NFTs

hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado today is march 24th 2021 exciting fun day long day just about to end the day but i figured i'd make a little video to close it out so you all will have noticed that i've been playing around with nfts lately it's a nice little thing to think about explore we're talking a lot these days about getting everything in place for alonso and there's a lot to do oracles there's stable coins dexes and yeah nft marketplaces have become a big deal go figure and one of the things that i always do just being curious about the industry and as an entrepreneur is i just try out platforms and so i i read in the papers that jack dorsey sold the tweet and i said i'm gonna go try that out and actually i've sold now two well one and i have an offer for the other one and one we donated charity i'll probably use the other one for microfinance in in kiva but i'm also taking a look at all the other marketplaces and we have a person that we work with from wave financial les borsae and les is like obsessed with nfts he calls me twice a day like oh he wouldn't believe about nfts mostly because he comes from the music business and he there's a lot of musicians there's a lot of artists that are coming and saying we want an nft we want nft and it is an art a marketplace we definitely can get on one of the things i'm trying to figure out is everything about that marketplace i did a crude business model canvas and i was looking at things like what is the intellectual property story how do you handle fraud and dispute resolution this is a multi-sided market so what's customer acquisition cost what does churn look like what are the barriers to exit in this market and how do you make them sticky and also these tweets i've sold on ethereum what stops me from selling them again on the cardonal blockchain i i'm a capitalist i can just simply double my money yeah okay there's providence and uniqueness but this is the ada version versus the ether version and like why is one more valuable than the other and so forth so there's a lot to think about there's a lot to do and it's certainly one of the most exciting things in our industry and i can see where a lot of these cool things go but it is something that i am exploring now the tweets i've chosen to sell one was connected to a tragedy in colorado the other one is connected to one of my biggest blunders in my professional career and part of selling it is kind of just owning that too many people they just pretend they don't make mistakes or they pretend the past the past well sometimes you have to have some event to say we're beyond that we've moved beyond that in some cases you make fun of yourself or you expose your own flaws or sins and the do who i am tweet from metamask is is legendary i tweeted it in 2018 i was in vietnam at the time i actually had the flu i'd been traveling extensively i was exhausted we were just about to launch icarus which turned into uroy one of our most popular products in the in the cardano space and metamask had just been delisted from chrome and it was a lot smaller at that time and i didn't have any of the founders contact information and i've talked to many people from jack dorsey to you guys see mike novogratz and others over twitter through pms and there's just a very convenient channel so i reached out to them and said could you pm me and they said use a support email and i was really concerned that they were thinking that this was an issue with their application in which case it's a small open source project probably not many people texting back so very pig-headedly i was like come on now i'm an important man you should reply to me and i got punished for it so anyway i'm selling that rare moment of of a lack of humility to the to the whoever desires to have it and frame it put it on a wall or something like that but i'm doing so because i'm learning a lot about nfts as an entrepreneur and as a as an ecosystem architect and actually what's cool is that a lot of these problems about metadata identity authentication problems about governance we have native capabilities built into cardano from catalyst to our metadata standard to how we handle native multi-asset that i think will make us probably long-term one of the best platforms to issue curate and transfer an nft from one party to another party so that's going to be an exciting thing to explore and i actually think it would be really exciting to also examine trusted hardware amongst other things because there you can get proofs of guaranteed erasure where nft could be transferred from one place to another and the prior representation of it can be destroyed so you have a uniqueness the very same thing that could do that with a private key could potentially do that with an nft so i'll continue experimenting and i use many other platforms many cases i don't do it publicly i do it through aliases because i get criticized or it creates a disruption but in this particular case because the tweets are connected to me the only way i can sell them is publicly but i do use many platforms i have used algorand and tazos and even eos i spun up a full node once and and i've enjoyed or not so enjoyed certain things what's most exciting about cardano this year is that many of the pieces are coming together to enable the creativity of an amazing community to go and do some really crazy cool things the last time i saw that at that same level that we're currently at was at the birth of ethereum so deep in my heart makes me really believe that we've kind of captured that spirit and momentum and we're going to see enormous amounts of innovation enormous amounts of just crazy ideas many of which won't work and that's okay and what we do as a custodian one of the many custodians is we try to give a helpful steer and push people in the right direction but unlike ethereum we have catalyst and catalyst is growing at leaps and bounds i think there's over 20 000 people floating around idea scale has never seen anything like this in their company's history and this is just the beginning of that very likely there's going to be over a hundred thousand people floating around in that framework within the next six months to a year and the amount of discussions project fertilization the idea flow the upgrading of things is going to be pretty incredible now for our part we keep partnering we're bringing in governance alive that's john buck's company we've signed i've signed that contract i think six times because we keep coming back and revising things a little bit but this time i think we got it right and we're also looking at adding an incubator accelerator component and we're also looking at post post-funding acceleration incubation auditing and oversight so we're going to keep pushing that through and we've looked at a lot of partners from ice addicts to others and in the coming months we'll in weeks we'll make some announcements about that stuff but managing that growth has been tremendously difficult for dorr but he's enjoyed it and i've enjoyed it it's we had a conversation last year about our hopes and expectations for how fast catalysts would grow and we exceeded every kpi that was set so that's truly extraordinary and if you actually look it's basically doing what i thought it would do which is seeding all these experiments for example nft marketplaces there are six at this stage in catalyst that are seeking funding to get started and what we can do is show up and try to give them support advice in some cases perhaps funding above and beyond what catalyst provides to incubate and bootstrap them but really it's more of a conversation of the crux of the business model so where will nfts be in five years or 10 years or 15 years and what will the dynamics of this marketplace be and what business model do we feel actually has the highest chance of success many of you may have noticed that i don't care so much about network effect because we live in an age where network effect is not sticky in many cases i have witnessed as have you platforms with hundreds of millions of users die in a matter of months to years every video game is very popular if these triple a games red dead redemption cipher punk and so forth and if you look at the gameplay usage tends to die off unless there's something to have people keep coming back and be sticky it wasn't too long ago that world of warcraft was the and it has definitely not succeeded as much as it used to the same foreverquest the same for all of these other things and those are among the most addictive and sticky of experiences so networks have to have a reason to survive and they have to go through a continual process of reinforcement reinvention and proper use and utility even things like windows which sought to be indomitable they may die because they just simply no longer are the model the same for mainframe computers and so forth so that's one dimension of network effect the other is that a lot of the network effect is borrowed if you're uniswap you don't wake up every day saying boy how do i make vitalik buterin and ethereum rich you're a platform for liquidity you're thinking about primary and secondary offerings you're thinking about trading and you're saying i don't care if the trading occurs on eos ortezos or cardano what matters to me is predictable cost what matters to me is people who are using the system are paying low fees are having a good experience that this is a better product than a traditional centralized exchange and ultimately my path to getting a billion customers is clear so what does that mean it means that most of d5 will become multi-chain out of necessity and a lot of d5 will nest at a race to the bottom so that seldom will be a completely decentralized platform it'll be some hybridization of permission and permissionless and that's probably not going to be the thing that gets your platforms where you need to go the social dynamics are far more important that said it's easy to clone these protocols it's easy to partner with these just in nfts we've already approached several of the top 10 marketplaces and already begun discussions of porting them over to cardano because why not it's an easy conversation it's just engineering resources and we're scaling up capacity there specifically for these types of relationships and we'll do the exact same for other protocols above and beyond just nft marketplaces eventually we'll probably see these things with other dexes and oracles and so forth and eventually as i said it's a race to the bottom because we think the bets we've made on our operating model long term will be superior to other platforms within a few year ban it wouldn't surprise me to see most of them migrate over to us because why would you want to pay more money especially if you're not giving up customers to transfer over so that's what makes this fun all that said tomorrow is going to be a good day it's our cardano 360 episode for the end of the month and this one's a pretty special one to me so i really would love for all of you to tune in and we put a lot of work into it we brought a lot of people on there's a lot of passion in this show and what's more exciting is that the subsequent shows in april may june july they're over time gonna become more community focused because a lot of the things that are exciting will not be infrastructure they will be products and projects and using utility and cool things you the community are doing so in addition to that we recognize that a multi-hour format while it's great for nerds like me probably not so good for the mainstream public so in addition to cardinal 360 we're also going to be deploying a cardinal 360 mini so each segment of cardano 360 will have david because he's really good at the short form concise one to three minute time tick-tock till-ish time frame he'll create a very concise version of that along with some visuals that are shareable and then we'll try to stitch that together into a 10 to 15 minute episode which if you don't have the time to watch the full thing we'll give you a real good high level summary of what actually happened what were the announcements what are we doing and well what did we accomplish that month so i expect to see you guys all tomorrow i'll be there and the coming months are going to be some of the most fun and challenging in the project and challenging that there's a lot to deliver a lot to do working more than i think i've ever worked in my life but also rewarding because this is where things get turned on and get put together and so forth we haven't given up any ground in fact we just keep gaining we just keep adding in fact i'm probably going to spend more money on scientific research this year than in any point in my career i suspect our research budget for just basic sciences and industrial research will be 15 to 30 million dollars to give you a sense of that there were years in our company's history where that was our entire yearly budget for every single thing we're doing and that's just now the scientific spending so things are definitely growing here we're probably going to hire between 100 to 200 people this year alone to augment add to the existing work lines that we have in addition to that we're starting to see very substantive commercial success and making headway in the fortune 500 and in the governmental space and so in the coming months we'll have more to say about that but i think our investments we made being the adults in the room in terms of doing the research doing the formal methods doing the code right and just being very clever about governance are going to pay huge dividends and allow us to win the long game cardano has always been a long game i don't particularly care about the day-to-day markets and the day-to-day social media storms positive or negative it is nice when everybody's praising you and you got to take that with when everybody's criticizing you and some days we win some days we don't but we never lose focus of where we're going and why we're going there in the mission which is to give economic identity to those who don't have it and i'd like to believe that there are now hundreds of thousands of people floating around the world if not a million who have that same mission and they've made my mission their mission and then together we can succeed so thank you so much for listening and let's have some fun cheers