The Metaverse is a much-needed clarion call, bringing technologies in line and building fast, flexible networks of the future we deserve. This week on our podcast, we hosted the CEO & Co-founder of Acknoledger, Yash Dahenkar. In discussion about, the company vision, becoming the essential nervous system of Web 3.0 digital assets by connecting the dots between NFTs and Metaverse and the strategy to get there.

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REFORMING THE METAVERSE

Participants:

• Nadja Bester (CEO & Co-founder of AdLunam)

• Yash Dahenkar (Co-founder and CEO of Acknoledger)

Hello, hello. Doing a sound check. If you guys can hear me, please send me your favorite emoji. Not that Twitter has that many options, or maybe it's not exactly your favorite, but your favorite Twitter one. Anyway. All right, so hello and welcome, everyone. Great to have you join us today. We'll let the room fill up for a bit before we get started, and in the meantime, while we wait, listen to some of the latest happenings on the NFT front. It's really hard to go anywhere in the world, even a mountaintop sometimes, without finding coca Cola there. Why should NFTs be any different? The soda marketing giant has airdropped NFTs to existing coca Cola NFT holders on International Friendship Day. Now, I didn't know there was such a thing, but like Mother's Day and Valentine’s Day, it's probably one of those things we should be celebrating every day.

Added to these particular, NFTs was a really interesting share to reveal feature where you'd only be able to view the NFT after sharing it with a friend. Very cool to see some of the more traditional companies coming into the space and what innovations they come up with. In the coffee versus cola debate, Starbucks won't be left behind. The coffee company slash caffeine lifesaver in my case, has one of the most successful membership programs on the planet, over 27 million members strong, and it's coming soon to a web3 near you. Details are hush at this stage, but CEO Howard Schultz has indicated that Starbucks is in it to win for the long term. NFTs are involved, so stay tuned and caffeinated for that one. All right, I see the room is filling out. Let's do this. Hey, web3 world. This is Nadja Bester from AdLunam, and you are listening to the Future of NFTs, the show that looks beyond current NFT use cases to what Non-Fungible Token technology is evolving into.

All this, as seen through the eyes and built by the minds of the fascinating guest speakers that we speak to each week. AdLunam is building the industry's first IDO Launchpad with a Proof of Attention allocation mechanism. If you'd like to know more about exactly what this means, visit our website at adlunam.cc. I'm going to go straight into what we will be talking about today. I think this is a topic that is going to have you sit on the edge of your seat. At least this was the case right up until Crypto winter that sent all of us indoors and hiding until it stops snowing, so to speak. With Bitcoin still on a bumpy ride, it's going to be a while before we see how hot these two topics that we'll be discussing today is going to get once again come Crypto spring and Crypto summer.

In the meantime, builders will be builders. Who better to speak to us today about NFTs and the metaverse than Yash Dahenkar, the co-founder and CEO of Acknoledger. Now, I don't often read out the text on a company website when I'm introducing someone, but in this case, I think you'll be as curious as I was the first time I heard about Acknoledger back in mid-2021. Acknoledger calls itself the nervous system of web3 digital assets. It's a global consortium that maps, monetizes and distributes web3 digital assets seamlessly across all metaverses and gaming NFTs. Yash, I am very excited to welcome you on the show today, even with all of the hiccups that we've had to get us to this point because I would love to have a conversation with you about how Acknoledger is connecting the dots between NFTs and the metaverse.

Where are you dialing in from today?

Thanks for the introduction, I really appreciate it. Thanks to the audience for the patience. It has been crazy day for me as well, and I think we kind of are in the space where things are moving so fast and moving in a fast momentum and then again slowing down and again moving in a fast momentum. We are really excited to talk about the NFTs and what we do and how the future looks like. So thanks for inviting me today.

Yes, awesome. I definitely agree with you on this stop, start fast, slow thing that we've got going on. It's probably the one thing that keeps us all on our toes. Before I hand over to Yash, let me tell you more about him before he takes over. He's been in crypto since 2016. Since he beats me by a year, I'm automatically assigning him an OG rank. Before Acknoledger, he founded a blockchain and AI firm called Bitgenie, where he developed Bitgenie research ,where they indexed over 250 market research reports. This actually led to the idea for acknowledging, so I'm very keen to get a bit more into that soon. Of course, the rest is history because now he's leading a very intelligent product. Not many projects in this space can call themselves a nervous system. I'm super keen for today's conversation, as I'm sure is the audience.

So let's kick things off. Yash, first I'd like to get to know the man behind the introduction. Love to know more about your background and what drives you in life and in business.

Thanks, really appreciate it. I've been an entrepreneur for my whole life, like, I've been working with startups and figuring out things. One thing initially it started with Bitgenie, like, I think back in 2017, it started as a crypto and blockchain company. But due to regulation issues, we kind of shut it down in India and then focused on mostly enterprise blockchain and AI products. Okay. I'm also an AI expert. I worked on machine learning, deep learning, and OpenSea as well. I have a pretty solid understanding of how these things work. During that time, we collected a lot of data when we were building our first product. It was like a fine market cap, but you can do a lot of interesting things over there, like not just check the price, but to perform actions, integrate bots and all. Yeah, unfortunately the bear market hit and then we shut down the product.

But we collected a lot of data. And that's how we started Research. It started as we created this blockchain reports around healthcare and telecommunication, how blockchain can be used. Later we realized that there's a huge potential. There are a lot of free reports that being sold for thousands of dollars and like 5 to $10,000, and a lot of these reports are for free. So we started aggregating. And that's how we created Bitgenie Research. So, Bitgenie Research, a fully automated AI based product, is basically scraped around to 50,000 reports across the Internet, fully automated way, and not just map those reports, but also it used to automatically extract the summary, the charts, images, and every single keyword that is being used in that report. You can search it and the search becomes faster and you can study the market. So that's one of the products. Doing that process, we realized that we are solving the problem of the past without understanding that, whether there's a need of this idea.

Like, people are they really keen on using this. I used to teach blockchain and crypto to a lot of people. During those times, I used to take lectures and a few of the students they wanted me to work one of the projects. Okay? They wanted some hands on project, and every weekend on Sunday, I used to spend the whole day working and figuring out ideas. That's how we started acknowledging we have been researching it for more than like two years. I think in 2021, we started building it. That was really interesting and exciting times because I personally know everyone from the crypto space, from meetings and deep in 2018, and from Polygon and all the big guys, even the investors. It was obvious for me to eventually start my own thing. So, yeah, that has been the journey. Acknowledge being why we call it the nervous system of the metaverse.

Because if you see the overall vision, like if you see and zoom out a bit and understand how the Internet works in Web2, what we essentially did is digitized all the data from physical world to the digital world. Google played a really important role in doing that. As we are moving towards the web3, what we are essentially doing is digitizing all the assets. Those assets are of two types. First is the fungible token, second is the non-fungible token, NFTs and atmosphere. We want to be the leaders where we map every single NFT asset that is being created across the chains and also how it moves from one metaverse to another and what kind of value it brings to the ecosystem. That is our goal and while building this we also want to help this metaverse as well as the users of this metaverse and NFT platforms to kind of leverage those insights and make best decisions and whether they are using the metaverse or while playing the game or even investing.

That's what the idea is and we are on the track. I think we already have ecosystem of more than 100 plus metaverse giving NFT projects and we are growing every single day. Yeah, that's about me and acknowledge it.

Awesome. Thanks Yash for that introduction. I think what really stands out from everything you shared is this trajectory that people follow. Starting off being an entrepreneur, coming into the web3 space, really just being engaged in the ecosystem in many different ways, being agile. Enough to it brought to mind for me. You said that during the previous Bear market, the product shutdown and it came to mind that especially in crypto where things are so innovative, what we perceive as a product or a company failure is really just a pathway to the next success. Because all of the journeys and the learnings that you get from building out a product, it feeds into whatever you are building next. In the case of crypto entrepreneurs especially, you'll often find that someone has multiple products and projects that they've worked on, that they've started and the learnings that come with each one.

I think it's really one of those things that is maturing the market over time and definitely building out the quality of people working in the space. I loved what you said about how this differentiation between web2 being digitizing information and then web3 digitizing assets. In terms of what Acknoledger does, I'm very keen to get more into it. I think what you've shared so far has been very fascinating and definitely has wet appetites on the call. Tell us more about exactly how it is that you guys are mapping this web3 digital assets, whether it's fungible or non-fungible tokens metaverse. I'd also like to know, speaking of the crypto winter and Bear markets as a company, you launched shortly before the market downturn. It would also be great to get your insights on how projects can survive the season because I think we've seen a lot of really great projects who are gearing up to go and to launch just before the downturn and now there's no market appetite for their product.

What is a company to do to not only stay afloat, but also to make sure that they are building in this time so that by the time that we go upwards again, that they come out as a stronger company rather than a company that's kind of turned into roadkill based on the market conditions.

Got it? I'll answer the first question which is what Acknoledger does and how it does like what it does. Second is surviving the market and in my personal experience, what is going wrong with the industry overall. So let me take the first part. The first part how Acknoledger plans to complete the whole vision and achieve the promises that we have made. For the first phase, what we realized that we have divided it into two parts, Okay? The Acknoledger trajectory, if you see the first part is to kind of map every single asset. Before doing that we need to have a solid infrastructure in place where any new NFT that is being minted on the blockchain, any blockchain that we want to be part of and that we want that NFT to be part of our ecosystem. Achieving that target is like a herculean task and you can't achieve it in a short span.

For that purpose we divided the strategy in such a way that first, what we will do is just take all the methods and map and index all the assets of those methods. The gaming NFT projects, we'll focus only on those projects because in a method there are assets from like 1000 NFTs to 10,000 NFTs, which is not a very challenging task. It's a challenging task, but it's not very challenging task. It can be done. What we decided is like we'll first keep indexing the assets in the metaverse and the gaming NFT projects and we'll keep adding it on the platform and parallely what we are building. We are building an infrastructure that can basically sit on top of all these blockchains and from the genesis block it will see what kind of NFTs that are being minted and it will extract and then structure those NFT data.

Once the system is ready, it will take some time because it's a challenging task, but once it's live so we will know every single NFT that has been created on the whole web3 space on any infrastructure project. Like we are trying to get as many chains as possible starting from Ethereum, Polygon, BSC and adding other chains. So that is the idea. For this purpose I just want to share that acknowledgment is going to rebrand itself as well in the future. Not now, immediately, maybe after like three or four quarters. This whole thing like the goal of acknowledges to structure the web3 and methods, as because today, as a platform, when we’re trying to build on the top of this metaverse we’re trying to extract data. We faced a lot of technical challenges today because the data is not structured. Querying those blockchain is quite a challenging task.

And the system fails so many times. Even not just us, there are other projects who are facing the same problem. If we solve this problem, we are solving the problem faced by so many other projects. It will be like kind of a blessing for them. This is what the strategy is. In the first phase, we also have created an NFT search engine. Okay, like the immediate problem solver because I have been working on search algorithms for quite a long time and I understand it pretty well and I also understand how to integrate it with artificial intelligence like machine learning and make it make things and take them at another level. Like it gives you solid data and insights so that we are already working on. And the NFT search engine is live. The best part about that engine is it goes deep dive into those attributes of those NFTs, whether, say, you can just search, say, red shoes or say, a pink, whatever color or whatever it is, you can just search and if that attribute is there in that NFT, it will give you those results.

Irrespective of which Metaverse is there or which gaming NFT platform is, you can also select it, personalize it, okay? This feature is already out and if you are a metaverse and you need that search capability and you can basically upload the NFT asset or index the asset with us and you can integrate our NFT search engine for free. We don't charge anything. What we do is once those assets, become part of our ecosystem and you integrate the platform like the search on your platform, we also help you increase the traffic and increase the revenue, by doing so we are working with DeFi platforms to enable NFT lending, borrowing and fractional NFTs. Through our inner partner ecosystem, through their APIs and SDKs. That once is integrated, people will be able to directly use those features without going anywhere. This is how the plan is to build Acknoledger and we will be doing the rebranding.

Also the plan is going and a complete revamp will happen once we finish this part of the product. The UCNS, which is our Universal Content Numbering Scheme. I'm very excited about this, I’ll tell you why. The way the ENS, Ethereum Naming System works which is mapped with your wallet the same way the UCNS face will be mapped with any individual NFT. For example, if you own a board apex, I have a goblin I will map like say Yash.UCNS or yg.UCNS with that goblin. So it verifies the identity. It helps my NFT to move from one metaverse to another metaverse interoperability. Second, when I have multiple assets, I can just name my assets the way I want it, okay? It's really powerful while playing the game, when you have multiple cars in your wallet, it's difficult to check every time and upgrade it while playing the game.

So you can do that. Third, the biggest problem of NFT today is the NFT data. Like only the hash is stored on the blockchain, the image and the video or whatever. The other characteristics of that NFT data is stored on whether IPFS or a lot of centralized server. Which is not a good thing because you can always manipulate that data. This is one big problem that UCNS solves. Overall, all the major challenges that are faced by the ecosystem, once we launch the complete acronyms whole like all the three phases, I think we'll solve this problem. This is the first part of the question that you have asked me. I'll also answer the second part which is really interesting. Second part is you also mentioned how we are planning to pop up because we have just launched before the market started crashing. I think our timing was really good that were able to plan the launch at the right time.

I have personally seen my co-founder and I've seen like two bear markets. We know how to kind of tackle that risk and how to manage that risk and how to survive it and at the end become be the winner of this. I think the problem with the web3 startups, one biggest problem is we have to focus on the marketing as well as the product. This is not true for web2 companies. So this is one big headache. The founders are always in dilemma whether they should focus on marketing or product, which is challenging. If you don't have any, like say a lot of teams, there are different types of teams, but if the team, doesn’t have any marketing guys or marketing experts, they are never able to deliver what is expected by the community. Fortunately, we don't have that problem. We understand the product building and the marketing very well.

All three of us, all my other co-founders, have been serial entrepreneurs. We know how to kind of tackle things and how to market it, build products and position it properly. The second and another problem that these web3 companies face is that we never focus on finding the product market fit, which is way too challenging in web3 because the space moves so fast. Another problem is to incentivize the users by giving them money like you give your tokens, which is not a solution and you don't understand whether they really need it, whether they really need your product. So this is a big problem. Okay? We have seen this blender in Axie infinity. The players were using this, getting so much of money, making 2, 3, $5,000 per month without any interest of liking that game because they're just making money and that's a big problem.

If you don't solve this problem in near future, I think we'll see this rate of web3 startup companies disappearing fast. Second thing that I've seen is the intention of the founders, which is really important, what they actually want to achieve. I personally feel that the founders, usually get so much hate from the community due to the price. They feel like it's not worth for making this community, working hard for this community. The community also plays a very important role because if the community doesn't support the founders, it kind of creates the hate in the community as well as the founders. I need to use this word, they don't give a s*** about the investor or the community. If they are loved, if they are nurtured, they will do things. And I've seen it. Okay? Personally, I understand it. I have also got hated at some point in the middle.

I understand that as a founder, you can't control the prices of the token all the time. This is a big challenge because it's an open market. What we can do is we can build a product, we can continuously do the effort in marketing and even we did it like we launched Rakmi ecosystem to handle when we cross 100 plus partners. It already has more than I think 14,000 followers. We are doing our effort from our side. This is what happens and this is what I've seen. It's like people, are here for the money, but they have forgotten the real reason for being in the space and this is the problem. I think the community is also responsible partially for this. Things will change, it will saturate also and it will be difficult to raise funds after four or five years because everyone we know will need the product, market Fit and all the other things.

Again, the formal is there and the companies, they have to if their product has already failed in the market, they should look to pivot and they should try to reduce the burn and then kind of focus on the things that are important. But yeah, I think that's it. I think I talked a lot, but yeah, I can talk, keep going on. This is my personal overview or my personal observation.

Thank you so much. I was just thinking to myself, it's exactly answers like these, why doing it with the spaces like this is always so enriching both to host as well as to listen to. Because I think all of the insights that you bring to the table are really enlightening in terms of, for example, you mentioned about this really mammoth task that you guys have in order to build Acknoledger, to function in the way that you would like it to function in the ecosystem. It's just very clear how when a project is committed to solving a problem, the entire industry ends up benefiting from each iteration that the project goes through. This also speaks really to what you were saying about the intention of the founders. What vision do they have? What are they trying to build? There's a huge difference between founders that only are in it for the money and are trying to quickly build a product for no reason other than the fact that they are going to get an investment from it, and founders who really are committed to bringing fruition to this vision that they have.

I think another point that you highlighted that's extremely valuable and certainly it's not something that I hear a lot of people talk about. This is this idea that the community also has a responsibility toward the project. I think if we look at the way that we have been doing things you were talking about the difficulty of delivering on marketing promises. I think because this whole concept of, as you said, incentivizing users by giving them free tokens without really understanding A) whether they understand what you are doing and B) whether they have any interest in it, I think that is the missing fit that founders have faced in this industry. Choosing Hype and choosing FOMO over sustainability. That's certainly something that is going to change as we go along. Especially every crypto winter, every bear market reminds us again how important this is. A very important point as well about founder hate versus founder support.

Because I think if you are in the industry and you understand on a daily, weekly, monthly basis how much there is to getting a project off the ground and to making sure that you have all your ducks in a row, most projects are really working hard, at least if they are committed to building a sustainable company. It's not always that obvious from the outside, from the community. Sometimes, of course, this is due to communication problems, not communicating effectively to the community what is happening. Certainly this idea that the community also has a responsibility, I think is very important. This actually leads to my next question. You as a company are focused very exclusively on mapping the web3 ecosystem. You have a very unique vantage point. I think that you can look out over the industry as a whole. In terms of NFTs and the metaverse changing the web3 space and even more than that, business at large, how do you see this playing a role right now?

Especially, I want to add on another question to this. You said earlier in the call about this phenomenon of fast and slow, stop and start that we have in this space. Of course, in Web2, we have the phenomenon that Facebook and all the other social platforms, they've been up and running for years. There's definitely an exodus now in the sense that people no longer really want to be on those platforms, but there's not a Web3 alternative that we can all turn to and go, okay, this is the community space that we want to be in. Now, NFT communities have been popping up, but it's an open question how sustainable they are going to end up being. The metaverse technology, of course, not yet at the point where we can easily say, okay, this is why Facebook rebranded to Meta, because we're all in that space over there.

We seem to be finding ourselves in this land between worlds when it comes to the community. There's a lot of investment going into web3, but in terms of the actual day to day, let's say, changes that we are seeing in the industry and in business, the greatest economic ecosystem how do you see NFTs and the Metaverse playing a role now and also in future? Playing an even bigger role in the sense that it will change how we do things, including community.

Really interesting question, Nadja. I'll tell you personally one thing, the Web3 space is really crazy about Web3 spaces. There's something new coming up every three to six months. There's always something new coming up. Right now we have this metaverse hype. Right now, Art and NFTs are kind of at the peak, and then we will see the next trend of soul bound tokens. This is really interesting, but the problem with Web2 and Web3 when it comes to survival or long term sustainability, is Web3 space moves very fast. You have to keep your eyes open. Even as a company and as a founder, as an individual, you have to pivot constantly, and which is really hard to do because you have to study things, you have to talk with people, you have to network, and then to keep yourself updated and your team and your project, which is like crazy hard work.

A lot of people, they just get tired of it, like, okay, I've just done, I don't want to do it anymore. This is what we'll see happening because the people who were there in 2017,2018, mostly, left the space because after like, losing so much money or making so much money, whatever that reason is, now we'll see like, in the next hardly any attempt. Out of all the people who are here right now, let's say only 5% of these people from this room will be there in 2023, as well as 2024, and then 2025. The point is, you have to be consistent. You have to keep your eyes open. You have to be consistent and you have to kind of just be part of the community and opportunities there, Okay? So that is one thing. Second, the platforms, why companies are not able to build because of this, the technology is improving so fast.

Okay? You need to have that agile way to develop things. Second, even the web3 people who work there are very gritty, I personally feel because they have seen so much of free wealth aired offs worth thousands of dollars. That kind of is they don't know how hard you have to work to make money, which is because you are getting free money everywhere. This is one big problem. It's kind of very short term mindset and over the time it actually destroys you personally because you think in life everything is easy. Like making money is easy. Things when they don't start, like you make good money in bull market and then that money is gone in bear market and then you start losing money and you see that how things are hard and you have never seen this. It's like this is one big problem and people, lose their mind.

It's like you are winning, winning and constantly winning. You are just losing everything that you are doing, you're just losing. It's like you are in that mental prison where you don't know how to break that slump, okay. You are in that abuse and you're just trying to get out. That's what will happen in the next, I think 12 to 24 months I personally have seen it and have survived it. So I know how people will be. A lot of people are going to go through this again and managing. In web two, we don't care about the price because you are a private company. Just focus on finding the product, market fit, getting the revenue and raising the funds. In web3, it's different. It's like managing the community, managing the marketing, building the product, creating the Hype, getting the investors, getting your coin listed on Exchange, doing so many things, okay?

As a founder, you need to focus. We have decided our focus is pretty clear that we are just going to find the product, market fit, get the product up and find that we at least make revenue to achieve breakeven. Once ,we build tremendous value for the ecosystem and then people actually get that value, then we start scaling things and then do the marketing. Okay. That's what our idea and plan is like. We want to survive also the market, which is really important. So yeah, these are my thoughts. I hope I've not missed any of your question that you asked.

Yeah, I think once again, very insightful. First, I would like to just challenge the audience. Are you going to be one of the 5 to 10% listening to this right now who will still be in web3 come this time next year? I 100% agree with you that we see this influx of people who come in fascinated. Unfortunately not so much by the vision behind what crypto and what Web3 can be, but more often about, okay, there's a lot of wealth flowing around in the space and this idea of free money, as long as you show up at the right time, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to deliver much value, because, well, you're there, so you should get this free money. Sadly, I think this is a mindset that especially in a bull market is shared not only by investors but also by projects.

You see a lot of new projects coming in when things are on the up and when you speak to them it's all about the hype and it's all about how we are all going to get rich quick from this. As soon as the going gets tough, as it inevitably will and those of us who have been in crypto for years know that whatever comes up must go down, and will go back up. You have to be able to ride those waves. You need to learn how to surf if you want to stay in this industry. Unfortunately, I loved what you said about this mental prison that people find themselves in because we have to remember that in some sense being in crypto is a bit like gambling. In the sense that we're placing our bets, we might feel that the bets we are placing is informed bets ,we are doing it based on research we've done, based on an understanding of how the industry works but ultimately it is still a bet and we won't always be winning.

I think that this whole idea of getting your head straight and understanding what you are doing, whether you are an investor, whether you are project building something, it's very important to know what your priorities are. Because if it's only going to be making riches, getting rich quick when lambo, I mean, this thing that we've been talking about and joking about for years, then ultimately it is always going to be like the short hit assassinations. Like come in, make a quick bug, get out. For those of us who are in the space long term and we have massive amounts of hope and optimism for how things can go and what they can turn into, it does mean that sometimes we're all smiling. Other times we're having conversations like these where we remind ourselves that ultimately it's about what value you can offer and not just the quick burn opportunities that are out there.

Speaking of where we are and where we could potentially be going, I'd like you to peer into your crystal ball for us. In your opinion, what do you see the future of NFTs as being and how do you think it will evolve from what we are currently seeing on the market?

This is one really important question, really interesting question, right? Personally I've been talking with more than 200 plus projects, 50 plus investors, advisors, influencers and understanding their perspective of how this space is moving. After discussing with so many people, I realize there are two, three things that will dominate in the future. Like the profile picture based NFT, Hype will fade away after some time. It's not going to sustain, trust me. Like when you just build something on Hype, it's not going to sustain until unless it has a really solid core value that it delivers every time. This will happen and all the noise that is there, it will just settle or disappear after like next 12 to 24 months. People will start working on this real life utilities of the NFTs. The biggest advantage NFTs have over tokens is they don't face that regulation hurdle which really sets it apart from the tokens.

They don't have to face that regulatory hurdle because they are not considered as a currency. Which kind of help uses NFTs and Edge for the mass adoption? For example, where I see personally if you have seen her like in Hadoop reader, Acknoledger whitepaper as well we see that asset like right now people only are focusing on when it comes to NFT they are only focusing on the methods NFT space and there are a lot of other industries like your patent copyright then music. All these industries are there where these NFTs can be used in really interesting ways. Whether it's your car or your driving license, your passport, it can be an NFT, Okay? This really interesting use cases are yet to come because there's no Hype or no one is asking about those use cases right now in the industry. People will go and people will find that value in the next few quarters.

I'd say people will start working on those interesting use cases and even VCs, they also prey on the high because they want to invest what is trending in the market because they also want to take their money out. There's one mentality. I personally see a big shift in how people look at things. The NFT space is going to be crazy. As I told you in web2 what we did was digitization of data. Here we are doing digitization of asset. Whether it's your chair or whether it's your even toothbrush, it will have NFT. We see that mass adoption of NFTs happening. Okay? One really interesting thing that alike has kind of invented is the sole bound tokens. The NFTs combined with those soul bound tokens will become so interesting, right? Right. For example, OpenSea gives you a soul bound token. Now whatever the NFTs that you own are verified automatically and the same is true.

Like say you have your identity card in any country. Every country has a different card whether it's a passport or whatever. It becomes a so bound token and all the other cards become like they are all your identity, they become your benefits or whatever it is, it can come as NFT. So, so many interesting things can be created, and especially in metaverse. I see that people are going to buy everything will be NFT. Token will be used, but mostly NFTs will be used more. There’s a good possibility that Polygon can be the leader because of the way they are envisioning the future and they have already adopted by stripe as well as Meta like Instagram going to use and we see so many influencers also using those NFTs. This will bring in massive audience in the space, a completely new crowd which we have never seen.

They will bring in their own ideas. We'll see that what's trending and what is right now hype and the DeFi space is right now facing its own algorithmic problem. I will say because of the terra Luna crash, there are a lot of hacks that keep happening. We have to rethink and redesign the DeFi completely on the top of it. We'll also face so many regulatory hurdles. The DeFi space will rise again but it has to focus again on the fundamentals, how we look at things. Because you have to work with the regulators hand in hand because we are not aliens, we live in a country, we will live in a society where we have to follow rules and that's why we are humans, we are not animals. That we have to find a midway where we work closely with the regulators. I personally feel because you can't just say anything, you build anything and just keep doing whatever you want because that's why the scams are happening because there needs to be someone who watches or keep tracks of this, what is happening in the space because there are so many rock pools happening.

I see so many people losing so much of money. I have been scammed a lot like when I was new to the space. I have learned from a mistake and even like the scammers are becoming so good, they always come up with different faces. The mask, it just changes its shape and form and they keep coming. This kind of will be a big hurdle that we have to solve and as a space we have to take that responsibility. We can't be just like you have made your money, but it's fine. Now what about others, those who are coming to the space? The leaders, the founders, they have to take the responsibility of this and they have to decide the direction where the whole space will move. We have to kind of not support these projects, whether whenever we should boycott those people who are kind of doing such rug pools or when we came across.

We have to kind of figure out a way to this. That's how I see it personally, the space moving. Again, if you ask me, there's just one less probabilistic prediction I'm doing on this call and it's getting recorded, that is not good. Like there's a 1% possibility that the whole NFT space will collapse. Okay? There'll be a new form of token altogether. I don't know why I just get this, because NFT, there are a lot of technical challenges when it comes to mass adoption. I think a new form of technology will come. Who knows, like, we might make it or whoever it likes, but I see that a new form of technology might come which will be a game changer. If NFTs are able to solve this existing technical challenges, it will be really interesting to see where the space goes. And the metaverses, they are really innocent.

I think by the end of this year, there are a lot of these metaverses that have raised money. They'll be launching their first phase. It will be really interesting to see. I'm really excited because I have personally studied those projects and invested a lot of my personal time on how they're going to build what is the best way to build a metaverse. All these methods, they are missing one really important point. It's not about the graphics. It's not about the high, very expensive NFT. It's about the stickiness. It's about the story. It's about the emotion that you are connected to that game. Like when you are playing the game Candy crush or Temple run, then you don't care about the graphics much. It just keeps you engaging. That's what this whole metaverse gaming and NFT projects, they are missing this point. I personally see 95% of them going to disappear in next two years because they are not getting the simple, fundamental basics right.

Those who will do, I’m keeping a close watch on all this metaverse, those who are going to like they are actually working on this, they'll be so much successful because they actually don't have any competition. If you see closely, that is the best part. We see those winners taking a bigger chunk of the market and capturing it in a really fast way because they have created something which people want. Not the crazy graphics built on unreal Engine Five, which is like you need a specific hardware to use that game. So, yeah, that's my take.

Yes, that was incredibly insightful. Thank you so much for all of the nuggets of wisdom that you dropped. I wish we had another hour to get into all of this. I think a few things that you said really stood out for me. One being that NFTs don't face the same regulatory blockages that other tokens in the crypto space does. It's really interesting to think about how this opens the technology up to possibilities and to just really explorations that you wouldn't necessarily find if it was more closely regulated. Although, of course, in future we will see the same kind of attempts, I believe, on NFTs that we are currently and have been seeing in crypto in general. I think another point that was really crucial to highlight was the fact that NFTs at the moment are very closely focused on certain use cases and there's so much of potential beyond these very obvious things that is receiving the hype and is receiving the attention.

I think this is probably one of the most exciting reasons to be in this space, even if your prediction comes true that NFTs as a technology is going to make way for something new. I think it's always this expansion of where can we go next? Almost like a Star Trek mentality where we get on our ship and we go sail through the universe and let's see what's going to come up. This is certainly one of the really the most rewarding things about being in the space. Also what came to mind for me what you said about the regulatory aspects that also should be internalized. We are only looking at regulators at a governmental level and oh, this country has this kind of regulations on this kind of technology and this kind of activity and it's almost like these overloads that we are running away from and okay, now they're chasing us.

It really is also so important that quote about who watches the watches we need to self-police in this industry. We need to make sure that what we are building is something that is sustainable not only in terms of the longevity of a product, but also really does it come up against? is it hurting people? For instance, are we building products that are responsible in terms of building out the space, in terms of being responsible towards investors and towards users or again, are we just jumping on what's making money now and so damn be the consequences? Lastly something I think that is also extremely important. What you mentioned was in terms of metaverse and I think this counts not only for metaverse but really for a lot of things, probably most if not all things in this industry it's not about the graphics, it's not about how cool things look and the design and who says what and who appears where.

This whole idea of as long as it looks good, it's easy to fool people because ultimately what is it driving and what is the method through which it's driving. For example, you said about emotions and stickiness, I wonder how many products out there and how many projects can really say that they speak to the emotions of their users and their investors beyond just okay, what's the new Hype? What's going to 10x? What's going to 60x? It reminds me of Yu-kai Chou, this gamification expert that calls the reasons for playing a game and for being involved in things that are gamified as core drives. Like, what really is driving us, and I think this is a question in crypto that products and projects are still trying to answer. It really is our responsibility to give that to the investors and the users, to speak to these core drives inside of them rather than just kind of wave this flag in front of the bull and say, okay, come chase me because we'll make a quick buck together.

Yash, it's been absolutely fantastic having you on the show today. I think that you have really brought very important insights about NFTs, the metaverse and the role that plays in Web3, especially in terms of how it feels, innovation and adoption. We don't have a lot of time left because we are already overtime. I'm going to open up the floor for only one question. If you would like to ask Yash anything, you can either put in a speaker request or you can drop your message into AdLunam's inbox with the handle adlunam Inc. Let me see from the team if we have some questions already.

I think what we should do is we should at least listen to three questions and then we should select which we are going to answer.

Great idea and I already have two on here. If there is another question in the meantime, I can start reading you one of the questions. Can they be counterfeits in NFTs and how can that be avoided?

Got it. Can you read the second question? Yeah.

The second question is what innovation do you see for NFTs who protect identities more?

I think I can answer both in one go. Like so usually plagiarism in NFT is hard to do if you know the contract address of the NFT.That and even I think at Acknoledger we are solving that one problem of plagiarism. It's kind of a really interesting problem. I'm not sure whether it's worth solving. Because when we check the contract of the address, it's easy to do, like verify. Even Acknoledger is solving that offline through. Once the UCNS goes live, you'll be able to verify the identity of the NFT offline also, so you don't have to be connected to the network. That we are doing the second part which is how do we solve the identity problem through NFT? For that, a lot of people are working on this DIDs like distributed identities. That technology is really interesting. Did we call it? This along with NFTs will be really powerful and a lot of projects are already working on this.

I know a few of them. So, yeah, I think it's going hand in hand and yeah, that's about it.

Thank you, Yash. And yeah, great. We could be so efficient and answer both questions in one go. So it is sad but true. Another hour of our lives have come and gone, but I think you can pat yourself on the back because this was definitely an hour very well spent. We are all walking away with great new insights thanks to the wisdom of today's crypto OG guest, Yash Dahenkar, the CEO of Acknoledger has shared with us. You would like to follow Yash and you definitely should. He's on Twitter at ydcurious and at Acknoledger. And Yash, it has been absolutely great. I will catch you around the metaverse. I feel like we definitely need to have a follow up to this conversation at some point because there's a lot of topics that I was just dying to get deeper into. Unfortunately, time is all of our master and we are its slaves.

To our amazing audience, thank you for joining in today. It's always an honor to have you share your time and attention with us here AdLunam. I will catch you again next week for another episode of The Future of NFTs brought to you by AdLunam. Cheers.

Yes. Thanks Nadja. Thanks to the AdLunam team for inviting me today. I really appreciate it. I want to add a few things guys. As an individual, my personal goal is to kind of build really solid products around the space and help other founders as well to create that value. I want to really impact like 10,000 people millionaires through Acknoledger or whatever I'm doing and then introduce at least a billion people to the metaverse. That's the long term goal and I'm figuring out how to achieve it right now through my products’ projects. And I also started educating people. I've been teaching blockchain crypto since 2017, by the way. I've given talks a lot of places, interesting places and you do follow me and I'll be keep posting about metaverse. Last week I actually did one video on the center land and I'll be keep doing some every week I'm planning to explore the metaverse.

Okay. On my YouTube channel which is widely curious and so do follow that channel as well if you want to know more. I've decided to be more active sharing content. Things go crazy because when you are building, working and you don't get time to create content. I'm trying to spend some time around this. Thanks to the AdLunam team who is inviting and sharing really interesting knowledge with all of us. To Nadja for really interesting questions, how you ask and really appreciate it. One thing I'll tell you, no matter what, just keep your eyes open, be consistent and we are all going to make it. That's the only thing on this note, I'll end this and see you all together in the next world run and have a successful lovely life, family, because that's what the most important thing to us is. Okay, thank you so much.

Beautiful. I think this is officially the nicest closing statement that any guest has made on the show so far. You have now really set the bar high and I cannot wait for other guests to try and even surpass this incredible goodbye greeting that we received from you today. So absolutely agree with you, Yash. I think that we are all going to make it, but we really need to understand what it is that we are building for and what it is that we want out of this. This is an incredible opportunity that we have received in our lifetimes and we are really blessed to be able to be part of something that is being birthed and new. I mean, how often can you say that you are part of an industry that is completely disrupting the way that society and the economy functions and even more have the opportunity to help shape this industry?

This is true for founders, it's true for any builders in the ecosystem and it's even true for the community. Guys definitely follow Yash and what he is doing. I think as you can tell, he is one of those minds that is just going to continue going on starship Enterprise and voyager and Discovery and just go find new planets and new life out there. Yash, until next time that we speak all the same nice things to you that you have wished all of us. We are going to go offline now and go hug and kiss the people that we love and then we are going to continue to build whatever amazing visions that we are building. With that guys, have a lovely day.

Yeah, thanks a lot and just don't be greedy. Take calculated risk. Yes. Okay guys, thanks a lot. Bye bye. Take care.

Guys with that. I wish you a lovely week ahead until we catch you again next time on The Future of NFTs Live next Tuesday, or you can also listen on your favorite podcast or streaming platform if you don't catch any of the episodes live. A final reminder for our weekly sister show, Diving into Crypto, that is live on Twitter Spaces every Thursday. So with that, over and out. See you next week.