Why no one cares about your NFT project - Jacob Haap | Anomaly Science

welcome Jacob to the stage thank you very much for the nice intro and I especially appreciate the mentioning of jpegs because it can be very important later anyway yes my name is Jacob Pap this is why no one cares about your nft project and just to start off I apologize if I seem a little bit off for anything I've been at three conferences in the last week I just got in last night so a bit busy for a quick overview about myself before I get in I run an early stage company out of Berlin we develop a tokenized solution for software licensing along with different web through developer tools I guess in short you could think about that licensing system as token gating for git repositories if you know what that is uh but to get started today I figured I'd share a little bit about my own background how I got into web 3 and then I'll leave that to the topic why no one cares about your nft project so of all places my intro in web 3 came from the game Minecraft now this might be a little bit odd a lot of people get into the web three in different ways but not many people get into it quite like this and the way this happened is back when I was about 11 years old or so I was running a Minecraft server with some of my friends and we were young we didn't really have money so we wanted a way to pay the server bills but no payment processors would ever dare to do business with an 11-year-old and as a result we discovered Bitcoin because Bitcoin didn't care how old we were or who we were it gave us an option to accept payment so even though this would be a massive violation of the end user license agreement if we wanted to sell diamonds for US Dollars that was a noo but selling it for Bitcoin that worked fast forward a few years I got involved with my first nfts and this was in 2018 with the purchase of a crypto Kitty if you do know what that is I guess you could kind of be considered an OG at this point because most people weren't in at this point in time and actually a cat is a really good example to get to something now if you were at this conference I'm going to assume that you are all web 3 people you know basic web 3 terms but one thing that's very important to establish before I get into the rest of the topic is the idea of fungibility and non-f fungibility for example Euros are fungible assets if I have a 20 bank note and one of you has a 20 bank note we could exchange that no problem fungible asset but since we just mentioned cats let's think about cat number one and Cat number two if I have a cat and when a view has a cat we cannot exchange that because they are unique they are not exchangeable this is the idea of non-ability and this gets me to that some of you may have heard a while ago where there's this news article that came out claiming that 95% of nfts are now worthless now myself maybe many of you included may have heard this and thought that seems a bit odd the nft space the web 3 space overall it seems quite strong maybe I have some nft they don't seem morth list they're valuable to me but it got me thinking why are people thinking this there has to be something more to it so I decided to explore that now look at this it might just look like an arrow but I want you to think about what it could represent sure it's a nice Arrow it's on a cool green background look at the direction it's pointing it just so happens to be that all of the biggest nft projects or at least a significant portion of them have profile pictures facing that same direction and this is exposing something that I'm trying to look into and that is the idea of a copy and face format format that projects are trying to use because they believe it will bring them success as a further example of this copy and paste format try to find which one of these is the real board ape I picked board ape because that's a project that everyone knows and with the exception of that one in the middle which is looking the other direction you can see that these all follow that same format before profile looking the same Direction and to spoil this since I asked you to find the real board ape the answer is there was not one there for some reason people saw the success of board apes and thought you know what let's just do monkey pictures everywhere because that seems like it will work and spoiler it didn't people don't really know about these collections they don't really care about them because they just got brushed off as copycats but looking more into this copy and paste method there is more to it there's more danger to that because think about it from a technical side there exist smart contract Builders ways that you could deploy your projects your collections anything with just a few clicks sometimes quite literally copying and pasting the same code now that may not seem to too bad at a surface level but if there are bugs in that code any exploits any errors something that could go wrong that's now being copi and pasted across countless projects and that could be a really big issue now why are people using this copy and paste format maybe it's because they saw other projects do similar things in the past and they thought that they could have success with it in the future and that has a little bit of an interesting effect because if people see one thing working they are going to keep trying that same thing as long as possible because it makes the line go up because a lot of people right now they only care about trying to exploit this for as much money as it is worth and that is a really big problem and why is that a problem because let me get this when people get so obsessed over trying to exploit stuff like nfts for personal profit we get like this cult-like reputation about the ways that we treat our jpeg we get people thinking that we're all about trying to avoid people screenshotting our nfts right clicking them you have Ryan a on Twitter asking if someone owns that monkey picture I mean this is ridiculous how did we get to this point so one thing I wanted to bring this is why why is this important why do I want to bring this up and I think it's important to think about it from a sense of what type of damage is this doing now I'm going to take out my phone for a moment to read an interesting thing that I saw the other day just because I thought it would be important for all of you to hear now it reads leveraging the decentralization of blockchain Technology nfts facilitate tokenized ecosystems Distributing traditional Frameworks through advanced token management protocols with blockchain's immutable Ledger the decentralization of digital assets ensures seamless tokenization token interoperability with and a decentralized platform revolutionizes nft exchanges now did anyone understand that at all raise your hand if so and the fact that no one is raising their hand is a good thing because that is supposed to make no sense that is what I could best describe as quite literally giving AI the instructions to generate grammatically correct gibberish filled with web 3 buzzwords and why would I want it to do that because the NF because when people in the general public hear nft they think scam monkey Apex and even worse than that is when we are getting all of this like internal talk about what it is and not getting exposure to the outside world when people hear about us talk about this technology they feel as confused as you might have felt when I was trying to read that from my phone right there they hear words but they don't make sense and why is this dangerous let's consider this example one way that nfts have a future use is in identity Solutions so let's pretend that any one of our local governments decides that they are going to start issuing IDs in a tokenized format let's say that they use an nft for your passport and you think great that sounds really good for security new ways that that could interact with existing apps ways that could work online but if you were just an everyday person who knows nothing about web 3 and you hear that your government is trying to use this technology that you don't understand that is associated with monkey jpegs you're going to be a little bit nervous about that I mean if I imagine myself in such a situation I imagine I would too and so let's get to this how do you make people care so I've talked about all these horrible ways that nft projects do this wrong ways that people just don't care anymore because of the reputation it's given people trying the same things over and over again so how about this how do you do something different now I don't know if anyone knows this but this is from a Bitcoin ordinal collection called tiny Vikings they are led by someone who back in the end of April I spoke on a panel of this exact same topic with in Estonia and he said one way you get people to care is by a cult around your project and if I think about that that has worked sometimes think about your boor Apes your pudgy Penguins your whatever they don't really offer much in terms of utility of the tokens but they have done a very good job at creating a cult getting a type of worship around what they are doing and people get absolutely obsessed with this so that is one way that you could do it it's not going to work for most projects and I'm willing to say that it has a very low chance of working in the future but it's an option now looking at historic projects I'm sure everyone knows what crypto punks are and I went to focus on what they did that is special because before Crypt punks were around the idea of having nfts or nft collections wasn't really a thing this is one of the first examples of non-fungible tokens so what I'm trying to get to here is they came along they did something new and it had a lasting impact back to the virtual cats as irrelevant as they might be now or as stupid as some people might think the concept is they did something very interesting for their point in time they brought standardization thec 721 uh standard was heavily influenced by and this was the first major use case of that standard without these virtual cats the standardization we have in nfts right now may not exist as we know it now let's think about this I'm sure a lot of people know about ens and Unstoppable domains web 3 native naming systems what they have done is they have used non-fungible tokens in a way this could confer digital ownership over web3 native domains or consider this a lot of people like gaming how can you tokenize this if you tokenize ownership of games through something like nft licensing then when you buy a game it's not like it is right now where you go through somewhere like steam or epic games and you're technically just licensed the game through your account and they could revoke that at any time it'll be like it's on a physical disc again you could play the game you could do whatever you want want with it when you're done you could trade that to someone else or you could go ahead and sell it and speaking of gaming what about this idea it's a nft racehorse now kind of similar to other nfts you just have a picture you have some other stuff with it but what's interesting is it proposes a unique type of utility that you could extract from this you can race it you can do things with it and I think that that's really interesting that gets me to this final point of if you want to make people care you need to do something unique the reason I brought all of those previous examples and the reason I showed all those things that could be done wrong before is that the ones that stick out the project that people remember the ones that they care about are the ones that have done something unique with the technology we know about board Apes because they came up with this idea of community they were able to bring a cult-like following to that they were very good with their branding and their IP what we don't remember are these thousands of projects that come along trying to go for the same number in their collection the same mint price the same shitty art style the same broken community and they do nothing maybe sometimes they'll do rug pools maybe sometimes they'll get a few thousand people in a Discord and get some attention for that but then ultimately they disappear but what we do remember are things that will advance the technology we remember Crypt punks because they brought the idea of non-fun ability you remember crypto kitties because they brought standardization we remember things like ens and UNS because they introduce new types of utility and in terms of different types of utility personal preference with this is stuff like authentication licensing credentials and a lot of people might think okay that sounds boring but I personally think that the future of nfts will lie in stuff that are the boring background use cases like if I rewind a little bit to get us back to this one back to the idea of a tokenized ID what is the use case of this if you have a tokenized passport or something imagine this when you get to the Border Point instead of them having to physically inspect the features on your passport to verify that yes this is legitimate and then looking through to verify that you have permission to enter this country seeing how long you have stayed somewhere like for most people stays in the shenen area are calculated by 90 days in a rolling 180 day period and they inspect that from the actual stamps that you have because there's not a really unified system yet you could tokenize all of that so instead of it being this long process all these verification steps you can check the token ID verify that is from a legitimate contract you could look for any deposited tokens that could replace entry stamps and you're good to go what about something like kyc if you have the ability to immediately connect your wallet that contains your tokenized ID you can verify yourself be done in minutes instead of going through the process that I'm sure we all know of having to get out your phone having to try to take pictures of your ID all this annoying selfie stuff even sometimes like trying to speak random words that it gives you how embarrassing that might be it's new things and now we have the rise of AI and what's something that separates humans from artificial intelligence AI that lives on a server somewhere humans we have identity documents and a big issue that AI poses is the ways that that can impact online traffic all the ways that it could interact with existing content and we need to figure out how do we separate people from AI and while you could go on and solve a capture and click as many pictures of cars or horses or whatever you want if you could just connect a tokenized ID to a website that proves that you are human immediately AI loses and that not only will make it easier for us but we could also use that to token tag AI data sources so we can know okay this is AI generated this is not let's not try to use AI generated data in our training data because that makes the AI worse getting back to the last slide just so that way I stay a little bit organized all of the things that I've mentioning back to the idea of do something unique you might wonder how does this impact you if you're trying to do your own project I challenge you to consider ways that you could do something new is there any type of new utility you could introduce that projects haven't done before maybe you want to go ahead and do a picture collection or jpegs or something and there's nothing wrong with that but maybe try doing something more interesting we're seeing a lot of projects right now like if you're doing a profile picture or digital art the majority of those they keep their art stored offchain maybe doing something as simple as storing that onchain could be a difference so if you take away nothing else from this I would encourage you to consider ways to do something new ways to advance the technology this was why no one cares about your nft project thank you very much for your time if there is any questions around I'd be happy to answer them if not thank you you give it up for Jacob yes we have our first question here I'm assuming we're going to have quite a few questions so next time I call you out get your hands ready yeah hey I just wanted to know your thoughts one of the things that I think it would be unique to see is a lot of these quote unquote Dead nft projects so crypto kitties you mentioned that I've got two in my wallet as well they're just sitting there but new projects new utility that develops they don't have to be ATT tied to the old project to where they can create new utility for those holders and it creates a new market for them to Market to do you see that as being um something that we could see a rise of to where I can create a utility where you get a benefit for holding that crypto Kitty if you can either come to my physical location or log into my platform and connect your wallet and verify that you have that nft I mean yes I would definitely agree with that I think the benefit of what we're building building everything on chain is the benefit of operating on a a public decentralized Ledger inherently it is interoperable so a lot of what we see as these Dead projects aren't really dead they're just kind of waiting for someone to come along and introduce something new like we could look at any dead project like if you look at crypto kitties and you want to offer something to people who hold crypto kitties you could look at that on chain verify that that is a legitimate asset and offer whatever you want offer any new functionality because there's no one stopping you if that answers your question I hope it does uh yeah uh how do we scam more efficiently just just kidding uh my real question is like uh I uh in some of these examples I would argue that uh some of these examples are not really uh good examples of real use cases for nfts for example in the case of gaming like uh you have the nft but then the game is centralized itself so I would argue that either both are decent centralized or nothing is uh so my question is like what would you say is the best utility you saw in a project that is actually here and that is like a real uh real world use case so for example you showed like a decentralized IDs uh which I think is really interesting but I think it's still not here yet it's kind of interesting to think about but like I at least for me it seems like far in the in the future with governments and everything so like uh what what what do you think think is like the best use case right now for nfts yeah that's a really good question especially on the point that while a lot of these can exist the tech isn't there to support it especially with gaming like you can license the game you could license individual assets but there's not really the storage capabilities of that but I think to answer your question what I've seen that is doing it the best so far with the existing technology are the name services like I mentioned the ethereum name service and I'll use that one as the example the ability to have a naming system that is completely native to web 3 and avoid PCY on web 2 Tech I think is revolutionary most people right now they're using their ens as something like a universal username but these can point to any type of decentralized content like ipfs or ipns content they could be used to point to Smart contract addresses or anything so there's a really big variety of use cases that people really aren't looking into but the tech is there to support it and that's one of the reasons that I like it because there's a lot you could do with it that is natively supported do we have more questions questions let's see those okay um I think we can wrap it up here Jacob like thank you so much for flying out to Belgrade first of all thank you for the amazing talk please give it up for Jacob thank you