NFTs that tell stories: Avatars and logbooks that can represent themselves | Rug Pull Frens x Matters AMA (text record)

Matters will hold an AMA (Ask me anything) on Discord every week, and invite Web3 experimental projects, communities, and authors to talk with us. We will continue to explore the following four themes, and hope to learn together with you:

1. "Web3 Learning and Sharing" : Every Friday at 11:00 in Dongba District, around different Web3 topics, different speakers are invited to explain knowledge points and case studies. It is free for everyone to participate. Please click here for details.
2. "Web3 Experimenters" : We will invite experimenters who are actively exploring different directions in Web3 to share their experiences, gains and doubts with them.
3. "Women in Web3" : Focus on gender issues in the Web3 world.
4. "Creator Economy" : Focus on how creators create new creation and co-creation models in Web3.

I hope that through the AMA, we can continue to discuss the above issues in depth with you. If you missed it, we will also post a video review on Discord, and organize the text record and put it in Matt City, so that everyone can easily review it and become a resource for Web3 learning.

Below is a transcript of the Rug Pull Frens x Matters AMA.

 Date: April 11th (Monday)
Time: 21:00 - 22:30 (East Eighth District)
Guests: Chen Mutian (RPF project leader), Zhang Jieping (Matters founder)

Video recap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvL2ix0wGpI&t=747s&ab_channel=Matters

(Note: There is a small overlap and repetition in the recording from 9:30 to 14:30, and it will return to normal after 14:30)

【Text record】

Q: Before we start, please introduce yourself briefly.

Jieping:

• From 2005 to 2018, he worked as a reporter, editor and editor-in-chief in the news media. In 2018, he left Duan Media and founded Matters Lab. He believes that "decentralized network" may be a long-term solution to the pain points of the news media industry. Currently the Founder and CEO of Matters Lab.

Q: Jieping left Duan Media and founded Matters Lab in 2018. I would like to ask what kind of problems Jieping saw in the traditional media industry at that time, and what opportunities did he see in the blockchain to decide to create Matters Lab?

Jieping:

• A long-known problem is that traditional media have difficulty finding the right business model to sustain serious content production.
• However, the collapse of the business model of the entire industry is not only in the form of content or the reading habits of readers, but also in the changes in the entire ecology.
• In the Web2 era, social media such as Facebook, Youtube, and WeChat have taken away the era when the traditional content industry was its own platform (such as the New York Times, or a small self-media account). Now the rules are determined by the social platform. Like the issue of land property rights in economics, when the land property rights in the virtual space do not belong to the creators themselves, part of it is the algorithm and the platform.
• At Web3 we want to return ownership to the author . Blockchain technology guarantees technical property rights. In 2017, when there was no such a hot concept as Web3, we believe that blockchain is at least an option other than the content monopoly of the current centralized platform.

Q: Can you share how Matters is different from other Web2 content platforms, or other Web3 content platforms (such as Steemit)?

Jieping:

• Matters has made many different attempts over the past four years, and in the process we are slowly defining the difference between ourselves and other Web3 platforms:

1. In 2017, everyone's imagination of blockchain applications was simpler. The original service of Matters was "never delete, never disappear" . All content will be stored directly on the IPFS distributed network , and IPFS will provide it while storing. Public nodes that can be accessed. So even if Matters disappears for some reason in the future, all nodes will still be accessible . In some areas where the Internet is blocked, you can also use IPFS nodes to spread your own articles. For example, Russian users on Matters will also spread in this way.
2. When more and more creators began to gather on Matters, we were thinking: If the relationship and interaction between people are not based on the big platform, how can Web3 establish an effective and independent relationship between people and people ? When Matters has gathered here from thousands to tens of thousands to now nearly 100,000 creators, exchanges and disputes will occur, so we are also working hard to promote community autonomy and experience in Matters (including incentives, punishments, and adjustment mechanisms) It is similar to Web2's bbs (such as Reddit or PTT), but we hope to achieve it through Web3 interactive tools.

• Unlike Mirror and Steemit, which are more Web3 platforms, we hope to be a bridge between Web2 and Web3 . We now have two methods of wallet and mailbox login, not only wallet login. We still have a very strong community, and we have a platform to undertake your articles, and there will be comments, rewards, clapping, and clapping will also have tangible rewards, but we hope that the core ownership of the work belongs to the author himself.

Q: Recently Matters also launched its own NFT: Travelogger, which is also the first NFT in Chinese that can write a diary. Can you please introduce the Tranvelogger project?

Jieping:

• At the beginning, we simply wanted to make a PFP. Because Matters has a large and cohesive community, we hope to give community members "identity" by issuing 1,500 NFTs.
• In the process of doing this, more ideas about "what can you do with this avatar" appeared. We hope that the holders of Travellogger will be the first "explorers" to explore Web3 with us, such as the priority of participating in other ecological projects of Matters Use, be automatically whitelisted, or get an airdrop to launch The Space in May.
• We hope that Travellogger can respond to the theme of "creator", so in addition to the 1500 images of the avatar itself composed of different personalities and different character traits, we also hope that Travellogger can be interactive. Since NFT is a blank certificate, Then everyone may also be able to write something on this NFT and add a part of the ownership. Therefore, when we launched the first version of Travellogger, we also brought our own Logbook. The problem with the first version of Logbook was that it was written directly on Ethereum, and it cost a lot of money to write a single line (a concept of a thousand dollars).
• NFT should not be just a static thing that can only be collected by everyone. The interesting thing about NFT is that as a certificate of ownership that provides scarcity , it should be expandable, interactive, and divisible in the Web3 world. moist .
• For the second version of Logbook, we mint it on Polygon, which greatly reduced the gas fee. At the same time, we have also enhanced its "co-creation" attribute to separate the Logbook from the Travellogger. After writing the Logbook, you can transfer your Logbook to the next person without linking the Travellogger's avatar during the transfer process (that is, although the Logbook is transferred to the next person) To the next person, you are still the holder of Travellogger). The next person will follow your lead, making Logbook 2.0 a "collective journal".
• Therefore, Logbook has already realized the scenario of transfer and co-creation, and we hope to achieve "profit sharing" in subsequent iterations. I hope that when the Logbook is sold again one day, the reward can be distributed to the creators who have serialized 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... great before.
• In the process of development, we will also think that such a flexible smart contract is actually one of the things we most want to do in the Matters ecosystem. We regard Logbook as an experiment to verify whether such an open and co-creation smart contract is feasible and needed. We also hope that this approach can be applied to the Matters ecosystem in the future.

Q: RPF hopes that the NFT avatars you buy can really become your identities in Web3, so we also launched Story Paper last week. Story Paper is a "white paper" that every RPF holder can have. You can write on the white paper to customize the description and introduction of your name. Here, I would also like to ask Mutian to share the origin and future prospect of Story Paper?

Mutian:

• Matter is the earliest text-based NFT in Taiwan, which is also a great inspiration for us. The text-type NFT has always been a vacancy, and the visual form is easy to get out of the circle, but the text-type NFT must still have a lot of room in the future. We are thinking that the real purpose of a good PFP is not purely for hype, but to represent your "identity" in the metaverse .
• Hashmasks is a very inspiring project for me. It has its own Name Change Tokens (NCT). If Hashmasks are kept long enough, it will generate more Name Change Tokens. This NCT can be used to exchange for "what I want" Mint's name on my PFP", each name is unique. This is a very good concept for an anonymous, blockchain metaverse world.
• So with Story Paper: we are technically trying to realize that after changing the name, it can be directly displayed on OpenSea, and the RPF smart contract has been completed. We are thinking about how to add NFT to the smart contract to achieve this purpose. I'm very happy that we finally realized it in a week or two. After I wrote it, I would have a feeling of "this really belongs to me". I used this avatar to represent my identity in the metaverse.
• We also insist that all descriptions are on the chain. Although everyone will spend some gas fee, it will make everyone feel that "it belongs to you".
• The relatively early projects in Taiwan all carried a little experimental spirit. No matter how the blockchain or NFT develops in the future, we all hope that we can do some groundbreaking things and bring you some different feelings. We hope to make everyone realize that NFT has many ways to play. In addition to avatars, NFT also has many other possibilities.
• Story Paper is a very good start. It is quite a step ahead in terms of the concept of PFP. We return the rights of creation and definition to everyone, and leave everyone a blank sheet of paper. What you want to yourself and everyone Write what you say. There will be more experimental content after RPF, please look forward to it.

Q: There are also a lot of quiches in the RPF community who like words. I would like to ask what is the possibility of cooperation after Jieping?

Jieping:

• Personally, I like the idea of naming. Although we are all writing stories, the combination of RPF and avatar is more closely, and Logbook is more like a "public diary", the content has its own theme, and this theme There is no such strong personal color.
• The exchange of diaries is an intuitive idea, but it is still necessary to continue to think about how to allow two Holders to exchange their NFTs.
• We can also give a Logbook to the RPF community, and everyone can have a shared serial book in addition to their own stories. This Logbook can be transferred between communities, and each avatar story can be copied on the Logbook. This Logbook can also become a "collective diary" shared by RPF Holders.

Community questions:

Q: How will The Space combine with Matters in the future?

Jieping:

• The Space is a project that pays tribute to r/place. It is a huge "digital Lennon wall" or "pixel canvas" that everyone shares and never goes offline. We hope to turn it into NFT (using NFT to determine each ownership of pixels) and introduce a governance mechanism for the Harberger tax. There will also be an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) to each creator.
• In simple terms, the Harberger tax is a tax that everyone pays depends on their own valuation of their private property, and anyone in the market can pay the valuation you submit to force a transaction. (For example, if you price your property low, you won't have to pay a lot of taxes, but at the same time it will be easy for others to buy your property.)
• We hope to use The Space to test whether public governance of the Harberger tax under Radical Markets is feasible. We think that the problem that will arise in any public speech platform is a large number of different opinions and competition between different creators. How to make competition a benign game rather than a vicious consumption? Do we have any other public space governance rules besides blocking the other party?
• We can regard the pixel game The Space as the smallest unit of opinion expression, which is simply an expression of opinion made with color blocks. It would be different from what Matters put it in words, but if the Harberger tax worked, it would have more room for the imagination.

Q: What rights will the holders of Travellogger have in the future?

Jieping:

• You can get the token airdrop after the official launch of The Space project, and you can experience the game first.
• After Matters Discord, there will be more internal discussions and sharing sessions that will gradually open up to Travellogger holders to participate.
• Travelogger will be the ticket to more community engagements in the future.

Q: Why did RPF develop the aspect of text NFT? Was it added later? Is it because of the common confidence of the holders and want to develop and create NFTs?

Mutian:

• It is because I want PFP to be more representative of itself. We believe that the works created by Raimochi have artistic value, but we are also thinking about how to make art creation more Web3, so we thought of returning the creation rights to all holders.
• The team is a relatively experimental team. Our NFTs can change their skin color, name them, or write their own stories. This is what RPF wants to represent. We want to explore more possibilities for NFT creation, and will do more in the future. many interesting things.
• I will be responsible for pushing more experimental things, and Raimochi will be responsible for more innovations in the graphics and visuals of the work. For us, words are one of many carriers. We also want to have more cooperation in the future to make the ecosystem more complete.

Q: I wonder what the first NFT of the two is?

Mutian:

• I bought the first NFT but didn't, because the money went to the wrong place and lost 0.5ETH. At that time, it was recommended by a foreign friend that there was a super OG in the evening and invited a lot of strange creators to share, which was very cool. It is a virus project. It has a mother strain of the virus. If you have that mother strain, you can use it to infect others, and the infected person will have an extra variant of the virus in their wallet. 0.5ETH is the price of a mother plant (there are only ten in total), I was super excited to grab it, but because it was the first time I was not familiar with OpenSea, I didn’t know why I clicked the wrong wallet address, so I lost 0.5ETH.
• The first NFT that was successfully purchased was Artvatar , which was a very early case of using Polygon. They have assembled a lot of well-known blockchain artists. The parts of each person's face have different styles. There is a little tribute to Hashmasks, just put on Polygon. At the time, I thought it was very innovative, so I couldn't help spending the money (but it turned out to be a miserable loss), and then I became more restrained.

Jieping:

• The ones you buy yourself are more expensive, and they are the kind that you are reluctant to sell, so it is not an investment behavior. One fortunately bought project on documentaries, "We Are As Gods" , is a documentary about Stewart Brand , who was the editor-in-chief of a really cool magazine in the 1970s called Whole Earth Catalog, which was published in the 1970s. ~The Hippie Enlightenment of the 1980s. Although I was not born in that era, I was very attracted to this story, because it was like the Internet before the Internet, and what this magazine wanted to do was what the Internet wanted to do later.
• The magazine's most famous believer is Steve Jobs, and his most classic quotes at Apple, such as "Stay Hungry Stay Foolish", come from the magazine and its founder Stewart Brand. From the 1960s, from Web0 to Web1 to Web2 to Web3, he was very pioneering. All the innovations and pioneering ideas of mankind were gathered in him. To me, his life is like a fossil recording all the pioneering moments.
• This documentary was funded by NFTs in September last year, and finally raised about 56 ETH. It has now been filmed and has been released in some film festivals. I have always liked his books and speeches, so this is how I feel. Best collection of NFTs. Also highly recommend this documentary and all his books to everyone.
• There is also a Chinese book "Looking for a New Paradise" published in 2016. The English version is called "From counterculture to cyberculture". I am writing this "Global Overview" and the founder's story, which can be purchased on the blog.

Q: I hope Mutian and Jieping can ask each other a question.

Jieping: I have been paying attention to the "Aesthetics Textbook" or "Cultural Bank" that Mutian made before. NFT is a subset of Web3. I believe that the charm of Web3 to you is not only the NFT itself, but I am very curious about the attraction of Web3 to you. What is force, what made you plunge into it like this?

Mutian:

• From high school to college, I have been thinking about what attracts me the most, and later found that "influencing the world" is the most attractive thing to me, so I will take "influence" as a priority judgment in any decision.
• "Aesthetics Textbook" is currently in continuous operation, and there will be two or three new projects this year, which will affect schools across Taiwan. I have been working on this project for eight years, and my teammates are slowly forming. I would like to do something that affects a wider range. I originally wanted to say that I wanted to do an international big topic after the age of 35, but I was completely obsessed by the ether chain. The technology attracts, when you explain to me that this thing will change the world, I immediately think about it all and want to say that I want to join the world and do something.
• I believe this technology will change the world in the next 20 to 30 years, not only in finance, but also in all politics and laws. Politics will be delegated to all organizations, and all organizations will be democratized. I think this is a very big innovation. Although I originally wanted to do it at the age of 35, I felt that if I missed this opportunity, I would miss an opportunity to change the world. Because I also do design, I will start with NFT.

Mutian: I would like to ask Jie Ping, I am a person who likes to think about the future. How do you think the blockchain will affect our lives in 30 years, from content or political aspects?

Jieping:

• This question is as if we were standing in 1990 asking Tim Berners-Lee how the World Wide Web would change the world. We are now exactly 2022, which is also about 30 years away. Just like when the first line of www was just written, no one should be able to describe the Internet society in 2022 so concretely. Because it has undergone too many unexpected developments, some of the mechanisms in the current Internet world must not have been what the inventors wanted to see back then. The invention of blockchain and Bitcoin is also a subversion of the traditional financial system.
• I don't have the ability to describe the specific events 30 years later, but I believe that this change is a change in the underlying logic. It seems that this is the "property revolution" that I shared at the beginning, and the "property revolution" is the most fundamental revolution, as if The land revolution, the land reform when any country was first established, is the most fundamental way to subvert the original profit distribution mechanism.
• It will be felt that in the future, people will be more absolutely dominated by the digital world, and there will be two different types of people. I hope they have their own places. One group of people is more important to them for freedom, another group of people is more important to them for safety. These are two categories without value judgments. This does not refer to leftists, rightists, or liberal statism. This is because everyone has different needs and is a value choice. I feel that the current digital world does not provide enough choices for these two types of people, and Web2 has moved towards the latter (free people have less and less choices). I hope that in 30 years, these two groups of people can not interfere with each other and have their own place to go. .
• I hope the blockchain can make the Internet world more diverse, which is why we are here to chat, act or participate in this process in various ways. The more you want to see such a world happen, the sooner you should get involved , because there will also be bad people who want to get involved, so the good people have to start earlier.

Mutian:

• When I look at it myself, I will consider this from the industrial chain or technical structure, and I will think that the most core changes will affect finance and law.
• All the financial systems of the past will become the concept of "everyone can be a bank", and they will benchmark the media and real estate industries that were influenced by the Web in 2000. In the past, the media would dominate, but now as long as you have an account, you can News, so the media industry is divided up like this, and Youtube is the same. I think the financial industry will be the same in the future. There will only be two types that will survive. One is a huge platform such as the current Youtube, and the other is a bank that everyone can easily open. All stocks, bonds, and futures will be made very simple.
• Coupled with the function of smart contracts, financial crises at the level of the subprime mortgage storm will continue to occur in the future, because in the past you will go through a lot of complicated reviews, but in the future, the government will become more and more difficult to review, and it will only become more and more free. But I am still optimistic that this financial crisis will be solved in another way, but this kind of collapse will definitely happen.
• The biggest legal impact is that in the future, we will not have "signing contracts" for laws related to business, but will replace them with smart contracts, which will greatly affect our organizational governance. I have always believed that democracy will take place in 30 to 50 years. Governed companies will become mainstream, autocracy will become the management model of small companies, and it will become democratic when it operates to a certain extent, because democracy has been proven to be a stable and effective mechanism. This is the direction I will think about.
• The impact of NFT on this matter is that in the future, almost all e-commerce companies may turn to NFT, because NFT can flow across domains, countries, and platforms, and you may buy an item and send it to your home. It may be an NFT as you The vouchers (including invoices and receipts), all membership cards or ticket systems in the future will also be NFTized, because tickets are like contracts and can be processed into smart contracts. For example, your current Netflix membership card cannot be resold to anyone, but when it is an NFT, you can resell it to others. Or Costco can announce that if you hold a Netflix NFT for more than six months you can get some kind of discount, which is very interesting and fun in the future.

Jieping:

• I really hope to see most of Mutian's descriptions. I hope he is a good thing that blockchain can bring us and we can make him last longer. If you asked me in 5 years I would probably be very specific, but 30 years is too hard. Because in 30 years we can witness the rise and fall of a civilization, and the progress and regression of history can complete a complete cycle in 30 years.
• But if we shrink back to 5 years, 10 years, or the peak brought about by changes in history, for me, if we focus on the content industry, I not only hope to see it, but even think it will happen. , is that the concept of "creator economy" (with creators as the central subject) will become more community-based and become the concept of stakeholder economy. In fact, this is more in line with today's actual situation.
• Assuming that the content is a financial asset, the producers of this content may have 60% to 70% of the shares, the first group of supporters may hold 20% of the shares, and later loyal viewers or ordinary viewers will have more or less Occupying a share of 1 piece, this is the direction the content direction will go in the future.
• In fact, the fan economy we saw in Web2, stars and fan circles are all going in this direction, but NFT, blockchain and cryptocurrencies have given tools to make this Stakeholder Economy more concretely shaped, I believe it It will definitely happen and is a good direction, and it is also a great change in the content industry in 5 to 10 years. It's hard to foresee how it will decline afterward, but the process of rising up will add fuel to its own.