Community Conversations: Behind the Scenes with Chris Deschenes, Director of Operations at Kalamint

Hello everyone and welcome to the second installment of our interview series! As the community manager for TQ Tezos, I am on a journey to interview builders, creatives, and community members from around the Tezos ecosystem. Our guest this week is Chris Deschenes, Director of Operations at Kalamint.

Kalamint is a popular NFT platform on Tezos where artists can create and sell their work.

Recently, Kalamint added a new auction feature to their platform. They are also focused on partnerships with various organizations like PangeaSeed — who partnered with Kalamint to host the world’s first CleanNFT art exhibition for oceans.

Check out the interview below!

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What initially got you involved with blockchain technology?

I had a buddy that pushed me towards it. I looked into it and I was like, man, this is gonna change the world. It kind of blossomed from there.

So then what made you get into Tezos? Specifically?

The idea of proof of stake was amazing to me. I have been around for a while and I really believe in the tech.

How did you get involved with Kalamint?

So, you know, I don’t do code and I’m not a developer or anything like that; however, I find projects that I believe in and make sure that I know them in and out. Then, I found Kalamint and started hanging around and doing some testing on the testnet and I was like, man, this is a really, really cool project. It’s got a lot of potential. So, I just started helping where I could and making suggestions. Back then one of the co-founders reached out and he said ‘we need somebody like you; do you have any business experience?’ and I was like, ‘well, as a matter of fact, I do. I currently own a company.’ I was miserable doing what I was doing; so, I took a leap of faith and now we’re flying.

So what do your day to day activities look like on Kalamint?

Basically, I hit the ground running and spend about 16 hours a day trudging through emails and being on Clubhouse. I’m working on EST, we had the PangeaSeed partnership that was in Hawaii, our founders themselves are in India and we’ve got people spread out all across the globe. Our goal is to build real relationships with people.

Got it. So what’s the current priority when it comes to the development side of things?

The priorities are building a platform that is stable and that we don’t have little bugs with. When you build an application from the ground up, without copying code, you need to be sure that every piece falls perfectly into place.

And how about the most exciting developments coming up?

We’ve got hives coming out and we’ve got our governance token coming out as well. The governance token will let the platform eventually be run on a DAO. Hives is cool because we’re essentially going to let people start their own separate pages. With these pages, the founders of the Hive can control who is featured or who gets to come in. You can run a highly curated guild that is run on a DAO or you can have a group of people coming together to support each other’s work. We want this space to really open up to new artists. If artists can work together and have a page together, like pages dedicated to the various diverse communities out there, then it’ll be easier for them to build dedicated audiences and highlight new people.

Sweet. You mentioned the priority of bug-fixing and making sure the smart contracts run properly earlier. What’s it like working with the wider Tezos community when it comes to all of that?

Actually, it’s been fantastic. I think that the Tezos community definitely understands what we’re trying to do. There’s a lot of tech savvy individuals in this space. One of our goals at Kalamint is to also start tying entities together. With so many smart people in this space, it would really be beneficial if we all work together. In the end, we’re all the underdogs in the blockchain world, so supporting each other is beneficial to us all.

Can you go over some of the benefits of being on a blockchain, as opposed to a traditional marketplace or e-commerce platform?

One of the main things that we always tell artists, when they ask about platforms, is to find out where their data is stored. For example, our data is stored one hundred percent on the IPFS, then the metadata is stored again on the Tezos blockchain, and we have Pinata running in the background. We want the art to outlast us all. In 2018, Art Labs was on Ethereum but they basically had everything stored on their own private server. Everything was fine except for when they ran out of funding and they had to let their servers go. After a year of no maintenance, they shut down. Any artists that had minted on that platform and any collector that had purchased on that platform no longer had access to the data. Artists couldn’t re-mint because someone had already purchased the piece but the collectors couldn’t do anything either because there was no information to pull from. I think that’s the biggest thing. One of the beautiful parts about just putting everything on-chain is that it’s there forever. You know, if our entire team is wiped out tomorrow in a plane crash, the information will still be there and still be accessible.

Hopefully that doesn’t happen. We need you around to build on Tezos.

We’ll never all get on the same plane, I promise.

Why do you think Tezos is the right fit for Kalamint?

Our founders came to the conclusion that, if you’re going to build something from the ground up and you’re going to do it so that it’s built to last, then you need to do it on a blockchain that’s built to last. What’s going to be here in 50 or 100 years? Tezos. That’s the beautiful part. The development has been all about producing results and we’re really starting to see the fruits of that mentality and all the labor that’s gone into it. The fact that it’s self-amending and has an established system of governance means that it will keep going and adopt all the new, necessary technology in the future. Once someone comes to Tezos they’re going to stay on Tezos.

So what do you see as being the future of NFTs as a larger market?

I would like to see NFTs so readily available, and so easy to use, that people don’t know that they’re using them day to day. There’s so much benefit to an NFT and the public ledger system — like what it can do for bookkeeping and what it can do for just making transactions simple and without a middleman. Once we figure it all out and we can transfer ownership with just one or two clicks of a button, and people are trading things of value without realizing that they’re actually trading these little bits of digital data, then you get so many benefits that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

And then how would you compare NFTs to traditional art and traditional auctions?

Well, one of the first pieces we ever sold on Kalamint is about to be listed on a real-life auction house in France. I think it’s all going to mesh well together. People will also be able to display their NFTs on walls just like you would with a traditional art piece. You can cycle through the different NFTs for different moods and all that. NFTs add a lot more flexibility and you have access to a lot of high-quality art.

What would you say to people that believe that NFTs do not have any inherent value?

So, I can go take a picture of the Mona Lisa and put it up on my wall, or I can pay someone to repaint it, but I wouldn’t own the actual Mona Lisa. That’s the beautiful part about the blockchain — that there’s a public ledger with this digital art so that no matter where it goes, how many times it’s sent back and forth, you can always follow that piece of art from wallet to wallet; someone really does end up owning the actual art. Yeah, there are some bad actors — but that’s why we have a slightly curated platform where we don’t judge the quality of the art or anything but we can make sure that the artists are original.

So, finally, if you had one final message to the community, what would it be?

Now is the time to come together. We’re a small community and we need to support each other. It’s time to get together and have our voices heard instead of fighting this uphill battle against each other and other platforms. Let’s be kind to others and be welcoming to everyone who wants to come to the Tezos community.

That’s a very nice message. Well, thanks for speaking with me today!

Happy to have spoken!