Episode Summary
Get ready to unravel the world of NFTs as I chat with Bruno Skvorc, Web3 hacker and educator with a long blockchain history. Hear how Bruno moved from his early days in web development through the land of Ethereum, Polkadot and Kusama, into multichain future of modular NFTs. Bruno will talk about his current venture, RMRK, an innovative project aimed at creating smarter and more efficient NFTs. Bruno has a knack for translating complex knowledge into easy-to-digest information.
We also delve into the concept of ownership in this space, examining the need for long-term, decentralized projects, motivations driving people to plunge into the world of NFTs, and the challenge of selling a technology that does everything.
There are many other interesting moments in our conversation, including the captivating concept of Skybridge project where the entire world is an NFT owned by the community.
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Transcript
BFG: 1:11
Hi everyone. I'm here today with Bruno. I'm not going to pronounce his second name, or probably I should, because you know, bruno Squartz is a name which is, for some of us, hard to pronounce not for me, because I'm originally Czech, so our names are pretty close to the Croatian ones and Bruno has a long history of doing things in Web3. I was impressed when I saw the long get-up page of different projects. I still am, actually, and you know, currently he works on Remark, which is a lot of different things and I'm sure he will talk about it. But let's start with.
Bruno: 1:55
Yeah, hi and thank you so well. I started originally as a web developer back in the early 2000s and then, after a few years of just doing web development, I started doing more and more data analytics, more and more optimizing my work and my habits and everything, and I data mined my happiness one day and realized that JavaScript was making me miserable. So I quit all of my JavaScript jobs, all of my web development contracts, and at the same time, just so happened to run into this thing called Ethereum. I was not impressed by Bitcoin. I never paid attention to anything crypto. I still am not impressed by Bitcoin and will probably never be, but Ethereum has the world computer and the decentralized database to help, you know, fight the tyranny of the United States empire, which was just ramping up, was something that I thought was really interesting, and so I decided to dive in. I spent a year just learning and then I launched a website to teach people about it basics of cryptocurrency, basics of solidity, development, smart contract, writing all of that sort of stuff. And then I was writing tutorials, publishing hundreds of tutorials on development or explainers and so on, on the reasonably popular site point dot com online magazine for developers that's been around since the 2000s and this is actually where I learned a lot of my flash development skills. Back in the day. There was a nice full circle where I became the editor there for the education channel and, yeah, from there I got hired by an Ethereum 2.0 company effort to help work on the Nimbus project, which is the Ethereum 2.0 client for for staking, and from there I went to technical education and the Web three foundation, where I finally started remark as kind of like an infrastructure project for better and smarter NFTs so that they finally evolve past the monkey pigs. There have been many other things in between. I've run an on and off ramp that I built in my spare time for Fiat to crypto and back. I've done some projects in games and Dallas and things like that, but mainly these were the big efforts.
BFG: 4:30
So it's a it's a long journey and we will come come back to parts of it, but I am so I am, I'm wondering. So you started publishing tutorials about things you learned. Was it like a natural thing or somebody prompted you? You always felt like you're a good educator or you felt the need from people you were around with.
Bruno: 4:55
I always was good at translating knowledge, and technical education in this style is really nothing more than translating the knowledge from somebody's head into somebody else's head. You just have to be a good filter in between, a good, a good translator, so that you remove the curse of knowledge from the person who is knowledgeable and digest it down into something that the person who is not knowledgeable can consume and remember. And this takes a lot of patience and skill and it takes a lot of time to build it up, but it's something I've always enjoyed. It is the instant gratification of being able to write something that people can immediately put to use and see the results of. That I really liked, and so in many ways it's like an ego game, much like I don't know, with a stand up comedian. He enjoys making people laugh, but because it feels good, he's doing it because it feels good to him and it felt good to me to help people understand a foreign concept and get that click about a certain technology or aspect or approach or the why of it all and how to get to a certain certain point of result, and so this is why it was also a very nice way of earning money because, as a technical educator with a decent command of English. I could work for an external company while living in Croatia, which made life also much more comfortable than working here, so it was a natural evolution.
BFG: 6:33
No, that makes sense. I'm asking because I feel it's really hard to be a good educator, partly because on and off I always try Outside of Web3, I do actually enter founders of work in business development and all the large deals are basically education game of the customer and whoever is providing something and finding a fit, and sometimes it's hard to translate that knowledge which may seem obvious to you or some other people into something which is understandable for the rest of the group which needs to sign up on things. So I think the good educators are rare. So kudos to you, definitely. Okay. So we got pretty much to the point where you did work on Ethereum 2.0, then you jumped to Polkadot and Kuzama work and I think we can probably skip over this, because it will kind of shine through when you tell us a little bit about the remark. Maybe you can start with the name, because the name is pretty cool. I like it. How do you come up with that?
Bruno: 8:04
So the project started while I was working at the Web3 Foundation, which is famously the force behind well, one of the two forces which are basically one force behind Polkadot and Kuzama. Kuzama is like the canary network for the Polkadot network, where things are launched first and tested to their extreme to see if they can graduate to Polkadot. It's not a test, it's an incentivized test. It's a canary network and there's this culture where Kuzama is the people's chain and Polkadot is the VC's chain. At least that's unofficial, that's the unofficial stance of a lot of the community there, and I liked that aspect of it because Kuzama was always kind of. Kuzama is also named after the, after Yaya Kuzama, the artist who does Polkadot patterns in all her work, and so this is kind of like a much to this. And so as this art chain and as the NFT summer was ramping up I saw it ramping up again I figured like it would be a real shame if an art chain didn't have any kind of NFT presence, because at that point Kuzama itself was just a relay chain, which means that it's used just to communicate, just to finalize the blocks of parachains, and no parachains, no chains connected to it existed, yet they were only on their own maps still. So there was no way to program Kuzama. It was a non programmable chain. It still is the relay chain itself, but because it's a substrate chain and substrate is the framework with which all chains in the Polkadot ecosystem are built, it's like the starting kit. It shared some functionality with all of them, and one of those functions is in the system module of every chain, so it's like a, like a sub sub module of the chain, and the system sub module has a command called remark, and with remark, you can just put a Any message on to it. You can send any message into the chain. It doesn't change the state of the chain, but all the clients synchronizing the chain have to acknowledge it and store it in their database. It's much like event logs in Ethereum, and so when you send it in, it doesn't really affect anything, but you've written a message to the blockchain, essentially, and so what I've used, what I've, what I've figured out, is that we can actually hijack this approach and reuse the old Colored coins approach from Bitcoin from 2011, where they tried to use custom messages in Bitcoin to do tokens. Basically. Obviously, this this didn't really take off in a big way, but here it was, it was usable, and so what I did was I used these system remarks who graffiti the chain and in essentially hack or simulate NFTs on Kusama itself. And I did this by just posting standard. I wrote a standard for reading these messages and A tool that can read all of these messages and come to a conclusion about the current state of all of these messages. So by repeating the chain, I kind of hacked NFTs on to Kusama itself, which was very fitting because for some was it was meant to be this hacky, hack friendly, you know edgy chain that is friendly.
BFG: 11:30
These experiments and it took off, it works my like the Expression and graffiti, the chain yeah, that's pretty cool.
Bruno: 11:40
I do explain it, like with the, with the analogy of shipping containers. If you have a lot like a big Transport ship that ships containers over, that's your blockchain and the containers of the blocks with Remarks, with these types of NFTs, these types of graffiti, you are literally you're not putting anything into the containers, you're not putting new content into the blocks. These are not transactions to be executed, but you are drawing graffiti on the side of the containers and when they're unloaded, the public looking at them sees something special, something different. You know there's a language for how to interpret these graffiti. That's.
BFG: 12:17
That's how it works impressive and actually very cool. Yeah, so it's. I can see that there is a big hacker mentality in the educator. So what was the? So the original plan with the remark was what I think we talked about the fact that it was kind of a game focused initially.
Bruno: 12:45
Initially, it was just to add NFTs to. Just Then I realized that NFTs were dumb in terms of not being able to do anything, and that most people were speculating on them, and so they were designed to do something more, and they could do something more, but it was not doable in an established ecosystem because there's a lot of Inconvince that you have to fight. So Kusama was the perfect breeding ground for innovation, where I could ship really quickly and not ask anybody for permission, and so this is how the next version of the standard came about, which allowed NFTs to own other NFTs, nfts to equip other NFTs into certain pre-defined slots, nfts to have multiple outputs at the same time, so that an ebook NFT could be an audio file and a PDF at the same time, and whichever, whichever context you load it in, that's what the, the render, pulls out. So if you load it into audible, it just pulls out the audio file. That's it. And so there are these aspects that I put together, that I call NFT 2.0 Legos, that you can just mix and match and come up with really innovative projects, and obviously One of the most obvious use cases for this is gaming, because you have characters, avatars, inventory systems. All of that can now be done basically on chain, and you don't need special indexers, servers or middleman Running your stuff Additionally, forward. Compatibility was really important to me because I noticed that every single NFT collection that launches is a vampire attack on all others by default, which means that if it launches, it's going to be trying to get the audience of another project really quickly, and so it's always a zero sum game where you're always trying to kind of take other people's audience and get them to be your audience, which is very unhealthy for the ecosystem at large. But if you make it a positive sum game where the pie grows with every new collection that's launched, because you have, for example, equipables that can be equipped on this collection but they can also be equipped with this collection and they can also be equipped with this collection. If you have game items that work in this game, this game, this game, this game and this game and if you can make them compatible with every upcoming game that comes out from, then now you suddenly have this growing world that will never stop growing because everybody who builds in it is contributing to it. So this was the obvious use case, you know. But then you have, like this explosion of use, cases where you can apply this to reputation, where you can have instead of a plutocratic governance in DAOs, you can have reputation meritocratic governance where, based on actions that people have performed, a certain type of reputation grows. So maybe you voted on 10 Treasury proposals and now your Treasury merit has grown to level 10, but your runtime merit is still level zero because you've never voted on a runtime proposal. Next time there's a vote, your Treasury merit will matter more if you're voting on a Treasury proposal than on a runtime proposal because you lack experience in it, and so this stuff can be represented as non-transferable or Soulbombs 2.0 NFTs inside of other NFTs, so you can grow your profile over time and use that for governance. That's one use case. Another use case is just musicians coming together composing a music song in one single track, each contributing a separate stem like lead guitar, vocals, drums, bass and so on, and then ultimately you get a final composition that can distribute royalties to everybody who contributed to it every time it's sold. And all of this is done in a decentralized way where you can equip these sub slots.
BFG: 16:20
Actually, I think I'm a member of a project who was trying to, who still is trying to use your standards to do exactly that, and it's like when you mint the avatar, later on, every avatar should come with some sort of the music instrument and then you can join forces with people who have other instruments which you want in your track and you can do it together. I think it was called creators. I'll research it a little bit and put it into show notes. But what you described is awesome and we a little bit skipped over the path that you basically developed it on Kuzama and then you made it. You kind of pushed it into ERC standards which are now available to everybody, I believe, and there is a there is a long talk about it from your viewers, from ECC, which I will put into show notes as well if anybody is interested. But the important piece is it's basically available to all the EM chains, basically everywhere on Ethereum you guys can use the NFTs which can own other NFTs logic which Bruno just described. But I would probably ask so, from all the use cases you listed, you know from gaming to you know, sold bound tokens and reputation, are there any? Is there any standout use case which you are the most excited about, like for yourself or for team, whatever.
Bruno: 17:58
I'm torn between gaming and reputation. I've always wanted on-chain games that can expand their economies and contribute to the global item economy. If I have an avatar in a space game and that avatar has a space suit and that space suit has a patch on it, I want that designer of that patch to get royalties when the entire avatar is sold. Even if that avatar is in a spaceship and that spaceship is sold, that patch should still give royalties to the owner. We have actually solved this in remark with nested royalties so that it trickles down all the way down to the maker of the patch. This works and you can actually sell nested NFTs, which really encourages artists to make stuff for others who are not their own project. It's much like the plugin architecture of some game engine or a Unity or whatever, where you are developing something for somebody else's work but you still get paid for it. I think that's really important for a global item economy that's supposed to be ever-growing. I also like the fact that the system allows you to have fully on-chain character progression systems, which allows you to really take an evolved or leveled up character avatar from one game to your wallet. Even if that game disappears. Even if it's not decentralized. You still have your experience with you. You have ownership of your experience. Another game may value that, may incorporate that into its new engine and stuff. It's important to keep the time you've spent, you've invested in a certain game or effort. I think it's important to own it so that you don't lose it if the project disappears, which, for example, is currently the problem with all Yuga products. If they disappear, everything they've built will disappear.
BFG: 19:56
I just want to say that it's actually, I think, the experience of anybody who is still in the NFT space. I'm pretty sure everybody had some sort of NFT collection which just disappeared from their wallet because somebody stopped paying for hosting or other things happened. It's not there. I mean it's pointing somewhere, but there is no picture, there is nothing, no metadata. It's just disappeared.
Bruno: 20:24
Yeah, that's a big problem, especially when you have centralized teams behind projects that disappear and that have not made sure that they leave a legacy. In most cases in Web 3, people are making sure that they make a quick buck, which does not really include long-term plans. If you're not building with long-term plans in mind from the get-go, you will disappear over time, because most projects just launch a token. The token goes down only over the years and three years later the project is usually gone. This can all be easily avoided if people just start building with decentralization in mind first. You don't put images on a central server. You put them on a decentralized protocol or something you encourage interacting with contracts directly. You encourage people to fork your UI, you encourage people to, if that's what you want. Some people have business models that don't apply to decentralization at all and just use Web 3 in a wrong way that shouldn't be used for, but to just make money, which I guess is also do what the tech allows you to do.
BFG: 21:29
I think I would say it's probably like 70-30. From my experience in the past two or three years. When there is a bull run, 70% of people. It's basically the easiest way to fundraise for whatever you want to do, whether it's buying a yacht or a house or whatever, or just try to run a project. And decentralization is kind of just an annoying problem because it makes everything harder and typically slower. And those 30% of others, yeah, they try to do it. But I'm sure everybody who was ever present in any DAOs before the bear came and during this summer was shocked how quiet the Discord's got. They have a DAO chat and the last message is in January. So is this DAO still alive? Oh, yeah, we are here. We just don't have anything to do. Let's do a little bit of a future. Look, because we already over 20 minutes unbelievable. It's super interesting. So what's up for E-mark? I know that you guys are working on some. I could probably call them demo apps. I hope it's not in south for what the tech behind the NFTs, which NFTs can do. But I'm sure there is some bigger plan than to do just apps and I assume you guys also want to monetize in some way the knowledge and skills you have.
Bruno: 23:07
Yeah. So it has been historically very difficult to, over the past three years, sell a technology that does everything. And this really is the end game of NFT. It really does do everything. It solves every single problem that NFT issuers have had in the past or will have in the future, because it's forward to compatible. You can extend it into the future. But it's very difficult to communicate that value, and so we've decided instead of we do have our marketplace singular app, which collects commission on sale, so we try to earn money that way, but, as you know, the bear market has driven away most users, so it's not exactly a very profitable venture, but that UI allows you to do everything that NFT 2.0 can do. So these modular NFTs that we've built, you can do everything on singular. But to communicate the value better of these individual NFT 2.0 Legos, we have created these mini apps that really demonstrate one specific aspect of things. So, like our Mint, our app makes it really easy and a no code UI to launch your connection collection in a lazy minting way where your collectors just come, pay and minted, that's it. And all NFTs minted this way will be modular NFTs by default. They will be multi asset, they will be nestable with other NFTs, and so on. There's emotesapp, which lets you emotes on NFTs on chain. Just send emotes, that's it. However, you want to implement this into your own apps is up to you. So we have provided this base layer and if you want to add to your app, you can use this. If you build a messaging protocol which where every email that you send to a person on chain is a message, is an NFT. You can actually emote on these messages, and so now you have an on chain emoting system for your messaging protocol already built. Then we have other apps, like wizardrmrkdev, which allows you to really pre compose code blocks that allow you to launch these fully fledged collections with equipables and so on. So we're launching these mini apps and they're all on the rmrk. app, RMRK app. They're all listed in the menu and we will be launching more and more so that people can get familiar with what this tech can do and really have easy ways of using it. Going forward, we do want to build our skybridge, which is our fully on chain game, where the entire world is an NFT, containing lands that are NFTs, containing houses that are NFTs, containing avatars that are NFTs, and so on into infinite depth, but the community itself owns the world, because the world itself is an NFT dial and so your partial ownership of it allows you to vote in its evolution and also change its world, change its story and everything else. So we want to demonstrate that, on this concept In general, we just want to see more and more of this tech out there. This is why we've also standardized it as ERCs. So with the EIP process, this has been going on for over a year now, but they're finally all finalized in final form ready to use by anybody open source we have open source implementation, so there's no token gating. You can just dive in and get going. All our apps support 5 EVM chains so far, and we will be adding more and more, but you don't need our support to launch on a chain of your choice, so this is also something that we support. We just want to build different use cases and show people what's possible to expand the entire universe.
BFG: 26:32
So your monetization path is not going through like helping people to actually implement it, but you want to focus on the game we have some of that.
Bruno: 26:42
So some collections have gotten in touch with us and we have helped them launch for taking a cut of the initial sale or something like that, and we are open to those collaborations. Obviously we need to approach such deals pragmatically because there's literally nobody buying right now. So you know I'm looking to 20% of a sale. That is zero. It's not very pragmatic in our case and it makes more sense to launch things that people will be using like crazy when the bull market starts. So it's a balance thing. But people can always get in touch and we will help and we have a telegram group with where our developers are ready to help anybody with implementation and building their own stuff All right, okay, very cool.
BFG: 27:26
Yeah, I will probably, you know, point people to your pin tweet because it has a list of those mini apps. Any, like you know, let's sort of get to the wrap up, but any you know stand out. External project which you know, of, which you really like, which is getting ready to launch using your tech, which you would like to mention.
Bruno: 27:53
Yeah, there's. There's two notable ones that I want to shout out that have been building with us for a while. One is blossom land, which deals with all of my passions. This is reputation. So blossom dot land is working on kind of like a work related reputation for Web 3 people, which means that somebody can vouch that you did something well and it builds up your profile and it turns it into your kind of work reputation. And this kind of attestation profile can then be used by other protocols to give you access to I don't know events or beta versions of their app or contract or whatever else, special minutes and so on. So it's kind of like an on chain vouching protocol. The other one is ever loot that's. That's a E V R L 00 T, which is a game that fully uses the, the modular that we created for items, equipables, farming, fishing, everything else. So they are doing what you go was supposed to be doing in terms of building on an open standard designed to interoperate with other games and past projects, past projects in the ecosystem. So they're building an incredibly vibrant and expansive ecosystem that will grow with more builders in the same ecosystem, and this is really important. So they're working, they have a full team. They're working full time on it, writing stories, writing quests and everything, and it's playable. Now you can already use it, so I recommend people check that out Awesome.
BFG: 29:30
Okay, yeah, that sounds, that sounds cool, awesome land and ever. You'll find it in the show notes, guys. Okay, so you know if the listeners want to connect with you what's the best way to do it and you know can they be any help to you or your team.
Bruno: 29:52
Help. Yeah, just go and build on top of the stack, and currently we are currently rewriting our docs to be more user friendly, more developer friendly, so that should improve dramatically. But even if you get stuck head on into Telegram, tell us about it, try building something and we will be there to help you out. Best way to get in touch with me is Twitter, probably. So just add BitFalse and I will be. I will try to respond to anybody who has any questions about it.
BFG: 30:23
All right, maybe last question, my curiosity. So, bitfalse, it's on Twitter. Where does Svader come in?
Bruno: 30:32
I've tried to get Svader, but there's a camper from 2010 who still has it, and so I'm waiting for Musk's policy of data counts purging the handles to come into effect so I can grab it.
BFG: 30:46
Okay, very cool. Thank you very much, Bruno. Thanks a lot; that was a great chat.
Links To My Guest
Bruno on Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/bitfalls
RMRK on Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/rmrkapp
RMRM web: https://www.rmrk.app/
Good thread with apps built (or building) on RMRK's modular NFTs: https://x.com/bitfalls/status/1703785137320706062?s=20
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