Reeve Collins: In the metaverse, your NFT wallet is your persistent identity

Ashton Addison: How did BLOCKv start, and what problem was it built to solve?▶ 00:22

Reeve Collins: We started this company in 2015, and we were truly the first platform in the industry to recognize the power of NFTs. Back then it wasn't even really a word, so we coined our own term, the vatom, short for virtual atom. We wanted to take what the blockchain gave us, a token that is tradable, ownable, scarce and finite, and add highly programmable characteristics to it. The result is a very engaging digital object, which everyone now knows as a non-fungible token. It just wasn't in the common nomenclature then.

Ashton: Did you foresee the metaverse when you started in 2015?▶ 05:48

Reeve: My partner Eric Glier is the true visionary here. He had this concept of programmable digital goods for a long time, and we dove in together in 2015. He foresaw the world we're just scratching the surface of today: a persistent identity and a wallet filled with digital goods. We wanted to be the technology provider and the standard for those goods. So we did an ICO in 2017, raised a significant amount of money and put all of it into building the most robust enterprise-grade smart NFT platform there is. From the advent of blockchain to around 2015, the only use cases were currencies and financial instruments. We saw a world where everything else would be tokenized, and if it's tokenized, we might as well make it highly programmable.

Ashton: What can NFTs do besides serve as digital art?▶ 02:38

Reeve: A lot of the market right now is hype around digital collectibles. They're no different from baseball cards, except they're digital. Once something is digital it becomes programmable, and that makes it more engaging than a physical good. Speculating on IP or art is just the first use case, and those pieces may or may not hold their value. What will hold value is when all the other use cases open up. Take tickets. Today you spend 200 for a flat PDF. Instead, you could get a video from the artist explaining why they're excited to tour in your city. When you show up, the ticket comes alive and you can be entered in a drawing to move up to the front row, or to win concessions or a prize. After the show you can win a backstage experience, and the ticket updates with a video compilation of the show. That stub becomes a very valuable piece of history. The importance of NFTs can't be overstated, especially with the metaverse becoming so popular. The one persistent thing across all those environments will be our identity. Each one will know it's us who showed up, through our wallet, and everything in that wallet will be an NFT. It's not about art. It's about how you move through digital worlds and what your digital life looks like.

Ashton: How are enterprises and large brands using the platform?▶ 07:44

Reeve: Our focus from the start was enterprise and large brands. We told them: instead of banner ads and emails, give your consumers something of value, an engaging object they can own, buy, sell and trade. It's also a new way to communicate one-to-one with your fans. It was a difficult education because it was so new, so we built tools that make it easy for large brands to roll out campaigns. We've done probably over 100 campaigns for global brands, including PlayStation, Doritos, Pepsi and the NBA. We just rolled out a line of collectible cards for Professional Bull Riding. You can combine the rider and the bull to create a different card, which gamifies how fans interact with the brand's assets. Step one is getting consumers a wallet and filling it with NFTs. Step two is creating metaverse environments where they can experience a brand's history and IP, listen to speeches or meet celebrities, and buy, sell or trade those digital objects.

Ashton: Is it still early for big brands in NFTs, given the metaverse's limitations?▶ 10:20

Reeve: The technology is advancing so quickly that, while the metaverse isn't quite ready for mass adoption, it's happening very fast. The slow part is brand adoption. Brands have to figure out a strategy, push it through layers of bureaucracy, then build, execute and go to market. I implore brands to dive in now, because it will take a year to get to approval and launch, and by the time they roll out in a big way the tech will be there. You could roll out a really robust experience today.

Ashton: What is BLOCKv's current focus, and how do the different companies relate?▶ 13:12

Reeve: The BLOCKv ecosystem is somewhat complicated, because the campaigns I've mentioned don't necessarily come from BLOCKv itself. We did an ICO and created the V token, our network token, which powers and enables us to issue NFTs. A foundation in Switzerland runs the BLOCKv technology, and several companies have been built on top of it. Vatom Inc., started by Eric Glier, creates vatoms and has gone deep into the metaverse with Spatial Web. It's one of the most scalable and interactive environments to date, and it was built natively with our wallet system and our programmable NFTs. SmartMedia Technologies focuses on brands. We have a history in online advertising, and it does television, digital and social media buying, and we've built smart NFTs into that offering. There's also a solutions company that does professional services for bespoke projects. They're different commercial enterprises, but all are driven by BLOCKv and the V token. The companies use the token significantly, and that provides the buy-side demand.