Boson Protocol is developing the underpinnings of tomorrow’s virtual shopping experience. Physical items will be ordered through virtual marketplaces using decentralized technology. Game theoretic smart contracts will ensure trust and reliability. Amazon won’t be the only resource that can guarantee your purchases will be shipped on time and received as advertised. Learn more about the unique and powerful technology of NFTs encoded with game theory with Jonas Seiferth, the Head of Strategy at Boson Protocol. Join your hosts, Eathan Janney, Jeff Kelley & Josh Kriger as they quiz Jonas Seiferth on Boson’s technology and vision. On a personal note, learn a little about Jonas’s lifestyle and perspective as a young person in tech. As always, we’ll also cover the day’s hottest topics in NFTs.
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Jonas Seiferth Of Boson Protocol, Building The Future of dCommerce, Plus: World Wide Web Code NFT, JAY-Z Reasonable Doubt NFT, NFT-Powered Digital Comic, And More…
We’re all here at the show and ready to dive in.
This episode features guest Jonas Seiferth who is the Head of Strategy at Boson Protocol, a decentralized commerce ecosystem where all participants share in the value they create. Boson Protocol automates digital to physical redemptions with minimized arbitration using NFTs encoded with Game Theory. Jonas, welcome.
Thanks for having me.
Jonas, let’s get to know you and what Boson Protocol is all about. You guys connect the real world with the meta world. Can you walk our readers through how that works?
What we’re doing there is what we call digital to physical commerce. If you want to buy any digital on-chain goods, that’s automated and trustless. If you buy an NFT on any platform, you don’t have to trust that platform necessarily. It’s going through a smart contract and you have these nice guarantees that in the end, you will receive the NFT you buy or you want to buy. What we’re solving with digital to physical commerce is how do you get to the same thing for real-world physical goods.
In eCommerce, we have this fundamental basic trust problem which is, if I want to sell this item to you, be it in the metaverse, in a virtual world or in an online store, as a buyer and seller, how can I trust you that you’re going to send me this item if I give you the money? We solve this with centralized platforms to take on this risk and trust and mediate these transactions. What we want to accomplish with what we’re doing with our core exchange mechanism and NFTs encoded with Game Theory is that we enable people to buy and sell things online without relying on a third-party. It’s the same as how you can create your NFT or buy and sell NFTs without relying on trusting a third-party.
This is a follow-up to that. If I buy something on Amazon, let’s say it doesn’t show up or something like that, I’ll complain, “This didn’t show up.” Maybe they have some record that they shipped it. It’s like what they do with credit card companies, they chalk it up to the cost of doing business. They maybe send you a second one or something like that. Are you saying that the platform that’s being built to the ecosystem and being structured here is going to delete the need for that like, “I’ll send you a second item.” Is it that it will help facilitate that?
It’s exactly what you said. It’s Amazon’s business model that they create this trusted environment and get through these network effects. You can buy carelessly on Amazon because you know that if it doesn’t show up, you can go to Amazon, complain and they will make you whole. This introduces a lot of problems because then you have Amazon building a monopoly through this role. What we’re saying is instead of a buyer and seller having a centralized party, facilitating the transaction and having the trust, you have an escrow contract. It’s a smart contract in the middle that facilitates the trust between buyer and seller and there is no third-party involved. It’s the buyer, the seller and a smart contract. This is not fundamentally a platform model. You can think of it as more of a primitive that can be used by everyone wanting to buy and sell physical things.
Can you tell our readers what is an NFT encoded with Game Theory? What does that mean?
The fundamental way we achieve this trust-minimized exchange of real-world things is that we don’t try to tokenize real-world assets. If you think back to the 2017 approach, a lot of projects tried to tokenize real-world goods and are still doing it now and that is quite challenging. If you get to it, it can be quite expensive. What we do is we tokenize the commitment, a promise to exchange something and we do that in the form of an NFT. As a seller, when you create an offer for an item, you create what we call a commitment NFT. It’s the promise saying, “Whoever buys that NFT has this IOU promising whoever holds that NFT can redeem it for the real-world thing.” These are NFTs.
The Game Theory comes in with the rules by which to exchange is governed. You have this commitment NFT and then it gives this IOU. It gives you the right to interact with this escrow contract and call certain actions in this escrow contract of rules that facilitate the exchange. This might be something like signing for redemption. If you want to get the item, you redeem and only the person with the NFT can call redeem.
In the next step, let’s say something goes wrong and you want to complain. Only the person with the NFT can call complain. Based on these actions, the outcome of this game between buyer and seller, what they get back from their deposits and their payment is different. This is the NFT encoded with the Game Theory concept in a nutshell. NFTs tokenized an IOU promise to exchange something and the Game Theory then facilitate that exchange.
If I buy an NFT as a gift for somebody else and it transfers ownership, does the ability to do these functions also transfer?
Yes. This is a nice property where you could buy an NFT for, let’s say, a real-world sneaker. You then could resell the commitment NFT and the next person that you resold it to can then get the sneaker. We call it a futurist market for everything that you lend and create. You can trade these claims and whoever holds the claim at the end can redeem it for the thing it promises.
I saw a tweet from Boson that $30 trillion in opportunities is lost because smart contracts cannot exchange real-world things. Can you dive a little bit deeper into the economic opportunity? Does that mean that Boson is a $30 trillion market cap potential business? Is that how the ecosystem can be monetized eventually?
$30 trillion is the big number of the whole industry that this is facing. What is important about this is, in the comparison, let’s say it’s like the banking system. If you have a system that fundamentally relies on these institutions and human institutions working properly, you lose a whole range of use cases. People who want to exchange don’t have access to these institutions. For instance, if you look at North Africa, there aren’t big eCommerce players there. There isn’t a real functioning Amazon, in that sense, that we have here. If you go from institutions to automation, this opens up this whole possibility of things. This is what we mean with the $30 trillion opportunities. All of a sudden, if you make it a more democratic open system where everyone has access to these eCommerce capabilities, the industry and the scope of the opportunity are large.
When you look at the value between person and company, you alluded to it before, this question of trust. Do you see this as a cornerstone of what you’re trying to do is to build that relationship and take it beyond how it exists today between individual consumers and the companies they interact with?
Yeah. What we’re seeing is that the relationship between consumers and companies is changing in that way. You see it with Pride Month. Every company all of a sudden has a political statement. You see the extreme in the crypto world where you all of a sudden have fashion DAOs, community-governed fashion brands. What we think enabling this trust minimized exchange of real-world things without relying on the third-party is that it becomes a way more direct connection to the brands you interact with.
If you think about marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, you don’t have a direct connection to the seller but you have more of a connection to Amazon. The sellers are mostly locked into this platform system. Once you unbundle these platforms that are building economic infrastructure and then locking people in, if you unbundle that, the relationship line between companies and people is blurring. People then come all of a sudden and their fashion DAO can govern what T-shirt is the next T-shirt and all of this stuff. The lines will get more blurry and the interaction will be more direct between consumers and companies.
Game Theory NFT: How can you trust someone online when you’re making a transaction? You should use centralized platforms that take the risk and trust and mediate it.
When we’re building a company, we try to work with people and serve people who believe what we believe. We have this alignment around the core values and the products we’re offering and we see the value in it. This takes it to a whole new level. That’s cool.
You guys made the news with a big purchase in Decentraland, $704,000 for some virtual property. Did someone get fired for using their credit card for that one? How did that all come about? What’s the deal there?
Buying a plot of land in Decentraland is something we look forward to for months. It’s not that easy to get a big plot of land. You have to find the right deal. Why we did that is we see the metaverse as a whole concept that you have these virtual worlds that are decentralized and more democratic in their ownership and decisions rather than gaming boards today that are owned by one company. It’s one of the major next adoptions of crypto if you see how many people are attracted there. Why we bought this land specifically is that there’s this great opportunity for what we call metaverse commerce. We’re seeing more and more of these huge games that are like Fortnite and Roblox games.
The gaming industry is bigger than the whole entertainment industry combined. We see that people want to start to buy and sell real-world things there. We’ve seen Roblox selling Gucci items in-game. What we’re going to do in Decentraland with this part of the land is building virtual shopping experiences and allowing players in this virtual world to exchange real-world items and go shopping in a truly virtual environment. It might sound crazy spending $704,000 on a virtual plot of land but we’re confident in Decentraland and a team there and the adoption that’s going to come. The metaverse commerce and in-game buying of real-world things is a major application that we can focus on.
Do you see this opportunity with Boson to replace the eCommerce system altogether? Is that the direction we’re going?
We often talk about this larger concept of decentralized commerce. We’ve written a lot of reports about this idea. What we see Boson doing is building a core primitive for that. I talked about a lot solving the core trust problem between buyer and seller and these execution guarantees. Once you have that then you enable this whole ecosystem to flourish. If you think of eCommerce now, it’s these platforms like Amazon that offer 1,000 services. Amazon has a reputation, identity and fulfillment centers. These platforms are offering 1,000 services. To unbundle them, you need this whole ecosystem as we’ve seen with DeFi.
The gaming industry is getting bigger than the whole entertainment industry combined. Click To Tweet
How we see Boson’s role is like with Stablecoins are to decentralized finance where they’re kickstarting this environment. Unbundling eCommerce now with these blockchain primitives will become the way we exchange value online. Once we get there, it’s going to be fun because you’re going to see all these new innovative ideas that have been stalled by these major eCommerce platforms having this monopoly. The same as how we’re convinced or I’m convinced that decentralized finance is going for the real-world financial stack, we’re going for the real world eCommerce stack with decentralized commerce.
It’s coming quick. Do you think the main interface exists now that we’re going to use to participate in this ecosystem in a big way? Is Google Glass type things going to bring us into an augmented world? Is it VR? Is it either through desktops, laptops or mobile? Is it something that we haven’t hit yet that’s going to provide that interface?
Is it the interface for exchanging real-world things?
Yes. What’s that tipping point where I can go into Decentraland and start buying things and feeling like it’s a part of my day-to-day life where it’s normal, seamless and ubiquitous?
AR and VR are going to change fashion shopping. Shopping for fashion online is counterintuitive. You go on this website and then you scroll through 2D pictures. You read the descriptions of the sizes and you’re not quite sure. You get it and then you probably send it back because it’s not the right size or it doesn’t look as good. In comparison to what you see already in AR being used to measure sizes as well as this digital fashion concept where you then have a digital representation that you could wear and check out the item. Where it’s fundamentally going is it’s a way better shopping experience than clicking through some pictures. How we shop online is radically going to change to more virtual environments. I wouldn’t say that the classic clicking through different offers in the normal marketplace to the marketplace is going away completely. AR and VR are exciting for this area.
You’ve got companies like Deeper Network, DeFinity and even Helium that are creating a new network of Internet of Things. What is Boson Protocol doing that is going to fit into these other players? Are you having conversations with these guys? Do you see them as partners along the way or is your mission laser-focused?
We have some conversations but not exactly with these players in the Internet of Things space. What we’re doing is not interfacing completely with the Internet of Things. The blockchain intersection is highly industry-driven and industry-specific. What we’re doing with commitment NFTs and this escrow becomes interesting once you have machine-to-machine commerce. This is also what we’re talking about. We’re laser-focused on solving the hard problem for real growth humans. Once we solve that, we can think about IoT and the opportunity that comes there.
I was curious enough to follow-up on the integration with how all this works. Jeff and Josh helped build a cool decentralized meal prep service. What does it look like for their business to integrate with the Boson Protocol-type platform where now there’s an exchange of monetary value for a meal being delivered to somebody’s home? Is that achievable and relatively easy at this point? Does it take a lot of setups? What’s the process like? When you have food prepared for you because you are lazy or you don’t know how to cook and you need something healthy to eat. Do you just sign up for the service and it comes to your door when you need it?
Is this sending you the ingredients or the done meal?
“We’ll make it for you. All you got to do is it heats up,” as far as I know.
For all these businesses where especially in the beginning, you want to give safety to users. Give them the confidence that they can go on your website and buy this meal without knowing you. This will become relevant as well. Because the fee is super minimal that Boson Protocol implements, it’s better once you have certain crypto adoptions for the business than accepting credit cards or PayPal. From a business perspective, it’s cheaper.
When you think about the opportunity, it’s huge to interact and build partnerships with several different folks. When you think about game developers, in particular, and this place where commerce is happening already even long before NFT became part of the vernacular, what does that look like in your roadmap? Any projects you could tell us and that you’re excited about that are forthcoming in that regard?
If you have such a big challenge such as eCommerce, we’ve seen several projects that also tackle this area. If you directly want to compete with existing eCommerce players like Shopify and Amazon, you’re probably going to lose because you have all the friction of interacting with crypto and the user experience is not 100% there. We’re looking into and working on our crypto native use cases. One of them is metaverse commerce. These are people in these metaverses familiar with crypto, with NFTs and wanting to exchange things.
Another one where we had a lot of conversations is real-world NFT art. You probably know that some artists give a physical counterpart to their NFTs sometimes, the physical print of the digital artwork. We’ve been exploring that space in conversation with different marketplaces and solving that problem for NFT artists and NFT enthusiasts that they can rely on that they’re also getting the physical piece without having to trust anyone. These crypto native use cases are how we see giving the biggest advantage to users and driving adoption that far that then we can then tackle the mainstream use cases. One thing I’ve been excited about is having a digital counterpart to a physical item. Imagine you buy a jacket or a pair of sneakers and then you also get that pair of sneakers as an NFT and then you can attach an NFT. You can have it as a skin in some games. You could have exclusive access to some Adidas drop. Once you merge these lines between physical items, NFTs and digital goods, that’s interesting and one thing we’re also working on.
I want my digital NFT of my pair of jeans to come with the pattern to how to make them so that when the brand changes the style the next season and I can’t find jeans that fit me, I could have them remade based on the digital item that I own.
Game Theory NFT: You can tokenize a commitment. It’s a promise to exchange something. The game theory comes in with the rules by which to exchange has governed.
From the jeans DAO. You have full supply chain access to the jean’s producers. This is the dream.
Some of our readers are going to be writing to us and asking, “I heard about the jeans DAO. Tell me about it. Tell me more.” Are there any specific once that you can mention that you’re working on or that you’ve announced?
On partnerships, we’ve worked with a lot of more DeFi-heavy projects. This is interesting to us. Once you get these commitment NFTs, these promises, you can have them flow through all of DeFi. We’ve worked with insurance projects, decentralized exchanges as well as DeFi wallets to allow people to interact with these things. A major partnership for us is that we were closely aligned with Ocean Protocol.
Data is a major part of commerce and thinking about how can you go from the current state, which is you have no control over your data to the user being in control of how to monetize that data and if they want to monetize their preference data and commerce data in general. We’ve announced a partnership with Decentraland for what we’re doing there with exchanging real-world things into the metaverse. We’re looking into how we can integrate that to make it easier for people building in Decentraland to enable this exchange to take place in whatever environment and event space they’re building.
Jonas, what metrics do you pay attention to? We talked a little bit earlier about return rates and that type of stuff. What are you looking for in your role as Head of Strategy in terms of driving future decisions on whether to go left, right or straight?
We have the first version of the protocol built. We have some nice demos. We’re working with what we call metaverse commerce for the first use case. We haven’t deployed on Mainnet yet so we don’t have any usage going on. We did some user testing though and getting a sense of how intuitive is this system. What we discovered there is how we can make it as intuitive and easy because the Game Theory can be a little complex to get your head around. We’re pre-launching something and looking into how we can make this convenient and easy to use as well as to understand.
The Game Theory is interesting in the sense that Game Theory always relies on that concept of rational behavior. We are all ourselves often not acting rationally. There’s an interesting part there that the Game Theory works out well if both parties also believe that the other party is behaving honestly. If you have two confused people making a transaction and acting erratic, that’s going to get to a bad state. We’re thinking about how can we make this easy to understand and how can we make it convenient to use.
It’s like if two people get in an accident, there are 100 different permutations of how they respond to the fact that their cars collided and there’s damage.
These edge cases that you then still probably want some decentralized court to escalate to. If you have a complicated or weird situation that somebody could still escalate it to a human arbitrator if it’s necessary so that in the end, you can be sure that you can’t get scammed or nothing too bad can happen.
Let’s take a moment and look beyond Boson Protocol. When you look at the landscape, what are the NFT projects or platforms that have yet to be formed, have formed or maybe out there in a concept that is going to be the game-changing ones? What’s one in particular that you can share with our readers from someone that’s such an insider into the industry?
In general, in this space, it’s interesting to see how most NFT marketplaces go from being marketplaces to now going for being protocols. You see that with Rarible or Foundation that now shift to trying to make the marketplace more decentralized. Giving users control of curation and all these things is exciting in general. For instance, MetaFactory is one of these decentralized fashion DAO projects working. Digital fashion project is interesting and is the next thing that we can expect some good adoption from.
The Fabricant or Artefact are pioneering this idea of these digital fashion NFTs. You also have some AR use cases from Instagram filters to wear them. These NFT projects and the idea of IP is a future one that’s going to be interesting. Trent McConaghy from Ocean had this interesting article about how could you represent IP chain like music IP, for instance, through a combination of NFTs and ERC-20. Once you start to tackle this music industry because they’re digitally native anyway, you can imagine music label DAOs, people doing Kickstarter campaigns, doing ICO for their next album masters and all these fun things. IP is a major one also being solved by NFTs.
Opulous is going to do something like what you described there. They’re in the process of coming out. You mentioned digital fashion. We had Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee of DIGITALAX on and that was a great conversation. We also have LUKSO coming up. These are all topics that are near and dear to us as you know. eCommerce is an obvious use case for NFTs. It may become ubiquitous within both the metaverse and normal physical goods within several years.
It’s funny, I started out working at LUKSO. I was the first employee there. In 2019, we were heavy on saying that for blockchain to go mainstream, all these fun NFT use cases are the way to go. People wouldn’t believe it. Everybody was laser-focused on DeFi and all these finance applications. I’m happy to also see the work there with digital fashion and so on. That mainstream use case is what we call a fun use case for blockchain. They are not just finance, which is more boring, to be honest. It made me happy to see that this whole NFT ecosystem exploded. It’s going to be great to talk to Fabio and Marjorie. They have some great expertise in this area.
It’s been a fun journey. It’s been great hearing more about Boson, yourself and what you all are working on in the industry at large. We’d like to get to know you a little bit better and some of your perspectives personally. Are you guys ready to dive in on some Edge Quick Hitters? What do you say?
Let’s do it.
As a quick reminder, Edge Quick Hitters are a fun and quick way to get to know you a little better. There are ten questions and we’re looking for short one or few-word responses but feel free to expand if you get the urge. Number one, what is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
I thought of this because of the European soccer tournament. Realistically, it’s probably candy. What I like it to be is soccer stickers, Panini stickers that you would collect and put together. I see projects doing that as NFT. That’s probably the first real thing I bought as a kid.
Number two, what’s the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
Probably flea market stuff. I also used eBay pretty early on. I remember my dad helped me as a kid to buy and resell Nintendo DS games, Wii games and so on. Probably games and toys.
Arbitrage opportunities, I’m sure.
It wasn’t that but that would have also been great. A seven-year-old getting the arbitrage opportunities.
Number three, what is the most recent thing you’ve purchased?
The honest response would be an energy drink and some cigarettes. The most major thing has been a projector to watch some nice movies on my wall. That has been a good investment.
Number four, what’s the latest thing you sold?
I haven’t sold anything in a while. I’m fundamentally holding all of my possession. I’m holding everything. Nothing comes to mind.
Number five, what is your most prized possession?
At the top of my head, besides the usual things that you need to survive, I’m happy to have the couch I’m having. That’s the way to take the edge off. You get the Red Bull, the cigarettes, the projector with the football and then you lay down on your couch. It’s probably the best thing I have here that’s functional.
Number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service and experience that’s for sale, what would it be?
I’m going to go for something random. I thought a fun thing to do would be to get a lot of early crypto investors, rich people together in a DAO like PleasrDAO and then buy up a real-world company. For instance, like, an art auction house. You turn this into a DAO and auction everything off they have as NFTs and so on. If I had all the money in the world, that would be a fun thing to do.
Shifting gears a little bit. Number seven, if you could pass on one personality trait of yours to the next generation, what would it be?
Taking risks is a good one. That, at least, has worked out well for me, taking some calculated risks. That’s also what I heard from a lot of people in this space. They jump ahead into this area. Trusting your gut and taking some risks is generally good advice.
I’ll throw self-awareness in there for you as well. Number eight, if you could eliminate one personality trait of yours from the next generation, what would it be?
A special type of ignorance. This generation or my generation so much is happening all at the same time that you have all this international news constantly flashing up. It’s hard to care about something because you get detached from this news. Eliminating this overflow of impressions that you get using social media would be a good thing.
It’s insightful and much appreciated. Lightening it up a little bit. Number nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?
I checked out the podcast, going through some other episodes, getting my understanding and staying up-to-date with what’s happening in the NFT space in preparation for getting a feel for what’s going on here.
Which one did you read to?
I honestly don’t know who was on but I read also the hot takes.
Maybe you read Chemical X or The Sh*ttiest NFT Drop.
That could be.
Last one, what are you going to do next after the show?
I’m probably going to bed and get the caffeine to slow down.
That’s Edge Quick Hitters. Thanks for playing with us. I appreciate it. We have some hot topics to dive into. Are you ready?
Let’s hit it.
First, on the list, World Wide Web source code is the latest NFT for sale. Bids for an NFT of the original source code, the World Wide Web, which was written by inventor Tim Berners-Lee. The bids have soared to $2.8 million from an opening price of $1,000 with two days to go until Sotheby’s auction ends. It’s interesting that it’s Sotheby’s auction. It’s interesting that they’re on top of getting some cash out at these auctions.
An interesting extension of that fact and what we’ve learned from being behind the scenes with some of these NFT sales is you got to have a whole movement around any one of these particular items for it to be making the news and commanding a large sum. It’s not your neighborhood creator posting their acoustic guitar song on OpenSea or someplace public and then everybody goes crazy about it. There’s a lot of movement that happens behind these things, PR, the platforms that are selling them or supporting the marketing around it and then you get an organization like Sotheby’s involved. They want to uphold their reputation.
Game Theory NFT: Game theory is difficult to understand since it relies on the concept of rational behavior. One of the goals is to make it intuitive and accessible for everyone.
As far as a big movement is concerned, I don’t know if we have a bigger inflection point in our lives than the web and what it’s done over the years that’s it’s been there. It’s a little different from when he wrote that code, isn’t it?
Yes. With these sales, it’s almost like the people are having a Mona Lisa or Pollock in the basement and them coming out to sell it. Also, with all these means, you have the tool to monetize that notoriety.
The second item here is another NFT auction through Sotheby’s. They’re going for it. Jay-Z auctioning Reasonable Doubt NFT. That’s interesting. I don’t remember Sotheby’s doing something specifically musical before.
They did touch on a previous hot topic where Damon Dash who was Jay-Z’s Cofounder of Roc-A-Fella Records tried to sell the same thing. He owns a third of it. He does own the rights to it. Jay-Z blocked him in court from doing it. They shut him down. In a couple of weeks, it spun this one up. I don’t know if this was in the works before, it probably was and that’s probably why they tried to head them off at the pass on this thing. You got Jay-Z out there doing this.
To me, it elevates this whole question around IP and ownership of IP. Also, in this space, how wonky and how messy that can get in cases like this where you have multiple owners of something and different layers and different rights associated with it. Also, somebody that’s got a lot of power and money like Jay-Z can make something happen pretty quickly. It comes with a lot of community support.
That raised a topic that we haven’t covered super directly but hope to in the future on the podcast. What’s it like to be a lawyer in this NFT space? Is it as complicated as it seems or is it a relatively simple extension of the law that we have in place and applying it to digital possessions? I hope to explore that a little bit deeper on a future episode in the works.
The next headline here is CoinFund set to launch new investment vehicle for NFTs, “CoinFund is doubling down on the non-fungible token market with a new investment vehicle, Head of Portfolio growth Vanessa Grellet revealed on an episode of The Scoop. It’s a way for investors to bet on the overall market and as a development studio for NFT companies.” It’s interesting how this is integrating with all sorts of places.
These guys had the big round with Rarible. They’re looking forward well beyond the hype of the collectibles cycle that we’re in and maybe on the tail end of in some ways, in terms of the values we were seeing before. Not that it’s going to go anywhere. Collectibles are an important part of this but there’s so much more. That’s such a bigger story for where things can go. We talked a lot about it in an episode. What’s the next frontier of digital fashion and all these different functional use cases bridging the digital-physical divide, all these things? What we’re seeing is the tip of the iceberg. For me, when I see news like this, it reminds me of how early we are. Funds with vision are supporting what’s going to be the next wave of probably mind-blowing projects around NFTs.
There won't be a bigger inflection point in our lives than the world wide web. Click To Tweet
These guys have made some interesting bets already. Acala is on the website, Balancer and CoinList. DeFinity, talked about it earlier in the show. These guys are looking pretty far into the future. They have invested in NFTX, which is a mutual fund of NFTs but a little bit more than that. They’re ahead of things. It’ll be interesting to see what they do here.
On that note, I’m sure we all have our parallel lives here being involved in the crypto and NFT space and then our friends and family that are outside of it. You start talking about NFTs and how important they are. You get the glassy-eyed look and don’t know what’s going on. It’s fascinating listening to episodes of other podcasts with Justin Banon, the Founder of Boson talking about the long-term future of this. People like you guys are heavily invested in this, Jonas. Knowing that Justin went from scaling a business from $50 million a year revenue to $1 billion rather rapidly, you got to trust your gut. My neighbor might not know as much about this like you guys.
We’re scratching the surface of the use of NFTs as a technology in itself. It’s a valid use case. Having an art NFT gives you a claim on some digital artwork. Once you get logic involved and these super dynamic things going, it’s a little bit like what you’ve seen with fungible tokens that started with these more community-driven or Meme coin-driven things even before Ethereum with Colored Coins. You get complex things that people start to build around these ERC-20 tokens. NFTs are going in a similar direction with what you are able to do with your digital fashion NFT can radically change over the years.
The next item on the headline list here, the last item up for discussion, NFT-Powered Digital Comic to Let Fans Decide Heroes’ Fates. This sounds fun. I love this. It’s much in the spirit of crypto and decentralization. Creating a project where the fans are feeling like a part of something. That’s the definition of a fan. To take a deeper role in what’s going on sounds fun and cool.
They’re going to let people choose the digital fashion these characters wear whether they live or die over time. It harkens back to some of the choose-your-own-adventure-type stories along with some of the early engagement that the comics did. They referenced in that article that back in 1988, DC Comics set up a telephone poll system to decide whether the guy that was the second character ever to wear the Robin costume should live or die. People called in and they voted. It turns out, they voted for Robin to die. Joker killed him off in comic 428. It was a cool way to engage people. If you think about community, involvement, bringing the consumer together with the distributor of content, making them want or bridging that gap is fun. I dig this.
I don’t know why but this is reminding me of a podcast episode. It might have been This American Life. At one point, NHL let the fans vote on who was going to be in the all-star game. They let the fans take the lead a little bit and they ended up pulling this power play on the league because they’re upset with how things were working. They voted this guy who you never would have put in the all-star game.
He was the guy who was a meathead, not much finesse in what he was doing. The guy himself, when he got into the all-star game, he’s like, “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.” It’s fascinating and it made for an awesome story. He scored a goal in the game. It was a fun thing going on. This play comes up in a lot of different places. People want to feel ownership of the product, services, entertainment that they’re involved with. They’d almost rather see something ridiculous happen and know they have a say in it than have it go according to plan.
Game Theory NFT: Companies need to give the people a voice. If you give people responsibility and impact, then you will get good decisions from them.
Think about how much better the world would be if we got to vote on the ending of Game of Thrones. There would have been so much less grief and remorse in the world if they had done that. Probably they would have made more money on whatever the sequel is if we got a chance to vote. That was such a terrible ending. It also reminds me of Fan Controlled Football League, which is a project that Jeff and I are supporters of. It’s on Twitch. You can join a team. As the audience, you get to choose the play that the team performs next based on whatever’s happened in the game, whatever you think they should do, quarterback sneak, bootleg, you call the shots. This is the co-creation time in our society where people want to have a voice and where they realize their attention matters. The right companies are going to do more of this type of stuff that these guys are doing. It’s brilliant.
To your point, Jonas, which was astute about growing up in the era that you have with all these different voices coming from all these different directions trying to sort through it all. Trying to have an opinion or not having an opinion so it doesn’t mess with your head. There can be when you have leadership cast in society, this idea that these people don’t have a right to make the decisions because they won’t take responsibility for it. This interesting play of decentralization, maybe if you give them the right to make decisions, they will begin to take that responsibility. It’ll be easier to feel connected to the outcome of things if you feel like you say matters.
There are all these examples of a company being like, “Let’s have the viewers vote.” The viewers troll them into whatever funny thing. Trolling is probably a one-shot game that if you would do it on the daily, the trolls would lose the fun of constantly trying to vote for the most ridiculous stuff. I agree, if you give them responsibility and impact consistently, you will probably also get good decisions made by the crowd.
Inner Pop is running that project. It’s a subsidiary of Tezos. I’m not surprised Tezos is behind something awesome like this.
That’s it for hot topics.
That was fun.
It’s been awesome, Jonas. I’m pumped that you were able to join us. Where can readers go to learn more about you and the projects you’re working on, social handles and websites that you go to?
On Twitter, it’s @BosonProtocol. Our website is BosonProtocol.io. We have Discord and Telegram group to engage. We have some interesting community initiatives there. We will have a Decentraland event and so on. Follow us on Twitter and check out our channels.
We’ve reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFT. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on this starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey also much better. Go to iTunes, rate us, say something cool and then go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Also, be sure to tune in next episode for guest Max Song, CEO of Carbonbase, for an engaging discussion. Thanks.
Thanks for having me. This has been a lot of fun.
Important Links:
- Boson Protocol
- Decentraland
- Deeper Network
- DeFinity
- Helium
- Ocean Protocol
- Rarible
- Foundation
- MetaFactory
- The Fabricant
- Artefact
- Opulous
- Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee – past episode
- LUKSO
- PleasrDAO
- Chemical X – past episode
- The Sh*ttiest NFT Drop – past episode
- World Wide Web source code is the latest NFT for sale. B
- Jay-Z auctioning Reasonable Doubt NFT
- CoinFund set to launch new investment vehicle for NFTs
- NFT-Powered Digital Comic to Let Fans Decide Heroes’ Fates
- episode – past episode
- Acala
- @BosonProtocol – Twitter
- iTunes – Edge of NFT
- EdgeOfNFT.com
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