Reeve Collins on dynamic NFTs and the Vatom Network at BLOCKv

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have reeve collins the ceo and co-founder of block v reeve welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time absolutely happy to be here i'm excited to dive into block v there's so much functionality that can be tapped

0:22into nfts and we're so early on and there's so much more to that as well i would love for you to kick off the conversation with just a little bit of background about block v and some of the solutions that your team is bringing to the space yeah it's really interesting especially now you know 2021 at the tail end of this year with the boom of nfts because we started this company in 2015

0:45we were truly the first platform in the industry to recognize the power of nfts and when we dove in there wasn't even really a term nfts that wasn't a word it wasn't a on a side note it's very interesting to see that they just announced nft is one of the uh a new addition to the dictionary like the most popular word of this year yeah so i just i just saw that but back

1:07in 2015 it wasn't even really a word and so when we rolled out this concept of highly programmable digital goods we actually coined our own term format which is called avatam which was a virtual atom because there wasn't a word and so we wanted to take take a token like what the blockchain gave us then which was tradable ownable scarce right finite and then add highly

1:32programmability characteristics highly programmable characteristics to it to have a very engaging digital object which everyone now knows is non-fungible tokens which truly is the technical term for it it just wasn't in the common nomenclature and so now we have these nfts and our platform enables you to do extraordinary things with them just make them a much more engaging

1:55experience than even a lot of the ones that you see today that they're simply just eggs in a wallet definitely great background there and you're right uh it with nfts getting so popular and people outside of cryptocurrency uh hearing word of them you know enough to get it into the dictionary uh which is which is incredible it's like a little green check for blockchain

2:16technology and the future moving forward um it seems a lot of people still don't fully understand the full potential of the functionality and the programmability of nfts you know they see crypto punks they see profile picture art and they're like okay it's nfts are digital art but it's not that's just one thing that they could be there's so much and i know that the

2:38vatim's that you guys are working on they're much more dynamic they're programmable i'd love for you to go a little bit more into depth into what kind of use cases and how can you use these atoms besides just an nft that is digital art absolutely and a lot of people ask oh is it a bubble is this all speculation what's driving the market and a lot of

2:57it is right there's just a lot of hype around getting these digital collectibles they're no different than baseball cards or any other collectible in the offline well but they're digital however once you make something digital it becomes programmable and when something's programmable it's obviously much more engaging than a physical good and so these programmable goods can add a

3:18significant amount of value to your life many ways so the craze right definitely the speculation on ip get a piece of art or something ideally it will go up in value now that's just the very first use case and so those may or may not hold their value but what will hold their value is when all of the rest of these cases open up you know tickets have been talked

3:42about a lot like when you imagine getting an event ticket there's a before during and after experience today you spend 200 to get a flat pdf now you'll get you'll buy that ticket instead of the pdf you can get a video welcoming from the artist and they can tell you why they're excited to tour in your city and then when you show up that ticket will come alive and and you can be

4:03entered in a drawing to go um you know to move your seat up like front row seats or to get certain concessions or a prize and then after the show you can win backstage and then that will update with a video compilation of the show right so that ticket that ticket stub becomes a very valuable piece of history and that's just one example on tickets the beautiful thing about nfts

4:26and why i always state that the use case and the importance of nfts can't be overstated it's because as we look at where we're going right now and especially with the advent or not the advent but the popular um how popular that metaverse is becoming um nfts are going to be such a significant part of our life because the only thing that we're going to have in all of these

4:48different metaverses the real thing that's going to be persistent is their identity so in each different environment they will know that it's us that showed up and our wallet and within that wallet you're going to have a lot of digital goods all of those digital goods are going to be nfts and when you think about why today is the metaverse so popular

5:08it builds on all the technology from the past but most importantly the explosion in popularity and the education that people now have of how to utilize the digital wallet and the desire they have for digital goods that is actually what has driven the this massive spike in awareness and excitement about the metaverse because now you'll have nfts and those nfts that

5:32you carry in your wallet will go from one environment to the other and you'll be able to use them and no matter what space that you're in and so that's why they're really so valuable it's not about art it's about how you're going to move through those digital worlds and what your digital life is going to look like definitely and i think that's a great

5:48point reef incorporating the metaverse and having a place where you can do commerce you can do an exchange you can go into virtual reality obviously it's going to bring a lot more functionality to these nfts and i'm curious on when you first started it in in 2015 you know nfts weren't even really a term vr was still very early on and it still is right now

6:11but metaverses weren't really being talked about did you foresee that functionality of those two combining and that's really where the exchange is available to happen on a global scale yeah so i was really fortunate uh there's a gentleman named eric glier who's my partner in this and he's the true visionary behind he really had this concept of programmable digital goods

6:35and he'd had it for a long time and the technology was just there and so we dove in together in 2015 and he he foresaw a world that we have today like he truly foresaw that we're just scratching the surface on today but the world he foresaw was that persistent identity and a wallet filled with digital goods and we wanted to be the technology provider

6:56and to be the standard for those digital goods and so what we did was we ended up doing an ico in 2017 and raising a significant amount of money we put all of that money into building out the most robust enterprise grade smart nft platform that there is our technology today is still leading the industry in features and functionalities and and what our technology what our

7:18nfts can do but yes back then we just saw this world where everyone where how important these digital goods would be because if you go back to date like from the advent of blockchain to around 2015 the only use case was currencies and financial based instruments and so we just saw this world where everything else would then be tokenized and if they're tokenized we

7:44might as well make them highly programmable and so that's what we said to do very cool and yeah building that technology is going to be the foundation of getting it into commerce getting into the marketplace but of course you need people to also use that technology and i would love to know more about you know the developer ecosystem are you getting enterprises

8:03involved how is this going from code to commerce yeah so that's an excellent question when we dove in and built the technology the focus that we had was enterprise and large brands how do we showcase these large brands this new asset it's a this this this new asset is a a token of engagement so we wanted to go to brands and say instead of banner ads

8:32and emails and all the ads that you're doing wouldn't it be better if you provided your consumers something of value and an engaging object that they can own and buy sell and trade and it can be a new way for you to communicate on a one-to-one basis with your fans and so it was a it was a difficult education because it was so new and so cutting edge but that's what we really

8:54focused on building these tools to make it easy for large brands to roll out campaigns we've done probably over 100 campaigns for for global brands we're running one now in in the uk for or in all of europe for playstation and doritos and pepsi and nba in the states for fjallrave and large clothing company and many many more brands are rolling out and professional

9:16bull riding right now we just rolled out a whole line of collectible cards for professional bull riding where you get the card and you can get the ball i mean the writer and the bull and combine them and create a different card so it's really gamifying the interaction that fans can have with the brand's assets and so for us that's extremely valuable

9:34for brands it enables them to stay ahead of the curve and not become irrelevant in this digital world because a lot of these brands just have these brick and mortar experiences and they send out digital communications but they're not in the digital world so our goal is to to usher them into that world through all these digital objects and that's step one is getting their

9:57consumers a wallet and filling that wallet with nfps and step two is creating these metaverse environments for those brands where the consumers can come in and really experience that brand's history and all of its ip and interact and either listen to speeches or meet celebrities or just interact with the historical aspects of the brand and then buy sell or trade all those

10:20digital objects in those environments yeah it's incredible to see the amount of companies that are coming in you know all over twitter you're seeing these mainstream brands buying up the largest nfts moving into the metaverse i'm sure you're very familiar with it having partnered with all of them and working on their campaigns and it seems like overall 2021 just for

10:41cryptocurrencies in general has had the most institutional interests and it continues to grow but in the nft space do you still see it as like early for the large companies that are coming in or is it the perfect time for all of these companies to be jumping on and i know there are limitations obviously the metaverse still needs to grow the graphics could

11:01improve the functionality could improve there's still a long way to go so where do you see that at right now at the end of 2021 yeah it's a great question and what's interesting about that is the technology is advancing so quickly that while the metaverse isn't quite there and isn't quite ready for the mass adoption it's it's happening very very quickly

11:22the slow part is the brand adoption so it takes a while for brands to kind of figure out their strategy put it through all of the layers of bureaucracy within that brick band and then build it and execute and take it to market and so i implore all the brands to dive in right now because it's going to take you a year to get it to approval and launch and the technology will be there right

11:45so the technology is almost you could roll out today with a really robust amazing experience fans did a really cool fans world in roblox so you can go in there what blows my mind is it's just a it's one of the many apps in the roblox universe but it's just as cool as like tony hawk's skate video game was when it came out you know and so it was just kind of interesting to see how robust of

12:08an environment that you can create today but anyways so the brands are jumping on it they are getting involved in these different environments and and i implore them all to dive in now because by the time they really roll out it in a big way the tech is going to be there um it's awesome and we've gotten such good feedback and all the brands are putting in um it's huge

12:30initiatives for those brands and how do they stay relevant how do they stay ahead of the curve and so i'm just i'm happy that we're a part of those discussions definitely and you're right about getting started now because that bureaucracy and all these brick and mortar businesses that take a year to get something out you know and it seems that's part of the reason why d5 has

12:50grown so quickly in and being able to not have to go through all these levels of bureaucracy and sort of leveling the playing field um so it's going to be a super exciting year for 2022 i'm sure from all aspects of cryptocurrencies metaphors and nfts i'd love to know a little bit more about what is the current focus right now with you and your team at block fee you did

13:12hint at a couple things i'm guessing you're going to be continuing partnering with bigger brands and maybe there's some other things up the sleeve as well absolutely the block b network or the block b ecosystem is somewhat complicated because when i talk about all of these campaigns that have run in the block v ecosystem it's not necessarily necessarily from block of either company

13:39so we did an ico and we created a token called v and v is our network token that powers and enables us to issue nfts and so there's this foundation a corporation in switzerland that that runs the block v technology and then in that world there's been a few more companies that have been built on top of that mainly vatim inc which was started by eric breit eric glier who i mentioned earlier

14:06and vadim inc creates bottoms and and has gone really deep down the metaverse world with spatial web spatial web is one of the most scalable and interactive environments to date um where you can experience the metaverse what's interesting about spatial web is that it was built natively with nfts in mind with our wallet system in there and with our highly programmable nfts in there

14:29and so that's vata ink that's built on top of block feed and i partnered with another gentleman tyler mabias for smart media technologies smart media technologies is really focused on the brands so we've done a lot of those brand campaigns where we go out because we have a history of of online advertising and media mind so smart media technologies is television media buying all digital

14:51media buying and social and then we've incorporated the smart nfts in that offering like i discussed earlier to really help the brands engage in a new way with their consumers in addition to that there is a solutions company where we do professional services for bespoke projects all on top of block b so the campaigns that i'm mentioning today have come from that

15:13ecosystem and the reason why it's so important to understand that is they are there there are different commercial enterprises however they're all driven and powered by block v and driven by our v token because we're all in this um right the the in this world for companies that have done icos the token price is very important right it's what fuels the network and our token is

15:39utilized significantly by these companies and that provides the the buy side demand and then we create a community around that of fans that that really believe in the technology and where it's going and the way they get involved is by participating in our token in our community definitely and thank you for all that information on all the family of companies it

15:59definitely sounds like you have a lot going on right now um for the viewers that are looking to follow along with block v get into the communities to talk about the token look for more upcoming brand partnerships and whatever other updates you have coming what's the best way for them to stay involved yeah really it's the telegram group and we'll be starting a discord one soon but

16:19mainly it's diving into telegram and seeing what's been going on and that's where we keep people up to date on the the new novel use cases that we're rolling out for nfts and all the campaigns that are hitting the market sounds great reef i will leave i'll leave the link to the block v platform and the website and the telegram as well in the description box below for the

16:40viewers thank you so much for taking the time to come on all the best with everything your team's working on moving forward and let's follow up in the near future absolutely i really appreciate it best of luck to you as well and have a great one