Kayla Kroot on making NFT creation accessible at Koii Network

0:01i'm ashton addison from blockwestcapital for investmentpitch media and the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have kayla croot creative director and co-founder of coin network kayla welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time ashan thanks for uh having me on i'm really happy to be here you're very welcome a lot to cover in a short amount

0:20of time so let's dive straight into it kayla can we please just start off with a refresher for me and for the audience you know a high level overview of coin network the solutions that you're bringing into the world and then we can dive into the details yeah of course so we um think of ourselves coin network is the is reshaping information the way that bitcoin

0:42reshaped uh finance and really what that means is that there's a huge um problem in the world with access to information we're seeing that now in conflict zones we're seeing that um you know with government controlled media stuff like that where people don't have access to the truth they don't have access to honest information and um and they don't have a way to put the things that they

1:08want into the world so uh what koi is doing is we are building tools for anybody to get really involved into web3 whether you're a developer and you want to build a completely decentralized app that doesn't rely on any centralized services like aws or if you're a creator and you want to make nfts or you want to make music and you want to own that content and and be

1:30rewarded for it instead of rewarding the platforms that you're working with um we are here to make web3 the future for everybody like globally everywhere and all the infrastructure that comes along with that amazing great intro and i really like the sounds of that um you're right there's a pervasive problem right now seems to be ever growing and i believe as well technology is the answer

1:55i'd love to know how long you know you've been working on this and and where your team is at right now so i have been working on this since um about august of 2020 so it's been almost a year and a half now um but my co-founder al morris has been thinking about these ideas of how do we give global access to information how do we reward creators how do we do that

2:21he's been like really thinking about that um you know five years before we even started this so it's it's been a long time coming uh and finally sort of the the groundwork for us to really um build what we are trying to build has been laid and so we just released actually a um our own settlement layer which will help us increase um transaction speed and

2:45payment processing and all of that and with that we are building what we call a task node which is our network of nodes that you could run one on your laptop i'm going to run one on my laptop i'll run one on my phone so we really have a global network that will enable us to do things like decentralized hosting where really it's coming from all the computers across the web that allows you

3:09to do a lot of different things like web scraping and other microservices um and then on the other end we we did build a wallet it's called fini um i love finney um sort of my pride and joy but finney is enables creators you know we have a drag and drop excuse me nft creation tool um and and i'm just gonna tease a thing that we have coming out soon there's a

3:32mobile um mobile app that we're creating that has allows you to create decentralized media almost like snapchat right from your phone upload it super easy so basically what what i'm trying to say is we've been building heads down a lot in the last year or so um and we're excited to like show the world what we have very exciting and i do like that on the

3:55creator aspect just making it easier for them to interact with web3 to create nfts or or content where they can directly connect to their fans um and just make it easier for those connections to be made and you you also mentioned earlier about you know just the whole protocol overall i'm guessing it's gets technical and there's a lot of different aspects to it but to make it

4:19uh adopted by the mainstream you really need to lower those barriers to entry make it as usable as possible as you have done with the creators on the on the development side and just as the protocol as a whole how have you approached that usability and getting people that aren't technical involved on the front end so there's a couple of different aspects

4:38here one is that we have built a template library a ui template library that is written entirely in javascript so if you know any javascript you can deploy an app in 10 minutes or less we even had our head of partnerships he tried to make a crowdfunding portal which is one of the templates that we have he had never written a line of code before in his life and he did it in 25

4:59minutes um up and running like and it wasn't his wasn't like tuned to any brand or anything so like if you want to like make it really like yours for your company it takes a little bit longer than that but as someone who's never written code you know we've seen a lot in the no code or the low code applications recently and really that's the future that like anyone can build an

5:22app if they have an idea you shouldn't have to know solidity or rust or any of the other languages to be able to help people put your good out into the world and all of that um and on the other side of it we so you mentioned the protocol we our protocol works um by tracking attention so it's called proofs of real traffic and then this helps people get rewarded

5:45uh for the content that they're putting out so whether that's an nft if you're a creator or if you're a developer and you've made an app and people your users are coming and they're using it every day or five times a day or whatever it is you get paid in our token it's called koi um the koi token and you can use those rewards to then pay your hosting services through our task nodes

6:11so basically we're lowering that bar bar barrier to entry excuse me um by you know making it more affordable making it easier to pay for your services and and making it so that like really anyone can get involved and you don't have to like put in a lot of money at the outset in order to like reap the rewards which is just like a you know the rich get richer scheme

6:36interesting and thanks for mentioning that i was curious to ask about the coin network token if they're you know maybe we can just get an overall picture from a high level you know is it similar to like a governance token in a protocol and it has other functionalities whether it's to do with the nfts or d5 you mentioned they're staking and paying for

6:56the services um is there anything else that we didn't talk about with regards to that yeah so the the token is really an incentive mechanism for the network so there's a daily uh mint uh and the only way to quote-unquote mine i hate the term mining for for what we're doing but that's what everybody knows so though the only way to mine the koi token is by

7:17putting content out into the world that people are engaging with and looking at using so that could be an nft like i said before or it could be a decentralized application um and then everyone who earns those tokens and you can then pay the network to do any of those micro services so all of the task nodes you write you know a small javascript code you know snippet and i

7:42ask them to do something for you and and that incentivizes people to be running nodes because they're earning a percentage of what we're calling bounties um to accomplish the things that you've asked them to do interesting and i feel like there's a a high waiting on you know the decentralized nature of koi or like running your own node now i know a lot

8:04of people that are using most people that are that are trading cryptocurrencies or using d5 nfts in ethereum and these other protocols they're not really focused on running their own node is that one of the more important aspects for your team at koi so we already have about 38 000 people on our wait list to um on our pre-registration list for when the node comes out to run that

8:31there's no reason really not to run a node with koi it it's a such a small um like program that it takes up about the same space and ram as a music playing app so if you can run spotify on your computer like you can run our node um and then that is just like another sort of income stream for you and it'll just it'll run tasks that like you can subscribe to the list that like we've

8:57vetted and we've approved so we know that they're like not malicious you can run basically um you know we're gonna make it very easy for you to run a node and then if you want to run like a heavier node if you already have that infrastructure for you know an ethereum node or some other node you can run them sort of in parallel um and still get that like a higher

9:21percentage of the rewards because you're accomplishing more of the tasks very cool and that's a very impressive wait list that's great to hear about the you know the traction already pre-launch and you did hint at a mobile app you know in the future and i'm curious what else is in the roadmap you know in terms of the tentative schedules because nothing is ever for sure in blockchain

9:45uh but for for this launch and the mine and other updates you know what's the schedule look like coming out in the future yeah so we are hoping to launch this mobile app that i'm not going to say too much about um fairly soon again i'm not going to put an exact date on that and then after that is going to be this desktop node so if you aren't a creator or you don't want to be putting

10:09your own stuff out into the world um you can run our node and earn tokens that way we will be having a public sale i am not on the off side necessarily i'm more product and design so i'm not going to claim to know all the details on exactly when that's going to happen but um should be this year for sure um and then

10:38you know we're building out from there one of the things that's really important for us is um cr is other other projects creating in the ecosystem so we're doing a lot of partnership work we are building up other apps who are using our task nodes and our other infrastructure to run their applications and build their applications so we are going to be building an

10:58ecosystems fund down the line as well and really like helping and partnering with those projects to you know make it a place where everybody really wants to be because if you know if we can lay the groundwork make it super easy for people you know to build the next set of apps on koi as opposed to in a centralized way that's really how global adoption is

11:19going to happen you know you're going to have people who don't believe in web 3 or like don't know about it or are just scared because it's like oh that's something that you know people with bad intentions do um you you gotta get the way that we get them in is that they're using an app that's built in web3 that's built on koi and then you know six months later you

11:45know they love this app they use it every day and then they find out oh that's decentralized that's blockchain that's you know web3 this thing that i was always scared of well maybe it's not so bad it's actually pretty good and the ux is good and as long as everything is is as good or or even better than what they're used to that's how we get everybody involved

12:07definitely kayla and i completely agree i always say the day that blockchain reaches mainstream will be the day that everyone doesn't know they're using it because it will just be in the back end so very cool looking forward to these updates for the viewers that are looking to learn more about that wait list and about the drop and everything moving forward what is the best way for them to

12:28stay connected and get into the communities um so you can head over to our website that's koi.network that's koi with two eyes and we have some sign ups there for the pre-registration to run a node also follow us on twitter it's at koi network um and then in our twitter bio link there's a bunch of links that's actually a fully decentralized application that we built

12:53that you can create your own decentralized identity um straight from the finney wallet that i mentioned earlier but within that it's almost like a link tree but it also has your nfts and it's like a decentralized profile page almost with wallet addresses that you can you know if you want to send us tokens don't send us tokens but um you could do that um and so our

13:18all like our discord is on there our um telegram group is on there i think our jobs page is on there as well we're definitely hiring um so if you need a job let us know where we hire all over the world um and and then also if you want to follow me on twitter it's at kayla croot my first and last name and i have my own decentralized id on there as well with

13:41some ways to connect with me some ways to get involved in koi too very cool kayla all exciting things and i will leave those links in the description box below as well looking forward to these updates coming for coin network uh let's definitely follow up in the near future yeah thanks so much ashton it was great to be here you