Jolyon Horsfall on SparkWorld’s NFT minting and prediction markets

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media and the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have julian harspal co-ceo of spark world julian welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time well thanks for having me on ashton a real pleasure here likewise there's so much to talk about with spark world your team has some

0:20great initiatives uh so let's just start off the conversation by having you explain uh what is spark what are some of the solutions you're looking at driving into the world with blockchain technology and then we'll dive into those details yeah absolutely so spark world you know we've got a couple of solutions coming i think our first solution is focusing on the randomized

0:43minting and white testing issue for nfts obviously it's an expanding space we're going to be initially focusing on the game phi industry just because it's very scalable in terms of the amount of drops they have and therefore our solution is going to be more effective in in there but i mean lots of the micro project specific issues are there's you know lottery

1:02based participation first compass serve mismanagement lack of transparency about how they're being selected for the white list and how they're actually distributed and what we're using is these predictive events these fair predictive launches as a community-based solution for that transparency and distribution so people aren't getting outbidded by sniper bots

1:20front running bots real users are getting into these gaming projects and you know there's obviously that added security around whether there's rogue pools by using our kind of like solution because we'll pre-vet the team private or publicly docks them um so that's the first solution that we're bringing the second is around a guest-earned protocol so once we've kind

1:40of launched these projects we can also use these predictive events to allow people to leverage their knowledge on nfts to earn spark and avalanche rewards um so that is kind of like a pvp and we're calling that a project first project so will project a have more volume in this week than project b there'll be a reward pool of spark and lavax tokens and

2:00people have to say this can have more this could have more volume and then project a would win the rewards so it's kind of some engagement uh post launch as well very cool and thanks for that intro julian so let's first dive into that first issue because i think that's one that people are going to understand more a lot of people understand nfts and board apes and you know digital graphics

2:24for the most part although nfts do expand out to access keys and all of these different functionalities as nft world continues to grow but right now let's just talk about say there's a a high-end nft minting and people were able to snipe these up for 0.1 ether or something and now they're trading at 10 ether or even 100 ether if it's some of the top nft collections

2:52there are obviously um things that some people need to do to make sure that they can get access to the mint and that's a super important time because it seems like the nfts appreciate a lot right after that but there seems like there's a lot of issues as you sort of alluded to with that minting process and making it fair and making sure that people aren't

3:12stealing them or using bots and hoarding them all up and now you've developed fair prediction launches is that what it is for nfts yeah exactly so we're trying to build builds build another kind of uh novel novel solution that's coming to market i think we see a lot of copycat projects of i'm doing this on this chain uh and that's something that we're

3:34really proud that we're not a something on a different chain so the fpls or the fair predictables what we're trying to do is combine prediction events with also uh the launchers so what we've seen is sometimes prediction markets aren't that sticky in crypto for a number of reasons liquidity the apy skew to people in in crypto one ten thousand percent apy or

3:55they're not interested so what we've tried to do is um go back to ideation phase of how do you create an ordered list of people on chain where the project themselves doesn't whitelist anyone so we don't want to be in a in a situation where suddenly we're choosing the polling method or we're choosing some off-chain um random number generator um but we're using a prediction event so

4:17the crux of it is uh predict something so a prediction variable might be the network token so predict the price of avats predict the price of the governance token so predict the price of axi shards in seven days and the closest 100 predictions are on the white list importantly we can be supplementary or exclusive so if you're having an nft drop and you've

4:39got a 2500 nfd to drop we can help white list 500 people with an fpl or we can handle the whole the whole drop so that's that's the kind of crux of it i was trying to say we want that blockchain ethos where we're making a smart contract that can whitelist people that we're not sort of controlling like you we we're like we're witnessing you we weren't

5:00listening then because everyone knows that's not fair access to the ground level which is one of our kind of core key pillars that's super interesting that you mentioned there about predicting the prices of coins as an example um i feel like this is one of those lotteries where you have to guess the amount of marbles in the jar and if you're close then you're

5:20gonna win access to the white list um that's exactly it that's exactly it nail on the head that's the nail in the head and do you see that as the ultimate solution for making fair access to minting um well i think in one sense there's never a perfect solution to anything uh so people who come out and say that we've got the ultimate blanket solution whether that's

5:46you know the l1 that they've created or a fork of arbitrary or optimism that they've made and they're saying it's this is the best i think when it's untested and two you know there's going to be some tinkering and some tweaking we can't satisfy the whales and the people who have relatively like smaller token holdings but all want to get access to these nfts i think it's

6:06about you know prey to efficiency is kind of like an unachievable thing normally like if you're a government or if you're making policy for anything you're gonna have to make some uh you know some kind of compromises where where you have to decide what can i do that's going to benefit the the majority of the stakeholders which is the projects the communities and then

6:29obviously the people who are getting into those nfts so we're trying to make an enhancement on the current situation and that will be improved as time goes on we'll be making more features more accessibility different routes but yeah i think we're having a good shot at making something that's um gonna bring some positive to the market amazing and you know with prediction

6:51markets uh as we've seen in the cryptocurrency world for the last five seven years you know as early as august it seems that there's a lack of traction for a successful prediction market that has a lot of liquidity or a lot of traction do you see this kind of reward in getting access to the white list and other privileges as a solution to increasing the traction

7:14for these types of markets in cryptocurrency yeah so exactly i think what's important here is the the prediction element is used as a means to an end so it's not sort of saying this is the whole concept of the of the platform because we've seen plenty of prediction markets like come through and not necessarily get that traction as you say so it's kind of

7:36combining an nft minting process which people are very interested in and predictions which people also are very interested in but sometimes doesn't stick and using say this is just the solution to get the ordered list of people for for that and i think one of the things that makes us quite unique is if you were to mint your nft on a normal platform you have

7:58two scenarios either you mint the nft or you don't there's no extra benefits whereas here there's going to be you know staking yields prediction rewards as well as getting the nft minting so if you had a game theory matrix where you're either minting on our platform or not minting on our platform even if you don't necessarily get into the top 100 or 200 it'll be unique per

8:19fpl and you miss out on the actual nft min you'll still get these other rewards so in either scenario you'll probably add a a larger benefit oh that's great to hear and it seems like there's a lot of nft projects coming out some better than others but i can almost see multiple per day coming out so where are you at right now with spark with with integrating and partnering with nfts and

8:44the development of the platform yeah i mean it's a incredibly crowded and um crazy space i think there's innovation happening at a rate of knots which is amazing to see but i think it's also difficult to understand exactly what's going to be successful so we're coming up to launch in the next month which is exciting and we're speaking to a lot of nft projects with a lot of

9:08partnerships about you know whether we're launched partners um whether they're nft projects they're going to do subsequent drops drops on our platform i can't give away any of the names yet but we've got some hopefully some big ones under the carpet which is exciting and i think as i said with the gaming nft space specifically it's something that we in

9:26the team are quite bullish on in the medium to long term potentially slightly more bear market resistant although we're yet to see that theory tested that's what a lot of people are saying but um let's see what happens when it eventually comes and and i think the um positioning is good is good amazing and so within the next month you're looking at doing a launch i'm

9:49also curious if you know you're not just working with these nft projects but if there's any you know spark world nfts or governance token and the crypto economics of spark in the ecosystem itself yeah exactly so we're going to be having some you know one of the things about early incentivization is that you know we're going to have a one of 100 nft series which is like the founders

10:16council and we want to be giving quite heavy governance rights to people who are going to be either get they'll be released in in batches so it won't be all at once but you know we wanting people to be engaged people who are taking time to predict on the platform you get experience and levels um by entering these fps so that's one way we're going to be

10:36collaborating with the nfts we're actually making quite an nft hub so we've got some partnerships with arcades they do mission pools for nft so lots of games that come across our platform they'll be able to make these mission calls and they'll be able to get people earning yields from their games without necessarily having to play them and we've got people like blockchain space

10:55they have the most guilds signed up of any project in the world i think they've got nearly 11 000 which is incredible we're wanting to collaborate on get uh the guilds playing the nft games that come across our platform something like iq protocol with nft staking renting and lending you know anything to make sure that there's a whole bunch of utility available to

11:15projects that actually interact with our platform so that's kind of our goal to make sure utility usage um virality of the token you know wanting to make sure like our governance token the spark token is used in as many ways possible as well as the nfts coming across the platform great looking forward to seeing that and now i just have a question more

11:38about the nft space in general from a high level you know as you're developing this technology to get these nfts off the ground in a fair way um they will the market will continue to grow exponentially i feel like but there's also talks of you know a bubble or you know overvaluation of the nft space in itself um what do you think about the nft space at a high level

12:03right now in terms of undervalued overvalued so i guess the concept of value is how you are explaining what you're valuing so i think when people say that you're valuing jpegs at x hundred of million x billion then it could be quite easy to draw a conclusion that they're overvalued but when people say that these nfts are just jpegs if you explain anything in the

12:30most simple way possible they always sounds quite mundane or quite silly so if you if i was to say someone gets paid 300 000 pounds a week to kick a leather ball into a net be like that sounds crazy but that's the word of football i think the same thing happens with nfts nfts are memberships gateways to high alpha groups you know um if you're buying like a boo

12:53or near or if you're buying a bugle on solana or an smb a punk an ape you're getting into an elite section or think how many people pay for members clubs whether they're in person or or on an app i think you're getting that access to these worlds to this high alpha to the white lists to the concepts and ideas that are actually going to be able to push you

13:15very highly forward so i think a lot of people who understand those things think they're undervalued and that's why they're continually going up and all the people who think that jpegs think they're overvalued for the moment i personally think there is a good chunk of blue chip sets that are probably deserve where they deserve to be and then there's obviously

13:36a lot of kind of um more whippy or scammy sets that kind of being artificially pumped um because obviously the wash trading is much easier within the nft space you know the liquidity is a bit more crazy you know you can sweep the floor d-list there's there's lots of ways you can get around kind of um compared to like a specific token that's openly trade

13:56definitely great perspective there julian thank you for that i really do appreciate that insight and i think that really helps people that are just getting into nfts to understand you know what am i buying and is it worth this much and is it something that is short term or is this something that's going to last for a long time now for nft projects that are looking for

14:18technology like spark to work together and for people that are looking for the updates for when the platform launches to see projects as they come out what is the best way for everyone to learn more and to get involved with with us specifically or just generally in the nfd space with you guys yeah i mean we're we're very active on twitter you've got to jump into our

14:41discords we're going to we've got a great team that's always on the lookout for we're launching in the avax ecosystem so we're quite focused on the projects that are coming across our desk or our table or our interest forms but we're going to be making sure that we get the best whitelist spots for our community that's kind of part of the the value add i guess of

15:01these nft projects you've got to believe that those that team those leaders are there to be in all those high alpha groups to get that to you you know sharing and inclusion and accessibility is like kind of at the core of this project and that's what we want to be doing i'm like guys have you seen this project or do what you guys think about that project

15:22again with some community members they flagged some potential upcoming projects that we actually didn't have our eye on and you know then we reach out to either our vcs our mutual connections to try and spin up a group and get those conversations going because we want to be speaking to as many founders as possible with these nft sets great well thank you so much for the

15:41information jolian i will leave the spark world uh links and the community links twitter telegram in the description box below all the best with the upcoming launch of the platform and with all the nft projects you're partnering i really do hope you guys make a positive impact on the minting of nfts and just make everything more fair and accessible for people so please keep

16:02up the good work and let's follow up in the near future cheers really appreciate ashton have a good day thank you