Anthony Estebe on building white-label NFT marketplaces at Liteflow

0:00i am ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have anthony estebay ceo and co-founder of lightflow anthony welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time yesterday thank you for having me that's great you're very welcome let's dive right into it uh nfts are continuing to

0:21explode and bring utility to other industries um your team is helping with solutions on bringing nfts to even more people and i want to dive into that today so let's kick off our conversation with uh just an overview to start of light flow the solutions that your team is working on and then we'll dive into the details yeah sure so so yeah light flow with

0:45with our team we are building for for the past year and even before that uh for the past five six years uh product with uh on blockchain more especially for the past year with light flow on nft and energy marketplaces so the goal of our solution is really to try to provide to brands to companies who want to go in the in the whole empty space either for the metaverse or for more

1:12like utility parts to provide them all the tools they need to actually launch their marketplace uh with their own branded branding and everything dedicated for for them and so that they can go to market really really fast here i'm talking about like a few weeks maybe a month uh instead of like taking like maybe a year to to actually launch our platform

1:35uh and yeah full feature and ft marketplace with not only the initial sale but also like all the resetting parts all the secondary market that comes with it so like that they have all the features to onboard their creators and also onboard also people who actually want to get it to nft great intro thank you anthony and maybe we can talk a little bit more about you

1:57know there is a few nft marketplaces that are sort of controlling uh nfts right now but they're and nothing's perfect there are problems with nft marketplaces in the way that they're buying and selling can you talk about what you've seen in the problems with nft marketplaces and how you're helping with those solutions yeah i would say one of the major issues

2:21that the there is currently is the centralization and we all in blockchain we know that centralization is good to some some extent but ultimately it's not necessarily the best thing to have one platform that centralize everything and that control also the market the goal here at light flow is to actually say like no don't put everything on let's say open c for

2:45example it's a major platform but don't put like all your effort only on that now you can also have your own marketplace for your own needs and and yeah that would be good for your community that would be good for your brand that would be good or so so like that you don't have like everything in one place and that's kind of like what shopify did in a way uh

3:09giving the possibilities to actually have this technology for yourself and including it in your own ecosystem in your own company and projects and overall kind of like decentralize uh where actually people do these traits interact with these nfts yeah definitely and especially because if it's super centralized then there's points of failure and you know you mentioned openc

3:36there there's been a few uh times where uh people have uh lost their nfts or you know there's been vulnerabilities because that's the only place and and and they sort of get duped here somehow and obviously decentralized or just more distributed uh will hopefully help with that and with openc specifically i know they're more working with nfts on the ethereum blockchain but

4:01there are a lot of blockchains that also have nfts on them uh with lightflow marketplace does it matter which blockchain technology you're using it does matter uh we are not compatible with like any blockchain uh like you cannot do nfts on bitcoin for example uh but any evm compatible blockchain that's something we can we can manage

4:29from like layer one to layer two uh that's something uh we can actually deploy the solution on any blockchain of your choice uh as long as it's evm compatible as long as there is this like erc20 standard so that you can use to actually accept different trades uh but yeah most of the blockchain on the market right now are actually evm compatible because the ecosystem is is

4:53huge and so there is no no issue with that so depending on the business needs they might want even some private blockchain they might want a public one like ethereum because it's reliable because it's well known and there is a lot of funding in that or they might want some cheaper solution like binance for example polygon so so yeah we make sure that we can have access to all

5:15these different type of blockchains that's good to know and also i've seen with marketplaces there's general marketplaces where many different companies are coming and putting their nfts or individuals but there's also sort of that you know you have a website that's your platform and you just have your nfts on your own website on your own marketplace are you seeing a mixture

5:38of both of those or how do you see that playing out as nfts and nft marketplaces mature i would say on the first version i would say it would still be like a kind of like different platform that is integrated in your ecosystem but ultimately yes it will be fully integrated in your website in your application in whatever business you have and that's also something that we

6:04actually work on we try to have like not only just like a direct product that you can just publish and you're good to go but also all the tools that goes around with that so all the infrastructure all the different apis and different components and all the things that the business needs to actually even customize entirely their their products and integrate this

6:27energy marketplace within their products that's great and you mentioned that lightflow you've been working you know in blockchain for many years now but more specifically on the marketplace in the last year how have you seen the evolution of nft and nft marketplaces since you know the birth of open sea sort of being the go-to place and now as that continues to

6:51expand are you seeing more distribution and decentralization of marketplaces like at a rapid pace or is it slow definitely a rapid pace but i would say like we need to differentiate marketplaces because a lot of marketplaces on the market are actually nfc marketplaces without being nfts and having like a centralized solution where like they call it nfgs but in the end

7:17it's just nothing like that it's not on the blockchain anything like that so a lot of these products are actually on the market right now they are i would say dangerous in a way uh then there is like normal i mean no more more like web3 uh marketplaces uh there are a lot uh they kind of like all compete with each other but that's a good thing that's a good

7:41thing the same with like ecobee's website or something like that there is a lot of e-commerce websites they all have their own like differences with some pro and cons and their different niche and that's a good thing that's a good thing we need to see more of these marketplaces we don't need to stick with like let's have one this one is great let's stick with that one every

8:01businesses should have their own marketplaces every project that launched their their nifty collections should have their marketplaces ultimately that's the way it will be it will take time but that that's kind of like the work that we are doing right now is to try to help towards this direction interesting and now i've seen one of the upcoming marketplaces that i

8:23saw seemed to be more decentralized it was like the looks rare and from what i've seen projects that have you know governance tokens uh they can use the token and then you know everyone who is a token holder sort of has a equal rights or voting rights for the nft marketplace in a more decentralized way with light flow solution does it apply to you know centralized and

8:50non-centralized and fully decentralized marketplaces it really depends on the company using the technology in the way uh that they want yeah exactly that's something we don't force anything and we really try to also like work with the companies work with a project to actually help them to structure their business model and when i see business model it's not only like

9:12taking a feast for example on the on the platform but also like what do you do with these feats how do you actually want to redistribute them do you want to i don't know maybe set a set up a deal and then redistribute the fund from that there is different ways and that's also the part that we we are trying to help all this these companies and projects it

9:32also provides some kind of advice some kind of a consulting on like how they could set up that for their community because every communities are different every brands are different and things that make sense for one doesn't make sense for another one so there's a full flexibility of what they want to do with that they can apply some fees on the platform if they don't they can

9:53redistribute to one entity or like multiple entities they can really customize the type of business models they want to apply with their marketplace interesting and you mentioned there sometimes it doesn't make sense and i i want to sort of have a flip side of this question now is there any uh situation or disadvantage for a company to not be using light flow maybe it doesn't

10:16make sense maybe it makes more sense to build something from scratch which is probably going to be a lot more expensive and take a lot longer i would say yeah it's just like price and and delay uh they can definitely do that but yeah you need to have the knowledge for that you need to know the right tools you need to have the time for that and it's not impossible but you need to to

10:40make sure you have everything and it's hard to get everything right you need to have people who are knowledgeable in the space for that which is hard to find uh so yeah they technically yes they could do it but then after it's it's more question of like time versus money and uh that's what you will get and most of the time with all the client we talk with all the

11:01different leads we talk with a lot of them actually come from like yeah we decided to do that ourselves and then we basically failed and now we need a solution that we can use quickly so like that we can go to market because we already like one year late on our project so it's actually something that happened quite quite often to to see companies that

11:22try because of course at the beginning you always want to try to do everything on your own uh and then after i really quickly realized that yeah it's not that easy definitely not that easy yeah and i'm curious on your thoughts on on the future of nft marketplaces and and the distribution of them you know with openc sort of being the go-to right now do you

11:44see the traction of open c potentially you know dying off or people moving towards these other smaller marketplaces and and not using openc in the future i don't see open open c like dying and like no volume at all on on openc but what i see is really all these projects that actually are on opencv as well on variables as well on lux rails there are all this platform as well and it's great

12:14it's they need to be everywhere they need to have like as many channels for themselves as possible but they also need to have this in their community in their space where like they have their products they have whatever type of communication they want to have you don't want to redirect your people to some external platform it doesn't it doesn't look good it doesn't feel

12:36good for the people of the community so you want to have that internally and you kind of lost there is nothing against having both and that's the stuff here like to try to actually have more channel of distribution rather than just focusing on one single channel of distribution interesting and anthony with where you guys are at right now getting more companies involved with

12:59their own marketplaces what are some of the plans that your team has as you continue to expand out your product is there anything in the roadmap that's of special interest uh in terms of like i would say go to market we are starting to push on collections direct direct collection right now we are focusing mostly on businesses uh who are not yet in the space

13:25but want to come in the in the web 3 space so this kind of deals take time it's it's long because you need to have a lot of education around that because you need to explain basically what is a website like how to structure a business model uh for all like web 3 space uh so now what we're also doing in parallel is actually to start to to work towards

13:46collections like nft collection that are on the market that already have some traction they already know what is nft uh they already have their audience and then to them propose them actually some some ways to improve uh their their their projects with their own energy marketplace with maybe a system like books rare that they can actually get some fees and redistribute to their

14:09community and like different type of business model that that that is actually interesting for for them and for their community so that would be the massive coming thing very cool and if there are other collections or businesses that are interested in learning more about this kind of technology what is the best way for them to learn more so first our website so lightflow.com

14:35there they can directly book a call with us or just send us a send us some some messages and otherwise uh twitter so we have lightflowcom and even my personal twitter hunter1404 uh that would be the the best way uh and and yeah directly on telegram after uh just that quick chat we really try to be like as present as possible and try to open the most conversation as possible with

15:02them sounds great anthony thank you so much i will leave the light flow links in the description box below appreciate you taking the time to come on and your insight about nft marketplaces and the future of nfts and all the best with life flow and let's follow up in the near future yeah thank you again for having me that was great you