GM everybody welcome to our Twitter space this morning afternoon or evening depending where you are thanks for being here and for tuning in today we have our wonderful guest
Pestel and RZero to talk about the future of NFT security, copyrights, and NFT marketplaces. We'll just give it a one or two more minutes till we have our log guess and we'll start shortly. Thanks again.
All right, thank you for your patience. And we'll get started shortly. Welcome, pastel. Welcome, art zero. Pastel, how are you today? Or Anthony? Sorry. I'm doing great. How are you doing? Good. Here, it's about 10 a.m. in the morning, having my cup of Joe.
No, it's not a person named Joe. It's coffee for all my friends from abroad to and art zero. How are you? Oh, hello everybody. Yeah, very very excited for the discussion. I'm here, you know, in the
middle of the night is midnight here though I'm not sleepy at all because of the excitement right okay all right well thank you both again for for joining us today this wonderful occasion to talk about NFT
There are still going strong, there are still forming communities, there are still lots of technology being developed with and around it. And that brings a lot of questions in mind as well. Questions about security, questions about copyright, ownership, and the
So Anthony and Pistel, we'll start with you. Can you give us a quick introduction? Discuss the project you're involved in, you're row within it, and how you became involved within the field. Definitely, definitely. So Pastel is a
Web 3 company, we really provide infrastructure solutions for the Web 3 ecosystem, specifically pertaining to non-fungible token technology. So as we'll discuss, you know, some of the infrastructure solutions expand all the way to data storage, data security, authenticity,
copyright protection and the likes. We do this via completely decentralized layer one blockchain. So it's an application specific blockchain that really fits nicely in the ecosystem. If you look in comparison to let's say some of the general purpose blockchains like Ethereum that have very very
high TPS but low data fidelity, you know, we've made a tradeoff to really provide for a tremendous amount of data integrity and we do that via a really, really application specific built layer one infrastructure. Thanks for the hammer.
It's super exciting to hear, especially the word decentralization when it comes to these aspects of ownership and the tangible ownership that we have of our identities, of our likes, of our culture even. Art zero. On the same line, can you discuss a little bit about your
project, who you are, what you're rolling in, and how you came to be in this part zero and NNT space. Okay, thank you for the question. Well, first of all, I think I haven't introduced myself yet. My name is Phoebe and from Art Zero, yeah.
And I'm in charge of marketing in art zero. Well, for those that have not heard of art zero, art zero is we're joining as our ecosystem with an NFT marketplace using ink smart contracts.
Our marketplace is like 95% ready and now it's open for testing in Shibuya Network This is our second NFT marketplace and the first one is the one that we have just built in on the Alex zero network Our final aim is to
We will try to provide secure, decentralized, and user-friendly platform for creators and collectors to engage. Our CEO and Fowl to Brian should have been here today because he's now in a flight to Paris where we will be
teaching in the Hong Kong, in the north of the country, in Paris. Since he is in the flight, I am here instead. We have earned the top three sessions in the Session in Smart Contracts in this hackathon.
Well, for how I became involved in the field. First, personally, Brian and I have been best friends like for life and we have worked with each other in a few couple of non-critical projects.
When Brian had an idea and effort to decide to start an NFT marketplace, he actually physically grabbed my neck and dragged me here with him to support him to help him. So yeah, there we go.
trying to create the best NFT marketplace. So yeah, basically this is how we form up the team, the project, and how we want to reach a target.
Yes, thank you. Thank you so much, Phoebe. That was pretty funny. Physically dragged you into this. He's physically dragged me, grabbed my neck. I've been known him and I've been friends with him for like 30 years now. It's a very huge number of years.
know, he actually physically dragged me in the project. Yes. That's one type of friendship. Thanks, maybe. And thank you both for such wonderful introductions and for leading the
space here. A little bit about myself, I'm Rams, Community Growth Lead here, and we're part part part-time, part-time-partly managing the socials as well for AMAs specifically. And at Astar for our listeners who are joining us, whether new or old or part of our dedicated core,
of community. Ashtar is a dual smart contract platform where EVM and Web Assembly compatible and I think we'll touch upon some of that Web Assembly today as well, specifically the coding language ink that is used. And we aim to basically provide a platform for any device
developer to come with the language and experience they know to build and innovate. We have a feature called de-appstaking which acts almost as a sustainable grant for these builders so they can keep fueling their ideas and not worry too much about the financial aspect of it. And currently
There's many DFC you can check out that live through this process and have build and continue building and adding features to their products on Ashtar. And some of those products that we're looking forward to as well is Pastel and ArtZero, who are
bringing the NFTs to a new level because it's required not just for us in our space and in our bubble too, but for the global context of it when users and the rest of the millions start onboarding and seeing the benefits of the Web 3 values.
which includes ownership. So I want to ask Phoebe, just to begin with you, since there's lots of marketplaces in the NFT ecosystem. I think we're all familiar with some of the most popular ones too in and around Ethereum, perhaps other chains as well. What
made you decide or the team decide on building another marketplace. And what stands out is the most appealing aspect of building on the Astar platform. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you that there are lots of, lots of marketplaces out there, you know,
We've seen everybody knows big names like OpenC, Raribol, Binance and a lot more. But I also have to say that there are a lot of blockchains as well. Some very new but very potential as stars very potential.
I think each blockchain has its own ecosystem and community and if we operate an NFT marketplace in those blockchains, it does not mean that we have to compete directly with those big names. I mean, it's pretty scary to
compete directly with those big names. Yeah, I have to say that. But our questions are always like not whether to do it or not because we don't have to compete directly. But we do it, but on which blockchain?
So, we have a few reasons why we want to choose, we have chosen, why we chose Astar, about all else to start our second marketplace. You know, after the one we have built on our live zero network, but I think the most
as anyone is that as our support smart contracts are written in ink. And you see we have an NFT marketplace just ready in ink. So when we realize that just by keeping the core codes doing some adjustment, we can just launch our second marketplace
in no time. And since we always want to do multi-chain NFT, multi-place, this is our dream. So it's like, you know, the first step to our dream. So that's the biggest reason. Well, yeah. Yes, back to you.
Thank you, Phoebe. Yes. I'm glad we're helping realize builders like yourself and the rest of the team realize their dreams. Yeah. Yeah. Vincent, sorry, Anthony, if in your view, what do you think that current hurdles are in the NFT ecosystem and that still remains
main on your on a dress that we need to pay more attention to. Absolutely. And we also actually do have Vincent here as well. Vincent leads a lot of the go-to-market strategy outreach and business development. So he'll definitely be speaking as well. But just to kind of jump into that, you know, I think that
And there's still a big gap in understanding of really what NFTs are and what they aren't, just with respect to from the technological barrier itself, the difference between the underlying token as well as what the data that's meant to be represented by the NFTs is. So I guess what the heck does that really mean, right?
If you have a Bordea Beyond Club NFT, you're effectively acquiring a token that lives on Ethereum that has a reference pointer to where that actual photo of that Bordea is living. And that could be living on another decentralized ecosystem. It could be living on a centralized server. You saw obviously some issues that started to unravel
with FTX and Magic Eden and the likes. If you went and bought an NFT on FTX, it might be under the impression that that NFT is going to be existing forever, living on the Polygon Network or whatever it might be. Loan behold, FTX goes under and now if I go look at that NFT, I get a
photo that basically says, please proceed to the bankruptcy website for more information. Turns out that in fact, while I do have a token that lives on the Polygon Network, the data represented by that underlying token was simply hosted on a centralized server. So one of the biggest gaps in the market right now has to do with the
barrier of Web 3 infrastructure to really bridge this gap in understanding between how do we put these pieces together. You have general purpose blockchains like Polygon or Ethereum, but they're not necessarily suitable for some of the application specific functionality like data storage or
Is there any other discussion?
But what happens to our NFTs there or in the art sense and the market play it's sense what happens to the marketplace that's holding these NFTs and the trading that happens there or the bidding if that's one of the features of a marketplace. So all these questions come to mind when you're a community and you
have an NFT or even a business that uses entities or DAO, what happens? And so I think you're alluding to a lot of points that I myself specifically are interested in. And so is a lot of the community here at Ashtar. And hence why we live on Polkadot and build on top of
the layer zero, a lot of security is covered by this layer zero. And a lot of these, the potential of innovation too is highly immense because of the XEM and the cross compatibility and messaging that we could do with other parachains and other blockchains and other apps. So when it comes to marketplaces and NFTs,
That's also a question in mind too. Is it secured? Is it secured as in the long run as well? Who owns it? So thanks Anthony for that. >> Hi, this is Vincent. I just wanted to add it on top of that. So I think also like another thing where, you know, is a huge hurdle within the NFT space.
is dealing with duplicates. As you see on many different Twitter, like tweets or different articles online, there have been countless number of cases where NFT collectors have been duped into buying fake NFTs. And unfortunately, a lot of the marketplaces aren't doing enough to protect their collectors. Right now, a lot of them
a very manual process of determining big collections, which is a very slow, it's too slow in this environment that where everything moves almost instantaneously and they just simply don't have enough manpower to keep up with the activity that's going on in the marketplaces. And so right now the only marketplace really
is hope and see that is utilizing some sort of automated duplicate detection. But, you know, their technology is very weak and can easily be bypassed. We actually created a video which can be found on our YouTube channel that compares their duplicate detection against ours, which is sense. And the difference is extremely big.
I'm going to check out that video myself. I've always wondered how pinpoint artist technology and if AI will play a role in it or is playing it over the nowadays. So, sort of things on my mind. Thank you Vincent.
Well, go to Phoebe. What do you think are some of the hurdles that still need to be addressed or being overlooked in your opinion when it comes to the NFT ecosystem and even marketplaces? Yeah, yeah. I'm just adding on some of my experiences with the
the security of fake collections and duplications and that's all things because it's what I'm working every day. Like daily, although I only have, we only have like 13 collections now.
ready to launch and they're in the testnet but every day you see there are like 10 20 users you know catch me via telegram and telling me reporting to me that hey maybe this is
This looks similar to this and to that. So they actually manually look for, because when users surf in the pretrial space, they see this NFT and that NFT and this looks similar and that looks similar. The NFT comparing
NFC to NFC it is not you know the whole the total 100% same but they're just like you know small small thing you know the eyes the hair you know the two the the the the traits that's all the things so it is very hard for me
to decide. We are running an NFT marketplace. We have to protect users. So we have to deal with all of that reports. It exhausts all of our teams. So yeah, yeah, it's one of the reasons why we reached out to
to Vincent and Pastel to try to solve this problem. I also have seen that even many suppliers can start, we know that difficulties and we know that harder.
we try to overcome it, but with limited ability to create such application or AI application, whatever. I also have seen application that only they can check, but they can only check in one blockchain, two blockchain
not all. So I think it's still an issue that a big issue and yes like Vincent said I don't think that there is any marketplace other than OpenSea. I haven't experienced with OpenSea and I'm not
you know, from technical background, so but I don't think that they can check everything in crypto space. So, so yeah, security is absolutely one of the very big things that that we have to address in the future. The second
One thing I think for us is regulations because you see the NFT market plays, the NFT market continues to grow. And I think there is a need for greater clarity and regulations around how entities are created.
traded or taxed or you know and there are even differences of regulations among countries as well. So I think this is kind of hurdle that creates uncertainty for creators and collectors and even investors. Yeah and for us
Because we run an NFT marketplace and the differences of regulations and the lack of clarity in regulations among countries also create quite a lot of difficulties for us as well.
Yes. Thanks. Thanks for the insight. Thank you. No, thank you for the insight. I mean, quite put much thought into the regulation part as well. From our community experience here at ASTAR, I could tell you for certain there's been collections that were later found to be duplicates, you know, so some
might not know right off the top of their head that that's a duplicate collection because it's new or it's brought from a different chain. So this is all even from my NFT collection endeavors I sometimes may be surprised too that
I thought something that was based on another collection without knowledge. So this is all great. In general, for all the NFT collectors out there or just people who are intrigued, this is a reality that we have to deal with even more so now. So I think again, Pest out not zero for being here to talk about, especially
the builder's perspective and uses perspective too. So I'm going to move on to my next topic. And Vincent or Anthony, if you can, sense the creation of NFTs. There's been many shifts, especially in everything related to NFTs, all the matters
shift. From profile pictures, the style, the PFPs that were used to seeing on Twitter, to utility based NFTs, actually performing some kind of function, one-to-ones, artistic, even some celebrities, artists who come in and do,
individual pieces, even physical adaptations of NFTs, NFTs associated with physical goods, burnable NFTs too. I've seen some projects where you burn your NFTs to get another NFT and so on or even
Marjoram. So all these are gaining popularity, this diverse form of interacting and owning NFTs. So my question to Anthony and Vincent, where do you guys see the NFTs space headed to in the coming months? Yeah definitely. So just
just at a high level and actually Vincent recently is, well we're actually going to be pushing it out next week but video talking through various set up tea trends so I definitely advise everybody to take a look but it's fascinating it's really just the tip of the iceberg with respect to the variety of use cases that we've seen for this new technological standard
Now while in the surface a lot of people look at it to be really synonymous with this large, it couldn't be further than from the truth. We're seeing NFT standards and use cases starting to emerge in the world of DeFi. You know, Uniswap V3 for example, in a variety of other DeXes, LP stakes or granted in the form of NFT
technology. Furthermore, we're seeing a tremendous amount of emerging use cases and the world of legal and the world of financial and the world of collateralization. A lot of assets that can be collateralized on chain and you might have certain types of documents that actually need to take the
form of an NFT itself. And so it's really powerful about, you know, even sense, or some of the duplicate detection technology is, you know, while it's super helpful to be able to actually spot check and monitor against duplicate collections, we're going to see a tremendous amount of problems in the world of over-hypothication
or re-hypothication of certain assets on chain. And so having some sort of way to actually be able to detect that sort of shortfall in the market is going to also pave the way for a number of new actors to enter the market, whether that's large financial institutions like jump trading,
or State Street, whether that's a lot more legal practices taking place on chain. We've seen KKR recently, for example, they're actually raising an entire new fund via the blockchain working with Avalanche. And so the ability to actually issue partnership interests in the fund in the form of NFT.
I mean, that's just amazing in terms of the actual breakthrough that we've made in terms of this sort of technology. Now that being said, we need to make sure that the infrastructure is there to support it. Vincent, anything else you want to add to that? Yeah, I think actually there are actually numerous potential paths still in the NFT ecosystem to follow.
in the coming months. I think one of the trends that is kind of emerging right now is the increase in big NFT projects originating on the Bitcoin ecosystem. I'm pretty sure a lot of you are aware of. Most recently, UGOLAT has successfully launched their Bitcoin NFT project. I think other
artists seeing the success coming from this will be inspired to create artwork in this ecosystem. I think some other trends that are popping up is the emergent use of NFTs and by fashion brands for token data drops or maybe redeemable drops.
I don't know how familiar you guys are with KIT, a huge fashion brand within New York, or that originated from New York. So they actually collaborated with indisible friends where they sent out pieces specifically designed for those NFT holders for free.
pieces are unique as they're not part of any regular collection of clothes that you can purchase from their store actually. And token gated access is becoming more and more relevant. NFTs are being tested in this manner by large corporations. Nike has been exploring, you know, some kind of like, sorry, exploring
these kinds of use cases with shoe releases and more recently Spotify has also been looking into testing token gated access to music. I'm not sure how, like I'm sure there are some projects currently working on this but I think a forgeable NFTs would be a really cool idea. I don't know how many
of you are familiar with the video game CSGO, but essentially in that game you can reroll skins for another set of skins. So essentially in that game you can reroll 10 of the same skin tier to get a higher tier skin in return. And I think something of this mechanic in the NFTs space
would be really cool. It gets people collecting certain pieces from maybe different collections and then if you burn all 10 you can get this really unique one of one piece. It's kind of like collecting parts of the exodia to create this super final art piece through the supporting mechanic.
Oh wow. He just opened my eyes to a few other use cases that I've heard too much about, especially the token gating for music makes sense obviously. And now I quickly add one that I'm a fan of to the carbon credit or certificates, you know, uses NFTs. Sometimes they do
have a visual and there's a few projects out there like Energy Web who talk about it and sort of are preparing for that kind of future with renewable energy. And Phoebe, what about in your take on this? What do you see the NFT space headed?
I totally agree with Vincent and Anthony and you on this. I'm just adding that because you have been listed out, you know, many fields. I think many fields will be involved in in entities.
And even for the types of NFTs that we've seen shifts that you have mentioned, I don't think that it's, although we've seen shifts, but I think it does not mean that the old types of NFTs have no room
to develop. I mean, the existing energy formats are still developing in quantity and quality, but we can expect to see more hybrid energies as well. So because you guys have mentioned a lot of fields and the expanding
of expansion of fields involving in NFTs. I'm just going to add up some standards maybe because we have developed at zero marketplace in PSP 30
We are working on PSB 37 and also RMRK's the nuts. For the NFTs that Vincent just mentioned, I think it's dynamic NFTs. These NFTs can change over time, based on some certain
or variables, like, and I think it's very nice, especially in games and in Metaverse projects where there are very nice stories involved. So, for example, you have a, say,
and then maybe you merge it with fire, you see fire can hatch and drag an egg. And after a couple of months up to you have merged it, maybe your drag an egg and Ft can be hatched and become a small little dragon and then with time.
time, the baby dragon becomes big dragon and then he can produce fire and come into fights and battles and that's all the things. The other thing of other form of energies I think is the very interesting thing is the freshenalized and
So the energies can be divided into multiple fractional pieces. And an energy can be very expensive. But if you fractionalize it, it can allow more
multiple buyers to own, you know, just a portion of the NFT, not everything, not 100% about that NFT. And I think with this, it can increase liquidity and make, you know, make the, uh, energy is more accessible to a wider range of collectors.
And also this can be very nice in games and metaverse projects as well because they also have nice stories as well. I've seen people, I think there will be more and more exciting and
different types of energies, you know, combined a lot of elements that we cannot think of now. But soon in the future, maybe just a couple of months, I think there will be more different types that we have not seen.
Thank you, Phoebe. Yeah, 100% agree. There's going to be many more types and standards where we have yet to see. I've seen a little bit of rentable NFTs. You mentioned the standard where we have composable NFTs or nested NFTs. Those can... We have that on Ashtar right now. We're testing it out and soon are...
community can see for themselves an experience, the remark standard in ink where you could attach detach parts to an NFT like Legos. And that's we're excited for as well. And we look forward to and all these again just to bring it back to where we all started NFTs.
and security. Obviously with more standards coming in, with more use cases and utilities and what not, the need for security to protect these because they might be super valuable, especially if you're working in an organization or business where they value actually a
to something that security is even more necessary. So I wanted to add another topic here since we have about 25 minutes left about the art and zero and pastel, you know, collaboration or like working together and how you see that benefiting the users that are listening in right now.
So it may be in plain language how Vincent or Anthony and Phoebe, whoever wants to go, how would the user understand what pastel and art zero are working towards? Currently. Yeah, sure. So, you know, we're working towards, you know, bringing
duplicate detection as well as permanent storage to the R0 marketplace. And so how this benefits users and collectors at the end of the day is that as a collector you want to be able to make informed decisions when purchasing your NFT. Because at the end of the day it's your hard-earned money and you
want to have something that's permanent. You don't want to be purchasing an NFT where a couple of years down the road, when you click on it again and look at the artwork, there's no artwork to be seen because maybe the person who is running the project may be forgot to pay their fees but it came to the storage or things of that nature.
And you also want to make sure that the NFT that you're purchasing isn't just simply ripped off from some other artist out there. I've been sure a lot of you have been aware. There's been plenty of times where at the beginning of the NFT craze, there's plenty of people who simply just took art from other devian art work like devian artists.
just simply minted it and claimed it as their own. And nothing was really done about it for those artists. And so we also want to make sure that the creators are collected themselves as, I mean, protected themselves as well, right? So anytime somebody's trying to take
an artwork that you've already minted and tried to mint it on other networks, then you can immediately be alerted and then you can take the necessary action towards requesting take downs or things of that nature in order for you to be aware of who exactly is stealing your artwork per se.
Thanks, Vincent. >> And maybe any other ways you envision this would benefit the user, the community that we have here, not just in Astar, but all of the Polka. Polka.ecosystem, which we jump chain to chain and use all these products because we can.
Yeah, so first because we are trying to build an NFT marketplace. So we want to build user-friendly, so user-friendly one and easy to, you know, assess to a wide range of users.
So we try to create our marketplace to be easy to navigate with building futures that allow users to easily buy cell trade energies.
Security is very important. That's why we have pastel with us here. We try to check all duplication, you know, run an authentication and duplication check on all, you know, new NFT
that have been uploaded or new collections that have been launched in our marketplace. We also have our own native NFT collections as well, but because we want to try to create a community
growth model. By community growth model, I mean, because with our energy collections, we use that by it and stick it on our platform. We'll get the chair of our revenue of our
marketplace revenue. So this is the community growth model and it truly soaks the community. Everyone has a share in it and I think that is why everyone will be willing to support and grow it. Because our
Our aim is to support multi-chain to cattle to, you know, preferences of wider range of users. So we have launched, you know, it on TestNet, on Alex0, and, you know, now I start to
try to, so we have two marketplaces now. And we try to create more and more and at the end of the road, Azure will be multi-chain. I think it will give more options and greater
flexibility and attract more artists, collectors, investors, I think it also helped increase the liquidity and value of NFTs traded on the platform as well, you know, helped increase the the the the the the NFT ecosystem in general.
So yeah, that's basically our key targets.
Thank you. Thank you, Phoebe. Now those are great. Yes, it influences other builders and other artists as well when they see this robust, secured environment where they get built and launched to projects. It's a great way to put it as well. So using both leveraging
both of your four days, you know, the platform and the security is just the win-win, especially for our start users. And I'm looking forward to seeing the launch and actually experience it firsthand, perhaps even launching my own project one day using both Pastel and Art Zero.
So thanks again both both our guest, our zero and pastel here, VB Anthony and Vincent for coming by and I wanted to leave the last words with all of you. And if our community has any questions please feel free to drop them into the little purple or whatever color
messenger bubble, you have it at the bottom right and I'm sure the team can get back to you whether it's a question for Astar, question for Pestel or RRZero. But Anthony, you've been sent any last words you want to leave with us today. Yeah, so I mean even though we are currently kind of in a bear market right now,
I think it's still important to note that there is a lot of development going on with NFT specifically. And I hope that the Twitter space helped you guys all realize the importance of what Pastel Network is building and bringing to the NFT ecosystem. And as well as what ASTAR and R0 utilizing are technology and how it's elevating this
standards of standards in the NFT space. So I'm really glad to see our hard zero and ASTAR seeing the value that we're able to deliver and hopefully more people supporting all of our projects. And to all the people that are listening, thank you for your support and we hope to see more people join the community in the future.
Thank you for sending any last words or comments you want to share with our listeners. I think that thing, I was just going to say, I think that pretty much covers it. I mean, there's a lot of exciting stuff happening in this space right now.
now and you know we're obviously fortunate enough to be able to partner with great teams like A-Star and R-Zero and I'm excited to see what it's going on full the next couple of years you know while there might be a lot of negative sentiment in the market it's an amazing
time to be building and to be bringing things to fruition and executing on plans and objectives and I think those players that are doing that today are going to obviously bear a lot of the fruits and fortune of what's unfold over the next five to ten years.
Yes, super excited Anthony as well. This is the best time to build and we have a lot of great builders like yourselves here and Phoebe. Yes, just one last word. I and also my team.
We are experiencing the doubt trend, but it will be even more and more popular playing very important roles in crypto spaces and also in
in our daily lives. I think this is just the beginning. And for art zero, we hope and we are trying our best to try to do something remarkable in this NFT ecosystem.
For now, I think everybody just come over and check our testnet page and then maybe try out some functions and give us feedbacks and then maybe come and have little chat sometimes in our community. We really appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you all again for coming. Please follow your socials at Fastdown Network and ArtZero, LordIO. And this has been Ask Start Network bringing you great building
building through this time and creating products for the community. Thanks again everyone for joining and have a great day evening or night. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.