Nick Rose on Ethernity's NFT marketplace and GameFi expansion

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have nick rose ceo and founder of ethernet nick welcome to the show and thanks so much for taking the time hey austin thank you so much for having me excited to be here you're very welcome so much going on in the world

0:19of nfts blockchain and ethernet is doing so much as well a lot to talk about in a little bit of time so let's dive straight into it i'd love to start off the conversation by just hearing a little bit about you know ethernet chain what your team is working on and then we'll dive into the details yeah authority chain is our nft marketplace and platform

0:40it started you know the idea came to be around 2017 and but we launched officially a year and a half ago we started as a team of three now we're a team of 70. and you know we were fully focused on expanding our offerings and building around the ern token growing our community and keep acquiring ips definitely that's great and there's so

1:09much expansion in nfts because there's so much different utility you know everything from from digital apes to profile pictures to digital identities to real world assets and where do you start and where do you focus with ethernet yeah so ethernet's first mission i would say was to bring brands and individuals into the web3 space so our first goal was ip

1:34acquisition we went out there and tried to speak to individuals and companies and sign licensing deals long-term licensing deals you know we've done some amazing licensing deals with lionel messi abg which owns the elvis priestley estate right for digital rights and shaquille o'neal mohamed ali mallory monroe we did a few things with tony hawk

2:02so we keep playing on that field keep acquiring ip keep doing licensing deals and getting those licenses and working them step by step on the web 3 playground and you know releasing digital collectibles from now that's really cool and how do you approach that and looking at like a you know entertainer or an artist and a fan connection i feel like there's different

2:25ways that the platform could approach utilizing nfts in that relationship yeah there's multiple ways to do it you know the easiest of all is like i said digital collectibles but there is a lot of ways to do to do that there is some individuals some notable figures who they actually want to get involved in being the community and be active so

2:46they want to build their own communities so for example tany potentially will have his own community and they start their own discord and they are in touch with their own community so they get asked questions daily so they're fully involved and there is others brands and individuals they just want to sell sell stuff like you know they're licensing our stuff and

3:09we gather our team or we partner up with an artist like boss logic or afghan city that we did things before and we put out their artworks and collectibles and some of them have utilities so let's say even if you don't have your own community you purchase now collective a lion or mexico like the ball maybe lionel messi will zoom with you once a year

3:31or like i did this personally with i released a collectible myself and you know the community love we love speaking to each other and i only made 20 of them and the community gets to zoom once a year with me so there is fun utilities you can get and interact with people you admire but yeah those are the three ways very cool and does that all work through

3:54the ethernet marketplace or do you go to the marketplace and search for specific artists how does the marketplace work yeah you can navigate through the marketplace and we which categorized at the moment that entertainment and sports right this one this thing will change because we're adding way more categories in the future but the moment you can go and search and

4:14and go 30 dot io and you will see all the licenses and all the drops we've done yeah ethernet dot io very cool and speaking of drops i feel like something that's brought a lot of hype to nfts and a lot of awareness to people that aren't involved in nfts right now are are the air drops and like these primary market drops where they sort of sell out right away is that how you're

4:36approaching these collectibles with the artists yeah i mean we've been experimenting a lot like i said this is a brand new space you gotta play around to figure it out so we did two weeks ago we did our mystery box our first mystery box drop ever the legendary sold in less than 44 seconds i had barely time to buy one and the whole drop sold out in a few

4:57hours you know we observing and experimenting with selling mechanisms for now and there's a lot of way to do it we've done options we've done we've done just limited items we've done open editions we've done mystery boxes as of now we're experimenting to be honest we love the mystery boxes selling mechanism it was a lot of fun for the community as

5:21well lots of engagement from the community and you know everybody was happy in the end which is pretty rare usually people will complain but that was one of the most successful definitely and that's great to hear and i'm guessing you know you've sort of been following the nft ecosystem and it sort of differs a little bit through different blockchains as well and some

5:42of them have some of them have issues and some of them have complaints whether it's with a non-fair launch or just the costs of the blockchains how have you know looked at the problems in nfts currently and solved them on ethernet chain yeah you can like i said well i'm a problem solver myself and i love solving problems like with experimenting and

6:07testing and seeing what the community wants and how things are easier we've done a lot of mistakes in the start i think we're getting much better and the only way to get much better in anything you do is experimenting and testing things right and at the moment we're only on ethereum but one of our biggest goals on our roadmap and something we've been working very

6:30hard on the background is interoperability being able to buy something and being able to mean it in any chain you want lowering the gas phase increasing speed and giving an option because that's what's all decentralization is about people need to have options having options about doing whatever they want so if you were to buy a collectible or an nft collectible from ethernet you

6:54should be able to mint it wherever you want right i think it's pretty it's very important because anyone will feel like they have 100 control of their assets and their purchases definitely i completely agree and i'm looking forward to seeing those big plans and i think multi-chain will be a huge part of it and you know speaking of the big picture i know ethernet is a

7:16part of the ethernet labs and i saw that ethernet labs recently raised 20 million dollars so congratulations first of all on that maybe you can talk about you know those partners what with that close what sort of plan moving forward with ethereum lab yeah so when we first started about a year and a half ago about a year and a half ago yeah we only raised 2.8 million dollars

7:39through iran but we were really lucky and we were part of that amazing nft bull run on 201 and we didn't need to raise more money but what happened is you saw that surge of companies and individuals trying to get into the market and you would see like sorry for my expressions you'll see stupid valuations and amounts a hundred million dollar fifty million

8:02dollars there and i was we were like okay let's go raise because this is not going to end up well and you'll see a massive market crash which i'm a big believer i mean you see it happening right now not in nfts yet but you see it on the stock market you see it on the on the fungible market and so with the goals we had even if the company was profitable and is profitable

8:24we still needed awards just to be able to compete against against others so we went out there spoke to a few strategic investors that we really like and we raised our seed round of 20 million dollars to expand our offerings because ethernet like i said is our first product right we're building i mean the exorians universe i don't know if you've seen

8:45anything about about it on twitter it's our biggest bet for 2022. Is our own brand it's our own little universe i don't want to say little it's our own universe because it's going to be more than little in my opinion it's our it's our own brand that we're building from scratch it has its own story and you know our aspirations for the bro this brand are enormous you know

9:10we're building comic books we're building a story we're building a video game a web 3 fully video game we're building a little metaverse as well again i said but yeah the exorcist universe is part is literally the first project after the ethernet labs fundraise that's great to hear and yes smart move following the market cycles there now

9:35i'm curious you know there's the you know the artist fan collections with nft utility then there's the utility of nfts in metaverses and in game five as well are you just you know putting your hands in each of those baskets or where do you see the most potential for nfts to grow out of all of these different ecosystems yeah i think it depends because there

9:58is different people it's all depends on the consumer right there's some consumers that all they care about is the art they just buy nfd's for the art like i love art if i walk you through my house you'll see i have buns of nfd's all over because i just love the art i'm not expecting any utility from the artist right though that's all i care about and eventually

10:17one day maybe i'll i'll resell that be somebody else but for now i just have it here and i enjoy it on a digital screen in my house or and i enjoyed seeing it on my on my on my metamask wallet and there's other people who they do this for work they do this for profit so their goal is to buy nfts and trade them for more money and flip them and those those consumers expecting the nft

10:38student to increase in value which obviously you can't control but that's the expectation right so that always wants you to see they always want hype around the project and if but like i said no founder can control that if there is things going on with the project they'll be they'll be high like today elon musk went and he was probably boarding the morning and

10:59he used an ape on his profile for fun he went up i own multiple apes that's how i know but like but like the founder who didn't even know that he was probably sleeping and he just woke up and pretend he's you know what i'm saying so there's things that are happening that's out of your control and some of them are good some of them are bad like

11:21so you can't really control the hype you can build as you can build as great as you can and have your marketing plan and things will flow and the third part is wearables and metaverse utilities which i love and we do a lot for example we've sold the dak prescott was the quarterback of the dallas cowboys we sold his wearables and what will happen is when our

11:45sandbox activation is ready and we're almost there anyone who owns that an nft will be able to run around sandbox wearing the duck prescott jersey right for dallas cowboy fund that's that's a big pretty big deal right and we'll do the same with messi we'll do the same with many other athletes wow very cool and you know speaking of the exodus universe and making you know

12:08games and metaverse it's a whole nother venture on top of you know doing fan collections and nfts for art how i feel like you to make a good game and to have a game that people are going to continue to use and not just you know have the initial hype and sort of fade off you need to have like a whole game studio or you need to have a really big plan in how you're going to retain

12:29people to play and bring long-term utility even i'll get insight into that or 100 and just to add to that you know my passion i had always three passions finance art and gaming i love art i love gaming i used to play a lot of games when i was younger and i had more time i'd still snatch out some rust sundays here and there but not much anymore i prefer spending time in nature when i

12:54can and finance with d5 we can talk about the file later but the gaming was always you know i always wanted to start the gaming studio myself it never i haven't done it yet so now it's the time to partner up with the gaming studio but what we did is which i'm going to learn a lot personally myself and you never know in the future you know i have a lot of aspirations as well

13:15so what we're doing is thomas vu who's a great friend of mine he's a he produced league of legends and he also produced this amazing so called arcane on netflix that actually broke records elon musk posted about this as well and so what we did he thomas game came on board ethernet labs he invested an x amount on our on our round and he came on board as a as

13:44our gaming advisor so he's helping us his health that's not helping us he's he's obviously helping us but we started months ago and he's connected us to bands of studios and he's helped us bring some key developers and key product managers in on ethernet labs to help us build this monster which called the exorians universe what we're building you said something

14:07very smart you said how people will keep playing the game and not just play and leave we're building a lifestyle game you know there's different categories of games there's games that you can play as a single player you can take a player finish your quests and that was it and there is lifestyle games that there is no quests there is no there is none of

14:25that stuff there might be a little story just to get familiar with the game but the main goal of the game is you have multiple maps and you connect with all your friends and you compete on those same maps and you get better and better with years it takes it takes a long time to get better right like fortnight fortnite is easier but like rust for example it takes it takes years

14:45to master the pvp and stuff so we're taking the lifestyle approach built a game that people can play with that gamers can play with using their exorian characters you'll obviously have a default character if somebody doesn't own an exorian they'll have the basic character but if you do own an exorian you'll be able to log in with your with your web3 wallet

15:06to use your accordion and play against your friends in different servers official servers and community servers very cool nick and great to hear about that league of legends connection there now you know the game games obviously take a lot of time as well is there any tentative timeline on where you're at with exodius yeah it's gonna take us about two three years we have no

15:29illusions of launching a game tomorrow it's gonna take us a while two years is our minimum time what we going what we're going to do is though i was holding this as a as a defy thing to tell you in the end because there is another utility in nfc besides the three ones that i mentioned earlier there is financial incentives right or defined incentives meaning you are now

15:54an exorian you can stake him and you can earn reward tokens tokens back which i love that and we're doing that we're launching and second token which i won't i won't name the name yet because our community is like cia they look at everything i say and everything i do and they save them and they bring them up with this chord it's like it's like it's like hilarious so

16:15we're launching a second token that every exotic holder will will get air dropped and you know but sorry not airdrop they will have to stake their exorian to earn and this will have bunch of utilities it's going to be our slp token in the game in the future but for now it will serve our defy our defined needs till the game is ready so we'll do this we'll have this fundify

16:38application until the while the game is being built and the comics i was mentioning is the goal is obviously we haven't put this on the roadmap yet because we're working on the logistics the goal is the stalkers we've already wrote the first season the goal is take this fun story we've written and put it on a comic visualization on comic visuals and

16:59seldom comics as nfts that sounds really exciting we will use ethernet as the marketplace to sell the exorbitant pumps because exotic universe a different website is a separate website with the authority both of them are built by ethernet labs but there are two different entities but they will cross they will cross in multiple with multiple ways so selling collectibles

17:20using potentially licenses from ethernet as wearables for the exorians sectors your messengers your doctors just bringing random names but there's gonna be a lot of crossovers there very cool looking forward to that nick and you know you mentioned about d5 and that you're creating a second token i wanted to just touch on the first token and you mentioned at the beginning how

17:41you're really trying to build the ecosystem around the ern token maybe you can talk about just that right now and what you've built so far around that ecosystem yeah yeah so ern is our native utility token if this talk the token's purpose is having a community that's using it and you know like every using our own token we wanted to make sure we have control of

18:07of the use case meaning the community will everyone feels that they belong in something when instead of using a different token why not use our own token right and potentially potentially i don't say this is going to happen in the future we might have our own chain because you know you saw what happened with the apes with that's why the name was always

18:26ethernet chain and not affirmative we obviously plastering now as eternity but potentially why not have our own chain because we do believe in what we're building and our community is increasing rapidly so eventually why not save those gas phases it's it's just a lot right but for now we're we're we're on ethereum we have a migration on polygon as well where we on our quick shop as

18:47well but everything we do within eternity is on so if you want to purchase an nft if you want a steak if you want to farm if you wanna lp stake you have to use ern and the other things we're building and we can go there later that ern will be we'll have a use case on our game now the exorians game anything you need to play the game you'll need

19:09if you want to buy an item in the game if you want to compete with someone in the game era will be the primary token for everything in the game but the reward stock it will be the new token we're going to create that's going to be this is our slp like axi for example right so we're going to have a different rewards talking with different economics

19:27and different mechanics but the purchase powering token and the governance decision token will be will be here because there's going to be a lot of governance that we are implementing in the future for the game for improvement for patches and fourth as well amazing nick so much so much going on in little different ecosystems and you know you mentioned they're hinting at a

19:50few things maybe we can just talk about you can hint at a couple things on the roadmap just for ethernet itself in the near future here that the viewers have to look forward to yeah sure sure so like i said the third is an energy marketplace so we keep adding features i mean we just added like we started as a plain marketplace that all you could do is buy

20:12sell buy sell so we're now adding nft swapping you can swap your entities with somebody without a monetary transaction right this is part of our roadmap it's not out yet but we're working on it in the background we added an nft transfers we adding make an offer now those make an offer openc already has it but we didn't so we're just focusing on what

20:32we're how is our marketplace is working we adding leaderboards we already have leaderboards for stone farmers i don't know if you know what stone farming is it's a program we have for people who listening that you can stake your urn and you can earn stones and instead of spending your earn when we have stoneholder events you can spend stones where they have no monetary value and

20:52and acquire nfts you like which is pretty cool and i love that a lot of people have been able to buy to purchase nfts with stones which was zero which is worth nothing you can do that just by staking and they were able to sell those nfts for ethereum or earn which it actually has value so they were able to make profit so that's a defy application there right there right

21:16You can you can like i said you confirm stones you can direct stake and you can lp stake provide liquidity on our uniswappool and earn trading rewards a lot of people doing that we have pretty good some pretty good tbl in there what else are we coming we're building we're building our mobile app which is my product my chief of products biggest

21:36Challenge right now we built it we were ready to launch it we didn't because we all looked at the inside it's good but it's not perfect so we are working on it right now hopefully we will launch the app through the summer because we like i said to take nfts mainstream you need both worlds you need the crypto natives and you need the everyday people right everyday people doesn't

22:01know how to use a mental mask wallet so building this up we've actually invested a lot of money on this on this on this iphone slash android app and when it's ready that's going to be a pretty big feature for the authority marketplace because now you can use the app and the website to buy collectibles and so it will open the door for an influx of users as we didn't have

22:22before what is how we're building on the background we're building a lot of our multi-chain technologies like i said maintenance in different chains and we're building nft lending but nft lending might be a different complete website because like i said with regulations in the us we don't know yet we have to figure it out but nft lending we've we are just waiting

22:46on from our legal departments being able to get a loan i love defy like i said but we have to comply with because i'm based in the u.s but the company is not most of the ethernet is based in officer and the majority of the team is based offshore so we'll see like i said i we complying with everything so we want to be compliant so we will see on nft landing

23:11when it's time yeah we have a lot of stuff built a lot of stuff being built in the background yeah amazing nick yeah that's a lot of stuff for the people in the discord to sift through and ask you questions about and you know just for the viewers that aren't already in the ethernet communities and they haven't used the marketplace you know what is the best

23:32way for them is it just to go in the discord and go to the marketplace or however people learn more and get involved i think it's 30. io sign up create an account and join our discord or telegram and then interact the admins and everybody that i'm there pretty often you can tag me and ask me a question or my twitter i am nick rose or the company's twitter you can always send

23:52me a question or i'm pretty i'm pretty active on twitter and or discords and like i said our whole team is active so we do amas pretty often and everybody's really really friendly in there and they'll be more than happy to facilitate for sure amazing thank you so much nick i will leave the links in the description box below as well all the best on everything

24:13ethernet chain and ethernal labs and let's follow up in the near future you got it awesome thank you so much man thank you for having me