On April 28, the "Vitality 2021-Blockchain Ecological Industry Cloud Summit" hosted by Odaily was successfully held. In the first roundtable forum in the afternoon, Robby Yung, CEO of Animoca Brands, Mary Ma, co-founder of MixMarvel, Allen, managing director of LD Capital, Bozena Rezab, co-founder and CEO of GAMEE, Lisa, co-founder and CMO of Async Art Liang and other guests had a wonderful discussion on the recent hot NFT.
The following is the specific content:
The following is the specific content:
Amber (host):Hello everyone, thank you very much for joining this conference. My name is Amber. I am one of the founding team members of Bihu, the largest and most influential crypto community platform in China. I am also the COO of the platform. I am the moderator of this forum.
Today we will discuss the topic of NFT. We will discuss the real value and the latest trends in the NFT field. Before we enter the question, I would like to ask the guests to briefly introduce themselves. Today we have five special guests joining the discussion, they are Robby, CEO of Animoca, Mary, co-founder of MixMarvel, Hobo, managing director of LD Capital, Bozena, co-founder and CEO of GAMEE, Async Art Co-founder and CMO Lisa. Please introduce yourself first.
Robby（Animoca Brands）：Thanks Amber, I'm Robby Yung, CEO of Animoca Brands.
We are a developer and publisher of blockchain-focused games, and I think many people have known us for the past decade or so. We have years of experience in the field of mobile gaming and have worked with many of the most famous brands in the world. I think we have now brought a lot of knowledge and experience to blockchain games and will also focus on working with brands like F1, MotoGP, etc. People are probably familiar with our games like The Sandbox and more recently GAMEE.
Mary（Mix Marvel）：Nice to meet you all, and thanks to Odaily for the invitation today. I am Mary, the co-founder of Mix Marvel and Rocket Protocol. My other two partners are senior game developers and producers from Ubisoft and Tencent. I myself used to work in a trust company in China. We Since 2017, he has been committed to developing in the blockchain field.
Our first game, Hacker Dragons, was #1 in August 2018, brought us over 100,000 users and $3M+ in NFT sales, and then we started helping launch again Other games, so probably in 2019, maybe half of the games in the top 20 were developed or published by MixMarvel. But at the same time, we also realized that the infrastructure for NFT and complex applications is not enough, so we started to try to build Rocket Protocol. After 3 years of development, we are very proud to say that Rocket Protocol is expected to go live around the middle of this year. We are very happy to discuss NFT, which is a topic that has been quickly out of the circle recently.
Allen（LD Capital）：Hi, nice to meet you all. My name is Allen and I am the Managing Director of LD Capital. LD Capital is an early cryptocurrency investment fund established in late 2017. Since then, we have been actively investing in quality projects in the cryptocurrency industry space.
Recently, our focus has shifted more towards NFTs and DeFi. We also recently established an NFT fund, which has invested in about 20 active projects, including some layer-one infrastructure projects such as Flow and Efinity, as well as some games and NFT trading platform projects under development. We are very concerned about the interactive experience of the entire NFT ecosystem, and we are still seeking to explore more in this field, focusing more on digital collectibles and games. Thanks.
Bozena（GAMEE）：Hello everyone. My name is Bozena and I'm the CEO and co-founder of GAMEE. With a team of 25, we've built a global gaming community of 25 million registered players. Our brand was named one of the 100 most disruptive brands by Marketing Week. Last year, we started joining Animoca Brands as an independent entity, which is the beginning of our journey from free-to-play games to blockchain games, and I am very excited about it.
Before entering the blockchain industry, I worked for Google, working on YouTube partnerships and monetization in Europe.
Lisa（Async Art）：Hello everyone. I'm Lisa, co-founder and CMO of Async Art. Our platform was officially launched last year. It was born from the question of why art needs to be still and why art needs to be done. Async Art tries to answer this question by creating art. NFTs never stand still and can be altered by different owners as new owners come on board. In fact, like the artwork in the background behind me, it's really just a layer of art that I own, so I have the option to change that background and share it with others whenever I want.
In our first year, we hit some important milestones, and in October we landed at Christie's for the first time. Last year was the year of NFTs, so this is just the beginning, and we are very excited to see creators using our platform to create new artistic mediums.
Amber (host):Thank you so much everyone, sounds like you all did a lot of cool stuff. Now let us officially start asking questions. The first question is, what do you think is the biggest change or inspiration that NFT has brought to the real world? As we know, the emergence of applications such as NBA Top Shot has set off a tornado in the real world, which has attracted the attention of many outsiders. Do you think NFT will have something to do with all of us?
Robby（Animoca Brands）：Of course, I think the biggest impact may be what we now call "making money",
Especially since NFTs have entered the game.
I will discuss it from the perspective of games. NFT gives users the ability to actually own content for the first time. On the one hand, this brings a lot of new responsibilities, but it also brings a lot of benefits to users, because when you can choose to When content is brought outside the game and can be traded with other players in the marketplace, you have the opportunity to monetize the game strictly outside the game ecosystem. Therefore, NFT actually creates a lot of opportunities for players to not only get rewards that can be used in the game, but also rewards that can be used outside the game. These can even be converted into cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and legal tender, which A complete ecosystem is created.
We see a lot of people playing games like Efinity now, especially in the Philippines, and they can even make a living this way, especially for young people, and it gives them a lot of benefits.
Mary（Mix Marvel）：Yes, I absolutely agree with Robby. In fact, we think that after the new crown virus epidemic in 2020, the digitalization of the real world is accelerating, and people are accepting the arrival of a more comprehensive virtual world, so I think that in this process, NFT can provide an opportunity for those non-standard assets .
With NFT, for the first time, people can describe all these non-standard assets as real assets, because they can be as valuable as standard assets. But we think it should not be limited to games, there will be many other use cases, as long as those assets can be considered valuable by a few people, they can be represented in the form of NFT.
We believe that NFT is meaningful to all of us. The connotation of NFT can be infinitely rich, and everyone can profit by publishing their own unique content or trading these unique assets.
Bozena（GAMEE）：I think the biggest inspiration brought by NFT is obvious, that is ownership, which is also the core of NFT. NFT brings countless possibilities, and we can do many things with it. I think this is a remarkable achievement. People from different countries and backgrounds can agree on this point.
There is huge room for innovation in the NFT space, the early stages may just stay in the field of art and games, but it also has other exciting uses, such as in education, the college degree we have represents that we have a skill Proof of ownership, which may also be a potential use of NFT. So NFT has an influence on every field of every industry, and it has brought us a great inspiration, that is, how to prove ownership and all the ensuing rights.
Allen（LD Capital）：I think NFTs expand the boundaries of how digital assets are handled in the real world, and help fundamentally educate people about how to build assets. NFTs can help the physical and virtual worlds become more and more interconnected, and it is important that we recognize that this is changing in our industry and society.
I believe that in addition to art and games, there will be many new ways of using NFT in the future, and many industries will have a new economic model based on this. I fully recognize the potential of NFT. The previous guests have also shared that NFT basically means ownership. In fact, everything in our daily life can be more or less connected with NFT, but now art collections and some Game items are more suitable for developing the NFT economy. But I think there will be more economic models in the future, in more innovative ways, that will be more relevant to people's daily life in some way.
Currently, NFTs of some art and game projects are being auctioned at sky-high prices, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that high prices can easily attract more people's attention, but this may make people form a subconscious mind that "NFT must be expensive". This is not the case, this is just a form, it can be used by everyone just like a certain platform or a certain service, choosing NFT is to make life more convenient rather than more expensive, (astronomical price auction) is just a a marketing effect.
So I think NFT will become more and more relevant to people's lives, and there will be more technology and infrastructure construction around the use and application of NFT technology.
Lisa（Async Art）：I agree with every guest before me. NFTs help grow the creator economy, and I'm sure everyone remembers when vloggers started turning into a means of earning a living. At the time you probably wouldn't think of this as a possible way to monetize (in fact it's only recently that the monetization model has become clear enough), and a few years ago I would have thought the idea was just rhetoric.
The same thing is happening in the NFT industry, if you told people a few years ago I made a digital asset that could sell for 100,000 or thousands of dollars and pretty much sustain myself while creating something I love, People also question is this really possible?
I think as Allen said, the price of NFT needs to be more acceptable to people. Some guests have also talked about the need for NFT to become some kind of practical tool. NFT should indeed become more practical, so that mainstream consumers can understand what I am buying. , What kind of real value does NFT provide.
Amber (host):Thank you all so much for sharing. Next we go to the second question, we hear a lot about what NFT can do. Have you noticed a situation where NFTs don't fit, or what are the limitations of NFTs that you've seen?
Robby（Animoca Brands）：I'm going to look at this from a slightly different angle, because first I'll say that I think NFTs can be used for pretty much anything. But I'm going to talk about potential decentralization because that's another aspect of it and I think for gamers performance is very important as we all know gaming hardware is one of the most advanced hardware out there and usually games require Very high performance, doing it in a fully decentralized way probably doesn't make sense for the game as a whole, but in order to support NFT in the game, you still need to decentralize the ownership of the NFT, but I don't think you really need to decentralize the whole game. I know this may be a bit taboo for very old-school encryption people, but I think the project side needs to find a balance between the attributes of entertainment products and the security of NFT assets purchased by players.
Mary（Mix Marvel）：Yes, I also agree that NFT can do almost everything, but I also think that things that are not suitable for blockchain now may not be suitable for NFT.
This is a very simple truth, say something that has nothing to do with the game, but something broader. There is a gap between the real world and the virtual world, which needs to be filled with some kind of connection, and we also need legal protection in the real world. In this case, the role of blockchain is definitely limited, and NFT will be limited .
As an example, a great and ancient work of art "Portrait of the Mind" was sold at Christie's last year and they did a great job, the authenticity of the work can be verified by a unique open link on the back of the painting, and This is connected to the Bitcoin blockchain, and it's a nice touch. However, there are still many risk factors such as logistics in the correspondence between physical objects and NFTs.
We believe that some shortcomings of the blockchain may limit many applications of NFT, such as the lack of efficient and sufficiently standard protocols, and the lack of infrastructure to support more complex applications. I actually agree with Robby that we don't have to put all our games on the blockchain because it's too complicated, but we need to find a balance. We were aware of this problem back in 2017, we were looking for some second-layer solutions and started working on building the Rocket Protocol. We hope to make NFT more useful and make the value discovery mechanism more sufficient, so that in the future people will not talk too much about high prices or insufficient liquidity, but instead can talk more about the applications we are building.
Bozena（GAMEE）：Yes, I think Robby and Mary described it well. NFT, like every new industry or new technology, seems to have millions of obstacles in the early stage. However, as more and more participants gradually join in and launch various corresponding solutions, the difficulties will be overcome step by step.
We're in the middle of the process right now, imagine if you were building an app to watch a live game, a few years ago it would have been very complicated, but now it's getting easier. We're entering a phase where almost anything is possible, and it's a slow but eventually easier journey that we're already on.
Allen（LD Capital）：I totally agree with what Robby and Mary said about blockchain games.
Let's look back at the blockchain game industry in 2018 and 2019. At that time, many game companies tried to use Token to manage their game ecosystem, that is, they wanted to put the entire game experience on the blockchain. This is actually not true. ideal. Frankly speaking, the most important thing about a game should still be its gameplay, which is the primary task of the game company, rather than creating a blockchain for players. I think games will still work the same way, and unless we see a major shift in infrastructure technology to support high-performance blockchain games, I'll keep an eye on it.
As far as NFT is concerned, what areas are not suitable to be NFT, I honestly think that NFT can be used everywhere, there is nothing that is not suitable for NFT, but the question is how the infrastructure and economic activities around NFT and supporting NFT are developed and designed . Imagine if we want to do a large-scale ticketing event at the World Cup level, it is obviously inappropriate at present, but not because NFT is not good, but because the infrastructure cannot support an event of this scale, but we have We have seen a lot of infrastructure like Rocket Protocol being built to make NFTs easier to adopt in different use cases or domains.
Lots of things can be tokenized with NFTs, but can they all be considered collectibles or valuables? This actually depends on whether there is value in doing so. This is not a question of whether NFT is good or bad, but a question of the people behind it. For example, music NFT, I think that for any music artist, the primary goal is to let as many people as possible hear their music, whether it is necessary to tokenize music, you need to consider whether it is helpful. There are many different ways NFTs can be used, but how to use, how to price, how to design the process and how to provide services to audiences and users are the current challenges, combined with infrastructure constraints, this makes some use cases not suitable now NFT, but this does not mean that NFT will not go to the public in the future. That's how I see it.
Amber (host):The next question is that NFT is breaking the circle now, thanks to the participation of encrypted art and celebrities, as well as big IPs that can resonate with everyone. What positive changes do you think will take place in the NFT field in the next stage?
Robby（Animoca Brands）：I think NFTs are interesting things I've seen. I have many years of working experience in the game field. After the game is live, the most important thing is to build a community, because this can help you get loyal feedback.
From a developer's point of view, once you build a very loyal community, players will enjoy playing together, and it will also bring income to the game, so you will want to maintain the community and hope to continue Provide new content updates to keep the community engaged.
What fascinates me about NFT is that NFT allows the community to have an ownership share of the content they are enjoying. The more they contribute and build to the community, the more they actually invest in the community, and the things they own may increase in value. So NFT is very attractive now, and I think it helps strengthen the gamer community.
Mary（Mix Marvel）：I think celebrities and all of us crypto practitioners have done a great job of bringing NFTs to more people, and we really appreciate it. But we would still say that the branding of artists and celebrities actually works everywhere, not just in the crypto world. It's just that if we can turn the IP itself into an NFT, it may achieve better results, and it will attract more people's attention.
I agree with Robby's point of view, there is a kind of potential energy in the community, and the continuous increase of community consensus will further increase the potential energy, and finally transform the huge value created by the entire community. For one thing, opinion leaders with 2 million fans in the traditional field may not be uncommon, but if these two million fans hold ETH or develop on Ethereum, a huge ecology will be formed system.
In terms of trends, we believe that there are at least two trends for NFT. One is that the pricing mechanism of NFT will be more adequate in the future, which may happen in many ways, and we are also trying a method; the other trend is that the community will cooperate with each other. It will be more interesting that they will work on building their own NFTs rather than just investing in or buying one specific NFT.
Bozena（GAMEE）：For me the answer is gaming, I think gaming was one of the early adopters of NFTs, however if you look at the size of the players and the billions of dollars invested now, we're just getting started.
There will be a larger audience of NFT games in the future, and they will understand that owning digital assets is valuable. On the other hand, there is also a huge opportunity to build games in different ways. If we can make money while playing, then the difference between Blockchain games really have the opportunity to blur the line between providing collectibles and assets, which will open up possibilities for new genres, new games, that we couldn't do before.
So if you ask me what's next, it's gaming, and there's a lot of work to be done in this area.
Allen（LD Capital）：Yeah, I think it's great to see so many celebrities come in and it definitely helps us get a lot of attention from the traditional world. That's all well and good of course, but for the industry, especially as an item or potential collector, they have to really get to know the items, there's bound to be some that aren't really valuable, and there's a big difference between them . There are countless IPs in the world, but this does not mean that any brand can generate value, and the brand will go bankrupt. Therefore, when we see that certain professionals will cooperate and do certain things, we will carefully evaluate what they are actually doing and think about whether their NFT has real intrinsic value before making relevant decisions.
I think retail investors have to be very careful and the industry still needs education to fully understand that this is actually a niche market. I give a lot of young artists and individual creators a lot of opportunities to act and express themselves, but it doesn't mean everyone will succeed, but it does give everyone a fair chance.
I think we are still in the hype stage for the time being, which is a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. I appreciate everyone's attention to celebrities and opinion leaders, but we must really return to the foundation and intrinsic value of the project.
Lisa（Async Art）：I think this question will have two parts.
NFT will definitely put more pressure, or impetus, on the development of technology. I don’t know if anyone remembers that the early minting costs and gas transaction fees were generally less than one dollar, but now if there are 5-6 $ or $10 and everyone will be happy, so it is necessary to push Ethereum to move to PoS proof as soon as possible. At the same time, this has also drawn the market's attention to other blockchains, more lightweight blockchains with faster transaction speeds, people are happy to explore these new chains, so I think NFT will definitely help promote further development of technology.
Secondly, what I want to say is true decentralization. Opensea and Rarible have not really achieved decentralization. Everyone just gathers on that platform. The real NFT should be able to be collected and traded in any place, instead of surrounding a specific platform like it is now. Taking games as an example, what I hope to see is that props between different games can be freely circulated and traded. This is a very cool future vision. It may take decades for these projects to cooperate with each other, but I think this is the spirit that the decentralized NFT ecosystem should promote. This is my opinion.
Amber (host):Thank you very much, NFT does have unlimited possibilities, but it must also be clearly recognized that it is still in its early stages and requires the joint efforts of all parties inside and outside the industry.
Thank you so much for sharing and participating today.
