Gossip About Gossip: Clout.art Migrates from Polygon to Hedera

Oh welcome to gossip about gossip. Powered by Hedera Hashgraph. And each episode will cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications, which will bring trust back to the internet for us all. Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of gossip about gossip, the podcast where we talk about real world applications of distributed ledger technology. My name is Zenobia Gods talk and I am the SVP of communications at swirl labs, helping to grow the Hedera ecosystem. I am delighted to be joined by juri ze, who is the founder of cloud art. Hi, Jerry. How are you? Hi, I'm great. Thanks Thanks for having me. Absolutely so tell our audience a little bit about cloud art and what your mission and your vision is. So well, I have to probably give you a bit of a back story because I've been in this space for a very, very long time, like in terms of the whole crypto industry, especially in the NFT space, I was fortunate enough to be part of the team that pushed forward the ERC 721 standard back in 2018. We also built the first NFT framework back then, sort of like a development framework that allowed people to deploy smart contracts using higher level programming languages like Python or JavaScript. And ever since, I've been basically in love with this technology and been wandering around figuring out things to build, trying to scale. Seeing that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, even through the bear market of 2019, 2020. But I think we were all taken by surprise back then with how NFTs have grown immensely, how much people have, how the interest in NFTs has grown a lot of the projects that have started launching and also seeing blockchain infrastructure, infrastructures, networks starting to tap into this. So back in 2021, at the beginning of 2021, I had this crazy idea that. You know, I was always a fan of creative economy. I think that's the future of independent creators. They're going to drive this forward. I think everybody's going to drop Facebook and Instagram in the next 10 years, but don't quote me on that. So when we were thinking about this back in 2021, it was like, OK, what's the easiest way to onboard people into the NFT space? And you need content, right? That's kind of like at the core of NFTs is that you're basically able to store something that is not a fungible number or a fungible function, but actually a content piece, and you're able to store that on chain. And then we thought about Instagram. It just made sense because we produce so much content on social media. It's insane. And if there were an easy way to just basically take what's there and then turn it into an NFT, that would kind of be a very important step forward. And I think blockchain has, you know, has been exciting me from the very early days, but up to this day, the user experience is still so broken. It's it was something that we kind of really wanted to fix to kind of bring this closer to mainstream. And yeah, so then when we launched, we, we did it with, with polygon last year. We thought that was a very good pick. And then polygon scaled immensely up to a point where things just didn't work as good as they did at the beginning. And we've seen this story over and over again. Either gas fees go up like crazy or you have to wait for transactions or transactions get lost in the mempool. So yeah, at some point I was introduced to it to Alex from the Bar Foundation and I really I've heard about Hedera before and about the gossip consensus protocol, and it was an interesting technology, but not until we've had the first conversation had I really gotten really deep into how it works and how crazy this technology actually is. If you look at the importance of scaling it down the road and let's say five, 10 years, but I did know that they were not very much into the NFT space. So to my recollection, there was always a bit of a more serious gameplay, a bit more enterprise, right? The serious companies were there, the big companies, the big names. And then we started talking about, yeah, actually doing a transition because the NFT ecosystem was starting to really bloom on Hedera. So I'm a bit, I'm talking too long, but to shorten it up, I think collectively as a team we've seen that there is opportunity not just because of the technology but because of the community that started to really grow on Hedera. And this has been proven to us and I'll talk a bit more about that later. And yeah, it was I think a couple of months ago, we made this final decision to transition. And here we are and everything else is history. Yeah and I do want to make sure we spend some time on that transition, but I think you raise a good point, right, in that. Yes Hedera is enterprise ready? Right that scalability, all of those things are ready for prime time and can scale as big as you grow. But the NFT market has also matured, right? You are building an entire business on this. People are starting to say this is not just a hobby or a collection. This is something where I'm getting really serious. And so I think at that point, you do have to think about how do I run this right as a business, how do I run it so that it is my cost of goods is not going to fluctuate wildly, all those kinds of things. But you mentioned making it super simple for people to create NFTs I think anybody who has tried to do it in this space has run into those challenges, right? I have to know how to do it. I have to figure out what marketplace to get on to. I have to then figure out their specifications. Can you walk us through how easy it is to create an NFT on your platform? Absolutely well, and before I get into that, maybe just the vision that I have for the future of NFTs and why I also why we enjoyed kind of moving this to Hedera and dealing with that was APIs and their infrastructure. I think NFTs and blockchain in general, crypto in general are going to be the exact same thing as you are sending your email right now in 10 years. Because when you send your emails, I think like 25, 30 years ago and I'm super young. So I was around at that time, but I won't tell you. I won't tell you the exact number like 30 years ago. You know, people still understood what SMTP protocol was, what a POP3 protocol was. These are the protocols that allow you to send and receive emails. Right? nobody's talking about that today. Like you're not. Setting this up on your phone, on your email client. This is just integrated. It's just part of the stack that we have. And I look in the future, blockchain being the same, right? It's just going to be one part of the stack. I don't think we'll be talking about NFTs in 10 years time. We won't say there's an NFT. It will be just generally recognized that there is a digital asset that is label. And that is using some standard. But in order to get there, we still have to do so much in the user experience side, right? And that's where I think we were most passionate in building our product is, you know, what's the easiest way to get from A piece of content to an nft? And we did a lot of testing, but, but right now if you go to the cloud art, cloud art, you're able to basically connect with your Instagram account, pick one of your latest posts or a very old post. It doesn't matter and just mint it. You have to add some text or you can add description if you will, just like some trivial stuff. But the idea is to make it in less than five steps actually to mint. The key value of that is, is not even the end user game or the end user experience. It's about bridging this gap in people's minds because when we were building cloud arts in one of our targets at some point were influencers. And I've spoken to, I don't know, more than 50 at least to more than 15 influencers in the last year and a year and a half. The problem with them was not them not knowing about NFTs. It was kind of bridging this mental gap of how can something that is digital, how can that be unique and valuable? So that could not grasp their heads around this idea of NFTs. Because if you think about it, everybody who's grown up in the last 30 years with computers knows that there's a very simple operation. It's called copy paste. And we've been yeah, we've been taught to just basically copy paste everything. If you look at how basically your computers work on the core level, you know, majority of these operations are just copy pasting bits, zeros and ones, right? So now there's a technology that's saying, here's a piece of a digital item and it's unique and that's really hard to understand. And the guys who get this the most based on our research are Gen Zeus and like, we're looking forward to this space. But yeah, like I said, there's still so much that needs to be done in terms of user experience, of really educating people on how this can be valuable. Because whether we want it or not, it is the future set to say that it is what it is. Well, and so you said now it's super simple to mint NFTs based on your Instagram feed, what is the what's the vision for the functionality that you will be rolling out over the next six, 12 to 18 months? So we look at this minting functionality or minting feature as just one of the kind of tools that we allow people to use within our whole platform. Cloud art basically is structured and this is kind of we'll be rolling out these announcements as we move forward. But there's all sorts of things we're still building what we want it to be like a platform for contemporary creators and their patrons. Because one thing that we've learned in Web3 is that there's always this community element that a lot of projects don't really give too much detail to or kind of pay enough attention when it comes to communities. And a lot of creators, like even in the past, if you look at how Leonardo da vinci, for example, how he worked, he had a really rich family, the Medicis that were kind of their patrons and supported all his works. And we think this kind of community can exist, and we're trying to build these tools for it. So but this is like a long story where you have to make sure all the tools are there, all the steps are taken. So Instagram is one of them because we think that's the easiest way we're going to be integrating with other social platforms as well. So we're going to take tuck in there, obviously. We'll see if we let YouTube in there. But all of these I look at them as tools, but then the grand vision is to have this platform where, you know, up and up, the rising up and coming creators are coming in and they're able to pitch their work and then get supported by the big patrons and then help them kind of get up and get them to succeed, basically, to start off. To kick it off. Really encouraging that art culture and that creative development in a way that I don't think has been possible before. Yeah, I think. Well, I have this crazy thesis that I don't like to share with people, but I'm going to share it with you. Right I think the biggest value of crypto is in communities. Even if you look at bitcoin, it's like Bitcoin is so hard to kind understand where the value is coming from. And my crazy thesis is that the value is in the community because there is a bunch of guys who back in 2008, 2009, 2010 believed in this, pushed it forward right up to a point where there was mass adoption of this and this community kind of then just dissolved and everybody's using it. If you look at how Ethereum came to be, there was a group of developers and they were kind of like pushing this forward. Open source, helping each other out until it grew really big. Crypto has this built in feature of being able to reward people and incentivize them for being not directly right, but indirectly for being active, for being participant and this kind of community incentivization. I don't think that was possible ever before in the history of our time. Now, even if you look at socialism, I mean, people did have these work actions and everybody worked, but nobody got paid at the end of the day. Now, you actually have an ability to have a community, to have the whole community work together and then get some value out of it. And I think that is fantastic. And that is what I am looking forward to seeing in Hedera with our project and with all the other projects out there. Yeah so shifting gears now. Tell us a little bit about your experience when you first started looking at Hedera. You've obviously you've now gone through one experience. You've learned some lessons there. What were the things that you were looking for in sort of that next platform? So that in an ideal world, you make that shift once and you never have to move off of it again. Well, that's a great question. So I think I think two things stand out. The first one is obviously we've been concerned about scaling. We we've seen what happens when you try to push something forward when kind of the numbers get up, when things just stop working. And that is I think that's one of the most important things that every blockchain should be looking it into every infrastructure project that at some point, if you want this to be adopted by a lot of people out there, if you want this to really succeed, you have to have a very solid infrastructure. There is no compromises with that. Right and I mean, like we are super small right now and I think the whole NFT space on Hedera is in its infancy stage. But at some point these things do take off and we've seen what happens with us and with other projects on polygon, and it wasn't the best experience for us, to be honest. The second thing that I think I've mentioned already before is, is the community. I feel like for the last week I've been tweeting about our transition and the response was just crazy. And it feels like Ethereum back 2015, 2016, you know, it's still a small ecosystem of crypto regions. I don't want to use this word, but it is what it is. And developers who are really trying to build this together, I've gotten like in the last two days, like a couple of emails from people saying, hey, we're doing this, you want to partner up, we can help you out. So I can announce any partnerships just yet, but it's just insane to see that the community is really while it's so early on, it's really mature and it's growing super fast. And for me, as a founder, what's also important is that we are able to write this early wave with Hedera because I 100% believe Hedera with its NFT projects is going to be a big contender in this space. Next to solana, definitely to Ethereum. Absolutely not right now. But I think over time when these things scale, like I said before, that is going to play an important role. And yeah, I think there is a lot of value and momentum to be captured there. So that was really important for us when thinking about the transition. And it's proven to me like in the last couple of days that the community is there, that there are true fans and people who understand what this is all about. So I'm very excited about it. Yeah, but it is an amazing community of such talented builders and just so willing to engage. I think it's phenomenal. How has as you were making the shift, how was that? Can you if you're trying to explain to somebody, so how long did the transition take? How complicated was it, those kinds of things? I can so I did not write a single lot of code for the transition. But what I can tell you is the feedback that I've gotten from our developers and their biggest concern was that they would have to basically move all the smart contracts to a different platform. But then they found out that a lot of these NFT things, NFT related things can be done via simple API. And if you're a developer, doing stuff through APIs is just fantastic. It just shortens things by a huge amount. So for us, I think the plan was to kind of try to do it in 3 months, but then we ended up doing it. The first beta I think was done in a little over a month, so that was pretty awesome. And then integrating with Zeus market, which took us, let's say a week or so and testing everything out, but it wasn't so complicated. So we were expecting to really come into a more difficult scenario, but it was good. So that's the feedback that I've gotten. That's fantastic to hear. I think it's pretty unusual that something a transition like that is less complicated than people expect. Yeah, good, good. Well, before we wrap up, anything else you would like to share with our community? We certainly want to keep everyone posted as you go along your journey. But any other words of wisdom as we close today? Well, I can invite you all to follow us, to join our community, because we have a couple of really interesting announcements coming up in the next two or three weeks. And then by the end of the year, one of them is I'll give you a sneak peek is our own NFT collection, which is called the patrons. That will kind of be the foundation for what we're trying to build in terms. Of these communities and relationships and doubts and self-doubts. But other than that, I think we're all living in really exciting times right now. There's so many things in the technological landscape that are being redefined. And don't blink or you'll miss it all. That's all I can say. Absolutely absolutely. Well, Jerry, Thank you so much for joining us today. It is so great to hear this story. It's great to, again, get confirmation of how fantastic the community is and how smart and capable the folks building on Hedera are. So thank you so much. Thanks for having me. This is a pleasure. All right. Have a good one.