 Hi everyone, I hope all is well. My name is Tom Farron. I'm a tech writer at Cointelegraph and usually you can find me writing articles over on the website but today I'm on the YouTube channel. I'm going to be chatting with Juventus and Italian national footballer Federico Chiesa and the founder of Huffer Gallery and NFT platform, Elio the Anna, about the launch of the creation platform and Chiesa's inaugural NFT collection. Federico, I wanted to come to you first. Congratulations on the successes in the summer for the European competition. How does it feel like reflecting on the past six months of that success? How does it feel to be a winner of that competition? It's a pleasure to me to be here, to be interviewed by you, by Cointelegraph. It's just amazing and creating this new collaboration with Elio, with the offline creation is just great. The whole point of the collaboration of these artworks is on the European Championship. It was just amazing to win such an important tournament for your country. I think I still need some time to realize what actually I've achieved during the summer. It was just an unbelievable moment. It's difficult to have it again in the future because it was just something incredible, just incredible. A lot of people said that you were one of the best players at the tournament, so congratulations. Thank you. I know you're an advocate of the NFT space. You've got a keen interest in the space. I know you've got a few NFTs yourself from the Huffer Collection, from some of the recent exhibitions. What aspect of NFT is really interesting to you? Is it the art side, the technology? Is it the potential for growth? The thing that got me the most about this project with Elio and now it's an offline creation about creating my new NFT was just the art side of it. I was a big fan when I was traveling with my family in foreign countries. We used to go and see museums of art paintings and everything, so it was just amazing. Having the chance to create in this modern era, my painting, my virtual painting was just amazing. The idea of creating an artwork, an actual artwork, even if it's digitalized, but it was just great. What kind of story are you trying to encapsulate within that? What story are you trying to tell with that artwork? As I mentioned before, in these artworks, we were trying to get the most out of what I've experienced throughout the championship, throughout the tournament, my emotions and especially one of the NFTs, this artwork, it was about my celebration after I scored the goal against Austria. We just tried to replicate the emotion, the feelings on this artwork. That's really good. What's the ambition for the NFT? What's the goal from your perspective? My goal was to give something to my fans. After the Euro, of course, I had a massive increase on followers on Instagram and everything, so I wanted to give something back to my fans to have. On the 29th of December, everything is dropping, so I'm hoping for the best. That's great. Good luck with that as well. Elio, I'm going to come to you now. I know that the Huffer Gallery has quite an established history with crypto currencies. I know when I visited the gallery, I researched a lot about it. Since 2018, you've been engaged in that space. What kind of inspired you to collaborate with a Federico on this initiative? We were, first of all, so blessed to be able to collaborate with someone of the caliber of Federico. We were, for a long time thinking, let's go and propose this. When it just took a second, Federico was like, are you really asking me to make my own NFT? I was like, yeah, that's right. He was like, I love it. It was my pleasure. It took about two seconds. It was done. Then it was like, okay, we can talk about something else then. Apparently, he had some good friends that were kind of pushing him, oh, you should really do that. I think we're living in a very particular moment in history. I think it's all about the timing. It's about finding that person that can represent that moment in history. I think Federico Chiesa was the perfect, the best possible candidate we could ever wish for when it came to doing our first ever non-strictly fine art NFT. It's the first time we actually collaborated in making an NFT for someone that's in the sport industry and entertainer and so on. With this new platform creation, the whole concept is that I think the only aspect that's pushing people away from acquiring NFTs is obviously these very high gas fees that are in Ethereum. What we've done with the creation platform is that it's built on Solana. For the end user, you don't really feel the difference because all you're doing is you're getting a phantom wallet instead of a metamask wallet. Effectively, the purchasing experience is the same, but it costs a fraction. You buy an NFT for $1. That's amazing because sometimes, and then you can buy a collectible NFT like this one, but in some cases people were trying to buy something and I think the prices were becoming astronomical in so many aspects. They're scaring people away and I think this is not about doing something that is only for a very high end collector and a very top of the pyramid sort of buyer. We wanted this to be, as Federico said, something for the fans, something for everyone. Of course, there's an auction which we don't know where it could potentially reach, but there is also an addition of 2500 of an NFT which will give effectively 2,500 people the opportunity to own an original work by Federico Chiesa. I saw a little bit about, in the future, you're going to work with more sports people and also entertainment. I'm not going to ask for names specifically, but are you going to go down a similar route with that, with the Salana as opposed to Ethereum, just because of the high entry fees? Our HoFa.io platform is built on Ethereum, is already out there on Beta, since quite a few months now, but that will focus strictly on fine art artists that have a background in being exhibited through galleries. We're keeping a very curated, more high-end approach, but with creation we really wanted to do something slightly more open, something that can embrace also entertainment, sports, music, also some gaming aspects. We wanted something, perhaps also perhaps for a younger generation, maybe, but definitely more accessible. In order to make something accessible, Salana was the best solution for us. We worked hard in making this platform. Federico, coming back to you now, you might be aware that Juventus partnered with SochiOS.com in 2018 to release a fan token. We've heard a lot about how this affects from the fan side and how fans are becoming quite receptive to these new initiatives. As a player, how does that impact you and what's your perspective on that? As Elio mentioned, we're living in a moment that we need to make people understand the possibilities that come with the NFT and all these platforms that you mentioned, and it's just great. It sounds like something in the far future, but it's just happening right now. I think the whole thing about this is making them connecting even more to you, to the club, the emotion side of things. It's all about emotion, football. Having this interaction, even if it's digitalized, it's great. I agree with that. Elio, coming back to you now, what are your expectations for this going into 2022? Do you think we will see that mainstream adoption that a lot of people talk about? I think so. I think 2022 would be an absolutely defining year. We'll see a lot of mainstream adoption in the NFT and tokenization space. Do you think specifically NFTs or just the wider crypto space? I think the wider crypto space, I think what hasn't been explored yet on a major scale is obviously tokenization with something being owned by a multitude of people, so basically a crowd ownership of something, which means things can be funded by the general public and this can be done all via blockchain. I think it's amazing because I remember some story, there's a pub in London that was going to get closed shut down and all the locals loved it, so they all decided to put some money all together and they kept this pub going. I think that's a perfect example of something that could be a business that's just not able to survive, but they have a beautiful business model and maybe it's something that's really worth keeping and they can just reach out and via the technology they can get funding and everyone can benefit from this directly through the blockchain with transparency of ownership. I think there are many examples of real-world use where both NFT and in general the tokenization models can become very interesting for the real world. Yeah, I agree with that, definitely. Federico, we hope you get back to fitness as soon as possible. Thank you for your time, it was just a pleasure having this interview with you and yeah, I'm coming back. Great to hear, great to hear. Okay, thanks a lot guys, I appreciate that.