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Join Josh Kriger of Edge of NFT live from Hack Season in Singapore as he explores the cutting-edge innovations shaping the Web3 landscape. This episode features Alena Chwalko, Ecosystem Lead for TUN, discussing the platform’s rapid growth and user engagement. Sergey Kunz, Co-Founder of 1inch, introduces their groundbreaking cross-chain swap technology, and Clara Tao from Filecoin Foundation highlights the crucial role of decentralized storage in an AI-driven world.
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Key Topics Covered:
- TUN’s Ecosystem Expansion:
Alena Chwalko shares insights into TUN’s journey from 30 million to 800 million in TBL, highlighting the success of user engagement strategies like Hampstead Combat and the Open League incentive program. - 1inch’s Cross-Chain Swap Technology:
Sergey Kunz unveils 1inch’s revolutionary cross-chain swap solution, eliminating the need for traditional bridges and enhancing security and efficiency in blockchain transactions. - Filecoin’s AI Integration and Decentralized Storage:
Clara Tao discusses Filecoin’s vital role in ensuring content integrity in the AI era, emphasizing the importance of decentralized storage for maintaining transparency and trust in digital content.
What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let us know in the comments on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/@edgeofnft/
Episode Highlights:
- Alena Chwalko: "TUN’s exponential growth showcases the effectiveness of our ecosystem strategies, attracting millions of users and hundreds of projects."
- Sergey Kunz: "Our cross-chain swap technology offers a seamless and secure transaction experience without the risks associated with traditional bridges."
- Clara Tao: "Decentralized storage is crucial in the age of AI, providing a transparent and trustworthy foundation for digital content."
For the full transcript, see further below.
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About Our Guest:
Alena Chwalko
Bio:
Alena Chwalko is the Ecosystem Lead for TUN, a rapidly growing platform revolutionizing the Web3 space. With a deep understanding of blockchain ecosystems, Alena has been instrumental in driving TUN’s exponential growth, overseeing initiatives like Hampstead Combat and the Open League incentive program, which have attracted millions of active users and a thriving community of developers.
Sergey Kunz
Bio:
Sergey Kunz is the Co-Founder of 1inch, a leading decentralized exchange aggregator known for its innovative approach to blockchain technology. Sergey is a blockchain engineer and entrepreneur with a passion for solving complex problems in DeFi. Under his leadership, 1inch has launched groundbreaking features such as cross-chain swaps, significantly enhancing the user experience in decentralized finance.
Clara Tao
Bio:
Clara Tao is a Founding Officer at the Filecoin Foundation, where she spearheads initiatives integrating decentralized storage with cutting-edge technologies like AI. Clara’s background spans enterprise technology, startups, and government roles, making her a pivotal figure in advocating for decentralized solutions that enhance data integrity and transparency in the digital age.
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Transcription:
Josh Kriger: Hi everyone, Josh Kriger of EdgeMFT at Hack Season live in Singapore. It's a really exciting week in the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain. I'm here with Alena Chwalko, the head of ecosystem or ecosystem lead for TUN. It's great to have you on the show. So I'm sure you are very popular right now. A lot of folks are talking about TUN and have been for quite a few months. We covered the hamster combat sort of rapid growth recently in the show. Tell me a little bit about what you attribute all this buzz to and when was that inflection point where things really picked up?
Alena S: That's a good question and it's really hard to answer it because you know it's been all around different factors that kind of contributed to this immense growth. So we achieved like almost 800 million in TBL we broke the record for the number of daily active users, which was just 1.6 million a couple of days ago. So what I was saying is that, can you imagine that just in January of this year, we had the TBL of like 30 mil, something like that, and then it reached 800 million. So a lot of things have happened, of course, like we had the knock-on launch, super simple game, like no one ever expected anything of its kind, right? So 35 million people, eligible for the ASL. Now they have 2.5 million old shareholders. We have the largest Mink one in the entire Web3 ecosystem, which is dogs now, like 4.5 million. And we are actually waiting for more than 200 million people to claim hubs this year.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, including myself. I think I'm at like the second to highest level actually. Yeah, it's a good thing to do when you're late at night and you want to get your brain off work, right?
Alena S: I mean, I wish I had played as well, I just didn't have enough time.
Josh Kriger: I get it, I get it. I'm embarrassing myself with how addictive that game got for me.
Alena S: No, actually it is indeed addictive. I mean, I used to play for like a couple of weeks, you know, I stopped testing the gameplay anyway because I need to understand what the product is about. And it was indeed very engaging. And this is exactly something that Hampstead introduced to the market, right? So they made one step further compared to NotQuant, because NotQuant was just about clicking and completing tasks, and Hampstead is already something more in-depth, more entertaining. And then we have more and more products of this type, like tap-to-earns, but with something more advanced. And this is exactly how we are progressing within the vertical. So tap to earn is not just about clicking, right? It's all about social mechanics. It's all about understanding how exactly to engage people and how to bring them, let's say, in droves, not individuals, right? But rather like groups to organize different competitions and to engage them like in hospitals.
Josh Kriger: So as you're sort of looking at your role in terms of tongues evolution, What are you doing to sort of support projects that are coming to you? And what are the types of projects you're actually looking for that sort of you think will support the next evolution of TUN's ecosystem?
Alena S: Yeah, so starting with the first one, we are actually doing a lot of things, and I hope it's kind of visible from the side of projects as well, because it's all been about hard work. So we have a major incentive program right now, which is called the Open League, within which we are incentivizing both users through Airdrops and, for example, helping boost indexes, as well as projects themselves. So we have kind of open competition for products of different verticals, including DeFi, applications of different types and NFTs. And so if you, for example, go to the website of the Open Week, you'll see those leaderboards that are updated in real time, where you can see in a very transparent way all the metrics of all key projects in the ecosystem. And going back to your very first question about the growth, so now we have, like, we started with around, like, 30 projects in the beta season in March of this year, and now we have more than 130 or even 40. So it's been also about the growth of projects themselves, of good apps, because also those are apps that are validated and that already have quite a substantial audience. So we are incentivizing projects in this way so that these leaderboards, they've become a very important tool for them, like a reputational tool. When they talk to investors, when they talk to exchanges, they can very openly and consistently show, like, this is our attraction, this is how we are positioned compared to other projects in the ecosystem. And then we're definitely giving out prizes, we are helping them with listings on exchanges, with marketing, we have a grants program, like a lot of things really. So it's been all about growth, our own gains, right? Because we can see that this vertical is really strong in the ecosystem. And those guys, they don't really need our support. You know, they start earning money from day one, which is super cool, right? Which is kind of the goal of every single startup out there. What we're really looking forward to is probably more growth in the DeFi sector. Because this is exactly the space where we want to onboard this audience.
Josh Kriger: All right, well, this is part two. You just finished a very popular conversation on stage. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about the infrastructure side of TUN, because we talked about all the people building. That's a lot of people building on the foundational infrastructure. How have you found the infrastructure working to handle that? Is it scalable to handle all this building? And what sort of advancement and innovation is happening on the infrastructure side?
Alena S: Yeah, I mean, I'm probably like, to be honest, not the best person to speak about infra and like the tech stack in general, but I'm going to be very, you know, high perspective. So, theoretically speaking, our infrastructure, our architecture is very scalable and it's, you know, intended to be so from the very original design, right? So when Zincolaiduro back then was kind of designing the white paper, it was all there. So thanks to sharding, it's super scalable technology and that was supposed to be, still supposed to be our competitive advantage over other chains, right? Especially Ethereum. Of course, I mean, I understand what you're hinting at, right? We did face some downtime of the chain throughout the year. But like, guys, we need to understand that like millions and hundreds of millions of people, okay, hundreds of millions of people will be trying to claim the airdrop in just one week. Before that, it was a bit less, so less than 100 million, but still, those are insane numbers. This is history that we're making in the ecosystem, so of course, we did face some problems, which was kind of obvious.
Josh Kriger: Good new test. I mean, we've seen what happened with X Spaces with some of their record-breaking spaces, and you guys, I mean, the volume here is astronomically higher than that, right? So, working through it is, I guess, the short answer there. And then, like, on the roadmap, in terms of the development of the TAN ecosystem, any partnerships, any features that you're excited about? I mean, I'm not sure I can disclose everything, so just, I mean... All right, well, we'll save some of that for the next interview, but what can you share?
Alena S: Yeah, what can it change? Like, I mean, just the recent one on the investment of Thought Start Ventures and Bidget, very exciting milestone as well. And then, you know, just yesterday, there was this investors day of Thorn and then Pantera Capital were kind of pitching their attitude towards TORN, their investment thesis and I'm like super excited about this particular one because I mean so far they've invested in TORN only but then we're really looking forward for them to invest in TORN projects which is going to be I think a very very important milestone to achieve. And then apart from that, like any more other one that we just discussed is something that, I mean, we're sticking to recently. Very important partner for us in different fields, not only in gaming, as the majority of people may think. It's about, you know, very, very multi-dimensional partnership.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, I can speak for that as a port co-company. I mean, there's certainly, you know, doing things in streaming that are really innovative as well as social fi.
Alena S: And meme points, by the way.
Josh Kriger: Yes. Yes, I mean they do, they have invested in a base Bitcoin platform and it sounds like maybe there's something going on there with TAN as well.
Alena S: Probably something is cooking for TAN as well, exactly.
Josh Kriger: I think they're all about sort of the full exploration of the potential of blockchain and doing it sort of in the best way possible, right? Like that's what they're all about.
Alena S: From different angles, exactly, yeah.
Josh Kriger: Well, very cool. What should folks do if they want to get more involved in TAN? Where do you like to send people first?
Alena S: I'll send you the link. I've prepared a very cool document, guys. It's the best document you've ever seen. You'll find all the relevant links, all the relevant forms where you can apply for different types of support. So just very briefly, we provide marketing support, we have a grant program, we have our accelerator, which is now an independent entity operating on their own. We have also like an ecosystem VC, also an independent entity, very actively investing in ton projects right now. So they've just raised like a lot of capital to be allocated into ton projects in the upcoming years. We have different incentive programs, the Open League that I mentioned already. We help with BD, we help with like everything. We're trying to do our best. Unfortunately, our resources are limited, especially time and energy, but really trying to do at least my best from a personal perspective.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, I can tell. And you have big shoes to fill with so much demand to work with Tana. It's an exciting time for you guys. Really appreciate your time chatting with me today. And we'll share all those links with our community so they can get what they need and maybe save you a few cycles of your day. Thank you so much.
Alena S: Thanks for that. Thank you very much. Cheers.
Josh Kriger: Hi everyone, Josh Kriger co-host of Edge of Nifty, live at Hack Season. We're in Singapore, it's bustling. I'm really honored to be here with Sergey Kunz the co-founder of 1inch. It's great to have you on the show. Hi, thank you very much. I don't think we've ever had you guys on the show, so bucket list item checked. I think having this conversation at this moment in the industry is such an opportune time. I know you guys had a big announcement yesterday. Why don't we cover those details first since we are on the edge of NFT? We like to cover the edge.
Sergey Kunz: Sure, yes. Maybe you are familiar with the problem that you want to move from one blockchain to another blockchain or maybe even to L2 or back. And it's always a pain. You have, of course, the bridge aggregators, but it also takes sometimes a very long time. I never have the time and then I miss opportunities. Yes. The thing is, they get hacked very often. The bridges, also the bridge aggregators, what we have seen also recently and last time. And we came to the idea, we have already great technology, our intent-based swap, where you just sign an off-chain order and the settlement is done through a professional market maker, a US user. You don't face any risks in terms of front-running attacks, what you get normally when you do this transaction by yourself. We thought, why don't we combine our intent-based swap with atomic swaps, put it together and offer seamless experience for question swaps. It's actually what you get now when you go to our app.1inch.io. In settings, you need to enable it because we are testing. It's stable, but anyway. And after you enable it, you can really easily swap from Polygon, for example, to Binance Smart Chain or TLL2. And it works with any to any with good prices because we let our market makers compete with each other. And we don't need any bridges, any cross-chain messaging protocols. It just works with the normal atomic cross-chain approach. This is based on Astros. It was mentioned back in 2012 by a guy on Bitcoin Talk. It's highly simple and offers a similar experience than 1inch now.
Josh Kriger: I mean, that's pretty revolutionary. So does this include like Bitcoin and Solana and Ton and Ethereum?
Sergey Kunz: It's coming. It's coming. Right now we have EVM support for like Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, Waze, Arbitrum, Avalanche as well, Gnosis as well. So we are working on Bitcoin, also on Solana and for sure Ton will come as well.
Josh Kriger: Cool. So how long did this initiative take to build and what's been the response of the community so far?
Sergey Kunz: So we had already last December, last year, the smart contracts ready with security audits. It took a little bit long on the backend side, on the application side, and in general, we were waiting for nice events such as we face here in Singapore. So I think it's really the right time because the current narrative I see here is intent-based protocols and cross-chain.
Josh Kriger: We're at a really interesting time as well in terms of the market. I think people expected a little bit more at this moment in the cycle. I was hoping for more. And yet we have one of the biggest blockchain communities in history gathering here in Singapore. Are you optimistic about what will play out the next few months and what do you see as the dominant trends? At one point it was going to be about gaming and then DeFi. I know the Bitcoin ecosystem is growing. You're seeing the movement of liquidity every day. So what's your perspective on what to expect in the next few months and the dominant trends?
Sergey Kunz: I think we will see more. projects, products, building into cross-chain and pan-based field. In terms of gaming, There are some good games coming with NFT and it's also tradable.
Josh Kriger: Do you ever play games? Do you ever have time to dabble?
Sergey Kunz: I played a little bit. It's called Illumium, I guess, right? Yeah. Feels cool. Also really nice that you can improve the skills of your monster you have. Beautiful graphics. Yes. Yes. Also as well. And we have swaps, so you can exchange. It feels okay, kind of, it's not super ready for mass adoption from our point of view because we need to learn how to scale and to provide better user experience in general. not just games, also like swaps and in general also in terms of if you look on liquidity pools of Uniswap when we provide now liquidity, you get sandwiched. I face this problem as well. That's why we are pushing the intent-based architecture forward so the user is protected by design and don't need to somehow find a solution for those.
Josh Kriger: So one last question, I know you have to run and you have a talk here. I remember when 1inch launched, hearing about it, you guys kind of came out of nowhere and picked up a lot of traffic quickly. There's so many more DEXs in the space and I see that you guys are keep innovating. Did you anticipate 1-inch would be at this point it is now in terms of size and growth and what do you think 1-inch is going to do to ensure that you guys stay competitive and innovative in a world where decks are being created every day?
Sergey Kunz: So honestly, from our feeling, it escalated quickly. So we didn't expect this growth. Nowadays, we are 150 people. Back in 2019, we were just two and a half men, I and Anton, and one advisor who supported us, Michel. So we were keeping always, the whole time, delivery. We were trying to solve the problems that we had ourselves. And the cross-chain swap solution, for example, is also actually a solution for ourselves. I personally, I have the problem. I need to transfer from Gnosis some USDC because I get paid from Realty. It's my real estate token investments. And it was really a pain and I thought it could be maybe a better user experience. And now the community feedback is really huge. You know, everyone likes it. It's simple. So, yeah, in terms of Us, from one inch side, we have now 150 people. It's a nightmare because you need to communicate properly. I had to learn a lot of things about how to speak with people. I'm such an engineer, you know. I'm not someone who can really communicate with people. And I had also to grow in this space and I have luck that we have a lot of contributors who come already with this experience and help us. Cool.
Josh Kriger: Thank you so much. We covered a lot. Just any any other perspective that you want to share in terms of sort of where things are going with the Bitcoin economy and Bitcoin DeFi and all these L2s. Was that something you anticipated. How do you think that will impact the space over the next few years.
Sergey Kunz: I think we will see more Bitcoin markets trying DeFi, I would say, and that's why we are also trying to push the cross-chain offerings.
Josh Kriger: It's good for you guys because DeFi is one of your fortes, right?
Sergey Kunz: Yes, yes, yes. So they need the possibility to use the Bitcoin somehow or maybe to collect more Bitcoins. There are some farming, some meme coins, some potential yields to get in DeFi space. And at the end, you can just collect everything in Bitcoin.
Josh Kriger: Which is what everyone said is the strategy you should follow anyway. So now it's going to be easier.
Sergey Kunz: Yeah, definitely. I think it's getting more like independent from the chain itself. it will become more abstract. You have just your wallet, you have your assets, and you should actually not care in what network you are right now. You just should have similar experience what you have in centralized exchange, but staying non-custodian, because we have seen FTX, you know, and Mt. Gox and some other stories where people lost a lot of money and you want to prevent this.
Josh Kriger: I saw Mark Kropopoulos at KBW and he's actually starting another exchange based on what he's learned. Did you know that?
Sergey Kunz: No, I didn't. Yeah, he's back in the exchange game.
Josh Kriger: Oh, okay. Well, really appreciate chatting with you. Thanks for your time and thanks for what you're doing for our space. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Edge of NFT. This is Josh Kriger your co-host. I'm here at Hack Season. It's bustling in Singapore. A lot of folks here. And I'm really excited to talk with Clara Tao, one of the founding officers at Filecoin Foundation. It's great to have you on the show. Thank you for having me. So we had Martha on a while back. We really haven't come up with you all in a while. I should disclose, I was one of the ICO investors. So I've been following you guys for a really long time. And I know you all are getting pretty deep into the world of AI. We're chatting a little bit about it. That AI may have helped us create this interview. So tell me what your perspective is on AI and how that sort of amplifies the core use case for Filecoin.
Clara Tao : Absolutely. So a lot of people don't recognize this but a lot of the major A.I. companies that are on the forefront of news like Anthropic or Open A.I. they are owned by most of big tech. So people don't quite break the pieces together. But Anthropic has a huge investment by Amazon and also the same with Chachi BT and Open A.I. with open AI through Microsoft. And so for us, 2026, we're going to see 90% of the content generated on the web, new content being generated by AI. And this is something that we think is quite scary because if big tech already owns our data, We don't want them to own the next generation of what is truth and what isn't the truth on the web today. And so at Filecoin, we have the largest decentralized storage network out there. We have independent storage providers, I was just with some of them 10 minutes away from here, who have been running huge data centers, storing over five exabytes of available storage. And we store all kinds of data, and you can imagine AI is another piece of that data. But there are so many interesting properties around decentralized storage that make it so important in the age of AI. So when you think about how content is stored on the web today, a lot of content is stored by location. So a good example is the links on the web for the last nine years. 67% of them actually don't work. You usually get a 404 error because the file can't be found because someone forgets to pay their AWS bill. In decentralized storage, we use something that allows us to locate an item by hash rather than by location. And so you can permanently be able to access the content of a link when you upload it to the decentralized web. And this is especially important because the biggest challenge in AI is really content integrity today. People are worried, whether they're creators, whether these are policymakers, whether these are everyday people, how their content is used and manipulated. Because it's so easy to fabricate things that are not true. And a lot of people might just believe what is AI generated as the truth versus independent fact checkers. And imagine a world where you have tons of companies all generating fake or news content every single day. You might end up with a web which has a lot of things that end up hurting reputation damage, being able to rip off IP from major brands. So these are all big issues that we want to make sure we can help at the storage layer. And so when you think about storing something at the infrastructure layer for decentralized storage, you can also look at the layers built on top of it. And so you can look at how a piece of content stored is manipulated over time. You have proof of storage, which allows us to validate how something is stored, how it's upkept, and the changes over time. And this is especially interesting with generative AI. where we can now track where data sets are coming from, which models data is being pulled. And so that's a lot of what we've been working on the last few months and over the past year is a lot of really great integrations with AI agents and really making sure that at the end of the day, we can really reach people at the application layer and have that backbone on decentralized storage.
Josh Kriger: So, I mean, it makes sense. If you're going to decentralize storage, understanding the metadata and where it comes from is core to the overall picture. Let's talk about traction. Has decentralized storage achieved the goals you had hoped at this moment in time? How far have we progressed in the industry relative to the standard solutions that are out there?
Clara Tao : Yeah, I think it's unfair to compare it apples to apples because we work in such a different way. Our coordination mechanism, our governance mechanism, and this is all for the positive benefit that you get to choose and own your data. It's different. It's like comparing Marriott with an Airbnb, right? They're just very different models where you can't say what's a better hotel brand, Airbnb or Marriott.
Josh Kriger: But what's one interest is eventually Airbnb attracted a pretty broad array of customer segments that originally might have thought that was a crazy idea, right?
Clara Tao : Yeah, no, absolutely. And you're absolutely right. And so my point here is I want to make sure everyone flips the switch in the way they think about comparisons. But I'm very, very optimistic about decentralized storage because we're actually also seeing enterprises really get excited about decentralized storage. We have an alliance that we launched called the Decentralized Storage Alliance. This happened two years ago, where we have huge existing enterprises. that all want to learn about how to get involved in decentralized storage because they don't want a single point of failure. We've seen huge IT failures even this past year with CrowdStrike. We've seen Facebook go down. And so even traditional companies today, they don't want to rely on just one data center that is centralized and fully owned to be able to upkeep their services because so many businesses around the world are now dependent on technology and IT and the internet working to be able to function every day.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, no, I really appreciate those points. I guess another part of the conversation where your broad perspective would be appreciated is this idea of censorship versus independence of data. How do you sort of reconcile sort of privacy with sort of what people are storing, you know, through a decentralized web? And it may not be for the right reasons for nefarious uses.
Clara Tao : Yeah, I think one thing that is really great that I mentioned earlier is really the properties of content integrity that you can do with decentralized storage. And I'll give a couple of examples, but one of my favorite stories was we're working with a group at Stanford University called Starling Lab, and they worked with a number of human rights and nonprofit organizations in Ukraine to make sure that photographic evidence by journalists on the ground for the war that's taking place can one day be admissible in international criminal court because in times of war there's a lot of images that are floated around saying there's attack here there's a bomb here and when you can actually prove that a photograph is taken at some point of upload you can use that and prove that this is not a manipulated or changed image. So I think there's actually a lot of positive properties to it. There's definitely downsides, but that's every single industry. You see challenges with content moderation in the centralized web. You're going to see some of that. But I think the beauty of it is when you have a government's model that many people can have a say in, I do think you can have a much safer place rather than one monopoly saying, no, I want this to stay. I'm not going to do anything about it. because I can make money off of this, or it could be an authoritarian government deciding, hey, I just want to shut this content down because I don't believe in it, right? So we do think that ultimately a decentralized model and especially a decentralized governance model is a positive thing.
Josh Kriger: Makes sense. So I've been to your Filecoin house in Davos and I know you all look at policymaking, policy conversations as a key part of sort of the future of a world where decentralized storage can be fully utilized. We're in a really exciting event today in Asia. What is your perspective on the policy side of things at this moment? What are your focus areas? And how are those sort of evolving geographically in Asia versus other parts of the world?
Clara Tao : I think Asia has been actually pretty progressive in places here like Singapore which I know the government has embraced a lot of crypto and also even being welcoming to events like this. We were just in Hong Kong where their consensus is taking place in Hong Kong next year. There's a lot of excitement from local authorities there to get involved. We also have a very large community here in the APAC region. And so I think Asia has so many people and actually a lot of interest in blockchain that besides language barriers, people are really excited to get involved and especially in decentralized storage. I think for me, I've worked in and out of many different roles, from enterprise to startups to U.S. government, and I think one big challenge with any kind of emerging technology is there's an education layer that people have to go through, because a policymaker is not going to have a basic education, typically, in normal tech, in Web 2.0 tech. more or less Web3. And I know Web3 is sometimes even complex and hard to understand for existing Web3 community members.
Josh Kriger: And there's been policies that have been designed based on misunderstandings of the underlying technology.
Clara Tao : Yeah, there have been a lot of policies that have been misunderstood. But I still remember the moment, because I went there in person, when Mark Zuckerberg did his hearing in front of Congress. Wow, you were there? So the first time I was there in person. That's exciting. And I remember how people were shocked at some of the questions asked. But that that is your typical U.S. policymaker. I mean, you have people that are within a particular age demographic that didn't grow up with the web in the palm of their hand. Someone asked me to explain Filecoin like I'm five. And I said, well, you know, most kids when they're 10 the same age. are way more digitally literate than their parents. So you need to flip the switch and say, how would you teach this to your grandfather or grandmother? And so I think this is a challenge with most governments around the world is the people that represent and write the policies are often in an age category where they don't really get to interact with it as frequently. I still remember there's a lot of congressional staffers that print out emails for their members of Congress to read. This is not everyone, but one thing that we're trying to do to change this paradigm is we fund a great organization in D.C. called Tech Congress, which brings a lot of folks from the private sector, including blockchain, to be in seats where they can help contribute to tech policy. And I think that education needs to be not only from outside in, but also from inside out. And hopefully we can have those kinds of talents and perspective nationally bubble up to real world policy.
Josh Kriger: That's exciting. So we talked about AI. Obviously that's a focal point for you all. Anything else on the roadmap and sort of your priorities for the next few years as you're thinking about the future of decentralized storage.
Clara Tao : Yeah I think the two areas that really have been a buzzword this year and I'm sure you've seen this this week as well has been deep in any eye.
Josh Kriger: And I think decentralized storage really is that came out of nowhere as like a potential leader of the pack for this cycle. Right. Yeah. I mean it was about D. It was about gaming, and it was at DeFi, and all of a sudden, Deepin, there's been like five or six events this week, and in Hong Kong there were events, in Korea there were a lot of Deepin events, and there's something interesting going on there.
Clara Tao : Yeah, I think Deepin is especially interesting because you have physical devices, and back to your policy question, when you can see physical things like cellular networks like Helium, or physical data centers like us in Filecoin, It's no longer magic internet money. People see that this is a means to accomplish a task. And I think Deepin is really exciting because you have real entrepreneurs that are investing into these businesses in order to help support a decentralized network.
Josh Kriger: And are you familiar with HiveMapper?
Clara Tao : I am, yeah, yeah. We've been working with them for a while on the ecosystem.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, so we interviewed Ariel yesterday, I believe, at Token. And I mean, like, I thought a point he made that was really interesting is they're doing... The deep-end reward mechanism is the icing on the cake. The actual cake is just the benefits that come from having sort of this access to more accurate mapping data so that drivers can navigate, fleets can get where they need to go in a world where traffic can take in the wrong turn, especially during token 2049, can add 30 minutes to your trip, right? So I think it's really exciting to see deep-end use cases where they're actually making the world better.
Clara Tao : Yeah. And one of my other favorite examples, because I know the founder very well, and they're actually storing their data on the Filecoin network. So a lot of these new projects are still looking at decentralized storage to be fully decentralized from their stack down, is a company called WeatherXM. They have decentralized weather stations all around the world. to make sure we can have accurate weather data. Because today, most of weather stations are pretty monopolized and centralized. So you'll only get accurate weather station in major cities. But the founder is actually a kite surfer, and he's like, why are these local kite surfers giving more accurate information than what weather stations are providing me? And so he's wanted to do this idea for the last 13 years, but every VC will slam his door back in 2011 or 2010, because crowdfunding weather stations sounds like an insane idea. Yeah that's right. But if you can flip the switch on the incentive mechanisms and say OK well everyone hosting the weather station now is almost part of the investment. of contributing to the network and they get paid, all these people with his weather stations, I have one in Miami.
Josh Kriger: So I'm not a user, I don't ever check the weather, but my girlfriend will love this product because she wants to know, is it actually going to rain or not? That is one of her fundamental existential questions, right?
Clara Tao : Yeah, exactly. And also, the better weather data that you can have your station contribute, the more you'll get compensated. So people actually can build out their own weather station in a more accurate way, depending on location. Yeah, I mean, you really should. But think about that and also the storage layer, right? So they're storing on the Filecoin network, and we have a ton of other Deepin projects all building on top. But Filecoin was actually probably the earliest major Deepin network out there. It's been around for a long time, and we've always been committed on how we can scale data centers all around the world. independent entrepreneurs can run and really grow with their own liking.
Josh Kriger: Very cool. Well, your authenticity and your enthusiasm is contagious. It's an honor to meet you and to learn more about Filecoin. I think you've given us a lot to think about. Appreciate your time today.
Clara Tao : Yeah, thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.
Richard Carthon: Hey, everyone, Richard Carthon here with the Edge of NFT, and we are live here at Token 2049. And I have the pleasure of sitting here with Parsa, who is with Seedphoto NFT and working on a lot of really cool and amazing things. I was able to get a really amazing demo of how the product works. And I was like, yo, I need to have a conversation with you. So would love to learn just more first about your background. And then, of course, you can tell us more about what's going on with Seedphoto.
Parsa Haghighi: And I'm co-founder of multiple platforms, which is like a sister-brother company together, seed.photo, avars.photo. And recently, we released the cash click application, which is the bot in Telegram, for our community to play, learn, and earn there. And if I'm going to give you a little bit background about myself, I'm in IT industry for more than like 23 years so far. I did play a role in a different format like as a network engineer, programmer, designer, product designer, and now like a serial entrepreneur in different companies working. And we believe that blockchain is going to solve lots of issues in the world. It's not just about getting crypto out in the finance market, it's going to help a billion other things. And that's why we are really lucky to be part of this journey and doing and adding value more in the community. That's why we built multiple platforms so far. This is a little bit about myself.
Richard Carthon: Yeah, well, thank you for that background. And the background makes a lot of sense for how you built out this product. So as I saw it, it was a way for your end consumer to come on. Photographers can come in and put their photography on blockchain meant to turn into an entity, but you also found a way to like gamify it. So kind of walk us through that product.
Parsa Haghighi: Yeah, we have two types of different users, which one of them is the artists that we are dealing with, which we have like one of the hardest KYC process to collect artists because we do respect our collectors and whoever wants to buy art and real art and we claim that we are going to save art in the future by using the blockchain technology. This is one type of users that we're dealing with. For example, we received more than 200K different applications of different photographers all over the world. Their job is very good, but we couldn't identify them as artists based on the representation of their work in the web format. And then we just collect 600 so far, I think so. And we have the artists there. This is one type of user we're dealing with. They bring their artwork and they make it as an NFT. And with this way, they can save lots of time and we help them to solve the biggest problem they're facing at the moment, which is the copyright infringement in the world, and especially in the photography industry. They can get the certificate of ownership for their asset and then they can freely share it in the market. Everyone can enjoy from their artwork and even they get the profit from the loyalty system and also for whoever buy their artwork. This is one side and combine it with the gamification, you find out we have lots of other people which is interesting in art but they're not artists. That's why I say, okay, let's have a community built around this topic. And since the tap and air functionality app or bot, it's getting so popular and people are really interested about that topic, we did it in a way that it's more meaningful. And we are in the first in the world that we have already listed token before we start our bot. Because majority of the bot, they provide their users some hope for the future to be listed. We have our own SEED token, which is supported. The platform, which the name is CashClick, it's supported by SEED.photo. It means whoever play and learn through our platform, they don't need to be worried about the airdrop for what we have planned to do it monthly and also the major airdrop which is the January 2025 and they can swap their thing and we built three major functionality which is related to photography one is by just simply watching photos what they can and see token that that's simple it's like the way that you are in the reels of Instagram But you see a lot of, you know, not good content too. And you cannot filter it anymore because advertising is coming. But this one is specifically focusing the photography and good artists. And you can see the good art and it affects your day-to-day, you know, what I call excitement to start your day as a normal people and being inspired as an artist. and this is the way just simply you watch art there is a way that you can you know play music background or something and you and see token in the background with doing nothing we have the air per tab which is the symbol and we have it there and another feature which we just sorted which is good and uh it's capturing photo for now the capturing the photo is all sort it, pixelize it in the NFT, it means it's 100% secure about the privacy. But what we are going to have planned to do in the future, we are going to give our normal user, which is not their, we don't call them as a professional artist, but they can take a photo and attend to the photo contest and earn SID token too and SID.photo token and then after that they can swap it easily. This is a multiple feature but we have it and there is a lots of other excitement feature in the future that we can share it later on in our platform.
Richard Carthon: That is so incredible. And I appreciate you breaking both sides down. So for your everyday photographer out there that can come onto the platform and right now start putting some of their photography so that now when the end consumer comes on, they can come and look at them and they earn tokens just by doing that. So you're incentivized to come on the platform, engage with art, understand how it's working, and even potentially create your own photos as well. So I even see, imagine on Snapchat, every time you take a picture and now someone else can come and do this. So you're creating that gamification of photography creativity. And like you said, you already have a token that's out, which is also very uniquely different. Whereas most of these others try to get you on this game, do a whole bunch of things for the idea of an airdrop, and you don't really know what's coming. But people right now can go and look, and that's the afterthought. Now you're just incentivizing people to come and participate, which I think is really cool.
Parsa Haghighi: Yep, good. And another point is, whoever deal with CashClick application, which is the bot, we release it. It's dealing with the real company. We are out there. We are here in Singapore. We've been in the lots of other international community out there, you know. And we are crystal clear because we have a huge journey in front of us. And whoever owns cToken or Cedix, We can assure you we are doing our best to help the community to get more. It's a win-to-win process. And it means that, for example, for any other airdrop out there, I don't want to criticize them at all, but they don't have any plan to do it. Just a simple gaming, they do it, and, you know, done and finished. What happened for the token? What's the reason why I'm using blockchain? What does that mean? Why do I have to have different currency which has no solving any problem in the world? but we have a vision, mission, value proposition behind of what we do and in general we are going to save art against of art AI which is so crazy and we need to do something and blockchain give us this opportunity to do it in terms of the copyright This is how we're adding value in the art community. And definitely we want to help all people dealing with our community to gain more through this journey with us too. And that's a future plan for us, yeah.
Richard Carthon: It sounds amazing. We at Edge of NFT really believe in bringing your artists first, being that creative and that creator at the forefront and keeping them in mind as you're building out a micro product and having it be a very seamless user experience and user interface so new people can come on and experience it as well. But like you said, you've now gone internationally to all types of events, but you've chosen to be here at Token 2049. How's your experience been so far? And why did you choose to come in and showcase Seed Photo here?
Parsa Haghighi: And to just let you know, sorry, I go back to your question. We just released our application bot 10 days ago to test it out. So far, we have a half a million users and it's crystal clear in the web app. They can just go there and check it out. We personally, you know, as a platform, I would get shocked too. And it was the result of the good work as a team. It was just like not the founder of the app, you know, the system. We have lots of technical person, which is working in the background, design team, and all these type of things helping together to build something for the community, which they love it. we have almost in all countries around the world at least 10 users and some countries we have like 10,000 like 20,000 whatever you know it's it's clear in the platform this is our plan you know since two years ago three yeah two years ago one once we started Because we have a long-term plan, as I mentioned, we attend to any community-based events or any other registration things that we can just attend there and then showcase what we are doing. to support the community itself. We've been in multiple, you know, events in the past and, you know, 2024, 29, it's something amazing that we've been, you know, what is called, we expect to have a booth there and explain the things for our users to
Richard Carthon: Well, I'm glad you're having a good experience. It makes a lot of sense to be here. Your booth has been busy the whole time that I've seen you being here. So for all those who love what they're hearing right now, how can they learn more and participate and even use the app that's now out there?
Parsa Haghighi: There is multiple things. For example, they can go to our website seed.photo, which is in the main page. seed.photo it's a domain itself it's all of them and like www.seed.photo and this is the one thing that they can check it out the other platform that we have it as I mentioned it's cashclick.app and token.seed.photo it's a listed for the token too and our social media and all this type of thing like an Instagram account X account and you know all telegram account It's all available out there. People can get more information, especially on YouTube. It's daily, you know, content will be there. Yeah, absolutely.
Richard Carthon: Well, everyone make sure you go do that. And thank you so much for your time.
Josh Kriger: Hi everyone, Josh Krieger here, co-host of Edge of NFT. I am live in Singapore at Hacked Season with Kevin Lee, the CEO of Gate Hong Kong. It's great to have you on the show. Thank you, great to be here. So you just finished your keynote to a packed house. What were you talking about?
Kevin Lee: I was talking about a concept that I just made up. It's called being at the top 10% is more important than having a 10X. So yeah, so basically it's around the concept of someone, a Theodore Sturgeon, have this Sturgeon's law saying 90% of everything is crap. So it's important to stay at the top 10% because like how every single industry will evolve in the same way where whoever is not being competitive will eventually fade out. So being a 10x, 100x is good to have, but being a top 10, That makes sense.
Josh Kriger: I mean, I think it's very much like about the principles of Dale Carnegie. It's like surrounding yourself with good people, good partners, good ecosystems, good things will come, right? Exactly that, yes. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So in respect to sort of what you're seeing across GATE, tell me a little bit about like the areas that are growing and sort of where you think folks should pay some attention to what sectors of the market.
Kevin Lee: Yes. So obviously, I also mentioned on the stage as well is like GATE at this very cycle, I think is more important than ever to have more genuine human interactions. I mean, it's so easy these days just to have interaction online virtually on Twitter and on Discord. But I think crypto as a whole, we need more events like this, like today, and like Tokyo 2049. So that's what It happens that we are like ramping up our sponsorship and the partnership with different events organizer and also we recently have a sponsorship partnership with Inter Milan football club as well. So just another way to you know go out to our users, go out to our communities. Have a face to the brand. Yeah, that's exactly that.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, that makes sense. And in terms of what you're seeing, folks were talking about this being the cycle where it's all about gaming. And then it was all about DeFi. And then we've seen this uprooting of interest around Bitcoin. Do you think we're at a place where this is just how it's going to be moving forward, where there won't be a trend of the year, but a lot of different sectors that are all growing simultaneously?
Kevin Lee: Yeah, well, I don't have the crystal balls, right? But like, I myself is a gamer, a big gamer. So like, I would definitely want to see gaming as a whole, not only in Web3, but like gaming as a more like a mature industrialized, like industry that we see not about like just keep playing computer games, right? So I think that would be cool. But at the same time, obviously, from where I'm from in Hong Kong, a lot of talks about like regulations and how we get institutions and traditional financial markets to integrate with our market as well. So that may be another interesting point that may happen in next year. I don't know for sure, but we'll see.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, what is going on with the Asia market that folks that aren't sort of as tuned in should be aware of?
Kevin Lee: Yeah, well, so what happened is obviously we see a lot of happenings and things about to happen in the West, especially in the U.S. But whatever things or plans, strategies happening in the U.S., I'm sure Asia will have counter-strategies coming up just to make sure we stay competitive in the landscape, right? So, I think Hong Kong is definitely looking into that direction as well. We will, in a way, have more comprehensive legislations, not only on exchange and trading, but also OTC trading and stable coins as well. So we will have some really holistic frameworks for regulations in Hong Kong.
Josh Kriger: That's exciting. So Edgeoff company is backed by Inamoka brands. I was just in Hong Kong for all the BTC events a few months ago. It was my first time. I had a great time. Great people. great culture, great food. These are the keys to life for me. And, you know, nature. Like, you have a lot going on. It made me feel like at home, which is not, you know, I travel to a lot of places. I don't feel that way normally. So I can see how, you know, the regulations are set in place. They're right. This could be a really burgeoning place for the future of the blockchain industry.
Kevin Lee: Yeah, you're right. I mean, I think it's very different in any other jurisdictions as well. I'm born and raised in Hong Kong, so I'm very biased. Hong Kong in a way that we have holistic support from the government and different regulators. And also, as you said, it's a great place. like historically it's a hub for financial market as well at the right time zone and at the right geolocations where people is like so easy to travel in and travel out so we have all the potential so we see how the industry is doing.
Josh Kriger: and really cool speakeasies. We went to a place called Iron Fairies. There we go.
Kevin Lee: Yes. Yeah, that's classic.
Josh Kriger: Yeah. Yeah. I'd never been anywhere like this. Really cool spot. Yeah. So definitely find a home in L.A. and it would be super popular.
Kevin Lee: Yeah. People is always like in Hong Kong also talking about the issues about like we're having not the same night life like we used to have before COVID. But also we have all this like crypto events coming into town. in October and also next year consensus is coming to Hong Kong in February as well. So yeah, that may bring a new life to the night scenes in Hong Kong.
Josh Kriger: It's going to be a little harder to get in some of these places than it was in the past. Speaking more specifically about the future of GATE, I know you talked about more events, more online, more face-to-face presence. Are there any features you're working on that you can speak to at this point in terms of the platform itself and what's coming up?
Kevin Lee: Oh yeah, there's a lot of moving parts happening, so there's a lot of things I cannot say at this very moment, but we do have new products coming out, but generally speaking, I think we are looking into more jurisdictions where regulations and licensing are actually making sense and applicable. We'll be looking into those jurisdictions as well and make sure we can plan and also we'll get the license.
Josh Kriger: Great. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak to me right after your keynote. I'm sure you're ready for a break and a nice lunch. But where can folks go to learn more about you? Are you on X? And, you know, how can they sort of learn more about Gate?
Kevin Lee: Yeah, historically I'm a banker, so I'm on X, but I can't be having 24 hours on X. I'm more focusing on LinkedIn, people like me writing on LinkedIn. I personally like writing a lot of things, not only on crypto, but just general what's happening.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, I'm a fan of LinkedIn and it feels like a more relaxed place where you can you know, someone you know posts and you can go check it like two or three days, not like in the moment, right?
Kevin Lee: Yeah, exactly that. So like I tend to write a little bit longer in LinkedIn, like we get a pretty good readership. So we'll see.
Josh Kriger: All right. Well, thanks for hanging out. Thank you again.
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