Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening wherever you are. Thank you all so much for joining our x space on NFTs en sui. We will give folks just a few more minutes, a couple more seconds to hop on to the space before we get started.
Wayne, our wonderful host will get us kicked off in just a few moments. Thanks again for joining.
Hi everyone, I'm Wayne Cunningham and welcome to our x space. Today we're talking about NFTs en sui.
Over the last few years, NFTs became the most visible and well-known aspect of crypto and the blockchain industry. With sui's recent emergence on the scene, its NFT culture is only now evolving. Given sui features such as on-chain storage and composability, it seems like NFTs have a bright future on sui.
Joining me to talk about NFT trends are Romus from Gomis Overdrive, Joshua from Tradeport, and Nadia from Ethos. Thank you all for joining. Let's start with some introductions. Romus, let's start with you. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your project?
For sure, for sure. I'm Romus, nice to meet everyone. I run Gomis in Overdrive. Gomis is a gaming hub IP focused project. Overdrive is a DAP focused IP project and I'm excited to share more about both projects in this space.
Great. Thank you, Romus. Joshua, can you tell us about yourself?
For sure. Hi, everybody. My name is Joshua. I am the co-founder of Tradeport and Indexer. Tradeport is one of the leading marketplaces in the sui network and we also are a marketplace aggregator. So you can find all your favorite NFTs across every marketplace inside one UI.
And then Indexer is kind of running in the background, running a lot of your favorite NFT applications as an indexer and core infrastructure company.
Thank you, Joshua. And Nadia, can you tell us about yourself and Ethos?
Hey, everyone. Happy to be here. I'm Nadia, the co-founder of Ethos. While many of you know us for our wallet and our infrastructure, we're also pretty passionate about NFTs and have been building on sui since the early DevNet days.
Some of our NFT projects on mainnet include the game Sweetie 192, the collection, which I'll talk a bit more about today, as well as the Ethos squad on testnet and DevNet.
We also launched earlier experiences like fully on-chain sui chess and sui checkers and Kathy AI. Happy to be here.
Great. Thank you, Nadia. And bear forgetting at some points that NFTs on sui aren't just images. They can be games, pretty much, or objects.
So let's get into it here.
Romus, I want to start with you because Gomis has been very successful. You see like rare ones selling for, you know, quite a bit of sui and then, you know, it runs the gamut. So can you tell us what makes Gomis such a success?
Great question, Dwayne. I believe at a current state, it would be wrong to be called a success, but thank you for your kind words.
I strongly believe what we have in plan for Gomis in the future will take us there. But we have come into this position at the moment because we focused a lot of our efforts in the character development phase to make a timeless IP that people can see going global in a couple of years.
So I would say the potential was a huge factor in our current state.
And speaking to the design, because I find the images on the Gomis NFTs really engaging, where did that come from? And do you think that's like the best way to go for a NFT project?
For sure. So basically, we worked with an artist that was already established and pretty famous. And we spent weeks on getting the perfect character and months on the traits.
With all the effort we put in, people have responded really greatly. You can already see a lot of collections taking inspirations from Gomis' traits in the character itself.
And speaking to the traits, can you describe what those are?
For sure. So one of our most famous traits is actually the Pepe dream. It was inspired by the culture of Pepe inside crypto, but we wanted to play a little spin to it.
We noticed a lot of NFT collections was not using the headspace properly, so we basically created another image on top of the head.
If you check it out, it's actually really cool. You can see the rainbow and the Pepe connected.
Great. Thank you, Romus. And let's move on to Nadia to talk about some of the work that Ethos has done.
Let's start with talking about the collection, because that was a really interesting project incorporating AI and NFTs.
Yeah, the collection was really inspired by the technology of the speed blockchain, as well as the sort of generative AI boom that we've been seeing.
But early NFT days, I feel like there was so much creativity and just community around it.
And so that's really what we wanted to channel with this is kind of an experiment to enable folks to create their own beautiful NFTs and then to let the community choose the rarity and which NFTs would become part officially of the collection.
So the mechanics are fairly complex sort of by design, but it really comes down to anyone can create a beautiful NFT and submit it to be a part of the collection.
And then the community votes via SWE, which artist and which artist they want to join the collection. And each day there's one winner selected and the number of NFT copies of that artwork will be limited to the exact number of supporters plus one for the original artist.
That sounds like a great mechanism, a great way to distribute them. Can you talk a little bit about what the user engagement was like with that project?
Yeah, it's definitely a very different project. And I think what we've seen a lot of positive response to is that sort of art creation flow and being able to create your own NFT using any prompt, along with the title.
We've seen folks do really creative stuff like one user as a philosophy student and ended up creating a social media account dedicated to different philosophers with artwork that they created.
Other folks are using it as their PFPs, you know, whether it's in the wallet or on X as their sort of profile picture. So we're seeing a lot of creativity, especially on the art side.
And then on the support side, I think people are really excited to sort of, you know, vote for minting the artwork that they find resonates. And if you look at the daily winners, there's just such a diverse set of art. It's like really wild to me how different some of the pieces are depending on kind of the whims and moods of the community.
Cool. And in building this project, programming artificial intelligence is not a trivial matter. Can you describe like how involved it was integrating this AI engine into the collection?
Yeah, I mean, the technology has come a really long way. We had experimented this with this back on testnet with Kathy AI, where we sort of leverage the sweet friend Kathy and let users create backgrounds.
So generative AI is something we experimented with then we're using the stable diffusion API is to sort of help users create and we've done some tweaking on our end iteratively with our community and just trying to get it closer and closer to what the artist's intent is with the prompt.
And so trying to create better and better artwork beyond the defaults. So it definitely was a lot of trial and error and experimentation, but it's been pretty fun.
Cool. Yeah, those are two different distinct ways to approach this. Rama is mentioning getting a designer that can really work on financing these things and then the collection, allowing just anybody to put in some prompts and have this art created for them.
I want to get Joshua in this conversation. Joshua, in the big picture, what trends are you seeing in NFTs in general and how are they being adopted on SWE?
Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at the last three or four months, one of the major topics for everybody across a lot of chains is kind of on chain metadata and on chain images.
You know, the really nice thing about SWE as compared to basically every other chain is attributes are on chain by default. That's kind of a weird experience for most people coming in.
Or maybe they're new to NFTs and it's like you actually start looking at the code and you're like, wait a second, these things are actually hosted on IPFS. It's not really on chain.
That's something that SWE has had from day one. And then there's been a lot of innovation around actually putting these images on chain.
Thankfully, SWE is fast enough. It's cheap enough that you can do a lot of these mechanics without kind of blowing your budget. And that's what a huge kind of moment.
The other big trend, obviously, is gaming. That's, you know, even if we look at, say, the last eight months and kind of like a down cycle, you know, games have been very, very strong.
You look at things like SoRare, etc. They've had a lot of user engagement and SWE has been really focusing on the gaming industry.
I know they have a lot of great announcements coming up here pretty soon about games that are going to be launching inside SWE.
And I think that's going to be kind of what this next cycle is probably all about, is users actually being able to use kind of composable NFTs, own their in-game assets and then play really fun and exciting games.
The infrastructure wasn't quite there across a lot of chains in the last year, year and a half, but we're starting to get there.
And then there's just a lot of innovations inside the SWE ecosystem that makes it much easier for developers.
Yeah. And one thing you were getting at here and Nadia got it as well as the question that, you know, NFTs don't have to be just pictures.
They can be dynamic things like the 8192 game, for example.
And with Tradeport and Indexer, are you prepared or do you have to make changes to incorporate those more dynamic NFTs in your platform?
That's a great question. Thankfully, that's kind of what we do in Indexers.
We support all this different standards. So we're definitely ready for those to come online.
Even if we think outside of like pictures or we think outside of games, we think of more business side, which is maybe not as sexy.
But we're trying to see a lot of like token access, like gating.
Right. So you could think of instead of having your login to Netflix, like your login is an NFT.
Right. Or you have different accesses to different parts of the website based on the NFTs that you hold.
So it's actually giving you a feature unlockability.
And so you can kind of lock down different parts of your app. Parts can be free. Parts can be paid.
And then you're paying. You're actually buying an NFT. That's what unlocks it for you.
So we actually have a lot of features that are going to be rolling out in a month of March inside Tradeport,
as we do some super premium features that are not very expensive, but it's going to be holding an NFT that unlocks that feature for you.
I'd love to see just more applications, experiment with those types of designs, because NFTs are really they're just assets on chain.
Right. They don't just have to be pictures. There also can be games in and of themselves or they could be your access key to different features on different products.
Those are some great use cases you just mentioned here. And I'm curious if you have if somebody has an NFT that is they can't trade it.
It's locked down. It's tied to their identity. There's no permission to trade it. Does that still work into your platform infrastructure?
It sounds like it wouldn't really matter at that point.
Yeah, for sure. And this is where kind of like indexing maybe you don't have to plug your own book here, but indexing is really important.
You know, one thing, let's say that you're a wallet like ethos and the user is trying to transfer the NFT, but they keep giving an error.
That could be really frustrating. So it's really important to have standards around and like data available that shows you, hey, this NFT is locked down.
Like you can't actually transfer this NFT based on the permissions or if you're looking at certain assets, you can't transfer them because you need to pay royalties because inside the kiosk standard, you know, royalties are enforced.
It's really important for the ecosystem to be able to see those kind of permissions on every asset that you hold. And that's something that indexers really striving for.
And that we build into kind of the data layer.
Great. Thanks, Joshua. And Rhomas, I want to get back to you because we've talked a lot about different ways you can use NFTs on suite.
How are you leveraging gomis and talk about the project Overdrive as well to explain how these are going beyond the typical NFT?
For sure. So this is some alpha, but we are working on the dynamic side of NFTs. Can't say much, but possibilities to train trades is a big bonus.
Look at Build-A-Bear, for example, on Web 2. People can really create the perfect gomis or Overdrive depending on their preference or culturally their race.
So it's definitely a big bonus for us that Sui has this dynamic feature on-chain.
That's a great point. And I don't want obviously we don't want to spill too much before you're ready to announce some cool stuff here.
But the idea of having rare traits that you can make a maybe otherwise common NFT to be more rare by adding these traits seems like a good use case.
Let's go on to Nadia. When you're running the collection, I mean, I know it's still running, but how did people interact with or make use of entities they created through the collection?
Yeah, I spoke a little bit to this earlier, but I think the piece that we're seeing that's the most exciting is when people really find that the artwork resonates personally and end up using it as like a PFP.
I've even seen folks on X outside of Web 3 using those images, as well as people creating whole sort of dedicated accounts to things that they wanted to pursue creatively.
So my favorite example is this sort of Instagram account by a philosophy student that is using all artwork generated by the collection and then including sort of daily philosophy facts along with it.
It's been really cool to see folks create artwork that's really personal and then use that across their platforms, both within Web 3 and social beyond that.
And with the collection, did you put guardrails on what people could do with the NFT? Did you keep them within or can they put them on marketplaces, trade them, etc?
Yeah, the NFTs are fully owned by their creators, so they're free to do whatever they like with them. They're absolutely able to list them on marketplaces.
I know we've seen some folks do that.
So they're pretty much yours. And what's cool as well is there's kind of two categories of NFTs. So you can create an NFT with AI for the collection, not sort of submitting it to the official collection, just creating your own NFT for your personal use.
Maybe you want to create your own collection. You can totally do that. We have bundles to sort of let folks create tons of art.
And then if folks are actually submitting it to be part of the collection of the collection, then you are locking that NFT while it's sort of up for community vote.
And then if it wins and is the daily winner, it'll get sort of burned and then the official winning NFT will get minted as sort of a new thing.
So it's kind of cool because there's two experiences. There's a very casual experience of it. You just love creating art. You can now create lots of art NFTs that are yours to keep or trade. You own them.
Or if you want to sort of engage in the community dynamic, you can then submit your favorite art to be part of this competition and let community members vote.
And it's cyclical. So every 24 hours, there's a new cycle. You can remove your art. And as long as it doesn't win, you can remove it for the next cycle.
Ditto for folks supporting with SWE. They can support or remove each cycle as it goes.
And one thing that Joshua touched on earlier is the ability to put royalties on NFTs through blockchain. Have you explored royalties at all on the collection?
It was something that we definitely thought a lot about. We kept it pretty simple in terms of the structuring where if you were the artist for a NFT that wins and is sort of elected by the community to join the collection,
you will get 50% of the support in winnings that you can claim in addition to your NFT artwork, which again, you own. So you can sell it. You can keep it.
So we wanted winning artists to really have sort of a good incentive and to really benefit from the community recognizing their creativity and contribution.
Very cool. I want to open this up to maybe a bigger picture look at the whole industry. And Joshua, I want to go to you for this.
I mean, SWE obviously has, you know, composability, dynamic fields, various ways to make NFTs do things. We have different use cases.
How are you seeing that expand to the industry as a whole? Are you seeing other chains adopt this kind of these types of features?
You know, it's really interesting. I think the, you know, the big example of being pushed in East, which is probably the largest NFT community at this point, is ERC 65051,
which is basically something that SWE have baked in. And you got to do a lot of loopholes to kind of make it work on the East, which is, you know, allowing NFTs to own other NFTs.
But the great thing about SWE is it has this object-oriented model. You can create kiosks, kiosks can own other kiosks.
And you get this, like, nice Russian nesting doll effect where your assets can actually own other assets or kind of operate us around wallets, which is a really amazing thing.
So we are seeing other people inside the industry take notice and try to build it inside their chain. But to be honest, just the way most chains aren't object-oriented in the same way or, you know, all NFTs aren't their own objects.
And so it's very hard to pull off. So those, I think, are going to be big unlocks just as we see games come into the space.
If anybody's ever played a game, obviously your character owns other assets. You got your own bag. You can pile things into that bag and you can sell off that bag.
So that is a big piece, but also it gives like a nice level of account abstraction, right, where you can operate kind of all your funds or all your NFTs inside of an object itself.
That has a lot of security benefits as well. So those are kind of the major things there. Obviously, upgradeability, being able to mutate objects.
We see that all over the place, you know, where let's say you stake an NFT, your NFT gains levels as you stake it longer and longer.
And so, you know, the traits can update as well. The nice thing here, again, I am going to plug sweet here because this is awesome to develop on is like you can do all of that stuff on chain by just mutating the object.
And so as a creator or as a game owner or let's say your company is doing like feature access control, you can actually mutate the state of NFT on chain, which all the indexers will just pick up automatically where previously you'd have to do that all through IPFS.
You'd have to kind of go to all the indexers and have them say, hey, I need you to re scrape IPFS because we've updated something.
All of that can live on chains has very easily trackable and like people can actually integrate it into their apps.
So those are things I'm really excited for. But we're seeing that idea kind of spread into the broader ecosystem as a whole.
Those are great points. And definitely, you know, I'm sweet bias, of course, too. So no problem with leaning in that direction.
I've got another question for you, Joshua, about the impact of gas fees on sweet are I mean, on NFT trading, do you see a lot of influence there based on that?
So I'm going to plug sweet again, the gas fees tend to stay fairly low and consistent.
But with other chains when they spike and stuff like that, do you see that causing different or different patterns in trading, for example?
For sure. So I think this is where you like if you're just scrolling on crypto Twitter, this is where you're going to see like the most survivor bias of anything.
Right. So if you're in East and you've been there since 2016, so let's say that you've got one hundred or a couple thousand because you've been there from the beginning.
Paying the gas fees isn't a big deal because you're already like you're already thinking and you've got a huge treasury.
But if you're a new user who's brand new to crypto and you say, like, I buy $50 in East and I want to go transfer to my friend and I have to pay a $50 transaction fee as a huge impact.
And so what you're seeing, like in the older kind of existing ecosystems where people have accumulated a lot, like trading is still happening and they're just eating that cost because they're already denominated in East.
They already have a big they have a big treasury of these.
So the gas prices don't make a huge difference for them, but it makes a huge difference when you're onboarding new users.
And so I think over the long tail, we're going to start to see, again, a little bit youth bias.
I would be very shocked if we don't see kind of a flat line of some of these other ecosystems that have really high gas prices just because you can't bring new users in.
And so it's kind of this gated community.
But with things like Sweden, you can have people from all over the world.
I've spent a ton of time traveling.
I've lived in a lot of third world countries.
I've lived in like 30 countries.
Right. And a lot of communities paying a $50 transaction fee is just like not feasible.
Right. That's like a day's wage.
But you're paying like a half a cent or one tenth of a cent or one one hundredth of a cent.
That is way more approachable.
And then obviously we've got even better things inside Sweden where you can actually sponsor transactions.
So it's like you're you're brand new.
You just sign up for a wallet.
Applications can actually sponsor those transaction fees for you.
So you're not even paying those gas prices.
So those are big leech for it as we look to adopt in the next generation into Web 3 going into this next cycle.
And it does make a huge impact.
So I can't stress that enough.
Like gas fees are really, really important.
You want them as low as possible.
Romas, I want to get back to you and get a little bit of your perspective on.
Have you done projects on other chains?
And what was your NFT experience there?
I haven't launched anything in other chains, but I am from Solana myself.
I would say Solana Gatsby isn't as bad as ETH.
I've also used ETH at the start.
But that's what made me move over to Solana at that point, because gas fees sometimes when it was really congested, it would go up to sometimes a thousand.
And it would be impossible to mint out the hyped collections unless you had a big bag.
And it was a really big turn off for me as a newcomer into the NFT space.
But with SUI, the gas fees are basically non-existent.
I don't even notice when I'm paying gas fees on SUI.
So that's definitely a big bonus for a lot of newcomers.
And I've got kind of a lightning round question here to ask each of you.
The question is basically, should NFTs remain art focused?
Is that what people want?
Or should they go for utilitarian uses such as show tickets or some of the other uses we mentioned here?
So Nadia, what are your thoughts on that?
I love this question. I think it's both, honestly.
So I mean, in the collection, which is very much like an art-centric community experience,
we're actually using NFT functionality for a bunch of different things.
There is a ticketing feature to enable you to buy a bundle to create AI artwork.
There is a identity feature in terms of the NFTs knowing that it came from that prompt author and that artist.
There's micropayments and sort of facilitating that through ticketing-like features.
So I think you can do both.
And I want to sort of echo what folks have been saying around.
I think there's unique benefits to the object centricity of SWE
and sort of how the SWE Move language works.
That enables you to really leverage NFT functionality in creative ways, you know,
above and beyond sort of just beautiful artwork being stored on chain.
You know, SWE 192, the game is completely on chain.
And I think that's a really special thing that we can only create with a technology like SWE Move.
So I'm really bullish on both, personally.
I love the creativity of the arts, but I'm also really excited to see more use cases, more usefulness,
NFTs being used in, you know, new and experimental ways.
Josh, I want to go to you with this question.
Art focused or use or utilitarian use cases?
I mean, maybe this is a compound answer.
So the art focus is really important for building community, right?
And like building a culture inside of the chain.
I mean, we have different types.
We have like one of one art and then we also have PSP collections,
which, you know, everybody's like, oh, the PSP collections have run their course,
but they serve a really core function inside of blockchains,
which is they actually bring people together inside of one space.
So you can think of PSP collections like your sports team.
These are the watering holes.
So if you jump into any NFT collection,
that's where all the builders are hanging out.
That's where all the devs are hanging out.
That's where ideas are really shared.
And if we go back pre-NFT, so like pre-PFP collections,
like blockchain was actually very decentralized.
It was hard to like find other people to chat with.
Like it was all on forums.
But now inside Discord, it's much tighter community.
And I think that's why we're seeing kind of a rapid progression just in the
technology in general, is people actually talking to each other.
Art, obviously for the culture,
it is really important for all ecosystems to build a great art culture.
It's the same way, same reason it's important for your city or your country
or your state to have its own kind of art culture.
That's what brings people together and really expresses the opinions
and feelings of people inside the community.
But I am very excited as we move into the next.
So those are like fundamental building blocks as a new ecosystem
You need a shared sense of culture to bring people together.
And then we start to get into kind of the more utility parts of it.
I'm very excited for the quote unquote utility.
It's overused, very excited for games.
I'm very excited for future access control and real world assets.
Then those are important as we start to build like more commerce on chain.
There's a lot of things that could be represented digitally.
And then we can have like real commerce.
So we already have fungible tokens,
which is what we're using to pay for things.
And when you have more assets on chain as we buy things
that provide value to our lives.
Okay, great thoughts, Joshua. I appreciate that.
Romas, can you comment on art focused or utilitarian use case NFTs?
So basically, I do see our NFTs really front running,
but eventually I can see legal documents,
loyalty reward programs, and even online gifts being used through NFTs.
The potential is really endless.
It just depends how companies utilize the tech.
So for example, loyalty reward programs,
you can put it into a dynamic NFT feature.
And as this user is more loyal to your company,
And you can also store some value on the NFT with kiosk.
Like Joshua mentioned on the kiosk,
you can have another kiosk holding it.
And then that could be the online gift feature.
So I really do see really big potential, especially with Suitec.
So I do really think that utilitarian use
is going to be really big in the upcoming future.
It's just how do we bring in these companies and show them the tech?
I'm actually learning quite a bit more than I knew previously
about NFTs on Suitec from this conversation.
So really appreciate you all chiming in here.
I want to just do final thoughts
or give you all a chance to talk and maybe plug a project
or just any final thoughts on NFTs.
So Nadia, do you want to lead us off?
Yeah, I think that my sort of call is primarily for the builders
and the artists and folks maybe on Suitec
or thinking about joining Suitec.
And I would just encourage experimentation.
I think that everyone's called out sort of a uniqueness of Suitec as a language
and we found as a team that it's really fun to use.
It almost inspires projects itself as you start sort of building.
And so I would really encourage folks to experiment, to get creative,
rather than sort of show anything that we're building at ethos.
I'm really excited to support and see what the community brings.
And I hope that it kind of does take on its own distinct culture,
I think that the bounds of what you can do are pretty limitless
compared to other blockchains in some ways.
And so let's get experimental.
I'm excited for all the Suitec builders to come.
And Romus, final thoughts or plugging projects or anything?
I believe Suitec is still so young
and we're in the early stages of NFT in culture.
But me personally, I'm working very closely with Suitec and Missin
to speed up the process of onboarding more users into the NFT ecosystem.
So I would definitely look forward to the upcoming future
because yet again, we're still so early.
So we have a really bright future right now.
And Joshua, any final thoughts?
I mean, just to echo everything, the call to experimentation.
We are in the very early innings of Suitec.
There's a lot of room to continue building the culture.
I think it's really important as Suitec is very young for us to set it.
So to call everybody, there's a ton of room for a lot more projects on chain.
There's a lot of culture yet to be built.
So everybody just launch your thing, reach out if you need help.
Even on this space alone in the audience,
there's a lot of people who have shipped a lot of products.
So if you're wondering how to get started or you have great ideas,
I'm going to ask for everybody listening too.
I hope you've learned something from this and I hope you join us again.
We'll be doing more X-Spaces.
Technically, every Thursday is our schedule.
And next week you can join us.
We'll be talking with the Web3 Gaming Services Provider Stardust.
Thank you again for this space, Wen and Suitec.
Thank you for hosting. This was wonderful.
And thanks very much to Joshua for being awesome journalists.