 And we are live. What's up everybody and welcome to my makeshift ghetto studio As you can see I have a mic in my hand my office is Inaccessible at the moment and but the reason why I'm here is like I'm a good friend Matt and you know I know each other for I don't know a year and a half something like that right now give or take Yeah, something like that and You know lately we've been talking a lot about NFTs and I in my mind I think Matt's probably one of the top guys in the world when it comes to NFTs It's a non fungible tokens and so the premise of our kind of talk today or episode today It's kind of talking about what our NFTs where we are currently NFTs and where do we have to go with NFTs for them to actually be? I would say accessible plus also usable on a global aspect so Matt like based on your let's say Research lately I'll ask you two questions. Number one is in your words. What are NFTs and then number two? Where are we currently? Well, we lost your audio technical difficulties Literally we had it a second ago That's odd Bear with us guys While we try to figure out the audio It was all working in Pre-production testing, but for some reason it's not look working in live. Very odd Huh? Ugh, this mic moves around too much Hmm. You want to log out and log back in maybe that'll work Let's do that bingo All right guys bear with us Matt will log out log back in it's cool hangouts. What do you expect? So much like invent like a legitimate Video podcasting solution where it's like an all-in-one suite We're like you log in the guests to side-by-side and there's transcripts and audios, but yeah Alright, so we see your mic is muted. Oh We hear something You might get some feedback. Can you hear me? We can hear you Okay, um, that's interesting because I've shut down all apps. I can't even see myself We hear you but your feedback, okay, hold on. Yeah, no worries this This should work. I'm just gonna turn you down really quiet. Can you hear me sure feedback? We're good. We're good Okay So we're talking about yeah, what our NFTs and where we are currently with them Yeah, exactly. So first of all an NFT is a non-fungible token What does that mean? Well, it's kind of hard to understand without understanding fungibility So fungibility is just simply a property of of money. So it's like cash. So ERC 20 tokens which obviously the standardization of those led to a big boom in Basically the ICOs and the token sales because everyone and their dog could could basically publish in the ERC 20 Now those tokens are fungible Which means that you know if a mirror has 20 of the 20 of a Particular token and then I have you know 20 of a particular token and we swap those tokens then basically We're right back where we started. So fungible tokens are kind of like cash It's no different than you know thousands of years ago people used shells salt silver coins and Basically these are these are just this is just money. So non fungible tokens are a bit different They're more like baseball cards or stamps. So each one is unique. It's part of maybe a limited edition run It's got a unique kind of image or attributes or properties. So in a kind of a tribal sense It's a bit more like like masks or jewelry and these kind of denote maybe that somebody is more More special or higher ranked than another person because of the attributes of the of the mask or the jewelry And in modern day sort of stuff It's kind of like baseball cards or or magic cards And that that's non fungible tokens right now. So what's really interesting is we're at an interesting time in the space The standard just got finalized There was a last-minute kind of breaking change But but it got it kind of got pushed through and it's actually kind of good that it does it helps with a lot of extensibility If we want to get more technical we can go into that But let's just stay on the surface for now and just say, you know ERC 721 on Ethereum has been standardized. There's a there's a great standard interface a lot of really smart people were involved in that it was originally proposed by By Dieter Shirley from axiom Zen also known as the company that produced crypto kiddies He originally proposed it back in September and then it got standardized by the community and William and Rickon is one of the guys or as he's better known as at full decent was one of the guys who really Kind of took up the torch and finalized the standard. So that's what's going on right now Where would you where would you say most people are kind of focusing on the use cases for it? That's a good one. So right now the use cases. I mean games are just exploding right now. So Basically, the reason is is anyone can kind of create characters that are represented by NFTs These NFTs can can level up So, you know as you play the game in a in a provably fair way the characters can kind of gain attributes and and kind of go up in rank and then You know, this is all done. It's provable through sort of a master game contract that That governs how upgradeable these tokens are so that's kind of how That that's a really big part of how NFTs are being used But there's other interesting aspects of them like identity Like sort of representing an avatar on different websites. So right now we could do that with our ethereum wallet But I guess, you know, Amir you'll understand this this this drawback right away If I use my ethereum account to use that as a login or to represent my identity on a website and then Let's say I want to pass you the credentials I mean with with an ethereum account if I give you the private key you You have no idea or sorry You have no way to change that private key and you don't know if I've copied it down somewhere So now we have this sort of leaky account kind of Issue right where you know, you don't know if I still have the private key and you don't know if you have kind of full Control over this account now and and nobody else is going to log into it But with an NFT we could actually transfer the ownership of an identity from one account to another so that's something that I think is is a really powerful aspect of of a Non-fungible token so a unique token to represent Avatars represent identity represent logins represent software licenses I see we're going on a tour now Where we headed you're gonna walk into my apartment are you? No addition We're going over to see horizon I'm not gonna bug me yet. No, that's cool. Go back to Go back to the identity part kind of dive into a bit more because that's a fascinating aspect of it Right so the same challenges that face identity on the blockchain with something like civic or status And you port it's the same challenges, you know, basically you take some account some unique hash Some unique public key and you need to verify it. You need the same level of KYC Let's call it claims attestations or or whatnot about that unique hash you you ID for that that identity You still need to do the same amount of work now if you just do it with a non-fungible token then And basically the identity is not something, you know something really really truly Scarce in the real world. So let's say it's just a virtual avatar And then this avatar gets access to software licensee is or gets access to special areas in a video game or special Experiences online then you can actually transfer it and you can't do that with With a public like a public private key pair because I explained before, you know We would have that sort of leaky leaky private key issue So that's where I think NFTs really shine. I mean You know fungible tokens are are they are scarce? Units, but they're indistinguishable. So, you know, it's just a bunch of it's essentially a bunch of you know, gold dust on them Oh, I think we dropped you on the audio. I think Google's being evil today They're practicing their number one slogan They say don't do evil. Let's the opposite. Yeah, no audio everyone saying that. Hmm. You know what we can do If this is giving us problems, man, we can just reschedule to make things easier You want to do that or no, I should be back. Oh, I think you are back man. Yeah, we're good Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. Okay. Can you hear me? Yeah, we're good. We're good. Can you hear me? I can hear you Okay Sorry about that, you know when in doubt switch to the phone Um, here we go. There we go. Okay. I'm back So, yeah, just talking about Identity use cases and for NFTs, there's also lots of other other use cases So you see a lot of things happening in games. So rare items and basically People are using them to do, you know, there's a there's a few different types of blockchain games. I Forget the write-up, but it basically had, you know, sort of there's full blockchain games So everything is happening kind of on-chain about the game then there's sort of Different layers on top of that. I think it was one of the guys when user feeds was publishing some some information about that So, you know, the the scarcity happens on-chain and then and then you build user Interface layers on top of that what I think is really interesting about the fact that some aspects of blockchain games can exist on-chain and Other aspects can happen in game contracts and then even more aspects can happen in the user interface is that you can have these scarce assets actually Actually move from game to game. So someone could jump into a game They start as a peasant and they go around, you know Beating sheep over the head and earning some experience points and they choose to become You know a warrior or a wizard and then they they get more experience points They move themselves up in the ranks and then they lift that character out of the game They sell it on a decentralized marketplace like rare bits or open C for NFTs And then another player buys it and then they drop it into another game and all of a sudden they're You know, there's some mechanic in a game like Team Fortress and they're building turrets. So it's It's really interesting to see that these these assets could be could be granted Sort of like visibility in other interfaces other games and buy other game contracts So the question comes up and I've received this question before why would an indie game developer do this? And I I basically said, okay. Well, you've got instant players, you know Why why did somebody build a game an interface game on top of crypto kiddies called kitty race? because they they've made money because people race their cats so It was a it's a whole kind of new realm of permissionless innovation It brings up for games. It brings up some interesting Questions and that is one of them is if a player can immediately drop into your game And let's say it was a role-playing game as a level 17 warrior How do you start the story from there? How do they find out everything that happened to them if they simply just bought a level 17 warrior on a Decentralized marketplace and then dropped into this brand new game experience So there's there's a lot that's gonna be unpacked in the next the the next few years. So it's really interesting space That's pretty cool. But you were mentioning something before how you can have NFT that owns other I can't believe it Go ahead Is what you told me earlier is pretty interesting not earlier today But before where you're mentioning how an NFT can be an can be an owner of multiple different tokens Yeah, that's right. So Basically, I'm also working on a standard called composables and that would be for composable non-fungible tokens and it I'll kind of introduce the concept. So basically you would have a non-fungible token that would represent a virtual basket, so it's like a a Crypto bag and inside that bag you could put a bunch of other non-fungible tokens. So you could put a few crypto kitties And then you could also fill them up with with ERC 20s of different projects So you could have a bunch of balances of ERC 20s all from different contracts and the reasoning behind this or one of the key motivators is that Right now if if you or I if I wanted to give you a basket of a bunch of Crypto assets and I wanted to say okay, here you go Amir I'm gonna start off, you know your crypto your crypto account with a bunch of this stuff and it was you know a crypto kitty and another an ether bot or an ethmoji a couple of other non-fungible tokens and some ERC 20s of some really Cool projects where you would be able to try out their betas. So if I wanted to start that off again I share you my private key of this account, but then you don't know if what I'm doing You don't know if that wallet is safe. So I You know in any event you would have to transfer out each one of those in order for it to be safe So you still face the same problem. So I think that Composable non-fungible tokens solves this problem of basically having one token Where you can transfer the ownership of that wholly and sort of provably on the blockchain Trustlessly and then from there you're free to do with those tokens Whatever you want and the idea with the standard is that you don't actually have to take them out of the bag to transfer them out Or to do anything with them you can actually reach inside that bag and and grab the items that you're interested in and Use them in those specific projects. So that's the the motivation behind that standard not from a like a tech standpoint like how far away do you think we are from Using this from a scalable aspect like crypto kitties obviously cause a congestion and theorem network You know in our office, we have a great video game company building something for building off-chain solutions but in your best Let's say judgment how far off do you think we are from actually having Scalable solutions to build on a grand scale Do you are you do you mean NFTs or just kind of like blockchain games the space in general? So sorry say that again. Are you are you asking about scalability of for example blockchain games? Just the space in general or just For example an empty with blockchain games one example when they can do with their own unique variation But then you have an FT for all these different you can have an FT for example with Tickets, you know Substituting for like ticket masters. You can have an FT as you mentioned for identity Generally speaking per se like based on these ERC 721 contracts You know need to how far off do you think we are from at least getting some momentum on to the scalability aspect of it Sure, so that's a really interesting question. Um, as far as I know Um, a lot of the state channel tech that's being built right now is based around Basically fungible tokens and sort of making transfers between parties now. I think that There's not there's not too much Sort of that that's not that's not a similar situation to that a bunch of parties would need to jump on to To a state channel and basically All agree that they're going to to swap non fungible tokens and then basically we're moving around the ownership of these UU IDs or integers of these tokens In these in these in simply a one contract So a non fungible token is is just a contract Like a like a fungible token is so I think that the As far as I know, I I don't know anyone building those state channels right now I do know of sort of the generalized state channels and counterfactual and and things like this And I don't know how far we are away from that, but But yeah, that that's sort of what would need to happen is somebody needs to make a sort of uh An abstract or generalized state channel just simply around non fungible tokens That would obviously be the first step off Are you gonna do that? Sorry You're tired. Are you are you talking to lia or something? Uh, but no, that's it. Yeah, it's for me. It's always like I see so many amazing use cases for For me, it's like, okay. It's a timing correct What's the adoption curve for this? How easy it is to implement in a legacy system? Is it difficult to implement? It's like You know all these like unknown questions come into play Absolutely, um, so I think that uh, you know, one of the things that was really um, really unfortunate was Something like crypto kiddies did clog up the ethereum blockchain I mean and and you know, if you're going to do this all just with smart contracts on the main chain It's obviously not the best approach. Um I think that projects especially if you're doing games, especially if you have to look at where the actual digital scarcity is being transferred. So and when the transfers are happening, um So I think that blockchain games where you can find items and their non fungible tokens You can go to the the the store in the game and you can trade your game gold for non fungible tokens You can meet another player and you can trade non fungible tokens inside a marketplace inside the the game I think all of that Needs if it's going to be happening rapidly like let's say somebody's playing for two or three hours And it's going to be happening non fungible token transfers, maybe a dozen 24 of them Then you scale up and think about you know games that have a lot of adoption even just with A thousand players. I mean it's it starts to become Uh pretty wild right so that we have one game on the ethereum blockchain attributing to uh, you know tens of thousands of Non fungible token transfers not only that the cost to your to your users is is quite high So I think we need to explore those scaling solutions and thankfully, you know in in generalized state channels and Um and other sort of more specific state channel tech that we've already seen rolled out in betas on the main net It's very exciting time right now to be developing on ethereum And these this state channel tech is is just evolving every day. It's getting better and better So I think that seeing a non fungible token State channel a specific one that can be used for different projects right away would be Uh would be coming down the pipe like shortly And then seeing an actual sort of generalized one that can be used for multiple non fungible tokens and maybe fungible tokens purchasing non fungible tokens from something like a Like a market or a store contract inside a game. I think that that could be happening. Um, probably I don't know. I don't want to make any predictions. But like, you know, maybe three months on test snatch six months Make the prediction. I was about to ask you that's your prediction. Okay. I got my my crystal ball here And I have an interesting thought though, uh, for example, we're gonna have ethereum We're gonna have all these like side chains coming out and or ethereum competitors coming out. Whether that is polkadot, you have cosmos you have aeon, etc, etc It's like, okay If I want to create like say nfts on all these different platforms, are we able to communicate with these nfts from cross platforms? That's something I I think I would really like to see. I mean right now Can we can we export and import erc20s across chains? I know that the metronome project was working on that basically saying that, you know, they wanted to create a fungible token Um, and the sole purpose of the fungible token was to be basically be able to live on any smart contract chain that can in fact encode Fungibility in a smart contract kind of way. So whether that's a, you know, a non-turing complete scripting language that still allows you to create Fungible tokens on like general purpose kind of fungible tokens on on this general purpose blockchain Or whether it's sort of like an EVM like a root stock or something like that So, I mean that was a really interesting project for me And I dove deep into that just to just to sort of figure out and obviously it was Jeff Garcic So you had to kind of pay attention a little bit And I just kind of looked into the tech behind that and I thought hey, you know what that that's really not that uncommon because you know chains like Like one chain they you know, they kind of do a token sale They sell in the rc20 and then when they launch their main net they do a they do a token swap Right, so they let you kind of they let you import your rc20. They burn it They they create it on their end on their own chain Um, so I think that hopefully we're getting to that kind of cross chain functionality I know that the team on aon is working on that as well and there's there's an interoperability alliance between One chain Zillica a on and maybe some others. Um, so it's exciting stuff. I think NFTs Just around the corner, but again, it all comes back to Maybe having a proper sort of standard around around these tokens and and like I mentioned when we first jumped on the call ERC 20 obviously got standardized pretty quick Fungible tokens on a general purpose blockchain great idea, right? basically We have the main chain with our accounts and balances of ether and then we've got our Our other tokens that we launch on top of the ethereum blockchain In a smart contract. So every smart contract that is an ERC 20 token Simply launches another mapping of accounts and balances that maintains this this new Fungible token. So that's an incredible sort of You know rallying behind a standard interface by the community. What does that mean? That means that applications Wallets exchanges can all implement any ERC 20 token that conforms to that standard By simply adding another address or letting the user add another address. So I don't know You know what your audience is like, but I mean You know, I've added custom tokens to my metamask Especially when I was learning solidity and I wanted to you know Go through the tutorials make my own ERC 20 token and just see what it was like So this is a really interesting aspect. So Now that ERC 721 is finalized you could see the same thing happening with non-fungible tokens and then this leads to interoperability. I mean it's it's sort of like, you know Basically a consistent data And functional interface that we can we can rely on across chains Um, I think even neo and maybe you could clear that up for me. I'm here. I think neo implemented like the n e p 5 Which is their fungible token standard as well right, so it's It basically has the same kind of properties or at least there's a mapping there. Um between the two so You know, could you actually burn? Some project that was on neo. I can't think of any off the top of my head Could you burn those tokens and then and then bring them on to the ethereum blockchain? Could you actually do it? You think we could you think we can do it like, you know, they have atomic swaps Well, we're super early in the atomic swaps, but you think it'd be possible to do like atomic swaps NFTs in the future I think so. I think actually that would be uh That would be a really cool Really cool use of them and I think that actually, uh, you know Not quite an atomic swap across chains But something that that kind of was funny that came out a couple of weeks ago was that There's a project called crypto dragons or something like that and they were basically offering people to uh to burn their crypto kitty um in exchange for a brand new shiny crypto dragon and you know, that's kind of like, uh That's where um This whole permissionless innovation I was describing earlier with all these different game layers and things can be used across different games I mean, maybe that's perhaps a different a different take on permissionless innovation than than most but it's still Ah, it's kind of you know, it's playful. It's kind of funny. Uh, it's interesting Cool man. So if you had to say, um Your predictions the next three months in the whole space. What what do you see? So I actually, uh, I I have a bit of a Uh, kind of a strong opinion around this and and that a lot of a lot of the early exuberance and projects from from 2017 Um, they were building protocols. So basically, you know, their own token powered protocols and building a layer in between Um, so I'm gonna use my hand here There's sort of the core ethereum blockchain and then there's sort of the the application layer So wallets exchanges decentralized apps They were building their their protocols in between there and trying to kind of provide Uh, a level of service and and you know, some of the projects were, um You know, I don't want to offend any projects out there But they were they were a bit naive and you know, they're saying that they're going to offer Um, something that is very very kind of abstract in general. So something like um Something like a fungible token or offering a protocol Um, where they said, you know, we're gonna we're gonna basically offer Non fungible tokens, but in order to get these non fungible tokens, you'll have to get our fungible token first So these kind of uh projects are, you know, they're they're kind of selling themselves as protocols when they're really abstract And and they're really they really should be sold as standards So I feel strongly that in between core the core ethereum blockchain Um or other blockchains, um There's a lot of work that needs to be done on scaling, uh, you know, they're working on sharding They're working on changing consensus mechanisms and all sorts of stuff and that and adding new op codes to the to the smart contract language And and the the ways that you can publish contracts and call functions on the blockchain in between core And in between the application layer, which we all know and experience through wallets and exchanges and dApps um, there's sort of there there is protocols or sorry, there are protocols like uh, like zero x for trading tokens And it provides a token that allows you to collect fees from trading tokens But there's also standards. So there's also erc 20 and erc 721 now and a bunch of other standards So I kind of see this space Is sort of emerging as sort of a a wavy space where we're starting as a community to figure out the lines between You know, what should be abstract general purpose standard on top of core? That can be leveraged by protocols to do something that is truly unique truly bespoke and special Um with their smart contract protocol. So I see that that this is still in between core and application This is still a wavy kind of space of sort of standard and protocol and I think that we're going to start to see um more standards being proposed because it actually helps more uh of the of the genuinely useful protocol projects Uh, basically get adoption and traction. Um And now why would you standardize? You know something like a fungible token or a non fungible token? Well, as I mentioned before it allows wallets and apps and and decentralized exchanges to basically instantly add new Um new tokens to their to their interface Um by basically just adding another contract address So I think that standards really help to to alleviate the burden on the application layer And then of course, you know, if if those applications don't have to worry about how they talk to the ethereum blockchain and these different protocols And they can basically speak through standard interfaces Then they can focus on what's really important Which is user adoption and good ui ux and basically onboarding new users into crypto assets So that's sort of where I kind of see the space going is an increase increased importance in standards alleviating the burden on application developers so that any Any web developer in the future should literally be able to you know MPM install marketplace and then take it from there and create Some kick-ass ux and and get a lot of people on board their their dat Well said man, I pretty much concur with everything that you said, uh, people want to get a hold of you or get a contact Are you what's what's the best resource? Sure. Yeah, uh, you can find me on twitter. Um, it's it's a little long But uh, it's it's m-a-t-t matt uh d And then my last name is l-o-c-k y-e-r or you know lock your lock your lock your tokens up And you can also find me on medium under the same handle matt d lock here Um, yeah, that's that's the kind of the two main spaces that I sort of I'll make sure that I put in the show notes below so everyone has access So then how do you recommend you guys follow matt like he puts out amazing information on twitter And is a really good writer as well and specifically if you're into nfts or anything within the erc 721 family Fuck and follow him. Trust me Sounds great, uh, thanks for having me on amir and uh, yeah, lots of interesting projects in the nft space coming out Um, just a quick shout out if if you don't mind, um So a lot of really good works being done by by the zero excerpt team and sort of those identity tokens I mentioned earlier and validating the kyc for those tokens. Um, that's that's really interesting Just some breaking stuff like coming out literally today And they've got william and ricken as an advisor and he's the gentleman. He's at full decent who basically wrapped up the The 721 uh standard literally last week. So this is all just happening right now, which is exciting times for the space um, and then also, uh, I'd have to mention, um, the nifty conf happening in hong kong July 24th to 26th. So that can be found at n i f t y dot g g Ni f t y blocky will be helping them out too. Thanks for the oh, that's awesome. Yeah, that's right. I saw free education Yeah, um, so that's actually, uh, it's a cool. You mentioned blockies It's actually a conference and a hackathon and we've got a lot Like we've got some of the best projects in the space coming The guys from loom are doing you mentioned state channels. They're doing incredible work on state channels axi affinity incredible looking game and game design coming out coin artist from neon district, which is a game that's a it's it's a bit in teaser stealth mode right now They're they're on there. They're coming out soon and uh, they're they're all going to nifty and they're all hacking And they're all getting together as a community, you know to figure out how we actually Build these things together and like I said, you know Different projects are going to do very unique and different things with non fungible tokens But we should really come together around the abstract standards and the interfaces that Make it easier for for wallets and exchanges to kind of support these assets because that's where That's where a lot of the the permissionless innovation and and stuff is going to happen Also, want to give a shout out to my own channel that I've been working Really hard on and my own standard basically composable non fungible tokens. It's erc 998 So or cnfts or crypto composables And all the discussion for that is happening on a discord channel called nifty magicians that has about Over 180 members now and there's a some fierce discussion about the future of the space and and a lot of it's around games So if you're if you're into blockchain games and you're into nfts Check out nifty magicians and I'll I'll throw a mirror that the link for the show notes as well Awesome, man. Thank you, brother. Like always talk to you soon then Talk to you soon. Take care. Bye