COZ is tokenizing real world items as non-fungible items

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have Tyler Adams CEO of the cause platform which is one of the core contributors to the Neo N3 ecosystem Tyler welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thanks for reaching out very welcome excited to dive into the world of non-fungible tokens

0:24non-fungible items physical items as well which I think a lot of people are interested in because in blockchain and cryptocurrency there's not a lot that you can hold on to in your hand and I think this is something really exciting I know this is just one facet of the huge ecosystem that your team is working on but I'd love to dive into everything let's just kick it off from the top for

0:45those who aren't familiar with cause if you could explain a little bit about what you and your team are working on and then we'll dive into all the details sure so cause and many of your viewers have probably heard of maybe city of Zion from the Neo and Aunt shares days around 2017 2018. So we've been pretty instrumental in building out the that platform both

1:09through core protocol development standards smart contracts and then also other tooling like sdks wallets explorers things like that we've also done some advisory work for agencies as well the European Parliament So lately we've been working on the N3 platform we brought that with the community and the core developers to mainnet about

1:3818 months ago and now we're starting to work on real product use cases and Enterprise relationships to help kind of build out the ecosystem yeah from what I understand with the Neo ecosystem it's the developer ecosystem part of it is pretty flushed out where it's easy for people to learn even

2:07even with traditional programming languages to start getting started and building applications yeah yeah yeah we one of the nice things about the ecosystem so we is the language support and this is something that we've really pushed on actually since ant shares days so Neo runs a virtual machine called NVM and while there are a lot of other

2:38blockchains which run I have kind of this VM or virtual machine architecture the Neo ecosystem has really pushed on this concept of supporting a bunch of different languages to effectively bring our products to the developers so if somebody is a go Dev for example we have a full Suite of go sdks and contract compilers if

3:05somebody's a python Dev we have boa and Mamba which is our smart contract compiler and SDK for python right we have the same for C sharp we have the same for Java we really have kind of the full Gambit of language support so people that want to jump right into blockchain don't have to worry about learning a brand new language to do it and that sounds like a great you know

3:33accessibility to all of these languages does that easily convert to a lot of web 2 and traditional developers saying hey this is an easy ecosystem let's start building there or is there more to it yeah there's definitely some more to it I think the consideration that it's a VM and explaining to people what that actually means is important so even

3:57when when you write in Python for example for a smart contract it's the language as close as we get Bo is the product that we're talking about as close as we get boa to being true python it's still it's not like native python right and we're pretty close it feels a lot like python when you ride it we also have a package manager which is kind of cool

4:24like you can just download Smart contracts and build up the sdks to start interfacing with news contracts or con things like contract calls but yeah there is a bit of a consideration there although that learning curve has really gone down you know probably I'm trying to think the last Workshop I did this is probably about six months ago I mean we can bring people up with

4:51python for writing a contract and interfacing with it in you know 30 minutes to an hour with writing a contract deploying it and then also I'm doing contract invocations it's pretty quick and one of the applications for smart contracts which is exciting and I know that your team's been working on is non-fungible tokens or non-fungible items I'd love for you to talk a little

5:19bit about you know the initiative that your team is doing at the recent conferences and how this affects you know cause moving forward sure so we recently released this technology that's called item and it's really an interface or a bridge between physical assets which we're calling

5:47non-fungible items and nfts I mean what we're really doing is we're taking physical non-fungible items like this is a one band ring that we were giving out at consensus and we are cryptographically binding them to an nft and these items are counterfeit proof they provide access to provenance information if they're traded

6:16Through the nft but I think the most important concept for people to understand is that what we're effectively doing is we're taking a physical device and we're giving it a software interface in a really easy easily packageable format so it consensus for example we had a generative nft and people could receive a one band and we distributed about a

6:42thousand of them at the event we had hour-long lines people were very excited about it we actually like walking through the hallway and the bathroom people were like expressing disappointment that like the line was so long to get one and things like that but we basically had a waypoint Activation so we had some gamification there where people could go around with

7:06their one bands and they could scan them and they had a generative nft that had about 15 000 combinations that would update as people went through our kind of our neat our Neo N3 Village to learn about the ecosystem so that was pretty successful and it kind of demos one of the one of the use cases of this technology

7:33You know I think moving forward we'll also be demoing a few other swim Lanes I think there are there are five that we're tracking and pursuing right now so it's it's a pretty interesting technology I think the one of the things that makes this specific product unique for us is that it's counterfeit proof it's not the same as like your your

8:01amiibos for Nintendo switch or something where you can buy you know you can buy Blanks on Amazon and just clone you know you can create exact copies of it in this case like this ring for example if I destroyed this ring I couldn't have a backup of it there is no like I don't know how this ring interfaces well that's not true I know how the software works I

8:26don't know The cryptographic Primitives that this ring has inside it and they can't be accessed by anybody very interesting and when you have the ring how do you actually check and connect it to the nft is there just a code you scan on the physical ring that shows you know this is ring four of 200 that have ever been made yeah you actually

8:53You can just tap scan them so they work with a phone like if you tap scan it with your phone it'll take you to in this case they take you to our Explorer right now and then it displays all the properties of the nft it shows the image for the nft in the very near future we'll be releasing some additional support there so the ability to like assert ownership

9:19and prove that you are the owner of a ring or an item the ability to securely message the owners of the items the provenance of the item things like that I feel like these Rings specifically in this example would be a great start to building like a real life video game or something like that what kind of experiences

9:47Are is cause sort of planning around these non-fungible items moving forward to add more value and utility to holders and users of the tech yeah so I think so I can speak to that a little bit maybe I'll start with kind of this anecdote right one of the things that when we were we've been talking within within coz for years now about this technology

10:14And one of the things that really pushed it over for the edge for me is that I'm not I don't play card games very much that's not my type of game but I love like a good pen and paper role-playing game right and one of the things that gets me excited is the idea of like lying all of my friends to Vegas for example to go on a quest like an alternate reality Quest

10:41and I was a child of these alternate reality games coming out of like the 90s and early 2000s and I loved that concept where there was something like hidden beneath the real world you know kind of like a Pokemon go type of experience and these get us pretty close to that you can imagine going to Vegas with your friends to fight a dragon and they're actually

11:07being a pot of gold there in terms of tokens right that are distributed to you if you defeat the dragon and you get a sword or behind me I actually have some chests so these were from our consensus activation the year before last you can imagine you know scanning your ring to power up your avatar and physically opening a chest and inside there being maybe another

11:33item maybe it's like a nice jacket like a anything like a North Face jacket or something like that like a collector's edition that also has this technology in it or maybe a gold ring which has some special capabilities for your next quest with your friends so that's that's something we've been really kind of digging into a lot

12:01I don't know I that's but that's also like my what I want to do for fun with the technology it's not you know when we talk about like priorities for example that doesn't necessarily always fall fall into the top the other thing that we've really been looking at and we demoed this actually at consensus a little bit in addition to the gamification is

12:28rewards so at consensus we had an after party for all the people who had received a one band ring and people could attend the party and they could tap scan their ring to get a free drink so I imagine there being a lot of real world like not necessarily gamification like on the surface but kind of deep down some gamification there in terms of rewards

12:56where people could maybe be you know a frequent user of our technology and they may get access to things similar to like how how board ape if you're a holder if you're in like the yacht club you get access to some after party or something like that we can also do similar things and we are doing similar things but we also have physical assets

13:20which do different things as well so and they can mechanically or physically interact with the environment so I think there will be a lot of fun interactive experiences for the holders in the future the thing that we've really been telling people is to not treat it as a disposable and like a toy demo like hold on to it when you get one keep it because

13:44They're they're usable in the future like outside of consensus for example very interesting Tyler and yeah I think a lot of people get free swag at conferences and they get bored of it you know coating t-shirts and stuff like that so this sounds like something very special in relation to that yeah and we've given we actually we try to package them

14:09effectively as well so here's like an example of the box that we were giving some of them out and consensus so they're kind of packaged in a way to immune try to communicate that to people that it's not just a disposable asset and it seems like people are keeping them which is which is good because they will be beneficiaries of that in the future you can imagine like the

14:34people that have them from consensus from this year at the next consensus will probably be having some sort of interactive experience with them right or another conference coming up so yeah we're trying to make that very clear to people but these are they're not really a hardware wallet but if you received a hardware wallet for example at a conference you probably wouldn't

15:01just throw it away you could you would keep it because it has some some inherent value to it so very interesting and with the rings that you gave out of the consensus I'm guessing it was limited edition you know what I've seen in the nft industry overall is a lot of it is trading or speculation on nft marketplaces but I feel like this is a little bit different

15:24than that yeah so there is there are different Rarities one of the things that like for consensus for example that we did is we use branching code so I my background is in like statistical programming and modeling so we actually run branching code in the smart contract so when people were receiving a ring at

15:53consensus they're actually different colors and all the colors have different Rarities and the contract invocation would pick the color so you would get minted probabilistically a ring color and then you'd receive that ring so most of the Rings were black or white but then there was a five percent chance to get like a red wind ring a green ring or a

16:17blue ring for example and those were kind of our we were calling like dev kit one or a dk1 the Rings like this next edition of rings that we're about to release will actually be even more limited than that and there will be they'll have a different kind of designation associated with them and they'll have different traits and then those traits are what can allow

16:41us to control how the activations flow in the future so yeah so there is a collect there's an inherent collectibility with them so far we're we're only Distributing the resin Rings if we're talking specifically about one band we have some other as I mentioned some other products swim Lanes where the technology is implemented slightly differently

17:05But we also have some other materials for the one band as well that will be coming out in the very near future so and for those ones that come out in the future are you only giving them out in person at the conferences or how can people access them you know are there drops and things like that right now you have to be there in person I think it's it's

17:33Kind of fitting that it's a physical item and you have to physically be there to get them we yeah we have been discussing larger distribution mechanisms right now the best way to get one is to show up at one of our activations and we're we're not really that hard to find we you know we go to consensus every year we go to token 2049 every year

18:05We do pretty big workshops all over the world that's starting to ramp up now especially that like in the past year it started to ramp a little bit more since covet has cleared up so yeah we've we've been doing we've been working in that way there will be other opportunities online or like remotely to be able to get access to some the those will most likely be

18:33through airdrops or through like our other token product utility token products that have come out in the past the there will be lots of opportunities to get them I think for us the goal is distribution so you know we're an open source company we want everybody to experience the technology and get to really play with blockchain right that's one of the

18:58things that this is really good at is you know I can give this to somebody who has no understanding of blockchain whatsoever and they can experience the utility of blockchain there's nothing actually in our entire consensus activation we don't mention blockchain at all there's no no communication of it being on blockchain it just works and we've onboarded a number of people with

19:24these outside of consensus as well where we don't even mention it we just say hey we're working on this ring project or this item project try it out yeah I feel like it's a great segue for people to get involved in Industry without having to understand necessarily the details of the technology sort of like Pokemon go you know people didn't you know love it because it had

19:48the augmented reality people just loved Pokemon and all of a sudden that technology became popular through that and I feel like there's a lot of people that you know they hear about nfts and non-fungible items and it doesn't really interest them but to have something that you can have on your hand and you can see online and you can level up or get experiences with it I

20:08feel like we're taking nft utility to the next level to actually provide value to people outside of the web 3 ecosystem that's that's absolutely correct and one of the really great analogies here for me is cloud right where you know 10 to 15 years ago cloud is marketed for the sake of cloud right now it's commoditized like everybody you just there's an assumption

20:36that there's Cloud the question is what's your value proposition it's not whether you use cloud and I think that for this and we spend a lot of time at CSE talking about this like how how do we get away from being blockchain for the sake of blockchain like how can we build products and experiences where the blockchain is like we're just

21:02showing the utility we don't actually have to even communicate that it's blockchain for somebody to want to use it and that's the direction the space and this technology is going to go whether you know my friends who are like maximalists and like really really hardcore evangelists want to believe it or not that's the direction this space is going to go

21:25like my mom for example doesn't want to know what like bip 44 is she doesn't want to know how to like derive a PRI a public key she doesn't she doesn't need to know either she what she cares about is the value proposition to her there's no like base value to for her to be able to do that she doesn't need to know yeah so saying for years that regular

21:52people will adopt blockchain into the mainstream when they don't know that they're adopting it and I feel like there's many different Paths of ways that people can use the technology and this seems like a really good path yeah it's it's definitely interesting the it's also relatively novel in that when we one of the things that's

22:19been really interesting like a consensus for example is that people get their ring and then you know you just let them talk you see them get the ring they do the activation and you kind of see the light go on in their head and for their space like what they're into and what they're working on you can see the gears kind of turning and they start to imagine and kind of dream about what how

22:43they can use this technology it's something that I think a lot of people haven't really considered so it that's if I'm being honest that was probably one of the most rewarding things about that activation was just watching people like really start to think about it and understand the technology it was pretty pretty fun very memorable amazing Tyler and

23:07what is the best way for people to learn more about this right now or potentially get one if you're looking at in person you know what's coming up in the roadmap for the future of cause well there are there are a couple Twitter handles to follow I think directly following coz underscore official would be the way to follow our team and what

23:30we're doing at a at a larger level though I think just following the Neo it's like Neo underscore blockchain Twitter handle is probably the best General approach since we're we'll be building out core technology and activations and things like that but the entire ecosystem is kind of rallying behind some of this technology and it's helping to

23:54build it out with integration so I think even like the Neo blockchain official socials would be a good place and those are also where it's certainly the coz official one for people to get an item those would be the most direct path is to follow our socials directly because we'll be communicating out like where they're available

24:21If there are going to be air drops and things like that and there certainly will be we're just we're trying to figure out a way that supports our community within the Neo ecosystem what while also Distributing these globally making sure that everybody has access that's one of the really important things about C for coz is just making

24:48sure that we support the people that have been kind of involved in supporting us from the very beginning definitely and we're seeing that more often in these you know these main Nets and these growing blockchain ecosystems that the people who actually went and tried out the technology you know they started using the dapps when they came out or you know they run on the test

25:09Nets and or they get involved in the socials that they're real you know they're rewarded it's not just like click a button and get free money and run away you know you can people contribute and they're rewarded in change so I will definitely leave the Social Links for coz and Neo and any other links I can add in the description box as well I will do that

25:34to keep people informed I'm really excited to try and get my hands on one of these I'll be looking for the upcoming conferences that you guys are going to see if I can test it out in person so that will be very exciting I appreciate your insights into non-fungible items and taking nfts to the next level so thank you Tyler for all the information and the value

25:56and I would love to follow up in the near future on this yeah that sounds great it was a great conversation Ashton thank you for the time