High Level Conversation 1 ——The First NFT Marketplace built on IC
First Marketplace on IC
Host：Lydia
Guests:
Herbert, AsiaGM DFINITY
Hao. C, Managing Partner of @IC Asia Fund
EasySteve, Toniq Labs Co-founder
Lydia:
IC Talk is a Twitter Space hosted by me. It is a great pleasure to welcome Herbert and Hao. C to join IC Talk as our resident speakers. They will join me in coming IC Talk sessions regularly in the future. IC Talk will also invite more founders of various IC projects to share their Web3 journey. Together with them, we will deep-dive into IC’s powerful technology which aims to bring crypto investors and web3 developers’ attention to the IC ecosystem. With IC Talks, I believe we can achieve our goal of bridging more talents in the Asian market to the global stage and connecting these magnificent ideas and minds.
I also would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to our community members and the IC communities such as DFINITYVN, DFINITYJP, and everyone who has supported us without reservation in the past. Thank you so much!
Today we are also honored to have EasySteve as our guest speaker. To begin with, let’s start with Hao. C, the managing partner of IAF.
Hao. C :
I am Hao from IAF. IAF stands for IC Asia Ecosystem Fund, which is co-founded by DFINITY Foundation and SNZ Capital. IAF is also supported by other top-tier funds in Asia and communities.
SNZ Capital has been following DFINITY for more than five years since our first investment. We have been following the project’s development closely since then. After the mainnet launch last year, we started to work with DFINITY Foundation to prepare and set up our ecosystem fund here in Asia.
IAF primarily focuses on supporting and investing in early-stage projects within the IC ecosystem, especially infrastructure projects such as ICSCAN, Wallet, Defi, NFT market, etc. It is crucial to building up the infrastructure at this stage for IC. We have a keen interest in other web3 projects as well, such as Relation.
What Relation doing is pretty cool. It’s building a social graph protocol based on IC. However, it serves the whole industry including other ecosystems like BSC、Polkadot, etc. This is the kind of project we embrace very much.
We also look forward to seeing IC native applications emerge in Defi、GameFi、Web3.0… We all know that IC applies a completely different structure compared to other EVM Layer1’s imagination is given in IC, especially in terms of development. There are many ways in which IC can empower its native applications. The whole industry is moving forward to the application layer from the infrastructure-building phase at the moment. It cannot be a better time for IC to showcase its unique features.
Allow me to do some advertisements here. I would like to take advantage of this opportunity to make it clear: anyone with magnificent ideas or who has deployed on IC is welcome to reach out to IAF.
Meanwhile, we do need to pursue the specific mandate as an ecosystem fund that is to empower Asia and leverage Asia’s power. With this goal in mind, we are eager to play our role as the bridge connecting the east and the west. My observation is that, since the mainnet launch, the ecosystem has been growing rapidly. We have got hundreds of projects coming out. However, we still fall short of our goal. There is still a conspicuous gap between what we aspire to and what we have achieved. That’s a pity.
To re-iterate, it is one of the most important missions of IC Talk — to connect the east and the west. It’s of great significance for the whole ecosystem as well. I do believe, that in Asia, we do have numerous eminent projects such as ICSCAN, which makes the best scan ever. Another example is Relation which I mentioned previously. AstroX is also on the list. Such great projects and highly capable teams in Asia deserve to be seen by a wider audience. On the other hand, in the west, there are definitely countless great projects who are unfamiliar with Asia ecosystems and the communities at this point. Western communities need to be more informed about the Asia market, which is becoming one of the largest markets in the globe with half of the population in the world and the most active user base in the whole blockchain industry. Axie Infinity and STEPN were all born here in Asia.
It’s a great honor to have Entrepot as the first project today to share with us in IC Talk. I think it is an opportunity to see the east and the west communities be more closely connected than ever.
Lydia:
Thank you for your wonderful introduction. I am well aware that IAF is very famous in China and have invited quite a few projects recently. I hope IAF can help more projects to develop their IC communities and altogether we can strengthen the whole IC ecosystem.
Now, let’s move on. How about having EasySteve talk about his Toniq Labs and Entrepot.
Steve:
I found that the story behind how Entrepot started is pretty interesting. Entrepot was created more or less, kind of by accident. Our initial team members all got to know each other via the internet. I first reached out to Bob because we both have experience in educational technology. Bob was even a Ph.D. for that. Before entering the blockchain industry, I worked on building online programs for higher Ed Universities. We got to know each other as we were both working on educational platforms on IC. Then, Steve Andrews and I met through Openchat. At that time, I created a group to add everyone named Steve that I could find. He thought it was hilarious and that’s indeed how we met. When we first started building, we released token standard and then Stoic Wallet. When Cronics came out, we were like: it’d be cool if there was a place where people could just trade these back and forth. Then we started building this little marketplace and Steve Andrews just whooped it out overnight. It was Rick Porter who asked us whether to charge a fee on these trades or expand on this. I was like: I don’t know as I hadn’t thought about it. Just like, well, you guys having the first marketplace on the Internet Computer.
We never had a road map for the marketplace that we invented, not even to mention some renowned launches or other plannings. It was really cool for us to find our footing. It has definitely been a very interesting year. We were really figuring out how to build and manage an NFT marketplace because there are just so many things that you could miss or realize until you’re in that trouble, building and trying to find the best approach out of that. We went back and forth for months on different things, such as — should anyone be allowed to mint? Should we vet projects? What’s the best way to vet? Is that even effective? At the end of the day, we land on that: open and permission-less is the best way to go. This is true as they align with some of the core values of blockchain in general. Over the past year, a lot of our time ended up being dedicated to Entrepot. We’re finally here now with our self-minting tool and version2.0 of the self-minting tool coming out hopefully within the next few days. We’re actually now able to work back on those original projects, like token standard updates and infrastructure level tools. It has just been a really crazy year.
Lydia:
Thank you, Steve. Last year, I saw Entrepot start from scratch. Now it is making its way to having a lot of NFT projects listed on it with lots of loyal fans. They are amazing. However, there are some complaints from the community. We will talk about this later! We are going to have the panel conversation with you shortly. before that a few questions from me.
Q: What do you think of the IC ecosystem now?
Steve:
It’s still in its very early-stage and only had two to three weeks for run-up(All prices increasing). We had only one cycle like that. The other thing is that we really don’t have any tools that allow a creator to launch a collection yet. While NFTAnvil can let you do this right now. Everything’s under development.
But the ability to launch a collection and have it traded openly on a marketplace without the need for any other party like CCC is still missing. NFTAnvil allows you to mint a collection with the marketplace functions. That’s a very cool project that I recommend people check out. Hatch has been working on a way for people to easily spin up the launch page. And his team is also working on the marketplace; Also Jelly, Psychedelic team is working on some marketplace infrastructure level stuff. But it is still very early for us all that Entrepot only has more numbers of users. And there’s been 10,000 people that have ever bought an NFT(Entrepot’s launchpad/marketplace). Compared to Solana(100,000+people), we have so much room for growth for everyone in the space. More projects we build, the more people we would attract. We need more infrastructure-level tooling and more communication between people who are building, like, agreed-upon token standards. It is very hard!
Lydia:
Thank you so much.Time for Herbert to ask questions.
Herbert:
As far as I have been watching Toniq Labs from Genesis to today, it has just been spectacular. Thank you and Andrew for what you have been doing for the community. So, my question is — what do you spend the most time on?
Steve:
It depends on what we are doing. Releases/launches. A large portion of my job and most of my responsibility over the last nine months has been the management of artist relations and scheduling for the team as it was indeed a manual creation process before we had the minting tool. Like collecting assets, pricing whitelists(with whitelist bot), launch schedule, and launch management.
On the other hand, I run social media-related things and releases if we need designs or videos. Luckily, we got two great people working with me. We’ve been trying to develop a content strategy and some great content to put out. Like our Youtube channel over the past few months, we’ve been able to publish some awesome videos there. Now I’m feeling myself, with our new minting tool that we’re rolling out. Also, I found myself being able to take a step back from that process a little bit and work on some higher-level marketing activities/engagements, starting to make things come together as a whole.
Herbert:
It’s always interesting to hear a founder’s journey about how you guys handle the day-to-day stuff. I pitched to Dom a couple of months ago that I wanted to see 50 unicorns out of Asia in the next 7 to 10 years. I think there’s a pretty good chance that whoever I end up talking to tonight, including you Steve, of you will go on to run some pretty massive unicorns in the next couple of years. So, again, it’s really interesting to get a close look at how you guys handle these day-to-day things. Thank you!
As you mentioned about working with artists, I would imagine in the world of the NFT marketplace, a major task is to convince upcoming artists to bring his or hers next NFT collection to our IC ecosystem, in particular to Toniq Labs. So, what are the biggest hurdles when you tried to convince them to deploy on IC rather than ETH? what are complaints or confusion, even pushbacks that you have heard most frequently?
Steve:
It’s a mixed bag. We do have a lot of people that want to launch on the IC who do not need you to persuade. On the other hand, when you’re dealing with artists with uncertain attitudes, most of them may prefer to end up launching on Ethereum first. The analogy that’s been made to me in the past is that Ethereum is the expensive canvas. That’s how a lot of these artists view it. It is known for anyone who works with a painting that the range of prices that you can get for different canvases is outrageous. People generally view Ethereum as the top end and they don’t want to lose that prestige that would otherwise disappear if they choose to mint elsewhere. It’s almost like it is the high price that gives it value, rather than the price reflecting the true value of the chain. They see more of the high price as the value driver for minting on that chain. Convincing people that come over to Internet Computer, you got to sell them on the tech and the vision of what the blockchain is all about. Once that’s done, the problem is solved because people who wanted to mint on the IC see the potential in it. That’s with every single project I talked to. With every project that launches on Entrepot, they get an application. And I would meet them and go through KYC. There’s a ton of back and forth even after the launch. They all believe in the future of it. And, once they believe in that, it’s a closed deal.
Herbert:
That’s interesting! This is the part I always run into as well when I talk to friends from the old world, web2. As you said I sometimes have to make a hard sell-off IC go down this path. For example, Steve, when you talked to the artists, I would assume most of them probably have not received any technical training before. Do they care about things like individual data sovereignty, ownership of your digital assets, save your assets on the decentralized platform rather than a centralized server? Do they care about those things according to your experience?
Steve:
It depends on who you’re working with. As for most of them, they do have professional technical teams. They understand the neurons of the Internet Computer, even more than I do some of them. On the other hand, we did spend a lot of time working with just digital artists who have absolutely no technical ability. For pure artists, on-chain storage is a huge selling point. And beyond that, it’s a lot of the things that originally drew most people into the IC — no gas fees, the scalability, and the speed. I still remember that the first time I send ICP from one wallet to another, I thought I was being pumped.
Herbert:
Yeah, I guess we can say that obviously, the token price hasn’t been much of help in the last couple of months. I would imagine a lot of folks would use price to justify that decision to mint and issue NFTS on Ethereum rather than other alternative ecosystems such as IC, which is unfortunate. Hopefully, things will turn around in a couple of months. Thank you! Steve.
Hao:
We know ToniqLabs has been doing a great job on IC. Indeed, Entrepot is one of the most successful projects on IC at the moment, especially for the NFT segmentation.
Deploying NFT on IC is less costly, faster, and more scalable. Apart from these features, can you guide us to imagine what potential advantages IC compared to other Layer-1 projects in terms of NFT?
Steve:
It’s going to come down to the mutability of smart contracts. What most users take for granted is that the smart contract is immutable. And, there are definitely times when it should be immutable. But as we start to see, other use cases for NFTs outside of launching a 10,000 collection, when we start to see businesses that are using them as a way to input data or use it to track progress/ reward employees.
Two things that are important and going to make these really powerful. One, the whole canister is mutable by default, for a business, may not be too worried about having an immutable canister if this is like an employee NFT. They’re going to want to push updates to it. They’re not going to want to migrate contracts if they want to make a change. For the enterprise level, private solutions like that are going to be really complicated. It is for sure that there’s always a reason to make something immutable at a certain point. Secondly, the on-chain storage can make it a lot easier for the smart contract to interact with the physical asset, which can be a video or HTML file, as opposed to like IPFS. To be honest, I am not an expert. But I do know that it’s supposedly decentralized to a point. But that doesn’t make it super easy to interact with. When you’re trying to update files, they will be needing a new identifier. I don’t want to dive into that. What I believe we are going to see is the dynamic and interactive NFTs, developing from pictures into tools. That’s the natural progression. Though we started with PNG and JPEG, there is a reason to believe that the next big evolution is going to be about interactivity and changing. NFT should be able to change. I am not fond of arguments stating that if an NFT changes, then it’s not an NFT at all. This is totally incorrect. NFT is just something you own. In real life, in the physical world, things that you own can change. So why shouldn’t the things we own in the digital world change and evolve in the same way? I believe that the IC can facilitate that better than any other solution any time soon.
Hao:
I definitely agree! You mentioned the on-chain storage and computing. All things are combined in IC to facilitate the interaction.
Speaking of this kind of unique edge about NFT on IC, Do you guys have any plan to extend to this kind of functionality? To guide or orientate the ecosystem toward this kind of new feature on Entrepot?
Steve:
We do have some new stuff coming down the pipeline. As far as I can tell, there is going to be some sort of new tab at the top of Entrepot. The big thing for us is just to keep innovating. I’ll also say that we are working on the capability for anyone to just top up their wallet in Entrepot using a credit or debit card. It is a considerable feature. And that lays the foundation to bridge Web2 and Web3. I think the IC is uniquely positioned to onboard people from Web2 as opposed to crypto natives. Firstly, because of the fee charged, a lot of crypto dwellers are prohibited from interacting with Dapps and have to look for something else. While IC charges no gas, users don’t need any cryptocurrency in advance. We have integrated this feature and named it web3 auth. It allows you to go on Entrepot and log in with Gmail or Twitter/Facebook. This is what we’re working on now and should be released, perhaps, by the end of July. It is to top up your wallet with your credit or debit card right from within Entrepot. For someone who’s new to cryptocurrency, this is like the perfect onboarding path, where they can log in with their Gmail and add some internet money to their wallet with their credit card and buy NFTs. There’s no annoying confirmation process. You don’t have to add ant-chain using some unfamiliar URLs to your fox wallet. The point is, it’s going to be simple. Targeting these Web2 users, I think it’s promising for IC. Meanwhile, there is a complete UI redesign now under active development. Maybe you get up one day and see a totally refreshed interface.
Hao:
Thanks! I agree with you that IC is the most accessible project for Web2 users to embrace blockchain and crypto. I personally quite look forward to it.
You guys have been developing different projects on IC for a long time. What is the biggest challenge you have ever faced?
Steve:
There are lots of changes. As for the biggest challenge, I would say it is probably in terms of asset uploading. We are groomed to work around this and come up with feasible solutions. I’m pretty confident to say that we can upload asset files to the IC probably faster than anyone else who has managed to. I think our largest project is 100 gigabytes of data. That’s like just under 10% of IC’s total state. We definitely had to figure out how to upload. Very early on we took down subnets temporarily and dropped the finalization rate drastically down to nothing. Now we can topple subnets like it’s nothing, just we can get so much more data on it. So that’s probably one of the biggest challenges.
For Entrepot, I spent so much time trying to figure out what projects get to launch? What are we able to guarantee? What are the best approach to the administrative side and the community side of an NFT marketplace? A lot of people come to us and asked: “Why don’t you only launch the best projects?” The answer is that ToniqLabs don’t believe that we are the right people to decide what the best projects are. Anyone that’s building on web3 probably believes in decentralization and permission-less platforms. ToniqLabs is not going to be the gatekeeper. There are surely things we can do, like checking the art status and having a KYC process for the creator. But It will not guarantee that you never buy fake identities online. I believe ultimately that anyone should be able to launch. It should be the community and the buyers that have the voting rights. If something doesn’t meet the standard, the market will reflect it. Coming to the conclusion was a long process of trial and error, also different notes and plans I have jotted down. It’s been a work in progress and a big challenge.
Hao:
It’s a big challenge OpenSea facing as well!
There is a bunch of NFT marketplace coming out on IC. Entrepot can be regarded to dominate this segment. So, the question is, how do you see other NFT marketplaces? Do you have any suggestions for them?
Steve:
I’m so excited to see more of these marketplaces starting to pop up and be successful. If it had been a year since we launched and we were still the only marketplace, I would be worried about the future of this space. Luckily we are not, and we have this competition, which forces everyone to improve, innovate, and grow the ecosystem together. We’re just so excited! What a lot of these marketplaces are doing is really cool. The best advice I could give…is don’t guarantee that there will not be a rug pull. I’ve seen some marketplaces on other chains, whose goal is to be super exclusive and that’s fine. There’s definitely going to be on the IC which you’ll see marketplaces that are more open and anyone can mint. You’ll see marketplaces where it’s really hard to mint on. There’s a place for both those things. But the second you promise that your vetting process is so good that there are guaranteed no rugs, you’re sinking your ship. You put out a big sign that is just a challenge to every NFT scammer out there. “Like, You can’t rug us, come and try.” Not only that, you just can’t guarantee that it’s not going to be a rug. No one can guarantee that. We’ve seen some great products on ETH that could have been really successful, successful launches, good arts, active teams…Floyd May-weather is doxxed and he has two rug pulls under his belt. You just can’t guarantee it.
Hao:
Thank you!
Herbert:
Thank you Hao for the great questions and Steve for answering and advice! We in DFINITY should probably never promise that we’re going to deliver BTC integration by the end of this month (This is a joke!)
Your current PFP is you on the beach. If one day you use an NFT for PFP, what would that be? (For Hao)
Hao:
Interesting question! PFP I am using was created a couple of years ago, on Morris island. I went there for my honeymoon.
I actually agree with Steve on what it’s going to be the big potential and the features of NFT in IC. It’s going to be dynamic, programmable, and mutable. With a lot of things attached to the NFT, we are going to open the door of Web3. I am a crypto native guy and I actually look forward to having more web3 activities linked to the NFT. Whatever it’s now or it’s a web 3 application. For instance, STEPN. I will be very proud to share NFT like shoes from STEPN. If those kinds of NFT projects come out from IC, I will be happy to share them too!
Herbert:
Oh, but that’s from Solana!
Hao:
Yeah, but there is big potential from IC, which will be more valuable and more complex.
Herbert:
Yeah! Hopefully, we will have something to replace STEPN! Thank you and I am looking forward to seeing your NFT photo one day.
SNZ Capital has been one of the most influential and experienced crypto funds in the world. You guys were the early investor of ETH back in the days. You have a deep understanding of the entire crypto space. You look at projects from many different ecosystems, such as STEPN you mentioned. What I am curious about is, when doing research and making investment decisions for the startups in the IC ecosystem such as Relation/ICSCAN, is there anything different compared to other ecosystems? Is there something more challenging to evaluate for the IC early-stage developer teams? Or maybe easier? Anything that you can share with us?
Hao:
There are a lot of criteria to evaluate a project. There are also different criteria to evaluate different projects from different segments. For instance, Defi. There are standardized criteria to evaluate projects from the Defi segment. Let me share two fundamental essential criteria we prefer. Firstly, the team and their knowledge about IC. Especially the team’s faith in IC, which is very important. We can see a lot of projects coming from other ecosystems trying to find an easier position in a new ecosystem in IC. But they actually don’t really know about IC so much. With this kind of mentality, it’s not that easy for them to stay long in this ecosystem. Belief in IC from the team is very important. From a project perspective, among the various criteria, one of them is whether the project maximizes the specific feature of IC and whether it is IC native project. That’s one of the criteria I am personally interested in.
Herbert:
Yes, when I tried to build a team for Asia, the number one criteria stands the same as Andrew here, which is holding the belief in the IC technology and its future. If people cannot pass that, there’s no second round. We really need to recruit developers who know IC inside out, know how to maximize the potential of IC, and apply IC in the right way. Not just using IC as a backup server to store some metadata. I would rather they redesign the entire app on IC.
(Asking Lydia) Lydia, you have been working with a lot of IC developers and communities around the world. Obviously, this includes many different countries in Asia. What are the differences you’ve seen from all these different countries, in terms of how they embrace IC and grow the local ecosystems?
Lydia:
To begin with, in general, the communities are cohesive and their members are very passionate about and really into IC. For the differences between those communities, I think there have been some language barriers for IC families. English speakers have a lot of information since they could read English very easily and understand well what IC is. Also, the developers talk a lot about the technology in English…What I want to talk about is Japan’s community and DFINITYVN. For Japanese community, they are very passionate about NFTs and have learned a lot about Motoko and IC technology by themselves. This is very hard since they don’t know much about English. That gives me a heavy impact. I want to help them and was honestly touched by their passion. DFINITYVN teams are very active in the NFT world. They have connections with great artists and have created a few eminent NFT projects. They truly bring a lot of energy to the community, which is great. About the Korean community, there are a few investors but they are also motivated and want to get more information about IC. I really appreciate the IC community which has actively supported my events and taken good care of me every time. I really want to say thanks to the IC community.
Herbert:
Thank you Lydia for everything you’ve been doing!
For Steve, I have one more question: The ICP burnt. ICP burnt is a measure of vitality that refers to how many users are actually using the Dapps in the IC ecosystem. The number has been small. Indeed, since Genesis, we have merely burned 79,000 ICPs. This is negligible compared to the additional minted ICP on a monthly basis. We hope the ecosystem can grow along with this number soaring. In what way do you believe that an NFT marketplace can contribute to burning more and more ICPs or actually ICP cycles?
Steve:
Kyle has done some great works on this and he actually published an article a few weeks ago about the ICP burns. He talks specifically about Entrepot in that a little bit. There are three main ways that ICP is burned from the marketplace. First, it’s from the transaction. For every sale on Entrepot, there are 3 ICP transferred. 1).Seller sends to escrow address. 2). Escrow address splits the amount between the creator and the marketplace. 3). 0.0001 ICP burned for each transfer. At the same time, a large percentage of total ICPs burned are from Entrepot. As transactions scale, we’re going to see that number grow. However, the number is pretty insignificant. The second way ICP could be burned is from pure storage, which is currently also a pretty low number. Specifically, the cost of storage on IC is $5/GB/year. The largest source of ICP burned is the computation that it takes to do the NFT transactions. I know we all want to burn more ICPs, but we try our best to keep that to optimize the number and keep it lower. There was a point we were spending thousands of dollars burning ICP to maintain these canisters, especially during that run-up we had in February. That was probably the most we ever spent on cycles.
As there are more collections and more adopters, we’re just going to see that number grow very significantly. NFTs burn a good amount of ICPs. But it’s nowhere in the air what we’ll see from Defi solutions and fungible token solutions. If you look at the ICP burned from Sonic launched, even just the swap between ICP and XTC, that’s taken off. One thing we encountered early on with reverse gas, we all know how it works but it’s the first time that it’s been used in practice. So it’s the first time that a marketplace has to figure out how to deal with reverse gas in…like how often are they topped off? How do they get topped off? Where does that ICP come from? There was a point where we kind of actually overlooked that.
As a result, we have been communicating to creators that it is your responsibility to keep your canisters. We learned pretty quickly one day that this message just wasn’t getting across and we have 20 canisters all run out of cycles. One afternoon and all of a sudden the marketplace wasn’t working. Then we built an auto top-off system, where the canisters reached a certain threshold, I think it’s 10 cycles then they’re automatically topped up with funds coming from royalties between us and creators. We’re trying to keep that burden off the users. Someone could take reverse engineer, reverse gas so that the users are paying for cycles again. But it kind of seems like a moot point to go back when we could be going forwards.
Herbert:
I agree. Probably out of all the verticals, it would require Defi or GameFi. We have to count on them to be the main drivers for burning ICP. I am hoping whatever we can get from the NFT space, maybe we just need to have a higher volume of NFT sales. Or more marketplaces, like Entrepot, so that all these numbers will eventually go up significantly.
By the way, Steve, you mentioned depleting the canister balance for those artists. You probably heard that we have this Canister Tip Jar app. It has been developed by Paul from DFINITY Foundation. Basically, anyone can donate cycles to a canister to keep its smart contract going. That sounds like something that could help you guys as well, in case the artists or the NFT project teams forget to top up the canisters.
Steve:
Yeah, it has been an amazing conversation. I really appreciate the idea of showing the cycles balance right on the marketplace page. If you look into the Stoic Wallet, it’s really easy to top up a canister. There’s a little gas can in the bottom. You just click that and you put in the canister ID along with the amount of ICP, and it automatically converts to cycles, finally topping off that canister. Showing the balance is one solution that I could come up with. This would be validated because if no one ever topped up the canister. The project would cease to be able to trade and it would be an interesting way to indicate if a project is alive or they’ve kind of just stopped. Because if no community members are topping it off and no team members are topping it off, maybe that’s not a project you want to be appealed to. It adds a new dynamic way for people to interact with NFTs.
The other thing is that the incentives are somewhat conflicting. Personally like me, as someone who’s been involved in the IC since day one. I want to see more ICPs burned. That’s the goal! But as a member of ToniqLabs, our goal is to reduce the amount of ICP that we’re burning, as that’s spending money. So we’d much rather be hiring developers and spending that to grow than burning more ICP. It creates a very interesting dynamic But it’s going to be something unique to the IC. I’m just interested in seeing how that impacts a lot of projects going forward and the solutions they find and how they affect their projects.
Herbert:
I don’t have the answer for that either. It’s a very interesting and somewhat scientific exercise to do at some point. On one hand, we want to be supportive of all the early-stage startups in the IC ecosystem like Entrepot by lowering the operation cost for you. On the other hand, we really need to pump up this to increase ICP burned number, to show that users are actually using and making the update calls to the canisters. I don’t know if anyone has a perfect answer where should that balance be where and how can we strike that equilibrium. We are in a bit of a no-man’s-land and uncharted territory, but that would be an interesting discussion for another day.
— — — — -Audience Q&A time — — — — — -
Lydia: Feedback from the community
Q1:
Entrepot did a really amazing job but still, we can see some complaints from the community. Lately, there is a scam project which disappointed the community. Some other unqualified projects have been staying on launchpad for a long time. The community would love to know why they are not closed?
Steve:
I was asked this question all the time. People are like…hey…these aren’t selling. Can you just close them? If we were trying to build a centralized exchange and a centralized launchpad, surely we can. But ultimately the goal is to not be any like that. We want Toniq to be hands-off. So if a project wants to stay on the launchpad for 100 years, they are entitled to do so. I don’t believe that it should be the Toniq Lab’s decision to remove projects from the launchpad just because they’re not available at that point. I think that mentality comes from a place where people are viewing NFT as an investment. Just because projects not minting and the floor price on the marketplace is below the mints, doesn’t mean that there isn’t someone out there who would be happy to mint one and get a random one, getting a design that’s not on the marketplace. Because NFTs aren’t just investments. They shouldn’t be perceived that way. There’s always a possibility that there’s someone out there who would be happy to buy one and make it clear that it’s not going to the moon tomorrow. So I believe that the problem is not to remove projects but to improve the navigational features of the launchpad, to build we have designed a new launchpad page and filtering/sorting. Making those projects easier to navigate and finding ones that you’re interested in. We don’t want to push anyone down. We want to lift up the higher-performing projects and make them shine. This goes for any collection, I think it’s better to identify green flags than red flags. Of course, we always want to be on the lookout for red flags. But I think green flags are even more valuable. Promot things that projects do well rather than trying to identify the things that they’re doing poorly and drag them down. I think it’s just far more effective to elevate what the community accepts as a standard and what we see as a good practice.
Lydia:
Some questions from the projects.
Q2: If they want to list their projects on Entrepot, they have to wait for a long time. What are the listing requirements for getting listed on Entrepot?
Steve:
If you have been waiting for more than a month since you submitted the application, please reapply! The criteria for being eligible for Entrepot is that you need to have original artwork and your road map does not violate the law. Those are really the only thing.
What we do is we take all the applications, and try as we can to prioritize them based on the answers from the application, meeting with the team, and looking forward to their community feedback. Also, the community voice on which ones they really want to see. But with our minting tools and we’ve just gone through our first round of closed beta testers who have used the minting tool. We identified some issues and we fixed them, then we made some improvements, finally, the new version of the minting tool is so cool. I cannot wait to share it with you guys. It’s so much more practical, we’re going to get Dutch auctions, and we’re going to get that dynamic pricing. Remember when we used to do those pricing rounds? Those are coming back. We’re going to be able to accommodate multiple time zones, so you’ll be able to split up your launch with a certain number of NFTs allocated across multiple time zone. You could do half your launch in a day and the other half 12 hours later. I think that’s going to be huge because I know a lot of people are up at 12:00 o’clock at night for these 3:00 PM UTC launches. With this new tool, we’re able to really scale up and launch more projects. If you’ve been waiting a long time please re-apply! We are doing our best to get everyone who wants to launch should be able to launch.
Lydia:
The community should understand you guys more after this talk!
Q3:
The question was really about the snipping bot because we’ve seen multiple times someone trying to sell an NFT and putting the wrong price, like 95% below the floor. The person does not even have the ability to kind of correct the mistake because the bot had bought his NFT. Is there a way for Entrepot to fix this by adding the pop-up box or something to let the user confirm?
Steve:
This is something that’s absolutely needed. We need a confirmation screen there. I couldn’t agree more. I’ll bring it up again to the team. Hopefully part of our next update. I know it has been a problem for some people and I wish not to see that happen.
Q4:
Entrepot banner’s algorithm? Why are certain projects listed there?
Steve:
Oh, that’s just me clicking. We have only about one launch a week before so the banners will just be an image. Now we have more projects and it becomes a carousel and will cycle through projects. The home page is going to need a redesign. I believe that how projects should be promoted on the home page and what should show should be based on recent performance Ideally it will be based on volumes over the past week or two weeks. But if you’re a project and if you have some sort of big announcement coming out, I don’t believe in paid advertising for the banner. I think it’s false…just let me know and I’m happy to discuss like putting you up there depends on what you doing.
Q5:
NFT projects complain about being too hard to launch on Entrepot and turn to other NFT marketplace on IC. What would you say to that?
Steve:
If you’re a project and you want to launch but did not hear from us in a while please resubmit the applications. I’ve been working on some really great process improvements for just being able to review and whitelist people for this minting tool. I have been trying to slow down the number of launches so that we can really get this minting tool, as well as some other projects into a really great place where we can just start to scale up. It’s definitely been a long road of trying to get good projects up there and get them listed. We are just a click away from being able to just on board a lot more people and I felt the new scheduling system, new calendar system, with the public calendar. You will be able to add to your Gmail that has all the launches. I know it’s frustrating for a lot of these projects that are trying to get on, but specifically right now is a great time to resubmit your application. Because I did kind of pull back on launches for this month. Also, the next month is still light!
Q6:
What kinds of tools do you want to work with on IC? Any plans?
Steve:
Absolutely. This is actually something I’ve been trying to push forward. Like collabs with non-NFT projects that building on the IC. I’ve been talking with the ICEvent team. We had a meeting the other week, about creating a direct integration with the minting tool to have a public calendar on ICEvent. Like a calendar-type project. We’re chatting with Catalyze-community building tools. If anyone has brilliant ideas or has been developing NFT projects which may potentially help us grow, we are more than delighted to have a chat.
— — — — — — — — — End — — — — — — — — -
About “IC Talk”, Please read the below information.
