Garrett Minks Of RAIR: "Not All NFTs Are Created Equal" Plus: BohoBones Music License NFTs, RECUR Series A, Epic Hero Battles Game Steals Art, And More...

||Digital Ownership: People are aware of what these non-fungible tokens do. These really awesome, unique serial numbers basically allow you to make almost anything work like Bitcoin, which is awesome.|Digital Ownership: It is a dirty secret in the space that royalties are currently siloed to the marketplace of origin. |Digital Ownership: If you support a centralized thing and they just decided that you shouldn't exist anymore, then you don't exist anymore. The same thing goes on actually writing the NFT itself to a blockchain.|Digital Ownership: You don't need to know too much. You just need to trust that the person you're doing business with knows what they're doing.  |Digital Ownership: Boho holders will have exclusive rights to certain festival events or some of our remix winners may get the opportunity to play on stage in a major festival.  |Digital Ownership: It's really about just giving utility back and rights back to creators and having a share model where you can have celebrities come in the metaverse, or in real life festival mashups.|||
September 18, 2021
Podcast
NFT 45 | Digital Ownership

 

NFTs are set to revolutionize streaming content, and RAIR is there at the forefront of this revolution. Designed to solve the thorny issue of digital ownership, RAIR and CTO Garrett Minks are focused on true authenticity, exclusivity, and durability of digital assets. In today’s episode, Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, Josh Kriger talk to Garrett about RAIR and its mission to deliver one of the best and well-considered approaches to ownership in the NFT space. We also hear from Allen Crosby of BohoBones as he drops by to talk about music and licensing rights for creators and owners of NFTs within Boho’s groundbreaking project. Tune in and get more cutting-edge NFT news in this episode.

Listen to the podcast here

Garrett Minks Of RAIR: “Not All NFTs Are Created Equal” Plus: BohoBones Music License NFTs, RECUR Series A, Epic Hero Battles Game Steals Art, And More…

Hang out for this episode to learn why all NFTs are not created equal.

Also, how snow cones helped to inspire RAIR digital rights management.

As well as, how Boho Bones is revolutionizing music rights so deeply that fans have Boho not just rattling in their bones but also inked onto their skin. All this and more on this episode. Enjoy.

This episode features guest Garrett Minks. He’s the CTO of RAIR.tech, a blockchain-based digital rights management platform that uses NFTs to gain access to streaming content. Garrett has deep expertise in distributed ledger technologies and their unique token economic incentive frameworks. He is an early adopter of blockchain innovations, digital collectibles and DLT based media platforms.

After writing his first book on distributed technologies, he realized no viable publishing platform using next wave distributed technologies existed where content could be sold and resold via immutable ledger tokens. Instead of using FANG platforms and giving the majority of proceeds to predatory intermediaries, RAIR.tech was born. Garrett, welcome to Edge of NFT.

Thanks so much for having me.

It’s a pleasure.

It’s great having you here.

Let’s jump right in. I want to ask you a question. For the readers who are unfamiliar, tell us what RAIR is and what problems are you solving? Let’s go a little bit deeper.

Many of your viewers are aware of what these non-fungible tokens do, these awesome and unique serial numbers that allow you to make almost anything work like Bitcoin, which is awesome. To be able to say, “I own this magic apple and I can send it to you and now you own it and now I don’t.” Now the whole world agrees on that. Taking it much further than a nebulous token in the sky but applying it to all sorts of interesting things, arts, collectibles, eventually real estate and all sorts of other crazy use cases. Once I found out about them from CryptoKitties way back in the day, I immediately got obsessed and then have been tinkering with how to make them more useful ever since.

It seems like we’re scratching the surface on what NFTs can do. You mentioned a few different applications but it’s like bananas. It’s much more than collectibles. Could you tell us a little bit about the technology behind an NFT unlockable content? Why should we care about encrypted streaming versus unencrypted downloads?

The amazing breakthrough with NFTs is this authentication mechanism. You can prove that you own a thing and then you can use that to ideally do stuff. This NFT 1.0 is like, “Look at this image. Look how pretty it is. I own it and nobody else does, even though everybody can view it.” Where I see the space moving is here’s your authentication credential and we’re using this giant global supercomputer to verify that I own a thing.

Metadata might be one of the most interesting parts about NFTs because, without it, it's just a serial number. Click To Tweet

Now, instead of seeing an image that everybody else can see, you can use it to unlock anything. We started with streaming video because that’s the biggest thing on the internet. If you can use an NFT to unlock streaming video, you can use it to unlock audio albums, eventually, eBooks if you get the eBook reader hooked up properly. Any media or generally, any data can be unlocked using this secure and new mechanism. That’s what gets me excited, especially about NFTs. It’s not just that they’re cool images but the future that they hold and proving that you own something and then using it to do something that you couldn’t if you didn’t own it.

We talked about these FANG platforms, which sounds Halloween-esque. You mentioned metadata too and how it’s stored and how that affects this whole equation. Talk a little bit more about the gamification of NFTs and why it matters if it’s shared or unique. How is RAIR making this process easier for folks that care about that?

Metadata might be one of the most interesting parts about NFTs because, without it, it’s just a serial number. It’s like, “I have 0x1.” If there’s a link to the giant JPEG, it’s not some random 0x1. It’s this thing that’s worth $70 million. The only reason is that there’s metadata that says it’s that way. That’s another thing that we’re barely scratching the surface of.

Metadata, as we see it now, is the image, the description and then some attributes. That’s already provided enormous value. With those attributes, the Bored Apes have different mouths, hats or eyeballs. That’s all metadata. That’s what gets those collectible spirits going, “I want the one that has this set of eyeballs and this mouth.” Only 0.1% of them do. That all comes from metadata. That’s what breathes life into an NFT. Without it, it’s just a serial number that doesn’t mean anything.

What can folks do with RAIR that they can’t do without RAIR in the context of what we talked about?

With metadata, there are a lot of folks that reuse it over and over again. That’s not how the high-value type of work operates. If you look at your Bored Apes, CryptoPunks, Art Blocks, they’re using metadata in this interesting and complex way. With Art Blocks, they’re doing all of this generative Math-type stuff to make their metadata. If you look at the run-of-the-mill NFT, that might be the same image 100 or 1,000 times. What makes number 2 different from number 1,000 if you keep sharing the same image over and over again?

In addition to our streaming tools, we’re also working quite hard on a lot of batch upload, batch optimization of NFTs to make sure that every single one of them can be unique. Even if you only provide one base image, we would then be able to manipulate that image in all sorts of interesting ways to make sure that the product that you sell to folks when you’re making NFTs using our platform is unique.

An interesting example is maybe you’re an artist and you only have this one image that you worked hard on, you can use our tools to assign a different HTML color code to every one of those images. Even if you only made one, if you wanted to make 1,000 copies of them, they could at least all be a different color at minimum.

It does put the onus on the creator. We have quite powerful tools that we’re developing. It’s up to the creator how they want to use them. Fundamentally, what we’re trying to do in all sorts of different ways is create powerful tools for creators to be able to make high-quality NFTs, if that’s making better metadata or better streaming video.

What about the flip side of that in terms of who can see the NFT? Do you guys play in that world at all?

Yes. The metadata is like the public-facing part. That’s what everybody sees. It’s the people image in the description. What we also do uniquely is we can upload streaming video and only the owner of the NFT can prove with MetaMask that they own the item and then we then can unlock an encrypted stream that only they can see.

This is beautiful. I don’t know how deep you’re going into membership sites at this moment. You got the streaming video but I’m thinking about courses. Courses are huge or even gated content. Like there is now, there’s going to be a ton of players who gate their online courseware with NFTs. It’s a matter of who’s going to get in there first and do it well and do it in a way that integrates like existing platforms do.

We’ve heard NFTs described as mini supercomputers before. In this conversation with you, specifically, I’m becoming more and more aware that there’s much more to be done. I’m curious why you don’t think more has been done yet in terms of the functionality of the NFTs and taking advantage of all the potential of the supercomputer aspect. We’ve got collectibles. We’ve got a few things and you’re trailblazing on how complicated it could be. Any thoughts on that?

NFT 45 | Digital Ownership

Digital Ownership: People are aware of what these non-fungible tokens do. These really awesome, unique serial numbers basically allow you to make almost anything work like Bitcoin, which is awesome.

 

It’s a shiny new toy, for sure. Maybe the logical first step is to do a pet rock and that sort of functionality. It’s interesting. I love that it makes people think a little bit deeper about what value is. If it’s already this valuable where it’s an image, you can imagine what could happen if it’s used as an authentication layer to then unlock things. Why exactly it’s been popular, I’m not exactly sure, especially given the state of what’s selling for such big money. I don’t judge if people want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these things. It’s great. It brings media attention and it’s positive.

The next question I want to ask you is comparing what you’re doing to other marketplaces. Other marketplaces are performing centralized accounting and not using the blockchain. Why does it matter if a project writes data on-chain for all transactions or if they don’t? What’s the difference?

A lot of this stemmed from how expensive Ethereum can be when gas prices are high. There’s been a lot of what I would call shortcuts taken to not use the blockchain very much or use it minimally. Moving forward as more people learn about what NFTs are, which is this provenance layer, if you can’t look up the thing that you own in the blockchain, then why use the blockchain at all?

These problems will get resolved with these faster networks like Polygon, Klaytn and all these other ones that are Ethereum compatible, maybe if Ethereum itself gets its act together and solves the scaling problem. It’s a temporary thing. A lot of technologists that jump into the NFT space, they’re used to centralized systems and used to using Amazon Web Services that it leaks into their products. They then end up providing an NFT without providing an NFT.

That plays into this other thing that a lot of people don’t realize and that’s that if you mint on OpenSea but you move over to Rarible and you try to sell something over there, your contract is compatible with OpenSea but you’re not going to be able to earn your royalties over on Rarible. There’s this cross-platform compatibility that’s not there. How are you guys working on that? How are you solving that problem and making it much easier for people to reap the same rewards across platforms?

That is a dirty secret in the space that your royalties are siloed to the marketplace of origin. Whoever writes the contracts, usually writes a custom way of doing the royalties. The only way that they’ll honor the resale royalty is if you use that same marketplace. That’s a perfect example. Mint something at OpenSea and sell it on Rarible. That’s not going to work. The solution that we’ve implemented is this thing called EIP-2981, which is this universal royalty standard.

The community came out with another awesome Ethereum improvement proposal. It came out in 2020. It should finally get integrated into the mainline of the Ethereum codebase. That should hopefully clean up some of this. With that, you put in this little field called royalty info. In the royalty info, you’re using a universal standard or ideally a universal standard if everybody adopts it where you can look and say, “This is what the royalty rate is.” If everybody adopts this EIP proposal, then you will have cross-marketplace compatibility. Now, everything is siloed, so just be careful.

With everything you guys are working on, is that incorporated into RAIR?

Yes. The awesome part about staying inside of the Ethereum ecosystem is that we can move to other places like Binance, MATIC and Klaytn and that same codebase will work perfectly. By them developing the universal standard on Ethereum, we’re able to use it in all of these other places as long as they’re compatible. It’s called a virtual machine. It’s the same underlying thing that the smart contract code compiles to.

I have SolPunks. Is Solana also in the mix there?

Solana is interesting. I’ve looked into them quite a bit. There’s one thing called Neon Labs. They’re trying to get the Ethereum virtual machine to work on Solana. Don’t they have Degenerate Ape Academy?

Yes. I thought about one of those. I didn’t pull the trigger.

That’s fun. We should do our own derivative. Those SolPunks at least are written in a Solana standard. It’s completely isolated and siloed onto that platform and would have no way of moving anywhere else unless somebody wrote the code to do it.

The metadata is like the public-facing part. It's what everybody sees. It's the people image and the description of the image. Click To Tweet

We’ll save that one for another day. It’s exciting what you’re doing to help the industry evolve. When we take a step back outside of RAIR and what we’ve discussed, you’ve been around a while. You talked about CryptoKitties. What stands out to you as game-changers over the next few years on the technology side? What are you excited about?

We’ve put quite a few of our eggs in the Ethereum virtual machine basket for good or for ill. At the end of the day, it is JavaScript. It’s not one of these fancy functional programming languages like Cardano has. The ERC-721, the original NFT standard, has so much value associated with it now and people like the people things. 0x1 looks nice.

Moving forward, if it’s the Ethereum itself or if it’s these dozens of other competitors that are trying to eat their lunch, it’s moving towards how we solve the scalability thing and allow people to make a high quality 721 standard NFTs. Do them in lots of places. If you want to have a lot of provenances and a lot of authenticities, mint it on several blockchains so that even if one of them goes down, it’ll still survive somewhere else.

You have an interesting technology perspective. I wanted to briefly touch on decentralized versus centralized storage and how you see that competition playing out over the next few years.

As a long-term Bitcoin person, “No keys, no crypto,” always rings true but at the same time, it’s difficult for the average consumer to even get MetaMask set up. I can see both sides of those. Maybe there’s even a bit of an evolution in a consumer where maybe they start in a custodial type product and then maybe they graduate to doing their own self custody. To get Fiat and credit card-type payments integrated throws a huge wrench in things because you’re trying to use the blockchain but you’re doing it on somebody’s behalf and that is quite tricky to balance.

Does Amazon dominate here? Do Filecoin and the other players have a shot?

Certainly. We use IPFS. Filecoin is a fancy version of IPFS. I certainly hope so. If you treat the actual serial number, the NFT itself, with all of this care to make sure that it’s being replicated on a blockchain, I don’t know why you wouldn’t also do so with the underlying data. If you have this powerful, interesting serial number, and then it’s going and rendering you an image that’s stored on Amazon Web Services, that seems like lying to me. That is the state of the state. A lot of these platforms were able to get up so quickly and scale fast. The OpenSeas of the world is using Google Cloud and things like that. They were able to jumpstart into things by leveraging these existing centralized platforms rather than doing the hard work of trying to get distributed stuff to work.

It’s version one of NFTs in the modern sense and not the CryptoKitties world. This is the mainstream version one. We got to get to the next layer here. I need to write a sweet series of Medium posts or something on these subjects. There are so many things that people don’t know. The way you’ve articulated it is very clear. We’ve hit on a few things that I don’t believe we’ve talked about before on the show and we rarely talk about in our circles but are important. People need to know this stuff. It’s critical. The cross-platform royalty question is a great example of that.

The summary of all this is that all NFTs are not created equal. Before we move on, could you expound upon what are the main ways to make it clear what went over that NFTs are not created equally that people think they are?

It’s not one thing. It’s a collection of things that make either a high-quality NFT or not. They all revolve around what you are buying. People don’t know what they’re buying most of the time. A blockchain is a bunch of databases that all agree on a shared truth. That’s why Bitcoin and Ethereum have been successful. When you see a slick-looking frontend and you see that you can click a buy button and then you see that an NFT shows up on the website, you might think that you own an NFT but you should check where they are storing this image. Are they storing it on something like IPFS? Are they using Amazon? That’s a given to the whole parlor thing.

If you support a centralized thing and they decide that you shouldn’t exist anymore, then you don’t exist anymore. The same thing goes on writing the NFT itself to a blockchain. You would think if you bought an NFT, it would exist on a blockchain. That’s also not necessarily true. A lot of places do this. It’s called lazy minting, which is an apt description of what it is because it is lazy to not put something on a blockchain but to store it on your internal database.

That makes sense. Thank you so much. It’s a transitional period. Kudos to everyone for putting in their two cents on how to make this work. We appreciate you bringing clarity of thought to the conversation. It’s much needed. Jeff, should we head on over to Quick Hitters. What do you think?

Let’s do it. It’s great info for everybody, Garrett. Thanks for sharing. It’s critical that people hear this and put it into practice when they’re buying and selling these things because it matters. Edge Quick Hitters is a fun quick way to get to know you a little better. There are ten questions and we’re looking for short, single-word, or a few-word responses but feel free to expand if you get the urge. Are you ready to dive in?

NFT 45 | Digital Ownership

Digital Ownership: It is a dirty secret in the space that royalties are currently siloed to the marketplace of origin.

 

Let’s do it.

Question number one, what’s the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?

It was The Offspring Americana CD with the little alien on it that’s eating the guy with a little leg brace. It’s such a vivid image in my mind. I was seven years old.

Question number two, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?

Probably snow cones. Everybody else was selling lemonade and then I figured snow cones.

Dare to be different.

It’s more refreshing, “I’ll 10X your refreshment over here than this lemonade.”

Some foreshadowing there with what you’re doing with RAIR, you’re taking a different path.

Where were you slinging these snow cones?

In front of my parent’s driveway, it’s free real estate.

What state was this in?

In balmy Houston, Texas.

It helps. Question number three, what’s the most recent thing you purchased?

A blockchain is basically a bunch of databases that all agree on a shared truth. That's why Bitcoin is successful. Click To Tweet

I got a 12-volt fridge to go camping with. That’s exciting.

I just came back from a camping trip. That doesn’t count if you’ve got a fridge. I’m kidding. I had an air mattress. We plugged in.

You got to have some cool beverages. Question number four, what’s the most recent thing you sold?

I haven’t sold anything in a while. I’ve done a buying binge.

That’s the problem with NFTs.

That’s true, hoarding. An old motorcycle of mine that didn’t work, I did get rid of that on Craigslist.

Question number five, what’s your most prized possession?

I do have this limited edition Vortex Koosh’s. I have the entire set all the way from the original Koosh, which shoots 90 yards all the way to the 110-yard Vortex Koosh. They’ll be a collectible. I collect weird things.

Did you have a second one you bought that you use? I would want to try it out.

Absolutely. Those are the new unboxed ones but I also have one that I play with.

I love how this almost turned like a QVC presentation. He’s like, “I have these.” I expect a little timer to show up, “You can have one for yourself.”

They may be listed. That’s true. Question number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service and experience that’s currently for sale, what would that be?

All the Facebook stock so that I could burn it all and then it wouldn’t exist anymore.

NFT 45 | Digital Ownership

Digital Ownership: If you support a centralized thing and they just decided that you shouldn’t exist anymore, then you don’t exist anymore. The same thing goes on actually writing the NFT itself to a blockchain.

 

Thank you. You freed me from the chains.

At least make an NFT out of it though at the end.

You then burn that NFT.

It is for sale but it might cost a pretty penny. Question number seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would that be?

Be a sleuth. Don’t take things at their face value. Dig in deeper. Make sure you know what’s going on. Otherwise, you might not like what it does.

You might have made a deal with the devil at the crossroads.

It’s an important trait, for sure.

Question number eight, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?

It’s a double-edged sword. Maybe not getting geeky and so lost in a vortex of time and interest. There’s probably a balance between sleuthing and over-sleuthing.

Question nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?

I was talking with my head of DevOps about Kubernetes stuff.

Last one, what are you going to do next after this?

I will probably go back to talking to my head of DevOps about Kubernetes.

You would think if you bought an NFT, it would actually exist on a blockchain. That's not necessarily true. Click To Tweet

We’re an interlude here.

That’s Edge Quick Hitters. Thanks so much. We appreciate it. What do you say we dive into some hot topics?

Let’s dive in. Let’s dive deep. NFT Game Steals Artwork, Gets Called Out, Deletes Account, “Epic Hero Battles, a blockchain-based game on the Ethereum network, was trying to sell 10,000 NFTs that consisted of a randomly generated hero and their pet. It could then be put into a battle to win either prizes or more NFTs. I’m not sure how randomly generated they would have been though because despite the well-worn, and by September 2021 shown to be entirely BS, claim that NFTs are all about artists and ownership of their work. For its main page, the game’s creator decided to straight-up steal a piece of key art from an indie game, Wildfire, which came out in 2020 and it’s pretty damn good.” On topic and hot topic.

They stole the data. It can happen relatively easily right now. If you don’t look into it, you’re not going to know what you’re buying. That’s the story there. That’s crazy, especially with these projects. Their goal is to do well, to succeed and to sell a good number of these NFTs for a good price and for them to be resold and to grow a community. It’s wild to think that you would somehow get away with that. We’ve seen this over and over again. It’s bananas.

There’s another aspect too. At first blush, you might think, “Blockchain is almost like a form of copyright.” If it’s on the blockchain, it’s copyrighted. It’s got that provenance. It is important to remember there are multiple blockchains. Maybe something can happen on a blockchain and later, somebody can mint the same thing and they can sell it to you. You can think, “It’s on the blockchain, so it must be the first one.” No. You’ve got to take a look. You’ve got to look for yourself and see what’s going on.

You learned that from our guest.

Yes, exactly.

It’s garbage in, garbage out.

Be a sleuth and figure it out. That’s a bummer. This is not the last time we’re going to see that.

One follow-up before we go to the next hot topic, Garrett, this could take a lot of time and attention as we’re discussing this. Do you have any advice for folks on going about that? Is it about finding the trusted source, finding the trusted chain? Is there more to it than that? There’s always a point of diminishing returns. Let’s put it that way. Do you have any thoughts or comments or advice on how much to invest your time and energy into this?

It is a pretty great paradox that you need these centralized oracles of truth to keep you out of trouble. Especially in distributed technologies, having a centralized source of truth that can help keep you out of trouble is quite important. How much should people have to know? I would lean on the side of you don’t need to know too much. You need to trust that the person you’re doing business with knows what they’re doing.

That makes sense. Be careful with your close relationships and partners.

Even on that topic, how many launches and we’ve seen it time and again with launches where you think you trust the folks doing it but there’s a lot that people don’t know they don’t know at this stage when they’re launching new projects and new collections. If we’re talking about the collectible realm, some of the most popular projects when they’re launched, time and again, we see this lapse in process. Individual buyers end up scooping up 1,000 of the 10,000 NFTs that came out and messing with the market. There’s some serious learning still to be had, even among those that are well-qualified to launch these things. They don’t know what they don’t know in some cases.

NFT 45 | Digital Ownership

Digital Ownership: You don’t need to know too much. You just need to trust that the person you’re doing business with knows what they’re doing.

 

Let’s hit the next hot topic here. Steve Cohen-backed NFT platform closes Series A at $333 million valuation. Let’s be careful when that doubles. People will start to be a little bit superstitious. “Riding the wave of interest in the market for NFTs, a startup with support from hedge fund mogul Steve Cohen is closed $50 million Series A. Founded by former DRW trader Zach Bruch and licensing expert Trevor George, RECUR is one of a growing number of startups operating in the NFT market where films like Dapper Labs and OpenSea have achieved unicorn status.”

This is an interesting new example. Early on in the podcast, we had a lot of fundraising announcements. Within the first 5 or 10 episodes, now we’re seasoned veterans. It was astounding to hear that this much was raised. We had an article about how much was raised or what the valuations were. Jeff made a comment, “That wasn’t much more than the people that saw.” We’re certainly getting into the territory where the businesses are putting some serious numbers on the table.

In this case, they’re going to start with the Pac-12, which is a big bridge into the mainstream. What you see with a lot of these bigger raises is this effort to move into the mainstream. Another interesting quote related to our topic today is, “We see a future where the standard for a decentralized recurring royalty is embedded, giving the creator due credit as assets are exchanged over and over again.” It’s great to see other folks concerned with the same things that you’re concerned with.

There’s that XKCD comic about all the USB and different charging, “We have thirteen standards.” “No, we’ll have the fourteenth standard.” That’s the whole point of the universal relative standard. Everybody wants their own, whereas maybe you go with the official Ethereum one and then be done with it.

There are so many people focused on it as well and improving the protocols there. It would seem to make sense. People are always going to try. There won’t be one winner. There will always be multiple. It would be nice to have a consistent standard that people agree on them.

We’ll move on to the next hot topic.

Let’s do it.

This hot topic is something new that we’re doing here, a special featured hot topic. It’s going to be fun. We’ll get you in on the conversation, Garrett. This is a special hot topic on Andy Crosby of BohoBones.com. I’ll give you a little bit about Andy. Originally, hailing from Australia with an innate talent for all things music, Andy came to the US for a university scholarship in Oregon. After graduation, he moved to LA briefly then set up for New York to join a crowdsourced live streaming new startup that would be the predecessor to the Citizen app we know today.

After the hustle and bustle of the city life in the Big Apple, Andy set out for greener pastures in the mountains of Colorado and built up a mountain retreat for his wife and son. Boho Bones is the first phase of NFT and metaverse experiential projects launched by SWIM alongside their green chain network. Boho Bones comes complete with 150 unique instrumental songs for token holders to remix, sample or reproduce as they see fit. 12,345 Boho Bones Tokens will be issued, and token holders will have complete commercial rights to a library of 150 original songs. Minting costs will be 0.8 ETH each. Let’s chat about this a little bit. Welcome, Andy. How are you doing, Andy?

Thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate it.

Andy and I met in real life at an NFT event. When I mentioned Edge of NFT, he’s like, “We’re doing something on the edge.” I have to agree in terms of giving over those commercial rights and adding so much unique music, it’s a cool project. We’re excited to have you on the show.

There’s been a great attraction to this project because that is getting the community to create. We’re about to launch our first remix comp with the community. Early adopters will get access to special VIP producer packs on top of that. It’s an ever-growing library.

What was your personal inspiration and experience to create this project and how does Boho Bones aim to reshape the music industry?

It is lazy to not actually put something on a blockchain, but to just store it on your own internal database. Click To Tweet

I’d been signed to Sony back in 2012 with a band. We had an A&R guy whose son had passed away. The project got shelved and all these rights got shelved because they decided to move on with other stuff. I thought, “That’s a waste of hard work. It would be great to give the rights back to create it.” What we’ve done here is open those doors. They can have all the commercial rights that are written in the first paragraph of our Solidity contract. If they make over $25,000, we ask them to donate 20% back to the community wallet for Boho Bone so we can give out additional scholarship grants, artist grants, music scholarships and keep the community thriving and creating.

Explain to our readers how Boho Bones is so different from other but similar NFT projects, specifically, commercial rights transfer. How does all that work? What makes this different and special?

You see a lot of the projects that might be a JPEG and its degenerative JPEG. We’ve gone and added the extra layer of putting in a unique audio track that then they can go and release on Spotify and own the commercial rights and monetize and not have anyone take any of the shares. It’s theirs. They can collaborate with the community. If they go and make $1 million, they donate back to the community wallet to keep the community thriving as well.

For folks that don’t know how the smart contract works when it comes to commercial rights, how is that baked in? How do you know that you’ve got something that’s legitimate as a buyer of one of these NFTs?

That’s all stored on the blockchain. We’ve created all the loops ourselves. We’ve registered those loops and given those rights to the actual community holders. That’s a first of a kind on the NFT side of the blockchain. Also, we’re looking at doing partnerships with certain artists who are well-known in festivals to do metaverse and IRL collaborations, whether it be big artists or DJs. That’s all stuff in our roadmap and pipeline. I can’t go into too much detail. Part of the reason for moving out to Los Angeles from Colorado was to secure some of those options. Boho holders will have exclusive rights to certain festival events or some of our remix winners may get the opportunity to play on stage in a major festival.

That’s cool. Garrett, you’re into collectibles. Does music cross your path?

Yes. If we unlock video, we can also unlock audio or any combination of the two. I was curious, Andy. It’s 0.8 Ethereum to do it. Do you have any plans to try to make it a little bit lower price point? It seems like maybe $300 or so might be a little bit tough for maybe some newcomers in the space.

There are going to be lots of giveaways. If we get to a point where we see an adoption slow, we might even pause the contract or give some back to the original holders. At this stage, our main focus was getting a flawless smart contract and reveal process and having it beautiful there and then pushing towards marketing. It wasn’t a pump and dump shill or anything. For us, this is a team that’s got a long roadmap and wants to see this work over years to come.

For us, it was making sure that the technology, the reveal process and the Solidity contract were airtight. We did a great job with that in the reveals and keeping them updated. It’s the big marketing week where the team shifted focus. It’s a pretty small team. We all shared bits and pieces of what has to get done. Everyone shifted to that marketing mode. We’ll get to the next and we’ll make a call. We’re at the tipping point where we could see big adoption real fast and we’re ready for that, too.

There is a 25% discount thanks to Ethereum.

That was 350 GWEI watch out.

Gas is no joke.

We launched on the toughest week possible. It was a public holiday weekend. Gas sometimes to mint 2 or 3 tokens was $7,000. Thank goodness, it’s calmed down. You can mint one for $20 Ethereum to value USD.

NFT 45 | Digital Ownership

Digital Ownership: Boho holders will have exclusive rights to certain festival events or some of our remix winners may get the opportunity to play on stage in a major festival.

 

You can take that same code and deploy it to MATIC or some of these other places for a penny.

We’re looking at deploying it on cross-chain but still having the main metadata housed on Ethereum. Everyone’s growing in the space and learning quickly. I like the authenticity of the ETH chain. Some of those others are bringing the transactional fee down. We’re going to try and accommodate everyone where we can.

I was excited to look through the catalog. I’m a musician. I went to school for it. I have quite a background into this as you do. It’s great to see somebody blazing the trails. It’s fun to see these loopable musical experiences. It’s fun to see the variety of them as well. I want to ask you a question, maybe about the community. First, I want to ask you, how did you approach putting together so many musical samples and having them all be interesting and have a variety and not have total duds? Is that something you can even explain? How does that work out?

We’ve got a couple of musicians and producers on the team. Everyone was riding together. I’ve also mixed and matched the records with some major labels before. I got those final copies and got through that. We’ve also got some partnerships with some automated cloud mastering that we’ll do in a Web 3.0 format in the metaverse and that sort of thing. I don’t want to get too deep into the roadmap. We also want community creating samples and having a community sound library in that access for token holders. We’re talking to lots of big artists who will come in and, hopefully, do a collab, a producer pack, a remix comp and grow the community and engaged in that way.

Speaking of growing the community, we shared what you’re up to with AJ Jackson of Saint Motel and Scott Page, formerly Pink Floyd, some of our friends. They’re pumped to chat with you more and learn more about what you’re doing.

We’re blown away to be talking to guys like that. I’ve got Saint Motel on one of my running playlists. Pink Floyd has blown me away since I was listening to music as a kid. It’s incredible this NFT space and all these incredible artists are attracted to it. It’s the start. It’s about giving utility back and rights back to creators and having a shared model where you can have celebrities come in. Whether it be metaverse and in real-life festival mashups, there’s so much we’re about to move into.

We used Saint Hotel’s Move for our intro music to the show. It takes some finagling but they were very generous in giving us those rights. It also reminded me of Jack Antonoff. He released a bunch of samples and loops and distributed those to his community and said, “Feel free to use it in whatever you want.” That’s a statement from him.

There’s nothing baked in to give those rights. There’s no actual contract for using it. At some point, one of his attorneys could get a wild hair up their ass and say, “No, you can’t use that. Just because Jack said it, doesn’t give you the rights.” What you’re doing here, the solution here, it’s pretty awesome. Those loops are sick. I enjoyed listening to those.

I appreciate it. It’s giving the right service to the community wallet, which then we fund off the contract. If we get other artists that want to be involved, it’s a way to grow the team and community and have a cool and creative new tune coming out as well.

I heard a rumor that the first tattoo someone got upon moving from Colorado to California on his inner forearm might have something to do with what you’re doing.

He got them on his chest. He got a guy called Cosmo. He lives in Mexico. He caught a bus twelve hours to Chihuahua, Mexico to get one of the first skulls that we’d created tattooed on his chest. You can check it out on Twitter. He got this incredible Boho tattooed on his chest. He’s a true Day One community supporter and a Boho fan.

Do you guys have that? We need an image of that or maybe a video with some of the music in the background or something like that. That needs to live in NFT land.

It should be in NFT. We should make a special with his tattoo and some music on it and maybe airdrop it to the first token holders.

We've got to keep everyone engaged. We can't have people panicking and quickly selling on open seas. Click To Tweet

A follow-up there, we talked a little bit about community and we know that you focused a lot on fully developing the community as opposed to whatever you could sell out right away on this type of project. Can you tell us a little bit about your thought process there and how you execute on that?

It’s keeping the message consistent. Each week, giving a little more to the early adopters, whether it be through airdrops, competitions, special packs for them and continually executing on our roadmap on time and keeping everyone updated on that. You see a lot of projects in the space and they promise the world and then after they sell out, you don’t hear from them again. It’s a complete rug pull. It’d be great to sell out on day one but that wasn’t our plan. The plan was to test and make sure we had a bulletproof contract and reveal process and then grow into the marketing after that, which is the pivot here.

We’ve got to keep everyone engaged. We can’t have people panicking and quickly selling on OpenSea. It’s communicating with them. I leave my DMs open for my Twitter account for @BohoBones.eth for the guys in the community to reach out. Some of the guys I see are grinding and reposting on Twitter and stuff and sharing their Bones. I send them from my personal ones that I’ve minted tokens and stuff like that. I’m keeping the doors always open. The community knows that they can reach out and ask questions and have them update on the roadmap and competitions weekly or daily.

Garrett, you’ve learned quite a bit about community building with RAIR and you can relate to some of these challenges that Andy mentioned.

We are taking a bit of a Software as a Service white labeling type approach where we’re giving these tools to people who can hopefully make their own communities with them. That is the difference between something successful and something that’s not. You’ve seen it with the Art Blocks and with all these other projects. If there’s not some interesting and compelling gamification reason to come back over and over again, people aren’t.

There’s this existing paradigm of, “I’m going to take an image and then make an NFT out of it.” What Boho Bones is doing is super awesome. I haven’t heard about it until now. Doing loops and samples that do generative new music, that’s the entire ethos of the NFT space. We don’t want the existing IP. I haven’t seen a bunch of Marvel IP trade for a bunch of money. It’s Bored Ape Yacht Club and Pudgy Penguins. It’s great. It’s an act of rejection of the previous IP paradigm. I am all for new stuff.

NFT 45 | Digital Ownership

Digital Ownership: It’s really about just giving utility back and rights back to creators and having a shared model where you can have celebrities come in the metaverse, or in real-life festival mashups.

 

This is fun. This is our little experiment bringing these two different topics together. Thanks for experimenting with us. Go to Boho Bones’ website at BohoBones.com. This is a double giveaway show. This is exciting. Andy, you’ve got five Boho Bones we’re going to be giving away. Is that correct? That sounds pretty awesome.

Yes. We’re giving away five.

If you’re excited about what these guys have cooking, you have a chance to join the community firsthand through Edge of NFT. Thanks, Andy, for joining us for this special hot-topic segment. We wish you the best with your project.

Thanks for having me on. Cheers, Garrett. We’re big fans of RAIR. We’ll do something together in the future, hopefully.

I’m looking forward to it.

Thanks so much, Andy.

Garrett, thanks again as well for joining us on our episode of Edge of NFT. We’d love to also share with readers where they can go to learn more about you and the projects you’re working on.

RAIR.tech is the main place. We have been a bit in stealth mode building the stuff in the initial part of this NFT-hype cycle. We do have the first couple of clients that we’re working with coming out with things. You might not see us directly. You might see the little, “Powered by RAIR.tech,” at the bottom but we will be there in the background trying to give people these tools so that they can make high-quality stuff.

We also have a little giveaway we’re going to put together with RAIR. What can you tell us about that?

We have all these interesting batch minting tools. I’ve offered to use them for an Edge of NFT to make you guys whatever you would like. We can batch mint them and airdrop them to your audience on mass. Pick the blockchain you’d like or maybe all of them. Klaytn and Polygon, they’re all quite affordable. Your readers will have to supply their 0x address and we’ll do the rest.

We’ll do something fun. Keep an eye out on our socials for all the information on the giveaways we talked about in this episode. Garrett, thanks so much for all the great info on this episode. It’s amazing. We’ve pretty much reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFT. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on the starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better.

How? Go to iTunes, rate us and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Want to help co-create Edge of NFT with us? Got guests you want to see on the episode? Questions for hosts or guests? An NFT you’d like us to review? Drop us a line at Contact@EdgeOfNFT.com or tweet at us @EdgeOfNFT to get in the mix. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.

Important Links:

About Garret Minks

Deep expertise in distributed ledger technologies and their unique token economic incentive frameworks. An early adopter of blockchain innovations, digital collectibles, and DLT based media platforms. After writing his first book on distributed technologies, he realized no viable publishing platform using next wave distributed technologies existed where content could be sold and resold via immutable ledger tokens. Instead of using Kindle Direct Publishing and giving the majority of proceeds to a predatory intermediary, RAIR was born.

Top Podcasts