What impact will NFTs and Web3 have on education? The educational process is fascinating but the system is rife with things that we thought we could only wish to be better. Animoca Brands and TinyTap are here to prove us wrong. Represented in this interview by Yat Siu and Yogev Shelly, respectively, these brands are hard at work in making the world of NFTs relevant to teachers and education. Yat and Yogev join Josh and Eathan to discuss how they are using NFTs to create interactive learning experiences for students but in a way that also rewards the teachers. They discuss whether ChatGPT and similar AI tools are a friend or foe to education. They also share how TinyTap is opening new doors for educators, students and families to amplify learning opportunities and at the same time, onboard them into Web3. Tune in for all of these and more!
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Yat Siu Of Animoca Brands And Yogev Shelly Of TinyTap On How To Use NFTs To Leverage Learning, And More…
This is Yat Siu of Animoca Brands.
This is Yogev of Shelly of TinyTap.
We are here to talk about advancement in education through NFTs.
We're on the Edge of NFT, the most educational show in the land.
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NFT-curious readers, stay tuned for this episode to learn how TinyTap is opening new doors for educators, students, and families to amplify learning opportunities and, at the same time, onboard them into Web3, whether ChatGPT is a threat or an asset to education and also whether ChatGPT comes up with good questions, and why our guests would love for everyone in the world to know they can be as creative as anyone else.
Don't forget that we put together a gathering called NFT LA that brought out thousands of the world's most innovative doers in the NFT space. Head over to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, bolder, and better but also as intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles from March 20th to the 23rd, 2023. See you there.
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This episode features Yat Siu, Cofounder and Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands, and Yogev Shelly, CEO of TinyTap. Both partnered to disrupt education through NFTs. A veteran of technology entrepreneurship and an investor based in Hong Kong, Yat Siu is a global leader in blockchain and gaming with the mission to deliver digital property rights to the world's gamers and internet users, thereby creating a new asset class, play-and-earn economies, and a more equitable digital framework contributing to the building of the open metaverse.
Since 2018, Yat has been an early advocate for the use of blockchain and NFTs in the gaming industry, which will allow gamers to enjoy true ownership of their game assets, data, and consequently, equity. With a clear vision of the potential of decentralized apps and assets, Yat quickly steered Animoca Brands to a leadership position in blockchain, gaming, NFTs, and the open metaverse.
A lifelong creative, Yogev Shelly, Founder and CEO of TinyTap, received his Bachelor's of Art and Design from Bezalel in Jerusalem. Yogev opened an interactive design studio as a means to pursue a content creation career, something he has carried with him ever since. He began to learn coding as a hobby, which would eventually lead to the development of the first iteration of TinyTap, a tool he first used as a way to engage with his ailing father who suffered from dementia.
TinyTap back then was primarily used by Yogev himself, creating activities that centered around his family. Yogev used pictures and voice recordings to ease the symptoms of dementia. Teachers worldwide found TinyTap on the app store and began using it for similar means. They would build interactive lessons for their students to create fun and engaging material to use in class.
This organic adoption of user-generated content inspired Yogev with a vision for the future. TinyTap provides a code-free platform that empowers educators to create and share interactive educational content and receive a revenue share when that content is used by learners. Welcome back to the show, Yat. Welcome for the first time, Yogev.
Eathan, it's so interesting that here we have Yat in Davos. You were on Digital.Davos. The conversation in Davos that Yat was catching us up on is all about the bigger impact on society of technology. Certainly, education is one of those industries that's so right for disruption. People talk more about the challenges than the solutions. Here, we have an interesting solution to a big problem.
Before we get started, I want to jump in and share that our co-host, Jeff Kelley, shares his regret that he can't join us. He's at a memorial service for our colleague who passed away unexpectedly, but he wishes he was here to be with us.
Here's a shout-out to Jeff and best wishes to him, his family, and his colleagues' family as well. In regard to the conversation around education, Yat, give us a view and what's going on in Davos in 2023 besides some snow.
First, my condolences to Jeff, his friends, and his family. In Davos, broadly speaking, first of all, the mood is much more optimistic than I expected, which is good. Maybe people came in with some skepticism about how the market is. Roughly toward the end of Davos, everyone was feeling quite good about themselves and the market overall. I'm not sure where that comes from, but the conversations were positive. There are a few macro things to consider that are adding to that sentiment, not just rising token prices, which has been somewhat of an interesting development.
There were two main topics that we're driving over here at Davos. One of them is Ukraine. If you think about what's happening in Ukraine, that has been going in favor of the general market and Western sentiment. That's adding to the mood. The second one is the metaverse. The metaverse is front and center in almost all conversations at Davos events. The World Economic Forum announced some of the metaverse findings with the working governing council, which we're part of.
We were part of the release, which the council members on that one aren't just Web3 companies. We're a bit of a minority. It includes companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and all our favorite names. This is an interesting conversation strike to grow the bridge. In any sense, it was a positive step there. The other thing is that, in Davos, many of the side events were a lot of Web3, crypto, and blockchain-type companies as well. Certain sections of it may as well have felt like Web3 Davos. It was quite fun.
We were there. If you have a chance, there's a vending machine in Davos where you can get yogurt, cheese, and sausage right out of the machine at any time of the day. That's a little FYI for you. Let's talk a little bit more broadly about the macro topics that this show comes together to cover. We have here a new form of sustainable, ethical, and equitable capitalism that Animoca Brands cares deeply about. That's one reason you're in Davos. It leads to the rest of the focus of the show, which is education, in particular, disrupting education. Paint a picture for us of this new framework of capitalism and how you're going about approaching this.
Particularly, this is why we're so excited about Web3. We believe in this concept of the shared network effect. We have spoken often about how the metaverse, Web3, and blockchain should be viewed as building economies as opposed to thinking of them as companies or businesses. Like a country, the size of its GDP and its economic growth has a net benefit generally to the whole population and everyone involved rather than benefiting a few. The problem that we have in the world, generally speaking, is that capitalism is generally a form of shareholder capitalism, which is most embodied when you look at where the value accrues.
If your company is successful, then the management, the founders, and the shareholders do well, but not the customers who have contributed to the success of these companies. This isn't necessarily digital companies, but digital companies are the ones who are probably best exemplified. They don't get outside of being a consumer of the service. They don't get a benefit for having helped build the business after all. You look at something like Facebook. If people stop using Facebook, the value of Facebook is zero, yet the people who use that platform are mindful of the data, and they don't get any value for it.
It seems that the consumer, and that's the term, is there to be extracted from. That's the kind of capitalism that we generally have. Web3 is a form of true stakeholder capitalism. It's not indirect. It's very direct. If you take, for instance, one of our other properties, which is The Sandbox, as an example, and if you buy land in Sandbox, you become a stakeholder in the truest sense of the word, which means that if Sandbox does well, you do well too. If Sandbox does poorly, you suffer equally.
What happens is the entire community has now a common sense of purpose because they're all part of that same stake, which also means you have a natural defense mechanism as we have in our neighborhood. If our neighborhood is going badly, the community will come together and say, "What can we do here?" Stakeholder capitalism isn't how we share value across the community. Stakeholder capitalism has the word stake. It means that everyone has something at risk.
We know what happens in societies. When you have something at risk or when you are staking something, you're not just staking money. You're staking reputation and things that are important to you. When you have something at stake, then it's worth defending and protecting. That's what we're hoping to build here with a new data paradigm, blockchain, and Web3. What was traditionally a customer-consumer now becomes a customer-owner. As a result, that customer-owner has a shared purpose with the community that he or she is joining. That is, broadly speaking, what we're so excited about. This is only possible in something like Web3. You can't do that in the traditional Web2 paradigm.
Here's a shout-out to a book called Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a relatively famous economist of sorts. That's what the whole book is about. How do we get skin in the game for various players in various systems to make it most functional for all? I also thought it was interesting to mention the word consumer. I thought of it in terms of something like Facebook or a lot of these social apps. We have turned consumers into producers. They're producing the content, but it's extractive. They're not just consuming, to be honest.
Traditionally, the concept of a consumer is someone who takes and consumes whatever is being produced. In that case, what you would think would traditionally be consumers are producers in the truest sense of the term. I would love to check in with you, Yogev, about what's going on here with TinyTap. I want to know how NFTs and Web3 technologies are improving earning opportunities, for example, for educators through the system.
I'm going to build on what we have said until now. Yat, I also haven't heard that focus and highlight on the word consumer. That's very interesting to think about. Web1 is the right place to put consumers in because we just consume the content there. Maybe Web2 should be about producers, and Web3 is about owners. That's a nice way to connect everything.
I'm going to talk at length about what we have created on TinyTap and how we're advancing the visions we already had before with Web2, but now we can amplify with Web3. The starting point of what we're building is the ownership part, to give the creators the ownership of what they create, and through that, opening all sets of new business opportunities and models for them.
As we were working on that, it made it much clearer that owning the content is a much fairer and truer way to link your success to a company's success than the traditional way we're investing in companies or taking part in companies. If I'm an avid Meta user, and I want to participate in the success, I can go to the public market and buy their shares, but we all know that has nothing to do with the actual success in terms of traction and revenue of the company. It's more of a hype in the market. The market can vanish it. The actual underlying assets are where the value is at.
If I own a part of the Evolution of Dance back then on YouTube, I don't know if audiences here know what I'm talking about, any successful videos that didn't get a lot of views when the platform was young but suddenly, this platform becomes huge, and I was a part owner of that video, then I enjoyed that success. It's linked directly to the success of the company. In a way, owning pieces of content and platforms that we use and engage with is a much better way to link ourselves to the success of a company that we believe in than going to the public market. I hope that's where we're going. That's what we're trying to advance also in education.
Can you get a little bit into how this works? There's another business. I don't know if it's necessarily a competitor, but there's something interesting about it. I know about this company for years because my wife and her sister got involved in it. It's called Teachers Pay Teachers. It's a platform where if you're a teacher and you made a PDF thing, you can upload it there.
Other teachers will spend $2 or $5 on this educational pack. It's so much easier for that other teacher to use that content and so forth. They eventually started calling it Teachers Make Millions because teachers are making millions by creating this content. I'm sure the model is similar and different from that thing on your platform. What are the similarities and differences there?
We love Teachers Pay Teachers. We have been in connection with them for years and have been inspired by them. That is also a testament to the fact that the current education system doesn't provide everything that teachers need and that it relies on the creativity of educators. What they're doing on Teachers Pay Teachers is allowing teachers to sell lesson plans and PDFs to other teachers so they can use them in the classroom, which means a lot of the time when you send your kid to school, you imagine that everything is there and ready for them to go, but there's a teacher that needs to come up with something creative and have it ready for tomorrow. She can use some other teachers' resources.
It is teachers within teachers. We want to expand it to teachers to parents and teachers to students and learners on TinyTap because we're leveraging the interactive aspect, which allows the consumption of individuals at home. You said teachers make millions. One of the biggest problems that we're trying to solve is that there are a lot of people who want to be entrepreneurs. They have great ideas on how to do education differently. It's anyone who didn't enjoy the education system or has other ideas on how to do that, but as Yat can testify, it's super difficult to start an EdTech venture, raise the funds for that, reach the market, and the distribution. Not all countries have an ecosystem for startups.
It's difficult to be an entrepreneur. That's why it is essential to go to Web3 and help them find business models that can help them get funding and partners to distribute that because if you look into Teachers Pay Teachers and a lot of other platforms, normally, it's the Pareto rule. It's 20/80 or much less than that who are making the most millions. You have the top 10 or 100 names making millions. The rest are creating great content but have no idea how to market that. We see that on TinyTap as well. People create content, but then they also need to market and push that. You need partners to join you.
To do an international partnership with someone you don't know, normally, you need agreements, laws, and a court that can enforce that. A lot of that is being solved with the trust that Web3 introduces here because if there is a smart contract behind it that says that both of us own a piece of content, you don't even need to know me, but you know and trust the system that you will receive the funds from that content's revenue. In a way, it removes so much of the friction. That's what we're trying to build. I'll talk about it more as we continue.
I have a follow-up question. You all have children. We're talking about a situation where education does need to evolve. Some of my friends with children were hiking and talking about the challenge of AI in ChatGPT. The chatbot has the ability to change the game in terms of doing research and writing papers. All these assignments that I got as a kid, people can do it now in five minutes with some AI help. As you think about TinyTap and other types of ways to gamify learning, are you also thinking about how to defend against AI and make sure people are enlarging their brains through education? My concern is that all these AI tools can go against the curve of actual pure learning.
ChatGPT is a marvel. Yat, I'm not even sure that you're up to date on that, but we already had a chance to integrate ChatGPT into TinyTap. There's a very simple way where you can ask ChatGPT to create a game about the solar system, and you will get a TinyTap game ready tomorrow. We're trying to be friends with it, not push it away. One of the uniqueness that we're bringing in the way TinyTap teaches people that is different from the online educational platforms that we're familiar with, like Udemy or Coursera, is that we're not about videos and consumption information.
It's an active learning experience. You ask the question. You need to participate and use your brain. Sometimes it hurts, but you're a part of the lesson. You're not just participating. If you're asking questions or seeing videos, it's not enough. We want you to work your brain, participate, and be a part of the lesson. ChatGPT can be a great help in that.
I typed into ChatGPT, "Give me a good question to ask Yat Siu of Animoca Brands." Let's read it. We don't have to answer it, but it's pretty good, "Can you discuss the strategy and vision behind Animoca Brands' acquisition and development of popular gaming franchises such as Formula 1, Garfield, and CryptoKitties, and how you see these franchises fitting into the overall growth and success of the company?" That is not bad.
ChatGPT opened up people's thoughts and opinions as to what AI can do. Unfortunately, we have heard some stories about some schools banning ChatGPT, which is the wrong answer because, if you think about it, ChatGPT can be a strong ally in education. When you think about generally what AI can do, one of the struggles, and this is why TinyTap stood out here, was creating personalized content for individual learners that happen to be different because we are all different people.
One of the reasons many of us are trying to solve education is that we recognize that people aren't one-size-fits-all. We don't all think the same. Therefore, we don't all learn the same. If you think about it, there are thousands of ways to learn English. Why do you need thousands of ways to learn English? It's because we are different. Some people are visual. Some people prefer text or whatever that may be.
What something like an AI system will do is better customize your content for your needs, except whose content will it draw from. If you think about the derivative of that and how ChatGPT asked me this question, maybe make it up. They had to draw it from someone. They searched Google and analyzed people's podcasts. Maybe they found a way to see what people are asking. That repository of knowledge is going to come from places like TinyTap as the teachers create content. In other words, it will be a much better personalization engine.
If I'm a kid or a parent looking for certain content, through a number of queries, it will pick out custom-made curriculums or the custom-made side of things coming from the content set that TinyTap has created from the 100,000-plus educators and teachers that are already making content because the source of that knowledge is still human at the end of the day. This is also why Web3 and blockchain are so important. Provenance matters now because if you're drawing knowledge from someplace, how do you reward the actual creators of where that knowledge came from?
If I'm now mixing and matching this educational content that came from five different teachers, that's something an AI can put together. You can reward. If I own five of these different NFTs, and it derives that knowledge, the AI can then share that value from the five different groups that it derived from. There are a lot of interesting possibilities. On one hand, it could be scary, but on the other hand, it could represent an incredible opportunity to fairly distribute value for the original content creators.
The challenge is now on us to turn reality into an active learning experience that is hyper-engaging for a very technology-driven younger generation. It's there. It's ours to do what we can with it. In the process of all that, there's a massive amount of data out there that all these platforms are leveraging. There's a network effect. It's coming from information that TinyTap and other products are ingesting and also what they're putting out there in the world. I'm curious about how you look at that network effect in data in terms of this educational landscape.
The network effect is the basis of TinyTap. It has been a community-centered platform since we launched it. Web3 is super interesting for us because it serves as a technology that allows us to do something more complicated to do. Here's a thing. People create content on TinyTap for their audience. They created it in Arabic, Chinese, different languages, and different topics. It's not all math and English. It can be local history and tradition. Chinese New Year is coming.
It's content that most likely won't get funded to be an EdTech company but can be created by individuals as an interactive activity. What we always wanted to achieve is to get that network effect where someone in China can take content created in the US, localize it, distribute it over there, and have their share. We always had that edit button. When you publish a game, you can allow people to edit that, but we kept it locally because we said, "If people republish that again, how do we do the revenue share then? Who gets what?"
If you have an NFT that says, "This content is mine," someone now owns a part of it, forks it, and creates a new version that is great for their local audience or students. You can easily distribute all the revenue share to everyone. You don't need a third-party distributor to pay everyone and do all the calculations in the back. You don't need to trust us or the company. You see everything on chain.
We're a little bit of a different bird in the landscape of Web3 because we have a working product. It's very important for people to understand we're an existing company. We have millions of dollars in annual sales from consumers accessing our content. As we're entering Web3, the first phase is that people will be able to still pay with fiat to access the content.
We're using the blockchain business model in the back to enable new opportunities for educators and partners, but very soon, you will also be able to access the services with crypto. It will be a full-cycle system. That's what everybody is waiting to see. If you own something, and someone pays with crypto, you see how the money flows throughout all the NFTs. You don't need to trust anyone. It's a closed system. It's beautiful. That's what we're building.
I'll give you one interesting example of what happens when you have actual digital freedom in the sense that you have actual digital property rights and the freedom to transact for others to participate in when TinyTap did their auction. Maybe later on, Yogev will explain the model. Effectively, the teaching content becomes a financial asset as well because you're now able to purchase and earn through the publishing mechanism, the publishing rights, and the income from that, which then qualifies as yield.
Whether this is 10% or 20%, it gives much more value to the teachers as a result of that because something that made $1,000 could then be sold for $5,000 or $10,000. The interesting thing was that because the typical education model is a walled garden, it would normally sell to the intended audience, "Let's go to the market and sell it only to parents perhaps or maybe a publisher," but the participants in the auction, in some cases, were yield-generating protocols completely unrelated to the educational market.
We're saying, "This is a pretty good yield. Why don't we participate in that?" Instead of giving out inflationary tokens, we can invest in a product that generates true cashflow-generating yield for this protocol. It's an example of additional participation from third parties that you would never normally expect because of the fact that it's something that anyone can freely participate in or compose as well.
It's one fascinating example. When you open things up, new business opportunities come about. It makes you think about what the future could look like because if you can bundle educational content of all sorts, then you can, in the future, go back and get yield in how people have green bonds. You can have education bonds perhaps in the future. That doesn't happen, but you can see how that could be possible now with an approach like what TinyTap has done.
That's fascinating for those of us who value the educational process, not always the system. Sometimes there are problems with the system. Were you the valedictorian of your high school, Josh?
That is a true story. It's not one of those fun facts you share often.
That's awesome. It's evidence of your caring about the details and working very hard.
How do we know he's the valedictorian? Do you have that on chain?
That is not on chain. It's hearsay based on me, but we will see.
That's the next evolution of TinyTap. You have to put all this stuff on chain.
It's to see the educational content, which I have created tons of. It has some value beyond what it's typically had. It's able to be captured because one of the things that happened also in Web2 and Web1 is that content is able to be shared. You look at Spotify and all these ways that you can create something very valuable and be like, "This is valuable. I'm going to share it with this person, photocopy it, and send the PDF and all this stuff." All of a sudden, it's like it never happened for the originator of that content. It's interesting.
Can I shift the topic to the metaverse here? Everybody is excited about it. It's a hot word. People are talking about all over Davos. Where do we think it's going to gain traction next? There have been these moments and initiatives where people get into various metaverses like Sandbox, Decentraland, and things like that, but there still is more growth ahead. What do we think is going to make that growth occur?
First, when we think about the metaverse from our perspective, we always believe that it starts with actual ownership as in digital property rights. Even if you can experience something, it's not yours. It's meaningless. The definition comes from the fact that ownership is also a form of self-sovereignty. It has to be real for you. If it's not real for you, then it's not reality. If it's not reality, then why does it matter? That's how we generally look at that.
Even if you can experience something, if it's not yours, then it's meaningless. Click To Tweet
VR, AR, and even the screen or the mobile phone are simply interfaces in which you can access your true reality as it was, which starts with the ownership of yourself. Assets that you own are part of your identity. That's how we think of it broadly, which means that all areas can advance this. Gaming is still one of the biggest onboarders because that's one of the ways in which we already have digital identities.
If we think about how our children interact and play in these games, they are identifying with it as a part of who they're, except they don't own that. When they do, then that's going to be much more powerful because their virtual identities are as real as their physical ones. They interact not with the same friends perhaps when they play online games.
We have to also understand that there are over three billion gamers in the world, but there are still only tens of millions of blockchain games and Web3 games. The growth potential for that is still in the early days. If you take a look, for instance, at something like TinyTap, that's another form of metaverse activity because it's creating real value. It's a user-generated economy. What do we all do, generally speaking? We're learning from one or the other.
Look at YouTube. YouTube is the largest learning platform in the world. It's videos. How is it the world's largest learning platform? People create learning content. They mimic things that they know and do well, which is how we all generate. What TinyTap has done is create a platform where they create those learning experiences but in an interactive manner as opposed to a passive way. That's another way to onboard people. How many families are being served on TinyTap, Yogev?
You have about 9.3 million registered parents and 350,000 educators. Out of them, 65,000 are creators.
That's onboarding. When you think about every person who ends up interacting with this learning content, buying an NFT, having ownership, or utilizing it in one form of fashion, it's another form of onboarding. It's something that we all do en masse. It is learned. Education has that potential as well.
It's very exciting. The question that comes to mind next is for Yogev. What is next for TinyTap? You have quite the arsenal to work with here in terms of a captive audience that is already into gamified education. There are so many fun things you can do from here.
We started with the Publisher NFT to get everybody's mindset on the same page. When they think about NFTs, they think about the way we have seen them until now, but I want everybody to go back and remember the core value of NFTs, which is ownership. You can use that for many things. The way we use that is to give our teachers an opportunity to mint their content. They have an NFT that represents that content. They can invite partners to become co-publishers with them like how someone who wants to publish a book goes to publishers.
YouTube is a co-owner of an asset. That's the network effect. The more people that co-own content with you, the more people care about the success of the platform you have and the more people to help you distribute. That was the first step for us. It's creating the Publisher NFT. It's a simple model that allows you in practice to invite people to become co-owners, take that NFT, connect their wallet, and get a piece of the action in terms of revenue but also participate in the promotion of it.
That's big as it is enough. We saw the first WOF. The people who purchased the first WOF NFTs are already generating revenue from that. This isn't about the market pipe. It's not about whether people are going to appreciate these NFTs in a year or not. It's whether the value behind them is going to increase or not, whether more people are going to be interested in that content, and whether this content can branch into new opportunities. That's the first part we're doing.
The second part is something we're working on and hope to launch very soon. It's a way to reward educators and bring them on board as the founding community of education on Web3. We don't want this to be a TinyTap story. This is an education in Web3 story. In the spirit of the metaverse, we want this to be about interoperability. We want the value of having an NFT that represents that you're part of this community to open doors on other platforms, not only on TinyTap.
I've mentioned before that for us as an existing company that already has a running product, which is built on creators, Web3 is already solving problems. Revenue share is much easier with NFTs than working with third parties and sending magic links to PayPal and withdrawing them. It's much easier. That's another problem it's solving. What we're going to introduce now even to the consumer side is the opportunity where you can go to our website and purchase a subscription or a course. You can either purchase a subscription to give you access to our library of content or pay to access a specific course.
That's a business model in TinyTap. Normally, once you finish the onboarding, we will give you a direction to download the app, connect you to your email and password, and get access. A lot of the time, people forget their email and password and how to log in. It's confusing because you bought it on the web. You need to log in to the app. What if you get an NFT that says you have that? You have it in your wallet, and then you connect to the app. That's it. The wallet is there.
It also helps with integration without the companies. We are now working with a few private schools. We're going to give TinyTap to their thousands of students. Normally, their company needs to talk to our servers, tell them the email and password, purchase a subscription, and open the app for them. You can simplify that and give them an NFT in their wallet. They can connect with that.
This is exactly what Yat was talking about. You're bringing the internet with you. Instead of the internet being on different servers and talking above you as if you're a child, you are the one who has the identification that says, "I have this. If you respect that, give me the service." You can take that to different services that respect that without those companies doing much integration.
We're going to be the first company to honor and give you different discounts and perks for having this NFT for the teacher community. We want other communities to join and support that NFT. This is the next step. It's a big project to reward educators online. We're welcoming our educators and educators from Teachers Pay Teachers, Udemy, and any other platforms to come and join and lead the way. That is the key. Instead of companies leading the way, we want educators to lead the way. We want to build the tools for them to do that.
That's very exciting stuff. I want to get to a question here. We mentioned earlier that Jeff was not able to make it, but he was able to share a question. He may have gotten it from ChatGPT. Here's Jeff's question. It's for Yat mostly. He's saying, "What does Animoca Brands' roadmap look like going forward? We know how active you were in the previous bear market, both building and investing in partnerships and acquisitions. Can we expect similar activity? Is there anything, in particular, we should look out for?"
Generally speaking, Animoca Brands is continuing to invest and build. If you look at our most recent announcement probably within ourselves and our Japan operation, for instance, there are 2 or 3 investments. That is still fairly active. One of the reasons why the investment pace may appear to be a little slower than at the start of 2022 has a lot to do with the quantum of companies that are fundable as well because there are quite a few companies out there that probably don't meet the bar as the funding climate has changed, for instance.
What's exciting is that the number of people submitting investment propositions has declined as well because those who are serious are looking, but there's a whole bunch of companies out there, frankly speaking, that may have had some doubts before about this space. We're looking at an opportunity to raise money, but we're serious. Those guys are all out. In some ways, a shakeout in the market is always very healthy because it shows you we're the ones who are here to do stuff.
The focus for 2023 continues still to be the same principles for anything that adds to the network of NFTs or helps in the onboarding of that. To bring it back a little bit to TinyTap, which was something that we had done in 2022, it's a new segment. It has an intersection of gaming because teachers can make games, but it addresses a completely new market that can onboard an entirely new audience of communities into Web3. We will continue to do that.
Maybe one difference from when we first did this show is we were running everything ourselves. We were much smaller as an organization. Animoca Brands has professionalized itself a fair bit. We have a venture team and a capital team. On one hand, that means we have more processes and, you could argue, some level of bureaucracy. On the other hand, we have also more diligence and capabilities with the team. That's all part of maturing.
One thing that we have done more now that we didn't have is we would have the partner days, for instance, or Animoca gatherings. These are the places where portfolio companies come together, learn from each other, do business with each other, and learn best practices from various companies, including our group companies as well. That's a forum that we have now started to set up as well. We're getting better at knowledge-sharing. Finally, on that point, one way for our portfolio community to participate is through what we now define as the Mocaverse.
The Mocaverse is a collection of membership NFTs, but it goes beyond that. It allows the community to have a participation in the Animoca ecosystem, not just through joining our events, but also to have a participation in DAO votes because we have a large treasury of tokens that could be used in, for instance, DAO voting as a result. We're being very thoughtful about how it's being distributed. Our investors as well as portfolio companies, group companies, and employees become distributed and decentralized given what's at stake with the right audience. These are some of the things that we're looking at.
That's great. We should disclose that we are proud members of the family. We're excited to be part of Mocaverse. We have shared some special perks associated with our upcoming event. They will hear some of the updates on the theme for the year, which will be exciting. One of the other things we're doing with our event is we are focusing on education. At 9:00 AM, we're going to have three workshops on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Yat, probably don't know this, but Mohamed has graciously raised his hand to teach a tokenomics and rewards workshop for the LA community and those that attend. There will be a full-hour workshop to start the day for people that want to dive into this stuff because the theme of this episode in my big takeaway is the power of education to amplify this space and help our society in general. We want to double down on that. Talks, parties, art, and music are fun, but we also need to take a step back, reflect on adventures, and start to put this into practice as practical applications of technology like TinyTap.
I'm so impressed with what you're doing in that area. Congrats. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes from here. I would love to ask both of you gentlemen. We're all in this space. We're all looking around and seeing what's happening. There are projects that we're more intimately connected to than others. What are the projects that you're seeing out there that get you excited outside of the ones that we have already talked about?
One project that I'm following very closely is the Royal.io from 3LAU trying to do something similar with music to what we're trying to do with education, allowing the fans and participants to be owners and work with the artists under songs. There are a lot of challenges to overcome in doing that both on the artist side and the legal side. I'm paying close attention to Royal.io. That's one interesting project.
Yat, what about you? You have your hands in so many of these leading projects, but is there anything outside?
I'm going to take it from a slightly different lens because it's a little bit like asking, "Who's your favorite child?" That's tough because we're excited about everything. It's not within a project space. This may sound a little awkward, but I'm excited about what we're seeing in the development of regulations. That seems awkward. It's like, "Isn't regulation something that is going to stifle this? Is it going to be too bureaucratic?"
This is a theme in Davos that we see as well. Maybe we're inspired by that. Here's one of the reasons why many countries didn't regulate crypto-fungible tokens. I don't think non-fungible tokens are within this realm, but as we know, the transaction system for non-fungible tokens is probably crypto. It's important. It's because they didn't want to give it validity.
The whole idea of not regulating was to say, "That thing is not real anyway. Let's not talk about that. If there's a problem, then it's not our problem. We gave you, 'Buyers, beware,' because it's going to go away. Why bother?" The theme throughout the world very much with Davos is it's here to stay. As bearish as some people might want to be, the world has now recognized that Web3 is here to stay. The metaverse and the Web3 narrative are real.
We need to find a way in which it can play and support its growth. That gets me excited because this is macro. You can see this effect already happening in places like Asia. In Japan, the Prime Minister announced Web3 and the metaverse as part of its national growth agenda. Hong Kong came out in late October 2022 with a digital and virtual asset policy, which then ended up not only in some companies getting licenses within the same year, but by the end of 2022 after their announcement, the first Bitcoin Ethereum ETF launched on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
It goes to show that what's happening in the outside area will affect Web3 in a very positive manner and what's happening in regulatory because once you have that, you have more safety and security. That means more participation. Of things outside of our ecosystem, that will have probably one of the biggest positive impacts on our industry. We're excited about it.
Hear, hear for regulation.
That has been an incredible conversation so far. Our next segment typically is Edge Quick Hitters. It will be our next segment. We already have asked Yat our Edge Quick Hitter questions. We will probably turn the focus over here to Yogev. Let's do it. Edge Quick Hitters is a fun quick way to get to know you a little bit better. There are ten quick questions. We're looking for a short, single-word, or a few-word response, but feel free to expand if you get the urge.
Eathan, it's past midnight for Yat. Maybe we should give him a chance to say adieu if he needs to head to sleep before another busy day in Davos. We will understand that.
Thank you so much. It's 1:00 AM here. I'll call it at night. Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to the next time. Keep up the good work, Yogev. What TinyTap is doing is incredible.
I look forward to seeing you, Yat.
Catch you later. Yogev, what is the first thing you remember purchasing in your life?
That's got to be a plastic dinosaur for $2 that I got from my grandma at age nine because that dino survived all the way through high school. I bought it when I was in the first grade or something. I remember that dime or that $2.
That is not a cheap dinosaur, which is the name of a friend of mine's chiptune band, Cheap Dinosaurs. Look it up.
It's good '80s toys.
The next question is this. What is the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
That's a proud moment in my life. I'm an illustrator and a designer. That's my passion. Do you remember the Garbage Pail Kids? I was a big fan. I collected all the cards. In the grade, we had 76 kids. I made a Garbage Pail Kid out of every one of them. I drew a doodle of them. My mom went and made copies of them at school. I cut them out and put them in packages.
I and my friend used to go in the lunch break and sell them in packages to the kids themselves. They would collect cards of themselves. They were sold for very cheap, but we made decent money for sixth graders. We gave them albums. This one kid managed to collect all the cards and complete an album. He won a firecracker. That was my first entrepreneurship moment.
That's impressive.
What is the most recent thing you purchased?
It's an iPhone 14 Pro. We were on a vacation, and I got that. I also got Bose headphones with it. If you are on AirPods, I love Apple. I'm an Apple fanboy, but Bose earbuds will blow your mind. Try them out.
I've been thinking about snagging some of those. That's worth considering. What is the most recent thing you sold?
Twelve Publisher NFTs on TinyTap.
That is a qualified response.
That sounds about right.
It's a business response. On a personal level, what I've sold is my kids' puzzles and stuff like that. When they finished them, I remember selling the last 6 or 8 boxes to another happy four-year-old or something like that.
It's very nice to recycle those toys. Here's the next question. Number five, what is your most prized possession?
Other than my two cats, it's my bicycle. I use my bicycle to work every day for the past few years. That's what I like most about living in Tel Aviv. It's a flat city. It's very easy to move around with bicycles. I don't think you have that in LA yet.
Not so much unless you want to get creamed.
When I was hanging out with you in Venice Beach though, Josh, they had scooters rolling around. That was fun.
They were there for a while.
Everything is so far away. You need a car. You can't get away from it. I lived in LA for a while. You need a car.
Here's the next question here. If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, or experience that is currently for sale, what would it be?
A simple sketchbook is all I need and some time to do NFTs. I don't need much. Other than that, I am considering getting the latest Oculus Pro from Facebook. I want to give that a go. I'm a big fan of VR. I've been following that since its inception.
We have an amazing library near us where you can check out toys, which is cool. They have puzzles, games, all this stuff with the kids, puppets, and all kinds of stuff. My son found this little packet. He picked it randomly. We didn't know what was in it. We brought it home. It had these little VR goggles in it and these books for learning. We're talking about learning here. You could go in and explore outer space or look at how a fireman does his job, but the cool thing about it is there are these VR goggles. All you have to do is take your phone and put it inside. There's a program that makes your phone into a set of VR goggles when it's inside this little box. They're very inexpensive and cool.
I remember that. Google used to do that.
It's Google Cardboard.
Going back to your question, I have to share that I'm a big Back to the Future fan. In 2021, I had the pleasure of opening WWDC from Apple, the event that they do every year. Apple invited me. I participated in this funny video that they do when the event opens. Go to YouTube and look for WWDC 2021. You will see me in the first frame. The idea that I gave them was to put Tim Cook in a DeLorean coming out and holding the next iPhone from the future. They did that. They reenacted that. They brought an actor to do that. If I could buy a hoverboard or a DeLorean, I'll be happy.
There's a new DeLorean coming out.
It's the electric one. I remember some tweets about that. Did that happen?
I haven't checked into it, but I did meet the crew. They were going to tie it to a digital twin NFT. The NFT holds your production spot. It's pretty cool.
I'll take the electric DeLorean.
There you go. If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what one would it be?
Creativity is one thing that is very dear to my heart. People are saying, "I'm not a math person." That annoys me just as I hear people saying, "I'm not a creative person," because defining yourself is such a bad trait. It's people defining you. It's killing a lot of people's creativity. That's what I like to see about people. I want them to explore their innovation and creativity and avoid titles.
I studied art and design at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. When I did that while I was in school, I thought the entire world was created by designers because we kept solving those creative briefs. I got out. A lot of my friends deemed themselves designers. You're not your job. You're not your title. You can do anything you want. You're learning traits and picking up skills along the way. That's what I wish for everyone. It's creativity and freedom of self-definition.
So you're not your job. You're not your title. You can do anything you want. Click To Tweet
I love it. If you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what one would it be?
I want to be a better listener, learn how to listen better, and be attentive. A lot of us in the innovative space have a bit of ADHD. We're a bit all over the place, listening to a lot of different ideas. Focusing a little bit, hearing more, and not hearing but listening is what I would wish for myself.
I like that. Next question, what did you do before joining us on the show?
Coffee because it's 2:00 AM. That's what I did. I was doodling on my reMarkable 2. It's an amazing product.
I've got a reMarkable pad.
It allows you to doodle on ink. It's from Norway. I'm not sure. It's a Finnish company. It's an amazing product. It's right on my nose. I wrote the highlights of what we're doing that I want to emphasize on the show. It's coffee and doodling.
That's beautiful. Here's the final question. What are you going to do after joining us on the show?
Not everybody knows, but in Israel, Thursday is when the weekend starts. On Friday and Saturday, we're off. Saturday and Sunday are workdays. We're starting the week. When we're going to say goodbye, it means my weekend begins. I'm going to give myself another hour of maybe Netflix. It's going to be wild.
That's beautiful. It felt on the theme. I asked ChatGPT to come up with a bonus question. It gave me one, and then I said, "Try another one that's a little bit more outlandish." I'll give you two questions that ChatGPT came up with. You could answer either of them or both if you want. The first question would be, "What is the best piece of advice you've ever received?" The second one would be, "If you were given the opportunity to live on a different planet, which planet would you choose and why?"
That is more interesting. I'm a scuba diver. I love corals, reefs, and sea animals. I love the latest Avatar 2. I know a lot of people have different opinions, but the visuals and the water world are fascinating. Pandora would be an amazing place to visit.
That was Edge Quick Hitters. Thank you so much for having some fun with us on that one. We're going to wrap it up here because we know you have to get to relaxing and sleeping soon. Before we jump off, where can readers go to learn more about you and the projects you're working on?
We're on Twitter. Look for @TinyTapAB. That's TinyTap Animoca Brands. You should follow us to hear when we're launching new projects and progressing with our project. If you want to follow a different type of project on Web3, do that. If you want to get some information on what we have done so far and see for yourself, go to Web3.TinyTap.com. Play around, get TinyTap, and start creating content. You don't have to be an educator. We didn't talk about it, but it's a free tool. It's completely free to create. Download it for the iPad and content for your children or any cause. It doesn't have to be for kids.
I can't wait. I'm excited. Thank you so much, Yogev. Thank you to Yat who had to leave us to get some of his sleep. We have reached the outer limit at the show. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on this starship, so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes, rate us, and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing EdgeOfNFT and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great Web3 content. Thanks again for joining us and sharing this time.
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