Jordan Fried on NFT domains and the Genesis mint at NFT.com

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media in the crypto coin show today on blockchain interviews we have jordan freed ceo and founder of nft.com jordan welcome to the show and thanks so much for taking the time to come on thanks for having me ashton looking forward to it likewise there's so much to dive into with nfts right now uh since

0:23nfts last year exploded with the rise of crypto punks uh digital apes monkeys but there's a lot more functionality behind nfts that's yet to be tapped into um like real world assets being tokenized and so on so there's so much to dive into and i know nft.com is playing a large role in that maybe we can start by talking about where does nft.com start with nfts

0:53yeah so it's a great it's a great question first how are using nfts today is likely not how we're going to be using them in 10 years time that's the first statement i'll make the second statement is if you're lucky if you're listening to this and you're lucky enough to be alive in 10 15 20 years you're going to own an nft even if you think you're not the space is exploding

1:11at a very rapid pace and the technology is very interesting from the perspective that it's the first time in human history that we can assign digital property rights to people on the internet and then start to onboard things of value in the physical world into the digital world in the form of a token at nft.com we're of the belief that everything of value in the physical

1:32world will at some point be represented in this digital world in the form of a token that we will be tracking it on the ledger we see that macro opportunity as you know an opportunity in the tens of trillions of dollars and could even surpass the entire market cap of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies altogether we're really talking about title deeds to properties authenticity certificates of

1:54things like watches or title deeds to you know cars michael jordan rookie cards uh personal seat licenses and season tickets to seat five and six row seven section 101 at your favorite sporting venue all of this is really where the nft space is going we're seeing that manifest a little bit today for those listening that come from the gaming world um you know their uh

2:17real world trading as known as rwt in the gaming world used to be the act of someone in world of warcraft or runescape or minecraft starting to create secondary markets around these games where kids would take the currency of these games or the characters or the items in the games and sell them outside of the game in web 1 and web 2 that was a violation of the terms of service of

2:40these game environments but now we're seeing the advent of web 3 gaming where decentraland is a place where you can own a virtual piece of land and has its own currency mana which can be taken outside of the game and sold for for bitcoin or ethereum or even usdc so the space is moving rapidly where nft.com is positioned is for this to work we need to solve some of the core

3:04problems on the internet today and those are that users have really harmful relationships and abusive relationships with the platforms that we use youtubers constantly face the threat of arbitrary algorithm changes which can see their view count on their videos their videos can either get shadow banned or they can get demonetized also arbitrarily and

3:25stop making that adsense revenue share that they have with youtube the same is true on google the same is true on amazon where people who make full-time incomes with fulfillment by amazon can arbitrarily see their products or their reviews be delisted or amazon even could come in and start white labeling and competing with them we need to rethink the relationship that users have with

3:46platforms which is why at nft.com we're putting the users first we don't view it as a domain name that i own or domain name that we a company owns we view it as a domain name that the community owns in a platform that the community owns it's fully open source open license fully decentralized anyone in the world can come to nft.com and eventually min nft.com forward slash

4:07ashton or nft.com forward slash block west capital or blockchain interviews or whatever that brand is and own that in the form of a token uh you'll have a gallery um if you're a collector a storefront if you're a creator and our vision ashton is that this is the place where you'll show everyone in the world everything that you've collected be it your diploma a title deed to a real

4:30world property or a metaverse property or you know just a really cool board ape or cryptokitty or doodle that you're super proud of very cool jordan thank you so much for that and yeah it's really fascinating to see how the gaming world has transitioned from you know real world trading and making black markets uh outside of the game to now having legitimate markets where gamers can

4:52actually own the items that they've worked so hard on in the game and you know to move forward with that and expand out to all of the other industries with real world assets and land titles like you said um it's going to revolutionize everything but where do we start you know because as you mentioned this is a decade or and more long path so where do we go from

5:14starting today with nfts to where we're going to be when all of this comes to fruition sure the core problem with our internet experience in 2022 is and i'm my bold statement here is just that the internet in its current form is flawed it was never it was never supposed to be this way we got here through really well-intentioned people who wanted to offer us free social networking free web

5:38searches free messaging right email how do we keep all those things free the companies providing those services to us have to monetize in some way so they have this economic incentive to create these ad platforms that mine our data and can very specifically target advertisements to it based on our preferences the way they know our preferences is by reading our emails

5:59reading our messages uh literally listening and following everything we do what pages we like who we're interacting with and that's not that's not the kind of digital online identity that we as internet users should have web3 technology allows us to literally rethink how we want to architect a user's relationship with the platform and the ashton token or the jordan token

6:19or the block west capital token those tokens really we view them as not just nfts but founding primitives of your decentralized web 3 identity you will use that token for single sign-on authentication into the nft.com platform that is your user credential no more usernames and passwords anymore so if you're someone who forgets your password or you know you uh um you're just tired of

6:42you know having to use lastpass or one password to remember all of it now you just need to manage a cryptocurrency wallet and keep it secure you need a letter device to do it there's lots of easy ways to do it but if you have a crypto wallet you can just simply have that token inside of that wallet and when you log into nft.com we check that you have that token and now that profile

7:00is yours now here's the other thing ashton if you'd like to sell that profile to another ashton in the world maybe ashton kutcher hits you up and says hey i want to be nft.com you can sell that too that's our position which is interesting and a clear distinction from web 2 which is a clear violation of facebook metas and twitter and tick tocks uh terms of

7:23service that's not um that's not approved behavior today in web 2. people do it all the time but if you get caught doing it you lose those accounts forever so that is a very clear difference between you know where we are today and uh and and where and where we believe uh where we believe this space is uh um is going and i think you'll have better relationships between users

7:45and the platforms uh that they use great great point jordan and you mentioned there about decentralized identities and owning your own information and data and i think that's super important because right now a lot of people are thinking about nfts as as digital jpegs and punks and apes but there's so much more than that and you know we'll get to that point where they

8:09are real world assets and land d titles but something that can be done right now is the decentralized identities and i i feel like yes so if you have to this is a really big vision uh you have to somehow start at ashton and the you know we put a lot of deep thought into how you started and i couldn't help but go back to what got me my start in the whole world of

8:32blockchain and decentralization what got all of us our start where did the whole space come from january 3rd 2009 that's the date that's the date of the genesis block it's the bitcoin genesis block and when you think of a moment of genesis when you think of uh when you think of what that means um and it's a special moment really so special that the founding person um you know

8:57whether it's an individual or a team decided to encrypt a message in that bitcoin genesis box uh chancellor on brink of second bailout it was thetimes.co.uk the times paper um their uh their their cover story for the day it's important to also make a statement it's important also be thoughtful about how do you birth these communities facebook decided that everyone with a

9:19harvard.edu email address would be their genesis block right the first users of facebook now those users never got governance rights they're not on the board of directors they never got equity they just got their data jacked and you know monetized for literally the rest of their lives we didn't want that to happen so we came up with this concept of what if we invited 10 000 people from

9:40all over the world to form our genesis block to form the genesis moment of nfp.com what if they didn't just you know get there you know have the lucky position to be early and get their profiles early but what if they were our beta testers what if they were on our board of directors via a dow mechanism a decentralized autonomous organization where they have governance rights what

10:02if what if they could submit proposals and advocate for layer 1 protocols that they thought we should integrate after ethereum should we support solana nfts or hedera hashgraph nfts or polka dot or al grand or avalanche nfts all of that is possible and you need that core user group bitcoin's really bitcoin because everyone that has bought it has a super

10:25high net promoter score if you look at the concept of a net promoter score it's typically used in large companies like amazon or microsoft or apple to determine how likely someone who works there is to recommend uh employment to a friend or someone who they know to also come work there what is their level of happiness well if you actually rank net promoter scores of people in the bitcoin

10:46community or just look at net promoter scores of people who try veganism and crossfit we know what happened there they don't stop talking about being vegan and they don't stop talking about doing crossfit well in bitcoin it's no different anyone who's ever bought bitcoin continues to talk about it so when that community was a thousand people it grew

11:02to five thousand and then ten thousand and then twenty thousand and then forty thousand and it really grew exponentially and i think the truth behind launching web three communities is you need that strong community group with high net promoter scores and the only way for us to build that is to really focus on a small core collective of people who are

11:20ideologically aligned with the ideas i'm sharing here and want to be part of building a true web3 platform so that's why we came up with this genesis key concept it's a one of ten thousand nft every key is different it's this beautiful animated um nft and it unlocks your user experience with your genesis key you get two profile mints you get the ashton profile or the addison

11:44profile or the block west capital profile whatever you'd like to mim you get governance rights and then much more which we haven't released yet but uh you know it'll be it'll be part of roadmap and stuff we could talk about down the line incredible jordan and with those genesis keys is that happening right now it's happening right now um the results

12:04have been amazing uh i can actually share some with you this is one of the first interviews where i can share them publicly so we started with this auction concept where we were very alarmed at these very harmful mint processes that we saw in the market a couple things were happening one price prices for nft mints got exorbitant i mean really just in a

12:27place where they shouldn't be where users shouldn't be minting above five to ten each for a new project and we didn't like that i mean think about that you're paying fifteen thousand to thirty thousand dollars to mint these new prop these new um nft projects we didn't want to we didn't want this to be cash grabbing we also didn't want to go the proof way or the

12:46moon birds way where we just pick a static price and ask everybody to mint it that was 2.5 east we wanted to come up with a mechanism that we knew would protect users and that would get a fair price out of it so we did a 48 hour blind auction that has just finished that finished late last night which is why i've got some bags under my eyes and it was an amazing process bids were

13:06submitted from all over the world and what we did ashton is we took all the bids and we ranked them from highest to lowest and we then did something crazy we took the three thousand and first bid only three 000 keys were going to those in the white list so we took the first loser the first loser bid the 3 000 in first bid and we made that the price of

13:27the entire auction so it has an interesting mechanism the top 3 000 winners all pay the same price and all of them pay less than what they bid which is which is how that mechanic works we then decided to take that median price of the 1500th bid of the 3000 winning keys and that price becomes the public sale mint price because the public sale is not an

13:50auction at all it's just a sale the numbers uh i think validate the mechanism uh the public uh the white list ended and the number the 3000 first bid was half an eighth point five of an eighth the um the median uh price is 1.2 each which is less than 50 percent it's almost 60 percent off of where you know the the recent moon birds mint was so i'm very

14:18excited about the mechanism i'm very excited about others in the nft space adopting our mechanism or some version of our mechanism to protect the community and protect prices from getting out of control so that just happened if you are listening to this you like these ideas and you want to participate you you still can um our public mint actually opens up on may 2nd

14:41so that is uh this coming monday and we're really excited about the remaining seven thousand or so keys going to uh going to the public and then finally launching governance in the community and all of that incredible jordan and congratulations on that first part of the genesis that sounds great because it's you know more transparent in a democratic process and

15:03there's definitely an issue that i've seen with nft launches not being fair and transparent so congratulations on the successful mechanism now i'm looking forward to seeing that public launch and then once that happens what are the next steps moving forward for nft.com i feel like there's so much to do yeah well this isn't the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning it's

15:26really the beginning of the beginning it's it's it's the point in which all of this has to start but our work has literally just started uh we have a very big vision ashton and people are going to call me crazy but i am an idealist that believes that this dao will be responsible for getting nft.com into a position of being a global brand now if we back up it's already a marquee

15:50brand right it's right up there i would argue with crypto.com blockchain.combitcoin.com ftx.com these are marquee brands that some of them have their logos on the side of nba stadiums in the united states i really believe nft.com can be up there among some of the greatest and most important tech companies not just in this country but on this planet but i think that it needs

16:14to have users in a position where they feel in control or they feel like they have a voice and that the platform is open source and works for them not against them and that's kind of the insurance policy of launching this as a dow our plan is to really stand up that governance first and foremost to operate in a default state of radical transparency we actually released the

16:37full breakdown of all the bids in our auction from highest to lowest just so people could see our highest bid was 94 eth right uh and it's important that people can see that and it's important that they can see the lowest bid in the breakdown so they can see all of that and they can trust the process and trust the system communities can't be built without trust

16:57so from the very beginning once this key minting is over we will stand up public town halls these public town halls we'll discuss our product roadmap ashton we're literally going to allow these genesis keyholders into the organization to start saying hey why are we doing this shouldn't we be considering this feature set shouldn't creators get self-service

17:17uh nft um you know nft features and functionality all of that needs to be thought through and and those genesis key holders have now a voice in how we how we determine where focus is spent we're still a team we're still a team that is largely led by myself and some other leaders in this organization but to be clear you know my title here can be a little bit

17:40misleading i am the ceo of a company called immutable holdings behind you know nft.com but i'm not the ceo of nft.com i'm the founder of nft.com our users our genesis key holders are the ceos they're the ones who really make the shot and i think that's a really important distinction so what you can look forward to after having a genesis character being in the community is you

18:01know wagner united was formed to buy a an english or european football club lynx dow was formed to buy a golf course kraus house dao was formed by the chicago bulls these are organizations formed to with a very singular narrow focus nft.com was formed to have a platform really controlled by its users with the goal of building one of the largest tech companies in the world what

18:25if it wasn't a billionaire or a tech conglomerate behind you know facebook or open c um and it wasn't a bunch of venture capitalists like excel partners or a16z or sequoia capital what if it was the users and i think we're gonna see platforms like that we already are uniswap is among them maker dao is one of the largest stable coins in the world is among them we are

18:47starting to see the advent of multi-billion dollar decentralized ecosystems and nft.com is is going to be one of the next ones incredible jordan and for the rest of the genesis keys for the may 2nd public auction what is the best way for people to learn more and to get involved in it so what i love so much about this domain name is so much concern about crypto

19:10security really revolves around links and links being sent around that aren't what they may appear to be these are phishing scams people trying to get you to go to you know coin base but base is spelled incorrectly right with like a z instead of an s and get you to connect a wallet to it or you know type in your private key or your password so they can

19:29compromise your main account it's really ridiculous the kind of scams that we have there and we're experiencing a lot of that ourselves with nft.com we don't even need to send you a link just simply type in nft.com in your browser it's six letters that need to be typed in plus a little period there but if you just type in nft.com you can find out all the information about the

19:50project we are a fully docs team i think it's ridiculous in 2022 to launch a project not as a docs team our reputations are on the line you can see what we have done from our first startups to our recent startups uh several of the team members actually come from the hedera hashgraph ecosystem and we're with me on the founding team of hedera and we care deeply about what

20:13we built we did things the right way at hedera we went to the regulators first we told them what we were going to do we're taking the same regulatory approach with this dow um i like to sleep at night i don't want to be looking over my shoulder worried about you know regulators are after me or law enforcement's after me um i have a family and i value i i value you know

20:33the right thing to do is always the right thing so join us if you like it go to nft.com and uh if you don't get a key on may 2nd surely secondary markets will form around it on looks rare or open c or your favorite platform and eventually on nft.com where we hope that's the platform you end up using in the future instead of opencm looks rare incredible jordan thank you so much for

20:55taking the time to come on all the best with the public auction on may 2nd the rest of the genesis keys i'll be checking out the public auction as well and everything going forward as you mentioned it's the beginning of the beginning there's so much to do and i really appreciate you taking the time and let's definitely follow up in the near future thanks so much for having me

21:23you