NFT marketplace. Wearable and the core developer behind metal Blockchain are teaming up to look into the development of compliant digital ownership solutions for the banking and fintech industries. Joining us now to discuss is Metallica Ceo Marner along with wearable co-founder and head of product Alexander Salnikov. Welcome to the show to you both. Thanks for having us on. Thank you. Thank you. Happy to be here. Of course, glad to have you both here. First, talk to me about this partnership. How did the two companies get together? Um And I ask that from the perspective is when we hear about wearable, we don’t often hear about fintech and a financial place. So how did this partnership come to be? Yeah, sure. Um So we, we, we are both uh very active in the crypto space, both wearable and metallic. Metallic is over the past few years. And since its inception in 2016, is focused on financial services with our Metal pay app and our metal platform. Um and our vision is to ultimately bring together banks uh and creating uh a share digital asset network that’s compliant, that’s safe and secure, but not only connecting banks but all of web three and crypto and everything you can do in the digital asset space and make it fun and friendly and easy to use. And we connected with Rable because we saw a fantastic platform, great user experience, great design and our vision at Metallic is is to make a product that people love and can use. Um when you think about Apple or you know, Tesla, other companies that you really subscribe to and you love the brand. That’s what we’re building here at Metallic is and we saw a very similar vision and, and brand and style with uh rable and everything that they’ve built in their community. So we were really eager and excited to connect with them and, and work together Alexander and, and why go this direction from Rar Bull’s uh business perspective? Many people know variable as the NFT marketplace for creators. That’s how we started and pioneered. But lately, we evolved into much more than that. So most of the current variable initiatives are regarding the variable API and variable X, which is the white label marketplace solution. And our global vision for this space is that what we’ve seen in 2021 with the $100 gas prices on just Ethereum that is not sustainable for the NFTS. NFTS will be driven by the fast blockchains with affordable NFT prices. Our top clients feature like nine or $10 average NFT check size and that’s our global vision to bring NF to the masses. We see the new wave of consumer adopting the space through our great partners like Metallica that are genuinely targeting the real consumers with the real use case in a compliant wave. So that is the the partnership marshall, talk to me about the application of NFT technology for consumer banking. Really break this down for me. How does it work? Yeah. So, you know, Blockchain has enormous potential. But I think uh in its early and nascent phase and we’re, you know, a decade and a half into the uh since the inception of Bitcoin. Now we’re starting to see some of the real use cases emerge. And I think very early on um it was, you know, speculative and still still is in some ways. But as it grows, we’re seeing the potential for traditional financial services to integrate a shared decentralized open network, a shared ledger. And there’s all types of information and data that can flow freely between uh platforms, uh companies, banks and that includes um digital rewards that includes loyalty. Um but also that transaction interoperability, we’ve never really had that capability where paypal could talk to uh Alipay, could talk to Metal Pay, could talk to Cash app. That’s kind of the future of where things are going. And when you think about um the old way that, that we track rewards and still kind of is what I call it the old way because I think it will rapidly change soon. Digital loyalty with um with credit cards and different point systems, this will evolve to ultimately use Blockchain. Uh The platform that we built with metal Blockchain is built off of the snow protocols for of avalanche and it’s highly tuned and optimized for banking services. So it has that compliance tech built into the back end and also some different technical improvements. And our vision is that these, these points or loyalty can ultimately transfer between your bank between wearable between multiple applications. And you could have a much more connected web experience using Blockchain. Alexander. Creator Nfts were really all the talk. Um you know, at the peak in 2021 they’ve kind of died off since then. Do you think Creator Nfts are going to kind of fizzle into their own niche? And we’re going to see more use cases like this come to fruition during the next bull market. Absolutely. We’ve seen only two so far. One of them is art and it actually didn’t die down. Uh We’ve seen a bubble but if we compare the numbers that are currently running versus the numbers that were like pre bubble and we are still up 34 X from that. So, uh but the ultimate vision for the space is that NFT is so much more powerful standard that only powering only to use cases such as art and pfps. We are seeing tremendous innovation and talking bound in ownerships in memberships in dynamic NFTS Music Nfts podcasts, you name it. So the future for NFTS is having 100 use cases. And that is why exactly we are building our products that are white labeled tailored towards these use cases because these use cases require different UX. The one marketplace fits all doesn’t really work anymore. And these new cases such as loyalty, they are completely unique. And we have seen an example of Amex recently to introduce NFT loyalties with their poop partnership. You, you could go to U open and claim a pull up inside your Amex connecting your wallet. This is the future we are talking about. All right. And lastly here, Marshall any regulatory compliance concerns uh surrounding the prod product, you know, recently we see the SEC bring to uh enforcement actions against NFT projects. Have you engaged with any regulators? Yeah. So at Metallic is we frequently engage with the regulators. Um We are registered uh regulated financial services company. So we uh we, we do that frequently um in our experience and what we’ve seen, you know, it’s really important to have good collection of customer data. It’s good to, even though we’re living in this decentralized world, it’s still all the same rules still apply. And I think that’s been one of the messages that we’ve seen from our regulators. Also the idea that we should innovate responsibly, right? So we should, we should, we should definitely be innovating. But at the same time, we should also build secure and robust systems and compliance systems. And I think, you know, all ultimately this notion of identity on the Blockchain has really gotten a bad rap. People think that it’s this Orwellian thing or it’s this bad thing. But it doesn’t mean that your personal identifying information is stored in the Blockchain. What it means is that we can better track and trace these systems from the back end. And it goes two ways, not only can we have better anti fraud and um am L but we can also have better customer experience, better loyalty and things like that. And as we start to, to really embrace compliance as an industry and build that into the user experience, we’ll find that it’s more than just a tool to fight, fight fraud and money laundering but can really custom, uh create a awesome custom experience for the end user. Any banking partnerships you can tell us about. Uh, unfortunately, I can’t comment on that. Uh So much. Um uh myself and my CFO are working together on a potential bank acquisition called FB BT Holdings and some information came about that out about that earlier this year. But um unfortunately, I can’t comment too much on that yet. Hopefully, more information on that soon. Hopefully the next time you’re on the show, you can tell us a little bit more about what you have in the works. Sounds great. Thanks again. For having us on. Yeah, Marshall Alexander, thanks so much for joining us this morning. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was Metallica Ceo Marshall Haner along with wearable co-founder and head of product Alexander Salnikov. Make sure you sign up for coin desks protocol newsletter which explores the tech behind crypto one block at a time. You can find that at coindesk dot com slash newsletters.
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