On Thursday 21 October, Alex Shkor of took part in an AMA in the Hillrise Group Telegram chat.
Hillrise Group supports ambitious Web3 startups with early-stage venture capital and fundamental research.
In this repost, Hillrise Capital compiled key questions and answers from the event.
Daniel Dal Bello
Hey Alex, and welcome. Goes without saying it is great to have you here. Could you please start with an introduction to yourself and to DEIP?
Alex Shkor
Sure, I’m Alex Shkor — CEO and Founder at DEIP. I started working in the blockchain space in 2013, at that time I was CTO & Co-founder at Paralect.com — a venture studio in Eastern Europe.
I was building distributed systems and then we (me and my co-founders Alexey and Yahor) decided to start DEIP — to create an infrastructure for Decentralized Creator Economy.
Raymond Reijnders
For the ones of us who have not heard of the creator economy yet, could you explain what it is about and why you’re building infrastructure for it?
Alex Shkor
The Creator Economy is basically part of the broader economy. This part of the economy is when you produce some assets with your creativity. Programmers for example are part of the creator economy, artists too, filmmakers, and many, many other industries.
In the previous century, this part of the economy was not that big, but now it’s becoming the major economic activity in any country!
@B_2_Moon — community member
Could you please summarize what makes DEIP outstanding from other Web3.0 players? And what is your ambition in this project?
Alex Shkor
I think there are three main things which make us different. Let me go through them one by one.
- We focus on real-world intangible assets with real value. So we want to bring established artists and brands to the Web 3.0 industry. It has to offer something valuable for anyone, even for those who are already successful. We came up with a legal framework that allows attaching the value of the asset to NFT (or F-NFT).
- We created a Decentralized Bank for Creators — this is something like MakerDAO but works with any creator economy assets, not just crypto-assets. And as a creator, you will be able to borrow stablecoins from the protocol using your creative works as collateral.
- We developed a Web3Constructor — an open-source modular framework to easily build Web3Portals and NFT marketplaces for any industry. It has two modes: no-code and low-code. Therefore anyone will be able to build a portal on top of DEIP protocol with just drag-and-drop functionality. We believe that this feature will accelerate the adoption of our protocol drastically.
Rowan Zwiers
With your technology you are attempting to push the global creator economy into the Web3 era with financial tooling, royalty schemes, loan collateral, rationalization, and more for any intellectual property without the need for centralized interference.
But since intellectual property rights are legal rights, their enforcement lies within the designated legal frameworks, which are very complex and diverse on a global scale. It is one thing to go through the technical aspects of publishing an IP NFT and fractionalize it into F-NFTs, it is another to see your legal right over an IP enforced in the relevant jurisdictions.
A lot of intangible assets in a lot of jurisdictions still require old-fashioned paper-based documentation. What is your going-to-market strategy related to this? Do you have a clear overview of the legal challenges?
Alex Shkor
It’s a great question and a very important one. It’s true that in order to bring this added value to NFTs, there should be some compliance work done. And we call it two-way-legal binding. NFT to Legal Agreement.
Basically, NFT refers to some legal agreement via the hash of this agreement. And Legal Agreement refers to NFT and the Portal who registered this NFT by specifying in the agreement address of NFT/Chain/Portal and other metadata. This is how it’s made possible to transfer some rights and royalties on the chain.
Rowan Zwiers
I am not sure I entirely understand, I do follow the bringing of on-chain legal IP/agreements, but I am not sure how the settlement (change in ownership) can be done on-chain with legal compliance, could you elaborate?
Alex Shkor
Sure, for this there are Portals in the network. Portal is basically a DAO + Web Application + Legal Entity. So when you register an asset through any Portal — you basically sign a legal agreement where you specify how this asset is governed on-chain.
Portal is fully responsible for maintaining this link. For this, every Portal makes a security deposit, which is like a guarantee that the assets it registers are authorized and of high enough quality.
Portal is basically a DAO + Web Application + Legal Entity. So when you register an asset through any Portal — you basically sign a legal agreement where you specify how this asset is governed on-chain.
@B_2_Moon
Could you please introduce your investors and partners? How do you see the unique value that they contribute to the project?
Alex Shkor
I love our investors and partners, some of them of course more helpful than another but I believe all of them do their best to help us.
Hillrise actually helped us a lot. Also, we have among our investors Shima Capital, M31, AU21, Blockwall Capital, and many others.
Daniel Dal Bello
You have actively explored fitting layer-1 infrastructure for your network. This seemingly led to your decision of launching the main DEIP network as a Polkadot Substrate-based blockchain, could you tell us more about this exploration and the considerations leading to this choice?
Alex Shkor
We believe that the future is multichain and domain-specific chains will have the most value in the future. Before Substrate, we built on the Graphene framework. And about a year ago decided to switch to Substrate because of its modularity and flexibility.
In the future, we think every domain-specific chain will be able to be connected to multiple relay chains and won’t have to choose just one. We are working on the architecture for this already.
In the future, we think every domain-specific chain will be able to be connected to multiple relay chains and won’t have to choose just one. We are working on the architecture for this already.
Rowan Zwiers
More recently you announced that you will join the NEAR ecosystem. You partnered with relay chain provider Octopus Network to bridge the Creator Economy Network Ecosystem and to enable the launch of your Canary Network later this year.
Can you tell us more about your current layer-1 infrastructure choices? Does this lay the foundation for the long term, or has a sufficient path on the short term been forged which will require changes in the longer term?
Alex Shkor
Yes, it’s a long-term decision. In the long term, we want to bridge multiple layer-1 via our multi-chain infrastructure. So the users will be just using DEIP Protocol without worrying about what is happening under the hood.
And if they come from the Polkadot ecosystem — they can seamlessly connect, if they come from the NEAR ecosystem — they can do the same.
@B_2_Moon
How could we — as crypto-holders participate in DEIP? Similar to other stakeholders, how do they join & what kind of benefit do they gain from DEIP?
Alex Shkor
As DEIP holders you will be able to participate even before the network launch. Because when we make a decision — for example on what relay chain provider to use for the Canary Network — the community has a chance to cancel this decision.
After the network launch, I think the best way to participate is through yield farming. For more details please read our whitepaper or lightpaper.
Raymond Reijnders
One interesting aspect about DEIP is the evolving council, where stakeholders and users can directly be a part of the DAO by staking their DEIP or by taking over a seat. There are also mentions of the council governing the DEIP Ecosystem Fund.
Can you tell us more about the involvement and importance of the council for the DEIP ecosystem? Are there any things that you’d like to implement for the DAO in the future?
Alex Shkor
Governance is a crucial part of the DEIP ecosystem. And the Council is the main governance body elected by the community. It already has a lot of responsibilities but in the future, it will be just growing and the structure of it will be just evolving.
Steven Krashos
Looking back and reflecting on the pathway that DEIP has taken so far, is there anything you would have done differently specifically in relation to implementing a DAO and council voting structures throughout the protocol?
E.g. Implementing a DAO earlier on in the life of the project. Do you feel a step in this direction would have been as successful as it will be now if it was implemented earlier on, or do you feel as if allowing the project to mature to the level it is at now was a better decision for the future of the project?
Alex Shkor
We tried to build the main governance DAO with a couple of principles in mind:
- Money does not govern the network, but real people.
- There should be a combination of experts making decisions and a public vote.
- There should be a mechanism to gradually decentralize decision-making, but without losing efficiency and speed.
Rowan Zwiers
The Collective Intelligence Protocol to be implemented in the first two years after mainnet launch is a Proof-of-Reputation protocol that forms part of your Decentralized Assessment System (DAS). You’ve written a whole whitepaper on the DAS as it plays an essential role in gauging the quality and usefulness of technologies (and their IP).
Can you explain to us in layman terms why this is so important, and how the Collective Intelligence Protocol (CIP) will work practically?
Alex Shkor
So, the CIP is important because it will allow crowdsourcing evaluation of assets via peer-review and multi-dimensional reputation framework.
Potentially it can add unlimited scalability to this process and add more decision-making power to the community. It’s a complex technology and DAS also includes not only CIP but some tools — like an agent-based simulations framework, that will allow us to bootstrap CIP and initialize the first reputation distribution among peers.
Rowan Zwiers
Will anyone be able to participate in evaluations and build a personal reputation within the protocol?
Alex Shkor
I would say so — everyone will be able to participate. And moreover, everyone will be able to propose adjustments to the algorithm.
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