Gregory Keogh on launching your own NFT marketplace, instantly with Curios (Episode 315)
Gregory Keogh joins us to discuss on launching your own NFT marketplace, instantly with Curios.
Gregory Keogh a Co-founder at Curios and heads up strategy and customer success. Gregory is a NFT collector, a crypto enthusiast and has been an engineer for the past 11 years. He is a firm believer that the blockchain will be used to track all ownership in our very near future and believes that all consumers should be able to own the items they purchase.
Links:
twitter @CuriosDotCom and twitter @curiosgreg
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The following transcript was created using artificial intelligence. There will be some grammatical errors below.
00:00:17:11 – 00:00:35:20
Richard Carthon: Elle Everyone, welcome to another episode of Crypto Current, Your host here, Richard Karp, on Today. I have a very special guest who’s joining us actually at the Acme Conference that we have coming on later on in October of 2022. We have Greg, one of the co-founders at Cheerios. How are you doing today?
00:00:36:08 – 00:00:46:05
Gregory Keogh: I’m doing wonderful. It’s great to be here. And I can say confidently that Austin is going to make it. We’re in Austin based company, so we’re happy to be part of this, this organization, too.
00:00:46:26 – 00:00:55:14
Richard Carthon: Absolutely. Well, excited to learn more about everything that’s going on over at Curious. But first, let’s learn a little bit more about you. Can you give us a little bit of background on yourself?
00:00:56:05 – 00:01:34:18
Gregory Keogh: Absolutely. Yep. So I’ve been an engineer for about the last ten years and I started out focusing mainly in robotics for large machinery and oil fields, quickly transitioned that into the more and more of a digital space. And ultimately you will always find yourself being sucked into the vortex of Web three because it’s such an amazing space to be in. There’s so much innovation happening and there’s so much hype potential for revolutionizing the way that we do everything as everything goes more digital. So eventually transitioned all the way through to Web three, founded Curios with my partner Grant, or January of 2021.
00:01:35:19 – 00:01:44:00
Gregory Keogh: And it’s been a fantastic roller coaster ever since. We’ve got a lot of accomplishments under our belt and we’re really proud of the platform that we stand up today.
00:01:45:06 – 00:01:58:10
Richard Carthon: Excellent. Well, going into the software development world and finding your way in the Web three, it sounds like a pretty similar path to some of the other people who we’ve had on the show. But what was that really? First introduction to crypto in the blockchain space?
00:01:59:05 – 00:02:33:01
Gregory Keogh: For me it was as an investor in Bitcoin I had I actually even was I consider myself being late to NFT sadly because of the maximalist mindset that can come with Bitcoin. You see the purity of Bitcoin, the purity of the blockchain, how it’s well run, and then it can keep you away from other great and fantastic projects for a bit. Happily, it didn’t take too long, so I was still able to enter the space. I think it ends up being inevitable for people to come into nfts in some sense because of just their potential and the digital world that we lead today.
00:02:33:03 – 00:02:59:02
Gregory Keogh: Almost everything we do is digital, whether we like it or not, right? Our banks are digital, our titles are digital, our accounts with different organizations, they’re all digital things that nfts are really well-poised to to effect in a positive way. So I think that inevitably everybody comes in but mine start out as being a Bitcoin maximalist, investing in Bitcoin very heavily, and that kind of opened up a lot of doors to them. Seemed to
00:03:00:23 – 00:03:01:08
Gregory Keogh: be.
00:03:02:05 – 00:03:33:13
Richard Carthon: Yeah, that’s cool, man. Like, I’ve it’s interesting. A lot of early developers who I met in this space kind of started out that way and either stick to their guns or eventually start to expand out. But when they expand out, they’re the ones that typically go super all in on what it means to expand and and see the old world. So I am curious, man. So like you. You’re now familiar with the space. You’re like, All right, I want to I want to build something in this space. I’ll come up with curios.
00:03:33:15 – 00:03:42:29
Richard Carthon: The Web three Tools for every creator in business. Tell us a little bit about that journey and what is curious and why did you decide to tackle this particular challenge?
00:03:44:03 – 00:04:06:20
Gregory Keogh: Yeah, that’s a great question and thank you for asking that. So essentially, you know, coming from the Bitcoin world, I knew how to hold Bitcoin on a hardware wallet. I knew how to have my own wallets. I know how to use exchanges and traded U.S. dollars and the cryptocurrency and things like that and vice versa. Right? So I felt that I was a pretty well educated individual in crypto and how to use crypto and how to interact peer to peer and things like that.
00:04:08:18 – 00:04:41:00
Gregory Keogh: I hear all the hype about this. It happens, It happens. I miss punks. I missed some early investments that I really wish I could get on that my friends got in on the recommended I go into, and then I finally decide to start entering the space. And the difficulty of interaction was so high, right? I’m like, if you’re trying to interact on Polygon, basically taking Ethereum based Polygon from an exchange like Kraken and then bring it over to Polygon based Polygon and then interacting with a smart contract to get him in to see that journey and end was so complicated.
00:04:41:02 – 00:05:16:27
Gregory Keogh: Even for somebody like me who will consider themselves adept at the space, I entered it very confidently, knowing what I was going to do and still came out of it, floored with how difficult it was. I saw the potential for fees, but the interaction levels had so much barriers, right? And Ethereum was a little less barrier filled with products like Opensea and Metamask. It became a little bit easier. But any time you have to walk a new user through, you still realize just how difficult it is and just how scary it can be for a user to transfer something like $10,000 worth of Ethereum from an exchange that they’re comfortable using to a Metamask wall.
00:05:16:29 – 00:05:47:17
Gregory Keogh: But now they’re holding the keys for and then connecting it to a website that they’re not familiar with to then purchase the token that they can’t necessarily see in their Metamask like those pieces all are pretty complicated. So that’s a very roundabout way of saying that what Kyrgios set out to do initially was just break down those barriers, make it really easy for people to interact both on the smart contract level for creating smart contracts and both on the consumer level for interacting with those smart contracts and holding and seeing your apps and touching them, interacting with them and exploring the utility of that.
00:05:48:01 – 00:06:26:26
Gregory Keogh: So those were the two main missions that we focused on right away. We accomplished those pretty quickly out of the gate and we saw some pretty fun successes from that. One of the successes we saw was we powered the Tori Lanes album, Drop. You drop an album called When It’s Dark. It sold a million copies in six days to sold them for $1. And at that time, that was like when a Syrian was going on a gas rampage. Right? It was August the 2021. So. If he was to sell it for $1 on a Etherium and a user had to pay $30 in gas to buy that album, it’d be a bit of a non-starter.
00:06:26:28 – 00:07:15:18
Gregory Keogh: And the reality was at that time, the gas was about $100, $10 plus. Right. So just because it’s $1 doesn’t mean your total transaction is a dollar. And for an album to be crazy, paying $40 for an album, be crazy or, you know, so anything like that. So basically we were like, okay, it’s got to be run on Polygon or a layer two like that. We ended up choosing Polygon. And then we had to break down those barriers I was discussing. So essentially what we did is we partnered up with circles so we could take credit card payments so the users were able to connect their credit card purchases with their credit card if they weren’t NFC savvy, had a of they’re able to we spun up a wallet for email address registered on the site so they could just come in, interact like they would for any e-commerce transaction, still own the tokens, still be able to stream the music because they own the token to resell it.
00:07:15:20 – 00:07:47:20
Gregory Keogh: All those pieces with being complete web3 novices. Right? So his fan base was not a fan base that necessarily was web3 savvy, especially at that time. So we were able to onboard all of his fan base and he sold out incredibly fast. I mean, I think he sold like. In the first day, he probably sold 500,000 copies of his album and by the end of the six day hit, the million mark technically went platinum. Right. And he is one of since 2014.
00:07:48:03 – 00:08:08:10
Gregory Keogh: He is the only platinum artist to go out and be a sale. So in 2015, the RIAA had to change their rules to incorporate streams because nobody was buying albums anymore. So out of nowhere, Trillanes was able to bring back the actual sale of music, which we haven’t seen since 2014, which is kind of crazy.
00:08:08:22 – 00:08:09:12
Richard Carthon: Yeah, it’s a.
00:08:09:14 – 00:08:10:10
Richard Carthon: Really exciting time.
00:08:10:12 – 00:08:47:28
Richard Carthon: Is extremely exciting. And what’s really more exciting is that I covered news around that and had no idea they were the underlying company that helped put that together. So that’s really amazing and comes back full circle and all the points that you just brought up, how you were able to take something that essentially almost was killed back to the forefront, like album sales and being able to make something platinum, be able to do that in six days and literally be able to show where all the sales came from. Because even back when people were trying to prove things went platinum or double platinum or whatever, they could do it to a certain point, but they couldn’t really show each of those transactions.
00:08:48:24 – 00:09:29:20
Gregory Keogh: Yes, exactly. Like we knew where exactly every dollar came from, from which user and things like that, which is pretty pretty crazy to do, too. And it’s also nice for the consumers to know where the money went, but the money went to the creator, you know? So, you know, this day and age, if I buy an album somewhere else, I can pretty much assume that the creator gets zero of those dollars. You know, if I buy it on Apple Music or wherever people purchase albums we like, we all know that they don’t get any money. So it’s kind of nice to know that the artists are getting paid again. And that’s really one of our missions, is to make sure creators can can get rewarded for creating their content, right? If they have something that people want and they’re willing to pay for it, they should be the ones that receive the funds, you know, so.
00:09:29:23 – 00:09:59:28
Richard Carthon: Oh, absolutely. And again, that is a really awesome use case just straight out the gate that I think a lot of people who are in the Web three space can immediately think, think about and and can definitely understand what y’all are doing. But you also are collaborating with a lot of other companies. Like you said, you’re kind of the white label in the background, kind of making everything happen. What are some of the other types of companies and businesses that you’ve been working with to help bring the Web3 space into a more easily digestible forefront?
00:10:01:04 – 00:10:21:09
Gregory Keogh: Yeah, that’s. Thanks for asking that too. Because like we, we do like to be the background company, so we want to power, you know, all of the interactions. We make the smart contracts easy. We make tracking sales easy so that you don’t have to be a developer or somebody deeply ingrained Web three and know how to use these blockchain explorers to like a high level.
00:10:23:04 – 00:10:49:03
Gregory Keogh: To that point, though, by being the background person, oftentimes a lot of companies don’t necessarily want us to disclose that we have relationship with them. We have some companies that we can so coin zoom, they’re a decentralized exchange that that we run a lot of their web3 solutions through Triller, which is one of the social media kind of TikTok competitors. They do a lot of amazing stuff. We’ve we’ve powered all of their NFT transactions,
00:10:51:12 – 00:11:24:07
Gregory Keogh: trying to think of other ones that want us to that are comfortable with us broadcasting that we have relationship. We have a cool opportunity in real estate that’s coming up out of Houston, where it’s going to be a bar that the if they’re going to sell membership tokens, where a membership token gets you annual profit distributions from the bar, which is going to be really exciting. So if the bar is profitable, they split that money out through a DAO that then goes to individual users. And essentially the Dow is just a decentralized LLC.
00:11:24:18 – 00:11:58:28
Gregory Keogh: So by owning an NFT, which you can purchase with a credit card via your email address, you don’t to like web3 savvy, you basically can get a percentage ownership of a bar and get the distributions that follow, which we think is pretty fun. That’s going to we want that to open the doors for like real life community engagement where you can like take part in the businesses that you want to spend money at, right? So that’s a great organization that it’s called the Powder Keg. That’s one that we can discuss. And then there are several others. But again, not sure if they really want to know that there were three solutions backed by astronaut.
00:11:59:12 – 00:11:59:27
Gregory Keogh: Yeah.
00:12:00:00 – 00:12:31:18
Richard Carthon: No worries. And shout out to the powder keg. George is actually going to be at Acme. He’s going to be speaking to one of the panels as well. So forever, whoever is joining us over there, get ready for a really cool conversation there. But you know what’s really interesting and I keep pulling back, the more I look into Kyrgios, it’s just how easy you’re making a lot of these. Different types of transactions just usable. So on there, you know, you talk about being able to mint fiat custodial wallets, being able to do ticketing.
00:12:32:26 – 00:12:51:18
Richard Carthon: Talk us through like if someone’s listening to this right now, they’re like, Oh my gosh, I’d been looking for someone to kind of help me. I have this vision of something I want to bring into the Web3 space, but don’t really have the technical background and expertise to do that. Curios potentially could be a good partnership. Walk us through like who are the types of companies that can come and work with you all?
00:12:52:21 – 00:13:22:23
Gregory Keogh: Yes. Yeah. And this is a this is going to be a bit more loaded question than you might have thought from the start, because we have the companies that we’ve worked with to date, and then we have kind of the roadmap of where we want to be. Right. So to date, we power basically any organization that wants to incorporate some level of web3 and blockchain, right? So say that you represent creators or you’re a creator yourself and you want to bring your collection to Web three and have people be able to own it as an NFT or something like that, or gaming company.
00:13:23:02 – 00:14:03:08
Gregory Keogh: If you want seamless transactions within game, right, if I trade with you in-game. So that actually be happening on chain in the background as well, right? So those are those are great organizations where anybody looking to go to the space that doesn’t want to have to take on the technical burden. We take that technical burden on how it would really how it basically looks is when you go to our website, you can launch our back in tools for free. And then from there you can deploy smart contracts just by filling out form fields, clicking through buttons you can pay in fiat, right? So if you want to deploy a avalanche smart contract, which is kind of a harder blockchain to get into initially, you can do it with your credit card.
00:14:03:15 – 00:14:39:25
Gregory Keogh: We then take those funds, we convert it to a back squad and power that smart contract through the blockchain all in the background so that you can kind of confidently move forward with your smart contract solutions without having to be an expert. That’s largely the kind of companies and kind of portfolios we’ve run out of the past and the kind of things we’ve been looking to empower. We are moving towards individuals, empowering individual creators. So we raised money, I believe it was I think we completed our raise a couple of months ago, and we’re going to use those funds to bring our tools to everybody, like open access to these tools.
00:14:40:05 – 00:15:17:08
Gregory Keogh: So where we’re trying to go is anybody who has any idea of what they want to do, like say that you’re an individual musician or you’re an author and you have an e-book and you want to publish that e-book as an NFT so that people who purchased a T can read the book. Once they read the book, they can give it to their brother or sister or sell it on a secondary marketplace, that sort of thing. We want to bring those tools to individual creators so they can be empowered to sell direct to their audience. Right with the powerful tools that are so very shortly. Our website is we’re undergoing a complete overhaul right now to where those tools that are typically on a backend platform will then be available on a frontline platform.
00:15:17:12 – 00:15:57:17
Gregory Keogh: So they can then just kind of walk through the tools like what they want to do. So if they’re smart contracts and then they’re able to also like look, feel and touch those smart contracts, right? They can airdrop tokens, they can mint tokens, they can see who’s minted. Basically providing them an insight into what what they’ve done. Because right now when you deploy smart contract, you deploy it on the blockchain and then it’s like it exists on your address on the blockchain, but you can’t necessarily see the contract, you can’t see what it does. It’s been programmatically deployed things. This opens those gates to where non-technical users, especially creators, can focus on doing what they do best, right? Whether you’re an author, musician, artists, you can focus on your art.
00:15:57:28 – 00:16:32:16
Gregory Keogh: Knowing the technical components are able to be handled by you using cross-platform. So that’s what we’re most excited about. We’re really excited to kind of bring those tools to the forefront and let the mission would be to let creators be empowered to keep creating. We think it’ll be a better world where artists are able to produce the art that they want to make. They don’t have to necessarily produce the art that these giant studios want them to. I mean, we see it with movies where movies are all the same. They’re remakes or they’re sequels, you know, and it’s just like kind of the same rubric because they don’t want to take risk.
00:16:32:27 – 00:16:48:15
Gregory Keogh: This would allow people to be, you know, either pre-funded or be able to sell, direct and pay for future future projects and things. We think it’ll be a more creative world, a more fun world to be a consumer in if creators start getting paid again. Sort of our main missions. Yeah.
00:16:48:29 – 00:17:20:21
Richard Carthon: That’s awesome. I think that’s a really cool directive direction to be going and I know that. I’m curious, do you ever go on and check out how to be able to set up some of those things? Because I could see a ton of use cases just with some of the different areas that I would want to are ideas that I’ve had around NFT creation and being able to potentially go a place where I can drag and drop and have everything there. Because one of the biggest hindrances in getting into the NFT space is the amount of.
00:17:21:12 – 00:17:54:01
Richard Carthon: Technical debt that kind of goes around. They don’t need someone who has that kind of expertise. And usually when you go to a third party and hire out their team, it can be pretty costly. But then after the initial launch of it, you then need to keep them around so that they can continue to work and do all the things you want. Whereas if you just had the tools in place that you could go and do the kind of the way I look at it is for some people who build websites that you can go and hardcoded, or you have things like WordPress and Wix and whatever, we can go in and do certain actions and now you can manipulate and go update and do whatever you need to.
00:17:54:18 – 00:18:00:13
Richard Carthon: But just having a little bit of technical experience and knowing how to use those tools.
00:18:01:15 – 00:18:34:26
Gregory Keogh: But that’s exactly it. And it’s exactly that. Because also, like, if you’re if your first project isn’t a smashing success, you won’t be able to afford to continue to employ those smart contract developers or the team or the organization you ended up working with. So you become stuck where you have to keep servicing your initial community, but you kind of can’t. It becomes kind of a dilemma and it becomes a difficult thing and we just want to empower people in Web three. It’s just like go to town and build basically. And the way we raised funds helps enable that too.
00:18:34:28 – 00:19:14:21
Gregory Keogh: So we raised funds as a road seer. So we were all we were able to crowdfund our our seed round, which opens our doors even further. Right. So the community provided the funds for us to make these tools possible. So we are indebted to the community, to deliver to the community, which is nice, as opposed to, say, VC funds coming in where they have different objectives than community creators do. Right? So we’re able to operate in a much freer sense and in a much stronger way for creators, we think, than if we were taking the money for the seed round.
00:19:15:02 – 00:19:21:12
Gregory Keogh: So we’re really excited with what we have and what we’re going to bring out to the forefront for everybody to use. And it’s going to be pretty fun.
00:19:22:01 – 00:19:37:29
Richard Carthon: Well, that’s excellent. And I know you’ll have a really cool roadmap for those who are listening. You want to go to CNNheroes.com. See you or I Overstock.com for more info. But what are other ways that people can learn more about what you’ll have going on and be able to connect with you?
00:19:39:03 – 00:20:21:21
Gregory Keogh: Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, just reach out reach out directly so Greg at Kyrgios dot com feel free to send an email. I have gotten a lot better at answering emails during our first build phases. We were really heads down and I dropped the ball a lot on email but gotten a lot better at that. So that’s an easy way. I’m actually just started a Twitter account for credit. Kyrgios So we’re going to start posting more information there. Kyrgios has a Twitter account, will repost a lot of corporate information, so updates from Kyrgios will largely come from our Kyrgios Twitter account, which is just Kyrgios dot com dot com and then Gregor Kyrgios as our Greg Kyrgios Greg sorry is the other Twitter account where I’ll be posting a lot more.
00:20:22:10 – 00:20:30:19
Gregory Keogh: We can call it opinionated content on where I think we should be going and who’s doing it well and tools that we’re incorporating and employing with serious things like that.
00:20:30:21 – 00:20:51:04
Richard Carthon: So excellent. And on that, I actually want to go in that direction. There’s two places kind of before we we got on the show that I know that you’re really passionate about. I want to spend some time there just for a second, and that’s gaming in fractionalized basically securities. So I’ll let you decide which one you want to start with. But let’s let’s dive into both of those.
00:20:52:03 – 00:21:23:27
Gregory Keogh: Let’s start with the securities, because it’s a complicated issue and it’s it’s one that’s plagued the space. So currently there’s been all kinds of web3 projects that have launched, and we can kind of call them like I call them roadmaps and tease, where you buy into a community, you’ll buy into a discord and there’ll be a lot of promises. It’ll be like, big things are coming. You’re part of the team, you’re part of the organization, things like that, like you’re a member. But then when push comes to shove, those community members don’t actually own the company.
00:21:23:29 – 00:21:54:27
Gregory Keogh: The underlying holding company that the funds went to that’s responsible for executing, executing a roadmap. Right. So then it becomes very similar to a Web two sort of structure where you have an overarching company. They’re trying to deliver value to their users, but their users might not think that what they’re doing is valuable or whatever else. There’s a little bit of a disconnect. And one of the main reasons that there is that disconnect is you can’t actually offer equity as an entity to date unless you have certain vehicles that are SCC approved to do so.
00:21:55:23 – 00:22:31:13
Gregory Keogh: So there are FCC vehicles that are sanctioned to allow for alternative securities or for crowdfunding, which is that exact same way that we raised funds for Cheerios, where you get FCC blessing to deliver equity as a token. Right. So we’re going to try and bring that into the space in a better way. The powder keg is a good example of how we’re going to do that. So essentially, any business can offer equity or dividend or something of value as a security to NFT holders, which will then kind of solve that disconnect.
00:22:31:15 – 00:23:04:01
Gregory Keogh: Right? You provide money to an organization for that organization to create a roadmap. That organization then is literally building for your equity, which we think is going to be a strong thing for businesses moving forward. Right from either a fundraising perspective, if you’re doing it kind of for fundraising, a future roadmap, or for community based things like the powder keg bar where the place that you go and eat and drink at, you are actively sharing an ownership role without having to be, you know, some real estate mogul that’s part of a giant LLC.
00:23:04:07 – 00:23:34:16
Gregory Keogh: You know, the doors can open up more towards regular individuals to invest in the things that they do and that they love. So that’s what we’re most excited about from our roadmap. We want to break down that major hurdle for businesses to enter. Web3 and the gaming side is equally exciting. A lot of times games are, you know, one directional. You pay money to a game, the game delivers you a fun experience, but that’s the end of it, right? You could get a bunch of achievements.
00:23:34:18 – 00:23:46:22
Gregory Keogh: You could unlock certain areas of the game, You could have really cool inventory items that you win playing the game, but they just kind of stop there. Like it makes the game more fun, but there’s not necessarily value to playing.
00:23:48:07 – 00:24:21:24
Gregory Keogh: Previously there were several games that did have a value, right? Like Magic, The Gathering and Pokemon cards were rare cards that you would purchase physical cards of that were worth one that you could then resell on eBay and places like that, or sell or trade direct with individuals. And then that kind of went away as things got more and more digitized. So Web3 is allowing that to come back where the actual in-game asset can be an NFT, the users can interact with each other with things of value. They could resell them on secondary marketplaces off site, they could sell them on game or in-game, they can trade them.
00:24:22:24 – 00:24:55:17
Gregory Keogh: Those kind of spaces we think, are going to make gaming a lot more fun too, right? Where the individuals playing the game can reap rewards from playing as opposed to just the corporations that are running those games. Right. So we’re really excited about those. Those two major verticals, we think that. We’re pretty confident that NAFTA will play a role in everybody’s life in the near future for ownership. As things are digital and go increasingly digital. It’s just it’s it’s where it’s all going to go. Like, inevitably it will all go on the blockchain as entities or tokens of some format.
00:24:56:09 – 00:25:13:00
Gregory Keogh: So we are just trying to escalate that by breaking down barriers and bringing people on and giving the advantages to the people that matter to consumers and the creators. Those are the individuals that matter in these relationships. We want to make sure that those are the people that are empowered and that are rewarded for doing so.
00:25:13:18 – 00:25:47:15
Richard Carthon: Right. So, I mean, I think those are two really cool areas. Just to kind of recap on those, first, on the real estate piece, something that you brought up that I thought was really interesting and I think it’s still a big role of this is, you know, the FCC and regulation doesn’t mean that it’s inherently bad by having clear guidelines and by saying like, oh, you can legally do this thing that actually opens the floodgates for more people to jump all into it, because a lot of a lot of people are hesitant just because they don’t really know how all this is going to shake out. But as soon as the rules are clear, it’s now providing access for a lot more people.
00:25:47:17 – 00:26:21:14
Richard Carthon: Now is the next thing I’m going to bring up, which is access. Your everyday person can’t necessarily go and invest in some of these big real estate projects. But now if you have a friend or whomever and they’re like, Hey, you can get into this project through an NFT art throw down, it’s going to be X amount. You’re like, Wow, how much was this? Cause if I tried to do this, otherwise you’d be like, Oh, it’d be like two zeros behind it. It just it’s, it’s just really giving people opportunities that they regularly wouldn’t have, but then also have the utility of them going to like how many people have their bar around the corner that they go to every other weekend or want to be able to throw a event or whatever.
00:26:21:16 – 00:26:33:02
Richard Carthon: And they they’re a great patron, but they they don’t own any piece of it. Now, you can keep doing that and have ownership and potentially have residual income from it. Like that’s so powerful. That just didn’t exist before.
00:26:33:27 – 00:27:10:15
Gregory Keogh: Yes, exactly. And the way you recap that is perfect because, I mean, that’s exactly what we want to do, is we want to open the floodgates so people can own the way that our 1% currently does own right. I mean, basically it is restrictive for a reason because currently accredited investors get first access. So they want that first access, right. And then it makes it to the public sphere once it goes as an IPO. And by that point in time, the initial investors, they rebuild the rewards of it. Right. So you’re you’re really going to be kind of like scrambling for pennies at that point, whereas in the initial phase, that’s where that’s where there’s value.
00:27:10:23 – 00:27:32:26
Gregory Keogh: And especially at the community level, if you live in a neighborhood that doesn’t have a restaurant and a restaurant opens up, that then is community owned, I mean, the potential there is incredible. It’s going to be a community space that everyone goes to and enjoys and loves because they own it, right? I mean, it’s a different, different interaction, different game, which is really fun. So that’s the stuff that keeps us highly motivated
00:27:34:18 – 00:27:36:07
Gregory Keogh: and keeps us excited about what we’re doing.
00:27:36:21 – 00:28:12:13
Richard Carthon: Definitely. And then just even going back to to recap the gaming piece and the the statement you made that nfts are inevitable in the future. Absolutely. There’s there hasn’t been a place in recorded history where you can now get residual income on things that you have already doing, and it’s just on in the digital space and being able to both identify yourselves, to have like an online identity, but then to have ownership and be making money based on that as it is, you follow in two different ecosystem, different metaverse into the into the future.
00:28:12:15 – 00:28:45:24
Richard Carthon: There’s a reason why, you know, the fashion industry, like New York Fashion Week, had a ton of nfts in it. You have all of these big major brands starting to make collaborations with nfts artists that are getting into it, etc.. Like, like you just said, it’s inevitable. And even from a gaming standpoint, entities make perfect sense, like you said, with with people working really hard, like with a certain tool or whatever it is and like, let’s say they’re done with that game and they just want to be able to sell it. You couldn’t even do that before. Now you can, and now you’re open up a whole other economy of value that you’re creating for people who want to come in and have that type of experience.
00:28:45:26 – 00:28:57:14
Richard Carthon: And the gaming industry is one of the largest growing industries, period. So there’s a ton of synergies on on which all working with and I know you’re excited about it. I mean, I’m excited about I’m excited to see what comes of it.
00:28:58:22 – 00:29:30:26
Gregory Keogh: Yeah, that’s for sure. I mean. Yeah. And then the other thing is like, you know, curios, we, we, we were founded on making those barriers easy to easy entry. And as a result, its position is really well to grow into these other two verticals, right? I mean, in-game, you don’t want to be like busting out your hardware wallet and then connecting it and signing a transaction. Like every time you pick up an item, you know, So you want those things to be programmatic, you want them to be running in the background, you want them on chains that you have the value associated with it, but you don’t want to be interacting in that kind of sense.
00:29:31:08 – 00:30:03:15
Gregory Keogh: Same with the real estate. A lot of people that want to own the pizza place going in next door, they don’t necessarily want to have to figure out like what is the theory. And before they do that, you know, they just want to like, buy a piece of ownership and then just know that it’s trackable. They can research, they can dive in deeper from that point and everything comes out like in a much better sense, right? They can see on the blockchain what percent they own and who owns everything else, which is like it’s, it’s kind of it’s pretty new for ownership of assets, which we think is really fun too.
00:30:03:17 – 00:30:08:00
Gregory Keogh: So, I mean, the world’s ready and it’s just a matter of getting it to the world. So we think.
00:30:08:13 – 00:30:33:08
Richard Carthon: Definitely and I think NFT is are the gateway drug to mass adoption for all of web3 So you’re also working in that space too. So I think it’s really cool. I think you all are working on the right things. I think it’s awesome. Just want to wrap up with a couple of fun questions I always like to end with. One is, um, with all the information that you’ve been able to garner while being in this space over the last two years, if you could go in part one or two pieces of wisdom to yourself when you first started, what would you tell yourself?
00:30:35:02 – 00:30:38:09
Gregory Keogh: Oh, my gosh. When we first started, it was so crazy.
00:30:40:27 – 00:30:43:00
Gregory Keogh: I would say that.
00:30:45:05 – 00:31:05:08
Gregory Keogh: The first major hurdle we came through was email based wallets. And I would say. I mean, I guess we accomplished that hurdle. So it’s tough. I would say my biggest advice would be like, do that, because that was super important for the storylines drop, for making sure people could come on, come on directly.
00:31:06:29 – 00:31:48:25
Gregory Keogh: Um, I actually, I would say that we just need to focus on. There’s one tool we have which is unlockable content, which basically means. Only NFT holders can access certain pieces of content. I would say I would tell myself basically, like, that’s the line. Like always walk that line, because we had a lot of other customers come on in the beginning that ended up like not deploying and not really working out like as organizations, and they took a lot of time away from where we are now. And I think that if we were able to have the foresight to, like, just stay on our current path and as opposed to be like pulled in all those directions, initially we would have gotten to where we are faster and we’d be kind of closer to the vision, which would be nice.
00:31:48:27 – 00:31:52:20
Gregory Keogh: So it’s always hard to say. I try to live without regret. So no.
00:31:52:22 – 00:32:09:13
Richard Carthon: Those those are two good nuggets, though, and I think for a lot of the builders that are out there, they can definitely take that away and and think through for for what some of the things that they’re building. So definitely appreciate that. But as we wrap up here, man, what is a final thought that you want to leave with all the listeners and it can be about any.
00:32:11:07 – 00:32:54:29
Gregory Keogh: Oh, my gosh. The final thought is to dive into the space. There’s a lot of ways where you can interact for extremely low amounts of crypto, right? I mean, there are there are downs and organizations that are pretty cheap. And the more that you the more that you get into the decentralized world, the more that world gives back to you. Right. We’re going from Bitcoin maximalism to NFT to being members of Daos and things like that and seeing this world and then now going back to like regular banking and trying to do a bank wire or like realizing that my money and my bank, like it’s like it’s pretty much nonexistent zero fractional reserve it then now becomes crazy.
00:32:55:01 – 00:33:27:09
Gregory Keogh: Like the reality that we live in is crazy as opposed to like what can be. So my advice for everybody is to dive in in some way. If you’re completely new, basically go to an exchange, buy a little bit of a cryptocurrency, just like go through that transaction and that interaction, and then at that point you’ll have a little bit of a vested interest and that will then kind of grow into how you enter the space. And I think everybody will be rewarded from owning their own assets, right? Having direct ownership and bear ownership of their assets. And I think that the world will be a better place if people start doing so.
00:33:27:22 – 00:33:29:24
Richard Carthon: So I think that’s my advice to everybody.
00:33:30:09 – 00:34:00:21
Richard Carthon: I think that’s a great final thought. When you get involved, find a way, get some vested interest and learn from there, because this is an industry still young, is still nascent, is still growing. And now’s the time to be learning, especially during these bear markets. Now’s the time to really double down on your learning. So once we get on the other side of it, you can be ready to to to be a part of of that next gaining opportunity. But Greg, thank you so much for spending time with us again. Yeah, man, I’ve had a lot of fun. Got a lot of great information.
00:34:01:07 – 00:34:14:09
Richard Carthon: Reminder for everyone listening to make sure you go check out Cheerios that cheerios to see you r. I. OS. Dot com. Follow the twitters. Get involved with community. And as always for everyone listening stay cryptocurrency.
00:34:15:08 – 00:34:38:23
Richard Carthon: Thank you for joining us for another episode of cryptocurrency cryptocurrencies, a cryptocurrency and blockchain education platform that’s bridging the gap between curious newcomers for just discovering the space and the thought leaders who are shaping its future. All opinions expressed by Richard Carson, the crypto current team and their guests on this show are exclusively their own opinions on this show and any other crypto asset production is exclusively for informational purposes.
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