Decentralized Tech Livestream- From Tangible to Token — Where Collectibles Meet the Blockchain

Decentralized Tech Livestream: Welcome back everybody.

Jon Radoff: You are on the decentralized tech live stream slash I think the web gaming live stream. I think it's almost everything today, in terms of what we're going to talk about. So first of all, this is going to be an awesome conversation. I've got a great guest with me here. It's Twam from Collector Crypt. And we are going to get into internet capital markets, real world assets, collectibles, compute capital markets because I'm going to mention what we do in relation to all this and collectible capital markets. So there's a lot to cover here. There's also a really interesting backstory to this. So Twam and I share a couple of really interesting things, more than a couple of things. One of our things that we share is a love of magic to gathering. So I started collecting them. I got Mox Gems and Black Lotus back in long ago. Let's just say I sold mine way too early. I wasn't as smart as Twam to hold onto them. I think they're probably trading around on Collector Crypt right now. But I had those. We have been talking each other for years. I'm actually an advisor to Collector Crypt. I started something like four years ago. So we've been on this kind of a similar company journey, different companies, but similar journey into our token launches. And of course, Twam also launched with Metaplex Genesis just a few weeks back. So that's what we're doing in another week ourselves here at Beemable. So we have a lot to talk about. I think we're going to drop some massive alpha. We're going to talk about tech. We're going to give you an insider view into what it's like being an entrepreneur, just kind of an entrepreneur in this market. So we got a lot to cover. Without further ado, though, Twam, why don't you just introduce yourself? How did you get to this point in time? And we'll talk about Collector Crypt a little bit more in a moment. But what's your journey into crypto and startup plan?

Decentralized Tech Livestream: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for incredible intro. My guys are complaining. I haven't given a clickable link to the show. So I just dropped it in the chat. Sorry about that. Yeah, so I think in many ways, collectibles and crypto kind of like hit the same happy place in my brain. And maybe that's kind of where I'm sitting in the seat that I am in now. So I started out very similar to you, John, collecting magic, gathering in the early 90s. I started playing in 1993. I never really got to open up much alpha when it was out because, you know, when it was like newly printed because I think alpha just like really, really sold out super fast. And I was only able to buy kind of alpha on secondary. But I did manage to get myself a beta box and I managed to get myself a couple Arabian nightboxes and one of my cards that I had originally. This is a card I opened up in a box in like early 94 or late 93. So, you know, it's pretty incredible. And you know, this card now, you know, obviously a lot of other cards have surpassed in value. But my original magic togethering deck had four of these, you know, kind of built around this card and all that kind of stuff. And I keep it with me here next to my desk because it's the easiest thing that I can do on a daily basis. I just pick it up and I'm like, oh, man, look how far, you know, these things have come and look at the platform we're creating and look at all the joy, you know, this card brings time, right? And so, like, I keep it right here. And I don't think my story is atypical. I think everybody, you know, has these cards. They look back on their childhood. They kind of remember moments when, you know, good or bad things happen. You know, I remember the time when, oh, somebody ripped me off like stole my $200 card or something, right? These are all like important lessons that we kind of collect. And the cards kind of help us trigger those memories and help us get it back. So, you know, I think early 90s got into collectibles. I mean, you can tell I'm very passionate about them. And I, I went and did my entrepreneur thing, started out in high tech and software in the late 90s, then got into biotech,

Decentralized Tech Livestream: in the mid-20, 2005 time period. And then my biotech career as an entrepreneur, I did that for

Decentralized Tech Livestream: like the next 15 years. But, you know, I kept on dabbling in collectibles and then blockchain

Decentralized Tech Livestream: came out in 2013, you know, 2009. I started hearing about it, started my friends started using it.

Decentralized Tech Livestream: And I'm like, this is the dumbest stupidest thing ever. Like, how are people paying so much money for this and why are people so excited? And then there was a moment in time in 2013, Bitcoin crashed from $1,000 down to around $200. And I said, all right, you know, now that it's down 80% and all my people have left, I'm gonna go and try it out. And so I started mining Bitcoin. That was kind of a waste. I think I was making like, you know, $5 a month mining Bitcoin for something like that. And, you know, but it helped me learn a lot about it. And then, you know, when Ethereum came out, I said, oh, wow, this is our contract concept is really, really good. So I got heavy into Ethereum 2016. I remember, you know, crypto, crypto kiddies breaking the Ethereum blockchain.

Decentralized Tech Livestream: And I'm like, that's stupid. Why are these people trading? And then, you know, it started to like sink in.

Decentralized Tech Livestream: I guess maybe I'm stubborn, but in 2017, you know, hearing about crypto ponds, hearing about using, and it teases real world assets. And by that time, you know, I had a massive magic-together collection. And I'm dealing with all of this friction from eBay, all this friction from everybody else in the world trading and ripping each other off and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, wow, you know, I think real estate on Shane is going to be really hard. I think finding a million real estate agents, convincing them, a 20-year-old convincing them, hey, we can put all this on the blockchain. You can get rid of title companies, you get rid of S-gro, you can get rid of all this stuff. And just put it in the smart contracts. You tell that to like a

Decentralized Tech Livestream: 55-year-old real estate professional. They're not going to give one, I don't know if I could curse.

Decentralized Tech Livestream: And so like a lot of those startups failed. And my idea, like watching this whole thing grow was, you know, if there's one place, like blockchain is very interesting. If there's one place that is extremely low regulation, where there's a tremendous amount of friction, where there's a real opportunity to disrupt incumbents, you know, collectibles is where it's at. And I was already doing cards. And so 2017, we initially had the idea. But then you kind of take a step back and say, well, how do wallets work? I was still using command-line to interact with Ethereum at the point. How do wallets work? How do you en ramp Fiat? How do you go and trade these NFTs? I don't know many of you remember, but crypto punks actually predates a lot of the NFT standards. And like most crypto punks you trade on OpenC are wrapped crypto punks. It's kind of weird. And then of course, ETH rocks had their own marketplace. So all these NFT projects had their own bespoke contracts in their own marketplaces. So just imagine, you know, trying to do everything at once. And so we kind of put it on the burner. But then in 2021, you know, DeFi Summer, 2020 was DeFi Summer. That fixed all like the stablecoin and Fiat on ramp gave more trust and tether and USDC and that kind of stuff. And then 21, you had NFT marketplaces, you had OpenC, you had Magic Eden, you had

Decentralized Tech Livestream: all these kind of things. Oh, I sure. Thanks. All these kind of things coming up and, you know,

Decentralized Tech Livestream: essentially, you know, coming together with infrastructure layer that we needed to launch our platform. And then the piece that was left was creating kind of this physical to digital bridge. Right? How do we vault these cards safely? How do we, you know, let people, you know, interact with the platform in a safe way that doesn't dox them all this kind of stuff. And then how do we, how do we make this efficient? And that's kind of what we spent the next, you know, two years building until we launched. And it was, you know, great to pick up some awesome partners like Magic Eden along the way, you know, famous Fox Federation was a big supporter of ours early on, you know, DGN apes. You know, we love, we love all of you guys that that helped us, you know, kind of grow our community

Jon Radoff: and ecosystem to get going. So let's zoom out the camera lens a little bit because I want to talk about the big bigger picture in crypto and Salana ecosystem specifically because Salana has really been driving this narrative of what they're calling internet capital markets. Really the idea that everything becomes digitally tradable. There's markets for everything. It's a global trading network. So to speak for all different types of assets. I remember when I first heard Toli speak about this a few years ago, he kind of the original version I heard from him several times was like NASDAQ, but open. But of course, now it seems like it's grown a lot more with this idea of not only that, but kind of tokenize everything, tokenize all kinds of assets, even create new types of asset classes. And I think both of us are doing this in our respective startups. So beamable is a company that builds gaming technology, but more broadly, it's really compute technology. We could ultimately sell compute to anybody, but we're focusing on this vertical of game developers because they have a lot of very common requirements that are also very challenging to support and they pay a lot of costs. And when they go down like Amazon did last week, then they're out of business. And they've

Decentralized Tech Livestream: really lacked an ecosystem. So there's all these reasons for it. High level, what we want to do is

Jon Radoff: turn compute itself into a new asset class. So it's possible to take compute and have fungible units of compute using technologies like lambdas and microservices. We don't have to get into that piece, but there are little pieces of compute, which you could think of almost as like the energy from the power grid, except this is computer energy. And if you wrap that in the right smart contract architecture, then it becomes tradable. You can have market forces at the price, you can scale up and down your needs, you can stream it to applications based on what you need by buying it off a market instead of going to centralized providers. So that's our vision. And I think compute is an example of a capital market that doesn't actually exist yet. There's a capital market for energy, but this is enabling a new type of capital market. I feel like you're kind of doing the same thing. We use this phrase in promoting this particular episode of collectible capital markets. I guess so kind of two part question is what do you think of that as a capital market? And how is that different than the fact that people just go around and trade things anyway? We've had a market for collectibles. What is blockchain doing that's new?