Halsey Minor on Vivid Labs’ NFT 2.0 platform

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the crypto coin show with hulsey miner ceo and founder of vivid labs halsey welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time today uh ashton thanks for having me you're very welcome a lot going on in the nft space especially uh you know in new york right now is the nft nyc i know i know

0:23your team is participating there and it's tough to keep up despite market conditions nft space continues to grow uh with real world adoption as well and i'm excited to hear your take on it i'd love to start off our conversation by just hearing a little bit about uh what you and your team have built surrounding vivid labs and and how you're applying that to the nft space and then we'll

0:46dive into all things vivid labs um yeah i mean we're we sort of consider ourselves in ft 2.0 because we have a lot of features and capabilities that you know today typically today you've got an nft

1:13that has some form of media short video an image and um and and that really sort of restricts the overall utility that nfts can have what we've built is the ability to have a single container that has an unlimited number of files

1:43um we support over 200 different file types in in the container it can go up to 32 gigabytes we have live streaming as part of a service inside of it so you can take a movie and you can you can you can stream it um and then the last part which is um i think i mean honestly the word revolutionary sort of overused

2:15but um all of our nfts can be updated so it allows the nft owner whether they've been given it or they bought it to basically maintain a relationship with the original creator and so a lot of our use cases they look different the some look the same as traditional use cases just they're a lot more rich media

2:44some of our use cases are completely different from anything that you've heard in the nft domain today so um you know by basically creating this entirely new sort of technology stack um i don't i don't even know that we're an nft i mean we use the blockchain and we use the same things that you know and we can put we can put our nfts on on our own

3:12blockchain polygon etc so we have all those attributes but when you actually sort of experience what we can do with the technology it's so um it has so many more capabilities that it almost sort of feels like a new thing um so you can you can take a single image and you can um very quickly uh publish it and i can talk

3:41about it in in a second the way we publish we allow uh for publishing of nfts um um so you could take a single image and you can go and send it to whatever marketplace you want so you can do that um it's just um the fact that we allow you to do so much more that's really defining our customer relationships and the use cases that we have

4:08incredible hull c yeah i'm really looking forward to seeing all those file types that the file size and i feel like those are huge limitations in what we see in the blockchain right now yeah throughout nfts in the last two years i feel like it's done so much for people who have been interested in blockchain technology bringing that kind of technology into

4:29the real world and also for artists and creators for them to have this technology to have them allow them to monetize and own their own artwork digitally and be able to monetize off that you know in perpetuity and and beyond um have you how do you see nft's 1.0 in the last two years and this sounds like a huge uh huge upgrade to what's coming um but following along

4:59do you see this as the right time um through what we've seen so far with nfts to be introducing this next level of the technology yeah i mean i think nfts are a bit stuck with the technology that they have today um it just dramatically limits the use case um you know i launched way way way back when in 1994 i launched and built

5:26a cnet network into a nasdaq 500 nasdaq 100 company with about 500 million dollars a year revenue and we gave away content that was the model it's the same today you could have seen it right so so our whole model was really about taking the traditional model which was paying for your newspaper paying for your magazine and giving and giving it away and that was that was it was a very

5:52revolutionary thing to do at that at the time but the website was this cool new thing that could do uh audio graphics uh text uh um he could even do some video we were a unique company because we had five technology tv shows as well as our online part so the the website was this completely new way of rendering content

6:20and um and so so i feel like today like what we've created is like the new website except instead of it being about um reducing the value of contents about increasing the value of of of content so so let me give you you know just let me just give you one example that i think will be really helpful

6:48um for people to sort of imagine the kind of use cases that happen beyond sort of art that's really defined i mean i i think art in five years is going to be ten percent of the use cases um so so we have a a customer who is um in the um estate planning business

7:15and their customers are people who create last will and testaments and i'm sure you've heard the story we all have of where somebody dies and the last will and testament is challenged they say that it was signed later that it was signed under duress uh that the person who did it

7:42was not of sound mind and body um there are so many things that people can say about the document because the document doesn't have a lot of context to it so so because we support i mean we support you know excel files word pages you know i mean you go for pdfs whatever

8:09um they're they're taking the the last will and testament and related documents and they're putting them on the blockchain and they're adding to it a video of the person describing exactly why they're making the decisions they're making you can see them sign it you can see them address the camera you can see them explain you know why each decision has been made

8:38there's no room for misinterpretation it's all very clear the dates are clear because the blockchain tells you when um when a a document has been signed and put on the blockchain because it's updatable you can change your will um and we provide a timeline of of the activities that

9:04happen in the blockchain so you can track that over time um and then the final part which is really i think you know um becomes sweet which is you know the ability for the deceased to be able to leave messages behind for all of the various different people who meant something to them in their life now

9:32you could actually this is a this is a good use case it's very easy to understand but there's no reason why you couldn't put you know every document in a in a legal case and every video that's taken from depositions put it in an nft put it on the blockchain and share it out to all of the related parties who have access to that kind of information

9:58um so so you know that's kind of like the the whole new world of of um business applications that we that we enable um but you know we're also doing um you know we have customers who are are um are creating nfts but they're not just an image um we have a

10:28customer natural selection uh they have one nft that has uh it has an image uh it has a 3d object of the snowboarding course um and then each of the 13 tracks on the mountain they have videos of snowboarders going down through those tracks so you actually have the full experience of what it's like

10:57and um you know it's a it's a much much much richer experience for the people who who buy the nfts and they've been they've been very very very successful selling them um i'll give you a third use case um which is um i'd say we're less far along here but it's uh

11:24it's uh i think going to be a very a very important use case let's say you you buy an hermes bag and it looks exactly like the 750 ones that come from china and you know you take our app which i can talk about later um you can scan a qr code down from the cloud comes proof of purchase

11:51um a video of how it was made a video an image of it um and a story of of um air meds in the history of the company um and they have the ability to continue to send you content over time so they can maintain a marketing relationship it is in music where we're starting to

12:18see a lot of traction now um you can um you can put 12 songs an album you can put an album cover you can put video from the recording studio you can put pictures from backstage you can put audio from a concert right and you can send your tour schedule and every time your tour schedule changes you can send a new tour schedule

12:46out and um and so it just vastly broadens the kinds of things that you can do with nfts so we've spent the last year and a half um building this um and we have you know a number of different platforms depending on whether you're a big business or an individual incredible policy and those are some

13:14great examples um and especially just showing the different types of of content uh that you can put into um in this nfts and and to have different types of content into one package as well i think is is a huge benefit um because often you need different types to make a full picture as you as you mentioned with the with the will and testament having video

13:39documents all of the like together and not having it all scattered around um now it makes things more valuable right if you if you buy in airmeds you say fifteen thousand dollars and and i know this is an extreme example but there are plenty of others there could be nike tennis shoes etc um you know when you get an nft and it has the early drawings and it has the you know

14:05production process and has it actually makes the product worth more i mean it isn't just the fact that you have proof of ownership you actually understand more about what it is that you're buying and so it the the value goes beyond um the value goes beyond um um just proving that it's the real thing um

14:32and um and and i think that this ability to sort of update uh nfts is going to create an entirely new kind of marketing interaction that can go on between you know even artists you know i think even even if it's a uh even if it's just a single gif having the ability to be able to push content in the future and so you know one of the things that that we're

15:01working on now and i think it probably will be another i don't know month or so is um you know everything that i'm talking about runs on our blockchain the vid blockchain but we should very soon be able to um take these rich nfts uh and put them on uh in a palm and polygon

15:29so you can sell them at all of these traditional markets which don't support the rich media we have but by using the standard you know we can have an image in the marketplace and then a link back into all the content um so we can take advantage of the of the relatively um i would say uh early technology of nfts

16:00um and we can still work with that to deliver these these these much richer nfts using these these these first generation markets that's incredible that you can part uh like link back to the existing networks and sort of build off from there and i know although we are early it's great to be able to connect to the early uh platforms and bridge them to something that's even bigger and yeah

16:29i was looking through your guys's clients i saw that you're already sort of working with some hollywood level partners and like a lot of different you know you mentioned different sizes of companies can work with different levels of the applications in vivid labs i'm curious on your take on all of uh you know all of the hollywood companies jumping in or all companies

16:49sort of jumping into tokenization of nfts in a certain in their own way in ways that benefit their their products and for their customers and although the technology seems early on in in beta stages you're seeing such great adoption from so many companies yeah i mean so so we really have three main products we have vivid pro and that lets um any company create a white label

17:17marketplace for themselves um and you know there there are a lot of companies who don't just want to dump everything they do in openc you know they have a community of their own they want to sell into their own community some of those um nfts may be the kind that could be sold on open sea you know if it's um if it's snowboarders you know some of the snowboarders are well known to

17:44snowboarders but not well well known to the rest of the world so so we're seeing a lot of people who want their own marketplace so so so that's the kind of the highest end um then there is vivid shopify which makes it really really easy because you know all of the shopify tools um for managing inventory and payments and all sorts of stuff and we've got

18:09um honestly i think one of the coolest things that i sort of created today which were options accurate my company created um which is our our app um which allows you on android or ios to you know in a matter of minutes add you know video audio you know add all these files you know together um and then to be able to you know say when i meant

18:3850 of these i want to meet them on polygon um and uh and click the button and uh and be able to create these these super rich um nfts you know right from you know an ordinary um you know phone so and and you you know we see it the you know a lot of people think about nfts as just things that are bought and sold

19:06so i think there's a whole nother category of things and um and our our app has kind of like a sort of social aspect to it so so i can create an nft and i can share it out with all my friends personal on my social networks and the reason that's important is because you know there there are some uh recording artists who can get a lot of money for their nfts

19:31and then there's the other 99 who really are going to have a hard time sort of selling their entities but they can drop a song they can drop uh you know them in the recording studio pictures live live events like they can use it as a marketing tool in order to be able to um take this this

19:59content box um and be able to share it out so so we see and the challenge for us really is there's there's just this broad range of use cases that goes from super valuable content that you know will have a very high price and i i think the content that goes through us will typically be more valuable because it'll have more content

20:26and more context around it um you know all the way over to these um people like the law firm i was telling you about where you know that's just a that's a that's a sas app right um or you've got bands you just want to be able to um uh i mean if you go way way back before um um facebook it was uh it was friendster and

20:55then it was um what was it called oh my god yeah myspace was started by bands putting content out you know that was the that that was the genesis of the entire thing was you know bands putting all their content putting images putting up you know their music etc so so there's a you know there's a real precedent

21:22for this you know happening um and you know musicians have to be savvy and they have to use the most recent tools in order to be able to sort of you know build their uh following um in the real world and online great point and i'm really looking forward to seeing that on the app because i feel like there's a gap right now uh in in the creation of nfts and making it as easy

21:50as taking a photo on your phone or just posting a photo to instagram you know there's still uh a technological barrier to entry whether it's um you know people having to go to the nft marketplace and create an account and go through those steps i feel like it's not as easy as it could be for everyone to start making nfts and especially in those other file formats you know totally in

22:14those other file formats that you're talking about well well it's very limited uh i'll uh i'll send you the uh i'll send you the alpha you can play with it yourself and and you can uh and you can see what it's what it's like i mean it's um um you know it's all those features in a really kind of simple ui um and um really we're just uh waiting for the ability to make sure we can we can

22:42drop all of these on all of these other not only the blockchains but also um and and it kind of makes us like a layer zero chain because you know we can move um um you know nfts from you know uh we could take one of our nfts off of here here's what i think it's going to end up happening people are going to get an nft

23:09um off of some place like ocean city they're going to bring it back onto our platform they're going to add some more content to it and then they're going to put it back out into a into another another platform and um because i mean the ability is is there you know the adult would very shortly be there to sort of sort of do that um um so anyway yeah i think you'll

23:36you know it's still it's still it's still an alpha but we're making a very quick progress and uh you know i think certainly before the summer's out um you know you know i mean if you go way back into my history when i started cnet um there were no web publishing tools so kind of hard to believe that world existed but it did there's no databases it published

24:01so we built our own and then we spun it out and we kept 35 of it and it became an 11 billion dollar company and the most successful website publishing tool and so i sort of feel like we're kind of back in the same sort of position where what we're trying to do is to make nft publishing um simple and uh and profitable um so we're we're not we're not a

24:26marketplace we're not but but we give you access to all of these to various different marketplaces and we give you lots of different use cases um and you know we give you um superior ways to um create value then he's very rudimentary you know i see something against open seas but i mean you know i've been doing except for 27

24:53years you know i started seeing it because founded salesforce started google voice you know going on and um you just see that that things go from being very simple to much more complex and feature filled and when we're in that very very low feature um you know area for uh nfcs you know very very limited use cases right now

25:22definitely yeah so they're still big business i mean i have to take nothing away from the size of the market but yeah but i just think there's so much more that can be done yeah even with uh you know open c and these nft marketplaces the volume being traded is is surpassing some of the largest ecommerce platforms um and we're still only in the jpeg you know version of it

25:43so when we move to all file formats i can imagine the opportunity size and i'm looking forward to seeing uh vivid labs be a part of that as well and and be one of the big players in it um what is the best way for people to um you know follow along for when the app is coming out into the public and if there's other companies interested as well in in working with vivid labs and learning

26:07more um yeah so still vividlabs.com um and uh our blockchain is powered by the uh by the by the the vid token um and um um you know if you go to your webs to our website there are a variety of different socials that you can join and and and and participate

26:35um can uh you know sort of participate in our um in our community um you know i think um i'm i'm sure that over the next you know six months knowing the customers we have that are starting to roll out um you know i i think we're gonna grow um we have a very fast

27:03growth plan ahead of us based on taking the customers that we have that are in development now and um and and getting them to market incredible looking forward to seeing it thank you for all the information halsey it's uh it's a big opportunity that lies ahead and i'm i'm looking forward to seeing how it all plays out i will leave the link to vivid labs in the

27:29description box below for all the viewers as well thank you so much for your time and let's follow up in the near future yeah it's great uh thank you ashley for having me on i really appreciate it you