Zora Announces The Zora Network

Bank of Ascension we got an exciting new episode for you today it's not every day that a brand new network comes into the ethereum fold the Zora Network Zora is getting its own layer 2 built on the op stack and today we have Jacob from Zora to guide us through that conversation Jacob is a very deep thinker about so many of the things that hold up this ecosystem the idea of on-chain communities digital brands minting ideas and so not only do we unpack all this

news about the Zora Network the news or layer 2 but we also just unpack deeply what is Zora kazora is it's an nft minting platform there are many of these around but Zora really stands out differently from the others out there and so these are some of the conversations that we get into but first more specifically a layer 2 primarily focused on media and art what does that unlock who is that for how does this set Zora apart from other nft minting platforms what is the Zora Network good for and then of course how and when does

the inevitable Zora token fit in here and of course at the end some bonus goodie conversations the conversation around on hyphen chain or on chain which one is right and why does it matter and also Zora frequently uses the line expand ethereum what does that mean so all these conversations are going to be unpacked in this episode with Jacob from Zora but first if you have built or are building a smart contract protocol and you need to make sure that your code is secure using the most modern tools check out ciphon siphon is a smart Contracting

auditing firm that we've used at bank list to audit the smart contracts over at bankless Labs with our earnify product so we ourselves have used the siphon product Dawson over at ernifies very happy with them and not only that but if you're also new to web3 and you want to learn more about smart contracts they have 27 hours of video content to get you the developer onboarded into the world of web3 and solidity these videos have over 5 million views and this course will give you the skills that you need to get into the world of smart contract security and D5 protocol development so there is a link in the

show notes to get started with cipherit but first before we get into this episode with Jacob from Zora a quick disclaimer Ryan is an investor in Zora he is also out today as you can tell uh he is out having some fantastic vacation time with his family uh and so that is our disclaimer there and there are some themes in this episode that I would like to implant into the listener's Brain before we dive in there there's three things that I'd like to pull out first lowering the barriers to entry of course we all know that layer 2's reduce got gas fees but specifically inside of the context of artists and artistic creation

lowering the bench barriers to entry I think there's a deep conversation about what that unlocks and what that can do for the world of on-chain Art and so that's the first theme is lowering the barriers to entry how is that unique in the conversation of digital creation and digital expression not just lowering gas fees but definitely lowering gas freeze but also what else does that do when there's the the barriers to producing art part go down to the absolute minimum so that's the first theme the second theme pushing complexity to the margins this is something that I think uniquely

sets Zora apart from any other nft minting platforms the the unopinionated nature of Zora where if you have an idea Zora does not constrain it as a as a platform it is meant to fully enable artists to do crazy weird things without the opinions of Zora saying like hey that's too weird don't do that here Zora is a platform that allows artists to maximally experiment and that just means pushing complexity to the margins that is a theme that I have brought up many many times on Bank list pushing complexity to the margins that's one of

the themes of this episode and then the last the last theme is the frontiers of digital expression when you have lowering the barriers to entry when you push complexity to the margins we find a new frontier and since we are talking about the frontier of media and art that Frontier Jacob has a ton of great ideas about and I asked him about the idea of digital expression the frontier of digital expression toward at the very end of this episode so these are the themes that I think should guide you through this conversation and I'm really excited for Bank listening to you to listen to this conversation with Jacob from Zora he has a big brain thinker and

has a very articulate vision for what the world of on chain expression can become so let's go ahead and start talking to Jacob from Zora but first a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible especially Kraken our preferred exchange for crypto in 2023. if you do not have an account with Kraken consider clicking the link in the show notes to get one today let's go hear from them right now Kraken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry the place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices even when I'm not looking to place a trade on Kraken Pro you'll have access to Advanced charting tools real-time Market data and

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Amber is airdropping its wallet token to early users for simply just using the wallet so if you want to get started with ambier all the links that you need are in the show notes Bank destination I would love to introduce you to Jacob the co-founder of Zora started in 2020 Zora is a platform for creators and collectors to mingle around a common campfire of digital Creations Zora has all sorts of toolkits for all kinds of digital file formats to start their life as on-chain artworks to be minted on chain and today we are here to learn exactly how Zora is expanding where it's

going next and Jacob is hopefully going to guide us along on that Journey Jacob welcome to bankless hey thanks for having me happy to be here I'm really excited for this conversation I really want to open up this conversation of digital expression digital art with this question for you Jacob Jacob is the internet driving itself off a cliff uh is the internet driving itself off a cliff um well I've always had this thing where it's like I don't think we actually ever reached the internet or like we never really escaped intranets like if you

think about the internet today it's really like six really really really big platforms and we had like a brief moment where the internet started and then you know kind of like the the 90s with the browser and some you know formative like new platforms coming online but really we've been living in like what I would just call like this Mega internet for the past like 10 years mostly defined by social media um so I actually think we're getting closer to getting back to the original internet um with blockchains and bringing information on chain and making it public and open so yeah that would be my

answer to that question I think your answer is like hey there is a true nature of the expression of the internet and for the last 10 years we've accidentally gone down the uh Corp version of Internet side quest and I think you're you're saying that hey it's now with web3 we're getting back on track yeah it's more open put simply it's like I don't think uh there's anything inherently wrong with the technical approach of social media it was like it was invented pretty blockchain but blockchain's kind of help us get to a more open and public system by default so yeah I don't think we're

um driving off a cliff from the internet I think we're actually getting closer to the original vision of the internet because of blockchain the original vision of the internet can you just unpack what does that mean to you and what should that mean for us the original vision of the internet yeah to me that means open and free access to information I think in its simplest times and then part of that is like yeah how do we connect and share that information um together

yeah and and to for what reasons would you say that it's been missing in the last like five ten years of the current Internet like why why do we not have this um I think the other piece of that puzzle is actually the the value piece so there's this um there's this great Stuart brand quote from the 1980s um kind of when you know a lot of people were like geeking out about the early internet which was like information wants to be free but information also wants to be valuable and that tension

will not go away and that was kind of like this big philosophical tension where it's like you know information wants to be widely spread you know the more that everyone knows the kind of like the better the world can get more generally but because of the you know we didn't have blockchains essentially but like the way that we kind of create and capture value of around information has mostly been dependent on trusted platforms so it's like you know we kind of construct a wall garden and that's built out of either advertising or paywalls and there's always this like

consistent tension of like well the platform is the one that's like determining determining how a value is captured for the people that are creating that information be it videos or songs or music or IP whatever it might be um and I think what we've seen over the past kind of like 10 years of uh social media is that the platforms are the ones that kind of make it's essentially all of that value that's created on those platforms um so it's like if you happen to be a top point one percent Creator on Spotify

or YouTube you can you can make a living for it but everyone else who's kind of creating and sharing that media and that information is not you know seeing any value from that um so you can create and share that media but you're not necessarily able to capture all of the value from it so I'd say that's um that's the piece that's been going wrong or not even wrong it's just a piece that hasn't been there up until now um yeah yeah so when we when you add the puzzle piece of a blockchain the actual

expression of value into this component I I think like the what you're illustrating to me is like these wild garden platforms that spotifys the YouTubes the apples the wild garden nature of it was kind of like a necessary evil to produce the value because you know prior to web 2 there was nothing right there's no monetization right uh and then we created these walled Gardens in an attempt to actually create some value for some people as as like you know we have these middlemen creating this structure but I I think what you're saying is like you add in the blockchain

puzzle piece and you get the same product you get the same net outbound product which is we have valuable Creations but without the Walled Garden structures that that we've uh come to have dominate the the internet landscape am I typing into something here yeah I think that's right I think I think maybe what I'm saying more explicitly is that I think blockchains and specifically nfts might actually like kind of solve that multi-decade tension of like simultaneously free and valuable there

if you think about an nft if Like You Mend an image you meant a song it's now publicly accessible to the entire internet you know including people who want to listen and enjoy to that media but then also the other developers who want to build their own platforms and experiences on top of it and none of that sacrificing value capture for the Creator because you know they're able to sell that in Ft they're able to earn from that nft over time um so yeah maybe that is actually solving that inherent tension of the internet which is information wants to be free

but it also wants to be valuable and nfts are kind of like a very neat you know open solution to that problem where it's like you know for the social media era I think it's uh advertising has been the best possible solution to that problem because it's like hey you can like consume this for free and we're going to monetize the platform by like showing you ads every now and then maybe nfts are a better progression where it's like well if you're increasingly minting that content making it free and open to everyone and you're getting that kind of uh value back in the form of the asset

of the nft itself and then also whatever the eth has been earned from minting it that might get us one step further than the ad space model and how to be free and valuable at the same time and the reason why I wanted to go down this quick Rabbit Hole of trying to Define what we're actually talking about here is because I've actually had a hard time defining what Zora actually is because like you know people know Zora it's a it's a place to Mint your nfts right it's like super rare but it's not quite like super rare right and it's you

know it's an nft uh like browser you can you can check out different open nfts kind of like openc but it's not quite like openc either and so uh the the boundaries around Zora seem to be very fuzzy to me and I I think that's almost intentional and so I'm wondering if I could just Elevate to you uh the higher question of just like what what deeply is Zora what does it want to become um well I guess the way we describe ourselves is like the best place to Mint on ethereum so that's like the very kind

of like tactical one sentence description a level above that is like yeah we want to help bring imagination on chain and then the question is like well why do we want to help bring imagination on chain and it's exactly because of what we were just talking about it's like we want to help information be free and valuable on the Internet or essentially reveal the value of everything that we're creating and doing in our daily lives on social media and everything like that and kind of like skew the the value part of the

equation way back to the creative side versus the platform side um so yeah I guess like there's a million different dimensions to it and maybe like the story of like how Zora sudden and stuff like that can kind of inform it but the way that's kind of um netted out to Zora today is like yeah we make it we want to make it as easy as possible for creators to meet their work and then similarly make it as easy and enjoyable as possible for collectors who love and enjoy that art and media and content to to collect it and support the

support the creator of it um so yeah the result is a platform that looks like Zora that is hey you can show up you can upload your imagination an eth and then on the collector side it's like hey you can start to experience all of this awesome art media and content in a completely free environment and if you happen to like it you can collect it I I think there's two specific Frontiers that are unique here um one is the ease in minting your imagination that you're using the word imagination rather than like your jpeg

or your mp3 or your MP MP4 or like pick your file format right and and so that that is a whole entire Frontier of Arctic artistic expression and then you're also saying like the easiest possible place for both both sides of the market right the supply side the creators and then the the demand side the collectors yeah and so Zora is a platform just like Spotify just like YouTube just like super rare just like openc but the emphasis on the easiest

possible I think is also worth uh unpacking because when you have any file format AKA your imagination and then you also have the easiest possible like a bunch of new frontier new fertile land like shows up in the in the crosshairs there and so for a brief a brief moment in time in 2021 crypto became very very cool very brief moment like artists flocked to ethereum and other crypto platforms as like a place to experiment with like new modalities of digital expression and then we accidentally turned

everything into ponzi's but never mind that part I just kind of want to focus on the experimentation with digital expression here can you like just help articulate and describe what what the frontier is that we've unlocked here what does this world of on-chain expression and experimentation look like to you as we go forward into the future yeah it's a good question maybe it kind of like speaks to the 2021 piece I think like yeah we obviously had a huge kind of mania or Awakening or you know kind of Collective Agreement that's like oh wait like nfts are valuable it doesn't

matter if anyone else can right click save as the image we're all inherently kind of agreeing and understanding that nfts as an object that can be bought and sold and traded are inherently valuable and represent ownership in that jpeg or you know the MP3 or whatever the file might be and that's like a huge deal it's like when a new value system shows up yeah obviously you'll see a lot of excitement and experimentation but I think the the overwhelming form factor we saw for 2021 was kind of like the 10K

pfp and then kind of in parallel we saw our experimentation around like the one-of-one Art Market which is like hey you can take a singular image Bring It On chain option as a one-on-one and like that can hold that can hold value I think where we are today is there's kind of like two shifts that are happening that we kind of are at the Forefront of and pushing which is one instead of seeing just like this 10K pfp kind of like collectible style Market we increasingly think it makes sense for

all forms of media and content to go on chain in exactly the same way so it's like well if you yes you can mint the jpeg of this kind of like profile picture looking collectible but why don't you meant this like you know visual artwork you made shared on Instagram and got hundreds of thousands of likes full like that that is inherently valuable is in something that inherently your community loves like that makes just as much sense on chain and then the other track is that I think the market has been evolving and experimenting you know uh in addition to

one of ones which has been the kind of timed Edition um or like the open Edition format that we kind of have been leaning into quite heavily which is hey like instead of just minting it and only allowing one person to to collect it at the time it's kind of absurd when you think about it in the sense of the internet that it's like oh hey like you had 50 people literally throw money at you in an auction you turned 49 of those people away with their money and you only let one person have it it's like well what if there's a model that you could let more than just one person at the time

have it when um you know the there's no physical constraint here like it's not like the artist has to you know individually produce each video it's like part of the internet is it can be broadly reproduced so the timed open Edition format is basically like hey anyone who happens to be here at the time can mint and if that's one person great if that's like a hundred thousand people amazing you've got now a hundred thousand collectors of this video or this image or whatever it is at the time so for I think where we

are now you know in 2023 a couple years after 2021 is yeah like we're much more focused on the kind of content and media focused form factor which looks very different to open c as a Marketplace like Zora looks and feels a lot more like a a YouTube or even a Tumblr or something like that where it is actually about enjoying the the content and then yeah the the model of which people are kind of like collecting is hey you can show up and you can mention an addition of that piece of media

um so yeah and then I guess the third maybe implicit piece um which I think is like you know very not unique to Zora but something that's very a big part of how we build is like we're like very much Unchained maximalists so a lot of our experimentation over the past three years is like how do you bring as much of this on chain as possible as pragmatically as possible and then how can you lead into the unique superpowers of protocols to do that so while Zora is that we do have a platform you know the website zora.co everything is built on

essentially these custom built protocols and smart contracts that we've kind of engineered that make it one easy and cost effective to bring things on chain and then two easy and cost effective to distribute them as widely as possible and you know kind of tie the connection between platform and protocol as best we can to to make that simple um so that's that's kind of like the sum total of all of those those three things like focus on content media the timed open Edition model and then like building things on chain is probably a

good Venn diagram with like Zora in the middle and gives a good picture of what we do yeah the the ethos so that I think you're expressing is is that Zora is built in a way that doesn't want to get in the way whereas uh it it's meant to me be a means to an end but like with other platforms both web 2 and web3 uh they impart some sort of like you come to us to do this to do this one thing inside of this constrained environment and we are Specialists

inside of that constrained environment but it seems to be that zores is trying to be as um uh con constraint free as possible as in is just meant to service service broad needs and and other people the artist can produce constraints but not Zora or the collectors can produce constraints but not Zora and Zora allows for the maximum expression of all of all parties without imparting some sort of like top-down here is what we are for

here's what we are do here is why you would come to us this is like the kind of the vibe I'm tapping into maybe you could expand on a little bit a little bit better yeah I think that's right I think it's um maybe the variation on that is like I think we've built a very very specific tool which is you show up you have some creative piece of media or work you meant it and then collectors can you know you bring it on chain and then collectors can mint it that's like a heavily opinionated that's a very simple tool or machine uh and then yeah I guess uh you know Creator shows up and

they get their creator and smart contracts and then people can collect but yes we kind of try and make it as open as possible because we want to one give artists the tools to like push the limit of what they can meant so it's like yes you can show up with like a video or a song um or an image but you can also mint you know HTML and websites or if you're like really in the weeds as a as an artist you can actually write your own custom metadata renderer on chain and start

doing more like art blocks generative and like very novel on-chain artworks that you can plug into the Zora smart contracts so it's like a very simple tool that kind of has these open ends that let you kind of bring your own creativity in whatever form that is which has been really interesting like uh yeah it is like the HTML editions that we released I guess a couple of weeks ago have been cool to see because it's like I don't know they're like interactive and people are even minting games and stuff like that and then on

the custom metadata renderer site it's like oh wow like we're seeing some like further experimentation on the generative side that kind of hawks back to like the early art block stays so yeah specific tool but like generic application is maybe the the way to say it yeah and I've always appreciated this line that um artists live on the frontier as in all artists always live where there is the most unknown they always are experimenting and if we just had like a an Azora alternative that was like uh you can only upload jpegs under

four megabytes yeah right highly constraining and heart artists would not be able to experiment very well and I think like one of the ethos that Zora is trying to double down on is that any sort of constraint comes out of the expression of the artist so the a more uh free platform allows artists to do whatever and if you if like some people might have been listening to that and been listening to hear you say like yeah you can mint HTML and a lot of people are like but why and the artists are like what can I do with that and I think that that's like unleashing constraints

and and un uh making sure the artists are as enabled as possible is what contributes to the most amount of experimentation and I think that conversation about constraints can actually lead us to where we have an announcement to make Zora has an announcement to make and but maybe we can talk about the constraints of the Zora platform as it has stood up to this point and like what has been needed to to unleash further experimentation so what are the big constraints in web 3 creation and on-chain creation that that Zora is trying to tackle yeah great question so yeah I guess um we've had

like a pretty exceptional 2023 so far like I think we're we're close to uh I think probably 850 000 collectors just this year um so like we have people minting like every other block on ethereum um and one of the kind of internal things that we track is you know like obviously mint throughput and then gas price and what we've found is that like uh a huge kind of structural inhibitor to like growth and accessibility of being able to collect on chain is the

gas price especially in the timed open Edition format where it's like a lot of these nfts are like free to like twenty dollars you know a 20 gas price to Mint a 20 object or a 20 gas price to Mint a free nft start to actually like get in the way of the collecting experience and puts up a hard barrier and for us where we see like millions of nfts minted it's like oh we actually feel like we're kind of reaching the upper limits of ethereum mainnet as a network and that's actually like a huge structural thing that we've

been looking to solve which has kind of pushed us into the L2 World um and I think where we've spent like months essentially kind of exploring all the different options and where we've netted out is that we're going to be launching um the Zora L2 built on the op stack or like the optimism stack um we're also going to be kind of like adding every other network within Zora as well to give creators the choice of their Network for whatever they're trying to do but yeah for us um we've

kind of decided to take the leap and launch the the Zora L2 like the Zora Network built on optimism which is like really exciting as a way to kind of structurally solve that um that gas price issue the Zora Layer Two so that the Zora the digital campfire a creation space of collectors and uh creators are getting its own layer to its own home how how would you describe so first off congratulations that's huge that's a huge lift uh how would you describe just

the nature of this layer too right because we have the generalized optimistic Roll-Ups of arbitrum and optimism which each have their own flavor right uh arbitrum is uh a defy heavy ecosystem optimism is experimenting and in many different fronts Zora is specifically about unchain creations and but would you call the Zora layer 2 like an app chain like it's a single service roll-up meant to do one thing how would you describe the flavor or what the purpose of the layer

2 is yeah that's a great question um I guess the is it an app chain or not I think we think of it more of an ecosystem or it is like specifically a home for creators like Zora by Nature about kind of protocol approach has like a pretty fruitful ecosystem system of like different platforms and apps built on it so like Zora I don't think well we'll we know we're not going to be the only app built on this network like we kind of on our L2 website have a list of probably like 30 of the top nft tools and Platforms in the space that are

going to be moving across and building on Zora as well so I think it's it's much more of a an ecosystem than it is in app chain um and then yeah I think the L2 era we're heading into for ethereum generally is like quite interesting like the way we thought about it is like yes you're right there's like arbitrim and optimism they're kind of these like great generic catch-all l2s and I think bass has been fascinating to see play out because I think it's kind of like opened up kind

of the window into the future of where we're heading which is like yes we will see I think an increasing number of l2s and in some sense like l2s are approaching uh like a commodity um if not already like the costs and complexity to deploy one of these to l2s is like going going down like every month so I think we're going to see a lot of these and when you see like kind of a commodity Marketplace like brand distribution and differentiation tend to be kind of like the core things that help you understand how things will play

out so it's like there's a reason there's You Know Tiffany Tiffany diamonds all like Nike sneakers or Starbucks coffee like they're each selling commodities but like their unique approach helps them kind of like excel in the market so for Zora yeah like we have I think we have a pretty incredible brand that's like loved by the you know autistic and creative Community as well as like pockets of the ethereum community of course uh distribution has been like growing pretty substantially over the the past year um and then for the differentiation