NFTs Beyond jpegs
Francesco Melpignano, CEO Kadena Eco
Brian Cho, GP/Co-Founder, Patron
Le Zhang, CEO Spaceport
Andra Nicolau, Head of BD, Origin
Francesco Melpignano is CEO of Kadena Eco. Prior to his work at Kadena, Francesco was CEO of Robobunker, and CTO at YellowLabel Technology.
Brian Cho is the General Partner and Co-Founder of Patron, an early-stage venture firm investing in web3 and metaverse companies. Brian was previously a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the Head of Ventures at Riot Games.
Le Zhang is the founder of Spaceport Technologies. Before founding Spaceport, Le was Founder and CEO of Squadle Inc., a company that streamlines food safety compliance. Le is also an angel investor and sits on the board of advisors at ACE NextGen.
Andra Nicolau is head of DeFi BD at Origin Protocol. Previously, Andra led growth at 1inch Network, where she spearheaded the Series B fundraise. Andra founded AN-RO Global and Mavensights.
The panelists discussed their perspectives on current use cases of NFTs, future use cases they believe will drive mass adoption, abstraction of value, the use of digital assets to represent real world assets, and the future of NFT marketplaces.
pANEL rEPLAY
Current Use Cases
“Exclusivity, collectability and utility”
Le started by summarizing the three pillars of NFTs. Exclusivity ensures more personal-level connections at exclusive events due to the scarcity of the assets. People who have the same NFT collections share the same values which also support the community. Brian pointed out that consumer applications drive the growth of NFTs. This makes sense given that NFTs are one of the easier concepts to understand in Web3. Francesco added that the current NFT use cases are just “Scratching the surface”. He asserted that “non-fungible” applies to almost everything in the world, so NFTs are a technology with the ability to represent any sort of value that we can create in the physical world on the blockchain.
Brian later likened current use cases to the placement of crude oil into barrels. There are a lot of potential use cases we will discover in the future as time goes on, we are currently predominantly using NFTs to do very basic things like wrapping images. Le contributed his own analogy involving a soda can:
"When you buy a can of soda, you technically own it by being able to drink the content, however, you do not own the logo or the font on the can because those assets are so complex in nature."
Le stated that there are a lot of pieces of ownership that go into physical products, compared to digital assets and products, and reiterated that we are still at a very early stage.
“NFTs are all about community building”
Andra suggested that NFTs enforce artists to connect with their audience to make more desirable products.
The main take aways were the versatility of NFT smart contracts to represent any concept of value irrespective of complexity, the understanding that current use cases are very limited in using the full potential of NFTs, and the power of NFTs to create communities.
The future of nfts
Le stated his vision for future NFT integration with the open AR Metaverse: the transfer of physical assets into digital assets will become the bedrock for the open metaverse. Francesco discussed his excitement about the focus of leveraging NFTs to create new digital business models from existing ones in the physical world. NFTs allow us to create tiered access and value, which in turn can be used for hierarchical governance structures, a driving force for unlocking more effective organization in DAOs.
The future of nft marketplaces
Panelists and audience members exchanged their opinions on popular NFT marketplace applications like Opensea. NFTs inherently have the capacity to enforce royalties or transfer of ownership at a smart contract level, and this is not being utilized to its full potential by centralized marketplaces.
The panelists concluded that Opensea is moving in the right direction of becoming a fully decentralized marketplace, but still has many centralized problems that need to be addressed.
At Decasonic, we innovate for a better future. There are plentiful whitespaces and opportunities within the NFT space and we welcome you to join us in building a better tomorrow, faster.