And there's, like, you know, tons of, tons of other benefits and things of just like being there for the long haul. And of course, this is still referring to even like a, you know, traditional Ethereum 10K style collection. But I think it just shows like a slight difference in culture even, even like a year ago.

But I think, you know, on L1 and through inscriptions where you're not only kind of in this almost like longer term philosophical mindset of, of, okay, I'm like, you know, I'm not just here for some speculative reason. Like, I'm here because I want to see some real value and utility and all of those buzzwords that are often used. But I think, you know, actually now there is a true long-term, like inherent connection there at a blockchain level. And so I think that I think this is going. to breed a lot of new use cases and a lot of new, you know, types of creators that are that are

willing to, that are willing to create, you know, in this way. And I think honestly, I know this wasn't your exact question, but I think it's kind of relevant here. I think it's our responsibility as a platform that that believes in this future and is building for the long term, not just building for the next six months of, you know, potentially a little bit more hype-driven kind of initial run here, but really this long-term view. And so in the product, we're focusing very deeply on how we can tailor the product experience to really align with this cultural shift, or not even shift. It's a culture that's always been here for Bitcoin. You know, you always hear like you got a hold of your Bitcoin.

It's like this is just the mindset. And I think that, you know, ordinals and inscriptions are just another like manifestation of that. Maybe to that point, talk a little bit about, you know, with that culture in mind, how specifically has that translated to how you've designed the Gamma marketplace? Yeah, I can talk a little bit to this. and Jamel probably has some thoughts here as well. But I think like for the current product that we have now,

you know, admittedly we just need to get something out there for users that is functional and that is safe. And so, you know, I think to some degree, because we've been, you know, building at this for quite a while, we were in. able to kind of move, move a bit faster than others. But ultimately, the experience is, is safe. And I think it's a good experience, like it's a good user experience. It's a, it's a, you know, a clean, like easy to understand interface and product. But I think, I think there are things that really we still want to expand upon. So I think, you know, for example, on our

user profiles, we have things like a showcase where you can actually, you know, select specific things that you, you know, really feel especially connected to. And you want to kind of like have it represent not only something that you like, but you want it to almost be like your, you're a little like shelf that you keep in your, you know, in, in your living room or something like that where, you know, it's kind of like a conversation piece. And so you can do things like that today on the product. But I think, you know, I won't share all of our secrets here, but I think we have some ideas of how we might, how we might kind of lean into the idea that what we're seeing created on Bitcoin is more, you know, special, perhaps more exclusive or high-end, kind of

like different kinds of assets than you see in other, in other ecosystems. And I think you could almost think of it as like, of like, you know, what you would see traded on eBay versus what you would see auctioned by Sotheby's or Christie's or something. It's, it's just, you know, it's a completely different, a completely different, you know, type of use case. By the way, though, I don't want to suggest we're trying to be, you know, gatekeepers or inaccessible. Like I think we have something for everyone, even if you, even if you are just trying to get your feet wet. But, but I think there will be a subset of users that are interested in a more, you know, premium kind of experience on a product level. And, and we're going to, we're going to make sure that that we have that.

In the end, we want to do, we want to make sure of two things, right? Number one, that, of course, whatever we put out as a product, we can personally feel proud of and satisfied with ourselves that we're proud of what we put out there. We feel good about it both from a principled perspective and from a user experience perspective. We take the design and the work very seriously and we want to make sure that what we put out there is, you know, makes us feel that we did right by our customers and right by our users. But I think more importantly, what we want to put out does write by creators and collectors as well. I think creators, especially when they look for a place to host their work,

they really do want to feel respected and they want to feel like where they put their work is deserving of their effort, of their artwork, of all the blood and sweat they put into making their work real. And I think we really do see that in creators. and often it's forgotten from the marketplace perspective, but we wouldn't be anything if it weren't for the creators. We wouldn't have anything to host. In fact, if you go to Gamma and you look at the homepage,

almost everything is black and white. The marketplace UI sort of fades into the background. And what you see is the artwork, the images, the videos, the text that people are inscribing. And we really put that front and center. And I think that's what really drives and motivates us to put out a product that we feel as high standard, not only for ourselves, but because we know creators deserve

a place where their work can be showcased in a way that they feel is respected, both from a principled perspective and that we're doing things the right way, that we're preserving creator royalties, we're paying out creators their fair share, and we're displaying their work and taking care of their work and being a responsible sort of platform. for where their work is showcased. And I think that in the end is what what drives us.

You know, the marketplace is just a medium in between, you know, collectors, the community and the creators who make it all happen. This topic of creator royalties has been the subject of significant controversy and discussion in other ecosystems. You know, I think the first question that naturally came up with ordnals is like, is it possible to implement and enforce creator royalties on Bitcoin? And, you know, how exactly are you guys actually facilitating that? So first of all, I want to start by like saying we work from the principles and then we, you know, figure out the best execution for it. And I think our principle here is that we want to make sure

that whatever we do, we do it while talking to creators while working with them. And it's not a marketplace versus creator thing, right? As I said, the marketplace is here because of creators. We're here because these people are creating work and getting their work out there. So, of course, different circumstances call for different, different, you know, approaches. And actually, for this initial marketplace launch, our guiding principle at launch is basically we should not make more than creators on these secondary sales if they choose to opt in to a creator earnings share. So whatever commission we take, if a creator opts into their earnings, they'll take the same. Right. And any creator right now can come up to us and say,

here's our royalty address, and we'll make sure that that's taken care of. So I think this is especially also well suited to the market that Bitcoin is operating in. We're talking more high-end work. We're talking more, you know, less immediate trading volume second by second. but higher trading volume when it comes to prices and value of the work. And so I think this is much more conducive to a creator-friendly environment than a high-frequency trading, almost treating NFTs as sort of fungible tokens environment that you see in some areas of the E.

This has long been kind of like we've been quite outspoken about creator earnings, you know, basically since things first, you know, started heating up where, you know, I, I forget which marketplace it was originally that kind of triggered some of the stuff. I think, I think a lot of it stemmed from originally Solana ecosystem, which, you know, as Jimil said, is kind of that like high frequency style trading and then, you know, kind of bled its way over into Ethereum. But I think, like, one thing I really always like to call out, because I think, you know, this is, this is maybe, this is maybe like a unique take and it's just my personal opinion here but um you know i've heard a lot

of people say the reason i don't like royalties is because there's no way to enforce them on chain in a way that like they must be trustless and enforced by every platform like there's always going to be a way around it and there's always going to be some platform that that like measles their way out of it. And I think, um, I think this is like really kind of the wrong way to think about it, um, uh, at least in my opinion. Like, I think the reason why you want, um, you know, things in Web 3, like, you know, to really lean into this, this principle of, of being trustless, um, is, is not exclusively, but oftentimes due to like a power imbalance. And so if you have, like, a marketplace and a collector, the marketplace has a lot of power to abuse that collector.

Or if you have even an NFT project and a collector, likewise, you know, there can be a lot of damage on there. And I don't want to suggest that there can't be damaged on from marketplaces to creators, because obviously we've seen that. But I think like the way I look at it is that this is like a be-eater. be relationship. Like this is a creator that is running a business and this is a marketplace that is running a business. And the marketplace is beholden to the creator for its supply. Like the creator is the supply of the product on the marketplace. And so there's kind of like naturally

aligned incentives there of if I abuse this relationship, you're not going to list your work here in the future. Now, in Ethereum, for example, if you have a smart contract, it's very hard to prevent that from being listed there in the future. But ultimately, I think creators will get more and more creative of like, I'm not going to support you. I'm going to speak out against you. I'm me to tell my creators not to, I'm sorry, my collector is not to use you. Like there's, there's different means that a, that a, that a creator kind of has there. Um, but, but again, going back to this like B to B business concept, like there's, you know, the blockchain is an amazing tool for so many, uh, so many, you know, use cases and areas. I don't think that

this particular use case is one where it needs to be like at the forefront. Like, these are businesses working together, you could even sign like a legal contract that says I will uphold your royalties. And, and, you know, I don't think we, we need to get to there yet. But, but like, I guess I'm just saying there's, like, creative ways to approach this. So anyway, I don't want to, I don't want to keep rambling on this topic. But, uh, but of course, like, it's, it's one that we really, that we really care about. And I think the bottom line is, um, If you are a creator and you are using Gamma, you will always get your fair share. Like things may change in the future because of, you know, speaking with creators and speaking with

collectors and finding that, you know, this mechanism doesn't work or this does work. But ultimately, creators are always going to be part of the discussion. And Gamma will never make more than creators on a sale. Not rambling at all. I'm really happy you kind of went into that. I think it's really important and a really key differentiator for sure. And I think, you know, based on how you both have been describing the more long-term, maybe fundamental oriented collectors of NFTs on Bitcoin versus other networks, it maybe

seems like the interests of collectors and creators is more like naturally aligned to allow for the upholding of royalties, the fair share of royalties being being paid out to collectors. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit and actually get a sense of how you guys are thinking about the market opportunity. It's really early, but what types of creators and collectors have been showing interest in ordinals, both individuals and maybe more, you know, bigger entities that have either dropped collections and have communities on other chains and are now starting to show interest in doing more with ordinals on Bitcoin. It's been pretty incredible to see the outpouring of interest in Bitcoin and

ordinals from people outside the ecosystem and from from you know both outside crypto and from from from other blockchains um you know i got a DM from from a prominent project on uh from the founder of a prominent project on another blockchain and he was like in this was about a day after we launched our inscription service so quite early on and he was like you know i've always low-key been a Bitcoin, you know, person. But I've never really felt comfortable, you know, coming into Bitcoin because I didn't feel it was, it was very accepting of, you know, projects, of creators, of the types of work that, that I've been doing on other blockchain. And I think you see a lot of this from people around the ecosystem. I think a lot of, many people sort of paint Eith and Bitcoin

as, or Solana and ETH and Bitcoin as a complete dichotomy of individuals. But I think a lot of, actually a lot of people on other chains started in Bitcoin. That's where they first fell in love with the principles of decentralization of, you know, of permissionless systems and of crypto in general. And you start to see a lot of these people start to come back and look at Bitcoin and say, hey, there's actually something interesting going on here in a much bigger way than we've seen before when it comes to the digital asset space. And so I think it's attracting, a lot of artists from basically all walks of work and all walks of life. So we've seen, of course, bigger brands like Yuga Labs come in and do a small,

you know, bespoke high quality, high value collection on Bitcoin. We saw Degods do the same, basically inscribing a small subset of their most prized, you know, NFTs directly on Bitcoin. And you also see a bunch of independent, one-of-one artists also come in and start inscribing their work. And I think the common theme is that you do see people treat this as a, you know, a high-quality, high store of value medium for their work. But you're seeing people from all walks of life, you know, whether it's, whether it's people coming from crypto or from outside. I think they're, you know, unified by the principles and the value that Ordiners and Bitcoin is offering right now.

Yeah, I think actually, just to kind of tack on to the very last phrase you said there, like, including even people from outside, I think this is, you know, to your, to your one question, Ria, on, on like, market opportunity here. I think this is, this is an area that, that I think Bitcoin kind of is uniquely positioned to, to kind of offer a great, you know, on-ramp kind of, kind of experience. I'll caveat that to say, if you look up articles from the last three to four weeks, you may see that, oh my gosh, it's so challenging to actually get started on using inscriptions and ordinals. But I'd say give the builders a little bit of credit in that, you know, we had 10 years of, you know, more than that, but let's say 10 years of Bitcoin development and no real proper web wallet that can sign a Bitcoin transaction. And now in the last five weeks, I think we now have three or four, if not more.

So I think like the pace of innovation and the pace of improving the user experience is just absolutely astronomical. And likewise, we'll hope people feel the same about it. gamma from a marketplace perspective. But I think I just want to like drill into this point here, though, you know, because I think for those of us that are, you know, kind of within the Web3 space, and I'll say more broadly, not not the Bitcoin space, but, you know, even Ethereum and Salana and Tezos and any other number of chains that you might be, you know, building on, I think it's easy to kind of put your blinders on and think like, you know, wow, Ethereum is just this crazy dominant force.

And something like OpenC is just this behemoth, you know, in terms of a platform and a user base. And it is pretty large. Like I think OpenC has something like 3 million users, maybe a little bit more than that. But I always like to draw this connection to almost like even not just Web 2, but like a in-between web 2 and Web 3, you have something like Coinbase. And so while OpenC has 3 million users, Coinbase has 110 million users. And so, you know, OpenC is just a fraction. it's like maybe 3% of the users that Coinbase has.

And I always kind of, I found this quite interesting. I had to re-download the Coinbase app. I had it on my phone and I deleted it and I had to reinstall it. And I searched for it in the App Store. And it didn't say Coinbase, where you buy Ethereum, it says Coinbase, buy Bitcoin. That is the first words that you can still see when you're searching for this app. And I think that it's really like an important call out to say, I think the Normie world, you know, they may have dabbled in kind of crypto and in Bitcoin.

Maybe they haven't. But in terms of like brand recognition and something that people trust, I think Bitcoin is like stands apart from the rest. I bet you, if you ask the average person, almost everyone has heard of Bitcoin, if not owns some Bitcoin. I would bet that a very small percentage of people like know what Ethereum is or own Ethereum. And I think even from a user experience and user safety perspective, as Jumeel was saying earlier, I think Bitcoin also has some unique value ads there. So having this kind of like post-condition model where the trade must occur in this specific way,

or it's not possible, versus an Ethereum model where I can click a link and I've just authorized every single one of my tokens to be drained from my wallet without realizing it. And so, you know, I also don't want to, you know, dismiss that you always should be careful. And there's, of course, risks of, you know, of even a Bitcoin wallet. But I think the long story short here is that I do truly believe that this phrase that people like to say of onboarding the next billion users to Web3, I don't think that I, I think Bitcoin has like really the greatest chance of doing that.

And I know that that sounds perhaps contrarian. But, you know, it also sounded contrarian when we said, hey, Bitcoin is more than just a store of value. It can be, it can be productive too. And I think that, you know, maybe there's, there's, it's worth thinking a little bit contrarian on this issue. Bitcoin was definitely my. you know, gateway drug into crypto and ordinals has definitely reignited my excitement about what is possible on Bitcoin and Nick, to your point, I think, you know, the brand recognition around Bitcoin

is significant. I love that anecdote about you, you know, downloading the Coinbase app and seeing Bitcoin mentioned above everything else. So we're running out of time here, but I do want to maybe end the conversation with a more lighthearted question around what some of your favorite creations have been using Gamma or maybe even not using Gamma. And kind of what are you most excited about in the next, in the coming weeks as it relates to Gamma, but also just the opportunities created. created by ordnals. For me, some of my favorite inscriptions and some of the favorite, I think my favorite aspect of ordinals and inscriptions have been that it sort of started out in a very, you know, simple, organic way.

I think it almost harks back to like that, you know, days of early computing or early Bitcoin or early hacker culture where you just see an incredible amount of creativity come from very simple tools and very, very primitive, sort of primitive early starts. And so what you saw, though, was almost an explosion of creativity with the first inscriptions. You saw someone put, like, Doom as an inscription that you could actually play in the browser inscribed on Bitcoin or like an Apple emulator or, like, interactive websites. The Saffy Seals project, you know, inscribed these digital artifacts that you could,

that were like dynamic images written in HTML and in SVGs. So I really love that sort of creativity and that explosion of ideas that comes from starting from something very simple. It's actually quite ironic because you'd think that a more like powerful, more special purpose blockchain would afford these opportunities when on some of those you just see copycat projects that are doing the same. things. So I think we've sort of seen a lot of creativity in what people have used inscriptions and ordnals for. And that's really what I'm looking forward to in the future is, you know, people

using this for art, for projects, for even like software and code. I think this is, it's easy to get lost in the day to day of trading when you're working in digital assets and NFTs. But I think it's important sometimes to take a step back and really realize that what we're doing here, is building the future of digital assets on Bitcoin. This is potentially a world-changing idea that you can build almost anything on top of. It doesn't have to be images, doesn't have to be text, doesn't even have to be digital assets.

It can be real-world ones too. And so I think the possibilities really are endless, if that doesn't seem like too vague of an answer, but I really do genuinely believe it. And I'm very excited to see what people build. As a marketplace, we're really here to facilitate it But it's really up to you, everybody, to basically build the future. Yeah, I'll, of course, echo everything that Chimil just said.

And I'd say, you know, from my perspective, I'm also just really excited to see kind of like the art community, especially, you know, find such a great fit on Bitcoin. because, you know, I think a lot of artists found their way to, to Web3, you know, because they're looking for ways to, you know, finally have a way to, you know, earn a sustainable living, doing what they love and doing what others can appreciate. And then being able to kind of lean into those connections and having, you know, that really, like, community-driven experience that, that Web3 provides. And so, you know, seeing fine artists who are for the very first time feeling comfortable putting their like prized creations on the blockchain because they view it as living on,

you know, into the future, like that's really promising. And also this is just like, you know, I'm personally a big art fan and I'm a collect a lot of a lot of art-based NFTs, you know, across different chains. And I think, you know, I'm very excited, actually, that we are going to be to be sponsoring and working with a curator at Bitcoin, Miami, 2023. And they have the first ever Ordnals Art Gallery. And it's going to be 21 individual artists that are featured.

and this will be like a fine art, you know, exhibit within the art gallery. And these like curators will actually be pulling together like some of the most unique, you know, and culturally significant fine art pieces and cultural artifacts and showcasing that. So I'm really excited that, you know, we're able to kind of provide those creator tools so that creators can just do what they love, and then hopefully also showcase some really unique cases of that. So if you happen to be in Miami and May, you should definitely stop by and check it out.

I'm really looking forward to seeing that. What is the best way for listeners to stay on top of what's going on with Gamma, staying on top of learning more about the events that you guys are doing at the upcoming conference in Miami, as well as learning more about how exactly these pieces are going to be curated. I'm definitely excited to learn more about that part of it. Yeah, so, you know, we have the Twitter handle at Try Gamma because we want you to try out Gamma. And so at Tri Gamma is our Twitter, and that's where you can kind of keep up to date with things and link off to anything else. So our Discord is there if you want to join our newsletter.

We publish a copy there weekly and you can subscribe. And of course, just gamma.io is our website. And that's where you can check out the platform and get started and create your first inscription. or by the time this podcast is released, you know, buy your first inscription on the marketplace. Amazing. And where can listeners find each of you individually? Yeah. So that's my name at Nick Sonato, S-A-I-N-A-T-O, and Jamil. Yeah, and mine is Jamil, J-A-M-I-L-B-T-C on Twitter. Amazing. Thank you guys so much for coming on on such short notice. I know you guys are probably

running around trying to get everything squared up. Well, I guess you will have it squared up by the time this episode drops tomorrow, but very, very excited to have the Gamma Marketplace launching on Bitcoin and making it significantly easier to trade NFTs and ordnals on Bitcoin and creating a very special targeted experience for both collectors and traders.