SBAC2: Farcast and Books and Frames and Basemint and Bubiko
Hello and welcome. Thank you for being interested in this.
SBAC is a very informal series of discussions between myself, Stephen Black, and Andrew Chu.
Past SBACs:
This is Andrew, going solo, decribing more Basemint features:
https://medium.com/p/0c8cb094a839
Andrew: After working extensively in fintech in Manhattan, Andrew set up one2all.
Me: My background is all over the place, literally. Photography, art, video, 3D game making, writing (including a bestseller); in Manhattan, Tokyo, Paris, Singapore, Bali, Hong and Shenzhen. Produced for Cartoon Network, CNN, Fuji TV Fox. Published in magazines. All kinds of art projects, usually underground, with the exception of a collaboration with Michael Lee for the Singapore Biennale. Most of my art has been seen in small galleries or unusual places.
The transcription is not great.(!!!! I just saw that Youtube has an automatic transcription feature! That one seems to be more accurate that the partial transcription below.)
These books/links/projects are mentioned in the video, and are highly recommended:
https://warpcast.com/v?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Re; the transcripts below. Read the transcripts on Youtube instead.( Although I find some parts of these nice as experimental text pieces).
00:00
Soom: I can record video to put on Youtube with this new system, uh or this different system, and export it after and then upload it to Youtube. My background is all over the place literally Asia, New York, Paris uh photography video, a lot of Arts stuff.
01:11
The day of the premiere, Morgan died of a heart attack. I told you that he said nobody ever died from not sleeping for 3 Days, and I had to go to the Morgan identify the body. I kept doing the art stuff, I decided to write books, I talked to some Vc people about grants, and then I thought maybe I should look into Ar, and I committed to it before Arkit and R Core were officially launched.
02:42
As things go on, we realize that AR VR, web3, whatever that might be, will all converge or at least interact. I was trying to keep an eye on what was going on and met someone at Nft, Nc. I’ve worked in finance and technology throughout my career, but more recently I’ve been working as a product manager at two fintech startups. The highlights of those experiences were building marketplaces and trading platforms, which are interesting products to run and build.
02:42
As things go on, we realize that AR VR, web3, whatever that might be, will all converge or at least interact. I was trying to keep an eye on what was going on and met someone at Nft, Nc. I’ve worked in finance and technology throughout my career, but more recently I’ve been working as a product manager at two fintech startups. The highlights of those experiences were building marketplaces and trading platforms, which are interesting products to run and build.
04:52
In my last role as head of product at a company called Liquidex, I built an Enterprise blockchain solution from scratch for a niche of the financial services sector, and I dabbled in blockchain on a personal note. Working on that project at Liquidex definitely opened my eyes to the possibilities of digitized assets generally. Especially because the risk averse and conservative institutions like Banks were already sold on blockchain and were looking to digitize some of their assets.
06:41
When Nfds came on, I saw that mainstream digitization was here, and I wanted to take the things I had learned and build a Market Place.
07:51
Although the entire software industry has improved a lot in terms of their processes like Agile development and things like that, I found myself frustrated in that two or three weeks still was not fast enough, right for certain things.
09:07
I talk to my team and they respond that they will put it in the queue and get it out in three weeks, if not in six weeks. I think there is a better way to build software Ultimately, and I think it’s no wonder it’s expensive to build software.
10:31
A platform called Bubble caught my attention because somebody built a Twitter clone completely in no code. I started messing around with it and was pretty impressed, so I decided to build a full-on Nft Marketplace completely in no code.
11:29
We built our first template in the summer of 21. We had to massage some things, work with some developers to get some libraries in working order, but uh, thankfully it was possible and that sent us on our way.
12:38
We do custom development for people who want to build their initial product and/or their MVP with no code, and those people range from being full-on companies to solo entrepreneurs.
14:00
When we need to move money around or send money to someone we typically need to tell the bank what to do. But if the bank suddenly decides that we are not in good standing anymore they can just say no, you can’t.
15:05
We store our money in a way that isn’t dependent on anyone institution or bank or organization, and we have maximum freedom to have our say in terms of how those funds get used sent. I read a book called Number Go Up, which is basically about crypto, and I have great faith in it. The guy was describing the things that he goes through and he said that onboarding is difficult but that customer service will change. He said that anybody can punch in their credit card and buy something and that customer service will get fixed.
17:43
I agree with you that the biggest risk with crypto is that there is no middleman. I think that there is space there for people to build services that abstract away a lot of the technical stuff crypto, distracting that away, and make the user experience really straightforward.
18:58
I think the major trend in 2024 is going to be the more mainstream adoption of crypto and web 3 and all this stuff, where people are going to be able to use this stuff and not necessarily know that it’s a wallet or things like that.
20:15
Basement started as a side project where I was looking to see if I could rebuild a popular web three app in no code and ended up winning an award in a weekend hackathon.
21:09
The app is basically set up to be almost like a private chat room experience, but it’s centered around a particular individual. It’s very userfriendly, and you can go from start to finish using it and not actually know that it’s Crypt based.
22:08
As successful as this app frch was last year, it was still more web three focused. Basement is a much easier to use app that does not require you to know anything about crypto. Lastek talked about using paradigms that people are used to already, such as the little play card with the credits on it.
23:31
Basement is a chat room where people can buy access to certain rooms, buy digital Collectibles or digital content directly in the chat experience and use their credit card or their balance, which is actually native cryptocurrency. We're hoping to get this project up and running for non-web3 music producers so they can use it and enjoy it, without having to think twice about things like seed phrases and all these things.
25:09
Zenica sent you an email from V Visan, who says that users want status or entertainment from a new social network, and that a new network must offer a compelling way to achieve both or it will face an uphill battle to get off the ground.
