Anthony Georgiades on Pastel Network's dedicated NFT blockchain

0:02i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews with anthony giorgiottis co-founder and ceo of pastel network anthony welcome to the show and thank you so much for taking the time to come on today yeah thanks for having me awesome excited to chat more about pastel likewise i'm excited to dive into

0:23pastel network i would love for you to start us off with just a high-level overview and the focus of passed on that work and then we can dive into the details absolutely so just you know in a nutshell pastel is you know really one of the world's first you know fully dedicated purpose-built blockchains for the sole use case of nfts so obviously you know just to kind of

0:44take a step back here we launched pastel and back in 2018 before nfts were hitting kind of mainstream media and the general thesis at the time was you know you had some applications like rare pepe you had cryptokitties which had just obviously started to peak and there were a lot of you know prevalent problems with the underlying use case of nfts on

1:06you know more general purpose built blockchains like ethereum so our thesis at the time was you know to really set out and build a piece of infrastructure and technology from the ground up for the sole use case of the nft application itself so we actually started off with a bitcoin like blockchain that uses kind of a ticketing metadata system versus the general smart

1:26contracting structure that's prevalent in most on nft platforms to date and then basically you know layered in a number of different features and you know all together what this supports is you know a highly robust sophisticated system that's you know scalable ensures you know very low transaction fees and registration fees you know into perpetuity and then allows for very

1:48custom features such as you know new duplicate detection that demonstrates the authenticity and rareness of the underlying nft itself and so you know from there we basically you know set down a path to you know launch and deploy a number of different tools and features that different players in the ecosystem can build upon as well as you know searching for interoperability

2:09across different obviously you know layer one solutions as well and then you know lastly you know launching our own dedicated marketplace that lives directly on top of the pastel network very cool thanks for that overview anthony and yeah it's compare 2018 compared to now it's exploded and i think having that technology in place is really going

2:32to help it seems that you know before the majority of nfts being developed on ethereum there were quite a few problems and it still seems that there are a few in the industry and i'm guessing that you really pinpointed those down as you continue to develop out the technology can you talk about from an artist or a creator's perspective they're coming to mint their

2:55first nfts and they see all these different marketplaces and different blockchains and what would you say to them for you know what's the main competitive advantages of minting and utilizing nfts on pastel network absolutely you know i think first and foremost right you know if you're leveraging kind of the pastel marketplace again that lives on the

3:17pastel network you know we've designed it from basically the you know perspective of the underlying user itself a lot of applications on the market were obviously built you know by crypto users for crypto users but don't necessarily tailor towards you know traditional digital artists or creators generally speaking so for us having a very nice you know user interface and experience

3:38that kind of abstracts away some of the you know wild west aspects of the crypto world was very critical for us i'm just making it super seamless super intuitive and simple and then in terms of kind of the actual core features itself you know first and foremost right a lot of times you know you're missing an nft on a dedicated you know let's say an

3:58ethereum platform per se right i have to get in line in terms of the underlying traffic and usage of you know hundreds of different applications or even just you know other minting you know creators of nfts right that lends itself to very high transaction fees scalability constraints and whatnot on the past dell platform you know you're insured always you know very negligible

4:18low transaction fees we've established a very kind of robust system that dynamically changes the registration fee in terms of you know psl during periods of high traffic or network difficulty which ensures that you know from a creator's perspective what that means you're always going to pay you know under 50 cents for anything that you mix a couple other things you know mentioned

4:39too i think what's become a very critical and important from a creator's perspective is this concept of you know where is my actual asset you know or art being or whatever it might be being stored right we've seen me see some of the rug cool scams and things like that you know when i acquire a traditional you know smart contract based nft i basically you know have the underlying

5:01token id and you know potentially hyperlink to you know where the actual data is stored and that could be on a kind of central web server such as a you know google cloud server or you know some sort of aws ec2 instance right i don't necessarily own the actual data itself as much as i actually do you know the nifty you know perspective of it there's also this a

5:22lot of players that are looking to solve upon this through ipfs pinning and things of the nature but the issue with that is you also now rely on external dependencies and you know different node holders that need to basically make maintain those ipfs nodes so for us what was really important was to actually build an internal storage solution so anytime basically an

5:45nft is uploaded onto the platform we use a sophisticated fountain block algorithm that takes the file and you can think about it as like chopping it up into you know thousands of different little blocks and then it copies those blocks and then distributes them using an algorithm called could then we have over every single node on the network so the actual intrinsic storage of the you

6:07know data is internally on the blockchain itself very cool i like that and you mentioned their 50 cents that's pretty good for you know having democratized access to create nfts and you're not paying a bunch of you know of unknown amount depending on the network and how many things are going on ethereum specifically but also seems that a lot of these

6:35networks are utilizing layer 2 solutions to remove those costs and therefore you know potentially having under 50 cents as well so i guess using pastel is it similar to when creators are utilizing layer two networks or is it is it better and different absolutely layer two networks in the sense of basically layer one solutions to help kind of ensure you know lower

7:00fees per se you know i mean look it's it's definitely exciting to see a lot of the solutions that have come into the market today right and i think you know that's just kind of one aspect of it as well but you know from our perspective you know you start to layer in a lot of these different kind of you know either kind of side chains or you know relayer

7:16solutions to help kind of bandage some of the intrinsic problems you know in our system itself you know yeah you might you don't necessarily see the trade-off right i might necessarily use a layer to network to ensure lower transaction fees but that might mean that i'm waiting you know x blocks before my nft is minted right so you know with some of that

7:35trade-off comes you know other intrinsic issues itself if that makes sense definitely but you know definitely it's definitely encouraging to see you know all the you know mind sharing development power in the space that's you know dedicating time and resources to solving upon a lot of these solutions definitely and speaking of development i was looking into the development

7:55ecosystem for pastel network and the nft dap that you know you really encourage developers to be able to develop easily on pastel maybe you can talk about the development ecosystem and nft dap yeah absolutely absolutely i cut off the last part what was the last part of the question the nft dap and just the development ecosystem all together

8:20yeah absolutely you know in terms of pastel specifically what's exciting is you know as i mentioned we've been working the last three years on a number of these underlying features right so for example our robust duplicate detection system conserve and stand like on an isolated basis right so you can imagine somebody that's running a layer to marketplace on

8:40top of an ethereum or solana can basically you know upon minting an nft a simple you know rpc call or you know a simple kind of connection to pastel enables them to leverage just one of our tools like for example the new duplicate protection system and you know you've now basically you know seen a lot of integration in terms of you know actual you know third-party

9:03developers you know building on top of pastel and interesting ways so from our perspective it's all about you know how can we be as basically you know open as possible right we built a lot of this awesome really cool stuff and you know what can we do best to basically you know leverage our resources and kind of open it up to the broader community

9:24and so from our perspective you know what the future looks like is you know you have obviously a number of different nft applications you know that coexist in the world right and you know potentially certain marketplaces you know leverage you know the duplicate detection system of pastel maybe some leverage the actual you know storage solutions that we have offered

9:43and maybe have actual layers marketplaces that transition directly on top of you know the core underlying layer one infrastructure that we've built out but at the end of the day what's exciting is you know we have you know basically at this point we've had hundreds of develop hundreds of developers contribute to our overall code base and we have you know 50 plus that are

10:02working you know actively on a daily basis and basically just contributing code from a core perspective with again you know several hundred others that have you know basically you know maintain active repositories in our you know in our github itself so i think the future is very exciting and i think as we you know continue to go to market and get more and more players and

10:21partners you know working with us and building upon us it'll just obviously have you know significant network effects of development mind share on top of us which will you know then lend itself to you know more and more partners building with us i completely agree and i do think that the duplicate protection is really interesting and i'm curious if you have

10:41more information surrounding you know how big of a problem is duplicate protection and when you and your team set out building this dap what was the main goal is it to protect creators to check if somebody else is duplicating their nfts or is it to stop in the process if somebody else is trying to mint something and it's already been minted can you talk a

11:02little bit more about that yeah you know it's it's a bit of both right you know the biggest issue that's really been prevalent in the digital art space for forever is really you know how do i know that what i'm actually buying is you know truly rare and authentic and you know how easy is it to basically just you know rip off something from you know the internet and basically

11:22copy it if i take a if i take a you know let's say that action decides to maintain it up to you i take that same nft i change one little pixel right it's the same data but it's going to demonstrate a different perceptual hash right so it appears that it's you know different so our whole objective was how can we really create a system that from a viewers basically naked eye

11:46looks feels you know is the same effectively an nft that's basically cropped flipped stretched you know the contour component of it a mona lisa with a mustache right something that's not necessarily you know truly rare right you know but is obviously you know a unique perceptual hash but so that whole kind of general idea you know started off several years ago

12:09and our ceo basically spent you know a long time trying to basically solve upon this research problem and i kind of view it as well i would say probably the biggest differentiating factor of the system itself the fact that we've been able to actually achieve this you know near duplicate detection component and so you can think about it you know

12:28as if i'm an artist and i admit an ft and i know it's purely mine i'm going to sign kind of a level of awareness and from you know your perspective as a user it's anything from zero to one hundred percent no hundred percent meaning you know this is extremely rare versus you know zero percent you know this is you know not rare whatsoever and just for a quick rundown of how we

12:49do this we basically use you know a number of different deep learning models to transform each actual nft into a you know 10 you can think about like a 10 000 plus vector fingerprint and then we basically use sophisticated statistical techniques to assess the correlation of that fingerprint against every single nft on pastel as well as you know collaborative platforms and

13:12then as well as doing you know an effective reverse image search on the network so we're basically you know comparing this fingerprint to any other fingerprint that you know the world has effectively seen so it's a pretty powerful system and you know you can think about it like this right if i'm buying a crypto punk and you know i'm basically a you know

13:31a new novel user mean it's you know been altered slightly i don't necessarily care you know how authentic or rare it is but you know maybe that means i'm not necessarily willing to pay a high premium and if i'm a highly sophisticated collector and maybe every piece that i want to acquire i want it to be you know truly rare truly authentic i guess the last thing i

13:51would touch on here is you know again the important aspect of this is to really protect both you know the user and creator from you know outright scam copyright infringement etc but at the end of the day too you know we've built in a level of kind of you know ticketing submissions where you know it helps ensure that obviously you know the user is protected in the case

14:11of you know false positives or false negatives and things of the nature great thanks for elaborating on that anthony i really appreciate that and i'm also curious about you know in the nft space there's been a lot of discussion and potential controversy around the environmental impacts and that minting nfts are bad i'm curious on your perspective on that is that a real

14:34issue and if it is your team doing something to mitigate that i mean look there's there's been obviously you know a lot of headlines in the news recently just with respect to the environmental impact of you know just the broader blockchain ecosystem obviously you know the debate over proof of work versus proof of stake the extraneous the computational resources that may or may

14:59not be needed definitely have kind of a potential detrimental impact on society itself there's obviously you know certain trade-offs as well with a proof of stake versus you know proof of work system you know the latter being obviously a lot more you know battle tested i would say though you know for the most part what is exciting is i think

15:20that for the first time in the industry's history we've seen so much work going on into basically combating a lot of this you know history concern which i think is super super you know powerful and from my perspective you know very optimistic right in terms of you know where things are going in the future in terms of pastel specifically you know we've been you know working actively

15:41with a number of those different groups but we've also layered in a kind of unique aspect of the system where we basically take a component of every registration fee and actually send it to a non-profit that plants trees to help basically you know provide some carb you know some carbon offsetting so you know i definitely think there's a lot of creative ways to

16:02help in terms of just you know purely carbon offsets this is kind of you know one of the ways we've thought about it but it is exciting to see you know how much work is going into to help find more sustainable long-term solutions great that's good to know and it's always nice to hear when there's a company planting trees as well so thanks for thanks for that

16:23Now moving forward you already have all this intricate technology with pastel i'm guessing people are going and minting nfts very often what are the next steps for your team in terms of developments and releases and growing the platform say in the next six months yeah absolutely absolutely so you know it's pretty exciting right we're at an inflection point where you know we have

16:48our full mainnet is fully functional in live in terms of the actual layer one application component itself in the coming weeks we're going to be launching our you know dedicated layer two marker plates directly on top of pastel and so you know from that perspective there'll be a lot of you know kind of user acquisition strategy in place in terms

17:07of actually going out to the market acquiring initial users and i think one aspect of what we're going to really focus on is you know non-crypto native users you know ones that maybe haven't even actually explored the nfc environment per se yet because they've either not had the resources to do so or have basically just been kind of you know scared to make that jump into

17:25the crypto space so that's one aspect of you know what we're really excited about on the roadmap and the second is just to continue to build out developer documentation in terms of you know all of these amazing kind of tools that we have you know built out in our broader ecosystem and then you know obviously from that perspective procuring more and more

17:45partners to work with us leverage our tools you know build upon us i wouldn't say that we have any competitor right i view everyone as a collaborator right it's still very early innings everything that we do is you know for basically you know the progress of just the broader ecosystem right and contributing to that growth so working with a number of these

18:05different collaborators on you know kind of a daily basis and you know obviously contributing to that like you know vision and goal and so yeah i think those you know really are kind of the two main things we're focused on obviously a number of you know underlying kind of specific features if you go to pastel.wiki you can see our full roadmap in terms of you know what

18:24we have laid out over the coming months and you know for every single release great i think that's a great perspective to have as we are very early days and there's a lot of work to be done so thank you for that anthony for the viewers that are looking to learn more about pastel network in general and to start minting nfts and getting involved and looking for the release for this

18:46marketplace what's the best way for them to get involved and join the community yeah absolutely so if you go to our website you know pastel.network you know basically we have a number of you know different resources on the website directly you can go to the about up us page you know read the overview and i think you know obviously go to the wiki as well for a little bit more of a

19:06technical overview on the platform and then you know once you're on the site we have links to you know our telegram our twitter our instagram accounts and you know if you join any of those different community channels you know we're constantly posting you know different updates and different news on the platform in terms of you know our progress and the next steps

19:23great thanks anthony i will leave those links in the description box below as well all the best with pastel network moving forward and let's follow up in the near future awesome thanks so much for having me ashton appreciate it you