Mnemonic indexing NFT data for mainstream adoption

0:01I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the cryptocoin show we have Andre yesenetsky CEO of mnemonic Andre welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time yeah thank you for having me you're very welcome um excited to dive into mnemonic but I'd love to start off our conversation with just a little bit on yourself and your

0:21background in in tech and blockchain and and how that led to being the CEO of mnemonic and then we'll dive into all the details yeah totally um well my background technically starts when I was eight years old when I got my first computer it was I think 91 I've learned how to write basic code like literally in basic language um and that's that's where the story

0:47starts um being with computers my whole life pretty much and uh studied in Kiev originally before moving to the US I was studying computer science um and electrical engineering electronics and most of my background was in software uh data Data Systems I moved to to the us about 14 years ago

1:17um joined Google where I was working on Google analytics and some of that infrastructure behind the scenes and some around 2014 one of my current co-founders Ben reached out from Uber and suggested that we chat we met at Uber HQ back down on the Market Street in San Francisco over coffee and there is just Mutual kind of Interest

1:44since then you know everything went pretty quickly I joined Uber in a matter of couple of weeks the fun fact about that was that like literally a couple of weeks before before that conversation I um I sold my car I actually never never looked back I still don't own any and um since 2014 I was completely uh relying on uh Uber Lyft and and other ways of transportation

2:13um but that was one of the sort of selling point like hold on a second okay I'm I'm interviewing at Uber but actually that makes sense I literally sold my car uh two weeks ago and I don't see anything anymore for it and I kind of like struck in my head that yes that's probably going to be you know um uh fundamental shift overall um in in the economy over the next

2:36couple of years I've joined just right at the time when uh we're starting to have um the massive growth I think we just raised like COC or B when I joined some around that that time um and uh I was early on on uh Uber Marketplace so basically we were a small team building Logistics platform and figuring out Dynamic pricing and infrastructure and how

3:01uh how would that power the logistics and transportation of the Uber system in general um so I spent a lot of time working on the market solving Marketplace Dynamics and no Marketplace problem and then later uh I joined atg which was a self-driving unit at Uber where I led the platform that um allowed any uh and enabled third-party cell driving Vehicles into

3:27Uber's Network so my team built uh the entire stack starting with Cloud infrastructure vehicle infrastructure security Telemetry and all those components that required to commercialize self-driving essentially so my whole career was spent on data and um working with massive uh data infrastructure data lakes and that sort of led me on the path of exploring

3:54blockchains because blockchains ultimately are the biggest database open databases in the world or rather they will you know I believe that this is the um this sort of Ledger that will store all of our interactions purchasing history and everything we do in the digital space we'll be starting blockchains over time and just looking from that data

4:24perspective data lens kind of on that problem I realized that in a few years maybe in the decade death is going to be one of the biggest data challenges in the in the world um sort of like in the web 3 world into which we are moving and sort of applying my my Google hat I realized that you know someone will have to organize this data someone will have

4:49to index it properly normalize it and make it um accessible uh but on top of it provide a lot of intelligence and so um when I started kind of chatting to a few people um I got connected with my current co-founder Elena who has a PHD in machine learning and Ai and she was exploring that um blockchain space from her perspective as well as a data scientist and trying

5:16to like dig through a lot of data points I had problems similar to um what we're seeing today of like basically how you access this amount of data and run you know analytics on top of it data science Etc and so when we started chatting we realized that hold on like this is actually um we're we're trying to approach this problem from different perspectives I'm

5:41looking at this as a um infrastructure challenge she looks at this as a um it is a data science problem and combining our two backgrounds we we decided to start a company and uh the rest is history great backstory Andre and you're right about blockchain's having a lot of data and I feel like there definitely needs to be more tools to to index that or to turn

6:10that data into information that can be actionable and and I'm guessing that's where mnemonic comes in could you talk about you know what is the what is the vision of mnemonic and what are you doing with this data to uh to bring it all together yeah so uh a quick basic a fun fact about the the weird name mnemonic and where it came from uh that's um I don't know um but they're in

6:3490s there was a um the cyberpunk movie with Keanu Reeves playing the main character uh it was called Johnny Mnemonic and um basically um he was uh he was the person who was working as a data vessel essentially so um there's a technology that allowed him to upload um data into his brain some private information and then basically he was like a vessel of this

7:01information somewhere else in the world you and where the client would download that data so he was like a delivery um kind of personal data and through this data uh would be downloaded he would forget about it forever and so the whole plot in the story was around that and so that's how um that's how mnemonic name um uh came about but generally is the nfq intelligence data platform

7:26and um we um we're ingesting and indexing data from blockchains that's basically table Stakes you have to have a ground truth foundational data in order to be able to build uh analytics and Intelligence on top of it so once we solve that we are applying machine learning um our machine learning algorithms and

7:53models to learn different kinds of behaviors from that data of all the behavior you know um different profiles of people interacting with with digital assets and basically that allows us to create very rich powerful data set not just analytics but also data set that is powered by Machine learning that allows us to get reach

8:20context from from that data so we're providing this data through apis to Enterprises businesses developers anyone anyone who is innovating in a web 3 space okay good to know uh and with analyzing information about nfts you know a lot of people that aren't really deep in the industry you know they hear nfts and they just know there's the digital Collectibles whether it's the

8:45crypto punks Apes Graphics art Works things and people understand that yeah it's going to expand to be you know real world assets and all of these different types of any you know non-fungible assets could be tokenized into an nft but I feel like we're really not there yet at least in the mainstream what are you know some of the main use cases that with what we're seeing in

9:07nfts today that companies would use mnemonic to analyze that information yeah um well first of all we see um nfts are being foundational technology that powers um you know well-powered a big chunk of web3 as we call it and that technology goes Way Beyond the Collectibles and jpegs of Apes I mean uh it's it's a great use case um it's fun use case but most great

9:34things start as fun and games you know and then they uh start to provide a lot of utility we're not 100 there yet but what we're seeing from kind of our point of view is that more and more Brands iconic brands in the world there have nothing to do with um you know web3 uh their traditional old brands that we all know today Starbucks Nike um JP Morgan You Know wardner music you

10:03name it uh Adidas that are innovating in the space and are trying to see they see the potential um to commercialize this technology and our general teases is that these are the kind of companies that will be the main driver for The Wider consumer adoption uh over the next couple of years um and they will figure out how to provide best utility and and best

10:27experiences to their users Starbucks I think is a great example um where they see it as a way of providing loyalty you know to their customers long-term customers I think ticketing is going to be a big use case in general where um by purchasing ticket you're also um the NFC has been created and then that gives an opportunity a way for the artist to engage with everyone who um

10:55came to the event you know um who's a fan reward them in the future um reward long-term holders provide them new experiences maybe unique access backstage whatever there's a whole spectrum of experiences you can imagine that could be built on top of um on top of these nfts that Pro that essentially provide a a way to engage understand your audience in a

11:23much better and a much more sophisticated we run at a level and overall I think where this is all going like I think that we are moving towards a hyper personalized world so to speak so if you look at um web one in web one we had ads as well and ads were all over the place to the point where on Myspace for those who

11:51remember like there was not a single Pixel probably in a web page that would not be an ad and that's probably something that analogy will add to the um Myspace is um sort of earn feature and opened up an opportunity for someone like Facebook to and Google to grow in that space but uh in web one all the ads were generally

12:20just banners right and some kind of like flashy interactive flash media in web 2 the content was monetized and in web 2 we learned how to understand the audience how to drive context from people's behavior on the internet um but still it was largely based on some kind of like an abstraction a cohort analysis and secondary sentiments when we like something when we comment

12:50when we engage with the content um that's kind of like a derivative activity which tells you whether someone might like something and we will offer them this product in web3 for the first time ever we're actually able to look at um and into people's wallets and this is the um um this is the the strongest signal I think um which will inevitably lead into Super

13:18personalized world where you and I will have completely different experiences that will be tailored to us whether it's content access to entertainment Goods uh whether physical or digital um and so forth so that's that's kind of the feature that I Envision and that's the future towards we're building mnemonic yeah it's uh I feel like it's there's going to be a catalyst where you know we

13:41we move from that General understanding of of what nfts are to all these other real world use cases which I think is going to be very exciting uh and I'm curious on on what you envision you know that sort of timeline for that to happen you know because I'm you know running a startup I've heard the the quote before that being too early is sort of the same

14:03as being wrong and I'm curious on how you're lining up the timing for this when you think you know I know all these major companies that you mentioned Adidas they're already working with nfts so when does that roll out to the mainstream audiences yeah I can speak to some of this timelines on the brand side as we're actually working with with a few um but yeah I think uh we're definitely

14:28early but we see early signals um of that as being like that is happening um I would say maybe not particularly this year in terms of kind of like a global rollout um and uh you know wide audiences but I think uh this year particularly because of the macro environment and what we see on the market this is a build time and I

14:55think um that's the time when there are a lot of experimentation is happening a lot of the companies are innovating I think early next year maybe mid next year we should see some of these Brands actual launching like real Integrations real experiences there are definitely some leaders in the space I'm a big fan of Nike and what they did with artifact and like that's

15:21the just the early examples of like first steps and trying the waters and trying to innovate like how can we bridge that Gap to like a regular consumer I think what we'll see from Reddit I think we will see from uh big Sports uh like NFL and others I think well determined like what will help to engage much bigger audience and bring it into like Top Shot at one point right

15:49like those kind of things um on the other side I think um I think Enterprises and sort of like bigger institutions and Banks and companies that are innovating in the web 3 are continuing to build and our product is um you know serving those needs as well uh we just announced partnership with coinbase um we've announced the launch of Base as well which uh coinbase is launching very

16:19soon so there's a lot of development happening which allows us to keep going build new products innovate with the market um and yeah I think a couple of years is probably reasonable bad yeah no it I think that the specific approach that and sort of the niche in which some of these companies you know like artifact and Nike I think they did a good job finding a niche that's

16:48interested in the technology that's ready to adopt it and what we saw with Instagram you know last year deciding to integrate nfts uh and and you know that's the biggest platform in the world for posting photos you know every photo could become an nft but sure enough not very many people used it and now Instagram is sunset of that and said you know we're taking away the nft part I

17:10maybe in the future everyone will turn their pictures into nfts but what's the value behind that it seemed that it wasn't ready for the mainstream and you know it the people just didn't see value in having nfts on Instagram I'm curious on your take on that yeah well on the other hand Reddit has a much greater success um I think uh what Instagram did was was

17:33done uh wrong like I don't I'm not in a position to to criticize I think Instagram is absolutely a great product um had a lot has a lot of users consumers um but I think in order to in order to tailor to um uh as we call in web 2 or regular regular users um we need to abstract away all these complexities and Notions that you know what is the wallet what is a

18:01chain like which blockchain you're interacting with what is nft I think all those things should be abstracted away I think Reddit has done a great job and Starbucks actually is doing it similar something similar is uh changing those name changing Notions changing terms uh that are familiar to regular people and I think that's the right uh does the right type of strategy to take

18:25especially in the next couple of years when this technology is evolving and you mentioned there about partnering with coinbase which I think is uh is very exciting and you know one of the leaders in the space um and I remember last year uh when they released their nft Marketplace um it didn't didn't do very well compared to you know open C and these in

18:49these major ones and it was a lack of volume and interest in it maybe it just wasn't the time for them but I'm curious on you know what that looks like moving forward and and how hopefully they can make a comeback uh with the help of mnemonic on actually having usability for nfts and and analyzing that data and actually making it actionable yeah so I think first of all there is

19:13just some just this many marketplaces we actually need like how many we need um how many let's say ebays do we need um and I think um over time that most of these marketplaces with Google consolidate there are clearly uh winners in the space right now um blur uh open c a couple others I think um they cover the majority of the volume we don't need yet another Marketplace I

19:39think um so from that point of view I I'm not too worried actually um I'm more excited about what coinbase is doing right now in the router kind of picture border ecosystem by launching bass I think that's a it's a big move first of all uh Builds an obstac which is uh very exciting they decided not to uh you know fork and create their own uh yet

20:07another um chain and even another protocol they are contributing Upstream into their optimism and I think that's uh the right way to do it moving forward we also don't need this many blockchains overall I think um launching uh cloud and web3 uh Cloud was the part of that strategy I think um now we saw the release of wallet as a

20:35service so to summarize this I think it's more of a infrastructure move infrastructure play long term similar to like awas at the time then um trying to you know build on top of speculative type of behavior I think we've seen that I don't think we need more of that type of things I think we need more of a solid infrastructure solid players and trusted companies and

21:04coinbase is the most trusted company backed by you know um um Public Market um and um that's the right sentiment to send to the broader ecosystem that hey um this is a trusted solid environment where any brand any Enterprise can go and build uh safe uh consumer experiences yeah good insights Andrew I agree

21:34infrastructure play is is what we need and if we're going to onboard you know more users uh in the next 100 million users we're going to need infrastructure that's stable and able to support that many and easy to onboard into so I'm looking forward to it and and now moving forward with mnemonic you know sounds like you guys are making great Partnerships with big companies and what

21:59are some of the next steps in the roadmap and releases is it just you know partner with more large companies and work with them to get their products to their customers at the right time well we're happy to serve the general entire general entire system um obviously like partnering with the big players has its own benefit but also takes a long time

22:25um to Foster those Partnerships we're working with a number of web companies too and brands in fact um I think in a couple of years some of this webtoon web3 native Brands will become large Brands widely recognized which just needs to take some time you know to to mature um so we're Banning on small players as well um and uh serving trying to

22:54power the ecosystem in general we actually have I think the most generous free tier on the market in terms of like to just incentivize everyone to build their products innovate while we're all in this build Market um we rather focus on you know powering a lot of those companies that are trying to experiment trying to innovate during these difficult times

23:17um giving them opportunity to to scale um and not particularly you know um focus of trying to like drive them into the um difficult difficult business conversation so we're pretty much open to the entire ecosystem and in terms of what we're launching next I think we have announced uh optimism is actually launching Zone base that's not our website

23:43um we are building more towards providing greater intelligence like I mean we've sold foundational data component we've sold the ground truth that's available we've sold analytics components so you can build experiences you know if you're a wallet you can build uh reach portfolio views write analytics around all your holding statistics and all that um we we've launched our spam solution

24:09which is the only solution on the market that is wallet focused we're analyzing behavior of every single wallet in relation to other wallets and chain and so um that allows us to build a match better more accurate spam solution which is personalized as well so for instance what's considered spam for you and me could be different just like in the regular email kind of spam it's all

24:35based on our previous interactions with those entities on the web and that's how we see a Spam problem and a solution as well but we will be continuing kind of diving into the intelligence part we just launched audience insights which allows you to really any brand or kind of a company that is working with audiences or Community right that is launching their new

25:04collection and better understand their audience and their behavior with behavioral sort of labels on a wallet level uh common collections common Trends across different segments we provide audience segmentation as well and so that's where sort of we're continuing to uh uh kind of move and and develop more products looking forward to to seeing it and if the viewers want to follow along

25:34with these updates uh or the Partnerships and and just learn more about mnemonic what is the best way for them to get involved yeah it's uh we have Twitter um mnemonic HQ is our Twitter handle our website is the same mnemonic hq.com uh you can sign up for our newsletter or just sign up for an API key three um yeah I think those are the main uh the best channels great I can leave

26:02those in the description box below as well thank you so much Andre for all the insights into nfts and the value that they're going to provide Beyond uh you know what people see them as now and I think it's going to take people surprise surprise and it's very exciting to see such large companies and Enterprise adoption uh taking this technology and using it in a

26:26way that adds value to the audiences and end users so I appreciate what you're doing at mnemonic all the best with everything moving forward and let's follow up in the near future yeah absolutely let's create and write that wave together foreign