Ava Labs has been making waves in the digital community. They are the team behind Avalanche NFTs, the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry today. This open program for decentralized applications is surprisingly fast, eco-friendly, and low-cost. Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger dig deeper into Avalanche with Daniel Killeen and Dominic Carbonaro of Ava Labs. The two explain how they push for NFT's integration in the enterprise and art spaces, giving founders and artists a brand new landscape to showcase their skills. They discuss why they focus on NFT opportunities that may not be considered exciting or sexy right now but promise outstanding long-term impact. Daniel and Dominic also talk about Ava Lab's Core web, which aims to eliminate Web3's two-dimensional clunky interface and create a seamless experience.
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Listen to the podcast here
Daniel Killeen & Dominic Carbonaro Of Ava Labs On The Art Of Creating Avalanche NFTs With The Future-Proof Blockchain Built to Scale
Stay tuned for this episode and find out how Avalanche is creating the bridge to easy onboarding for Web3.
Also, why NFTs will take new and interesting forms in the very near future.
Find out why chickens are still the most interesting thing in NFTs all. All this and more on this episode.
Don't forget we put together a gathering at NFT LA that brought out thousands of the world's most innovative doers in the NFT space. Head to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, bolder, better, but also as intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles, March 20th to the 23rd, 2023. See you there.
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This episode features Daniel Killeen and Dominic Carbonaro of Ava Labs, two members of a world-class team of experts building Avalanche, known as the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry as measured by time to finality. Avalanche is blazingly fast, low cost, and eco-friendly with a mission to digitize all the world's assets.
Dominic is the business development lead focusing on NFT and arts and Daniel is a business development associate for NFTs and Culture. Avalanche is the future-proof blockchain that's built to scale. You build anything you want and any way you want on the world's most developer-friendly layer, one. Ava Labs team has collective experience from leading Fortune 500 finance and tech companies to high growth blockchain companies.
They are passionate individuals creating a frictionless world by redefining the way people build and use finance applications. There are three main use cases leveraging the high-performance capabilities of Avalanche, decentralized finance AKA DeFi, institutions, enterprises, governments, and digital collectibles. Their community is expanding and growing, supporting fifteen plus languages now. Daniel and Dominic, welcome to the show. It's good to have you here.
Thank you. I'm super excited to be here.
Thanks a lot, Eathan and thanks a lot, Jeff. I'm looking forward to this.
Welcome and there's a lot to talk about so we'd love to dive right in. Before we get too deep and have a lab side of things, we would want to know about your journeys to Ava Labs. How did you get there as team members and arrive to where we are now?
In my previous life, I was working in educational technologies, mostly working with instructors on a one-to-one basis like convincing them to use different textbooks and softwares. COVID happened and I couldn't execute on my job anymore. Most of my job was at college campuses meeting with teachers and so you can imagine March of 2020, there wasn't much in person going on. I had a ton of free time.
I got into crypto through some friends and I'd found Avalanche pretty early on and went back to school to take some courses to figure out how to run a node. October of 2020, I had to take some community college courses while working full-time and eventually got a node spun up and was very active in the ecosystem, and from there I been pretty much all in on crypto. I had known some of the employees at Ava Labs and worked out that. I'm in this position now.
I was on the other end of that equation. I was a PhD student teaching statistics and I remember those folks like you like visiting and say, “Here's your textbook for the year. It’s a software. Make sure you utilize this. Do you want to add this here?” That's great. I'm passionate about education and I'm sure that's probably part of what brought you to the domain and integrating tech into it. It's a lot of what we are doing here with the show. It's educational. Daniel, how was your way towards Avalanche?
A little also unconventional. I've been around crypto since 2010. First time I have learned about blockchain and Bitcoin. My hometown was very early. A lot of people from where I'm from livings New Jersey, either work in crypto or own crypto early on. Avid follower of the space very into the Ethereum committee or ETH. I was very active in that subreddit for a long time.
I did University of Colorado blockchain, not a founding member but one of the earlier members and when I started that was like a 6-person club that I'm on Reddit and now it's like 100 plus people that has sponsorships from both the engineering and business schools. I'm proud of that journey career-wise was always going to be civil service, public policy, wanted to be in communities where the crypto ethos ties in.
During the pandemic, I was a first responder. I was a 91 operator during in Hudson County, New Jersey, which is the six most densely populated county in America. Experienced intense amount of 91 call volume. I got pretty burned out and said, “I want to go do something else.” Crypto DeFi Summer was picking up at that time all of my friends were doing well.
Luckily, I stumbled at 3:00 in the morning while doing some job resume work Ava Labs in the middle of June, July of 2020 before the protocol went live, and then I said that's a North star and I did everything I could to work for the company and here I am now. I've been with the team now for over a couple of years. First started as a contract employee and now a full-time hire. Again, it’s awesome to be speaking with you guys and love what Dominic has been helping us out.
Things are working out. That's a good sign when they bring you on as an employee. Also, another connection there, I went to Rutgers for my undergrad, so not too far from Livingston. We know Avalanche. It sells itself as an open programmable smart contract platform for decentralized applications, but you encourage people to try for themselves and watch that it should outperform its competition. Where does Ava Labs see the future of NFTs and the way that Ava can support that?
There are a lot of pathways for how we see NFTs developing. There's that renaissance moment of people understanding what NFTs are as a technology component. We are going to start to see more integration in use cases of NFTs as it's a technology in the enterprise area. Things like ticketing or diplomas where people are using the baseline technology and saying, “This solves a fundamental business use case for us and it makes it significantly easier for us to operate using the technology of NFTs.”
That's going to be one vertical and we are excited to see. You could think of a lot of different things, reward points for major airlines, and things like that. There's going to be a lot of growth in that area. In the other area which is what people normally associate the term NFT too, which is like the Bored Apes. A lot of people who have maybe very little exposure to this space think, “I think of a NFT, I think of a picture.”
What we saw was in very similar to like 2017 ICOs. NFTs as a profile picture we think have strong validity in the sense that it's a form of digital identity. As we move more towards a digital space, people want a way to identify in that space and we think profile pictures will primarily dominate that realm. You can think of things like having a digital Lambo or a digital Rolex. Your profile picture becomes a flexing status.
Where we eventually see those things going, they will merge towards being a physical identity component and then becoming some brand. Whether those end up being luxury brands, fully digital brands, whatever it may be, the profile pictures that we feel will survive and continue will be the ones that then continue to switch to a brand.
Probably most of them are going to struggle to make that transition. We feel like the future will hold the ones that have emerged and are strong and the ones that continue to enter that profile picture space as brand component with an identity, some type of long term like roadmap for building on a digital brand. Those will work.
We also see the primary growth happening over the next few years is going to be an NFTs in a sense like an art component. What we mean by that is digital art but more towards individual artists building a brand for themselves and communities around them. What we have saw a lot of in the boom of NFTs was, the reason people bought them was because the price of them went up, and that's not necessarily something that can be sustained forever. As we all know, price eventually goes down.
What we are starting to see emerge is loyalty to a creator and that creator building a community around them and continuing to grow out that brand. Them doing an NFT on a weekly basis that's auctioned off to their community. Those are sustainable things that necessarily don't require the number to go up, but it's based in a creator in a creator economy.
I wouldn't want to say a lot of our big bets, but what we envision it going towards is emerging of the physical art world, which we already know is a $60 billion space and this NFT space merging into that. New creators, artists, and mediums are emerging from that and those two things becoming one. That's where we want to be on the front lines. We want to be onboarding a lot of those creators and creatives into that specific vertical.
We have had a lot of these conversations about digital identity, what that means, and how it's identity. We are talking digital identity. It's not that. It's merging everything together. We are early in that process, but that's the direction we are going. There are so many interesting things that'll evolve from that. Whether it's like the more mundane stuff like your driver's license and these things like this existing in the digital world or some of the sexier stuff, it's interesting how that path is emerging. It's like the train has left the station.
Around that, you guys are developing a ton of different products and you have core web which you released and the idea here is a Web3 user experience. It starts to integrate a bunch of these different components we were talking about. We had this quote from your head of product which was saying that core web is the perfect example of a product focused on human-centered design and the principles of providing users freedom, flexibility, and efficiency of use. It’s a pretty solid quote. I like that. Tell us why is this a great way to connect with Web3? What's special about it?
That mainly helped out with a lot of integrations with getting people onboarded into core, especially DAP level. Core Web is a probably a big step forward for all Web3 as a whole to have a command center, a base to start interacting with ease, simplicity, and elegance. You could do everything from swaps all within browser to seeing your collectibles to eventually integrating with full suite of DAPs. Long term for C core as potentially being a landing page for when people want access Web3. Bold statement but you know how there is now Safaris, Chromes, and Mozillas of the world. People will start with opening their wallet first. Interfaces are two dimensional in a sense and they don't give you the full traditional banking experience or traditional finance experience.
What a core does is letting you move again seamlessly through all Web3 within one experience, and then the big component which is going to be necessary is thesis of application specific blockchains, which is what Avalanche owns with subnets. Core allows you to integrate and work with a wide variety of different blockchains with a few clicks.
It shouldn't be login in out of this or that. Put your private key in here, put your C phrase in here. Now if you want to go to another blockchain, it's click, simple and seamless. If you want to transfer assets between different chains or if you want to see units of values go across different chains, it doesn't have to be a complex experience. Refreshes and reloads instantly and, again, is posted direct down chain. The beauty of all Avalanches with instant finality is you see it happen in real-time.
You are not seeing a loading or a waiting, which we have seen a lot of Web3 experiences before. I call Web3 clunky right now, but core is a big step to making Web3 less clunky. It might not sound sexy like you use the word sexy, but it's a necessary step because, for me, UI and UX adoption are as important as critical mass as the rest of the pie. If users are not feeling comfortable, if it's something that my mom or your dad could adopt, then we are making progress, and that's the core what does efficiently.
That easy button needs to be there for people and that sounds like that's a great step forward.
Clunky is interesting. It's funny the media consumption around Web3 for me is like we are right inside of it. We talk about the Metaverse on these shows too and stuff like that. There are a lot of integrations there. I saw a mainstream thing about the Metaverse where they had some personality from CNBC or something. You always see, “I'm trying out a Metaverse,” and they ask the guy who was guiding them, “Where are we at with this technology?” He said, “We are at like dial up.” Even with the Metaverse which has been around for years and years, but it's a great analog for what's going on with Web3.
Meaning not that you can't reach a good stage of performance but that in the development of the technology, there are still leaps and bounds to be made in various directions. That's because I could see you guys taking it on. When people think about Avalanche for NFTs, I'm curious what they think of or what you guys want them to think of. Any interesting examples or thoughts in that domain?
When I started, we didn't have an identity. When people think Avalanche NFTs, what do they think of? I don't even necessarily think that that's been established yet. People still are like, “I don't know.” There are pros and cons to that, but I do think the big pro is that we get to help establish what that narrative is going to be.
When people think of Avalanche NFTs, we want them to think of art, creators, value, things of quality, and things that are going to have lasting impact, things that are sustainable and will be here. Those are things we want to support. When we look at our NFT ecosystem, we are thinking about this in a 3 to 5-year vacuum of who is going to be here 3 to 5 years from now continuing to create content, continuing to build their community out, and continuing to onboard new users in? Those are the things we are supporting.
They may not be the sexy things right now. They may not be the things getting all the volume that everyone's paying attention to but that's not necessarily our goal to look around and tell you, “This is working right now. Let's go do that.” We want something that's going to be here. That's our identity and that's what a community is tending to gravitate towards.
TapTapKaboom is a recent artist in our ecosystem. He's done tons of mints that continue to sell out. He continues to grow his brand and his audience. Gabe Weiss is a pretty prominent NFT artist. He did a mint on Avalanche. He did very well. Not only is our community responding well to this and in consuming this, but we have very high faith that these artists will continue to be here in continuing to make work and create and grow up our identity and our ecosystem.
I have seen some tweets out there describing Avalanche as an art chain. Having art, the capacity to be showcased specifically here a fully customizable gallery spaces for the Avax community, decorate hanging NFTs on the walls, hanging out with friends plays or avatar was like the vision of this tweet, but it's interesting to see right and see that develop and appreciate that as someone coming from a creator space and a musician as well that thoughtfulness put into wanting to be affiliated with great art.
On the NFT front, what are some of the more interesting ones? What are some of the sexier ones that are in your orbit right now within your ecosystem that stand out to you, some of the more fun stuff? I feel like there is a meta-purpose of things that are purely fun. Maybe there's other utility as well, but there's something there and that is to bring folks into the space to get excited about it, to have that enthusiasm. Is there something like that in your orbit that you could highlight for us?
One of our main marketplaces is called Joepegs. It's from our leading decks, which is a decentralized exchange Trader Joe. They made a NFT marketplace Joepegs. With that, they launched Joe Studios, which is they are like Web3 studio brand-like building projects. We have seen some cool projects come out of there.
They have Rich Peon, Poor Peon which is a play on Rich Dad Poor Dad. There's a whole mining component. A big rock component. It's a very fun project but it also has a legitimate team that's building a whole story behind it. We have even seen like even funny NFTs like we have chicken also, which is based off of a chicken and a rooster and there's farmland. The chicken lays eggs and you have to feed the chicken to get it larger and to get more eggs.
There's a whole community and component and those have done extremely well in terms of price and where they are at now. The things that we have and we are focusing on are legitimate projects with real communities behind them. I would say those two are great landing points if you are looking at fun stuff that has good communities around it that have been here and have been tested and we'll continue to be here.
Are you aware of the Krapopolis NFT project from Dan Harmon and Fox Entertainment? We had them on the show. It's a pretty big serious project. Fox Entertainment, this blockchain creative labs that they have going on. Dan Harmon created Rick and Morty Chicken NFTs. They lay eggs. We have at least one, I don't know how many. We maybe have a hen house full of chicken NFTs, and apparently, we are brimming at the seams with eggs that we have laid. Fruitful concept.
You all have some chickens?
With those chickens. We got some of your chickens too, but we do have some Krapopolis chickens.
Our chicken is a first mover came out. That's real recognized.
There's room for lots of chickens. They are fun. That's part of it. It's a good time and appreciate the example and I always want to remember that too because I feel like in many cases some of the more fun projects the interesting ones do catch a various time for whatever reason. The fact is there's got to be fun. There's got to be interest. We got to get out there and enjoy ourselves in what we are doing and carry the space forward. It's an important part of the puzzle for sure.
I have to say I was at one of my son's friends' birthday parties and they had a hen house in their yard and chickens are cool. They had about fifteen chickens.
The campaign starts there. Chickens are cool.
There’s a trend. They have a big old hen house. They had a mini chandelier and there was super fancy like they love it. There are were 10 chickens or 10 hens. There's something going on.
They are sweet too. They could pet them and hold them and it was fun. I'm curious what's next on the roadmap for you guys? Partnerships, collabs, features, and stuff like that. Anything you'd like to share about or stuff you can't share about you could share with us here? No problem.
We had OpenSea deploy which was cool. We have some announcements I would say coming up in Q4 that are going to be pretty exciting and people should pay attention to. We are confirming those getting and everything tied down. I would say the next time is going to be pretty crazy here so we'll share those when we can. We'll make sure to get those over to you guys.
I can add a little bit into that. Living in New York City at a very gratifying level, I feel there's a cultural renaissance here and there's a lot of great participants in the renaissance, and then it's happening in different cities as well with the benefit of New York City is so you have your MoMAs, Sotheby's, or Gagosian. There are a lot of competitiveness to get to that level.
People are excited for what's next, especially at the artist level and that's what we have been tapping into. It's like I go out on a Monday. I have going to an event almost every night and asking artists, “What can we do? Where can we fill? What is a pain point? Where do they make a mistake? Where was their trap? What would you like to see as the most important question that comes back to?” What we have been doing best is listening and that's gotten us in the right rooms in the right conversations. As Dominic alluded to, we have something special that we are going to announce and I can't wait to come back on and share more with you but we can only tease alpha, not give alpha.
We'll keep an eye off that and pay attention, everybody.
We talked about inspirations a little bit or we at least alluded to them. Give us a little more insight. What's inspiring you in the space beyond what we have already talked about? What's getting you moving?
Some of my friends, Vinnie Hager, Efdot, Dave Krugman at Balloon, people that are like, “Things worked out for me in Web2 but the system is flawed.” I see not only the goal of the West Coast and Web3 but I see a way to make a home here and make a long-term living here and bring others on board. Communities like the ones I mentioned are not selfish. They are collaborative. As long as you are positive, they are positive.
The ethos that we are looking for is positive builders that have had already putting success in the space but want to take that next leap. Their ideas are sometimes off the wall crazy, “Can we rent out this giant warehouse?” thing to simple and small to like, “I have got 2 to 3 friends that are going to be the next big music NFT in the space. Can you help us out?”
Our role is to be igniters in this space and let creativity not hit a limit. Avalanche art is in my opinion, something that an artist will want to flock to because we'll be supportive of what they are trying to accomplish. The inspiration comes from my artist friends and non-crypto friends. People just keep saying, “That's cool.” If you can make me say that then it's a guaranteed win in our book.
For me, I would say the thing that excites me the most, it's a simple concept is the ability for a creator to directly connect to the community without the need for someone in the middle to facilitate that and take a like portion of that. Even giving creators an outlet in a way to connect your community in which they necessarily didn't happen.
Some of the artists I have seen who have built communities around them and while it doesn't sound crazy to a lot of people, doing it anywhere from like $1,000 to $1,500 a week in NFT sales. Maybe they are located in more developing countries like that's everything. Would they have ever had the chance to be able to get their work into the hands of people and build a community around them and be able to monetize that?
I don't necessarily know if that's true or not. That idea of you having a creator and a community and this is giving them the chance to connect very seamlessly without the need or forcing someone in the middle. That's a powerful thing and that's only going to continue to grow. Creators will naturally start to gravitate towards that and then that flywheel effect starts to kick in.
The possibilities in the next several years of like what it looks like with creator connecting to community are what I'm most excited for. That's what it inspires me because all these NFTs right now, but I don't know what that's going to look like in few years. Those are the things where we want to be ahead of and we are paying very close attention to.
Reduce that friction and make it easier to access. Bring great people in this space. All those colleagues you mentioned, Daniel. That’s exciting stuff guys and thanks so much for sharing with us some of the happenings, not all, but some of the happenings of which there are many with Avalanche and Ava Labs. There are so many cool things. We'll be keeping a close eye here over the next few months for some of those big announcements.
What we wanted to do is to switch gears a little bit and get your personal perspective on a set of questions we like to call Edge Quick Hitters. It's a fun and quick way for us to get to know you a little bit better. We are looking for short answers like single word or few words, but we may dive a little bit deeper here or there. Are you guys ready to jump in on these?
Yes.
Let's do it. We'll work our way through. I will have both of you answer each question and we'll rotate. Question number one, Daniel, we'll start with you. What is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
As a child from grandpa's money, a Hess toy truck around Christmas time. That was a little sentimental but that comes to mind.
You still got any of those old trucks hanging around?
Yes, somewhere. I was talking about collection value maybe. I don't know what the price on Hess is right now if you are longing it or shorting it, but we have got a couple of decades of collections growing up.
Dominic, how about you?
Mine is a pack of Big League Chew, specifically that gum.
When you chewed that, did you feel like were you at that age like, “I'm chewing the big league?”
That's what I thought. Your marketing was so good.
Question number two, Daniel, what is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
Lemonade stand did well. Put ourselves on a highway like in a junction into a highway. Set up at 5:00 PM as so suburban New Jersey. The people come from that city. They stop, they are thirsty, cause a line of traffic. The police came. I was like in 4th or 3rd grade with my friends. The police end up taking lemonade and drinking with us. End up closing stand. Never go back to business again.
How Jersey is that? That's awesome.
That's pretty Jersey indeed. The only thing missing is Bruce Springsteen is wailing in the background.
My first thought though, he said, “What's the first thing you ever sold?” You said, “Lemonade stand.” You built the lemonade stand up as a business then you sold it.
Franchised it. Enterprise it. I didn't get to venture capital.
Dominic, how about you?
First thing I remember selling in my life was a pair of used ice skates. I grew up playing ice hockey and so I can remember when eBay came out. That whole process of like selling stuff on eBay and I sold a pair of skates. I remember with my dad. I didn't do this, but I remember with my dad going online and like selling a pair of my old skates and getting money for it and that was such a crazy thing to do at the time.
Question number three. Daniel, what is the most recent thing you purchased?
Besides groceries because that's not that fun, a piece of artwork for my buddy Alex Penske. I show my Twitter. He has a studio. He's a known New York City artist. I bought in cash, not crypto, a piece of artwork but was in his studio on Saturday night until Sunday morning. He was spray painting on his walls. He's one of the best spray paint artists alive. It's cool to be able to go to his place and put some caps on some cans and not have to go to worry about going to jail afterwards either.
Dominic, how about you?
I bought a onesie of a skeleton. Me, my fiancée, and my dog all have skeleton pajama, things we are going to wear for Halloween. We did that.
What does skeletons have to do with Halloween? That's my question.
My dog already has a pair of that. She's like to match the dog and I'm like, “You could do that.” Now I have a full black onesie with like skeleton bones on me so. I don't even know if it's a Halloween costume or we just matched the dog because it’s the easiest.
I'm so sorry but this is so funny. I was walking down the street and there was a little kid. His parents were like steps ahead. He's laying in the grass in a skeleton costume and I was like, “Hello, Mr. Skeleton,” and he was like, “I'm not a real skeleton. I'm Patrick.” It's hilarious conversation we had with this kid.
We pulled down top prize rocking the Hamburglar outfit. It's an unexpected win there, but there were many a skeleton in the house too. Moving on. Question number four, Daniel. What's the most recent thing you sold?
That's another funny one. My table and my chair for my kitchen. You can't tell from this show, but I am 6’6 and I got what I thought were high quality IKEA furniture. I sat down on one chair and it snapped instantly. Instead of go buy the chair, I was like the other chair is going to sit. If I sit down the other chair, it's going to break, and then the table don’t match. That went straight to StreetEasy and somebody picked up. Hopefully, somebody a little bit more nimble and lighter weight can take advantage of that.
Dominic, how about you?
The last thing I sold was a 16-ounce gold coin. I bought them a long time ago and I sold it to buy an engagement ring, which I got engaged. That was my sale.
Congrats. Question number five. Daniel, what's your most prized possession?
I have a Derek Jeter limited edition 3,000 bat that's signed by him in gold white. There's only 3,000 of these bats. That one's cool, and then to get the signature on top of it. It comes like standard, and then I met him one time. I knew he was going to be at event so I brought the bat and he signed it. That one's up. If you are talking about collectibles, that's probably up there.
Dominic, how about you?
When I think of possession, it's like the thing if it got deleted or got taken away so it can be anything. It's going to sound funny. I have a warlock on World Warcraft that is the original character and it is extremely old. If I had that thing deleted, I would be like, “A piece of me was gone.” I would probably say that character. It's funny, I still play here and there not much anymore but you play with younger kids now and it's like my character's older than you. It's existed longer than some of the people you are playing with who are kids. It’s that thing for sure. It depends on how long I can keep it going.
We'll flip the order here. Dominic, we'll start with you. Question number six. If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical service, and experience that's currently for sale, what would it be?
I'd probably buy my dream house which I have not done with. I have a house I'm in Brooklyn forever. That'd probably be my probably my own money there.
Your forever house.
Do you have a location in mind?
Yeah. Right on the beach. Right down here. Probably somewhere between Newport Coast or Cuna Del Mar right there on the ocean.
Daniel, how about you?
Redundancy here but land, Colorado. I went school at UC University of Colorado, so I'm obsessed with Breckenridge, Aspen area, most beautiful part of the country in my opinion. Think about also a little sports car here or there. It doesn't hurt. It's the 50th anniversary Corvette pops up on my phone every now and then.
Question number seven, Dominic. If you could pass on one of your personality traits in the next generation, what would it be?
I would probably say my competitiveness. I remember even dating back to when I was a kid, people would be like, “It's PE, why do you care?” I sometimes would like, “Yeah.” As I got older, I would say like my competitiveness, wanting to win, wanting to compete, being okay with competition and winning and losing. Even as I watch some of my brother's kids now and sister's kids, I'm watching that somewhat start to be taken away.
It's my West Point guy. There's an important quote from Douglas MacArthur among many that there's no substitute for victory. I'm with you on that. Daniel, how about you? Personality trait you'd like to pass on?
Something I learned in the pandemic is being human, being involved with a lot of crisis, and having to be the most vulnerable I could ever be with people in their unfortunate last moments. A lot of people have limited views on life and some also have open views on life and the best thing you do is learn to speak from the heart wherever your stance is and be available to people. I find especially in crypto, people are very fast moving and try to one up, get ahead, and all that stuff. I have simply one on being me, being very honest, and human at the end of the day.
It’s important and not as common as you'd like. Question number eight, Dominic. If you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?
It's a tough one. It's got to be going forever, but I would probably say lack of patience. I don't know if there's a word for that necessarily, but like giving things some time like develop.
I get it. I can relate indeed. Daniel, how about you?
The ability not be tired all the time. I don't know. I'm a big person so I don't know why it all comes at in waves. Coffee is my official brand sponsor. It doesn't matter the brand of coffee. What matters that it's sponsoring me at all times. If we could eliminate the feeling to be tired, pull at all-nighters here working for Avalanche but still would like not to feel tired.
Coffee is the lifeblood that fuels the dreams as champions.
Hold on. What is macha then?
I don’t know.
That's living in Brooklyn. I have gotten into a whole new pick there.
That's a whole other level.
We are running short on time, but I have to say that is a quote from a movie starring Will Ferrell. He's like a kid's soccer coach, kicking and screaming. Jesse Dylan who is Bob Dylan's son and has been on our show is in crypto space. He played part in that and making that movie. He's the director or something like that. Fun fact. It’s one of my favorite quotes from a movie.
Going into question nine. Dominic, what'd you do before joining us on the show?
I fed my dog water who is now walking around the house. This is my quick break before we started. He’s warming on and it’s hot out. It's good to hydrate him. I chopped up with little pieces and gave him some watermelon.
Daniel, how about you?
I had one of the coolest calls since working here about AI art and somebody that wants to make something cool for AI art and I'm excited. That is alpha. For the readers at home, I'm doing the mind exploding presentation for you, but able diffusion and other ways of creating art are something I'm into. Long-term future here.
There's some amazing stuff out there on that front. Last question guys. Dominic, we are going to start with you. What are you doing next after the show?
After the show, we have a meeting and agenda with a great community builder. I'm going to go get some coffee to get ready. Lifeblood for that one. Hopefully, it'll be the last little component of our coming initiative. It'll be nice to put a bow right on the package. Very exciting.
I know where you are heading then, Daniel. Anything in between?
Nothing in between later. I'm going to support my buddy Emmet Cohen. He's a Grammy Awarding jazz pianist. He's hosting 100th live stream of his show. Do not have the name of the show offhand, but go look Emmet up. He's awesome. He's been doing streams since the pandemic and it's been a great force for jazz in New York City.
If you do figure that out, I will send it our way. I don't know if you get a jazz pianist here on the other side of the screen here with Eathan.
I'm a full-time connector. I happy to get everybody in his shoes.
That's Edge Quick Hitters, guys, we appreciate you sharing lots of good stuff and lots of fun.
Word on the street is we got a little shout out we wanted to share. This is a segment we created to give some people a little bit of love in our orbit and elevate them here on the show. I will turn over to you guys. Who would you like to shout out, I should say?
Builders in the Avalanche ecosystem space. Avalytics is a great site. Joepegs is a great marketplace. TapTapKaboom and Gabe Weiss are two great artists in our native ecosystem. If you check those people out, it'll be a great starting point.
Check them out, people. Move in the needle for these guys. We do appreciate it. Before we close the episode, we do want to make sure that our readers know where to go to follow all these amazing things that you are doing as well as this forthcoming news that will be breaking very soon. Where should we send them?
I will take that. Avalanche’s Twitter account, @AvalancheAvax probably the best source of information. I also recommend people go into a AvaLabs.org. From there you can get sucked into the rabbit hole of what the future of blockchains is going to look like. Lastly, you can follow myself @DanielxKilleen on Twitter as well as Dominic. Dominic, do you want to give your Twitter handle?
There it is. Check these guys out. Follow Avalanche, all the amazing stuff that they are doing. cool guys. Thanks so much for sharing with us. We have reached the outer limit at the edge of the show. Thanks for exploring with us. We have got space for more adventures on this Starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better.
How? Go to Spotify or iTunes right now, rate us and say something awesome. Then go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing EdgeOfNFT with no spaces and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us, fellas.
Important Links
- Ava Labs
- Avalanche
- NFTLA.live
- Daniel Killeen - Twitter
- Dominic Carbonaro
- Joepegs
- Rich Dad Poor Dad
- @AvalancheAvax
- Spotify - Edge of NFT Podcast
- iTunes - Edge of NFT Podcast
- EdgeOfNFT.com
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