Hello, friends. Welcome to the University of Nicosia. Welcome to the Open Metaverse.
I'm George Giaglis and it's a real honor and a pleasure to welcome you all here today.
I'm really excited to see hundreds of people from all over the world joining us. This is
a truly historic day as we all come together for the first live session of the world's
first ever university level course that will take place entirely on-chain and in the metaverse.
I couldn't be prouder to have with me as a co-instructor in the 12-week journey that we start
today, Punk 6529, who is undoubtedly the world's leading authority and a visionary thinker in the
field of NFTs, the Open Metaverse and the future of our decentralized world. I am so proud to count
him among my mentors. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the more than 50 investors,
artists, collectors, entrepreneurs and thinkers that have kindly agreed to share their unique
insights into NFTs and the metaverse with us over the next weeks. I cannot honestly think of any
university course ever that has had such an impressive lineup of invited speakers
and I'm sure that I will be learning from them as much as everyone else here today.
Special thanks also to my amazing team at UNIC who are constantly breaking new ground
and always give their very best to support our students and the educational experience that
we'll be having over the coming weeks. And last but not least, a big thanks to Ryan,
Mungi and the whole team at Oncyber for making all this possible and for working around the clock
with 6529 and the UNIC team to create an awesome metaverse experience for everyone.
Right, so before we begin with session one, let me bring up our presentation to take you quickly
through the logistics of the course. So, as you know, the course will be running for 12 weeks.
Each week there will be a presentation like the one that you are looking at now. This will include
further reading material for those of you interested in it. We will also have a live session
like the one we're having today and we will have starting next week one or more additional
guest lecturers or interviews or panels. All material, including this live session, will be recorded.
Everything will be available to watch on demand for those of you that cannot attend live either
for due to time zone constraints or some other reason. At the end of the course, there will be
an assessment. The assessment will be different for those of you that are already students at the
University of Nicosia and want to take academic credit from this course. You will have to do to
take a qualitative assessment. Everybody else who simply wants to receive an NFT in the form of a
professional certificate issued by the University of Nicosia will have to pass an online multiple
choice test with a score of 60 % or more. As I've said, the course is being led by Punk 6529
and I'm going to be helping him whenever I can, but obviously such an experimental new course
couldn't have been possible without the help of many people from our team, both at the University
of Nicosia and from the team of 6529. In this slide, you can see the members of the team
that are the main contacts for this course. We have introduced them in the pre-course last week.
You can find their Twitter handle and Discord username for all of them, so please refer to this
slide and talk to them either in Discord or on Twitter for anything that you need relating to
this course. All of them are with you today in the OM and are monitoring the chat, so they will
be taking on questions that they can as we go along. Let me say a few words about the University
of Nicosia because I'm sure judging from the multitude of countries where everybody's coming
from, many of you might not know us. We are the largest English-speaking university in Southern
Europe. We are a comprehensive university. We have more than 14,500 students across more than 100
degree undergraduate and postgraduate programs. We are ranked top 3% globally and among the top
200 to 250 universities in the European Union. We are one of only 50 universities in the world
that have received five stars in the QS assessment about our online teaching. Our campus in Nicosia
consists of more than 20 different buildings, among them probably the world's most beautiful
and iconic student accommodations ever. But apart from the people that we have
on site in the university, we are very active online and we are particularly active in the field
of crypto. We have always been a global pioneer in this space. We were the first university in
the world to accept Bitcoin for tuition payments. We were the first to launch a course in crypto,
our free MOOC, the introduction to digital currencies taught by Andreas Antonopoulos,
Antonis Polimitis and myself has been continuously running since 2013. It was the first course ever
in the world and we are proud to have trained more than 80,000 students from more than 120
countries until today. We were the first to offer a full academic degree in this area. Our master's
in blockchain and digital currency started in 2014 and is still the world's largest program in
crypto. We were the first university ever to issue our certificates as blockchain verifiable
credentials. We started in 2015 with our MOOC alumni. Then in 2017 we moved to issue all the
degrees that are awarded by the University of Nicosia. They are now awarded on the issued on
the blockchain. Last year we started issuing certificates also in the form of NFTs on the
Ethereum blockchain. We have the largest dedicated crypto team in academia globally, in our
Institute for the Future. We do basic and applied research working with many crypto projects as
well as institutional partners like the European Commission or the European Central Bank. We aspire
to become the first university in the metaverse having launched this course today in partnership
with Punk 6529 and hopefully we will be aiming a new full academic degree in metaverse systems
next year. Now having said that trying to be first at something is always a challenging
endeavor so this course and the whole learning experience is going to be a big bet for us and I
think it's going to be a learning experience for everybody. We've frequently said that this is the
first university course to be held on chain and in the metaverse. Let me take a second to explain
what we mean. By on chain we mean that our internal bet is to try to do as much as possible in this
course without touching upon any centralized information system of the university. That's why
we did not ask you to register in a web page and give us your full name and contact details and email
or whatever. We asked you to mint an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain and this NFT will become
your ticket to access the class. We aim to have all material available in the form of NFTs so
everything will be air-dropped to your wallets so those of you that have minted the course access
token I would encourage you to transfer that token to a separate wallet that you control
because on that wallet will be air-dropping a number of things including this presentation,
interviews, panels, discussions, everything that we're going to be doing in this course.
By the end of this course you will have a full portfolio of material inside your Ethereum
wallet. That's what on chain means and in the metaverse obviously means that we're going to be
using the OM to do that. Today we are using the open space of OM. We are here in this beautiful park
but starting in the coming weeks we will be gradually revealing parts of the metacampus
that we are building in the OM. We're going to be holding future activities in auditoriums,
in special learning facilities, we're going to have exhibition rooms, we're going to experiment
with many modalities within the metaverse and we would like to have you with us in this journey.
We expect to have some hiccups in the beginning of the course and probably even later as we're
constantly breaking new ground. Please get back to us, tell us what you think, what works well
for you, what doesn't work well for you. If you have any feedback or ideas or you would like to
help us in making this experience better for everyone we are open to your suggestions on Discord,
on Twitter and in the chat here. A quick technical tip for those of you that
are connected through mobile you will make most of your experience if you connect through a desktop
environment and if you connect through a laptop please make sure that you set it up so that your
browser uses your dedicated graphics card if you have one to render the world that you are seeing
in the OM. Many laptops would by default use their internal graphics card and you might have
a lesser experience. Having said that because we have hundreds of people we have made the design
choice today to create separate rooms. Each room consists of around 300 people so that we do not
have hundreds and hundreds of people in the same space to avoid any performance issues.
In the future as we become more comfortable with the performance of the world and the environment
we will be bringing more and more people in the same instance as well. I'm saying that because
as we go along and especially in the Q&A session some of you might hear either 6529 or me talking
about a question in the chat that you might have not seen in the chat and will be wondering what's
happened. The reason is that there are separate chats in each of the rooms so each group of 300
people or less are looking at a different chat and we are combining everything together in our
current. Another thing that I would like to stress is that everything that you see in this
course coming from the University of Nicosia is released under a Creative Commons Attribution
License which means that you are totally free to reuse the presentation materials and everything
else that we produce in this course as long as you attribute back to the University of Nicosia.
So you can take this slide use them as they are or modify them so long as you attribute that the
source was the University of Nicosia in this course. Obviously this release has to do only with
intellectual property that comes from UNIC and not intellectual property from other parties.
All the presentations will be available on our Github and all the presentations will be minted
as NFTs and air-dropped to your wallets. Obviously this is an educational course only.
We will be discussing various projects, various people, various NFTs. None of this is investment
advice. None of this is a recommendation to either buy or sell an NFT. I hope that this is
clear to everyone but I had to set it. If you are new to crypto, note that we are at the frontier
of investment classes here and any investments at all at Island should be made only after careful
research and probably after consulting a professional advisor. As you have seen in the website,
we have a 12-week schedule ahead of us. We are in the first week now so we're just going to be
laying the ground, the background and making sure that everyone is on the same page about
what is an NFT and why all these things are important. Each week we're going to be dealing
with a specific subject either on NFTs until week seven or related to the metaverse from week eight
onwards. That was it in terms of the logistics of the course and let's go to session one.
Session one is a challenging session in the sense that we have a very diverse group of
students obviously. There have been more than 20,000 people that have minted the course access NFT
and we're super happy about that but obviously some of you are very new to this area and some
others are at the other end of the spectrum. You might already be developing or collecting NFTs
and hence you know much of the background information. The goal for today is just to create
a common language about NFTs with everyone. Some of you will find today's presentation very
straightforward or even simplistic. Others might find it very difficult. The presentation will
consist of two parts. I will start with a brief technical overview to define NFTs and discuss
some of the standards for NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain and then I'm going to hand over
to 6529 who will take us through the different types of NFTs, their use cases, examples of
interesting collections and explore the market size and structure for NFTs. Let me start with
a technical discussion. I'm going to try to keep it as simple as possible and not go through
everything that you see in the slides. You can read them at your own time. First of all,
I hope it's clear to everyone that NFTs live exist on blockchains. If you are not familiar
with the concept of a blockchain, a distributed network of computers processing transactions
in a peer-to-peer manner, grouping them into blocks and appending them into a chain, then I
would suggest that you follow our introduction to digital currencies MOOC, the link to which
you can find at the bottom of this slide. NFTs live on blockchains and so we could be
spending time here discussing the different types of blockchains, but we decided to keep things
simple to just base the discussion on one of them, the Ethereum blockchain. I'd like to start
by discussing what Ethereum is. Ethereum is what we could call a second-generation blockchain that
is capable of running applications. I'm using the term second-generation to differentiate it from
Bitcoin, which everybody considers as the prime example of the first-generation blockchain. Bitcoin
is an open public and permissionless network of computers. This means that anyone can join
just by downloading some software and connecting to the network, but Bitcoin is single-use.
The only thing that the Bitcoin blockchain is doing is effectively processing the Bitcoin token,
so the blockchain and the token have the same name. Ethereum is a second-generation blockchain
network that is similar and very different to Bitcoin at the same time. It's similar because
it's also an open permissionless public blockchain and also has its own token. It's called Ether.
Many people call the token Ethereum as well, but technically Ethereum is the blockchain and
Ether is the token. However, unlike Bitcoin, this is a blockchain in which we can program and run
applications. Very simplistically, you can think of Ethereum as the Internet of decentralized
applications, a global network of computers that can run any application without needs for
intermediaries. You can have the functionality of Facebook without having Facebook, the company
mediating the transactions. You can have e-commerce without Amazon or some other provider,
and this is what is most revolutionary about these types of blockchains. How is this possible?
It's possible because Ethereum and other similar blockchains run what we call smart contracts,
and smart contracts are computer programs that run on the blockchain and are immutable. Immutable
means that they cannot change, and this is a very powerful characteristic. I cannot overstate the
importance of this characteristic. We have programs that once we hit run and we deploy them on the
Ethereum blockchain, they cannot be stopped or modified or nothing even by their owner. Technically,
the owner can keep them in a state that is changeable, but I hope you will forgive the simplicity
here. The promise of having such immutable code running on a blockchain is nothing
short of revolutionary because now, for the first time in history, we have the ability to program
any interaction between parties that is automatable, program it in a smart contract,
and be trusted to run as programmed without intermediaries and without censorship,
without anyone being able to stop it. This opens up the possibility to all sorts of applications.
The other difference of Ethereum is that it is a multi-token network. As I've said,
it has its own native currency, Ether, but on Ethereum, we can also create additional tokens.
Some of these tokens are fungible and they follow a standard that we call ERC20,
and others are non-fungible or NFTs, and they follow different standards like ERC721 or ERC1155.
Fungibility is a property that has to do with whether different units of some asset are exchangeable
or not. When we say that a token is fungible, we mean that any two units of that token have the
same value. If you have one Ether and I have one Ether, this Ether, in theory, should have the same
dollar value, but non-fungible tokens are unique. They are different from each other. If you have
a CryptoPunk and I have a CryptoPunk, the value of our Punks is generally not the same because
each token has its own properties, so some of them might be more valuable than others.
As I've said, there are three major standards in Ethereum governing token creation.
One of them is outside the scope of this course. ERC20 is the most popular
standard and it deals with fungible tokens. The other two, ERC721 and ERC1155 were both
released in 2018 and they both deal with NFTs. ERC721 is the most widely used standard for NFTs
today. ERC1155 is a more complex version that allows us to create smart contracts that manage
multiple token types at the same time. These tokens could be fungible, non-fungible or hybrid.
ERC20 is, as I've said, outside the scope of this course, so tokens like Uniswap, Sushi,
Tether, USDC, Manna, or Raptether that you see in this slide basically deal with various types
of financial applications, so we're not going to be dealing with them. If you are interested
in fungible tokens, then we've got you covered. We have another MOOC that I'm also teaching with a
group of colleagues from the University of Nicosia on decentralized finance. You can access this
at the link that you see at the bottom of this page and it's a totally free course.
What we are going to be dealing with are the standards that are used to implement
non-fungible tokens. The simplest of that is ERC721. It provides basic standard functionality
that developers need in order to manage, track, and transfer NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.
Technically, you would need to write computer codes in a smart contract programming language
like Solidity to do that, but in practice, most creators today would use some third-party service
that would allow them to create their collections without writing code or with very little programming
involved. ERC1155 is Ethereum's multi-token standard. If you see the first three bullets in
this slide, they provide the basic difference between the main standards. If I wanted to create
an ERC20 token, a fungible token, I would create a different smart contract for each token.
So, Tether has its own smart contract and Uniswap has a totally different smart contract for the
Unit token. ERC721 allows me to have different tokens in a single contract. So, I have punk6529
and punk6530, which are different tokens, but are managed within the same contract
with different meta data, different attributes for each of the tokens. But all the attributes
are defined at the smart contract level. So, whether my crypto punk is male or female or alien
or an APE is defined in an attribute in the smart contract. And ERC1155 takes this idea of being
able to create meta data and attributes for your tokens, not at the collection level, but at the
level of the individual token, at the token ID. And this is something that is very important when
you want to create more complex applications, for example, in gaming. We'll discuss gaming later
in this course, so I'm not going to go into details. This is a table that summarizes the
differences between the two main standards for NFTs on Ethereum. Now, and I will finish with this,
if I wanted for you to take one thing away from today's lecture, the technical part of it at least,
is this slide. Many people, even people that are quite knowledgeable in NFTs, have a very
fuzzy idea or have never thought about how, where are their NFTs really stored. And what I would like
to emphasize here is that in most cases, storing big data on the blockchain is very expensive.
So, if I created a collection of 10,000 images that each of them, you know, is a few megabytes
worth of information, it would be very, very expensive to store the images themselves and
transact with the images on the blockchain. So, instead, the token that you own, when you own an
NFT token, like the course access token that you minted here, effectively you own a pointer
to a URI, a Uniform Resource Identifier, like a web page link, that points to where the actual image
or the actual content of the NFT, because it might not be an image, it might not be a video,
it might be this live session, is actually stored. And when dealing with storage, we have two options.
We can either store our NFTs in a centralized server or we can store them in a decentralized way.
And what usually happens is that in the NFT field, if we have to choose between centralized and
decentralized types of storages, always decentralized is better. So, two examples of
different philosophies that do the same thing, distributed storage of NFTs, is IPFS and ARWAVE.
ARWAVE is the standard that we are using in this course, but IPFS is equally good and they both
provide ways in which the actual image and its metadata for your NFTs are not stored in a single
central location, but are shared by thousands of computers worldwide so that you have additional
security that nobody can mess with your NFT unless the whole network goes down.
Now, in some rare cases, we might even see NFTs that are stored natively on chain and this means
that the actual image and its metadata are stored on the blockchain. This is obviously the best case
scenario. It preserves all the first order features of the blockchain, so you have really
immutable, decentralized NFTs with no single point of failure and all the other attributes that
those of you familiar with blockchains will know about, but they tend to be very expensive,
as I've said, so you would see them only when you can somehow compress the data. For example,
in generative art, as we will be discussing in a couple of weeks from now, this is a decent
choice to store your NFTs natively on chain. If you have one of one art or photography or
videography or anything else that creates large files, this is probably not feasible.
So what I want you to remember again is that when you own an NFT, effectively you own a token
that is a pointer to some location in which the actual file is saved and whether this is on chain,
off-chain decentralized or off-chain centralized matters a lot, this is going to be a big theme
in this course. Okay, so this concludes the technical primer and I'm going to be
handing over to the man that you've been waiting for. Punk 6529 is with us and I'm going to give
the floor to him to discuss what our NFTs are. So 6529, if you can hear us.
Okay, fantastic. Well, first of all, I want to do my own round of thank you's to
everyone who has brought us to this point. First of all, George and his team, the team on oncyber,
the team at 6529, the broader team at the University of Nicosia that has helped even
folks who are not in the blockchain area have been helping. The audio visual team is helping us
here today and of course all the incredible guests, lecturers, panelists that are going to be joining
during these next 12 weeks. So thank you. This is a group effort. It's a team effort and the
overall experience is going to be not just a group and team effort among the people who are working
on this course but also with the students. One of the things we are trying to understand here,
one of my deep interests in trying to understand, is in fact what we can do on chain and in the
metaverse. My general perspective is that we have been a little bit intellectually lazy in the
crypto world about how much we can actually use decentralized systems. The vast majority of people
use cryptocurrency for realistically financial speculation and sometimes things like transactions.
Part of what got me very excited about NFTs in addition to seeing great art and wonderful
artists was that the NFT world in great contrast to the fungible token world was spending a lot
of time on chain and was doing new functions on chain. Last week we were minting QQLs at
6529. That was fun and it was an activity that I don't remember doing three or four years ago
in cryptocurrency and I believe for cryptocurrency to make it, for decentralized walkchains to make
it, we have to have real-life usage cases that are something more than we're going to hold on to
these tokens and the number is going to go up. I've mentioned this before on Twitter, I learned
by doing things and yes I'm going to be sharing some material and I think the students will learn
some things from the material that I will share but I also hope to learn from this course and
specifically what I want to learn is what does it mean to have a large group of people engage in
you know broadly a course and do it without using a centralized database. What does it mean if we're
doing a class in the metaverse but more importantly what does it mean if we're going to run a community
focused on learning about NFTs or working in the NFT space or thinking of new ideas in the NFT space
and what does that mean in a persistent three-dimensional environment.
While I think today's experience is super interesting and I've been enjoying watching it and watching
George and lurking in the background in one of the rooms I think the more interesting thing over
the course of the next few months is what we are all as a group going to do outside the classroom.
I think there will be an exercise an iterative exercise of seeing what people want to do,
trying to build these spaces that enable them to do it. George mentioned the campus is being
built and the OM teams doing a lot of support there and one of the reasons the campus is not ready
is just because it's not ready but the other reason that it's not ready is we want to take a design
iterative design approach there, and launch a certain set of spaces see how we use them see what other
needs we have see what spaces are needed to support those needs and what would be a great success
for me at the end of the year is not only that we've had some nice panels and lectures
but there are groups of people who have met in this course have become a part of this community
and are planning all types of interesting things to do together, that we can find people to
also educate in parallel with this course. We stopped at 50-ish
lectures because the logistics were starting to get out of hand but there's a lot more people who
want to contribute and part of what we're trying to figure out once we get past these first couple
of weeks is how to let them contribute in parallel with the course. I noticed this when I was working
on my set of slides. These slides, if you're deep into the crypto space today's are the NFT space
and you have a crypto background today's session is super easy but I was trying to think if we're
trying to onboard someone new here someone who is excited about the NFT world or the metaverse world
but does not have a deep understanding of crypto well we are trying to cover everything from bitcoin
to ethereum to smart contracts to where do you store an NFT to what is the market cap of the
space what are the subsections of space in a few slides, it's not possible and so what I'd like to
get to is parallel tracks people doing not every single person has to come to every session but
that over the next few weeks we have a campus an educational area, where people are learning all the
time there's no bigger barrier to our development and education there's never a limit on how much
we can learn I've been in the space for a very long time and I learn new things literally every day
and there's people at different levels of development and they're going to learn things,
every day as well and so we're trying to enable something like, a
university of old right where you went there and you're learning you're living there and you are
aiming to learn from your colleagues and those students and the faculty and the visitors but
with the great benefit that we can do it globally for the whole world at the same time and so
this is the spirit of this course, and this means that we're going to need your feedback for sure
your help for sure and your initiatives for sure to figure out how to do all these things and figure
out what are the things you want to do and so where you know reach out on twitter on discord
feel free to organize things I think in two to three weeks once we have the basics working,
we're going to be very open to people coming and saying hey I want to do a
special lecture specifically on the details of how IPFS works, and we will say yes the answer is
going to be yes the answer is let's do more let's find a way for everyone to be able to share the
knowledge that they have and for people to learn that knowledge so this is my view of let's say the
course philosophy now in this and the time that I have today I'd like to do one and a half things.
What I really want to focus on is my big picture conceptual idea of what NFTs are
conceptual the rest of my slides are things like well what are the sectors of the NFT space PFPs
or generative art one of ones we're going to fly through this fly through those today, because for
each of those areas we have a session later in the course, so I'm not going to spend almost
any time on PFPs today because we have a whole session in two weeks on PFPs and we'll dig into
the micro details there so I'm going to focus on the first set of my slides and see if we can get
some big picture ideas communicated with that that's a great lead into this slide,
in a way the way I see NFTs it is the most absurdly trivially simple idea,
literally the only thing an NFT actually is, is a token with a number they are enumerated tokens,
they are tokens where you can identify one token and it is different than another token,
this sounds I mean if you think about it at this most basic level and if you,
think about if this is important. It sounds very unimportant, I'm trying to imagine if this was
several years ago and someone told me oh this is a really important idea you know what's the idea
we're going to have tokens and we're going to put numbers on them. I'm pretty sure okay well
that doesn't sound very important why is that important okay cool, I guess right what we're
seeing here on the slide are the three-six-sequential tokens that on the crypto punks contract that
includes 6529 so in my theorem wallet is punk 6528 crypto punk tokens 6529 and there's also 6528
and there's a 6530. That's all NFTs are and it's weird because it's one of those that is deceptively
simple because it actually enables a huge number of things, let's go to the next slide.
Because the other part of NFTs you will not find on a blockchain the other important part of NFTs
is a social convention. People who don't understand NFTs well often make criticisms of
the following genre but NFTs are just a receipt, they're just a pointer they're not the thing
they're the thing that points to the thing. George earlier pointed out that most NFTs the
actual image is not on the blockchain it's somewhere else it's on IPFS for example,
and people say it as if this is some type of big gachu and that's because people haven't spent
any time thinking how any advanced society works, and every single advanced society
works primarily by manipulating pointers not underlying objects.
I have a big tweet storm about real estate and people say oh you know real estate is a super
tangible thing like when you very different than NFTs you own a house you own a piece of land you
own an office building. but when you own a piece of land what does it actually mean what it actually
means is that the land registry office for your jurisdiction there is a title deed and that title
deed says, plot 123456 is owned by Mike Smith and if Mike Smith wants to sell it to George.
They're going to go to the title office and maybe some other places and maybe their lawyers will
put some documents together and they'll sign all these documents and the pointers will change hands,
nothing is actually going to happen on the land itself right the land is just going to be sitting,
there the land doesn't have the slightest idea the land's been there for billions of years right
that's the slightest idea that there are some overgrown monkeys us who are trading pieces of paper
or in modern times entries in a database and saying this land is my land this land, is your land
we've now changed who's landed as the land's just there very much off-chain hanging out but Mike,
Smith and George are trading a pointer to the land and when that pointer moves we all collectively
pretend that George owns the land just like we all collectively pretended that previously that Mike
owned the land, this is the part where someone says yeah but the reason that works is society is
willing to enforce it like if George now owns the land and Mike won't get out George can call the
police and yeah that's just because society, is respecting that social convention it's just a
social convention. It didn't exist at some point at some point hundreds or thousands of years ago
it's one of these stories that other if it's actually true, that people say about when the Europeans
came to North American the Native Americans were there they didn't really have this concept of land
ownership and they thought the Europeans were kind of nuts quite saying like, oh I owned this river
and I owned this mountain, I don't know if it's actually true or if it's one of those things
you learn in elementary school, but in any case that is in fact how it is it's just an imaginary
social convention we have decided, that the way to organize land ownership, is by trading these
pieces of paper well that is exactly what NFTs are. We have decided and today the people who care
about the social convention are maybe a million people, or half a million people or two million
people, but that number was going to grow every single year we have decided that a token and if
that token is in your wallet, it is a pointer to something else and we're going to attribute
ownership to something else to the person, who has that token. It is also why the right click
save as argument is so very silly if you're deeply crypto native someone of course can go
right click save hug 6529 right now. In fact when I first started tweeting a lot people would do it
to me all the time they'd come and say, oh ha ha ha I've right click saved your punk and now I'm
going to use it okay have fun I mean you can use it but the reality is we all know, that, the
crypto punk token 6529 is in my wallet not in your wallet and if you want a market assessment of
how strong the social convention is, the market assessment will pay exactly zero dollars for
your downloaded jpeg, but would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the token that's the
social convention at work, that's why if you go just stand on someone's land you don't become an odor
of it you have to go buy the title deed right you have to go through the social convention.
So what does how do I see this where does this fit in,
to the history of crypto assets it is all exactly the same idea as when we started with
bitcoin. Bitcoin is this concept for money currency you can argue which one of those two it is
is some type of commodity one of those things and what we have said in the bitcoin world, is if you
own these certain outputs in your wallet you can that means something and the amount of
eye rolling that was happening a decade ago when bitcoin people would say that was gigantic
there's no question this mean anything at all why does this matter right now. It has been established
that it matters and this doesn't nothing changes of bitcoin's worth two thousand dollars twenty
thousand dollars two hundred thousand dollars the it's clearly worth something people have clearly
subscribed value and monetary like value to bitcoin then the ERC20 tokens, that george mentioned
earlier are more or less the same point but for financial instruments now you say well what do
you mean are they financial instruments are they securities, are they not securities there's a lot
of dancing around on this topic because of the us regulations, against secure against unregistered
securities, so some ERC20 tokens look very much like financial instruments some go through
a variety of convoluted ideas to not look like financial instruments but basically, that's what
they are right and some of them might be a security under the us definition some of them are not a
security under the us definition, but what they are aiming to replicate is arbitrary financial
instruments so if bitcoin or maybe ether but you know the popular perception of bitcoin is
the underlying currency well, an ERC20 token is something like a stock, a bond, a derivative
some weird new financial instruments that don't have great analogs in the fiat world, but things
whose nature is primarily financial and they are fungible and that's how financial instruments
work, right, that's how financial instruments work in the real world they are all fungible,
and they're traded around primarily for financial reasons and if you see how ERC20 tokens
work that's the context of their environment with this in mind we go to ERC-721 switches
or 1155s in any case the nft protocols. This is the same concept for quite literally in my view
everything else in the world and it's interesting because everything else in the world, is actually
a lot of things in a very big number most things in the world, are non fungible there's a huge amount
of value embedded in fungible instruments, in the world a huge and possibly well certainly hundreds
of trillions of dollars, but there are even more hundreds of trillions of dollars, embedded in
non fungible objects and with that let's go to the next slide.
This is my highest level view of what NFTs are, what NFTs can be, and how NFTs can develop
over the next decade, and the first thing to see here is that split on the top between
natively digital intangible assets and physical, or tangible assets, where we're
making an abstract pointer to them. NFTs will first develop in the intangible natively digital
category the reason that is is because the blockchain world, the online world, the interoperable
with blockchain world, does not need anything from the regulatory system from the government,
from the enforcement mechanisms of the state, in order to make the first part work so, if
like uh i do on occasion we mint a meme card and there's i don't know 420 tokens and we assert
that that meme card each one of those tokens, represents an addition of one out of 420 of
this piece of art and we the artists the issuer are going to treat them as such. Well that's it
but i don't need any other i don't need any other assistance from the state to do that.
I can see where those tokens are i can interact with those tokens
permissionlessly i can say if you have one of these tokens, you can come into this token gated
space in OM, if a person who does not currently have one of these tokens asks me, how can i buy one
of the additions from this artist? in the meme cards i can just point him to the meme cards
contract and say well buy one of these tokens and then they can buy it on a permissionless exchange
i never need to call the courts i never need to call the police i never need to use the
enforcement mechanism of the state that is required for physical goods. Because the wonderful thing with
cryptocurrency it is much easier to play defense than it is in the real world. In the real world,
if i was if there was no state and i had a piece of land and i'm just a normal type of guy
maybe someone who has more muscles, or more guns, or more friends, says well i don't care about your
silly little title, you have i'm moving in and you're moving out and in absence of a state
mechanism it's actually quite hard to prevent them you know if you did this with a normal
developed state, you're going to call the police and the courts and someone will help get you your
property back but in absence, of that you'll probably lose it, with the encryption embedded in
crypto assets with the model embedded in crypto assets, playing defense does not require any help,
you can just have the token in your wallet, and nobody can take it to you by force at a first
approximation and yeah there's hacking and things like that but at a first approximation nobody
can take it by force, so what this means is anything that can be digitally, linked to an NFT
can start developing now. The regulatory state the normal,
Society is slow on innovation they'll eventually get there but it might take 5 to 10 years
15 years, fortunately we don't need to wait for Washington or Brussels to make a decision in
order to put an intangible asset like a piece of art on an NFT so in this bucket what do i say,
well NFT started with what weren't something like collectibles or things that straddled the
line between collectibles and art they have gone very strongly into the art space as well
so collectibles and art are the majority of the market today. What most people expect is going
to come in the next phase, as greater usage in gaming assets, in metaverse assets, buildings
lands trees things of that nature. What will come after that is more real world intellectual property,
right well intellectual property that might not be directly linked to a visual on an NFT,
brand's cultural society all of this type of intangible assets and can come on board now there's
no technical challenge stopping it there's no regulatory framework. That is needed all you need
is education onboarding and you might say well okay i mean that stuff sounds small it is not
small at all intangible assets there is a very large report and in fact George we should add it
to the reading and maybe next week, that every year counts the amount of intangible assets on
corporate balance sheets and it's over 75 trillion dollars and that doesn't even capture intangible,
assets that are not on balance sheet you know the american flag, the statue of liberty, the land of
the free, and the home of the brain that's an intangible asset but you're not going to find it
written down on a financial statement somewhere but it certainly makes the United States more
valuable than if it didn't have this type of branding so we are looking already at a
existing stock of intangibles that's larger than the money supply and there's no obvious
barrier to me for some of that migrating on chain this is kind of bucket one bucket two which is my
mission for being at 6529's mission for being we'll cover this in later
sessions in more detail. I believe NFTs can be the underlying database for an open metaverse
but i don't want to get into that today. That's a longer story we'll pick that up towards the
end of the course then at some point we will start migrating non-fungible physical world assets,
and services to NFTs, and these are all the examples that people talk about now but nobody
does, because it's going to take time oh i can buy a house by buying an NFT, i can rent a holiday villa
by buying an NFT, for these certain dates i can rent a digital billboard, in Times Square for these
hours, by buying an NFT and what it means once this happens you can move all of these interactions
out of a bunch of fragmented proprietary databases which is where they are now.
If you want to book a night at the midtown Hilton, on six avenue you have to call Hilton
which nights are available in the Hilton database and these things are going to end up
a decade from now in the OpenSea of that which might be open here might be someone else, so
i want to go to the Hilton let me see what the floor is for Hilton upper room prices on these
days on sixth avenue. For these things to happen you'll need some more let's call it enforcement
counterparty regulatory certainty, now you have the token you show up and say hey this house is mine
someone says no it's not. Well we're back to the physical world issues the mechanism by
which you bought the house has to be recognized by the state so you can say look, Mike you've
got to leave the house i have the token i can prove to a court that i have the token and
you're going to get evicted so i see these coming closer to the end of the decade.
Both will happen and when both happen you're discussing an addressable market of several
hundred trillion dollars but the natively visual ones will happen first. Let's go to the next slide.
I think this one straightforward i put it here in case anyone,
you know, if it was helpful after the prior slides but this is in fact the kind of two
by two matrix that fits here there are things that are tangible and intangible right so commodities
oil, wheat, etc is tangible and fungible a bushel of wheat is a bushel of wheat at a first approximation
there are things that are tangible and non fungible my house is different than your house my
painting on my wall is different than your painting on your wall there might be things,
that are semi fungible, right? My Nike sneakers are different than a lot of Nike sneakers but
similar to some Nike sneakers and well, it's a joke but, it's not a joke i mean us right all of us
are tangible non fungible objects towards, is different than me and we're very much tangible
and then on the intangible side the intangible fungibles are the ones who said before money
and financial instruments. These are these are where we see the l1 the the tokens of the major
blockchains and the ERC20 tokens or their equivalent that right above them, and then
tangibles and non fungible intangible non fungibles are culture society, a lot of services are
intangible digital goods, obviously like the ones we've been describing a lot of intellectual
property and so, fungible tokens will work on the first row, here non fungible tokens will work on.
The second row short of public blockchains, public cryptocurrencies getting banned by the regulators
which spending a lot of time and effort, to make sure that does not happen all of this is going
to happen over the course of decade and all, of it is going to be actively good for society
there's no reason they'll be actively good for society, in the same way that the internet was
better than filing cabinets, or a bunch of independent content management systems were
the internet gave you a unified platform, a single standards-based interoperable way to
transmit information. Crypto assets give us a uniform interoperable public commons
to trade things of value, whether they're fungible or non fungible. So let me see which is the next
slide is. One more high-level model and people who follow me on twitter hear me talking all the time
about memes and how we need to seize the memes or how the memes are the most important thing in the
world and i think, some people think i'm joking but i'm actually not joking at all
there's a great book called Sapiens by Yuval Harari which talks about myth how society works with
myths or stories if you prefer or if you prefer, if you're a sociologist inter subjective
realities and objective things are things like the computer i'm speaking to and the microphone,
i'm speaking to objectively they're here subjective things, are kind of non-tangible
things that i feel, right, i feel happy right now, i'm telling you that i feel happy but, i, you know
there's really no way for you to see it or feel it inter subjective things are imaginary things.
We believe together so imaginary things, we believe together, are that the Nike is a good brand
but just do it makes us feel happy but just do it makes you want to buy a pair of shoes for more
money than you would have otherwise, but wearing shoes with a swoosh on them, might make you more
likely to jump higher or further or faster, so these inter subjective myths,
are basically not different from the memes. They're basically not and you can say okay well
that's fine but that's not the important stuff the important stuff is trucks and guns and oil and,
and physical resources and cash flows and investment bankers and i disagree.
All of those things are downstream from memes and myths.
Nike has a lot of revenue and a lot of factories and a lot of distribution
but the reason it has all these things is because people believe in the solution just do it and the
general brand that has been built, and if that brand didn't exist, those would be less important and
less successful. It's easy to see at a national level people are willing to
unfortunately die, for national memes and myths and that might be good it might be bad it might be
bad it might be noble it might not be but it's clearly the case that people are going to know.
If you're very good medically if you're Obama and you say yes we can and you repeat it thousands of
times, or if you're Donald Trump and you say make America great again and you repeat it thousands
of times, and your meme your myth, that yes we can all do it together with solidarity or
that America's on the decline but if we change how we operate it will be ascendant again. These
are intersubjective myths their memes right that red hat make America red hats a meme.
If you're very good at memes the population of the united states will reward you by making
you the most powerful person in the world who can direct trillions of dollars of economic resources,
and give you the power to end human life on earth.
Armies are an important tangible thing they're not a meme, but who gives instructions
to the army is the person who's good at memes, that's how you get elected and i think in the last
16 years of politics if anyone previously had delusions that the reason you get elected is
because you write very good policy papers, that should be over now right though
well you get elected is by getting people to feel a certain way to organize a certain way to believe
in a common reality a common intersubjective reality a myth a meme, and then human behavior
organizes downstream from that. Long-winded way of saying nfts can be very important socially as well,
because they give us direct access, to the underlying meme
i don't think this has even played out one percent what am i about to say.
If you are Nike and you are now the holder of a powerful myth
you have to go through an extremely complicated set of activities designing shoes hiring athletes
who are putting them on tv, running factories in Vietnam, shipping shoes across the ocean,
shipping shoes across the country, having retail employees sell them to you accountants lawyers
taxes money and bank accounts financial statements shareholder resolutions and you pay a dividend
at the end you monetize that with a vastly complicated set of activities you take the
meme that is intangible you make it tangible through a huge amount of human effort and billions of
dollars of dividends got there. Here we can short circuit here we can hold the intellectual property
directly the meme directly i say well why does it matter what can you do with it i think we're
figuring that out i don't think it's actually this is not something where i can say on the next
five slides i'm going to tell you what you can do when you see the meme no we're figuring that part
out along the way. I believe this gives us the opportunity to change society for the better
that when people say well i'm not happy with this societal system or i'm not happy with that
societal system well societies are just made out of people right voters are just the people,
you go to work with or go for drinks with, or hang out with, or i don't know go to sports games with
those are those are the fellow voters everyone believes in memes, everyone believes in myths
and when you change a medium you know the medium is the message every time there's a shift in medium,
there's an opportunity for new messages to emerge and perhaps we have an opportunity for
more pro-social messages to emerge for messages, that are more decentralized in nature that a society
that gives more trust to people and spreads power more diffuser. I think there is that level
of opportunity it's not easy the opposite could also happen right NFTs are politically neutral.
Someone could use them to very effectively promote memes that are against perhaps the values
the crypto community believes in so they're politically neutral like every other technology
but, i think we will see a different way of organizing human activity just like tv organized
human activity in a different way right tv was, a centralized force in American culture all of a
sudden once broad network tv crossed across the country at the same time at the same hour across
the gigantic country all people could watch the same show or listen to the same news anchor and
that formed a form of certain social construction. Now we have the ability to form social construction
in the natively digital environment that we live in and without the centralization that
has happened with social media companies but it's not a sure thing this part's not a sure thing
this part we have to work for. This part we have to figure out how to do it but i have a
very very gut sense that it is possible, i think this is it on my high concept slides and
hopefully this was comprehensible. Can we see the next slide please.
I'm going to run through the rest of these slides quickly because i think for some of you
these are over basic and in any case we're going to cover this in much more detail in future sessions
early nft collections did have a collectible slash gaming flavor and you know now there's a big
debate you know our punk's art or the collectibles or Pepe's art and the collectibles they certainly
have some collectible type characteristics right even if they're art they certainly have
collectible type characteristics and this is where the space started. Next slide please.
PFPs are by far the largest market category today we'll talk about that in a couple weeks. Next slide.
Of the more art oriented nfts generative art has found its natural medium on chain
we'll have a whole session on generative art it's probably my favorite area of
NFTs and i'm very much looking forward to that we have some of the greatest
generative artists in the world joining us, to talk about generative art. Next slide.
One-of-one art is really interesting it's such a token-based term right it's because,
a lot of other tokens are not one-of-one but one-of-one art in the world at large, is just called
art by a painting, not, an addition but one-of-one art is not one type of thing. It's many types of
things again we have some great artists joining there. We'll talk about that in five weeks i think.
Next slide. Gaming NFTs, metaverse oriented NFTs,
this is not to say that we don't have these now we do but these are areas where people believe
that, there's going to be tremendous growth and there's going to be tremendous growth in
the coming years if you notice venture capital firms like entrees and Horowitz are funding
an endless number of gaming studios to build blockchain centric gaming companies. So i suspect
we'll see a lot of development over the next few years here and learn a lot more than we know today.
Next slide. Utility-based NFTs are also an area that has not just a ton of potential but
almost completely unexplored the most famous one is BNS, the ethereum name service where
it is in some ways one of the most successful NFTs collections the domains are NFTs
and it is a blockchain based domain service where the domain itself is an nft it's fabulously
smart it's super successful. But you know the mint pass that you will use to attend this course
that's also utility-based nft there's a nice piece of art associated with it but the primary use of
it is to be able to enter the core spaces to be able to mint your certificate, at the end,
there's a lot of potential utility-based nfts that we mostly have not yet fully explored. Next.
This is the back end of my prior chart when we start representing real world objects on chain,
as i said for big important objects like real estate, we need, regulatory bridges or some type
of enforcement bridges for people to feel comfortable what you're saying now is super
interesting experimentation this is a project by G-money where you mint an NFT, that NFT represents
apparently an extremely fancy t-shirt i understand you can actually take possession of your
t-shirt or they can store it for you i don't i haven't dug into it in detail but we're at the
beginning of representation of visual objects as NFTs and it's logically going to start with
less expensive items like 300 dollar t-shirts or expensive t-shirts but they are not actually
highly expensive items in the house and as we learn more we'll move up the value chain into
more and more expensive objects. But this area has been truly almost completely unexplored
it's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out. Next slide. All of those are
topics we are going to cover in the coming weeks. I want to talk just for a couple of minutes on
market structure, to give a sense of where we are in overall size area of development what have you.
The point that out this is in no way a comprehensive list of exchanges, there are many more exchanges,
but to me the most interesting thing about exchanges,
is in the NFT space, is that almost all of them operate on chain,
which means you have data that you just didn't have
with traditional centralized exchanges
and traditional centralized exchanges report some data they might have an API they might
they might share some stats and figures but they're not showing you every trade.
That's in their own matching engine or whether it's open seer super rare looks rare,
you can just go on the theorem blockchain and see every trade. It's a level of transparency
that i don't think we've ever seen in markets and so this allows for a lot of data collection
to minimum but it also allows i think for a more interesting and competitive environment
looks rare, when it launched in a form of what is known as a vampire attack on open sea it basically
dropped tokens on the large customers of open sea in the hope that this would
incent them to move their business looks rare.
Well you can't actually do that in the centralized one right like.
Binance can't call up Coinbase and say hey brian i'd really appreciate it if you'd send me your
customer list and in fact not just your customer list and their contact information but their bank
accounts and also if you could be so kind as to rank all your customers in order profitability,
because i really want to go after your profitable customers and take them from you.
it'd be very much appreciated just just email it over me to hear CZ at binance.com right
that's how it works this is like the most closely guarded data at one of these companies and in the
NFT world it's all out there in the open not only it's not closely guarded it is literally not
guarded at all it's on a public blockchain and once you've seen this, it actually feels strange to
go back and if you're truly a believer in free markets, if our regulatory system could get past,
its one-sided view of crypto we'll talk about that later, and think about what this can mean for
capitalism for consumer surplus for, actual free markets, it's very good for consumers there's a
reason that transaction fees are low and dropping in these marketplaces they'll continue to drop,
because you can compete and you can compete in a way that you know nobody can compete with the Apple
app store for apple devices so i think it's interesting that we'll have a pretty open and
transparent view of the trading in this space. Let's go to the next chart. So this is a chart that
comes from a team at the University of Nicosia called nftvaluations.com i'm an advisor to the
team a bunch of other six-five to nine people advise the team they're trying to build up market
caps of various collections token by token and the market cap in a fungible collection is easier
right you just take the number of bitcoins you take the last trades you multiply those two
together as you know that the market cap of bitcoin is 385 billion dollars, or whatever it is
the market cap of the crypto punks is hard because sometimes some are alien, some are zombies, some
are humans, some have hoodies, some have mohawks, some have the dreaded spotty face, i mean what you need
to do is calculate the value of each one and then add it up and it's hard and on any given
and on any given token you might be wrong, but i've seen the data that underlies this,
it's certainly more than good enough for the purposes of this chart right any particular token
might be wrong but in aggregate i think the mistakes cancel out, and what it says that for
pfps and generative art and this data does not include one-of-one art yet, it does not include
metaverse land, except, i think the other side land is in there um it does not include utility
based which mostly don't exist except for ens and it does not include gaming, but it does have
most of the major PFP and generative art collections the overall market cap is around 10 billion
dollars today at peak happiness in the crypto markets, it was around 30 billion dollars.
This matches my sense and so it's 10 billion, maybe with the other sectors in it's 15 billion
something like that. What is my takeaway from this the space is still absolutely tiny, tiny,
fungible tokens are we're flirting with a trillion dollars recently, in the peak they went almost
at 3 trillion, i say this all the time to everyone i can find the only thing i'm a hundred
percent sure, of is the current ratio of fungible token market cap and non fungible token market
cap, which is today about about a hundred to one that ratio is wrong i think that ratio is going
to get closer every year i think one year they eventually they're going to be more or less the
same. That might take a decade but they're going to be more or less the same and they're probably
going to be more or less the same at a higher number than we are today. Now.
I got pretty active in the bitcoin world in summer 2013 and in those days the market cap of bitcoin
would you know go to 5 billion dollars and maybe all of the other altcoins, maybe you'd get to 10
billion i don't remember the details but it's in that range and this is what it actually feels to
me this is what the maturity of the space feels to me like, it feels like 2013 era bitcoin it's
about that size it's still a fairly close community, i tell people sometimes enjoy this is the time
where if you're really active in the space you can sort of kind of feel like you know everyone
you might not know them individually, but you know of them that's going to change, it's going to change
fairly soon and it's going to change, because the space is going to get bigger and it's a good thing
the space will get bigger it's a healthy thing but fairly soon you there'll be hundreds of things
going on all over the world in all types of sectors and sub sectors of NFTs and you'll have no idea
about them because you'll be focused on, you know generative art in south America or something
but so i think the important takeaway it's still very early it means the space is also going to
be hugely volatile, all crypto assets are volatile bitcoins the least volatile theorems a little bit
more volatile the altcoins are more volatile than a theorem. NFTs are more volatile than all of them
and that has to do with their level of maturity which is not very mature and by the way i just
want to be clear and i reiterate George's not financial advice from the beginning.
Just because the NFT space today is 10 billion dollars and i think one day it's going to be
100 billion or a trillion it does not mean your NFTs are going to go up 10x or 100x.
Your specific NFT might go to zero and that market cap could be in a new NFT collection
NFTs do not have the same network effects that bitcoins right with bitcoin most of the value of
the money currency commodity store value usage case, coalesced in one token that's definitely
not going to happen in the NFTs space. NFTs represent a wide range of things we've been
discussing so there's going to be a broad set of NFT tokens and collections that are carrying this
market cap. The vast majority of them not yet invented so certain of course NFTs will do well
over time, but, my perspective is not that the average NFT will do well over time economically
in fact my perspective is actually close to the opposite the average NFT will not do well over
time some of them will but most of them won't but what is absolutely the case is that NFTs
as a category will do better and better and better every year, you know subject to the normal
macroeconomic and crypto market cycles. Let's go to the next page.
So these are the two different ways, that they calculate market cap anyway there for these
purposes the same the interest is the thing, i would point out is among the two categories
PFPs and generative art most of the market caps and PFPs and it'll be very interesting.
if anyone can come up with a reasonable estimate for the value of one of one art,
that's a very difficult problem because it basically never trades so we'll see what that looks like,
but i'll be surprised if it's more than generative art right now i guess it's in the same range so
it does mean that even though a lot of people say like oh i don't know about PFPs maybe they're not
great, most of the market cap the market in aggregate values PFPs more than anything else.
That might be wrong we'll see but it's what the case is today an interesting sub point a lot of
that market cap is in the Yuga collections or Dapes, Apes, punks we have one of the co-founders
of Yuga coming in a couple weeks we're going to discuss that and if that's healthy not healthy
what it means how that space evolves but today the things you should take away is the space is
10 15 billion dollars most of it pfps and as we'll see when we do the more detailed PFPs
most of it in fact Yuga Labs manage PFPs so let's go to the next bench.
Let's go to conclusions.
Okay. Very, very high level uh summary and i think we cover this in more detail but
NFTs are unique, enumerated contracts that can live on smart contract blockchains
they will certainly there's already, certainly representing a lot of intangible objects and
represent a lot more intangible objects and in time tangible objects the potential addressable
market is gigantic but the current NFT market is tiny, so many exciting things have happened but it
is still super immature super experimental many things are going to fail there are many new things,
that we're going to invent along the way that have not been invented and so we're at the beginning,
of the beginning, we'll have several cycles of up down and new inventions along the way over the
next, you know, over the next decade. Let's see the next slide.
We have put a little bit of extra greeting for those a little bit more technical you know
or you can go see some of these standards of, how an NFT token is designed what are the design
standards if you're not technical i think you're going to find the first four licks borderline
incomprehensible and i wouldn't worry about it you know if you're more technical and you'll want
to see the protocols it could be interesting. A lot of these big picture ideas i tweet a lot
and tweet storms and that's the link to all the tweet storms but we're working on trying to get
them in a format that people can read easier, so at some point during the course we'll have
that and i'll share it and some of these topics you know real estate and memes and what have you
are covered well in the tweet storms and so, we'll make that available and then the data we just saw
on market cap came out of a report that the NFT valuations teams does have recorder,
it's online, there's a link there they they have not learned to make it an NFT yet we should harass
them to make it an NFT, but right now it looks like it's just a pdf on their server but there
are some interesting facts and figures there to look at. Okay. I think these are our official
slides i think incredibly George is going to come back here and what we're going to do is
answer some questions and hopefully, the because, hopefully the team has been pulling together
questions while we chat and maybe we can spend George, on 15 20 minutes answering questions
something with them I think first of all thank you very much for this this was as always hugely
enlightening. We are at the beginning of the beginning this is this is what what what I've kept
and I think we're gonna be coming back to this thing later on. So first of all the team has been
active in in the chat and they have been responding to people's questions
and covered many of them uh there are a couple of questions i can i could relate them to you.
One is - What are your thoughts about Manifold launching a gallery-themed marketplace yesterday?
Well first of all I would say, I think Manifold is great I think they have done,
the best work of anyone in terms of helping the community realize, it is doable manageable and
with the help of their tools easy enough, to get to launch on your own contract. I've used
manifold contracts for several things I found their tools helpful so I think Manifold's great
i saw their announcement that they're going to make a marketplace.
I think it's a logical move for them i think it is also,
always a challenging business model. Marketplaces are very successful when they're successful
and tough to break into when you're new. Right? So right now right now most
over the volume by far is on Opensea and that makes open sea an extraordinarily valuable
marketplace and there are endless teams, coming from different angles, to try and take some of
that market share and some of them have taken some market share. But the competitive dynamics of
who gets to be which win which part of the marketplace market share is probably the
single most competitive thing in NFTs right because it's the single most valuable prize.
If you can win it so i understand why they're doing it and i wish them luck because i think
they're you know they're very good operators in the space they're promoting the right values but
it's also not a sure thing because breaking the liquidity of another marketplace is hard.
Okay thank you. There's another question that i think i can take it's uh it's technical about
the course. When will the airdrop occur? I guess the question is about the airdrop of the material
for week one the answer is that we have already started airdropping course material the first
400 of you have already gotten the material this presentation in their wallets. The reason
for the delay has been that we basically broke the limit anything about the 19 000 airdrops
needed a special handling from us so we're doing it in batches so those of you that
have minted the course NFT you should expect this presentation dropping to your wallet in the next
couple of hours and then we're gonna be having multiple airdrops for the videos and everything
else in the course please monitor our discord and twitter you see both in the slide here because
we're gonna be announcing every time we're doing a an airdrop next question is actually very
interesting. Is there a pull-up proof of attendance protocol to admit.
I mean i think the answer is no right now right but it's a very good idea but it's a good idea
it's a very good idea and so, um and so, the
we should do it for some event yeah yeah let's make a note let's make a note for that and
get back to it it's a very good idea i think and some of the things that we are doing
especially with our guests might, it might be a good thing for people to to have a proof
of attendance on these events and i think as we roll out the campus over the next few weeks,
this is going to become more more pertinent. I can actually see the question chance myself so
oh nice. The Amazon web service is responsible for storing all of our NFTs well i
don't know who our NFTs are but certainly not the ones for this course right the ones for these
course are on Arwave i believe correct so no no we are we're all about decentralization
and setting best practices so we will not be putting your NFTs on Amazon web services.
Another similar technical question people asked. Why did we make the mint passes?
As ERC 720 ones not 1155s and the answer is so we can track individuals right like so people can
say this is the one that i got here and i did this over time when an 1155 doesn't 1155, is
non fungible within is fungible within the context of a specific token right so if we want to say
a student 1234, did these 18 things over the course of the semester
we need a ERC 721 to do that george is that correct sir accurate yes yes i think it's a it's an accurate
description. There's a similar question that says: If i transfer my course NFT to another
wallet where the airdrops come to the new wallet? The answer is they should we as i've said in the
beginning we are we're experimenting there we've done our tests at limited scale today if i'm not
mistaken we have had up to 3000 people joining us live we have more than 20000 wallets connected
and minting the course access token so what we're doing is we are we're querying the
contract and we're looking at transfers, so we should be able to airdrop the, the, nfts to the
current holder of the token this means that if you have minted your course access nft and then
you transferred it to another wallet, all future airdrops will happen to the new wallet however,
if there have been airdrops to the previous one obviously these are not going to be automatically
transferred you would have to either leave them in the old wallet or manually transfer them there.
I don't see why the team couldn't snapshot the new wallets for airdrops allow lists things like
that so i think we'll be okay.
Oh here's a very good question: Are you going to issue soulbound NFTs for students who have
completed the course? Very good it's a very good question. We have our initial view but we're going
to think about it over the course of the semester and give a final answer at the end of the semester
but my general view, is no we will not make them soulbound. Because my general view is let's say
you want to hold this uh certificate for the next 40 years of your life there's zero chance you will
not change wallets during that period in fact you will probably change wallets many many many
times during that period and if you want so either that means you're going to be stuck
maintaining an old wallet for the rest of your life just to hold a course nft or the University
of Nicosia is going to have to provide customer support for the rest of your life, where they'll
have to verify that you are now that new person in another wallet to transfer which seems quite
difficult. So we um we think they will not be soulbound but probably once we get to the last
few weeks of the course we'll come out with our logic on that and how specifically we think about
doing that. Fair George yeah i think it's fair i as you said i too haven't made up my mind 100%
about the applicability of soulbound tokens for for university degrees and
certificates but given that long term there's as you said zero chance that people will not be
migrating to new wallets and so on and so forth i think the default option should be that these
things should be transferable. Now we need to figure out how we can make them transferable but
not sellable because obviously we don't want people to go in a marketplace and sell
their their degree to others uh that's that's that's totally an open question, we have some
thoughts on that too but i think we should start with with a non soulbound token and you
know be convinced otherwise. Next question. Are you scared of big brand style of centralization
or should we embrace because there's truly room for both? So the answer that question is yes and yes
i had many arguments discussions healthy debate vigorous debate on Twitter about this topic when
big brands issued NFTs right and a lot of people said well we don't like it that Adidas did an
nft draw we want to be here for the independent artists right and i'll answer the second question
first first of all it's a permissionless network anyone just like an independent artist can
issue an NFT Adidas can issue an NFT and they don't have to ask our permission to do so right
and if a lot of people went and spend a lot of money on the Adidas NFT and it suggests that people
want the Adidas NFT right if everyone really didn't want the Adidas NFT it wouldn't have been to them.
Right? It can't be like it's very very bad a lot of people bought it if a lot of people bought it
a lot of people wanted but to me and my things that i care about which is ensuring that our
digital world in the future, the metaverse is decentralized well if Adidas doesn't issue an NFT
it's not like the alternative is Adidas will not participate in the digital economy Adidas
will participate in the digital economy anyway and they will issue some type of digital collectible
on Facebook and the same people who like Adidas and buy Adidas shoes will buy the digital collectible
on Facebook and Adidas will earn the same amount of money from doing this and promote centralization.
Whereas if Adidas issues on an nft instead Adidas and its market power is promoting decentralization
so between the two there's no actual option to say Adidas should stop earning revenue and people
should stop spending money on adidas right they will this is going to happen and so if that's
the case do we want them on our decentralized quote unquote rails or do we want them on someone
else's centralized rails i prefer that they come with us. Now does this create a risk that people might
or big brands might successfully centralize the space? Yes, for sure the big brands are excellent
meme makers they're excellent myth makers they have millions of customers they have years of
marketing people like them and so there is a window now, where new crypto native communities brands
ideas can emerge but that window won't be open forever right eventually the big brands are going
to come and they are going to be successful and we have to in the meantime stand up some of our own
brands some of our own communities some of our own ethos, to be able to hold their own with them
it's also why i sometimes laugh when you know people think that certain artists and
certain artists, are minting too much or becoming too big. None of this is true.
Everything in the NFT space all together is still a rounding error versus the big brands big
society centralized society and so forth, this if we want to be successful in the world of large
we have to get bigger all of the big nft native brands need to get bigger so that when we're 15
years talking about Disney and Nike and Adidas and apple we're also talking about 10 other
brands that got built in this era and that have decentralization as their underlying ethos
otherwise all that's going to happen is only the big brands will go away there's no version
where we can only stay small i don't i don't think that actually happens
Okay. I think there's a related question regarding to regarding big brands, whether
they will be in the path of decentralization the future so for example if you see Facebook
or twitter become decentralized in a few years from now, what are your thoughts on this.
Well is that the question about tech companies being decentralized or is it about brands being
decentralized so i think well the first part of the question is about brands and then the example
that the student offers is about Facebook and Twitter but i think we can take both.
Okay one second. So let's take brands first because this is
a very interesting topic the i think of something like Nouns right. Nouns is trying to build
a very decentralized brand right they are they have their Nouns glasses and they're of course token
based and the actual imagery is CC0 public domain imagery and so anyone can use their brand
imagery and punk 4156 who's one of the founders there is going to come on the course later in
the semester to talk about this and i think his view is that network brands that take advantage
of tokens and social media and public domain IP will actually emerge and be able to compete with
big brands, because they'll use the power of networks it's a very interesting question it's a very
interesting experiment nobody has nobody knows how it's going to play out, but i very much look forward
to seeing it now to another question you know will we have decentralized social media in effect.
I think the answer is yes. I've also thought that for many years and i think it's less likely that
it's because Twitter will become decentralized on the blockchain or have you in fact Elon Musk
yesterday said specifically that he does not want to do that he does not think the scalability is
there, to run a Twitter like service on blockchain whether he's right or wrong that's what he believes
sounds to me that Elon wants to build the western We-chat uh but i do think some version will emerge
but it's like the it's like the marketplace question. Twitter has gigantic network effects.
Facebook has gigantic network effects what is the thing that is interesting enough
to pull people away and my guess is with always these things it's not going to be Twitter 2.0
and there's a lot of people trying to make Twitter 2.0 trying to make twitter but decentralized
and i wish them the best and i hope it works but my gut sense is people get disrupted not by just
the exact same version of what they are but decentralized they get disrupted by something
that they don't think is a competitor at first they look at something say okay this is not a
competitor i think the thing that will disrupt Twitter is something that when twitter sees it
on day one and year one i was saying this is not a competitor to me at all i don't have to worry about
and it's going to come from a completely different angle that architecture will be decentralized
and then one day it will be taking market share from Twitter in the same way that Twitter today
takes market share from the new york times and at some point you know 15 years ago if you told the
new york times you are going to lose market share and brand share and setting the agenda for the
world share to Twitter it would be a laughable proposition and yet it happened and so i think
it won't happen but probably not in a direct clone but i wish the direct clones luck and maybe
hopefully some of them will work i've supported some of them a direct clone would also be helpful
and but i think it's going to look a little different.
Okay. We are we're closing to two hours i know we've said that its live session would be one hour
long but I guess this one was would have to be longer anyway because we needed to cover the
course logistics as well. I think we've covered most of the questions that were related to this
week's material i see a number of questions in the chat but they are related to stuff that we will
cover in the future we have another 11 weeks ahead of us so let's not cover everything today.
I guess we could wrap it up at this point 6529 any final parting thoughts
because before i give people a few practical pointers to the future. No, i think it's great
look we have i don't know 30 40 50 sessions in bound so we'll have plenty of time to cover a lot
of topics if you are not following the UNIC metaverse Twitter account and discord please do.
For now this is probably the only centralized part in the infrastructure and we're trying to think
about how to eliminate that as well but for the next few weeks i think that is real it's a real
thing and so do follow it and there are going to be ongoing developments every few days so keep an eye
there so you you know you know what's going to happen. Absolutely we're going to be using both
twitter and discord to announce things almost on a daily basis because we're we're building
around the clock so as 6529 said please follow us on twitter and make sure that you
keep an eye on discord especially in the announcements uh discord is our primary
course support channel as well uh you can email us at metaverse@unic.ac.cy
although I would uh say that discord will probably result in a faster resolution
of whatever issue you have. I would like to remind everyone that the next live session for week
two which uh is going to be about copyright and provenance will take place on Wednesday
so that's October the 12th same time 5pm eastern European standard time Cyprus time so
looking forward to seeing everyone then uh in the meantime uh have fun and uh keep an eye on your
wallets because we're going to be air dropping uh lots of things uh to your wallets in the coming
days bye bye everyone bye bye bye