Jake Udell on Metalink’s NFT social platform

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have jake udell ceo and co-founder of metalink jake welcome to the show thank you so much for taking the time to come on today you got it ashton thanks for having me all the way from tulum that's right and today we're talking specifically

0:20about nfts the craze continues to grow not all nfts have equal value and access and utility but there's a lot of innovative solutions coming out for nfts and it's continuing to grow and meta link is playing a great part in bringing more value to the nft ecosystem so let's kick off the conversation uh from you jake to hear a little bit about metalink

0:42and what are the solutions you're bringing into nfts and then we'll dive into the details you got it so what is metalink uh metal is the place where nfts hang out we create gated gated chats based on verified token holdings so based on the nfts you own we put you in chats with your community uh we started as just a private chat app for crypto punks and we

1:03didn't know what to expect you know would anybody actually want to connect to a platform like this and what we learned very quickly was that they did in the first 48 hours over 15 percent of crypto punks joined our platform we became the first place on the internet where you could actually see the nft somebody owns and message them at the same time and from there we launched boarded yacht

1:21club cool cats world of women and even recently a couple weeks ago we launched a server for openc so uh we've become a i'd say the premiere trusted uh safe and secure platform for you to talk about your nfts and over the course of the next few months uh we'll roll out trading as well which we're excited about very exciting jake and thank you for that intro and yeah

1:43there's definitely some solutions in metalink that i know uh are a problem in in nft space right now and i feel like one of those is just chats that are convoluted or groups and trying to get groups of nft holders or even daos together and i feel like currently they're trying to use discord and it just seems like a mess like thousands of channels of people saying

2:04good morning where's the value in that um i'm sure you're sort of probably familiar with you know a lot of nft groups being on discord maybe you can talk about that transition and why metalink is better as a chat platform for nfts yeah when you're on discord you don't really ever know exactly who you're dealing with right like somebody could technically have the same username um

2:26anybody can get into your inbox metalink was built as a web3 solution that's really focused on thinking about what the problems are for this community you know this isn't our ninth biggest vertical nfts are our one and only vertical we're building for you the nft community and so examples of that are like simple things such as message requests right where you can have a

2:46folder that allows you know new messages that come in to go there instead of directly into your inbox but also the fact that you can see the nft somebody owns when they message you is very helpful in preventing scams and spams from actually uh being large on the platform and you have to be you know in order to enter uh any of the actual community-based chats on our platform

3:09you actually have to own nft of that collection um that you're talking in and so i think that also has been an inhibitor that's created a safe and secure place for people to connect around their nfts you know we still have a long way to go we've only been uh building this for about seven months and every day we you know we work hard and we try to shift

3:28new features that we think will be valuable to the community and it's really only just beginning definitely and great point there about verifying the authenticity of the account with the nfts from what i understand you can without giving away your private keys you can go into your wallet and prove that that you have the nft in your wallet and then that attaches to your account so that

3:51you know personally there's a lot of i've seen so many impersonators especially in discord getting messages and it's really hard to tell if that is the actual person that you think it is absolutely i think that you know in web one it was about how we connect with information web 2 was how we connect with each other web 3 is how we interact with value and a lot of the web 2

4:13platforms weren't built to think about how we actually engage and uh connect around these i call them connected experiences right where your wallet's connected and you're actually looking to achieve something and so uh metalink was built with that in mind you know it's our mission to enable you to own those connected experiences uh from payments to social and everything in between

4:35today we think about owning our payments maybe in our crypto and our meta mask but what about owning our followers or what about owning the posts that we make on social media these are things that aren't really talked about a lot yet but blockchain is actually going to be a reasonable solution for and a great solution for and so that's sort of our our grand mission and i think the way

4:54that we think about achieving that is figuring out how do we actually connect chat and payments social and crypto together in one unified super app you know we saw this happen in the east where uh wechat is such an intuitive app that you know a lot of people really love whereas big tech in america is typically frowned upon and i think that there's an opportunity you know where

5:16imessage messenger and whatsapp don't have to be so segregated from paypal venmo and cash app you know maybe i guess the elephant in the room ashton is who needs another chat app right probably not you and not i but at the same time what if there was a chat app that intuitively tapped into uh our needs as cryptopreneurs if you will um so uh that's really what we're trying

5:39to create with metaling definitely and i completely understand you jake there's too many chat apps and all of them you don't want to use um and personally i know many crypto people that are searching for you know whether it's a decentralized messenger or one that can attach to your ethereum wallet or send send payments in the chat um and you mentioned they're sort of expanding

6:00that out beyond just a messenger to a social platform that you can actually be rewarded and first of all have ownership of the content that you produce and then be rewarded handsomely for producing content right and how it works now on social media is you don't own the content that you produce and you don't really get rewarded either so um there's that i'm really looking

6:23forward to down the road if that is something to expand beyond a holistic place and you're right we don't need more messengers but we do need one that is good so let's hope metalink can provide that yeah absolutely absolutely now we need one that can actually link us to the experience of the metaverse um right now when you click on a channel in other chat

6:45platforms you're going into a text-based channel um you know exactly what that is that you're getting and on metalink our channels will be text-based but they can also be something completely different so for example today we just rolled out our integration with chain-link vrf to set a new standard for nft giveaways what i mean by that is when you go into the

7:04channel instead of getting a text channel you're actually on a contest landing page and with just one click because you're already signed in with your wallet for metal link you can actually enter this contest directly uh with your wallet and what this does uh is it makes it very simple for us to actually tabulate the wallets that have come in but then from there we

7:24use chain link vrf to make sure that the winners you know are provably random and verified and it's a tamper-proof smart contract that um is public for everybody to see who the winners are so that these contests you know there's so many of these contests whether it's to win custom nike air force ones that dead fellows are putting out or is to win one of the many allowless spots to

7:44the hottest new collections these are really important opportunities for people to generate wealth and they want to know that the winners are selected fairly and so that's why we integrate with chain-link vrf and so today it could be a text channel or a giveaway but tomorrow who's to say that you don't click a channel and wind up in a metaverse experience a

8:02lot of the metaverse experiences today it's quite intimidating to figure out where do you go to actually explore the metaverse and we believe that you may want to just click on a channel and just be linked right into the beneverse and that's what metaling's trying to do great point jake uh with with with the metaverse at the stage that it's at now fairly early on i feel

8:23like there's not a lot of direction on what what you can do there's all these open worlds and you walk in and you're like there's a billion things potentially i could do but what do i want to do and how can we make it easier to go to the place that you want to go or meet with the like-minded people that you want to meet in the metaverse with one click

8:42and it sounds like that's part of what metalink's vision is yeah have you explored the better verse at all i have explored it a little bit you know um but for me still uh it's not something that i could be in there for multiple hours without without getting bored or without you know getting ticked off at the graphics quality you know and i think it needs to still improve a

9:02little bit more absolutely where do you see um nfts you know because nfts in the metaverse they're two separate things but really they can work cohesively and they're continuing to grow together um in metalink's vision how do you see what you have now fitting into the metaverse is it's having channels and then moving those into specific metaverses of other

9:28companies or maybe an in-house solution what do you what do you see there i see a couple things um i see sort of this this short term uh solution where the next generation's first exposure to crypto i believe is going to be through play to earn gaming and play to earn gaming you're going to win an nft and you're going to need somewhere where you can display that nft socialize around

9:51that nft and transact that nft all in the same place and it's going to be a lot easier if this place is a unified platform that doesn't require you to have a different profile and wallet on one platform and a different one on another platform and this will allow you to actually carry your reputation with you from game to game to game now that's the short term uh idea of how i think we

10:14can sort of service the metaverse but the long-term vision is that our platform you know the servers themselves will actually be able to live in multiple places at the same time and what i mean by that is imagine being able to uh have the server on metallink.com or on our mobile app but then also it actually exists in the game and so let's say that you're in sandbox and you

10:38have a chat going with your neighbors you could actually have that meta link chat going with your neighbors on sandbox but it could also be living uh in metalink as well and so whether you want to go to metalink or you want to be in sandbox regardless you can have that same chat going at the same time sort of sort of decentralizes the chat experience a bit

10:57definitely very cool looking forward to seeing how that plays out and one other thing you mentioned as well was being able to exchange or purchase you know get new nfts um is that something that's in the works in the long-term future near-term future for metalink yeah so we have a launch pad where we get behind projects that we believe in and and sometimes we partner with them

11:20you know we get behind them because we want to give uh those opportunities to our community to get in early you know you look at like a finance launch pad or a coin list offering um finance launch paper they gave sandbox and matic and a bunch of other amazing projects uh the privilege of getting their tokens to regular people who just kind of applied

11:41to want to get in on these uh on these ico offerings and look at how well those projects have done i mean some of them it's like 3 400 x right so um we like to do the same around nfts um we've put out cool man's universe and we actually put uh recently like cool pets and dead friends um through our launch pad as well where uh we basically use it as a

12:01platform to give away uh give away those spots and that was sort of the first time that we started to really interact with the value around the nfts themselves and provide that value to our community moving forward we have lots of ideas of how to expand that we're really excited about it um but when it comes to actually the trading itself uh we'll be

12:19rolling out something called meta swap and what meta swap will do is it'll be that you know i mentioned earlier that metal link was the first time you can see the nft civilians and message them at the same time and the missing step of the triangle is to actually be able to transact with them um and so we'll be rolling out a peer-to-peer training platform that will allow you to not just

12:38actually offer you know my dead fella plus some ethereum for your board ape uh but it will also allow you to chat in that same interface and we're really looking forward to rolling that out super cool and i really do love that because i feel like these auction platforms um you know if it's somebody that has something that you want and you're both in the nft space and you

12:58want to connect you should really be able to make it easier for people that are in such a small niche market which is just continuing to grow to be able to create synergy between each other and have a discussion if they want to yeah absolutely right it's like if you want to chat if you want to trade you know we think trading is going to be really big and

13:19you know we weren't interested in competing with traditional marketplaces uh at this time you know and so we really wanted to um roll out something that we thought could be beneficial to the community we're always thinking like what is the community what does the community want and what we were seeing that that so many people were having trouble conducting trades you know some

13:36of the discords have like a 14-step process for how to execute a trade in a safe and secure way uh we thought i don't may be able to provide a solution there definitely and you know with openc and the trading volumes only continue to grow i know that openc actually exceeded ebay and they were doing like billions in volume for ac ebay yeah exceeded ebay wow

13:58in such a short amount of time you know ebay's been around um yeah so with that do you see nfts continuing you know in with exponential growth um or like the markets in bitcoin you know there's ups and there's downs as well are you gonna do you see like lowling points with nfts throughout this year in the next year or do you see the trend just continuing

14:25yeah so i believe there's blue chip projects you know like board apes where they're probably going to be around for a very very very long time um but a lot of the projects it's a lot of hype it's a lot of fomo and fun and craziness and people are just kind of looking for that quick flip and it's very uh it reminds me so much of that ico era that you lived through and kind of saw

14:49where a lot of the projects just didn't really have the entrepreneurial capacity or necessarily the depth um and and an actual value that they provide to the ecosystem to create a really long-term value proposition to the people that were actually owning these tokens or speculating on them and so i think we're going to see the same with nfts um and one side that's kind of scary but on the

15:13other side the value of nfts is is only going to grow like i think we're going to see nfts take on many different meanings i definitely follow chris dixon's ideology that tokens are the new websites and websites at the beginning were just like you know a almost like a uh here's your recipe right uh when you're going to cook or something just information um

15:34but websites have become so much more than that obviously it's the way we do so many things the way we get e-commerce shipped to our doorstep the next day right so i think that we're gonna see nfts take on a really big evolution compared to what they are today and with that obviously uh you know the prices will continue to kind of go up and down because it is a very volatile asset

15:53class but nonetheless it's one where it's very fun to collect there's always been people you mentioned ebay before people are always interested in collecting it's how ebay got its start and i think that this is a very fun way to collect where you don't have to ship things back and forth and you can feel like you're actually part of a community because it's all

16:12trackable on the blockchain which is is a really nice uh facet of an nft yeah very well said jake and earlier when you were speaking about you know having a unified login or being able to have the chat in different platforms you know how do you keep track of your account and what i'm most excited about is you know those those web three logins themselves you

16:33know no longer having to have a separate uh account created on every single platform you have thousands of accounts or trying to log in with with google or facebook and then and then you say something they don't like and then they delete your account and all of a sudden your account is deleted on on all of those platforms now you can have your nft you can have your wallet logged in

16:53and you can go to any website that's web3 and you can just log in through that and you don't ever have to remember different passwords or emails and i feel like that's going to be a huge advantage for web 3 as we continue to grow out absolutely um you know makes so much sense right uh we've been working with a company uh that won the ethereum naming service grant to create

17:15the ethereum authentication standard and we use the ethereum authentication standard the company's called spruce id when you go to log in with google or facebook somewhere on the internet you're not fearful that you're gonna get hacked or that something really bad is gonna happen to you at worst maybe you're sharing some data but like it's not the private data it's not like your

17:34password or something like that it's not like you're getting you know at risk of giving up your assets and we really need to get this authentication standard to the point where people are comfortable knowing exactly what they're signing in a message uh and understanding uh what they're actually giving up because smart contracts obviously are capable of so

17:55many things good and bad and in order to detract the nefarious actors we need to create more clarity um and one of the things you know with metalink we've seen you mentioned ebay before and how open seas passed them in revenue you know back in august etsy did a billion dollars in revenue ebay did seven billion dollars in revenue and open c that was that sort of breakthrough month

18:13where we're like whoa what's going on you know i did three points six five billion in revenue and the first three thousand wallets that connected metal link um where these collectors and owners were giving us a chance they made up over 350 million of the 3.65 billion in revenue so it was over nine percent um and it was sort of a sign to us that we're headed in the right direction and

18:35we are creating a platform uh for the biggest collectors in the world and over time uh you know we knew we had to start there to get trust and safety but over time uh we really are excited um to roll this platform out to the entire nft community definitely and i'm very excited as well jake thank you so much for explaining all of this and taking the time to come

18:54and chat i really do appreciate it and now for the viewers that have nfts whether it's one that you mentioned or one that's up and coming on the platform or they just want to start using metalink what is the best way for them to learn more and to get involved right now yeah just go check out metalink.com um you log in with your metamask it's really simple uh if you have a ledger um

19:16and you want to verify one of the nfts on your ledger you do have to log in that first time with your with your wallet but you're actually able to go into settings afterward and connect uh connect to another wallet that has no nfts in it and you never have to log in with your ledger ever again um that was a big thing that we wanted to roll out to make it

19:34for people um so you can log in at metalink.com you can follow us at metalink labs on twitter i'm jq dell on twitter and uh i welcome your messages and looking forward to connecting and continuing to build for you the nft community amazing thank you so much jake i appreciate it all the best with metal link moving forward and let's follow up in the near future

19:59awesome thank you so much ashton appreciate your time you