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Background
Mint Season 2 episode 14 welcomes Jeff Marsilio and Jordan Lyall of Nifty’s, who are building the ultimate destination for creators, collectors, and curators.
In this episode, we talk about:
- Web2 social media vs. Web3
- On-chain curation
- Building social products in web3
- Art collabs via Common Canvas
- Introducing Damien Hirst and SpaceJam to NFTs
- What will eat web3?
…and so much more.
Thank you to Season 2’s NFT sponsors!
1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co/
2. POAP – https://poap.xyz/
3. Socialstack – https://socialstack.co/
4. Celo – https://celo.org/
5. PrimeDAO – https://www.prime.xyz/
Interested in becoming an NFT sponsor? Get in touch here!
Jeff and Jordan, welcome to Mint. I’m so excited to have you guys on let’s just jump right into it. I want to save our time. So Jeff and Jordan, give me a quick brief about yourselves. We can start with Jeff and then and then go to.
Jeff Marsillo: Well, I’m the CEO of Nifty’s and before Jordan and I and some other co-founders started Nifty’s.
I was at the NBA for the last eight years where I was senior vice president of new media, which meant my group was responsible for things like partnerships with social media companies and app distribution and digital content strategy. And one of the areas that we were. Responsible for was you know emerging technologies and how they might impact the fan experience.
And as part of that, we created a blockchain working group that ended up creating NBA top shot with dapper labs. And of course you know, they did that for labs. I think that all the hard work and, and we also had some good luck with timing, but it ended up being a an NFT. And for me, what that meant was that I got a front row seat to NFT’s entering the main stream.
And I came to appreciate that, not only is it an extraordinary revolution in the way that people can engage with creativity, create, and, of course, own things on the internet, But it was also still pretty early and there just was still a lot of opportunity. So I met Jordan at around that time, you know, just this last winter.
And we got to talking and we came up with Nifty’s and here we are.
Give me a quick brief about yourselves. Who are you and what were you doing before crypto?
Jordan Lyall: Thanks, man. Prior to joining up with Jeff and the rest of the founding team I was at consensus, so I spent two years at consensus as the product lead for Defi. So I ran several teams that innovated in the Defi space in the early days of Defi Created several projects around risk within Defi and we issued a couple token staking platforms. Prior to that, I was a chief product officer at a Dex startup called total. I know your former employer is really close to total invested. Prior to that, I sold a web 2 startup to a company called Jib jab, a big entertainment, digital media company in LA.
So I worked on, you know, fund media, digital content for a few years. Then I was doing blockchain for three or four years. Now I’m doing fun digital content on the blockchain with NFT’s. So it’s a fun kind of career arc for me. And You know, without bearing the lead too much. More recently, about a year ago, we just celebrated one year of meme.
We launched the meme project in August of 2020, and that really led to innovation with Defi but also with NFT’s and that kicked off this project in the community and Jumped into the NFT community with both feet and got to experience the amazing community here. And it really, you know, taught me about building for not just, financial tools, but being able to have, have like creativity come into play and building maybe more some of the things that I learned in my startup and then selling to jib, jab, and working at jib jab about building consumer products for the first time on a web three stack. And then we’ve come full circle here and we’re building something with that tries to take that delicate balance of focused on new users who may not be, who may not know what a, what a private key is and introduce them to something that Changes the game, to use that phrase.
It’s something certainly exciting. The ability to own content and own digital content for the first time and transact and provide incentives. And now for the first time, it’s like known IP as we do several big brand partnerships. So it’s super exciting. We’re having a lot of fun.
Adam Levy: You guys are two OGs in the space. And I really do respect and applaud your progress so far, which kind of leads me to this question. You’ve obviously seen a lot of the development of the NFT, the space over the few years. What’s the current state as of now, where are we seeing like, just to throw some metrics out there, we’re seeing open sea achieve a billion dollars in transaction volume in a month.I think a couple of days ago it was like a hundred million dollars. Crazy amounts of money. And also keeping in mind, a lot of these NFTs are high ticket items, which also contributes to it. Right?
So what’s the current state? I’d love to get both of your points of views.
Jordan Lyall: For me, it’s still early and we’re really experimenting..
We’re seeing a little bit of FOMO. We’re seeing people that are buying NFTs just because they think they may go up tomorrow. So there is a ton of hype, whether it’s justified or not. I think so. And then what’s super cool is that we’re seeing some of these big brands and some of these maybe more experienced and established product builders enter the space.
You know, the first couple of years it’s always developers building for developers. Now we’re actually starting to see well-funded companies. Big brands, big budgets enter the space and we’re seeing it for the consumer experience that it can be.
Jeff Marsillo: Well said, I mean, I look at some of the numbers and there’s, there’s something that’s kind of out of, out of whack in a way. There are extraordinary sales volumes though. But the numbers of individual people who are actually engaging with NFTs as a medium, whereas the technology is still really small.
So I think you’ve got a group of passionate, early adopters who are willing to, you know, put up with some of the complications and difficulties of engaging in a new space, some of the risks of engaging in a new space, but you’re seeing the average person. And frankly, the average company kind of waits on the sideline until they feel like it’s ready, the space is ready for them to enter it. And, you know, even the NBA, obviously a big brand and maybe a little less risk averse than other big brands. So relatively early in this game But with, with top shot, the numbers are in some ways extraordinary, but still relative to the billions of people in the world who are NBA fans, the number of people who are engaging with NBA top shot, I think, is pretty small.
So you know, that’s kind of where we come in. I mean, I think a big part of it is just making it a lot easier to use, removing some of the Obstacles some of the some of the jargon simplifying that, and then bringing in the opportunity to be social around it. So it’s not just about what Jordan was talking about, right.
Speculating on value. It can also be. Joining communities don’t get me wrong. Community is like the name of the game and the NFT space, but there hasn’t really been a home, a native home for that community to emerge. So we are trying to build one of those homes and really emphasize engagement, really emphasize, ease of use and invite everybody who’s on the sorta, you know, the sidelines to enter the space and have fun with everybody else who’s already here. Just being creative and engaging with this creativity.
Adam Levy: Agreed. The current state of NFTs from my point of view is it’s very, multi-platform right. You’re living across discord. You’re living across Twitter. We’ve been slowly dabbling into Instagram a little bit, but it feels very scattered because you also have to go to open sea and to all these different NFT platforms. So I think this kind of gets me to my next question here, I’d love for you to kind of build upon what is the grand vision for Nifty’s here.
I know you touched upon it and talked about more of a central hub for NFT’s, but what does that look like? What does that really mean?
Jeff Marsillo: You know essentially I kind of think about it as a difficult to analogize to current examples because currently in the world of web 2.0, we talk about marketplaces and we talk about social networks and social media companies. And really what if these want to be something like a merger of those two? So Jordan and I will often call it a social marketplace, but it is a place. And by the way, the reason, the reason being. The distinction between commerce and content is by definition blurred. When you talk about NFT’s and if these are content and commerce.
And so we believe that the complete experience that isn’t don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that in the future there’s just one NFT home and that’s it. I don’t think it’s like that. I think it’s like video or even bigger than that, where there will be many, many homes, but a really complete experience is going to need to embrace commerce and embrace, embrace social.
And that’s what we want to do. We want to be a marketplace that has a home for communities. And then as a place where the average person and the average brand can come and engage with this new media.
Adam Levy: Yeah. It’s interesting because like, you look at web 2 social media right now, they kind of, they use the user as the product, leveraging their data, promoting advertisements to them, etc. And when you’re talking about social media being web 3ified quote on quote you’re kind of like, you need to, re-imagine what that business model looks like. Right. Instead of exploiting user data, we’re seeing a lot of trends of platforms, putting users at the core of what they’re doing, giving them governance tokens, and making them core contributors to how the platforms move forward. Jordan, obviously, they have a lot of experience with that with me and kind of the rise of meme and how that started from literally a tweet. And now it’s this grandiose platform, right? So there’s a lot of history guys.
How do you guys view the business models kind of evolving for these web three or social media platforms? And you can take this either from your point of view, what you guys are doing or how platforms in the future are going to be leveraging this new form of user data.
Jeff Marsillo: I mean, I think it’s, it’s a super challenging question. I very briefly I think that we don’t know exactly how it will evolve. We have some ideas about how we’re going to approach it. But one of the things that’s just extraordinary about NFCS is they really open up the possibilities and a whole bunch of new directions that just, you know what, weren’t there with web 2.0 web 2.0, sort of inevitable that you that you end up, you know, essentially monetizing engagement through.
Because you know, the unit of media, the individual video, the individual photograph, or whatever was static and not very smart, right? Like you just, it’s just a video with NFTs. The unit of media is itself programmable, so you can put rules. That relate to how you transact with it, how you engage with it how it makes money, how it pays money out, how the rights are managed, that are just almost infinitely flexible.
So what it means then is everything is kind of possible now. And probably what you will see is you will see you know, kind of cornucopia of platforms and their means of monetizing engagement and monetize. Content for nifty is where we’re starting out is where a lot of other platforms have started out.
We monetize by by taking transaction fees because people are right now are buying and selling. Yeah. We don’t have any plans to simply monetize data. Like you suggested that just isn’t anywhere in our thinking or on our, in our roadmap. But I do think that our way means of monetization could potentially evolve beyond the simple transaction fee down the road. But I don’t know exactly where it might take us.
Adam Levy: You know, one thing that I like to think about. All user data is public, right? Everything. Now on the blockchain, it’s all like anonymized per se. But you can build interesting narratives around wallets, Based off the currencies that they hold based off past transactions that they’ve made. Like the first thing that comes to mind is, and I use them a lot in mantas friends with benefits, That’s like a social community that if you hold these tokens, like the 77 tokens. You could make an assumption that this user is part of this community, right? If you hold meme to an extent, right? So meme tokens, you can make some assumptions that that user has some involvement in the meme community. If you look at his past transactions and you see that he’s maybe used either nifty or open sea, or this platform or that platform, you can kind of build a narrative about where the expertise you’re actually able to build is like decentralized social graphs. And build narratives around users. And I see Jordan, you’re smiling and you’re nodding your head. I feel like you’ve thought about this before from a product point of view.
How do you feel about the role of on-chain data in building products?
Jordan Lyall: No, you’re hitting the nail on the head and I’m really glad you went there because you’re right. It’s public information. It’s all on the blockchain. Anyone can easily see what a wallet holds, pick any wallet and you’ll be able to just, okay, they hold these tokens, these these NFTs and you can kind of.
You can kind of find out more about their identity or identity for maybe for the first time is, is on public display. You just can’t really access it at all. One thing that’s always kind of been the through-line through everything we build is the ability to showcase your collection. Right now we’ve got a playlist where silver surfer has identified the top NFTs in his own personal collection.
We’re really starting to scratch the surface of what it means to be able to curate an NFT gallery. And it doesn’t have to just be for people like SilverSurfer with a lot of ease to burn, right? Like he’s, he’s one use case. Another one is I don’t have to collect physically own these NFTs, but I’m able to curate and put together a playlist and match up different art styles and But it all comes back to the user type.
And for the first time we can, now, when someone connects their wallets and fifties, we know a lot about them, not in a super-secret way where we’ve, we’ve been spying on them. Although there may be some education that’s needed as web two users may not be familiar with some of these practices. And we want to be as compliant and user-friendly as possible in everything we do, but you’re almost building out the.
Web three identity for everybody that connects to the site and you’re able to, Hey, I see you like space jam. We’ll have you, have you checked out tough shots or vice versa, or you’re able to identify the user before they even take an action on your platform. So I think it’s about combining kind of these, these things that we’ve been building in web to some of these Integrations and practices about really building a worthwhile product that provides a lot of value and then applying it to the unique tools that we get in web three.
Adam Levy: Yeah, you know, this moment in time really reminds me of a very iconic period in tech history. Do you guys remember that whole scene? I was really young during this time, but I kind of remember it starting to develop. Apple introduced the iTunes store and the ability to buy songs for a dollar 29, right. Or at 99 cents. And their main reasoning is that the problem they were trying to solve is one making streaming more accessible to the end-user, without them having to store it, all the songs and illegally download stuff. And they realize there’s actually a market for people who want to support artists and purchasing. And that’s obviously before streaming came out, etc. Now people just pay a one-month fee to access unlimited songs, but the point being a lot of that moment of time caught, it reminds me of where we are today with NFTs, right. The purchase and consumption of media.
Do you guys ever like have a reference point in times when you’re building out Nifty’s? And kind of reflect, like, why are people spending so much, what does this level of ownership mean to the end-user and how can we integrate that? What do you guys kind of think about that process when building it out?
Jeff Marsillo: You’re getting deep here. It’s a I think first and foremost, it’s, it’s social in the sense that all of these things have valid. Only in connection or in relation to other people, how we feel about other people, how we want other people to feel about us. Jordan was talking about how your wallet can almost be your identity.
And that’s really because NFTs are a form of self-expression, right? You’re you are, you are expressing something about your preferences and it’s not enough, frankly, on Nifty’s you can make playlists. And those playlists can showcase things that you are just interested in, things that you own, things that you created, but you don’t have to own their creative them to make a playlist.
And we think playlists are great and it got to be a great way to get into this space, but it’s not the same thing as owning an NFT because when you own the NFT, you’re saying something else you’re saying I have invested time. I’ve invested in. I’ve invested myself in this, this unit of culture that I’m now showing off.
And so that I think that investment and that sort of showing off, go hand in hand and have cultural meaning for people. I’ve got a book on my shelf over here, somewhere called culture and consumption. It’s basically, it’s basically it’s premise is that. All of our choices, all of our choices in commerce, all of our choices and you know, our commercial goings about our cultural decisions.
They’re decisions that we make about how we fit in with other people and how we express our support for other people and how we express ourselves. So, you know, look, I think that we referenced that, that point about human nature. And everything that we do, it’s really the foundation of what nifty is, is and you can look back and there are examples of this through time.
I mean, it goes back to probably the first caveman who found a shiny rock and hung it around his neck. Right. I mean, that’s it’s really not very different from that. Intrinsic need to have something valuable that says something about yourself and show it off to other people that goes back way, way earlier than.
Adam Levy: No, for sure. I think I only really liked that example because you were able to get songs for free. And now Apple came out with this concept of being able to buy them. Right. And you’re able to save pictures and in torrent videos that are technical enough to use also for free, but people see the value of owning it. Right? And it, it really causes us to really reimagine, rethink. What is value on the internet, especially for things that you can’t touch and you can’t feel, you can really only see, I mean, you can get like intimate objects and like frame your collectibles and you can technically touch them, but you know where I’m going with this, this whole movement of like digital ownership, digital scarcity, so many it’s, it’s very new.
Jeff Marsillo: Well, It’s very common and it was very common in the physical world. I mean, if you look at basketball cards or baseball cards, they’re just pictures that are commonly available on 2 cents worth of cardboard generally. But there’s something about the.
And it’s, again, it’s a social construct, something about the fact that these are the ones, these real ones are the ones that were authentically distributed by the person who was responsible for creating it right by the creator, in the sense of the NBA being the creator of basketball. So that just translates to the internet.
What what’s different now with blockchain, of course. And this goes back to, I think something Jordan said. Is ownership is now possible in a way that never was before we feel again, that we really own something on the internet now, because nobody can take it away from us, unlike iTunes or unlike Kindle, where when they shut that app down, you don’t get to take that song and bring it somewhere else.
That’s really their song. You’re borrowing it here. Now the database of ownership is distributed. Nobody can take that away from you. You can pass it onto your grandkids or do what you want with it. That’s the that’s I think the big difference here. Yeah.
Yeah. I want to pivot for a minute into your collaborations and all the projects that you guys are working on, which is super exciting and super mainstream. The first one that comes to mind is Damien Hirst. That’s like selfishly, one of my personal favorite collabs, seeing that documentary come to life, seeing that piece of art come to life and then his first experimentation in I guess dabbling with NFTs was through Nifty’s. I’d love to hear the story of how that kind of came together and what was that process like working with one of the most, I guess, famous artists of our time.
Jordan Lyall: Yeah, it was an interesting one to kind of kick off the platform with right. The Damien Hirst project was organized by Henny and they’re an investor in the fifties. It was collaborated on by consensus and their blockchain. Which is our exclusive side chain platform at the moment.
And I was really close to consensus having just left consensus to start this company. And it just all lined up perfectly that, Hey, we’ve got this, this project that we’re thinking about at the top artist, we’re going to need a secondary market and they need the marketplace. One thing led to another and it just, it just made a lot of sense.
It was an interesting solution to how it kinda came about. The Damien Hirst project was launching at the same time that NIF DS was launching at the same time the Palm network was launching. So it makes for fun stories. We’ll have to have over a beer one day, but I think it was really, it’s a really fun project.
Not just the fact that top artists, maybe the wealthiest artists, living artists chose to do something with NFTs and to in some way, partnering with nifty. But the project is innovative on its own. In a few months, everyone that holds a Damien Hirst tender as they call it, we’ll be able to decide, okay, do you keep it as an NFT or do you turn it into a physical NFT, thus burning?
The NFT. Do you turn it into a physical piece that you can receive in the mail, the choice of physical or digital? It’s a really fun project. It was something great to kind of put our brand next to those brands next to Damien Hirst. Yeah, it’s a tremendous project. And we’re excited about the future.
Jeff Marsillo: Look, I just think it’s a, I didn’t think about it this way at the moment you were asking the question, Adam, but it’s kind of the perfect. Illustration of what we were just talking about, right? Because it is this, this art project that explores and sort of teases out what we mean by ownership and what we mean by nonfungibility and fungibility, and the fact that it kind of forces this choice between physical ownership and digital ownership.
I think the hypothesis of that experiment is at least my hypothesis would be many people are going to choose digital. And when you put physical ownership against digital ownership and many people choose digital ownership, you’re kind of demonstrating, Hey, enter ownership on the internet is really here, right?
People have chosen among the two, they had an equal choice and they chose digital. I know that’s what I’m going to choose. I think that’s what’s going to be.
That factor is also super dependent on who you’re targeting, right? Because if you go more to the normie crowd and you still try to explain to them what digital ownership means, they still don’t get it, they’re not there yet. If you go to the crypto crowd, obviously they’re going to choose, you know, the digital one, or at least most. And that was actually my next question. What do you guys imagine being the outcome of this? Right? Because it’s a perfect test, a user test, right. To see what they value. And Jeff, you say they’re going to lean more towards the digital side.
Jeff Marsillo: I don’t really know if a lot of people are going to choose digital. I mean, I, I think, especially with all the excitement around NFT’s, I don’t really know. I never really speculate on these kinds of things because people surprise you. You know, I think one of the cool things about this experiment is they just made the choice available.
Now it’s up to everybody who bought one to make that choice. And we’ll see.
Jordan Lyall: To be honest, I think a majority of people will choose digital. Okay. I think just. It’s a really, really tough question. But I think with the amount of people that are crypto native crypto collectors that participated in that, I think enough people see the value.
Several people have more than one. So we may see a situation where it was like buy two and burn one. So you get one of each. But just for the benefits of like, why, why are NFTs cool where you can display them anywhere digitally there’s a market for them. I can easily sell an NFT a lot easier than I can an 8 x 10 print out, right. There may be a secondary market for the, for the actual printed thing that emerges. But just, you know, buy NFTs in general.
Jeff Marsillo: Really good point, because the way the experiment is, is designed. Everybody owns the digital version for. So you’re forced to experience all the benefits that Jordan just described.
Some period of time, you’re going to be able to show it off digitally. You’re going to have a liquid secondary market, and then you’re going to have to decide, do you want to go back to fiscal? That’s really what the decision is. Do you want to forego all those benefits of NFTs and go backward? And now I, and then I hear Jordan say it that way.
I think he’s got a great point. And I think, you know, probably most people will decide to stick with digital.
Yeah. You know, another cool project that you guys brought to life is the collaboration with space jam, which was also super cool. I know I fangirl over it. I got all the free ones and the one you can purchase too. My brother also went crazy over it being the basketball fan that he is. How was the process of bringing that to life? Two very different projects. One’s like a mainstream franchise. The other one is a very famous iconic artist. Right? How was that like, tell me the story behind that. How did that come to form?
Jeff Marsillo: Yeah, sure. Well look, one thing that I learned when I was at the MBA working on NFTs and working on top shot and all that stuff, is that yes. I mean, of course there’s this enormous opportunity for brands and companies to engage with fans in new ways, but. Even today, and this was true then, and I think still now there aren’t actually that many platforms for brands to do that.
And so, you know, you could do what we did and go work with a great, great company like dapper labs and build one, build a platform for, you know, your brand. Beyond building one yourself and all that investment and all that risk and all that time. There, there, there haven’t really been platforms to engage for brands, to engage with their audience in a large kind of scale way.
So that’s, you know, obviously been the pitch that we’ve been making to the market. Like. You could go on any number of marketplaces and you can do a drop and you can sell, you know, one of ones and you can probably make a lot of money if you’re a big brand. But what we know is this. Is that for most of these brands, a million fans is worth more than a million dollars, right?
And when you’re trying to market a movie like space jam, right, with billions of dollars behind it and multi million dollars in expectations of revenue to make a million bucks on it and selling NFTs is not your primary objective. What you really want to do is you want to get a whole community of people to engage with the brand, get excited about it.
And then there are lots of other ways that you’re going to make money, including selling tickets and maybe including selling entities. So that’s our pitch to the marketplace, you know, are these brands in the market. And that was our conversation with our friends at Warner brothers. And obviously it aligned with their interests.
They wanted to engage fans like they had already made the property and they knew their money was going to be made from the movie. How do we engage a large scale audience? So what we did. And this goes to, you know, George’s point about this sort of stack of everything we did, Palm was being created. If these were being created, Damien Hirst’s, you know, currency project was being created.
The space jam project was great at the same time and launched on the same day. And on that day we distributed about 92,000 NFT’s.
That’s actually insane, think about this for a minute or these like more crypto native users, because I know the way you guys set up your onboard and your funnel, it was super, super easy to claim one. Right? You could claim it literally in a heartbeat to connect your credit card and all that process was streaming Perfectly. Right. So were these more like mainstream users? Or Are they more crypto native users?
Jeff Marsillo: It was, it was easy when it was working really well. And so I want to just acknowledge that for most of the day, it wasn’t working very well.
It was our day, one of our platforms and, you know, a few parameters were kind of set the wrong way for that kind of scale. And then suddenly LeBron James posted on Instagram. But when it was working smoothly, when it was working the way it was supposed to be working I think it was one of the smoothest experiences for getting NFT’s.
Now, Jordan will tell you he’s not satisfied. He’s got a million ideas. But it was a pretty smooth experience relative to what you’ve seen in a lot of other places. And as such, because of that, because of our message to the world, Hey, this is going to be easy. This is an IP that everybody can get behind.
Come try it out. Many, many of our users were much more of a much more casual variety. I kind of think of them in three buckets. I think of them as. Crypto native, you know, they’re on open, see, they’re maybe using meme and they’re using some of the more advanced platforms. And then the sort of middle is the top shop.
People who are used to a relatively easy experience, but they know what NFTs are and they’re, you know, they’re they’re, they’re engaging, but, but it’s maybe not with, you know, with a metal basket, things like that. And then there’s this new group who like, read about this in variety. You know, or read about this at fortune magazine had seen it before.
I’d heard all about it in New York times and on on the news and thought, all right, maybe this is my chance to try it out. And we got a ton of those kinds of users as well.
Jordan Lyall: Also, you know, as a crypto guy, as a defy guy, thinking about this, you know yeah. We issued 92,000 and FTS in one go.
In half a day. But we, we onboarded tens of thousands of users to the world of web three in the world of defy cause whether they know it or not, when you sign up for nifty is, and you claimed your account, you were given a theory of address our Apollo address. They’re given a crypto wallet. We use a tool called magic link and we’ve created a nifty wallet for all our users.
You can also optionally add in your Medimap. But as just someone that’s interested in like growth of defiant general, I was totally geeking out about that stack about, about that stat, about how, how big a step forward in the macro level. We contributed to onboarding users, the mainstream audience into, into defined the world of web 3m, really fun
Jeff Marsillo: The day afterward. When, you know, we were stabilizing the platform and, and dealing with all this inbound interest for what we had, just what we had just done. And, and getting a ton of questions from people who had just gotten their first NFT, you know, like, Hey, what can I do with this?
You know, all these, all these interesting questions about what it now meant to own a space jam and a C and D Jordan and I we’re together. Because we were visiting San Francisco and he was up there. He and I were both visiting San Francisco for a meeting while we were launching as another thing that made it extra hectic, but we kind of turned to each other and we’re like, yeah, We’re now responsible for this space jam community, you know, like that, like, this is, this is not only tens of thousands of new people and new wallets, but it’s now it’s a community of tens of thousands of people in there and their wallets and, and and like, we just were like, we can’t let them down.
You know, like now this is a responsibility we’ve got to shepherd this, this community. So we’ve been. You know, working with w and Warner, by the way, it feels the same way. I mean, they were thrilled and just thrilled that they could reach so many new kinds of fans with something like this.
But they don’t view, you know, space jam. This has like a campaign. And then like you go and hopefully you watched them to theater and then they’re done. They want to grow a community too. So, you know, we’ve been working with them about how this transitions from a movie campaign, to a real community.
Now we’re talking. I can only imagine the airdrops and when they get sued in my wallet for getting all those NFTs this is, this is great, guys. I want to, I want to kind of pick your brains on what can we expect from Nifty’s is in the future. What’s to come, what can you share publicly? What alpha can you leak? Give it to me.
Jordan Lyall: I think he just got a little bit alpha there where this is not, not just a one and done space gen. And we’ll, we’ll have some follow-up you’ll be able to use some of these NFTs. I won’t say that utility where but you will be able to use them for additional fun experiences. I think it’s not just about NFT is about it, about experiences and the unique benefits you get by building on a crypto stack.
More ways to participate in the community. More ways to collect not with just space jam, but other properties, not just with Warner brothers, but with other big brands and organizations. We’re not forgetting the little artists or the up and coming artists. We’re going to be doing a drop here in the next couple of weeks with some really cool artists.
We’ve got the rest of the calendar year and already into 2022. With some of these big tent-pole releases planned, it’s going to be really fun. And then in addition, as, as we roll out the product and improve the products and improve the user experience and making it super easy for brand new users without crypto background, to be able to join and participate Start to see more ways to communicate more ways, to collaborate more ways for communities to reach out to their collectors or ways for artists to collaborate with other artists.
We see this as not really these like branded drops, driving the train, not the platform, driving the train, but really together. Pushing the gas here. I think it’s going to be really cool with what you’ll see in the coming months.
Jeff Marsillo: I would just, just to elaborate on two things, one you know, we Jordan and I met in the winter.
We met in February, so we brought this together really fast. We launched our company. We announced our company in March. We launched our platform and. And we kind of had a tough decision to make. I mean, we could move it forward and just get started or we could wait until it was complete and kind of you know launch it only when it was kind of tied up with.
And obviously we decided to do the former. We decided, you know, we could do enough. That was fun. That would be interesting and new and valuable to the space that nobody had done before, but it wasn’t going to be our complete vision. So when we launched on July 12th is in some ways a kind of a teaser of what’s to come in itself.
I mean, you can only. Explore nifty today and you’ll, you’ll discover some dead ends and it’s almost like, you know, there’s a sign, there’s an invisible sign there that says roadway calming, you know, like men at work. And you’ll find a bunch of those on NFTs. Where are you? Like, oh, okay. You know, when I see that there’s a road coming in here and it’s going to connect to somewhere, that’s really, really.
So, if you’re kind of interested in where we’re headed you can kind of look for some of those, those road signs on Nifty’s where you’ll find some things that are missing. I’ll just give an example, but we are really excited about this idea of NFT playlist. I mentioned. NFT playlist is an incomplete feature on niftiest.
You can make a playlist today and you can showcase it, but there’s some limitation of what you can do with it. You can’t edit it. You know, there’s some limitation on what you can do, we’re going to be over time, dramatically expanding what’s possible with playlists on nifty. So that’s just, just an example of where if you mess around with playlists on Netflix today, you might’ve said, okay, this is kind of cool, but like, where are we going with this?
Well, you can see that there’s a road being paved ahead of the. The, the other, the other thing that I just want to elaborate because Jordan teased this drop was coming up in a couple of weeks. And I think it’s to just maybe elaborate a little bit about it. We haven’t said too much about it, but I don’t think it’s it’s you know, I don’t think it’s saying too much to just go into some detail here.
We are, we’re going to be doing, we’re going to be not just working with big brands, but supporting independent artists. And we’ve got something that we call common canvas. And the idea here is we work with a creator to identify a canvas. And in this case it’s a skate deck and that canvas.
We’ll be used not only by that creator, but by a number of other creators from their community that they help us to identify and kind of recruit into the project. So it’s a little bit like a group show from the art world. And you know, a little bit like an individual collection that is shared by a number of creators, but in this case it’s a skate deck and the creator that we’re working with goes by the name of Spain.
And he’s a professional skateboarder and artist. He’s helped us to recruit a bunch of really, really cool artists and skateboarders. You know, some, maybe a little better known than others, but all of them have a really, really cool kind of enthusiastic grassroots following. And we just thought like, you know, it, actually, the thought came to us from, Damien Hirst, like Damien Hirst crosses over in so many different directions.
What’s an unexpected, next thing. Next thing that we could do. And, you know, we thought about the escape backs. He had done it with Supreme, the shoes that he had done with vans. And we’re like, let’s hack into that community. You know, there’s like a bridge to be built here and let’s, let’s go, let’s go for that.
So, you know, that’s the next one, but there’ll be more of those kinds of projects, more bridges being built between different demographics who maybe haven’t wholly embraced. But have all the propensity to do so. So you know, that’s, that’s what common canvas and everything else that we do in nifty is going to be all about.
Yeah, that’s exciting. That’s really cool. I’m stoked to see that come out and hopefully by the time this episode comes out, we’ll see more information about it and more things to learn about it. But before I let you guys go, I think that’s a perfect place to wrap up before I let you go quickly plug yourselves and the project and where people can kind of find more and learn more. We can start with Jordan.
Jordan Lyall: @jordanlyall that’s where you can find me and my fun Twitter activity. That’s probably the best place to reach out to me as well. I’m on all the channels.
Jeff Marsillo: I’m @jeffmarsillo both on Instagram and on Twitter. I’ve never really gotten the bug. I’ve worked a lot in social media, but I’ve never gotten the bug to post a lot. I’m more of a lurker, I guess. So you won’t find a lot of opinions. Maybe I can learn from watching Jordan A.
Little bit, but nifty is you know, not only do we post about stuff that we’re doing, but we try to support the NFT community and the creator community. And so you’ll find some, some really good things hopefully in some useful information there. And of course That we, you know, drop information you know, about upcoming releases and projects and updates is on our social handles.The other thing we should probably mention Jordan is our discord, right?
Jordan Lyall: Yeah. it’s at Nifty’s.com and you’ll find a link in the footer to our discord.
I just joined today. So I’m in there. I’m alive and let’s get going guys. Thank you so, so much for being on and as nifty is developing, I hope to have you again in the future and kind of do a recap as we get bigger and we reach a billion users, more power.