Floor is Rising Ep 80: Non-speculative NFT search engine - Nathaniel Naddaff-Hafrey, Karthik Thiyagarajan
Primer: Nathaniel and Karthik are building Lasso Labs, an NFT Search Engine. What does it do? How do they differentiate speculative and non-speculative NFT use cases? Let’s find out in this episode of Floor is Rising.
Getting Into NFTs
Started in late 2020/early 2021
Nathaniel was working inside Google’s incubator (Area 120) at that point in time
Was building creator tools for Web2
After the NFT boom, people started asking them if they were going to support NFTs
Karthik and him started experimenting, eventually leaving their jobs to start Lasso Labs
Lasso Labs
Is focused on the non-speculative uses for NFTs
Users connect their wallet to their DApp and they will be able to visualize the things they can do with the assets they hold (e.g. airdrop/mint eligibility, access to events or digital communities, etc.)
It helps in the discovery phase for new projects or utility activations based on wallet-aware personalization
Wants to improve the user experience for users
Have a data platform that combines on-chain events with off-chain social data into a knowledge graph
Non-Speculative Use Cases
Their long-term belief is that digital objects will become a huge part of the global economy. NFTs are the primitives that enable them
While Nathaniel was at Google, he conducted research with Gen Z. Gen Z gravitated toward digital products over their corresponding physical counterparts
Currently, the market is heavily financialized and speculative. This is not a bad thing as speculation is what brings people to the market
They are building to meet where the market is heading to
Being able to participate in governance is an example of a non-speculative use case
Catalysts Spurring Adoption
Currently, it has become a meme where merch becomes the utility
A real use case is to have a token that confers some financial benefit or discount for the holder
The categories of governance, virtual goods, and gaming use cases are experiencing high growth rates
IP rights are one use case that has not been talked much about yet
There’s a ton of capital that has been deployed into blockchain-based games but most of them has not been realized yet
Interoperability of gaming assets mitigates platform risk
The market has become more challenging for brands to launch their loyalty programs in Web3
Starbucks is still building toward their Web3-enabled loyalty programs
Web3 can leverage brands that have an affinity from a customer standpoint and bring in a new class of consumers that are not on-chain today
Blockchain Gaming And Its Speculative Culture
It’s an uphill battle
Most crypto-native games are not fully developed yet
The main sort of task is that there’s an NFT collection and people collect all sorts of tokens which confers some form of benefits to the player in-game
In the future, users are able to bring their assets from one world to the next and sell them
We are heading into a world with high cardinality and scarcity
Scarcity is needed not for the object to become financially lucrative, but for what the game item typically provides
When users want to play the game for the sake of playing the game, things will end up changing
Traditional gaming culture had a huge backlash towards crypto gaming because they saw it as predatory monetization of gamers. This will change as things move forward
How Do They Index Their NFT Projects?
Have an automated system that scrapes social media (Twitter, Discord, and project microsites)
The data flows into their data platform where automated tagging tries to figure out which snippet of text is talking about utility
It then goes through another model where they extract information/metadata
The final step involves a human reviewing whether the metadata is correct
As the space is notorious for phishing and scams, they click on links and check them
When the space scales, individual reviews are not going to be scalable. Have thoughts on ways to address this issue:
Creators/community members add a missing project/collection and vote on it
Adding, removing, or verifying pieces of utility
A lot of token-curated registries are ghost towns and have a bootstrapping problem
Will Their Platform Remain Automated?
Long-term, it will be more sustainable if it is automated
Even with automation, they will not get everything right (e.g. metadata issues, trust and safety issues)
Hence, the need for the community and creators to come in
The system will also get better with reinforcement learning
They are a small team, so they began with a single-player product that is focused on the collector/demand side, heavily using automation to build the inventory
Plenty of marketplaces try to bootstrap both sides simultaneously and never have it go anywhere
What They Have Learned From Their Experience
Nathaniel
Their belief is that their use of off-chain signals to build a broader knowledge graph for search would make for an amazing, open experience
Have heard unequivocally from users that search was not a useful starting point for them because they do not know what to put into the search box
Has received a lot of questions about the meaning of utility
Moving towards feedback from users
Karthik
When they launched their beta product, they wanted to put each utility record front and center
Collectors came in to look at the utility per collection. They were less interested in collecting or redeeming an NFT for a particular form of utility (e.g. airdrops, merch, etc.)
Plenty of users used utility as a proxy for community health
Favourite NFT Projects
Nathaniel
The White Rabbit project that Pplpleasr is involved in
It’s an animated series
The NFTs are called producer passes
Also super into Memory Supply, where people design their own floppy disk and mod it with different sticker packs
Karthik
ENS — Think it’s a phenomenal concept
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