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#1 POT: The Cryptocurrency Podcast - LTO Network, NFTs and KYC With Shawn Naderi
111 Plays2 years ago
The LTO Network is a hybrid blockchain solution that combines the benefits of public and private chains, providing enterprises with transparency and security while maintaining control over their data.
Ownables - A Layer 2 for NFTs
Ownables are digital assets that can be owned and traded on the blockchain. Unlike traditional NFTs, Ownables are designed to be more flexible and customizable. They can be used to represent anything from digital art to real estate. One of the key benefits of Ownables is that they are what NFTs should have been in the first place.
Ownables focus on the idea that you own that piece of data. Ownables allow you to choose where you host this information, it could be on a hosting service such as IPFS or even on your own computer. Furthermore, you can choose who has access to see this Ownable. You can make it public is you wish, or you might choose to make this information private. Because of that, Ownables allow you to truly own your NFTs.
Proofi
Proofi was designed to help organizations comply with regulations and prevent fraud by verifying the identity of individuals and businesses. Proofi works by taking the user through a KYC process and then storing the KYC status on chain.
Proofi then gives KYCd users what’s called a verifiable credential, which is an on-chain flag to say that this address has been KYCd and passed verification. This way a user may only perform a single KYC and, by sharing their on-chain status can immediately gain access to any other application that requires KYC, without them having to give their sensitive details to this application.
Consumables and Gaming
Consumables are a special class of NFTs that can be owned and “consumed” by other NFTs. There are many applications for this kind of relationship, but video games are a very good example of this mechanic.
For example, a player could own a Consumable that gives their character special abilities or skills. This Consumable could be traded or sold to other players, creating a market for unique and valuable items within the game.
Let’s say that this consumable is a health potion. Your character (the Ownable) owns this potion. You get into a tough fight with the arena Boss and need to heal. Your character will now use this consumable. This action will be recorded on the ledger, and the quantity of your consumable will decrease by 1.
This technology can be used to create decentralized and MMO games that are completely hackproof, completely removing exploits and hacks from MMO games, as every action is recorded and cannot be re-written.
Cross-metaverse Compatibility
A metaverse is a virtual world where users can interact with each other and digital assets. However, different metaverses have different standards for digital assets, which can make it difficult for users to transfer assets between different metaverses.
The LTO Network is addressing this issue by helping create a standardized protocol for digital assets that can be used across different metaverses.
Imagine having a cool sword in your favorite MMO game, and you want to transfer it to another game altogether and use it there. Standardizing item properties and how they render could enable gamers to transfer items between completely different games.
This podcast is fueled by Aesir, an Algorithmic cryptocurrency Trading Platform that I helped develop over the last 2 years that offers a unique set of features.
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Transcript
Enhancing NFTs with Layer Two Solutions
00:00:00
Speaker
We're not trying to replace NFTs. We're actually kind of, if you think about it, more like a layer two for NFTs. We're bringing extra functionality, extra scalability to the NFT ecosystem.
Meet Damon: A Reddit Reunion
00:00:20
Speaker
Damon, thanks a lot for joining. This is fantastic that you've accepted my invitation. As I mentioned before, this is the first episode of Proof of Talk. So thanks for being the first one to join. Stok, to have you, man. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. It's quite interesting how we met on Reddit really randomly. And I think we connected really well. So thanks for having me on.
00:00:42
Speaker
No, 100%. I like the fact that from the start, we kind of had this synergy. You could tell that there's, you know, like genuine interest and it's kind of what I want to make this space about. I just want to talk to people about the crypto projects that they're involved in, the tech and any other crypto and tech related discussions.
Damon's Creative and Crypto Journey
00:00:59
Speaker
When we were talking initially last week, I think you said that it was a music that eventually got you into crypto. And I thought that's pretty cool. So I was just wondering if you want to talk a little bit about that as well.
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah, look, I come from a music background. Actually, so before music, I come from film and TV. So I did that many years. And I was also a developer at the time, and I was like, really into the whole like, multimedia thing, you know, at the dot com era, I was, gosh, show my age a little bit here now. But when I was 16, around a dot com era, I won tickets to go see Bill Gates talk, you know,
00:01:38
Speaker
And I went alone and I just like, he was talking about how video and film and TV and interactivity and websites were going to connect to each other and it was all going to become one thing. And at the time, nobody knew what that meant, but obviously he was so correct about the future. He was right. Yeah. He was so right. Yeah. And he's, he's a genius, you know, as far as I'm concerned, you know, um, he saw where technology is headed.
00:02:07
Speaker
That inspired me to pursue careers in all the different fields of media, you know, whatever it is, I've always loved being around media. So I worked in film and TV, and I worked later on in a bunch of digital advertising agencies, especially ones in the financial industry, did a lot of finance, you know, marketing.
DJ Career Highlights with Top Artists
00:02:31
Speaker
Then my DJ career took off, you know, and I did that for like a decade.
00:02:36
Speaker
Um, and I worked with some of the biggest artists in the world. Uh, you know, went to the Grammys did all sorts of crazy stuff. And then, sorry. And that's crazy. I thought I knew you, you were talking about it and you said that you worked with some of the biggest artists like in, in like the DJs and people in electronic music. I didn't realize that you were making the music yourself. I thought you had more of like a producer or like band manager kind of, kind of rolling that. Yeah. I mean, you, you wear a lot of hats in the music industry, you know, and, uh,
00:03:06
Speaker
I started off while I was DJing and touring. I discovered a young dude who became Flume. He's a huge electronic artist from Australia. And through working with him and him blowing up, I got to work with like Marshmallow and Squirrelex and all these people that I really look up to. And then as I was releasing my own music, the pandemic hit.
00:03:31
Speaker
And that kind of like made me realize, hey, I can't tour right now. Australia was, I don't know if you guys know, but Australia was very locked down. Oh yeah. I've heard, I've heard that. There were people just being fined even if they posted about it on Facebook or something like that. I was not allowed to go more than five kilometers from my house. It was crazy. So what do I do?
Pandemic Pivot: Music to Crypto
00:03:53
Speaker
I'm like, you know, I want to make extra money. I want to do the trade crypto. You know, it was the bull run. The fallback.
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah. And then like next thing you know, I went into a telegram chat room for this team called LTO and I was like, yo, this project is nothing like anything else I've seen in crypto. Like everything else in crypto, there's people promise things but don't actually have anything to show. Yeah. LTO had like tech that, you know, working with the United Nations, with IBM, with Dutch government, Chamber of Commerce.
00:04:30
Speaker
all these kind of people. And I went in the chat room, and I'm like, hey, I've got all these crazy ideas. I want to talk to you guys. I want to talk to you guys. And only because I just want to pump my own bags. But eventually, I don't remember how, but someone connected me to Rick. And Rick said, hey, you've got a lot of dope ideas. We're looking for someone like you. Do you want to be involved? And it kind of grew from there. And yeah, I'm pretty grateful that that opportunity happened.
00:05:00
Speaker
Oh yeah.
Crypto Trading Bots and Musk's Tweets
00:05:01
Speaker
It's crazy how things happen, how you kind of come across something because of like a bloody pandemic. Yeah. I was doing a bit of music promotion at the time just before the pandemic. I was working with a few rock and metal bands around London and I was a band manager for one of them. It was pretty fun because we actually got to record their third album. So it was my first time experiencing like the inside of a music studio and jamming.
00:05:29
Speaker
you kind of get to meet all these crazy individuals that are really cool. There's this, there was this one guy, I was a producer who bought a church and converted it into a house. And I was like, man, that's so cool. I, you know, yeah, there's a lot of characters in the scene, you know, and everyone's like, I mean, I used to work in finance and no offense, but like a lot of people, like just very similar personalities, not everybody, obviously, but yeah,
00:06:03
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, no hundred percent. And I think it's great. I think I think it's fantastic. I think the finance industry. Are you still connected to the bands? Are you still connected to them or? Not anymore. So it kind of slowed down. We talk a little bit, but it's kind of all slowed down after Covid. Well, during the pandemic, because like touring stopped. We was full lockdown in the UK as well. And then I kind of moved away from music and got like into crypto and I got into development.
00:06:24
Speaker
the entertainment scene. You know, there's some wild people out there.
00:06:29
Speaker
because I suddenly had, you know, all of this, like I had to be inside. I had to spend time indoors. So like, how can I entertain myself? There's only so many games you can play. So I got into, a bit more into building my own trading bots. And I built a few cryptocurrency trading bots. And- That's right. I remember checking out your website. So you built that yourself. So, okay. You actually like coded that yourself.
00:06:53
Speaker
Yeah, so the ACR, the project's built by six developers, there's six of us. So it's an algorithmic trading platform and people can, like if you have a trading strategy, you can go and you can automate your trading strategy on there. But that kind of took two years to build, which was just right after I was just building open source bots and I was releasing them on Reddit.
00:07:16
Speaker
And I thought, man, like people like this kind of stuff. I should do more of it. I built one that would buy Bitcoin every time Elon Musk would tweet about it. It was the post that got me to the first front page of Reddit because of it. And that's when I released that. And then a lot of people had kind of trouble
00:07:41
Speaker
using that software or the Binance, the one that trades based on volatility on Binance. And I thought, well, what this needs is a UI. But then there were so many people talking about this thing that we just started talking on Reddit and then we decided, okay, let's just start this company and let's just build something together. You reminded me of something I've forgotten. During the last bull run or whatever,
00:08:11
Speaker
I had a Twitter alert set up for any time Elon Musk did anything. I would just quickly run and just quickly buy Doge and then five minutes later sell it and I would always make little profit.
00:08:23
Speaker
Oh yeah, 100%. He still does that. Every time he tweets about some coin or something, the market's still pumped. I think it's absolutely unreal that that's a thing. Do you think that it's all the bots that people have still got set up? There's probably no people doing it. It's just bots that are programmed to go when he's talking about stuff to buy it.
00:08:42
Speaker
100%. There's definitely bots doing that. There's also an inverse Kramer ETF sort of thing. It's like, you know, I'm a financial guy from, yeah, that basically whenever he says something, the exact opposite happens. So if he says like sell your bags, Bitcoin is going down, that's the time to just buy more Bitcoin because it's definitely going to pump.
00:09:06
Speaker
Uh, so yeah, it's, it's like the market's a bit crazy. And then I think it's all moving to, to kind of like automate, uh, the, the, the trading that people do, um, to keep track of on it. Like I, I don't, like, since I joined LGI barely trade, like I've got one dude or follow and I, you know, um, he's a friend of the LTO project.
LTO Network's Evolution
00:09:27
Speaker
Um, shout out to Han, you know, um, Hey, Han. Hey, Han. Hey, he's a, he's a really cool dude. Um,
00:09:36
Speaker
And, uh, but, but like, I, I needed that just out of being connected to a little bit of what the trading world's about. But yeah, automated stuff is probably where it's going to go. I agree. Yeah. And from what I've seen from our previous discussions, you're part of, you're one of the co-founders of, uh, or, or the founding members of the LTO. So I'm part of the management team. I'm the chief marketing officer at LTO. Um, the team has been around for a couple of years before I joined. Uh, so originally it was founded by.
00:10:06
Speaker
Rick Schmitz and Arnold Daniels. Arnold is our head of technology. And the original project idea was to make a blockchain that was useful for enterprise technology. So the team had a strong background like Rick comes from Deloitte. So he was in mergers and acquisitions. Arnold used to do a lot of app development in the corporate area. And the idea was, hey,
00:10:33
Speaker
blockchain technology companies that are pretty serious are interested in it, but they don't really know how to deal with blockchain. So let's make a blockchain network and a company surrounding the network, which can help these enterprise solutions, you know, deal with blockchain a little bit. We've moved considerably since then. We found quite early on that there was a lot of interest, especially around 2019 in the areas of anchoring and data protection and the immutability.
00:11:03
Speaker
And a lot of companies were just throwing R&D money into these sorts of things. But as the technology has matured and companies are realizing, okay, what is it that we need to do to actually, what does the bottom line really mean for us? Then the pandemic hit and then the inflation and all these things. Companies are asking, where is the real value in blockchain? And so that's where our art was and that's where we've evolved to.
00:11:30
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that's fantastic. I like the fact that with the way you're positioned, you're in between a private and a public blockchain. So you have a public ledger that can contain private information, private data, if I got that correctly. Yeah, it's a really interesting thing. And it took me when I joined a little while to understand how powerful this is. So the hybrid architecture that we have, there's a public ledger where the records, you know,
00:11:57
Speaker
go like a typical blockchain, but there's a private layer where the applications that are on our blockchain can pass data back and forth to each other or itself without revealing that information to the public. So what does that mean? That means that you can have stuff where personal information, identity data, all this stuff is dealt with by the application, but it no longer needs to be shared with the rest of the world. And what that means really is that we can be regulatory friendly,
00:12:27
Speaker
so we can comply with GDPR regulations in Europe. We're probably going to be very easily capable of dealing with the mica laws that are coming up. And right now the future of blockchain is starting to become a little bit more regulated and I think we're in a perfect position to do that because of our structure.
00:12:47
Speaker
Yeah, well, it does feel like regulation has gone crazy for the last few months. All I see whenever I go on Twitter is just new stuff coming out in terms of crypto regulation. We've got in Europe, it does feel like there's a lot of regulation, especially when it comes to exchanges.
00:13:05
Speaker
For instance, Binance is just slowly getting out of the UK in the sense that they were allowed to, you were allowed until a few months ago to deposit and withdraw GPP. Now you can't do either of those things. You can't stake in the UK. You also, they've withdrawn from Australia, from Australia, Jesus, from Austria. And they've also, they're also withdrawing from the Netherlands as well. So it does seem like there's a lot of movement in there.
00:13:33
Speaker
Yeah, and it's interesting what will happen in Australia as well. I know we sound like Austria, but yeah, Binance is no longer able to do fiat on-ramp or off-ramping anymore because their banking partner pulled out in Australia due to reasons separate to Binance, but it just means that the crypto space is starting to come under more scrutiny. And I actually think that's a good thing.
00:13:59
Speaker
In a perfect world, crypto and blockchain and cryptocurrencies would be completely decentralized. But the market has spoken that a lot of people feel comfortable with some centralized structures existing. So when you have a company like Binance and a centralized structure,
00:14:16
Speaker
Look at what happened to FTX, you know, there was no oversight. Obviously, Binance has done a lot and we work with closely with Binance and we feel very confident in their ability to be compliant with these things in the future. But really, these laws are there to protect the consumer, you know, and I guess there's a balance between the freedom, wild west of crypto that, you know, anybody can do what they want.
00:14:42
Speaker
But at the end of the day, there are people who are losing their money and these do need to be balanced and technology will help the situation.
00:14:50
Speaker
Yeah, no, 100% I agree. And it's challenging to strike a balance between allowing decentralization and allowing like a free system to operate independently and then ensuring that there's no like scam coins coming up every day. Like 99% of the market of the crypto market is actually just scam coins. If you look at it, it's ridiculous or coins or tokens with no utility. Definitely some regulation is needed. I'm not sure the SEC is doing the best job at it for the time being.
00:15:19
Speaker
But yeah, I completely agree thing is they're not doing the best job at it, but they're not doing a portal They're just not doing anything and it's not clear and that clarity like I don't think there's anybody who's a serious project or a serious business in the blockchain crypto space that is not ready to be Complying, you know and doesn't you know, like all the serious projects really want to be, you know looking for five ten years in the future and
00:15:47
Speaker
And without the clarity on what the rules and regulations are, how do you do that? Like, that's impossible. So the SSEs suddenly come out of nowhere claiming that, you know, there's all these things that people have to comply with, but they don't really pertain
00:16:02
Speaker
crypto, you know, they might make sense for assets and financial stuff that existed from like in 1910, you know, until like, you know, 2000s. But crypto is a whole different thing. The crypto asset is so much more functional and it can bring a lot more. And the old rules don't really work.
00:16:20
Speaker
Yeah, no, definitely. Like, how do you regulate something that's completely new and you're trying to fit it into a paradigm that's been around for hundreds of years? You know, it's uncharted territory, for sure. So going back two ways, you know. Yeah, yeah, no, for sure.
00:16:35
Speaker
I mean, it does look like crypto is becoming less of a Wild West and you're bringing that institutional money into crypto. We've got like the BlackRock ETF and all the other like big venture capitalists like looking to have some stake in crypto. It's becoming less and less Wild West.
00:16:55
Speaker
And that's a good thing. I also know that decentralized maxis would be like, would prefer it to be like, I know people that prefer it to be a Wild West and I know people that prefer it to be regulated. And I'm like, Oh, where do I stand with this? Like I'm somewhere in the middle, really. Well, this is where technology, as I said, what will help things. And, uh, for example, um, uh, I'm going to go to a little bit of show mode here, but, uh, we've, we've got like a technology that places like Dex's, um, can use.
Proofy Technology: Privacy and Compliance
00:17:24
Speaker
where users can still participate with their wallets and they can still do things like KYC, but they can protect their private data, you know. And these are the things that our network can do. And we looked at the problems that are coming up, you know, in a few years, and we realized identity is like a big, big, big deal. And this is the thing, you know, technology is going to help solve some of this stuff. But what we're seeing, though, is everybody's kind of like sitting on the sidelines because no one knows
00:17:52
Speaker
exactly what the final laws and regulations are going to be. So nobody knows what to do.
00:17:58
Speaker
Yeah, no, 100%. So with your LTO network, just as a practical example of this distinction between the private and the public layer, for instance, if I were to transfer you crypto using the LTO network or any kind of token, would the ledger record a transaction but not record a wallet? Is there like, where does the privacy layer come into play?
00:18:23
Speaker
So the privacy layer comes in the applications that people can develop on our chain. So the coin token stuff, you know, that's all public and we're not like Monero or anything like that. So that we're not doing that. It's really about the applications and we're not trying to be a cryptocurrency. There's a tokenomics involved with LTO.
00:18:44
Speaker
Sure. There's a coin, which you know is speculatory, etc. But at the end of the day, we're not trying to use LTO as a payment system for our daily goods and services. Okay. There is a payment system for applications on LTO. So if you have an application that uses our network, you pay a transaction fee. Okay. And those transaction fees are essentially where the payment system comes in. But really where the privacy comes in is if you write an application,
00:19:14
Speaker
on the LTO network that deals with identity and data and personal information and sensitive information. You can deal with that in a really elegant way. So look at one of our software applications that we're releasing publicly something called proofy.
00:19:32
Speaker
Proofy allows you to do a KYC on a wallet without getting any other customer information. So let's say I'm an NFT project and I want to know that I'm only selling NFTs or allowing minting of NFTs to people that are in France and they're over 18. So how do I do that so I can comply with my local laws?
00:19:59
Speaker
Well, proofy, the project asks proofy, hey, can you proofy this wallet? And when you do that, proofy will take the wallet information and take the user through a KYC process through a third party. The data comes back to proofy.
00:20:15
Speaker
Proofy analyzes all of that, then records on the blockchain whether or not that person is eligible to participate. It gives them a sort of verifiable credential, which is kind of like a thing that they can keep forever to say, this is my result. And it tells the project, yes or no, they're allowed to participate. It doesn't give their name, doesn't give their address.
00:20:36
Speaker
doesn't give the age or any of that details, it simply says yes or no, they met your criteria. Now, the project can then go to regulatory people and say, hey, we use proof here for this system. If there is some sort of a legal requirement, like say the project gets on a government auditor or there's concerns about some money laundering or some problems like that with the project, the government
00:21:02
Speaker
can use the typical laws which allow them to get information to then request that information from proofy about that individual customer.
00:21:13
Speaker
but the project doesn't get that information. So let's say places like online casinos, online gaming, a lot of places where you probably don't want to give your personal information over and over and over, your passport picture, all these things that are sensitive to you and people can then use to steal your identity. You don't want to give that to every project you come across.
00:21:35
Speaker
So you would use Proofy and our network allows you to do that. That's fascinating. It's incredible that you guys are able to balance out this sort of private and also keep it GDPR compliant and everything. Is Proofy or do you guys have plans to bring this kind of technology for like cross chain compatibility or do you have to only use the LTO network to benefit from that?
00:22:02
Speaker
Luckily, we've got a partnership with Chainlink. So we're using their network to make that data available cross-chain. We'll also create our own bridges to any chains that they don't cater for. So ultimately, that user information
00:22:20
Speaker
about the yes or no can be queried by like an AVM project, you know, on Ethereum, or by an smart chain project through the Chainlink integration. Right. That's really cool. So from what I've read from your white paper is you've got something called because this basically this is this technology Europe, you're applying it in different ways.
Improving NFTs with Ownables
00:22:42
Speaker
So using it on proofy to KYC people is one application of this technology, but you also have
00:22:48
Speaker
your own take on NFTs and you're calling them ownables, right? They're actually not, like, ownables are really interesting because when we first came up with the light paper for it, we thought that it would be a replacement for NFTs technically. Yeah, because they're called NFTs 2.0, at least in the light paper. Correct. Yeah, yeah. And obviously, like, when you go through the development phase and the R&D phase of
00:23:14
Speaker
tech, you know, you realize some limitations, but then you realize opportunities as well. And where we saw, so ownables, okay, what ownables are essentially, it's a digital collectible that you own and you choose where it is. So the problems that we looked at, I asked Arnold a couple of years ago, I was like, hey, what can we do in the NFT space? And he said, ah, it's all high pipe. I said, look, yeah, sure. But clearly there's a community of people interested in digital collectibles.
00:23:44
Speaker
So what can we solve with these problems that NFTs have? And we looked at the problems from NFTs. One of them was that anybody can copy the content. So the image, like if it's a JPEG or an audio, is publicly available. So the intellectual property and the copying and screenshotting, all that sort of stuff is a problem that has been there from day one. The other one is
00:24:10
Speaker
You don't choose where it is. So the NFT project that creates it and the marketplaces, they connect you to the asset. So quite often you can get like 404s, you could lose your assets. There's a lot of problems that can happen. Yeah, 100%. Not to mention that I've seen collections using AWS buckets to store their images. Just kind of weird considering that's probably as far as you can go away from decentralization.
00:24:38
Speaker
Yeah, and who knows what will happen? And if the project dies, then your NFT is kind of worthless in the future. So for us, anything that you can completely own and control has some intrinsic value. So let's say that the original creator disappears, the whole project is completely gone, but you still have the asset
00:25:00
Speaker
And maybe in 50 years, a new Metaverse application or some game will come and say, hey, I will support this ownable that was created in 2023. And the value is retained. So what it is, again, is it's a digital collectible that you control where it lives. It can be on an IPFS. It can be in your hard drive. It can be in your own digital wallet, which we're developing.
00:25:28
Speaker
But the other thing that it does is a technology called consumables. OK, so with NFTs, you can do some dynamic stuff. It's incredibly complicated to do it really well. Typically, you need a website which does all these sort of things. And there's a lot of dev power that goes into making NFTs dynamic.
00:25:48
Speaker
and they're quite limited in how much dynamic aspects you can bring. So, ownables, each ownable is its own Cozumwasm smart contract and they're highly functional. There's a lot you can do with it. You can have an embedded widget. You can have ownables that consume other ownables. So let's just say, I know you've got a potion in a video game.
00:26:13
Speaker
And one ownable is a character in a video. Again, it can consume another ownable.
00:26:20
Speaker
And once that ownable is consumed, it's gone forever. Now, for game creators and content creators, that gives them an incentive to come up with crazy new ideas of things that they can do with this technology beyond what NFTs can currently do. It's quite fascinating what we're able to achieve with it. It's just in the infancy we launched the SDK only a few weeks ago.
00:26:48
Speaker
there's a whole fully functional wallet that's going to go with it. And we believe that projects, like we're talking to projects that, you know, NFT projects that haven't done so well in the bear market, you know, over the last couple of years. And they're saying, hey, we can't afford to get devs to keep growing our project ideas, but we've got really cool creative ideas.
00:27:12
Speaker
Well, Ownable solves that because all the hardcore tech stuff happens automatically inside the wallet. You know, they don't necessarily need a dev to try the project going onwards. Yeah. Yeah. So what happens on the chain once an Ownable consumes a consumable basically? Does that get burned? Does that get sent to a burn address or something?
00:27:32
Speaker
So essentially, the event gets recorded on the public ledger side of things. So the amount of potion remaining goes out to zero and that's recorded publicly. And so anybody who receives that ownable or looks at it, we'll see that there's nothing left in it, essentially.
Gaming Innovations with Ownables
00:27:56
Speaker
This kind of tech is also used for, I was talking about the privacy aspect, which is,
00:28:02
Speaker
something that's really important. You can have like a like say it's a piece of art and the actual art itself whoever owns the owner will concede the full art but the wallet and the public can see like maybe a cropped or a blurred or a low res version if it's a movie could be like just a short version of the movie but the owner gets to see the whole length and that's because the full package is on the private layer
00:28:30
Speaker
but the cropped version or the cut-down versions on the public layer, you know? That's really cool. And that's also something that I feel a lot of marketplaces are struggling with when it comes to creating a web-friendly, web-optimized NFT marketplace. I work in marketing, I work with an art gallery, and we're doing NFT projects, and we have our own marketplace, and I'm quite involved in the tech side of it as well.
00:28:57
Speaker
So one of the issues that I'm seeing right now, if you're looking at NFTs that are meant to be their own, are hosted in IPFS or Arweave, is that you're more or less forced to take the metadata and then display whatever comes from the metadata. And most artists only work with the original file, like no one's actually going to create a custom metadata and add a preview of your video.
00:29:23
Speaker
So that creates a lot of overhead for us. Like do we offload this image? Do we use like a middleware or something to optimize the size of it? Because it's really quite challenging to do. You have so many videos that all want to load at the same time. And then like the marketplace can literally like break your page. And in five years time, 10 years time, the previews you have now.
00:29:46
Speaker
may not be sufficient. One thing that's really worth mentioning, and I forgot to add that when you were asking about if we're trying to be a replacement for NFTs. So ownables, when you create an ownable, what happens is you build the ownable, and it creates the ownable on our network, but it also creates a matching Ethereum NFT for it. So the NFT is married to the ownable,
00:30:16
Speaker
And what happens is you can use the NFT on a public marketplace and somebody can sell that to another person, et cetera. And whoever's got the NFT can go to our bridge and claim the ownable. So two technologies, yes. So that's what I meant. We're not trying to replace NFTs. We're actually kind of, if you think about it,
00:30:37
Speaker
more like a layer two for NFTs. We're bringing extra functionality, extra scalability to the NFT ecosystem. There's no point trying to replace NFTs completely. There's too many people that are using it. The technology is entrenched, but we're adding to it.
00:30:58
Speaker
No, I think that's really cool. I think that also I can see a really interesting use case for consumables in gaming, but especially in MMO gaming. You could have decentralized servers that are all aware of each ownables type of consumables. You could play around with some pretty cool things there. You could really give people the freedom to create decentralized MMO games or things that are not possible right now in gaming. And I'm yet to see a really cool
00:31:27
Speaker
blockchain-based gaming experience. Like you could have a character who is in an MMO game but then outside of the game you could even have like its own thing where you could like I don't know let's say it's a horse you know you can feed that horse in your wallet
00:31:46
Speaker
And you could give it skills and special features and stuff like that without even having to go in the game. And that becomes something that you take with you while you're just sitting on the bus. Then you go back home and you're connected to your laptop or whatever, your VR goggles, and then your horse has evolved since then. And that's stuff you can't do at the moment.
00:32:04
Speaker
Yeah, and not to mention that you're probably creating a system that's unhackable. I'm not playing MMOs anymore because I don't really have time. I used to play a few MMOs back in the day. I spent way too many hours on something called Cabal Online. It's just a classic MMO. You build your character, you grind hours and hours and hours on skills and gear.
00:32:24
Speaker
Um, and then at the time, I remember you were able to, if you really knew your way around the application, you could, you could basically break it to duplicate items. Like you could dupe your loot. Like if you've got a cool sword, you could just like put it in your inventory, remove it for inventory. Interesting. Yeah.
00:32:40
Speaker
So I'm guessing this would basically not exist anymore. You wouldn't be able to hack or... Yeah, correct. Each individual, like ownable, it's an immutable, unhackable item. Somebody could make a fake one, but if the project doesn't support it, it doesn't support it. We've come up with additional stuff that's on our roadmap. One thing that I'm really excited about is how proofy technology can KYC individuals, but it can also KYC businesses.
00:33:10
Speaker
So let's say you've got a KYC on a business, let's say on a Nike and you're like, okay, so this wallet is the official Nike wallet and we've proven that through business credentials.
Business Verification with Proofy
00:33:22
Speaker
Okay. Then Nike wants to issue some ownables, like a bunch of, you know, different sneakers or whatever, digital sneakers. Proofy will be able to then connect to the ownable and you will know that the ownable that you're buying or you own is from the real Nike.
00:33:41
Speaker
Right. Yeah. So in the case of your game, you know, you could be like, hey, that sword is really the one that's issued by, you know, whoever the game company is. And it's the real authentic one, not a copy, not a hack. It's the real original one, you know, and that brings real value to these collectibles, in my opinion.
00:34:01
Speaker
No, 100%. It's crazy we're not doing that right now. It's crazy that you've got a layer on top of like you've got OpenSea that verifies wallets or whatever other marketplaces, but it's crazy that like on Ethereum at least, you don't really know whose wallet is who. I guess that's part of having it sort of anonymous, but also public.
00:34:20
Speaker
I think a few months ago, Ethereum and Vitalik were talking about adding a privacy layer to the Ethereum chain. Have you guys thought about how that might play out with your network in case it does happen? I think it was just discussion. I'm not sure if it was an actual proposal on the chain.
00:34:41
Speaker
Yeah, look, I've seen a few different things come across. One of them is, I'm not sure about if it's the exact same thing that we're talking about, but I've also seen a proposal that allows additional dynamic and privacy stuff for NFTs. But at the end of the day, it starts to become a lot of overhead for projects and developers who have to create this stuff. So the way that we're doing it is the consuming
00:35:08
Speaker
Let's say you've got a car and you want to give it a paint in your game or whatever. That consumption happens in our wallet. The game can do it as well, but if you're a small developer and you don't have the resources to add a whole Web 3 component into your application to your game, you can let the wallet handle that and offloads all that dev work. It makes it so much easier for you to do that.
00:35:37
Speaker
Right. So I don't know how techy you want to go into this, but what are some of the like, if I wanted to write a smart contract on the LTO network, um, what language would I have to use for that?
00:35:47
Speaker
This is definitely going way too tech for me. But at the end of the day, I know that just any general full stack developer is able to develop apps on our network. The ownable stuff, it's a Cosmwasm smart contract, which is JavaScript-esque from what I understand. I'm not a developer on marketing guy. It is JavaScript-esque, but it does require dev knowledge. But the way that we're doing things different is
00:36:15
Speaker
we're actually implementing tools and creating stuff. So content creators don't always need to go in and do it the hard way. Like before, you got to go in, you got to get a developer. If you're a graphic designer, you kind of can't do it alone. You need a bit of a help to get these things. We're trying to build a range of tools to allow people to create ownables and not just basic ownables, but full featured ownables with most of the use cases that we can imagine just through click, drag and drop.
00:36:46
Speaker
That's cool. I like that. So people would just be able to create their own thing from scratch on the chain without any kind of outsourcing, any sort of developing experience or anything like that. That's like the ideal perfect dream, you know? Yeah, no, 100%. So what are some of the specifications of the chain or what's the usual transaction fee or cost to create a smart contract?
00:37:16
Speaker
Look, generally most things cost less than one LTO, which at the moment is about six or seven cents. These transaction fees are able to be, there's two things you can do. You can batch transactions. So you can have up to 999.
00:37:34
Speaker
you know, records done in one transaction if your app is able to be efficient enough to do that. But other than that, if we're realizing that the cost of transactions becomes an impedance to the network growth, the nodes can vote on the cost of the transactions.
00:37:52
Speaker
So they can make it a port like half an LTO if they want or whatever. But we're not seeing that as an issue at the moment. It was in the past. It used to be before the batching used to cost projects a lot. So we've got a lot of projects that are still doing anchoring and stuff from our enterprise core.
00:38:16
Speaker
And we've still got some more anchoring stuff coming up, especially with like land registration, et cetera. And these projects, you know, the batching helps them keep the costs down. But essentially it's like one ownable. Under one LTO. You will have to pay some gas fees for the NFT aspect of it, though, that gets created. But you don't have to get an NFT made for it if you don't want to have ownables married to Ethereum.
00:38:42
Speaker
Oh, you mean like if you wanted to have the, you wanted to have it on Ethereum, then you'd pay the Ethereum gas fee. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I was just going to ask you, um, uh, what do you mean by anchoring for people that don't know? So anchoring is, um, uh, essentially it's recording, uh, a line of data, you know, one piece of block of data to the blockchain. Okay. So if you think of like an Excel spreadsheet, um, one row of stuff can get recorded on the blockchain. Nobody can touch that forever. You know, it's immutable. Um, right.
00:39:10
Speaker
locked into the blockchain.
00:39:13
Speaker
In the past, in our enterprise past, a lot of stuff that we piloted, we did stuff with the Dutch government, IBM, a lot of enterprise people where they were using old systems to share data and manage data. And then the cost of securing and verifying and maintaining the integrity of that data was quite expensive.
00:39:42
Speaker
So they did a lot of pilots on LTO network to test out things like, for example, I think there was a waste management application. There's a real estate companies and all sorts of different companies that are using LTO. Some were in pilots, some are still continuing and they record that data on the blockchain and the management of that data and keeping it secure and safe and that they don't have to do backups and all these sorts of data management things.
00:40:09
Speaker
And that's what anchoring is. It's just keeping some data on the blockchain really easily. Right. Cool. Thanks for explaining. That makes sense. So I had another question about your project, the LTO network. So one of the things that you had in your light paper was a metaverse. Is that something that you guys built or are you building and what plans do you have for that?
Interoperability in Metaverses
00:40:35
Speaker
Oh, so the thing about Ownables is Ownables is the perfect, in our view, technology for digital assets in metaversus. The reason is because it's not centralized.
00:40:51
Speaker
One Metaverse can use it and so can another Metaverse. You don't need the marketplace to help you connect to the asset itself, etc. So let's say you've got a sword in your wallet. You go to a Metaverse that supports your class of sword or brand of sword, whatever, and you can use your sword there. Then you finish gaming for the day, you take it back, put it in your wallet. Tomorrow you want to go to another Metaverse. You will then connect your wallet to that Metaverse and your sword is available there.
00:41:18
Speaker
So that's where our work with Metaverse comes into play. So we're hoping that in the future, a different Metaverse will support ownables natively. If they don't and they do it through NFTs, that's okay as well. But yeah, that's how we're looking. And we've actually been fortunate enough to connect with, there's like a standards body that is forming around Metaverse's, things called the Metaverse Standards Group.
00:41:49
Speaker
There's a number of where we're part of that. There's like, there's like Nvidia, I think Microsoft, a lot of big companies, all part of this body, trying to figure out what the interoperability and the standards and the future of metaversus are going to look like. And that's where we fit in. We want to be part of that. We want to be the fabric of, you know, digital assets on the metaverse if we can. Yeah.
00:42:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's super important, especially considering that you have, um, there's a lot of complexity there, right? Because of course you're going to point to like an image or a video or, or whatever kind of file it is, but then how do you render that in a, in a 3d space? Cause I'm guessing you guys will have to work with like the metaverses that are out there with the central land to help you render that object in 3d or something.
00:42:36
Speaker
Like that technology kind of blows my mind because I know how it under I can understand like the technology how you'd get it there But how do you get it to display in like in a game? So like we see like let's say you've got an ownable for a sword. Okay. Let's keep using that example We're not sure how the standards are gonna work and this is what's being discussed at the moment, but let's say that
00:43:02
Speaker
There'll be some variation of this kind of thing where you will have a picture of the sword, like a PNG maybe. You might have an OBJ file or some sort of 3D file. You might have another type of 3D file. You might have an SVG of it. You might have a low bit GIF of it as well. So there'll be different versions of the same asset.
00:43:27
Speaker
in the package, and it'll be applicable to different places. Because let's say you've got a 2D platform game that is a metaverse, technically. Metaverses don't have to be 3D. It's just kind of like a world that people live in digitally. They will want to use a different kind of asset than a 3D file. A 3D file might be completely useless to them. So a creator,
00:43:55
Speaker
will be like, hey, I want to create something that can be used in this, this, and this. And they will create all the different assets in mind. Wow. So you could have the same object that's basically 2D or 3D or anywhere in between. That's really cool. Yeah. So essentially it's a zip file, which we're figuring out what the capacity and the limitations of the file size are.
00:44:23
Speaker
But whatever they end up being, we think it would be a few hundred megabytes. Whatever they end up being, people will work within that and create as many useful assets as they can for that one thing. And they might not create multiple.
00:44:38
Speaker
the metaverse standard stuff that we're talking about here all these things are being discussed about what different formats what different structures you know is there a way to have every type of metaverse look at the same file formats you know and these are discussions which will happen and i think there will be multiple standards possibly in the future like there's no
00:45:00
Speaker
There's no technology where the whole world has agreed on how to do it the one way. And companies and businesses are involved. Things change very rapidly. We're figuring out how that stuff works and planning ahead for it. Cool. And is everyone available? Is everyone able to use your chain to build stuff on it? Or do you have to go invite only? And what kind of features can people use? I'm guessing some of them are built, some of them you're still building out.
00:45:28
Speaker
Yeah, look, I mean, we made a post about a year a year ago, a year and a half ago saying that we're currently an
Building on the LTO Network
00:45:36
Speaker
island. So when we were doing the enterprise stuff, LTO was a blockchain, a public blockchain.
00:45:42
Speaker
for LTO, the company to use to build our own applications for companies. But what we are trying to do is be a properly decentralized blockchain with a view for anybody who wants to come and build on our network can come and do so. We're creating the structures and the tools for them to do that. You can come and build on LTO, do whatever you want right now. It's open source, that documentation is there, et cetera. But in my view,
00:46:10
Speaker
Once the Ownables technology hits the mainnet, so currently it's on our testnet with our software development kit, that's when we'll probably start seeing the real growth happen. But right now, if you're a developer, we want you to come and test out. You can build some sample Ownables, you can test the technology out. You can come into our Telegram or into our Discord server. If you go to Ownables.info,
00:46:35
Speaker
You'll be able to get all the links, hop in, have some tech chats. We're here to guide you. We're here to help you. It's really early days. Like we are on the bleeding edge of technology, which is really exciting. But I imagine what it was like, you know, in those early Bitcoin forums and, you know, like the mail groups that, you know, existed when they, yeah, like create that technology.
00:47:02
Speaker
ecosystem early days. If you're a developer, come and hop on in. We will support you. We just had a few discussions recently. We're going to be creating some developer fund, an incentive scheme to get developers to help create things on our network, and we will reward them for doing so. There's a lot of ways that we're trying to support growth.
00:47:31
Speaker
and invite developers. We want developers, you know. Yeah, developers, please jump on. No, that's awesome, dude. Do you want to give your LTO's Twitter handle and website? So if you go to twitter.com slash the LTO network, and if you go to ltonetwork.com,
00:47:52
Speaker
Or if you go to ownables.info, you'll be able to hop onto our channels and come get involved. We've actually got a really fun and very engaged community. Yeah, if you're into talking and banter and having fun with community members, and if you really care about the tech, I think you'll enjoy being part of the LTO community groups.
00:48:15
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah. I mean, I like exploring new technologies. I like, that's kind of the reason to have this podcast. I like talking to people who build new things. So you might, you might just see me on there as well. Just shooting the breeze on the, uh, yeah, I think there's a couple of metal heads in the, in there as well. And, um, like where, where, where the original project team is Dutch, you know, so there's a lot of Europeans across all of Europe.
00:48:38
Speaker
from the UK to the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, you know, Eastern Europe. There's a lot of us, a lot of Turkish as well. So just come and hang out. It's a fun space and we just love to talk tech. Yeah, 100%. That sounds ideal to me, man. Thanks a lot for coming on. Thanks a lot for the invite. Thanks a lot for taking the time to talk about the LTO network. It's genuinely been a pleasure.
00:49:04
Speaker
Thank you. Good luck with your podcast. I think there's a brilliant thing you're doing. Thank you again. Thank you, man. Have a nice day. See everybody.