 Hello. I think we're still waiting for Daniel to show. Oh, no, Daniel's there. Okay, great. And David, there we go. Hi, everyone. Great to see everybody here. Thanks very much, Brian, for that introduction. So today's format will be, I think, maximally informal. There's no need for us to observe a dusty procedure here. So if we could just start with a general introductory question, which is, given the enormous journalistic and public and financial interest in NFTs over the last half a year or so, how exactly have they impacted your work? Shall I begin? Oh, absolutely, please. Yeah, let's let inspiration dictate the passage of events. Well, I have done this really as an experiment to see what's out there. What does it mean for me as an artist? What could it mean for us in the future as musicians? So I really just, I released a few kind of bundle of them. They went up about three or four weeks ago, and a few of them are sold and a couple of them haven't. It was really insightful just to understand the space and how actually really complex it is and how it's changing every single day and how even I, Imogen Hoop, early, you know, interests in blockchain, still found it really hard to, you know, to sell my NFTs. You know, you really have to be in amongst it and really kind of live and breathe it. But for me, what it's changed is my imagination of how I could create music in the future, not just like song format, but in kind of short form, something kind of more bite-size manageable chunks for me, especially as a mother and kind of doing a lot of things. I'm quite excited about the idea that there is no kind of template right now. It can literally be an idea for a song or a few lyrics here or something over here. It's very undefined and I really like that play space. It doesn't kind of block us even. So that's what's exciting about it for me right now. How about you, Darren? In the last six months, in the last six months, I guess I left my job and started a new business around NFTs. So it's impacted me significantly, so to say. I think it's incredible the way there's this groundswell of enthusiasm and blockchain managed to cross into the public attention in a way it's never actually succeeded in doing so before through NFTs. Blockchain primarily has been used for decentralized finance experimentation and that's a huge market and very exciting, but NFTs represent all things, all assets, all media, all creativity, and that's so much bigger of a market and to see the potential experimentation and creativity that you was talking about unleashed in those various fields. It's been wild and fun. Maybe this would be the point just to get a little bit of context on palm. Would you like to explain the background to the project? Yeah, sure. So my personal background, I spent the last three and a half-ish years leading the Protocol Engineering Group at Consensus and so we're very close to Hyperledger Foundation. For example, we contributed Hyperledger Basu and sort of have a couple of members in my team or former team on the technical steering committee. What I realized is the NFT craze was exploding is that a lot of the technology we had already built with Hyperledger Basu for enterprises like JPMorgan J or UBS or MasterCard could solve a lot of the challenges that NFTs have on main meta theory and so in partnership with some amazing creative partners and Consensus as a technical partner, we decided to launch POM as an NFT optimized chain inside the Ethereum ecosystem that's sort of scalable, low gas, high throughput and really optimized for creators and rewarding creators. The POM NFT studio on top of that is basically they suggest a creative studio to help and partner with creators, brands, content owners and so forth to land in one. Actually on that note of collaboration imaging, is this some given your own personal interest? Have you noticed much collaboration or cooperation between musicians or do you find yourself as sort of a solo point of energy and enthusiasm? No, I found a lot of collaborations in the music space around this. I mean even just on the on my own personal little NFT that I released, it was musicians who were supporting me to do that. There doesn't seem to be competition in the same way. I think there's this feeling that you know there's just so much opportunity and it's fun. This kind of idea of picking each other up against each other just doesn't seem to exist in this space. So actually Don Diablo, he's a very successful musician, DJ and he has done amazingly well with his NFQs and he's spent a whole year creating these amazing pieces. But he bought my first one and there may be a collaboration in that in itself, you know that he takes a little piece of this idea because it's a seven second lute piece of music of an idea of acapella piece. So he's inspired to take that on. So it's kind of interesting to discuss what is the IP in this NFT or was it there at all? So it's quite, it's really exciting to be able to have those discussions openly right now because none of these things are defined. So it's good to work with people and we have to do it because otherwise you know there's going to be this people are going to come in like publishers and labels and they're all going to try and get a piece of it and not really understand. We're not going to have a chance to to let it have its full potential. So I think it's really important that musicians get in even now it's a bit confusing just to explore and kind of have a bit of fun with it. And when it comes to audio in particular what do you what have you found or what do you think might be the most successful marriage of different art forms? Would it be audio with a video loop or audio with a static image? What strikes you as maybe the most promising combination of audio with another form of expression? I mean one of the some of the most beautiful ones I've seen are Holly Herndon's, Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst have released some absolutely beautiful in fact on foundation I think. And I mean that just seems like the perfect kind of to me anyway if I I would like to buy them if they've gone up way too much for me. But just the way that all the technology is integrated and the AI and all the projects that they have it just feels like a beautiful kind of it feels like the perfect place. It wouldn't exist if it wasn't for NFTs and it feels like this new art forms are being born like every day. So I don't know I feel like not putting it into a box because it seems like that box is just kind of being already out of shape by just saying one thing. But I really love you know some of the just simple photography is just really beautiful kind of parallax photography of nature or it's what I love about it is it's about these these these energies they feel more like about a moment in time they're like encapsulating a moment which is something that you can contemplate rather than music which on streaming services just feels like this kind of endless kind of stream of noise and you know it's kind of in the background it's not really being paid attention and this is kind of the it feels like the flip of that right now it feels like people are really paying attention to these quite detailed small pieces and I think that's really lovely. And Dan what is what have you found it because obviously you're showcasing the work of multiple artists has there been a particular way in which audio or music has been published? We haven't like palm launched yet we actually have some major milestones today in the coming weeks which I'll let people who announce these things announce something but in terms of what I've seen out there and I think my favorite audio project is the Winner Beats so far I think both the way they experimented on generative music but also experimenting with bonding curves and other crypto-native primitives is really cool really challenging really innovative and I think it sort of speaks to the creativity in the space but I love I think there's such a powerful kernel of truth in what imaging just said about people paying attention to the medium and I think it's because we have a different relationship to content when we feel like we own it or ever say the content the whole rise of streaming has become this one-way flow of content that's really I think made the fan sort of peripheral in that process not a stakeholder not care as much and therefore not as much of a fan NFTs I think reshape the relationship between creator and fan and bring them back in to the process by having an ownership stake and that's really powerful and I think we're just the beginning of what that can actually be. So ultimately when one or multiple art forms are put together one of the appeals of NFTs is that they perhaps become collectibles and that brings us directly to you Brendan because you're in the field of sports collectibles and because I'm rather familiar with some of your work I know very well that you take let's say the traditional static design of what previously on paper or cardboard would have been a card a baseball card or a basketball card but you you join it with a little for example a little video loop so given that you're already doing some of the things that we just talked about in the field of music but in sports how have NFTs changed your very well established world of tangible static collectibles? Well it's been very exciting first of all everyone's talking about them they they kind of dawned on the public consciousness in a really big way in the first quarter of this year Panini launched its NFT product in January of last year and it was difficult because we were having to think out to explain an NFT and then all of a sudden we no longer have to explain an NFT at least with respect to collectibles but certainly lots of questions around what it means to be authentic and what are the actual contractual rights and is it property and is it not and is a token good enough and what all these things mean but you know the athletes the agents the entertainers that we work with they've all been hugely interested and motivated in this direction they see it as a new opportunity there's lots of different emerging points of distribution and of course lots of conversations around royalties and and what it means for the creators and you know the people in the creator communities as a as the largest one of the largest licensees in the world you know we're we're really focused on protecting the first the Panini brand is a 60-year brand and of course we've represented some of the largest licensors in the world and and we're practicing in a 120-year-old collectible category so we've moved deliberately and slowly we're actually using the hyperledger sawtooth technology and we're really excited about the future of the category and what it means for collecting. Since some two of you have already mentioned hyperledger needless to say the issue of or the positive issue of blockchain technology lies behind a lot of what we're discussing so Brendan how has the issue of forgeries been addressed or maybe even just appreciated by your by your client base because when we're talking about let's say for example baseball cards I mean for decades there's been an enormous problem with with forgeries. Sure so you know the this technology has evolved very quickly and in fact it's it's evolved quicker than actual adoption of different decentralized identity solutions for example and establishing authenticity so if you have a major company that's representing what they're doing either on a public or private blockchain network that can be a really strong point of authentication but in the larger world the larger community of creators if anyone on the internet can be a dog well anyone that's creating NFTs can potentially rip off your work and so there's some really important work that's ongoing in terms of how to create public registries and certification process for the creators and the content developers so that you have the strongest authentication possible at the point of creation when it's actually when the when the creator assigns it to a public blockchain it's connected to the the network you know that that that is a strong and perfect bond and you've got the surety that you need that it's actually either officially licensed or created by the person who's representing it. So when it comes to creators actually that brings us directly back to you image and one of the things we haven't we've only been here for 10 minutes but one of the things we haven't yet touched upon is uptake what barriers do you think there have been or what have the greatest obstacles been to public involvement or uptake how hard are these things to make for you and your your peers. Yeah well everyone has a different story because there's so many different routes there's you know different markets there's you can go your own way and kind of bespoke create your plan I mean I really didn't know what I was doing so I worked with somebody called Sam Porter who sorry Sam Parker who does know the space of it and he after a lot of kind of deliberation and chatting to this other guy Tim Exile who we launched it with this company called Endless where I made the little pieces on and we decided to go with cargo to you know put all the information and again they would go to Pernaweb Rweave and so they'd be stored on Rweave and then we would put them up on OpenSea and so we had these three different kind of pieces to it and then it was the the metadata you know we almost and in fact we actually they put it up and then I was like wait we haven't done the metadata yet um they were like oh yeah so we had to take them all down again and then go in and make sure the metadata was perfect because that's a real opportunity that we don't have in digital distribution a lot of the time is to be able to explain where it comes from who did what how much percentage might be going to a charity for example um to be able to exhibit that and be connected to that piece is you know what I've been dreaming about for music to be for so long to be able to see the history and all the people involved that it remains intact so that's exciting um but yeah other musicians do it in their own way um and that's the thing there is no kind of set place there's there's like Hickeckmunk and there's this thing over here and if you're lucky you get onto foundation and you know there's there's so many great places um and I'm sure there's a million there's probably like 20 more since I you know did my research just three weeks ago um so it is a kind of free for all right now um there is a misconception that because we only hear about the big sales uh that if you put if you put you know an NFT up you're going to make tons of money which is kind of what I thought um but um that's not the case you know you still need to work it just like anything else out there and go out and market it and you know um so the people who are successful are there who kind of living and breathing it and they're working the clubhouse rooms um and they're in the community you know and rightly so you can't just swoop in and like suddenly make a bunch of money just like you can't do in the music industry you know you've got to work at it for years and you've got to get to know your people and you've got to do your touring it's not an easy win um but it is a very exciting space and I and I do love to um share the positivity because the future is really exciting um and it will become much easier and there will be services that will take bigger cuts and it will just make it easy for artists to go up and you know put up stuff and they'll curate it and you know so I just hope that there's going to be lots of options um the thing that really does need to happen as Brendan mentioned is the identity layer how do we connect the NFT to the artist or the creator and how do we enable them to be really searchable across different um blockchains across different services um like a massive marketplace of you know every bit of art that could be out there how do we find them um and for things to be you know interoperable and transferable and um so yeah so much still to do but um and and for many artists I would actually say if you don't have lots and lots of time um maybe don't go into it right now but if you're a bit nerdy and you're curious um and you like getting stuck in then go for it because we need you and subject to by identity and metadata that's probably good time to ask you about the creative passport yeah so the creative passport um really came out of hearing about blockchain for the first time or exactly six years ago actually uh in may yeah this year um my friends that were keeping told me about blockchain um because I was lamenting about having to like have this song and then upload it and then none of the data kind of sticks to the song I'd have to go in and make sure everyone's registered you can't be sure whether everyone gets paid um and just on discovering really what blockchain and spot contracts and this kind of that world could look like if it was put in the right directions and the pieces were kind of puzzled together correctly um we could have a really fluid fast sustainable transparent um you know thriving music ecosystem with tons of services you know with songs with all of the data intact on a you know an amazing ledger that can get searched and anything you want to need to know about those songs including who to pay um would be agreed by all parties and be able to be seen um and then the identity layer which I realized was missing um from a lot of the services who're kind of building things actually for the major labels because that's where all the rights are um but not really thinking about how the musicians independently were going to benefit from these features and I kept hearing about all this service I'm like yeah but how do we how do I get a part of that and they're like well yes kind of through the labels we're doing these deals with the labels and they're like no it's happening again we're just recreating old problems in a new amazing possible space so we started to develop the creative passport which is really a digital identity for music makers at the moment it's in beta and it's actually quite static it just is a knowledge store for you know your biography your um your press picture your skill sets your websites and maybe your NFTs um whatever you want to share publicly in one place that you might want to share um kind of like a dashboard like a patch bay of information that's public and privately permissible that you can decide I want this information to be shared with these people and this information not to be shared um so you could have like I want my biography to be freely shared across all music services that come share our APIs and then you would have biography and press image always up to date always exactly as you want it um but equally if somebody wanted to cross-reference some information about you they could find it with your skill sets combined with your passions combined with your interests you know so it's really just um a base layer and at the moment we're just trying to rally together musicians to understand the importance of data um and the value in their data just on its own you know ahead of the music but just get that bit right get yourself organized and we can be prepared to allow those services of the future to to know that we are who we say we are we I am verified image and he and and I can start to plum into these services without them having to do the KYC um so at the moment it's very early stages um but really it's about kind of sharing a vision and trying to get musicians to sign up to actually but there's not really very much there um but it's just together we're going to continue to develop um this platform um because ultimately it could be that our CEO in a couple of years time um would be the DAO you know it'd be a DAO of musicians and we're just already starting to explore you know voting and governance just in a kind of soft way um where we're just about to launch a website where you can just vote basically and suggest changes I got inspired by seeing the Flamingo app uh Flamingo DAO app um page so so it's just very early stages like we don't have a way to do the KYC in terms of the person um so we do need to work with top layer kind of DID um companies um so we've actually been I mean I've done so many of those here's your passport yes I do want this crypto wallet to you know basically all that stuff I've done that so many times um but we know that it's going to become the norm you know we're all going to have a digital identity and then this stuff's going to be way easier but right now you know um as Brendan said we don't have that yet and that is slowing things down because there's this adoption that has to happen just like we did credit cards you know um we now to have that with with digital IDs and we'll have we already have our online banking um you know and we have our wallets but why not have a big identity with all the different stuff and your wallets and your your health and your creative passport and your but you know we do what we can when we can and that's what we're doing right now so I mean Brendan let's say somebody has a has that metadata in place and they got a creative passport set up one of the the less familiar issue will be how to get started and we've just had a question come in from the public through the chat which is uh well verbatim the question is how can an artist digital or freehand get into this what are the first steps so if they came to you and your platform what would you suggest as the um the best way to get going logically you uh with your own help sure so with the um you know most of the major um NFT marketplaces have facilities for creators to mint and create NFTs but that's a little bit different than a turnkey service kind of what Amogen was saying about you know if you have an overall strategy that the people you're going to want to talk to there are smart people in the community and you can reach out to different boards and and communities connected to the NFTs space in both on social media and the marketplaces and they can guide you through it and so right now you probably need a specialist but I know for a fact that there are a lot of initiatives to provide turnkey services to creators and artists so that um and those will be emerging in the next few months there's already some that are out there I can't represent any at this time but they're they're coming and you know in six months certainly this time next year there's going to be some really sophisticated offerings for a whole suite of different NFT products uh on with with established distribution and rates and hopefully um some Adele ownership or stake Amogen is talking about the distributed autonomous organizations because that unleashes the possibility that artists at all skill both those that are world famous like Amogen and then smaller ones can all participate in a network without being captive to the established distribution models and that's kind of the dream absolutely so how about how about you Dan I mean how are you making this process easier how how is palm going to streamline this and maybe help people who are either a bit nervous or maybe not that gifted technically um do what they would like to do with NFTs so we we operated two layers of the stacks so first you know the core more plumbers in many ways we create the infrastructure that enable the tech platforms and the service providers to do what they do and so in that capacity we wouldn't be interacting directly with artists but we also through the creative studio partner with creatives and Damian Hurst will be our first project of the season artists of both quite quite high stature in his world uh class world but there are other small artists we for us what we select partners based on a few criteria obviously financial impact is one of them but we're most excited by artists who have a vision for how to use the technology to push forward there are a lot of people I think just want to take something they're already doing put in an NFT and have itself with millions of dollars and that's not really how the world works there needs to be a reason and a process on what you can do with your art as an NFT that makes it more exciting and compelling as an artistic endeavor and I think we're just at the beginning of that experimentation when it's possible so if I were an artist looking to get into the space I think the first thing is to answer why none of them are in the space I think there's a number of folks who've entered it for purely financial reasons you can be quite successful in that regard but I think just like in most other financial pursuits you need to build your audience that doesn't matter the platform in terms of meeting your NFT as much as building the community engaging in finding your patrons but then there's a whole set of different partners who really want to experiment with new tools, gentlemen art, collaborative art, artwork, new financial relationship to art it's like the project like if this art piece is always on sale or other in those I would love to chat with you and I know lots of people who would love to chat with you or really in this with the creative pursuit. We have time for a couple more questions how optimistic do the three of you feel about this technology as a truly revolutionary potential do you think there's much of a risk that ultimately NFTs might be used to recreate or re-establish the current power imbalances in the media or entertainment space? I am slightly nervous about I have to say that's why it's going to be very hard to do because it's so enormous and fast spreading and there's so many independent people but I am a bit nervous for the music space that there is a history shall we say of the music industry kind of taking a very hard line on things that they don't have control over and that have the potential to you know stop the flow of innovation but there'll always be I mean certainly for anyone who's already signed because they'll be like oh no but this is a new format and therefore we need to have our massive chunk in it so that is you know slightly concerning but there's massive hope you know there's such such hope we're so early on in the time in these days and you know just in a little month of kind of or month or two of exploring this space my mind has been opened up to the possibilities I'm feeling you know really positive about my own creative output and that I am not limited finally to this you know four-minute chunk that there's this whole you know and also the collaboration side of things you know how once we will get our identities kind of sorted out and everything's into linking and nice and smooth which might take five or ten years but the idea that you know these NFTs like kind of go into virtual worlds and out over here and come out of the radio at this point and then go into that person's wallet and they skip over a stepping stone in some other program and then it does this and but everything's everyone's like paid fairly and acknowledged fairly like the all the worlds and all the different mixed media kind of come together mixed yes it's just fluid and awesome so and it just felt like it wasn't really going anywhere right now and then there's all of this explosion of possibility because there's no kind of box yet so you know I'm excited that's oh sorry yeah Brenda I think I can hear your voice please go ahead yes that's the vision I share I think I mentioned got it there there's a lot of possibilities you know everything's built on top of protocols and I think those because they're available to everyone of course there's always going to be advantages that accrue to some people but if anyone's trying to extract inordinate rents or excessive economic value from distribution then that distribution gets to go somewhere else and that's new you know in the past was a captured captive model and so this technology unleashes in my view huge new potentials and and the long tail of creators are I think and I'm very optimistic about it are going to get their due they're going to be able to create their communities and whether they're global superstars or not there's going to be a space for them to get economic returns on their creativity and the audiences that they generate I'm really optimistic about that would you agree Dan yeah I completely agree I think I think what's powerful about blockchain for NFTs for finance across verticals is not necessarily the elimination of middle man the whole sale elimination movement but rather forcing or requiring that the value that the middle man captures is commensurate to the value they create but it's no longer this disproportionate value just because of their privileged position we have open ecosystems and so I don't know a ton about music studios that sound my world but I'm sure they do some valuable things and some extractive things in a blockchain future I hope they continue to do the valuable things and aren't able to do the extractive things just because they no longer have that sort of control I really believe that we need to kind of make this space we need to augment the existing system the existing the existing services and we need to be able to highlight the good work that they do and the fact that's there will become apparent and other things will take their place and there's nothing like when they understand when when certain people understand that then then only good things can happen because if they want to survive then they need to play this fair game so I yeah I I'm very excited about that and when we have this kind of essential core protocol layer where things are able to float between services and everything is kind of clean there's just going to be a blossoming of new ways to interact with art in such a huge way and it's going to be so much easier for the users to be able to flow through them and you know know what they can do with art so hopefully we never any more questions or emails and images I want to play this in my wedding is that okay I'm like yes of course it's okay like people are terrified that they're going to be like hunted down by the police and dragged into jail for playing a piece of music at a wedding so hopefully it will just be a lot more ease of collaboration and genuine kind of yeah goodwill because nobody's worried because everybody's credited I think that often that often stops people from working together because they're just they're why they're not going to get credited or um okay so yeah I'm I'm the same I'm super positive as you can tell just um just to reign on everybody's parade of positivity I think we might be remiss in the last 120 seconds not to mention energy consumption would one of you perhaps like to comment on NFTs and your views about some of the public concern over that issue yeah so if you don't mind I'll take that one yeah please so first this is not a direct answer but I would love someone to do analysis on the energy consumption of the traditional financing the traditional entertainment distribution business with millions of people going into massive towers every day to make those systems work it's it's interesting and hard to compare apples to apples the numbers are certainly scary when it comes to blockchain but we already know that systems exist or continue to roll out that are many many orders of magnitude more efficient than the current proof-of-work standards those are coming to the ethereum ecosystem rather rapidly in ethereum 2.0 palm which will be launching imminently is sort of a million to 10 million times more energy efficient than proof-of-work systems so uh you know the first car in 1914 was massively inefficient they become more efficient over time I think the impetus and particularly the demands from creators are forcing our industry to prioritize this in a way that maybe it hadn't before and the solutions are coming to market very quickly so it's a it's a problem but one one where the technologists have heard and understood the concerns and will will make the requisite changes imminently anybody else 60 seconds or do we concur completely I concur completely yeah I mean it just is every single blockchain out there um needs to be you know completely at zero um in the future to be able to to be able to make it uh with the public you know it's good that there's this massive concern it's forcing people to get to that place quickly um and those that can't or won't are going to fall off quickly listen thank you so much for being so wonderfully accurate with your time usage and uh with that and with the deep bow gratitude to all of our guests I hand you back to the studio and ryan thank you thank you david thank you imaging uh thank you dan I what a terrific panel as you can see from looking across today and looking at our key notes this this entire week our community here at hyper ledger really encompasses not just the big money core infrastructure use cases like supply chains and central bank digital currencies they also touch on issues like the fight against disinformation and reinventing the music industry and so thank you to all of you on the panel for making that that really come to light and it's so great that we can be working on technologies like this so now let me pivot now to the close thank you all thank you yeah