Did you hear about that $69 million NFT sale on Christie’s? Well, we just dove right into NFTs! NFTs or non-fungible tokens are unique digital items that are not interchangeable. We are beginning to see the rise and value of NFTs take off, mostly in the creative industries, where we see digital art, music and other creative work being bought and sold as NFTs. In this episode we explore the state of play of the NFT world and how they have taken the world by storm this past year. Our guest, Ryan goes on to discuss the origins and beginnings of NFTs and the creative industries, namely creators and artists in Hollywood, his former hometown.

We continue discussing the potential and opportunity NFTs hold for creators that have been traditionally left out of the spotlight and off the stage. Ryan describes how new and young creators can take work into their own hands and start making a living for themselves without necessarily needing to answer to the current “gatekeepers” of the creative industry.

Ryan shares the work they are doing at Crucible and his vision for the platform and how it will contribute to a larger paradigm shift of what he calls an Open Metaverse. We also touch on the future of NFTs and how the world will look in a decade’s time because of this new technology.

We want to give a special shoutout to our sponsor Blockfinex.

Special Guests: Ryan Gill

Special Guest: Ryan Gill.

Woodstock Fund is a new and emerging crypto fund based out of India and Pranav delves into how their fund operates, in particular, their 3 core focuses, which include:
Public decentralised ledger technology
Decentralised finance
Web 3.0

Pranav shares his experience of co-creating creative solutions in sales and distribution and how his learnings through creating this led him to create the fund he is running today.

Ahmed sets the theme for the episode which focuses on the right investment vehicles behind cryptocurrencies and assessing the optimal token models that make sense.

Starting off with public chains, Pranav explains their thesis behind the investments they made in Holochain, Casper Labs and Elrond. From a decentralised finance perspective, Pranav shares why this emerging sector is not just important for the new value it can bring but how it’s solving problems that currently exist in traditional finance. Web 3.0, according to Pranav, is all about being more human and unbundling of the human potential wherever you are in the world.

Pranav expresses that the right economics has to come into play before any consideration of investment. Ahmed is intrigued about what is the right vehicle when investing in these projects as the investor can invest in equity, tokens and convertible notes. In the past two years, countless projects used tokens as a way to raise money without necessarily thinking about how token economics will play and pan out in the future.

How do you define the right instrument when building out a project? Pranav argues the business model should drive this decision and currently, in this cycle of the crypto market we are seeing more projects using the right instruments during fundraising.
But the question still arises, should investors go for equity (which has legal recourse) or go for tokens which are still largely unregulated with not so much legal recourse.

Running a pro token investment fund, Pranav gives many suggestions to the above, from a dual equity-token structure, or raising through an STO which can then be converted to a utility, or the project themselves having to bootstrap the project until they find minimum viable utility where a token is the right instrument in this case.

Tokens as a unit of trust
Ahmed and Pranav then discuss the different ways to assess token models and how an investor can discern whether a token model makes sense or not. Pranav shares his experience with the 6 investments they have made and that a token model should be looked at from two important aspects: Ecosystem and adoption.

Someone can create the best technology ever, but if the ecosystem is small and there is zero to little adoption, then what is the point? Pranav also shares a technical-economic response between demand and supply and how the right economics should facilitate more adoption in a perpetual enforcing cycle.

All of the above and more will be on this week’s episode of Encrypted!

If you liked what you heard, please do leave us a review on iTunes and the other platforms. Don’t forget to support us by spreading the word!

Special Guest: Pranav Sharma.

Ahmed catches up with Jamie in London to learn more about Outlier Ventures, how they’re structured, their investment thesis and what makes them different as a VC investing in this space.

Unlike other VCs, Outlier is funded by the capital of the co-founders, their team is mostly comprised of technical analysts and researchers in order to do a lot of applied learning as well as supporting the projects they invest in and contributing to the wider ecosystem building out open source networks. Jamie likes to describe Outlier as more of an incubator or a Venture as a Platform business where they reinvest all returns into the platform, where they recently committed to reinvesting $30 million of their own capital in the next 3 years to support investments.

Jamie then goes onto to discuss the concept of Convergence and what the Convergence stack is, how autonomous agents work, and how they’re trying to create the new data economy.
He talks about the evolution of the internet citing two main innovations; platforms and cloud. Like every other person who believes in the space, Jamie touches upon the current problems of the internet and these past innovations, in particular how big platforms and cloud providers have become. With European regulators trying to strive ahead to unbundle these mammoth platforms to protect the end consumer, Jamie shares how they are solving these problems and preparing for what consumers demand in the future.

If you’re a governance lover, Ahmed and Jamie discuss the concept of Pathway to Decentralisation. This is a really interesting concept and idea which proposes founders and projects to never codify assumptions early on and to keep some aspects centralised until their assumptions are validated. Jamie also shares their recent partnership with Smart Dubai and how they’re working together.

Ultimately, this awesome episode is all about the new internet, theorizing how it could play out and what's needed to realise the vision. What’s amazing is that this is all a socio-economic experiment and we have no idea what will happen.

All this and more on this week's episode of Encrypted.

Also, the legal bits for the soundtrack used in the podcast:
Music Credit: LAKEY INSPIRED

Track Name: Warm Nights

Music By: LAKEY INSPIRED @ https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired

Original upload HERE – https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired/warm-nights

License for commercial use: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported “Share Alike” (CC BY-SA 3.0) License.

Full License HERE – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

Special Guest: Jamie Burke.