Kellie Kennedy: Well, hello and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today. So I'm with Gregor from Callaghan Innovation and Gregor is an R&D consultant with a data science background and passion for creating digital art.

And he's going to be running us through a two-part presentation, part technical and part non technical on how he created some NFTs on Cardano. But before we kick off, we'll just do some quick housekeeping. So this session will be recorded and we'll be re-uploading this into the events recap section in Circle.

During Gregor's presentation if you have any questions, please drop them in the chat box and we will circle back around to them at the end. And then also hopefully before we go into some questions we'd ask if you can just give us 2 minutes of your time to fill out a quick survey on our learning series. So I will pass over to Gregor to kick off.

Gregor Neumayr: Cool. Thanks Kelly. Welcome everyone. I'm just gonna try and I put, put slides together for you guys. Share the, there we go. So we're gonna, we're gonna talk about NFTs today non fungible tokens. First, I think, let's, let's go over a dictionary definition.

I'm gonna break it down because there is quite a, there are quite a few components to what they actually are and talk about NFT history. Some, some uses and applications. We're gonna talk about concepts like on chain versus off chain NFTs. And yes, I did I had a, well actually still you know, building NFTs on Cardano.

So I had a couple of projects there, which I'm very happy to share. We're gonna talk about different standards, how NFTs work on different blockchains. And then we're going to try and make an NFT live. So we'll see how we will see how that all turns out. The, here's the definition, right, and I'm, I think it's worth breaking this down into its individual into its individual components.

The first thing we wanna discuss is it's a unique digital identifier, which is actually what that word non fungible means. So there are fungible assets and non fungible assets. If I give you a cent coin and you give me a cent coin, then nothing really has changed. We both still have a cent. And so that, that means that, you know, a New Zealand cent coin is a, is a fungible asset.

So are, you know, washing tokens and so are actually cryptocurrencies in that sense. They're all fungible and interchangeable, but if you give me your driver license and I give you my driver license, then we are both, we both can't prove anymore that we are road legal and so they are non fungible assets.

So that's what actually is meant by non fungible. It just means that these assets are unique. There's other examples like software licenses that are very specific to a copy, diplomas or the title to own, you know, own a house or even, you know, messages of of appreciation, like, you know, flowers or something like that.

Or, you know, a, a token of, a token of appreciation, I guess, I guess you could say. With a lot of these technical terms, what happens is that they are very, they're defined very specifically, And they have a very specific meaning, but when they take off, so to speak, in the public arena, then they get, they get a much broader definition assigned with them.

That's what happened with NFTs as well. There is a strict definition what they actually mean. This definition comes from the ERC 721 standard on Ethereum, and that's what the meaning a here is in the, in the, in the dictionary definition. But they have acquired a much wider definition as as just generally speaking, the assets that are represented too.

Illustrate that. I put a slide there. So this here is one of my favorite NFTs. I don't know if you guys can see that move. The reason it's one of my favorite is because I won that on Twitter. They asked, what's your favorite fruit? And I said I think I said I like all fruit or something, including cucumber.

And they liked it, so they gave me this one. And so on the left side, you see the, the first definition, the strict definition of what an NFT is. It's a digital identifier that is used to certify authenticity and ownership. So it looks a bit like computer code, which is exactly what it is. You can see there is a, I don't know if you can see my mouse.

I think so you can see a link there which is the link to the, to the video on the right side. So the NFT itself in the strict definition is actually this digital identifier. It comes with some you know, with some immediate type. It comes with a, with a name and so on, and a link to the actual document, whereas, In the wider definition, the NFT is, is also the document that is certified by it. But strictly speaking, these are two different things, right?

Gregor Neumayr: I need to go back to this window, right? Certify. You know, what does, what does certification mean? Basically these things aren't new, right? You, when you have an art print here an artist by the name of Max created in this example, the a colorful print of the Mono Lisa, and it comes together with a certificate on the left here.

And if you look, I don't know if you can see that, but it says this is print number 400 out of a total of 700 or something like that. So, you know you have an original well, an original print from Max if you also have the, this certificate. Both of them are probably pieces of paper. Certificate of Authenticity also acts as a sales receipt. It also acts as a physical document that can track provenance of your works and so on. So that's what we are talking about, this kind of a certificate.

Gregor Neumayr: Now, this one I'll take a little bit, I'll take us a little bit through through the evolution of, of different payment systems to, to explain what that means. It cannot be copied, substituted or subdivided and that it is recorded on a blockchain. This is always a, a typical start, right? We have a cash system. That's what we had for a long time before the internet. In this case, Max sells his art to Alice he physically hands over the, the, the print and the certificate and Alice pays with a dollar.

Physically. This requires them to be close. Physically, and it doesn't require any trusted party when you look at it, right? So there no one else, in fact, actually knows that these guys are doing that transaction. With digital payments, that's different. So, you know, let's say Max sells it over the internet, and we have a typical online shopping situation, then we have the trusted party here.

Jean Piermont he's a great guy. Everyone trusts him. You know, everyone gives him all the money. And he runs a central, he runs a central ledger, which in which he enters basically this transaction here that Alice has signed. This is Alice's transaction. She says, $1 or from Alice to Max. And then Jean Piermont puts that in the ledger and everyone trusts the system.

And Max, let's say, in the, in the case of internet shopping, online shopping just puts it on a truck and, and ships it to ships the, both the certificate and the artwork to Alice. But this re, this system requires a trusted party. A peer-to-peer electronic cash system is one where everyone has a ledger and Alice doesn't, doesn't send her transaction to just one party, but she broadcasts it.

So she broadcast her transaction to everyone, everyone puts it in the ledger. This doesn't require a central trusted party because everyone can, everyone has visibility and can control each other. So in this case, the electronic cash transfers an entry in a decentralized ledger or in multiple copies of the ledger.

And you know, this is obviously what Bitcoin was a first example of a, of a system that actually, that actually worked and that took off. In an ideal world, this would, this would be pretty straightforward, right? She broadcasts it everyone puts an entry in their ledger and they can later compare and make sure that these ledgers agree or, but to find consensus in the real world is much more complicated because of delays in the, in the communication. Alice could tell one person something else than, than what she tells a different person and so on.

She could end up double spending her money, and that's the actual problem that Bitcoin solved for the first time in a decentralized way. So what they do is they pick someone to be, I guess, a trusted party. Not really trusted party, but a central party temporarily only for a very short period in time.

And this is how, how all consensus mechanisms work on blockchains. One of them gets picked and their ledger then is you, this, this you know, party or person who's picked there has the job to build a new block. And we will just see in a second what's, what the block is. But, that person builds a new block and puts all the transactions into that block.

The way that Bitcoin does that is by proof of work, which means all of the participants race each other to resolving a difficult . Which means it's, it's random because it's not clear, it's not predetermined who will win? Whoever wins is the new block producer. And in on other blockchains that works in a different way.

On Cardano, for example, Cardano was the, was the first or the, yeah, the first blockchain to implement proof of stake. Ethereum has originally used proof of work, but moved over to a system, and that is, that is more similar to what Cardano is doing in the merge. So I need to go back here, right? So, so the block produ, so like I said, Alice Creates a transaction, signs it, and then sends it off to the network, broadcast it, and the block producer then collects all of these transactions, that's Alice's one plus other ones, and puts them together in a block.

And the block is linked up cryptographically to, to to all the blocks that were produced before. On, on Bitcoin, a block is about every 10 minutes you have a new block. That's by design. Different blockchains have different block times. Now, an NFT is basically the same as what we described before. It is that certificate is, is being broadcast now.

So now we have a digital certificate. Max broadcasts that, you know, a Mona Lisa certificate goes from max to alice and, and it works its way through the blockchain, through the, through the system, and ends up on the blockchain. That is true for systems that use UTXO like Cardano and, and I think to a degree Bitcoin as well.

For, for Ethereum, it's not strictly speaking, sitting on the blockchain because Ethereum has a bit more technologically, a slightly more patchy system. But the, ultimately it gets, it gets stored in multiple different places. The certificate, the, so the transfer of the art can still be physical. An NFT can be a certificate for a, for a paper piece of art, or it can be a link to, to a document that sits somewhere else like we saw before, or it could actually sit on the blockchain.

So what we see here, but the point here is that you don't need a trusted party for the certificate. It comes directly from the artist and it goes directly to the customer, if you will, and can be sold on. So this is here what I meant. About 10% of NFTs. I saw some numbers recently. 10% of all NFTs across NFTs, across all blockchains are so-called on chain NFTs.

And this is where the artwork itself is broadcast and also stored on the blockchain. This one, you don't need any central party and you can completely, you know, by yourself or maybe in a team or whatever, produce these things, sell them everything just from from, from your home. Obviously art is not the only use case, but you know, this is what, this was the, was the big one.

So you don't, you also don't need a shipment and you don't need a server because it's all on the blockchain. Just to illustrate that a little bit better you have an on chain bunny here. You can see that that's quite pixelated. And you can have an off chain bunny, which is a, a nice photo of an actual, of an actual bunny.

The difference I'm making here is that, well, first what I said is that right, if you own an on chain bunny, or if you create one, you actually own that transaction output, or you own the actual bunny on the blockchain. However, if you own a blockchain bunny, and again, that's 90% of all NFTs, what you own is a link to a file that sits somewhere else, right?

Or I shouldn't say own. What you, what you have in your wallet is, is a link to a file that sits somewhere else. Now, of those 90% of NFTs out there, about 50 per 50% in total are sitting on some service. That could just be some centralized service like Google you know, Google Drive or something like this.

And so these links could break in theory. About 40% sit on IPFS. That's the one that I showed you guys before. I think you saw that link to the grapes, was an IPFS link, which is a decentralized store and which is immutable. So the link can't change, and it's kind of, in a way, a more, more secure way of, of linking them up.

That's one aspect that the, that the actual thing is on the chain. The other aspect of what comes with that is a limitation in size. And this is why this on chain bunny is so pixelated because the blockchain is not actually made for, you know, storing lots of data on it. On the Cardano blockchain, there's a 16 kilobyte size limitation.

So if you do the, the numbers, then that means if you do a pixel image, you can do 73 by 73 pixels, pixels roughly at 24 bit color depth. So it's not, there's not a lot a lot of space. And I guess that's what partially makes it also interesting and exciting as a medium for, for digital art. So there we go.

Blockchain, these things can't be copied, can't be copied, substituted, or subdivided that relates to, you know, within that blockchain, within that system. It can't be copied.

Gregor Neumayr: So yeah, I said ownership before, I don't really want to talk about, I'm not a you know, a, a lawyer. I don't really understand what authenticity and ownership, how that's defined, but I do want to tell a little story about that because there was an interesting case that goes over over, over several years, almost a decade.

And that involves the, the first NFT, the media, call it the first NFT. And that story starts in 2014 in, in a hackathon in New York, seven on seven. This hackathon I think happens every year. And an artist, Kevin McCoy was paired in the hackathon with a technologist, Anil Dash, and these guys worked together on a, they figured out that, you know, digital art is worthless at the time because if you're a digital artist and you want to show some of your art, you send it. Let's say you send a jpeg file that you made via email, you've already given it away. There is it is, it, there was no way to, to certify an original digital file at the time.

Also, the second problem they saw was that Bitcoin, which at the time Bitcoin had fallen off a cliff for the first time and everyone was fleeing Bitcoin right in, in 2014, mid 2014 people thought, you know, this isn't gonna go anywhere. And so it was, it was a I guess the first big bear market which is kind of similar maybe to a situation that we are in at the moment. Well, so they then figured out that these things could be combined. I want to I wanna play that video for you guys just to get an idea of what that was like.

It's just one minute.

And, but the goal here was to bring together these communities that have issues that they need to resolve. In the case of the artists strengthening the values of their works and in the case of the Bitcoin community finds something to do besides with their lives, besides overthrow the Federal Reserve.

Right, right. So it's good to have Venn diagrams. This is the, the way we think about the communities. There are the current set of people that are literate about blockchains. It's the current set of people that are not entirely contemptuous of all artistic endeavor in society. And then currently people in this room are in this very sliver overlap..

And you know what that smells like, a market. Yes. So we want to make the overlap slightly larger between these sets. Here's the cool thing. We built it.

Yeah. So obviously I think you can tell from the, from the mood in there how, you know how new that felt and how fresh the idea was at the time. And, and they built it.

They, part of the story is also an important part of the story is that they built it on a, on a blockchain. That was a fork on a, on a Bitcoin fork, which was called name coin. And name coin was originally made to, to to register internet addresses, right. Domain names like google.com and so on. You could on that.

And it still exists, I think, and you can, you can register a domain on it and you have to renew it every, I think 250 days or so. Later in that same session, a lady shouts something that I can't quite hear, but it leads to the first transaction.

It leads to the first, the first transaction of, of a, of an NFT. And we're just gonna watch that briefly too.

That is really good, right. You know, that's an excellent question. Hey, are you interested in some animated gif art? Am I ever. I got a good, I got a, I got a cool thing here. Check this out.

Hey, do you want, you want buy that? Yeah. Name your price in any currency. 20 bucks. 20 bucks. Sounds fair. You got 20 bucks. I probably do. What the heck? 20 bucks. Can I pay you in US dollars? Sure. Alright, that's cool with me. I have $4. Jesus Really? Mine are a bargaining people friend. That's, that's the, sorry, state of my art market right there in a nutshell, folks. Jesus.

$4 and, and so then nothing happens for years, right? Kevin? Basically what you saw there was the, the second ever NFT being sold for $4. I'm struggling a little bit with here we go. However, a few years later in June, 2021, they go on to, they never, they never actually renewed the original NFT, but what they did is they created a new NFT on the Ethereum blockchain, because by that time that's where, that's where NFTs were, you know that's, that's where, where almost all the NFTs were.

So the Quantum, which is the first NFT, I suspect it was their test token. The artwork here, that green thing is actually was made by Kevin McCoy's wife, and that one sold for 1.4 million dollars. And they didn't renew, they didn't renew the original NFT of this one here, but somebody else did they, on the day or day after after this was sold on Sotheby's or after it was advertised or something like that, when the news came out, somebody went into the original blockchain and renewed the original NFT, and they claimed that they are the rightful owners of the, of the NFT and sued Kevin McCoy and Sotheby's.

And by the time I put these, these slides together for the first time, this was the, you know, this case was still going, but a few months from now before now was yeah. End of March. The case got dismissed. Right. Which is kind of, I guess now the end of the story. It's really, I think one of the interesting things here, and they say it in the title too code is not law, right?

Just because you have an NFT on a blockchain that doesn't really mean that that you yeah. Just cause you possess that, that doesn't necessarily mean that you can, that you can prove that you, that you own an underlying asset or something like this. I think there's probably more to come from that, but the decision of the, of the judges in this case, to go with the artist who actually created the work I think personally I find that encouraging.

Gregor Neumayr: So I don't know if that's, if that's too small to read, but my main point here with the timeline is that it's always difficult to say, you know, media say this is the first NFT and the first of of anything. But in terms of technology there is always a first of a certain kind, but very often the ideas were there long before.

So in this case, you know, in the, if, if you want the timeline of NFTs, for example, the, to use a chain of blocks or a blockchain that's an, that's an older idea that that was, you know, published in 1991, in the early nineties by Haber and Stornetta and it was a, you know, temper proof document, timestamping system.

Even the, the idea of smart contract is, you know, stems from the mid nineties. Also digital collectibles. The idea to have these, to have something like NFTs also stems, maybe the earliest one I could see stems from the mid nineties. The idea to have a decentralized cash system is about 10 years older than Bitcoin.

And obviously if you look at the, if you look at the Bitcoin white paper sites, all of these other ones, right? So that wasn't the they didn't really invent when Bitcoin was invented. They didn't really invent all of these individual bits and pieces, but what they invented was a way to combine them.

And this is always a story, and this is probably also similar here with what we just looked at with Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash. The idea was in the air, and these guys went with that. And obviously at the time when when the NFT craze happened here in 2021, that's when Kevin McCoy, you know, remembered his, his early NFT.

And he then kind of re rebranded it, I guess, as an NFT because it wasn't an NFT at the time. And, you know, the story went from there. The, the term NFT actually stems from the, when NFTs go mainstream from the, like I said, ESC 7 21 standard in 2017. So, you know, what's the first NFT depends on how you use that term, but I just find it generally interesting to, to look at the history of things if you wanna know what they are, to put that a little bit in context.

Gregor Neumayr: So we talked about what they are and let's, let's think about what, what they could be, right? What could NFTs actually be be used for? We hear a lot about proof of work, proof of ownership, proof of authenticity. So I thought I do an analysis of, of proof types, right? So my my good friend ChatGPT and I came up with a really long list of all sorts of proof types and we try to categorize it.

And I think this one was an interesting categorization, which is why I put it in here. Because it shows a few things that I, that I find somewhat insightful. So first of all, there, there's a, you might want to prove something using NFTs or using blockchain technology. You might want to prove something to the world, right?

You might want to prove that publicly, like the ownership of, I dunno, of an, of an art NFT, let's say. But there are other things that you might not want to prove publicly, like membership in certain clubs or subscription to certain services and things like that. You may not want to prove that to the, to the world.

The same thing is true for, you know, you might, you might want to prove conservation efforts publicly, but you may not want to prove medical records publicly, right? So that's, that's one interesting aspect I think of what the technology can be used for. Currently most blockchains at least the popular ones are all public blockchains.

This is why I think the use cases that we are seeing at the moment are mostly these kind of public proofs. They're proofs of what people you know, um you get that for free, basically with the technology already. Whereas private proofs requires an extra effort. There are no standards for that.

There are some privacy chains, but this, this hasn't fully worked out yet. So it explains to me, at least in, in part which kinds of applications are already out there and, and, and why. Right. It, it shows that, another aspect to that is you can have a, a category of intrinsic proof, which in this case means that, that you don't need any other party to prove something.

Right? Let's say ownership of an NFT, well, the certificate proves that directly. You don't need any central party to issue anything, right? If you own the, if you own the, the NFT in your wallet and you know, you can prove that that's your wallet. Whereas if you have something like provenance, we talk about provenance quite a bit, right?

Yes, you can have these NFTs, but somebody has to load them with meaning. There has to be some party off, off chain outside of the blockchain that kind of gives meaning to these. It could be that that's a, a trusted party that issues those tokens. And then, you know, that, you know, this is typically done with identity verification, proof of identity, something that in this group, in the, in the Web3NZ, we have talked about, or I have talked about with a, with a few people, and I know it's something proof of identity that that, that we need resolved.

And I suspect that, you know, we can debate if it is, if it is classified correctly here under extrinsic or intrinsic. I think efforts are there to create solutions that, that make it intrinsic to the technology. But those, those are not, not yet readily available. So yeah, I think that's kind of an, kind of an interesting way of, of looking at applications.

Gregor Neumayr: So before I talk about the, the projects that I made and show you guys some, some nice pictures, I just want to quickly, because also there was a there was one question before, why, why Cardano right. And what's the difference here? For me as a, as somebody who is interested mostly in the technology behind you know, behind the the things one thing that strikes me is that almost all NFTs are, are made, are implemented in, in this way following Ethereum standards at the moment, right?

Ethereum was, was started or designed, I guess first in 2014, which was before that idea had taken off and Ethereum, had Ethereum brought this this great utility of programmable Of, of, you know, of, of being able to program your transactions. And with smart contracts, and this is how NFTs work on Ethereum, they are a smart contract.

So everything to do with your token, and I just put that here for comparison, right? I'm obviously not gonna go into the detail here, but if you look at this graphic here of the, of the ERC 20 standard, which is for fungible tokens, right? Think cryptocurrencies, let's say other currencies, and this, this standard for non fungible tokens, you can see that the NFT standard is somewhat derived from the standard for for, for cryptocurrencies, right?

So basically when you develop an NFT, you write a computer program in the Solidity language, which is a, which is the smart contract language in Ethereum. And most blockchains have, have copied that. Not most blockchains, that's wrong. Most, most NFTs are on blockchains that have copied this.

Gregor Neumayr: On Cardano, it's different. Cardano was designed later, and with the benefit of hindsight, they basically have a multi-asset ledger. Which means that you don't just have one cryptocurrency that is very different from all the other ones on the same network. But all of the cryptocurrencies on the Cardano network are have a minting policy, like, you know, this thing here, which can be a smart contract or not, but it's basically just, it defines, you know, for, you have one of these per currency or per NFT collection, let's say, and it defines who can mint tokens in terms of the addresses.

Who can, who can mint one for this co collection? When can the tokens be minted? How many tokens can be minted and so on. This is split off from the actual data of the NFT on Cardano where. I showed you before the, the metadata, the transaction metadata, that, that code that I showed you guys was basically this thing here.

There's a thumbnail, there's a file and the link, and it links up to its policy ID. So you don't need a smart contract. The way it works on Cardano is that this, you see down here, I wrote NFT and policy name and so on. Basically the, the transaction metadata that second, that second blue filed or that, yeah, that second blue box that I showed you before, that content goes inside of a transaction.

So if I create an NFT on Cardano, what that means is I come up with the metadata here, I put that inside the transaction, and I sign it with my policy signature and I sign it with my wallet signature, and then I broadcast it. So that's the, that's the transaction that gets broadcast. And then the block producer, like we said before, puts it in a block on the blockchain.

I have a summary here of of differences between Ethereum and Cardano. I guess in summary, you can say that the way that Ethereum does NFTs is far more widespread, which you can, you know, you can look at things like Crypto Slam and see how many NFTs are traded there. It's far more widespread. Other blockchains like Tron, Binance Smart Chain, which is currently in the news. Polygon and so on, they have all copied, they've all copied the standard, right?

So for Binance it's the, instead of, instead of ERC 721, it's the BEP-721 standard, right? So yeah, I guess in summary, you can say that the way it's done in Cardano is a more robust system. We can discuss this if you want, but I don't wanna go too much into detail here either. And this is something that I that I prefer because I'm a, I'm a nerd. Right. So I like, I like nerdy things and I like robust design over over adoption, over short-term adoption necessarily.

Gregor Neumayr: Yeah, so that was, that was pretty much that from now on it's more, it's more about talking about collections and art and that sort of stuff. That's fine. I don't know if there are any, any questions or comments now, or if we should just just rock on Kelly. Cause it could be nice to not, to not have me just continuously talk.

Kellie Kennedy: Yeah. The room's always open questions. I don't have anything in the chat at the moment, but oh, Patina. Hi. Hello. Yeah, if anyone has any questions, feel free to jump in. Otherwise we can just kick on.

Gregor Neumayr: Cool. Yeah. So, you know, people collect all sorts of things. Might just put some examples there, rubber duckies or monopoly games and so on. And the collections market is I think a year ago I saw these numbers, so don't know where it's at now, but it was about 600 billion dollars, which is the same size as the accountancy service market at that time. And it, it is, it was projected to, to roughly double the collectibles market to about a a trillion dollars, which would be about the same size as the as the biotech market, right.

And most of that, most of that, you know, extra market volume was was attributed to NFTs, so expect over the next 10 years, right. So people are expecting that collectibles will be, I guess the whole collectibles market will be made up to, you know, 50% or so of NFTs, which is which is quite interesting.

The standard NFTs, you know, that what you have seen is like, you know, pictures of monkeys or of bananas eating bananas or whatever it is, right?

Which I think you know, it's art and it is art that caters to the taste of a, of a specific audience. Not necessarily to my taste, but, you know, I, I like some of those. And what you know, these, these things, you know, it might seem, it might seem silly, you know, if you're not, if you're not into, you know, a, I don't know, a, a pixelated picture of a, of a poop or something like that, then that might seem, that might seem silly.

But at the same time, there are people that are into that and they have pocket money and they buy that and, you know, they go out in the market and do do a lot of, do a lot of things there. So the kind of stuff I am more into looks a bit more like that. Again, I'm a nerd, right? So I like geo geometric art, and I do like art that has an emotional impact on me.

I don't, I can't necessarily see that here with, with these ones here, but they're technically interesting. The, the autoglyphs, they were, they're attributed to be the first on chain NFTs, and they were of course on the Ethereum network. And I just copied this one in here from the from the block explorer.

It, you can't really see it, but maybe you can see the pattern there. This is actually the code. This is the smart contract code. In other words, the graph, the graphics that you see up there are, they are not, this is not a picture on the blockchain, but this is a smart contract that that prints out all of these all of these symbols.

Over here we have a now and a few years after, because this all I got into that in 2021, right. And on Cardano, I was relatively early. So it was about half a year in after Cardano got NFTs and there were a couple of on chain NFTs when I started. Now there is quite a quite a list of them. So yeah, I had two projects.

Gregor Neumayr: I'll just quickly go over them and show them. The first one is really silly and the second one is was a collaboration with an artist in in York, in England, who, who found me via my, via my silly NFTs. So I had this, yeah, I had this idea of of the Wicked Kiwis which was, I was playing in, in 2018 or so.

I was playing with anagrams for for the, for Wicked Capsie, which is basically a wicked Capsie is just a, a nickname that I made up. And I played with anagrams for that. And then I started drawing these little images. And I thought when I started to, you know, for me this was a project to actually get involved with the technology and figure out how to do things.

So I thought, oh yeah, this idea will do. So I created these cards that flip around and, you know, this is all code, what you see here, this is code that runs on the blockchain. It's not actually graphics, of course, the, yeah, I dunno. I can talk about that a little bit later, but if you want to. But basically I had no idea that you were supposed to do 10,000 NFTs.

So I just came up with 12 motives times 12 themes, which is the different colors, right? Times, 12 cards. I didn't consider rarities at the time because I, I had no idea about NFTs. This was all a, a technical I guess endeavor. They are interactive. So if you click on them, they flip around and they are on chain.

This is just another, another view that is kind of similar to what I showed you with the grapes before. So basically I wrote this here and I wrote this, this stuff that is, that is in here, which is HTML code. So these NFTs are basically little web pages, right? It's HTML with JavaScript. That's what they actually really are, and they sit on inside of this transaction metadata.

So I tweeted them, of course, you know I tweeted individual cards and I, I made giveaways, you know, came up with some ideas to try and get some people engaged, mainly with the goal to connect and, and to learn more. I did a naming contest and I showed them to colleagues in real life. Some of my colleagues actually got kind of like these.

And we are currently working on a kid's book that is based on Wilbur. Wilbur is the name that Wilbur is the Uber Kiwi, right? And he fights Fear. And Wilbur is Wilbur is the name that came out of that naming contest. So what I got, the responses that I got on Twitter were, you know, for giveaways, you get Thank you tweets.

And that creates a little bit. Got some followers, not, not a lot, a few hundred followers now. New, new connections, which, that's, that's the most, the main interesting thing for me I guess. I also learned that I put that here in all the crypto and Alqsie. I learned that you, which I, you know, I guess as an adult, you, maybe you should, you should know that beforehand, but I, I didn't.

I learned that if somebody comes on Twitter approaches you and says Hey look, I got 300,000 followers. Give me money. I will I will send, I will, I will, you know do a a giveaway. You can run a giveaway through me. This is actually how it is done. And these guys did run. I gave them money, they did run giveaways, but I then ended up sitting sitting there for, I think two days in a row just deleting these Twitter bot followers that I had acquired.

Yeah, something to some, I dunno, a learning, I guess. Wilbur says No to fear. I already said that there might be a kids' book coming out. So anyway, this guy here this guy's Jay, or his actual name is Jason Steele. He calls himself Uber boring man on Twitter. And he calls himself super boring man on Instagram.

And he used to work for, for this guy here, for Eli Saab, which I had no idea cause I don't know, you know, international fashion or anything like that. But apparently Eli Saab is somebody who makes dresses like, like this one. And Jay was his, worked for him for seven years as an arts director. He also worked as a uni professor that I think that's more in his role there as a uni professor with, with his students in the Lebanese American University.

And he defined an arts degree there. He's also an artist. I think this bear is from him. And also he already had some NFT projects going, and he already sold some NFTs by the time when he contacted me. So I was obviously very excited that, you know, somebody who's, who's already done some NFTs, wants to collaborate with me.

And yeah, he's also a, he's also an an, an excellent guy. He's really nice. And great to work with. So I learned, you know, I this is a different, like I said, you know, I said it before about art, you know, it's, it's about taste, but I think it's also when you take it seriously and he's an academic guy, right?

It's about beauty, it's about emotional power. It's about meaning and, and, and the impact it it has on you, right? And the other thing I just wanted to say about interactive art is that you want to interact with the piece of art in the way that it's intended. So, you know, I guess if you, if I put the original Mona Lisa somewhere here on my beams or something like that, I guess that might just not, you know, it might not have the, the, the right effect.

But if you have interactive art, and the one that we made, his concept basically that he, his idea that he showed me then was meant to be in a, in a situation like these ones here, right? Where you have it in a museum on a big wall and you can interact with it This art is typically not collectible, right?

You typically don't have people collect like museum pieces like this, however ours is. So he said, the very first picture he sent me was this left one there. And I thought, okay, is that a cloud of things? And that's a finger. And so obviously we had, I never talked to him to this day. I've never talked with him.

But we, we managed to to make a NFT collection of thousand NFTs and sell them out. And that was quite a, quite a process. It took a long time to sell them too, because that's also not for everyone, I guess. But he, yeah, he's a, he's a very creative guy. We, we had to learn how to work together because I have never, I've worked as a software developer.

I have worked in situations where the software has specific, you know, I've also worked as a researcher. I've also come up with, you know, specific Whatever it is, you know, the ideas of how exactly the software is supposed to work and things like that, you need that if you want to develop software.

However, this guy has never worked with a software developer and he just, you know I don't know how to say radiates creativity, right? He has concepts, he understands concepts and all that. He's an academic after all. But the way that he works was we had to find a way of how to work together, which is really interesting.

I think that would've never, I would've never run into that guy if it wasn't for, if it wasn't for the, you know, for blockchain and, and things like that.

Gregor Neumayr: So we had, as a starting point, the process was, the starting point, was a the concept that he had and his artistic references, which I learned is that artists also have references.

They reference other art and they reference other you know, real other, other situations from life and all sorts of things. And then the refinement was basically this collaboration process. I think much of the things it took, it took a while for me to buy into the art in the beginning because I couldn't see it, the kind of words that he used to describe it, it didn't make much sense for me.

And I just ended up trying to, trying to make these animations that he said, but obviously they were misunderstandings and things. And I think that is kind of what added to it. And once we were finished he said that this is something that he couldn't have done by himself, even the art aspect of it.

And, you know, it doesn't look like one of his pieces. It, it, and I said, well, it certainly doesn't look like what I could have done. So I think it's a, yeah, it's a collaboration that, that we did. And he said that I, I said, okay, we need to test this on different devices. And he said he doesn't have different devices.

He had an iPhone and an iPad. So he did all of that on an iPad. And I needed to write more software, not just the NFT itself, but I needed to write an editor for him, this one here, so that he could, you know, change the colors and the speed of the of the objects that that fly around and, and all sorts of things.

Yeah, I tried to get him to test it on other devices, but he said he does also doesn't know anyone who has, who has a device other than an iPad or an iPhone. So, yeah, it was a really interesting experience and I dunno, I put the exploration, exhaustion, meditation. Yeah, there you go.

Gregor Neumayr: So I had learnings I had technical learnings if, you know, could also be discussed if someone's interested about on chain NFTs, the kind of design principles and constraints and things like that that you come up with.

There's interesting things with, with licenses, I guess, and how you, I dunno how you deal with that or how we dealt with it. But I wanna show you guys the result here real quick.

So if you put one finger down, then they come. And if you put two fingers down, they, they go away from you, which is what, what she's playing here with. Like I said, this is actually meant, it works on small devices, but it's it's meant to be projected onto a wall. There's a cycle in there. So now they leave and the cycle will start again.

There's a little, the screen goes dark and then the screen goes bright again. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So there is quite a lot of variety in the thousand NFTs that we did. Here is a, a new word I learned, a triptych of, i, I hope that's how it's pronounced of of three different of three. Three times the same NFT.

So like I said, when a cycle, when it cycles back, it comes up with different objects. You can see there are fighter jets here. This one is zeros and ones in the middle, and there's more fighter jets. And this work here is called Walter three, which is named after, after Jay's dog, who actually died since then, unfortunately.

But one thing that this here also shows is that's how he had imagined it to, to, you know, to be presented maybe. But it's also the, actually the idea to put three of them next to each other came from a community member in this case the bookie. So this is really a collector's market, right? This is not a, so these people are, these people create the market.

There's people out there who, you know, who are interested in NFTs and any kind of art and things like that. And then they, they do a lot of the work to, to actually popularize it or to find other collectors and things like that. This is another NFT. This one's called Reactive Strive D.

We did one for, we did a, we did one called Prymachenko, which is this one here as a as a charity token. That's the only one that is actually still, that can still be minted. We don't get any money from that one. No one does. Also, the minter, we pay, we we have a we, we teamed up with a minter because we didn't want to do, for my first NFTs, I did the minting myself all on Linux command line stuff.

But for this one, it was much more convenient to just give a little bit of the profits to someone else, to, to, to look after that. Yeah, it's, it's based on Maria Prymachenko, who is a Ukrainian folk artist. Then, yeah, this one, I don't know. It's, you know, I, the rest here is really just pictures that I could show you guys and, you know, we, we can talk about that.

The wrong fairytale. That's yeah, that's a weird mix of Disney, Walt Disney colors with military camouflage and fighter jets and things like that. So yeah, so this one we put on a, we put on a, on a market. This is a little bit older, that looks a little bit different now for NFT Market. We, I made, I made a technical tweet series also to try and, you know, get it out there.

This tweet here was quite interesting because I got some responses from people in, in the Cardano community who, who liked the way that I did the technical encoding. And these are all, I think because it's safe space. So at the time I said, I told you it was half an hour half a half a year in from Cardano NFTs.

And it was maybe two other people had done on chain NFTs before. But I changed the encoding from what they had done because I thought I could save more space. And after that, yeah, this and. You know, people have, have considered some of the stuff I did to put into standards and you know, we had some, some nice discussions.

Yeah, this is it pretty much. So, yeah, I think I, maybe I might have spoken a little bit more than 45 minutes, but this is pretty much all I wanted to tell, so we can have a chat if you want, or we can, we can also make a, make an NFT life if we want to.

Kellie Kennedy: That's amazing. I didn't know you had so many personal projects going on the children's book. Very cool.

What we might do is we just I might just share the screen quickly and if we could just fill out the survey for the feedback and then we'll jump straight into questions or open up the room if that's okay. So it's just let me see if I can try and, Make that a bit bigger. So I might just leave that up for a couple of minutes or one minute and then we'll come back to you, Gregor.

Okay. Hopefully everyone's grabbed the screen by now. Cool. And we do have a couple of questions in the chat box, so I might just read them out to you and then we can, if everyone wants to open up And put the camera on.

Kellie Kennedy: We can have a chat instead, but the first couple of questions was back to one of your Kiwi, I think it was the Kiwi.

Kiwi, I forget the name of it. Wilbur. Was it?

Gregor Neumayr: Right, Wilbur, yeah. Yeah.

Kellie Kennedy: Was there a specific reason for the 10,000 number or is it arbitrary?

Gregor Neumayr: Yes. So that's historic, right? I said, I said that I didn't know that you were supposed to, to do a which is a little bit cheeky to say it that way. You can do what you want.

Like your collection can be, it's an arbitrary number, but the crypto punks, which were, you know, very famous and now very expensive collection of profile pictures. I think they started it on Ethereum. They started a collection of 10,000 of those NFTs people have done other numbers. And so I think if you enter, if you go into a market that.

Let's put it that way. I think the fact that, that this collection, apart from the fact that I never meant to sell it, right, and I haven't sold a single one, I've just given them away, but we sold it the next project. But apart from that I could have, I probably also couldn't have sold it that easily.

And one factor would've been that I didn't do 10,000 because that's what they were expecting out there, right? Every and that hype year 2021. Every that's what everyone did. Everyone tried to copy that success model of, of crypto punks. I don't know. I guess does that give a bit of

Kellie Kennedy: Yeah, so it's more the exception rather than the rule.

Kellie Kennedy: Cool. And the other question was so as a UX designer, what factors do we need to consider to communicate and collaborate specifically Web three and blockchain developers?

Gregor Neumayr: Wow, that's a really interesting question. So I'm not a UX designer. I am, I am not a designer. I have designed systems, not from a UX perspective.

Maybe a question to Yeah, maybe a question to open up for, you know, if some, if somebody else wants to say something about that. What, so, yeah, or maybe, maybe if I get a bit more context, I can maybe say something or ...

Kellie Kennedy: What would you say for what were your learnings when you were minting and creating this NFT piece with that artist, what were the main learnings that you would give advice?

Gregor Neumayr: So I mean, okay. So specifically with that artist, and I think it might just be. In the question there was already, it said clear communication, right? What you can do and ca what what is possible and not possible is something that I, it took me a little while to, to figure, to figure him out specifically and to see that he was constantly changing stuff.

I was you know, it cost me a lot of time, a lot of energy and to, to so I could have approached it more, in the retrospective, I could have approached it a little bit more professionally in the way that I used to when I was, you know, developing software. But the situation was different because we were partners and not, I wasn't, you know, he wasn't paying me.

We were just doing this together and see if we could sell it or something like that. So showing like, you know, all the, all the good stuff, you know, do, do small iterations, you know, and show, you know, be agile and, and, and show. I don't know, show show frequent updates and things like that. It kind of keeps you from, from going off too much, too much off track.

Yeah. I'm not sure I can say anything, anything more substantial about that specifically with, with working with him.

Bettina Way: So just to give you some context, because I was the one that asked that question. Mm-hmm. So I am a UX designer and I'm really familiar with working with Web2 developers like, and stuff.

Mm-hmm. But I guess my kind of like question is kind of like, because I imagine that you know how developers in Cardano kind of like develop in Haskell and things like that. And I'm not like, you know, for the everyday person yet, but like, what, technical, like how can we, like what considerations and things that we should think about to, to make it easier for the developer's Technical consideration.

Gregor Neumayr: So, oh yeah. Okay. I see. So I think the choice of the choice of technology, you know, or the choice of what exact, and the way that I used to do that when I was a software developer mainly was I, I pretty much, you know, had I pretty much insisted in, in choosing the technology myself, like, am I, is this, is this a Haskell project or is this, should this be done in Marlowe, like you say, right.

There's just, if you use these two specific ones, right? On Cardano, if you use these two specific programming languages, Marlowe is relatively new, only came out I think quite recently and is intended for people who are not, not programmers. That's how they say it, right? It's not a Turing complete programming language.

So you cannot program just anything in Marlowe. But you can program financial contracts and these sorts of things. It's made for, for decentralized finance, and so you would probably pick that language, you know, under certain circumstances for certain things, and you cannot do anything in Marlowe. Then Plutus is actually the smart contract language on Cardano that is based on Haskell, like you say, and yeah, it's functional programming.

It's it is unusual for most programmers to think in that way. People find it tricky, but I think it's just different. That said, I don't personally have much experience. I've played with Haskell a little bit, but I've never I've never done anything with Plutus. The other thing that is actually now changing is really the way that that software gets written, right?

I have. So that was still before ChatGPT, right? That was still before tools that, that actually allow you to just ask for code and you get code and then you can, you know, can change it. I think these things will change a lot in the way that that software gets developed. So I think yeah, clear communication, right?

If you talk to them what you need and what you need things to look like and all that sort of stuff, I think that's always gonna help. Right.

Bettina Way: Cool. Thank you.

Kellie Kennedy: Awesome. Jake?

Jake: Yeah. Hey Gregor. I'm just gonna ask what you're up to in this space at the moment actually. We do quite a bit in the Cardano NFT space, and I just looked at your project on EG and the stats are pretty good. So I was just curious to know what you're doing these days.

Gregor Neumayr: Yeah. So basically two, two well, maybe three things. So I'm, I'm, I'm doing three things and I'm not actively doing any of these because it's a hobby thing and you know, it's, I had to do pay my crypto taxes and that took me a few weeks to figure out and all that.

So, but once I get into it again, which will hopefully be soon, and one of them is a guy called, so it's all on chain, right? What, what I'm, what I'm still kind of looking at, I'm open to do, you know, whatever really I'm, I'm interested in, in collaborating and in working and in learning new things and that sort of stuff.

But the current things I have is one, one is a on chain idea, a pretty simple one that I first, first kind of almost dismissed as too simple, but then, you know, I still don't get this art thing. So, you know, I should probably, I think simple is good I reckon. I had a chat with a guy from from that space who is in Wales, I think.

And yeah, so he had this idea and so I might do, I might do that with him. It's kind of a. It's kind of nerdy too, so that might be a, it's, it's a combination of different colored dots and things like that, so that could be kind of cool. The other one is that with steel, with this guy Jay. We, we actually have planned a another collection that, that follows that one which yeah, we got a little bit, so he's, he's not, not very healthy at the moment and so, you know, this didn't really go anywhere.

And yeah, I have regular meetings with my colleagues in Callaghan Innovation with some of them where we discuss how to, how to make that kid's book. So I think that one will probably be the most likely one to, to come out at some point where where we'll, we'll have one NFTs, one chapter, and it's all on chain and there will be some graphics and. We already have the text. It's a, it's a pretty cute book.

Jake: Yeah. Cool. Oh no, it's good to know. I just tried to go into your discord, but it said the link was invalid, so I was just curious to hear.

Gregor Neumayr: Yeah. Cool. So what are, what's the kind of stuff you are doing, you guys are doing on with?

Jake: We've just got a project jet plane.

Yeah. Yeah. So we're minting a few at the moment actually, but we're, yeah, we're just kind of in a few different directions at the moment with it. But essentially we're helping projects do their minting as well as just opening up a few tools to make minting more accessible for other people and so forth.

Our website's, jetplaneNFT dot com. But yeah, always interested to find people in Cardano NFTs and always looking to collaborate cause there's only a few of us, but there's definitely enough around to form a bit of a community around.

Gregor Neumayr: Cool. So can you guys do if, if I just have JSON files for metadata and stuff, can you, can you mint that too?

Does it have to be, you know, does it have to be an image and or can it be on chain, let's say?

Jake: Yeah, yeah. No, we do all that. So we've just opened up essentially our own minting service. I'm more the operational side of things, whereas my co-founder on the project, he's done all the minting. He's got, he's built his own minting engine for our project, which we can let other projects use now, which is really good.

But yeah, we had over a hundred traits to compile and like update metadata as we it's quite complex. I might have to, yeah. I'll let you go through the process to have a look, but it's, yeah, it's quite cool the minting engine that he's built out.

Gregor Neumayr: Yeah. Excellent. So maybe, you know, maybe instead of showing that that free minting service that I was just gonna show for one NFT, maybe we could just change that.

You can, you know, you can show us how, how that works with your services, but, but that might also be a conversation on another day as well. Yeah, yeah.

Jake: But we'll stay in touch anyway and we can discuss afterwards.

Gregor Neumayr: Yeah, yeah. Awesome.

Kellie Kennedy: Yeah, we'd be definitely keen to see a demo or was there any other questions before we wrap things?

Kellie Kennedy: James asked, what do you think about Bitcoin ordinals?

Did you get that Greg?

Gregor Neumayr: No, sorry. I'm, I'm a little bit confused at the moment.

Kellie Kennedy: What, what's the, what do you think about Bitcoin ordinals?

Gregor Neumayr: Oh, ordinals. Oh, sorry. I didn't hear that. Sorry. It's meant my, my voice. Yeah. Cool. So I don't know much about ordinals I think they are, the way they're done is Basically similar to the, similar to this idea of colored coins in 2012 from, from Rosen.

And they are, they're attached to an individual satoshi, technically, so to the smallest. So in a way, I guess you could say they're an afterthought, which isn't surprising because NFTs weren't, weren't there when, when Bitcoin was first and, you know, that wasn't really a, a main concern of the design of Bitcoin.

They had a, yeah, they had a tap root update and, and that allowed later to I guess to have, to have these ordinals on the blockchain. I think I would restrict my, my, my view on to that because I haven't played with them. I have no idea what's on there. I have just seen that they have picked up quite a bit and that they have produced quite a bit of traffic for the Bitcoin blockchain that I think people were maybe in part also struggling with.

Yeah, I guess that's, that's probably it.

Kellie Kennedy: Awesome. Thank you. Any more, any last questions before we wrap up? Bettina?

Bettina Way: Yeah I just had a question for Gregor and Jake, because I work with a collective of artists, so we're an artistic collective, so we come more from the artwork side of things. And so when we mint this, because one of our artists were actually asking how to mint NFTs.

And I just wanna make, like, I just wanna check like when we mint one do we have to kind of like, you know, teach them which specific wallets they should be using. They're not familiar with the blockchain and if like, the smart contracts are safe, and how do we go about checking the smart contracts?

Gregor Neumayr: Hmm. Yeah. So, so I don't have much experience with, with smart contract NFTs, which is, like I said, that's how they, how they're done on Ethereum.

There, yeah. Sorry. I'm, like I said, for me the, the, my own experience was mostly in in Cardano you would, you would probably for, for checking the smart contract and things. I understand there are people who provide smart contract auditing. You might want to find them if it's, you know, if that's worth it.

I, I don't, sorry. I don't really know. In terms of which wallets to use, that's, there are, you know, they're popular wallets that that's true for, you know, for any blockchain. They're cross blockchain wallets and things. It's, I guess picking a wallet that is, that is safe and that is what I, generally what I do is I look at, you know, which ones are the popular ones and I look a little bit at, you know at, at people's reviews and things like that.

And then, then I pick that wallet or, you know, I hear from someone in the community that I trust, but I always, I think it's always important to do a bit of research on that one. Then, you know when you're confident in, in which wallet you would use then, then I guess, I dunno if it's a matter of teaching or of recommending other wallets, but it shouldn't really matter that much.

For NFTs there might be some, I know for Koran there are some, some wallets that work better for NFTs because they can also show the content in the wallet and things like that. But you can use, yeah, a large variety of wallets should work.

Bettina Way: Cool. Thank you.

Jake: Yeah, I was just gonna say, it depends what you want to do with it really. Like like yeah, it depends how complex you want to get, what you're looking to achieve. I mean, it's just for your own membership or your own collective of artists to hold as verification of something doesn't need to be overly complex at all. But if you're looking to raise a hundred thousand dollars as a way of kickstarting something from a mass audience, that's where you need to get a bit more complex and clever with your marketing, your NFTs, the rarities as Gregor's already explained.

So just depends on the use case you're really looking for and having a plan for that. Cause it's just like anything, the more you're looking to raise the more complex you kind of have to make it.

Bettina Way: Okay. Yeah, that's good to know cuz I think we're wanting to really do this properly from like a commercial level, you know, like cuz it's not, our focus is not so much kind of like, you know, creating the NFTs.

But for example, for now, like if our clients commissioned us to do artwork, it would be great if we can kind of like NFT and then the smart contract will have the licensing and stuff. So, you know, like actually really utilize the power of the blockchain as opposed to the NFT campaign.

Jake: Right. So you want to use it more as a contract? As verification. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Bettina Way: And so for example, if we wanna renew it for another campaign, then it'll automatically, like the NFT will kind of know that it's being used again and they wouldn't need to come back to us to relicense, for example.

Jake: Right. Okay. Yeah. Well that doesn't need to be overly complex if it's used as a verification as such.

But yeah, yeah, yeah. It just becomes part of the process. I, I'm just trying to figure out the best way that you'd go about implementing that. But I don't, there are quite a few tools out there. None are really coming to mind at the moment, but there are ways to be able to do that quite simply.

Bettina Way: Yeah. Cool. No, that's really good to know. Thank you. Yeah.

Gregor Neumayr: Yeah. Also, I mean, you know, only for, for you know, bringing these things up and, and thanks Jake for, for chipping in. I, I, I'm wondering, you know, that might be a question for maybe, you know, some other, some other people in the, in the Web3NZ community as well.

Kellie Kennedy: Yeah, Bettina, Mila might be good for you to connect with, which I can send you a message on Circle after this. She's done something I think it might be similar with logos. Yeah, I'll send you her details and might be good for you two, to connect.

Bettina Way: Yeah, that'll be really good cuz I've been researching this space for about two years now and this is the first time I'm engaging with the community, so yeah.

Kellie Kennedy: Awesome. Great to have you. Thank you. Thanks so much everyone. Thanks Jake for chipping in. Thanks everyone for coming. Thank you Gregor for your amazing presentation.

Gregor Neumayr: Thanks.

Kellie Kennedy: Yeah, we'll see you guys next time. Thank you.

Gregor Neumayr: Thank you. Have a great day, see ya.