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The following transcript was created using artificial intelligence. There will be some grammatical errors below.

00:00:03:08 – 00:00:30:14

Steven Miller: Of course, I’m just playing. Well, look, guys, I am really excited to be here with you today. My name is Steven Miller. As Richard said, you may have heard from me before today. I would love to be able to give you a little bit of an in-depth introduction to these fantastic gentlemen in the NFT space. I’d like to start with Ben Noble from Hal Labs. Ben’s been in the NFT space since 2017 and today owns over 20,000 nfts.

00:00:31:06 – 00:00:32:07

Ben Noble: I’ve forgotten to sell.

00:00:34:18 – 00:01:00:00

Steven Miller: Everything from CryptoKitties to Gods Unchained right now. So over the last few years, he’s become a well respected voice on crypto, Twitter and clubhouse. And today, Ben is the co-owner of Hal Labs, a marketing and PR agency that works with Web3 projects at the intersection of culture, consumer goods, entertainment and fintech, serving the likes of Nestlé, Solana, Binance, Immutable X and Cosmos. Can we hear it for him real quick?

00:01:03:09 – 00:01:04:00

Ben Noble: Thank you. Thank you.

00:01:04:12 – 00:01:34:29

Steven Miller: I was going to say his parents are very proud. Now, Grant Powell, on the other hand, from curios, is what I would consider the lead type of veteran that you want to hear from as a builder. Now, Grant is a 20 year digital veteran who’s worked at Google and operated multiple startups. Through his experiences, he’s developed a wealth of knowledge around technology, product development and digital advertising, leading to where he is today. As the founder of Kyrgios, a no code Web3 platform with easy to use tools for every creator in business.

00:01:35:15 – 00:01:43:20

Steven Miller: Now that you’ve gotten a chance to hear a little bit about them again, I would love it if you could give Grant a little a round of applause. Let him know that you’re here. Oh,

00:01:45:06 – 00:01:56:04

Steven Miller: fantastic. So I would love to direct to both of you this question. Can you tell me a little bit about what really fires you up about Nfts and why you’ve decided to plant your flag in this space? Let’s go to you first, Ben.

00:01:57:16 – 00:02:28:18

Grant Powell: And if these are fascinating. When I first got introduced to NFT, as it was looking at CryptoKitties and the explosion of of cats on the blockchain, we had moon cats. Two cats are a really prevalent thing in NFT culture. Actually, at this point. We’ve got cool cats. Basically, if you want a winning project, just make it about a cat. But Robbie and James Ferguson, I was at Token 2049 in Hong Kong and I was meeting the Axie Infinity guys.

00:02:28:20 – 00:03:00:21

Grant Powell: I was talking to the gods and chain guys before they had the immutable platform and just their explanation on what digital asset ownership meant, what it could mean and where that could lead us in the future really opened my eyes to this is more than just a jpeg. That whole right click save mentality kind of dissolved in my mind and I really started to understand that this is about a transformation on how we look at digital ownership and digital identity. And so I took that back home with me.

00:03:01:04 – 00:03:28:05

Grant Powell: I really started exploring everything I could, whether it was games, whether it was collectibles, whether it was just really, really cool, generative art, whatever. And I stuck with it and everyone thought I was crazy and I am. So yeah, prove them wrong until the market went down recently right now. So we’re still bullish on NFT is I really believe that there’s a place for this in the future and excited to see where we end up.

00:03:28:24 – 00:04:16:10

Grant Powell: Grant Yeah, so I originally discovered NFT is because I’m a collector. I’m actually a collector of physical objects like rare coins. My specialty is Scottish medieval coins. For any of you out there who might be interested, and not likely any anyways, as a collector, I was really excited to be able to collect things digitally and so that’s what first brought me into the space. Of course, as Ben just said here, what really excites me now and about the future of Nfts is this this single ability that the technology has to prove the concept of ownership of something intangible and the applications of that are just limitless? You know, I’d love to see every stock, every every share of stock in a company be verified through a blockchain token in the future or, you know, real estate being owned through tokens.

00:04:16:12 – 00:04:29:05

Grant Powell: I know people have talked about that I think earlier today here. So yeah, I came to the space as a collector, but now as a as a technologist and entrepreneur, I’m excited for the things far beyond collecting art and digital collectibles.

00:04:30:03 – 00:04:50:14

Steven Miller: Fantastic. So let’s turn to Ben for a second. Ben, as a marketer and a longtime collector, you are no stranger to the importance of things like variable identity, worldbuilding and downstream communication in this space. Would you mind shedding some light on why these are so foundational to projects that we consider GMI going to make it?

00:04:51:12 – 00:05:24:25

Ben Noble: Yes. So it was such a rollercoaster of emotion when all these individuals started approaching us and saying we really want to build out an NFT concept. We want to get it. Unity on board, and we want to understand how to communicate effectively so that they’re on board with the vision and everything like that. One of the big projects we got to work with was Tom Bill use Impact Theory. So one of the first jobs he did was with Steve Aoki, but he’s gone on to do the Foundation Keys and Kaizen and all these other things.

00:05:25:06 – 00:06:06:27

Ben Noble: And I remember after we had spun everything up in The Discord and Tom having the audience, he had like 50,000 followers immediately into the discord. He was like, Wow, People expect communication constantly. And I was like, Yeah, it’s no joke. And they ended up having to, like, double the staffing just to to handle the discord in the day to day. And what I loved was how willing Tom was, how willing. A lot of the people that we worked with the founders were to get involved in the community and speak directly, speak earnest and honestly about what their timeline was for delivery, and then basically executing on those things.

00:06:07:04 – 00:06:39:19

Ben Noble: But downstream communication has become incredibly important. It’s always been important, but even so now, so what we’re seeing now is a lot of communities that didn’t nurture, didn’t maintain those communities effectively have all but evaporated. And so what we’re left with are a handful that are still thriving and a lot of anemic. Oh, crap. Now we got to figure out how to re ignite and galvanize our audience once more. So we approach it from like, you know, it’s a it’s a health thing.

00:06:40:08 – 00:06:48:13

Ben Noble: A lot of people are like, we’ve got the collection now. We’ve made the money, we’re done. No, you’re not done. You got to keep, keep, keep, keep communicating. So, yeah.

00:06:49:19 – 00:07:20:25

Steven Miller: It’s really interesting, you know, the way that we have to continue to see these communities adapt and otherwise, the result is you get to this point where the community turns completely against you and you have the opportunity to, you know, reassess or the community can theoretically take over. One of the great examples that was Funk’s, and I think there’s a lot of lessons that can be taken away from something like that. But I would like to shift gears to the building side of things, because within Nfts, there’s no question that experimentation is core to the way that we’re going to see this thing develop.

00:07:20:27 – 00:07:43:19

Steven Miller: You saw a company like Roofstock come out a couple of weeks ago, sell the very first, you know, house on blockchain with proper financing. So, Grant, I want to turn to you, you know, because your your project is so big on building and things like utility and your focus on, you know, trying to build in ownership as well. How do you see the application of Nfts evolving outside of the scope in which they’re used today?

00:07:44:24 – 00:08:16:08

Grant Powell: Yeah, so I referenced that a little bit. You know, earlier when I talked about the idea of owning a share of stock, for example, through, you know, an NFT, a token, I think that if you if you really dig deep into this concept of ownership, it’s more than just owning a physical object. Ownership is also another way of defining the right to access something. And so we see applications of that already with getting access to a Discord server by owning an NFT. But I think it goes beyond that. You know, NFT ticketing is really exciting, giving people access to real world events.

00:08:17:04 – 00:08:49:09

Grant Powell: Just to touch on that one a little bit, because it’s one that’s really, really a passion project for mine is, is that with ticketing now, you know, you can buy a ticket and sell it on the secondary market, but the the person who’s buying that ticket doesn’t know that it’s real. So you could be selling a fake ticket. I’ve had this happen to friends where they go to an event, they buy a ticket from a scalper. It ends up being a fake ticket. They can’t get in. And if you can solve that because you can prove that it’s you know, if you’re buying it through an app, you can prove it’s a real token and verify it on the blockchain, verify that it hasn’t been used.

00:08:49:21 – 00:09:20:18

Grant Powell: And it’s again, all that prove ability, that proof of ownership and how you interpret that and apply it to, you know, virtually anything is really inspiring. So the future is, you know, I don’t mean to be vague here, but it’s kind of limitless, right? You can take this technology, use it to, you know, prove people’s identity. Right. Ownership of your own identity. You’re owning it through a token, you know, prove people’s access, you know, right. To access things or, of course, even owning physical objects.

00:09:21:10 – 00:09:23:00

Grant Powell: So it’s it’s very inspiring.

00:09:24:05 – 00:10:03:24

Steven Miller: What you said there about the future being limitless. I have to kind of lean into you for a second. I want to I want each of you to take a stab at this, because while people in the NFT space like to say that the future is limitless, I think a lot of project leads are much more in the mindset of, well, we need to keep the future ambiguous, right? That’s how longevity is achieved. So I’m curious what you guys think. If this is a narrative that’s going to start fading away or if this is something that because again, it affects both communities and user groups, you know, from the project side, as a builder, my curiosity is like, how do you see projects serving like lifeblood to their communities? How are they going to sustain fandom? In both those groups.

00:10:04:03 – 00:10:05:09

Steven Miller: So let’s go first to Grant.

00:10:05:27 – 00:10:41:26

Grant Powell: Sure. I think it’s yeah, it’s it’s not being ambiguous. It’s speaking to and building to specific utility specific functionality people need. You know, when you come to carry out and say, hey, I’d like to use your tools, what two tools do you have? I don’t respond with ambiguity, saying, Oh, we have these tools that can kind of do these things in a nebulous way. We’re very specific about, here’s how you can token gate, here’s how you can unlock content, here’s how you can, you know, grant access. And so, yeah, I think I think the ambiguity will go away or needs do I think the people who speak ambiguously might, you know cultivate inspiration initially.

00:10:42:05 – 00:10:45:06

Grant Powell: But at the end of the day, it could just become another run pole. Right.

00:10:45:21 – 00:11:17:00

Ben Noble: You know, we talked about this a little bit earlier. The idea that some people are creating projects and not knowing where they’re going terrifies me because there needs to be a little bit of completeness and vision. I think the ambiguity and understanding that IP can proliferate across a bunch of different mediums and I’m not saying you need to box your project off and say, We’re only going to work on this one thing, but knowing what those things are that you can bring value to, that your IP can start hitting.

00:11:17:06 – 00:11:48:25

Ben Noble: And really that’s the big conversation here, is do you want to go into gaming? Do you want to go into something that’s a little bit more, you know, like film oriented or do you want to go just the route of digital collectibles is a question mark for a lot of projects. When they’re just starting out, they’re like, Let me put out a 10,000 FP collection that, you know, sells like hotcakes, and then I’ll figure it out. And the problem is when they’re doing that, they’re writing themselves into a corner a lot of times, or their community is running away with it.

00:11:49:28 – 00:11:50:14

Ben Noble: Yeah,

00:11:52:07 – 00:12:24:20

Ben Noble: but I mean, there is something that you said earlier that I wanted to piggyback off of, and I think that’s ticketing systems. I think there’s very real use cases that I think in the next few years we’re going to see manifest in a way that abstracts the technology component. So Starbucks working on what they’re working on with giving it like what we call that a loyalty program that’s based on the blockchain having an active blockchain, a ledger that’s keeping track of who’s doing what within your storefronts and then sporting arenas.

00:12:24:22 – 00:12:59:19

Ben Noble: Sporting arenas have been very early to the game. There’s a lot of investment coming from everything from the NBA to the NFL, and we see the owners come to us and say, Hey, we really want to build something for the long term. You’re going to buy tickets, you’re not going to know they’re an NFT, but that ledger system is going to give them the ability to provide lots more value than just here’s a ticket. Like maybe you’re getting an NBA top shot drop of like Steph Curry shooting an amazing three at the end of the game that he just like he just did that thing.

00:12:59:21 – 00:13:04:19

Ben Noble: And then you’re getting that card essentially a digital collectible card commemorating.

00:13:04:27 – 00:13:35:11

Steven Miller: Yeah. It’s interesting that you bring up that example because to me, I find myself really fascinated by the fact that we’re starting to see changes in the terminology. And I think that may in fact be one of the things that gives Nfts longevity at the end of day, because the key to mass adoption right now is moving away from these complicated terms to the point where it just starts to blend in and people start just being users. So my curiosity is because we just started to see Reddit adopt, you know, digital collectibles as opposed to Nfts.

00:13:35:23 – 00:13:42:04

Steven Miller: What are your guys thoughts on the fact that we’re going to see the lexicon change over time? And what types of things would you like to see changed?

00:13:42:06 – 00:13:48:26

Ben Noble: Well, I don’t call the Internet the information highway anymore. I don’t know if anybody else does, but terms change.

00:13:49:09 – 00:14:15:25

Grant Powell: Yeah, but it is still the Internet, right? I think I think what’s going to change is that what people are buying isn’t the NFT. The NFT is the technology that powers it. Right? So you’re not buying an NFT, you’re buying a digital collectible. Oh, well, how is this created and how is this secured and proven? What’s proven through an NFT? And so, yeah, I think the terminology, the terminology will change in terms of what what product or service are you rendering, but it won’t change in terms of describing the underlying technology.

00:14:16:11 – 00:14:24:03

Ben Noble: Yeah, my mom doesn’t know how the internet works, but she’s able to use it to her advantage. That’s really where we got to get with technology and that’s removing friction points.

00:14:25:00 – 00:14:37:29

Steven Miller: Yeah, I think the friction looseness is absolutely key at this stage of the game and I think we’re probably still I mean, what do you think, maybe a year, two years out from that, or do you think the technology is here right now? We just need to be getting more exposure to it.

00:14:38:16 – 00:15:10:18

Grant Powell: I think the technology’s here. I mean, I’m a little biased because we primarily build for, you know, easy experiences, easy on ramps, Web two bridges to Web three. You know, we were chastised like a year and a half ago when we were accepting credit cards for Nfts. But now everybody does it. So I think I think the technology does already exist. But, you know, there’s the underlying technology and then there’s the user experience, which itself is a technology. Building those designing and programming those interfaces, they become technologies of their own. They’re just not a back end technology, their front end technology.

00:15:10:27 – 00:15:20:18

Grant Powell: I think those front end user experience technologies are still evolving, but the underlying technology that powers the ease of use and the on ramps are already there.

00:15:21:22 – 00:15:58:19

Steven Miller: So to all of you who are UX designers in our 100 person crowd, please start because we need you like a year ago. Very bullish. Now, granted, I think you were starting to speak about this a little bit earlier, so I want to direct this one to you. One of the things that you are clearly passionate about is the idea of decentralization at scale, and especially interoperability, which we just got down here in about a minute ago. But what would you what do you think is the importance of both of these concepts? And can you share a little bit with us about the importance and how the NFT community can achieve each of these from your perspective?

00:15:59:24 – 00:16:30:25

Grant Powell: Well, first, I’d kind of like to talk about decentralization as it relates to our previous topic and, you know, adaptability. You know, building something that’s decentralized, that is unusable will not scale, and therefore it doesn’t have any value, right, just because it’s decentralized. I think in order for decentralized technologies and decentralization to be valuable and viable, they have to be usable so that the adoption will scale and then that will drive further scaling of the technologies. So when you mention decentralization and scaling, that’s the first thing that comes to mind for me.

00:16:31:21 – 00:17:07:20

Grant Powell: But the second part of the question, which is just in terms of like how how can we build these decentralized technologies to scale? I mean, it kind of does come back to the same answer, right? We have to build them to be usable in order to build them to scale. I think some of the topics on the last panel were also relevant about hardware limitations. So if you’re building a technology that you know, runs a decentralized communication protocol, it needs to be able to do that efficiently so that the hardware required to run a massive network of protocols isn’t, you know, isn’t hardware prohibitive or cost prohibitive.

00:17:08:00 – 00:17:17:00

Grant Powell: So I do think that there needs to be a lot of innovation in terms of how those protocols work to require less processing and less data storage and stuff like that.

00:17:17:25 – 00:17:24:22

Steven Miller: Would you say that those concepts, though, they have to lean on one another? Or is it that you see one, I guess, proceeding the other?

00:17:26:10 – 00:17:30:09

Grant Powell: You mean like the adoption versus the underlying technology?

00:17:30:24 – 00:17:47:05

Steven Miller: I was more so saying with like the adoption side versus add scale versus interoperability in general. Like can we see adoption at scale? But in a way that is still, I guess, on one chain? Or is it strictly Multichain future?

00:17:47:08 – 00:18:28:24

Grant Powell: Probably not. Right, Because when and if you started scaling massively on Ethereum, we had the gas wars and stuff like that. So I don’t think that the if there was, you know, another round of mass adoption, I don’t know that blockchains are ready to to handle that. So they both need to happen, right? We need to have the technology to support mass adoption and we need to design it in such a way that will drive mass adoption. And I think I think a lot of, you know, layer two or layer zero or layer infinity, I’ve sometimes heard them called these technologies that sit on top and maybe are not quite centralized, but are limited in how decentralized they are.

00:18:29:05 – 00:19:01:29

Grant Powell: And they they act as a as a, you know, to put it really simply like a queue system, right? People can come into this this layer, this additional layer of technology, make their request, which will queue it up to happen on the blockchain as soon as it can. You know, for example, lazy minting of nfts, right? It is a way in which we can drive mass adoption working within the limitations of the underlying blockchain. So we build a queue system on top of the queues, all the requests them into an NFT, and then we send them through at a cadence that doesn’t create a gas war.

00:19:02:06 – 00:19:05:01

Grant Powell: Something like that is a middleware that could solve the problem.

00:19:06:09 – 00:19:35:13

Steven Miller: See, all all of this is really key to the future and the success of all this technology being adopted. And one of the things that we spoke about, you know, a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about this session, Ben, was the idea of Nfts becoming objects of convenience. So this topic is directly correlated to everything we’ve been into so far. And I really would appreciate if you would unpack that term because it’s something you personally really passionate about and kind of explaining how this is a key narrative to the future of Nfts.

00:19:35:26 – 00:20:10:17

Ben Noble: Yeah, I think I think that’s been a bit of the uphill battle. Even when we were seeing peak adoption was the amount of friction points people had to go through to even obtain an NFT, let alone understand the full utility of some of those Nfts, especially when we’re talking about NFT, is that offer things like options into gated websites, or maybe it’s giving you voting control. Trucks within a dhow or whatever. These are hard concepts for the layman to wrap their head around and they already don’t get it.

00:20:10:26 – 00:20:51:20

Steven Miller: So when we’re when we were experiencing this last phase of just mania, people coming in, a lot of it was done at the speculative level and it was done by people that were already here already interested in cryptocurrencies. And we brought in a couple new people here and there. We’ve come so far over the past ten years on everything from how we transact on exchanges. We’re not trading Bitcoin on USB devices anymore. We’re not having to wire money into a really sketchy exchange that has really no visual guided guide for somebody who’s never done that before.

00:20:52:15 – 00:21:25:21

Ben Noble: I think Nfts have gotten way cooler, but we’re still experiencing a lot of that. Hey, how do I set up a metamask? And really until it’s point and point and shoot and people are able to do things like walk into a football arena with an app on their phone and scan it and, and get the value of, like I said, like a digital collectible card or whatever and, and intuitively go and be able to maybe trade it not on some separate exchange or maybe they’re doing it on social media, maybe they’re doing it through Twitter integration or whatever.

00:21:27:00 – 00:22:00:01

Ben Noble: I think this is going to be hard to get more and more people. And over time, because we will address these problems, we will we’re doing it right now. I think it’s if we are able to hit adoption in two years time where this becomes more of a natural occurring thing, I’d say in five years, maybe NFT, as the technology set is starting to live behind things and we are starting to experience this more as a day to day occurrence where I buy a pair of Nike shoes and I get my digital collectible.

00:22:00:03 – 00:22:03:16

Ben Noble: I go to a sporting event and I get my digital collectible.

00:22:05:00 – 00:22:32:06

Steven Miller: So all together, I mean, there’s there’s so many fantastic take aways on this entire conversation. And unfortunately, as we’re coming to time here, I need to find one quick way to get us back to the entire conversation of the day. And I would love it if you would address this question from the perspectives of both of your businesses and what you guys are bringing to the Austin community. So from what you are doing within the NFT space right now individually, how are you helping Austin make it?

00:22:34:00 – 00:22:47:26

Grant Powell: That’s a tough question, an important one. I mean, I don’t know how many people here as everybody here from Austin is Anybody Not from Austin. Cool. So it’s actually like a good amount of people now from us. And I mean, just thank you for.

00:22:47:28 – 00:22:52:26

Steven Miller: Joining us for another episode. Don’t worry and be great. It seems like.

00:22:52:28 – 00:22:55:06

Steven Miller: A lot of times I usually get on the stage with the recent news.

00:22:55:08 – 00:23:05:19

Steven Miller: For general covering the space for business leaders getting. It’s nice to meet you. All opinions expressed by Richard, I think, different team and their guests. I don’t know if I leave our questions.

00:23:39:21 – 00:23:44:18

Grant Powell: And so I don’t know if that answers your question directly, but that’s one way in which we’re trying to help Austin make it.

00:23:45:10 – 00:23:46:09

Steven Miller: I love that, Ben.

00:23:47:26 – 00:24:19:07

Ben Noble: Geographically, Austin’s in a beautiful spot when we’re talking about trying to onboard new artists, musicians, whatever. We’ve spent a lot of time in Los Angeles. We’ve spent a lot of time in New York City. We spent a lot of time in Miami. But having this central hub right here in the middle of America that we can quickly jet over to these different locations and tap into that talent is incredibly important. Our business was originally set up in San Francisco and we moved the entity over about a year ago.

00:24:20:03 – 00:24:41:29

Ben Noble: When we came out here, we immediately noticed how much the community was growing in Austin and how some of the most influential voices were. We’re moving to this area. I’ve had the pleasure of of meeting with the amazing people like yourself, other crypto enthusiasts, owners of exchanges. And really

00:24:43:18 – 00:25:17:09

Ben Noble: the big thing is that Austin has so much potential right now to become a mecca for people looking to get into the NFT space to tap in. There’s so many amazing art galleries. There’s generative artists like Tyler Hobbs, one of my favorites. He’s been out here, created the fit Denver. I think they procured one for like the MoMA or something. Maybe that’s just rumor. Don’t quote me on it. But but when you see that, I think that what we’re bringing to the table here is

00:25:19:15 – 00:25:37:15

Ben Noble: marketing that is going to be decentralized and all over the place means that you need to have a core group of of like minded individuals that you can bounce ideas off of. And I’m finding it just here in this room. I mean, if you turn and look, this is an amazing showing for the first event. So I got to congratulate you on that.

00:25:38:07 – 00:25:55:27

Steven Miller: Thank you. And again, it may be a bear market, everybody, but the real builders are in this room. So a big thank you to every single one of you guys for being here. Ben Grant, thank you for joining me. We’re going to move on to our next panel in a bit, but thank you guys very much. And we will see you guys out on the floor.