Spotlight of Web 3.0 — Getting into the Creator Economy in Arweave

In Spotlight of Web 3.0, we share about what you care about the crypto world. This is a weekly talk series produced by Huobi Incubator, the incubation arm of Huobi Global Exchange. We support developers building the crypto space in many ways, and we think that sharing their stories is one of them.

Host:

Shi Bin

Speaker:

Chelsea Jiang — Researcher in Foresight Ventures

Xylophone — Founder of PermawebDAO, Co-Founder of ArweaveNews

Kevin Primicerio — CEO & Co- Founder of Pianity

Frank (Zhang Hao) — Algorithm Designer of Bobo Video, DMetaverse NFT Platform Creator

Dave Chan — Blockchain Analyst in Huobi Research

Shi Bin: Can our speakers give a brief introduction about themselves and their companies?

Xylophone (PermawebDAO): I’m one of the original co-founders of ArweaveNews, that’s was my entry point into the web 3 after my long history in software marketing in Web 2. I joined ArweaveNews, but then we kind of went from being a media company to a software development company that creates software for media companies. So we wanted to use Arweave for all of our back end stuff and to make sure that all of our content was stored forever, that lead us to to build Permacast.

Permacast is a way to host podcasts and videos using Arweave as the back end but not sacrificing the ability to bridge it across to Web 2 and get it on platforms like Spotify and iTunes. We also put incentives in the process, for example, each episode gets minted to NFTs automatically.

Kevin (Pianity): Hi everyone, I’m Kevin. I’m one of the Co-founder of Pianity. We found a bit more than a year ago. I’ve been in the Arweave ecosystem for a few years now. Very interested in the Permaweb and permanent storage.

At Pianity we use Arweave for everything, so data storage, smart contracts, NFTs, etc. So we built a platform where the musicians can turn their tracks into limited editions and sell them to their fans. So the idea is that musicians store the NFT, the data itself into what we called on the Arweave ecosystem atomic NFT, so the data is also stored stored there.

Frank (DMetaverse): Hello I’m Frank. I engaged in Bitcoin investment since 2013 and we developed both Web 3 applications and Web 2 applications. Our team is mainly engaged in the application, research and development of big data, artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. We have over 100 members in our team mainly focusing on product development technology. The core members of my team have made four 10 million+ DAU short video content applications totally from zero to one. We have full stack content, short video technology capabilities including AI shooting tools, mobile phone apps, and high concurrency back end services.

The founder is my friend, also is the early core recommendation system architect of TikTok from 2015 to 2017 The technical architecture of the entire TikTok recommendation algorithm distribution logic was designed by us the company still uses this architecture till today. After leaving TikTok, our team started Bobo Video, an Asian Youtube. We were responsible for the entire technology from 0 to 200 million users, its real-time peak users reached to nearly 20 million.

We then start engaging with Web 3 with the beginning of DMetaverse. We made a NFT marketplace with a focus on NFT staking mechanisms. In the next step, we will build a video NFT to earn, to verify, and to enrich our environment.

Chelsea (Foresight): Hey guys, this is Chelsea from Foresight Ventures. We are a research-driven capital that liked to help and motivate growth in Web 3. Creative economy is one of the things that we really invested in. We have invested in to Permacast and Pianity because they have empowered musicians, artists, and creators to derive value from the products. We really like their products and teams as well. So happy to join this session to discuss more with the great projects here.

Dave (Huobi Research): Hey guys it’s Dave. I’m from Huobi Global Research that I’m responsible for doing the Web 3 analysis. I’m so excited to see and to talk to the our panels today. Arweave creative economy is so awesome, Michael Jackson, Drake, Katy Perry and now electronic music like FKJ. The capital right now is coming back to the artists. The ownership is real and is backed by blockchain and unchangeable data.

In Huobi we have a lot of expertises on the data availability. Some of my articles are about Web 3 storage ecosystems like Arweave.

Shi Bin: Thanks Dave. Today we’re going to talk about the Web 3 creator economy. But before we do that, let’s talk about Web 2 because we are still in the Web 2 era. If you look at the Web 2 creator economy, I would say that it really got started when Facebook, Instagram, Twitter came along followed by YouTube, Twitch and Discord. Some people say they might not see an issue with Web2 creator economy. After all, if you look at the Twitch streamers or Youtubers, some of them are making millions of dollars, so is there really an issue with Web 2? Can speakers share about your thoughts on the Advantages or disadvantages of Web 2, and where do you think Web 3 can help?

Frank (DMetaverse): Yeah, it’s a huge topic and I’m very interested in it. To put in simple words, in Web 2, consumers are mainly motivated by personalized content at this stage, which is the incentive of biological dopamine or from the customer level it is a kind of spiritual curiosity, comfort, freshness and desire excitation. So much material incentives such as red pockets or some extra money given to people are extremely supplement to this. So the best thing that encourage people to earn is just the spiritual satisfaction. The incentive model is undoubtedly relatively mature after many generations of product updates with a number of formed advantages.

From the creator’s point of view, in the video field of Web 2, there are undoubtedly many Internet influencers who have risen because of this. Their identities are not privileged, in fact, they are grassroots. However, they have attracted a large number of fans with their unique styles and receive financial rewards that pays for traffic and attention support on the platforms. They gain from monetization experts such as e-commerce or live broadcasting events. So the system is very mature.

Of course, the problems and benefits brought by Web 2 should be viewed separately. The fundamental problem of Web 2 is that it is extremely centralized. The platform has too much power to, for example, the content censorship, the account suspension, the distribution strategy are all some of the problems controlled tightly by the platform policies.

These problems are the main pain points Web 3 right now are tackling, but the back of this problem brought another interesting thing. The centralization obtains extreme advantages with high quality content, it can push it to become instantly hot. Such as Miss Liu YeXi became popular overnight with TicTok and DouYin. Without that centralization, she might not able to gain the traction. The centralization manage things with an overall macro control, they based on the platform’s long-term interests such as user retention, duration, and the encouragement of originality.

Shi Bin: Xylophone, you come from the podcasting world. If you look at the podcasting of course the biggest name is Joe Rogan. He’s paid multi-million dollars for his deal with Spotify and then after that he got into some problem right? Maybe you could use this as a way to kick start.

Xylophone (PermawebDAO): Yeah, sure. I think Joe Rogan is an interesting example that is playing into censorship and the need for that to be an actual open forum of ideas that doesn’t necessarily need to be controlled by an intermediary. As soon as you start putting stuff on the blockchain, you can feel the difference in having the information here permanently and securely.

Monetization is one thing I want to talk about, the only ways that the platforms or creators make money in Web 2 is generally through advertisements or through paywalls. The inventive mechanism is different in a Web 3 system. It’s possible for you to tokenize your work, or build communities around the work itself and to earn from rather than introduce worse experiences for your listeners or to make your content harder to consume.

Shi Bin: Since you have multiple projects built on Arweave, can you provide us about what’s the advantages of using Arweave?

Xylophone (PermawebDAO): There are a couple of advantages. Permanent storage is obviously one. It is backed by an endowment, which currently has enough tokens in it to keep the content running for like 200 years, even if nothing new is uploaded and the miners are never funded again. So that’s a very strong guarantee.

The fact that it is uncensorable and immutable is also one advantage. To compare it to something like IPFS, IPFS is unincentivized, if you want to pin it then you have to pay monthly, same sort of problem with Web 2. Content disappears off the Internet all the time because creators stopped paying the hosting fees and that’s extra pressure on company to keep paying a recurring subscription. With Arweave you pay once and it is there forever.

Another really good part about Arweave which people don’t often talk about is that it has really powerful and simple smart contracts. They’re written in JavaScript, which makes them easier to adopt for the general web developer rather than something like Solidity. They are gasless and lazy loading on the client side, so generally it doesn’t put a burden of compute on the network of nodes, which is just supposed to be mining and storing files. So these are a couple of things about why it makes sense for us to build 100% Arweave only apps.

Shi Bin: Kevin, when we talk about Web 3 creators, musicians and artists are a huge part of it. Of course, Spotify is the elephant in the room, please tell us about your outlook towards the Web 3 creative economy with regards specifically to musicians.

Kevin (Pianity): Yeah liked you said, Spotify, YouTube or Apple Music are all with the same problems. The main one is the redistribution of the money, which is first not transparent at all and second skewed so that only the biggest artists survive. When you pay for your monthly fees on Spotify, around $10 per month, even if you listen to one single artist for the whole month, your money will not go to that artist, it will be spread with respect to some obscure rules that Spotify fix with all sorts contracts between major companies and small independent artists.

The other thing is, not everyone can upload his music on Spotify. You have to go through a distributor or through a validator before being able to post there because they don’t capture much value from the fan base. To give you an idea on Spotify, only 1% of the artist able to make a living, 99% of the artists make less than $1000 per year. Because you need like millions of streams in order to make $1000. So one of the reason about this is because Spotify doesn’t really capture much value from the fan base.

And finally, I think this maybe the worst, is when you post on Spotify you don’t own your streamers, you don’t know who is listening to your music. It’s not like if you have a newsletter and you send it to your subscriber, you know exactly who you’re addressing, when you stream on Spotify, you have no idea about who is listening to you, and you can’t retarget them or talk to them directly.

This kind of problems is what Web 3 is solving, and it’s exactly what we are trying to solve with Pianity. First and foremost, the distribution of money is transparent as we are on the blockchain. Second, because we are just a platform and we just take our cut the same for everyone, we don’t make distinction between big and small artists. And finally, when you post on Pianity and sell your NFTs, you own your followers, you know exactly who bought your NFTs. The idea for us in the future is to become more and more transparent about this and even allow you to directly send an email or a message to the people who bought your NFT.

Shi Bin: Would love to know about how is Pianity better than Spotify? And how are you empowering musicians?

Kevin (Pianity): First, anyone can post music on Pianity which is not the case on Spotify. Second, artists on Pianity make at least 10 times more money, if not 100 times more money than on streaming platforms. Also, we have this transparent distribution. Finally, we allow you to exactly know who is buying your NFTs and we allow you to add experience on top of your NFTs. In the end the NFT itself is not only a nice certificate, but since it’s programmable you can even add more content than just the music, such as access to some private content. Early access to your next ticket sales for your next concert, etc.. The utility of the NFTs are limited and so Pianity is an incredible tool for artists, especially in terms of growing your community of followers.

Our user base is very diverse. We have like 30–40% people from Europe, 30% from Canada and the US, and rest is from everywhere else.

Shi Bin: Chelsea, since you work in a VC you get the advantage of like a 10,000 foot view of the creator economy space. So tell us how you’re looking at the space and are there any sub-verticals that you see that’s interesting.

Chelsea (Foresight): It goes back to what’s the Web 3 and the difference between Web 3 and Web 2. For us the keywords are decentralization and ownership. Web 3 is different because you own your work and monetize on the product you made, so that’s something we’re interested in.

The key part here in the creator economy is about decentralization. That’s like a touch upon on demand versus platform. Platform can bring you huge amount of audience, if you work on your own you might not get noticed, but it will be more probable to have a viral video on TicTok. But the point is you cannot monetize on that viral video or viral music song made by you as the platform take a big cut in videos, in podcast, and in music. Especially in music where the market is structured to to give more profits to the institutions like labels and recording studios, but the singers or the creators is not making money off of it. So that’s why people talk about creator economy because you can actually make money from it.

The obvious example is, you create an NFT project and you can sell it in the primary market or mint it in separate market and collect royalties. So when we look at NFTs the visuals are only one segment of it.

Pianity platform take the power away from the collectives and give back the owners, and they can actually monetize 100% with their great music. It’s very important to be immutable, which is the very nature we liked about Arweave, because as you upload it, no one can take it away, it always lives on chains so you’re assured as a creator or as an owner of this piece of art. For creator economy is definitely about decentralization and giving the power back to empower the creators to monetize, to have a better tool to reach a greater audience.

Shi Bin: Dave, anything to add?

Dave (Huobi Research): Sort of like a referee economy. Why I’m so excited about Arewave is like it’s immutable so people really own their data. The entertainment industry makes 57 billion in revenue, but only 12% goes to the others. 68% is earned by the top three major record labels like Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group and is it not right.

If you go to YouTube or another platform, you’ve got a lot of like distribution fees and legal fees and all of this stuff can be rightly settled by the referee platform. With companies like Pianity revenue can go straight to the artists, which are quite fair now.

Shi Bin: What are the differences between western and eastern creator economy?

Frank (DMetaverse): If we want to combine the different cultures the best way I think is to have the local members in DAO or employ some local members to understand what people really like or really focus on the global area. Let me share my experience in building a branch in both Korea and China. We have tried to make an NFT exchange in Asia, especially in China. The definition of NFTs there is quite different from what we know in Web 3. It make a boom that in China the NFT is so hot now we can see the NFTs are quite different from what Western or European people like or very different with the Japanese people like.

NFTs in China is almost 8 million GMV per day. If we want to bring those net from Asian to Web 3 NFT markets, we need local members to fill in those gaps and to bring value to all. For example, the culture behind it, the value that in China that makes people realize that it is valuable. So I think local members and local teams in those countries are quite important.

Shi Bin: I’d like to talk about tokens cuz when we talk about tokens there is of course fungible and non-fungible tokens ERC 20 versus ERC 721. Creators have the choice to issue either one of those tokens or both at the same time. So I’m just curious to try to find out more about your mental model when it comes to thinking about whether a creator should issue a fungible token or a non fungible token. Let’s say, a musician comes up to you and say, I have so many fans, I also create music, obviously I can turn my music into an NFT, but I could also issue a creator tokens and maybe I could set up a DAO and my fans who hold those tokens can come into my DAO. How do you think about this?

Kevin (Pianity): To be honest, I I don’t really understand social tokens and how it is used and what’s the value of it. What I don’t like about issuing fungible tokens for an artist or creator is that you put a price on someone and I don’t like this. Like why would that creator be worth like $5? I don’t like this idea, so on Pianity we only issue NFTs. You could use your NFTS to vote in a DAO and create a community, so you don’t have to rely on a fungible token to do that.

Xylophone (PermawebDAO): I would say I agree with Kevin in pretty much everything that he said there. It’s better to actually own a piece of the work through NFT rather than to be owning some kind of fan token which is separated from the work itself. So I would say NFTs have fantastic synergy with the rest of Web 3.

DecentLand is a Web 3 social protocol built on Arweave, it does token gating. So for example, if you were to own somebody’s piano NFT or if you were owned to own somebody’s Permacast podcast episode, that creator could then set up a gated social community where they could then share unique content inside that. Synergies like thiseven start to replace giants like Patreon or any kind of fan economy up in Web 2.

When you talk about voting in a DAO, I also agree with Kevin. You can vote with NFTs. You could even say say somebody is an extreme fan of a podcast that only has 17 episodes. You could get to the point where there are fractionalization of those episodes down into fungible tokens. Then at that point you could use those for voting in a DAO if the creator want to set one up. So actually, I don’t think it needs to start from the perspective of fan token, it can start from NFTs and be innovative on from there.

Chelsea (Foresight): Technically you can vote with your NFTs and governors and everything, it just depends on the design. One thing I wanna add on is non-fungible is basically like it’s different and unique, it is a scarce content and a scarce piece of work. So that’s why profile pictures of NFT can skyrocket because people talk about the scarcity, the value, it’s unique and everything.

But when you’re talking about fungible tokens, because it’s fungible. it’s actually general purpose, general utility, general value that you can be exchanged to people. So the market will determined the price through client demand curve with many people on both sides. But in non-fungible there are scarcity, everyone values it in different numbers. It is just like art, some people can spend millions on a piece, some will not. NFTs need to find the right people who are willing to pay for them. But for fungible token, because it’s being traded so much and so general, you have to make sure that its utility provided by these fungible token can meet the demands of normal people, a large group of people. So that’s why I think fan token or social tokens is hard to manage because you have to make sure that the utility provided by this token is valuable to one group of people, so I guess that’s like one big difference between Non-fungible and fungible tokens.

Frank (DMetaverse): I think fungible token and non-fungible tokens are well suited to play a greater role together, especially with GameFi. For example in Stepn, the fungible token plays a very important role when it describes this price trends through the key line. It can be very easily to upload to the centralized exchange and it can affect people’s credit and people’s staking period. For the non-fundable token, it can be used though initial NFT offering. Through this way, people hold the NFT for longer time because it can’t be easily traded. So in Asia some people prefer to hold NFTs because many of the fungible tokens they hold can change suddenly. For example, Luna just one night 114 dollars worth to nearly zero and lot of people lose their money through their contracts or their economy designs. But with NFTs, the crash of the project will be slower if some really bad things happens. The project may has a lot of future design to hold its value, or holding members can make some subDAOs and some new groups to widen and to raise its value.

Shi Bin: Advice for Web 2 creator who would like to adopt entities in Web 3 space, What advice would you be giving the person?

Xylophone (PermawebDAO): I think it is such a big barrier. If you’re in Web 3 already then you are set up with the bare essentials as to have your native tokens for paying transaction fees, you have a wallet, and you possibly are signed up to a centralized exchange. All of these kinds of things which might do someone’s headache if they aren’t Web 3 native. So I think rather than necessarily having advice for the creators who want to switch, we probably need to focus on making it easy for creators to adapt to the apps themselves.

Arweave specifically, It’s kind of difficult to get its token in the US, or at least like semi impossible from their centralized exchanges. There are a few solutions for it, one of the most obvious ones that happens on some NFT marketplaces is pay in Fiat, which is then converted by some server on the backend into the token and then the that server pays the costs on the user’s behalf.

We also have bundle and network which means that you can pay for Arweave storage in like a whole bunch of tokens such as Solana, Ethereum, Avalanche as well as the currency instead of using native Arweave token. So I would say like more along those lines we need to do a better job at onboarding the creators by making it less frictional.

Kevin (Pianity): The main advice would be don’t believe in overnight success. In the press and in the news you can read that artist made a lot of money from NFT, but it’s not a magic recipe. It’s not because you create an NFT that it will sell for a lot of money. So that would be my first advice.

If you want to go from Web 2 to Web 3, you really have to understand what is Web 3. Own an NFT yourself before selling one, understand a bit more what it’s all about. It’s all about the long run, so you have to build your community as you go so I wouldn’t go from one NFT only if I were an artist, I would probably go for a collection and start with the first one and try to sell it. Not so expensive, but just to have a start and then the second one will use the community that bought the first one to sell the second one and etc., and then I would build up my community as a creator around that collection.

Frank (DMetaverse): So there are almost the 1.5 million new NFTs everyday, about 30 million new NFT social nodes, and there’s also 50 million existence NFT product out there. So there is a huge number NFTs exist.

How could we select one that is really valuable and not disappear in one or two years? It is a very hard question. In my opinion I think firstly you can rely on some useful tools like some new data analysis tools. The main thing is that we must pay much attention to the NFTs in different period. For example, in the early stage, some KOLs or some big crypto holders said that this is valuable, we followed, but most of them we can’t buy it in the first hand.

The next one is the price trends. It mainly depends on so many features, such as the marketing hold status, or continuation of the NFT project team, if it is like BYAC then you are very lucky. It’s really hard for long-term holders because there are so many teams and so many NFTs already in the market. So make your own decision, your feelings is quite important.

If you are a first newcomers that you think all that is quite valuable, then you should be careful and you should research more and ask your friends that invest on NFTs or research the background of the team and the history of the team.

Shi Bin: What are some of the creative ways you have seen artists use non-fungible tokens?

Kevin (Pianity): I have a few examples. Of course you can attach other things to your NFT, so that’s a very common in Pianity. Some people attach such as exclusive digital content like other tracks and stuff, some also attach a real content such as Vinyl record, an artist also attached a guitar with an NFT so you would see the guitar arrive at your place.

You can also use NFTs to finance charities. In the past we did a drop from the record label Shika Shika, the name of the project was the Birdsong project. The idea was the artist recorded a bird songs from Amazonia and from Africa. He did 18 recordings from 18 endangered spaces. The idea was to sell those recordings as music NFTs and use the money earned from those NFTS to finance a charity that will protect those specific birds.

I think it was a really cool project because first the money flow was very transparent. You could see in the contract that it was going to the chosen charity. Second, I think it’s interesting to at least save the song of those birds forever on Arweave, no matter what happens. Of course, we hope they don’t disappear, but if they do disappear, this artist saved their songs. And finally, through that operation, they raised close to $30,000, which is way more than what they raised in the past using Kickstarter.

Shi Bin: Can you tell us about what is your project working on right now and what can we expect from you in the next 2–6 months?

Kevin (Pianity): Actually, in the next week, we’re going to announce something really cool, which is an integration with MetaMask. So you will be able to use Arweave with depth from MetaMask. As an open source project, it’s going to be useful for everyone in the system and outside, so that’s the main thing we’re going to release soon.

After that we want to introduce play to earn to Pianity. So gamify the platform and also we do have Mobile app that is coming very soon as well.

The music NFTs will be increasingly more exciting. The music industry, including the creator and distributors are very curious about Web 3 now. The goal is for companies to make a great product that will fit both the creators and the fans, and that’s the most difficult part.

Xylophone (PermawebDAO): So for Permacast we recently made a change to the base smart contract which allows for video content to be uploaded as well. Now we’re kind of grappling with how to get that displayed on the front-end. While you can upload videos to Permacast, they’re not supported yet, but that is something that we are kind of working on with high urgency to get it out because this really makes the transition from just a decentralized repository for your podcast into something which could act more like a YouTube as well.

Beyond that, something we’re bringing out in the next couple of weeks is going to be an incentivized test-net. It will be possible to earn test-net Permaweb tokens by uploading content. So there are going to be formula which works out how many Permaweb tokens you should get for the amount that you spent on Arweave tokens in order to make the upload.

So this is going to be a short-lived program, we’re not going to be running like this forever. We think that once we get the NFT marketplace off the ground and start to get other ways to reward creators. It’s not going to be necessary to giving it out for uploads. For now it acted as a short term incentive maybe for the next few months or a year. Those are the main two things that I can talk about because they’re coming relatively soon.

Shi Bin: Where do you think the Web 3 podcast space specifically will go in 2022?

Xylophone (PermawebDAO): We’re targeting with Permacast so that your work is interoperable with other Web 3 systems. An example of that is DecentLand, it has Arweave name services protocol where it aggregates everything that you have done inside the Arweave ecosystem. Everything like your feed, your video are all link back to your Arweave address.

We also think that, beyond the Arweave ecosystem as well, the podcasting is probably going to be a kind of post type in future web 3 social networks, so you know, like on Twitter you can put in a poll or you can put in a text post or whatever, a podcast would also be one where you could link your Permacast account and link in an embedded audio of the episode. So I think what we’re going to be doubling down on this year is seeking integrations with other Web 3 social/activity aggregation platforms like RSS 3, lens protocol.

Frank (DMetaverse): So we been involved in technical product collaborations for some of the projects on the markets using our technologies. We have a complete product facilities around NFTs and its derivatives including NFT cross-chain marketplace and cross-chain NFT staking, mining mechanisms.

Our real purpose is not to create a short-term popular Web 3 product that belongs only to the crypto members, we want to explore the transformation from traditional Web 2 to Web 3. Only by attracting a large number of traditional users who don’t hold coins before can allow we produce killer applications or killer ecosystems with sufficient influence.

A product on the way is the video NFTs combined with our cross chain marketplace. Simply put that, we want to create a video to earn project. We have already product in mobile HTML5 version. By having the algorithms and cross-chain technologies combined together, we made a tokenomics that both activates the creators and the consumers of it. So it will be put to the market after three or four weeks.

We also have the video shooting and creating companies in the early Web 2 and we will bring the Web 2 users of video to make some easily templates to simulate, for example the face mask, imitation, lip sync, and dancing videos to make these people like the game. People who make this video previously or quickly will hold some airdrops of tokens through curve algorithm. So we want to make Web 2 users enter into the web 3 smoothly.

My last opinion is that we need to respect Maslow’s Hierarchy. First of all, if we want to widen the crypto world and the crypto influence, we should serve mankind and not to do things for the fashionable concept.

In our team, many folks are working on Web 2.5, I think the two can combine together. For example, we use the advantages of the existence Web 2 facilities, the software architecture or services, and we bring those traditional users through an easier way to the Web 3 using the GameFi, so this is our aim. Challenge is always how to break the circle, attract them, attract the Internet people, make your products/tools easy to use. I think it is the nature of the future of both Web 3 and Web 2.

Now we are focusing on how to design the tokenomics to balance the centralized rights and decentralized assets to make people enter easily, how to make people understand these tokenomics, how to rely on what we committed, and how to maintain the safety of the contracts. So it is the complicity of the Web 3 and we are making efforts to link all the people and projects together to make it a big world.

Chelsea (Foresight): We do see create economy has so much potential to grow and there are so many type of forms of what we haven’t see, such as movies, theatres, more utilities coming into play that can like expanded the type or form of content creators that can make money and monetize and provide ownership for NFT owners. But currently we do see different tracks playing out, for example music.

Music is a big industry. We do see many more players coming in and we invest in Pianity. We are very excited for what they’re bringing, but we also see different things that playing off. Like people adding the augmented reality into music, adding ways of how you can experience music. In music festival like Coachella, one of the largest music festival for example, is working with FTX to bring their NFT experiences. The mainstream Web 2 music industry has been embracing this great economy as well, they are trying to figure out how to make money or how to get into the thing of NFTs. And we do see music has very broad use cases because you know people’s paying habit, people would love to buy a tickets to go to the festival to experience music.

We also see very interactive art going on as well. For example, there’s one project which they have a game with each layer owned by players. Say if you own this layer on on this entity you can play with it and then you can sell it and then you can be on top of it. We also see other interactive or AR that is playing into it. We can speak about Metaverse. In the metaverse, you can have this gallery, this interactive art, this AR experience. So yeah, I think there’s there’s many more different things and uses cases that being explored, and there’s way much potential.

On top of that, we do see a lot of tools being made for creators like open AI that you can really draw a beautiful picture with just your words to describing it. We’re very excited to see like how this can bring more imagination into this creator economy.

Audience question (Web 3.0): What ways do you make sure that you can onboard people successfully into Web 3?

Kevin (Pianity): So in Pianity we are doing at least two things to simplify your onboarding. The first one is you can pay with credit card. You don’t have to own crypto to buy NFTS with us.

And the second is we do custodian and and non custodial wallets. So if you have a wallet you can use it, but if you don’t even know what is a wallet we create one for you. So those two elements make it very easy for people to to buy their first NFTs on our channel.

Xylophone (PermawebDAO): I think Kevin’s approach is very smart. In the case of Permacast, we’re not round that point yet. Right now what we’re thinking about doing next is integrating Bundler, which means that it’s possible to pay for storage with different tokens. The vast majority of people know how to use Fiat, vast majority of crypto people know how to use Metamask and EVM tokens, and then a very small amount of people in that subset have got the Airwave wallet installed and they’ve got our tokens. So I would say we’re probably going to be moving up that hierarchy by introducing different tokens and different payment methods.

For using Fiat, any kind of proxying makes me personally uncomfortable because while it is better for user adoption, it also introduces centralization into something which we’re trying to get away from. But the counter argument for that is that until crypto wallets are as popular as visa debit cards, we might have to make some concessions.

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Pianity Twitter: @pianitynft

Permacast Twitter: @permacastapp

Foresight Venture Twitter: @ForesightVen

DMetaverse Twitter: @_DMetaverse

Huobi Research Twitter: @Huobi_Research