Session 5: Mintbase, NFTs and the Path to NEAR with Nate Geier Transcript by 4NTS Note: some parts not included due to sound or conversation watch the full video for certainty and quoting for other purposes Nate’s previous work at a company doing transactional ownership didn’t see a future in tech there. Nate Geier: T hen blockchain you get rid of having to deal with that big company, and the company behind the scenes, and you have the ability to interact with the settlement layer directly. T o me that's the big reason I am getting into the blockchain. It’s allowing developers and anyone to interact with a settlement layer without having to deal with old code. And users actually own what they own - they can choose whatever wallet they want. In reality, you as a customer you interact with robinhood - robinhood is a broker dealer - they interact with a clearing firm, and the clearing firm have several companies behind the scenes that have a file that basically says you have 0.0112 shares of starbucks stock (for example). The world we are in now gets rid of all of that - I get to choose whatever I want. And I get to keep my asset on that. That is what I am after. It is not finding a magical unicorn until the death, it’s about getting off the cluster F of the financial system. First project in crypto? Did a year of playing around with stuff. First app I deployed was Tejap - the idea was a self-twitter. I went to the DevCon 4 Hackathon in Prague. Where Status did their thing. I sat down, and ended up coding night and day. The original idea of mintbase was rooted here. Now Mintbase is the core of what we are doing. Minter - to make it easy for someone to mint. And create a couple tools for people to play around with it - and then seeing how humans play with it. Introducing People to NFTs: When did NFT’s come to the front? The First NFT was on the Bitcoin chain. The one that really made it popular was CryptoKitties - that exploded the network. What was really fascinating was the community. NFTs Point: Blockchain is getting really excited about two things - it is getting crazy with DeFi, and then NFT’s which is basically everything that is not money tokenized into a single form. Coffee, Artwork, Tickets, anything that is not as fungible of money. For things that have a finite number, or one, it makes more sense to use NFTs. If you want to show ownership for a thing. To show that true ownership of it - which we are seeing in crypto voxels - then that is your property and you can put it on open-sea and set it for auction. That is the microcosm for real property in the future. Would you fractionalize NFTs? T he 1155 standard is fractional ownership of NFTs. It is great for Gas. 1155 is amazing when Gas skyrockets. Mintbase Origins: D evCon4 was the beginning. Right now Mintbase is just Nate’s partner and himself. They have been named on Dapp Radar as being one of the largest marketplaces with the most users. People don’t recognize mintbase as being that massive because you could be using Mintbase without knowing it. A lot of the mint on our platform exist in other spots. Mintbase has over 73,000 transactions through their system. They pioneered everyone owning their own smart contract. When you deploy your own store, it’s your own verified smart contract - you don’t own or use the Mintbase smart contract. Aragon has over 1500 DAOs and we have almost 900. Top Use Cases of Mintbase: - Music has been the latest thing, a lot of people have been minting music. We enable people to mint multiple files through a single NFT so it's not just a single part you have in it - it’s your art, and maybe your legal documents are also pegged to it. It is all bound into another blockchain called ARweave. - 791 stores. - What we started with and nailed was the interface and how it interacts with Ethereum. - Ethereum is now chugging through the system, and the graph is now going to pick that up, and as soon as it gets picked up and confirmed it will pop up and be stored. - ERC721 Contract. - For Developers - the origination of this talk was a talk about the graph. The hardest part about blockchain is this interaction about pressing confirm, and the interaction of actually updating. The entire mintbase interface runs on this thing called the graph. Let’s say you are a developer you can click on store and get all of the tokens to mint. As soon as you mint the token, it updates and then you see the thing. What we are building now on NEAR is our own indexer. What is an indexer and what was your own process of creating it yourself? T his is the biggest problem for mintbase converting into NEAR. We are converting all of our smart contracts to RUST from the ground up. This is the most complicated thing of moving to a New chain. As soon as you mint something, you lose complete track of time. You want all of the data to come from the blockchain to a data storage and then pull from that. NFT’s are really going to start shining when using voting and tickets with NFTs. You can buy the ticket using a decentralized currency and go to an event. But as soon as you say there is an open API anyone can interact with to create voting apps or ecosystems, then you can add things by saying, anyone who has a DAppcon ticket can cowork at our space as well - this is what Nate gets excited about. Art NFT’s: Another thing that is pioneering is royalties - we have never been at a time when an artist can sell their art, and continue generating revenue as it moves throughout markets. This is why people are getting excited about Art - we have a programmable piece of item for other things. NFT’s supported on NEAR are not yet fully implemented on the bridge. Excited about NEAR for a lot of other reasons: - What was the journey for yourself and for other teams who are considering NEAR? (25:45) I t is kind of weird having your dreams crushed by Ethereum a little bit. You have this vision, and you know the community and technology pretty intimately and it feels like your best buddy sometimes, and then you spend so much time and effort on a thing that finally got working - building blockchain Apps is super hard. Making it in a way that is a well oiled machine - then seeing gas just skyrocket is a moment of saying - I just spent all that time building an App that might not be that effective. It was a hard last couple of months. Nate is pretty excited about the NEAR Ecosystem. - The first question was: is an EVM right for me, or should I just re-write everything, and if I re-write everything do I do it in Rust or AssemblyScript? These were the first big hard questions. - He came to the conclusion that the EVM might not be the future. - It came down to Polkadot, NEAR or Solana. He looked at NEAR and Solana - the talks of Ready Layer 1. It came down to sharding or big pieces of machinery. He thinks that Sharding is the future that he wants to live in. As a consumer I want to be able to help validate the network without spending a stupid amount of money. - Then it got down to NEAR or Polkadot. Running its own chain and validators was the turn off from Polkadot. Now he is on NEAR. - Typescript is super important and he understand AssemblyScript super well. He pulled the trigger and went with Rust. Rust is like learning about linting for the first time in your life. Typescript is good but you have to enforce that stuff. If Rust doesn’t compile it means you did something wrong. It might be too early for developers to build on Mintbase on NEAR. We are cruising pretty heads down and hoping to get the new contracts to audit by early October. (32:30) What was the argument related to sharding how does it benefit app developers? T he benefit of sharding the obvious one is state bloat. Everyone stopped having the conversation that ETH 1 ran into called State bloat. Everyone is just throwing a bunch of stuff into state, and we have to run a node that copies all of that stuff. It’s too big. So eventually machines will not be able to copy all of that stuff into infinity. A lot of applications like xdai will also run into this issue. To handle this, you either need to get massive machinery like Solana to do all of the copy, while sharding breaks the chain out into a bunch of different areas. So in the future when Mintbase gets massive, parts of one app will be on one shard, and parts will be on another shard. It seems like they handle it pretty relevantly in Rust. But it seems like communicating from one shard to another is kind of handled like we do it in typescript with promises. EVM is going on it;s own shard soon. We are going to have multiple EVMs on the same shard. That is going to be really useful for Ethereum Apps, that can first go on the EVM module and then re-implement the Rust. What are other markets in NFTs? What is your vision of value added NFTs? V alue of NFTs vs. Not doing NFTs - the value added if you look at tickets - Eventbrite does a great job - our vision is buy a thing, own that thing, have that thing do multiple things. You can show it in crypto-voxels, redeem for an object, etc. The Path of Mintbase: - Can we figure out how to get users who don’t know anything about what blockchain is, to deploy their own smart contract, mint NFTs on the thing, and sell the thing. Would they even want to do that? - The second path was - how do we make these things more useful? I have a collectable in my pocket, now what can we do with this? Had all of DApp Con using NFTs on chain - 750 people - before Covid. Now we are back to square one where ticketing didn’t work. Once we deploy on NEAR we will chug on the process of making things useful again. Why Arweave over IPFS? When filecoin comes out, we will offer the ability for people to choose between Arweave and file coin. What is important for us is the incentive mechanism to store the files, right now IPFS without filecoin, doesn’t have one. You have to hire a centralized service like Pinata to store the file or else it can go away. You have to either host your own node, or rely on us to manage that kind of stuff. Arweave, really nailed their endowment mechanism - when you go and mine the file - and it get’s mined - file discovery is under 700 milliseconds. Not 100% goes to the miner but a portion goes to the storage security. We want to give our store deployers the ability to point to a gateway they want to : Some gateways are not GDPR compliant. Anyone building a production application right now - and thinks they don’t need an index - that works for very small use cases. Once you want to go bigger than a PoC you will have to write a million loops. He references the blog post on why he chose NEAR. (42:44) Any other Dapps that you want to see on NEAR, operate with Mintbase? A nything in the meta-verse land. I just think that it is such a beautiful way of showing what you can do a little bit more. Seeing things move to the meta-verses, and opensy - the exchanges t- then you can see more and more what you can do with these things, Decentraland, Crypto-Voxels, DeFi is also coming in: Aave. (44:00) Mark just minted an NFT that allows you to accrue your states interest, if you are the owner of that NFT. So if you want to give that NFT to your friend for christmas, then they can start accruing the interest. The owner of the NFT is the staker - the Aave staker. The NFT offers portable stake pieces that can be shared or loaned out. DeFi NFT stuff is the next frontier.
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