HODL Podcast Episode 13 was originally published on August 1, 2023.
Join Drew and Joel from the Hold On for Dear Life Podcast. In the episode, they discuss Holder’s new product launches (wallet messaging and web3 marketing automation), ERC-6551 and ERC-721 smart contracts, the Ripple Ruling, and Freeport’s fractionalized art projects on the blockchain.
Episode Rundown:
- Web3 brands can communicate with holders with Holder Wallet Messaging.
- The importance of Holder Web3 Automation.
- News on ERC-6551 and ERC-721 smart contracts.
- The Ripple Ruling is a partial win for the web3 ecosystem.
- Freeport fractionalized art projects. (Since the podcast was recorded, Freeport closed their open sale and decided to move their business in a different direction. As of July 31st, the company is refunding individuals that were affected. You can learn more about this on their site: https://freeport.app/.)
About Holder
Holder is a CRM and marketing automation platform for web3 brands and creators. They help businesses engage and communicate with their customers on the blockchain. With Holder, companies can manage customer data, track user engagement and automate marketing processes. For more information visit our website.
Podcast Transcript
Read the Full Podcast Transcript Below:
Welcome back everybody to the hold on for dear life podcast. This is the semi-regular podcast episode number 13 actually from the team here at Holder.
We took a small break over the last month or so working on a handful of really big product launches and updates in the business. And we will share a lot more about those later on.
If you aren't familiar with Holder, we are a web3 CRM and customer engagement platform. Like many podcasts in this space, it's not financial advice in any way, and do your own research, but we just love to get on here and talk about some of the latest news and headlines and web3 and what that means for holders and all of you today.
Today I am joined by Joel Moser, who leads our engineering team here at Holder. So first off, we thought we would update all of you just on where Holder is at and where we're going as a business. And then we'll have kind of a handful of headlines and news and stories to cover today.
But the biggest one on the Holder front is that last week. We launched our brand new product called Holder Wallet Messaging, which we are incredibly excited about. You know, as I think about web3 and one of the most fundamental challenges for brands building in this space and for everybody from a DeFi product to a protocol itself, one of the biggest challenges has been I have no way to communicate with my customer, they are just this wallet address and I know that they're engaging with my product and knows they're a customer of mine, but I have no way to communicate to them, engage with them on a regular basis to build a loyal kind of relationship with them. And so that's where we've been kind of building toward this for many, many months.
In partnership with XMTP, which is an open web3-based network and messaging protocol. We have built out this wallet messaging platform where similar to sending out an email marketing message a text message or an SMS marketing message to your customers. You can just send a segmented or one-to-many or automated wallet message that shows up right in someone's wallet inbox.
Just a week prior to our launch this Coinbase wallet released their own in-app wallet messaging inbox built on top of XMTP. And so any message you send out of Holder will be delivered right to someone's inbox inside the Coinbase wallet. We're also integrated into any Lens client. So Lensster, Orb, or Butterfly or any kind of XMTP-enabled app, which there are many more being added as we speak. And so we just, as a business feel like this is a fundamental shift to a really big monumental occasion and super excited about it.
Lots of kudos to Joel and our engineering team for getting this live. But Joel, I don't know, is there anything maybe that I missed or just anything that you're kind of really excited about as we think about kind of the future around wallet messaging?
I don't think you really missed much, but one of the exciting parts about building on top of an open protocol like this is just really the interoperable part is that we can now Integrate or anybody can integrate with us directly without us actually really needing to do much.
It's all at the protocol layer. They just work with XMTP to get that integrated, which by the way, all of their documentation is open source. It's all on GitHub. Like they're to be able to integrate with that is what, web3 was always trying to promise.
And so like, this is just like another step forward for that. I mean, yeah, sure. You could argue that anybody can run an email server or anybody could integrate with SMS or do any of those things. But at this point, those protocols have, borderline become so complicated or they're so archaic that people don't know how to do that.
And there's not, I don't feel like there's really clear. Open documentation about how to do that either. And you always hear the things like somebody's running an email server in their basement. What are the security problems? And so it's just kind of like it's just kind of funny that now we're doing that in an open and secure way. Not insecure. So that's just one of the. Really cool thing I think is just being able to tie into a network like that.
I completely agree. And yeah, the XMTP team is incredible. We've worked with their team really closely over the last handful of months on this and a handful of their team members I've worked with even in the past and so it's just been fun.
We definitely have to have, yeah, one of their team members, maybe Shane or Peter or somebody joined the podcast at one point too. I think that'll be great just to kind of get their perspective. But I do agree as well that it's the interoperable nature. , it's combining a lot of things that made open source really, exciting and interesting as a technology.
Absolutely. And evolving on that. I think that makes it even kind of more interesting, especially around ownership and incentive models and things like that, which is what makes. , blockchain, and web3.
And I think I believed this for a very long time, but the wallet address is the new email address. For how we log into things online to how we communicate our online identity.
I think the wallet address is becoming the next rendition of that. Especially the Coinbase wallet inbox launch, they are the first major wallet provider to launch an integration in this realm. And I don't think they will be the last by any means, but it's kind of interesting to see some of these applications, you know, this idea of particularly in Western culture, alike quote unquote super app that has never really existed, but there's always been the goal of, can we build a super app that, especially in more Eastern cultures.
There's a handful of these from WeChat online and some other ones that have become these massive super apps that your entire world online basically revolves in kind of one app. And so I think it's, it's also interesting to see Coinbase wallet in particularly it's the non-custodial, wallet where you own your keys, you own everything is kind of trying to be in some ways this destination as the super app for payments store of value and money to identity to communication and all of that combined.
It just makes me really excited for the future of where we're headed with all this.
Yeah, when the web3 representative in the U. S. integrates with it, that's a telling sign.
It's huge.
This announcement product launch actually came on the heels of another one of our really major updates to the holder product, at least, which is our automation builder product. This is really bringing marketing automation and what we've seen in web2 marketing to web3. Being able to build automated customer journeys that drive deeper engagement with your customers.
The beautiful part of this is all of our automation builder capabilities are already integrated into our wallet messages as well. So. Imagine building out a customer journey that based on when someone purchases or mints or buys your NFT and based on other holdings in their wallet, you can trigger, personalized messaging that goes directly to that customer.
This is a really powerful and something that we've been building toward from the beginning of holder, really over a year ago. It's exciting to have this finally launched and be live in the customer's hands. And I think we're already seeing it kind of really do amazing things with customers and how they're using and kind of rethinking what kind of customer journeys and what onboarding should look like for her customers, which is really exciting.
So maybe to move on to some of the non-holder headlines one that I Was really interested in talking about today And getting Joel some of your feedback and opinion on is a new EIP proposal or relatively new I don't know. It's been around for a handful of months, but I feel like in the last couple of months It's just really gained a lot more traction, particularly just in media and things like that and people talking about it and the ramifications of it.
This is ERC 6551, which is token-bound accounts basically is what the shorthand for this is. So this is a proposed new token standard for NFTs and the proposal defines a system basically in which an ERC 721 token, which is an NFT can have and own a smart contract account.
So it controls the private keys basically of another smart contract. And then that smart contract can actually own other assets and interact with applications without requiring changes to that original ERC 721. It's almost like nested accounts basically in ownership.
One example use case that I love to think about is More from a gaming perspective. If I sign up for a game and I create a character and that character starts to accrue boots and different weapons and whatever.
Like I have my inventory for that character and I have a handful of gold for that character. All of this now, and this token-bound account structure. There could be my character is the original ERC 721 and it actually owns the tokens for all of these other kinds of tokens rather than it being bound to my wallet address.
Those assets are bound to the token that I own, so I could sell the entire character basically with all of its ownership and winnings and things like that to another individual. And I think it just kind of starts to open up this idea and kind of help the standard consumer, understand more of the power around ownership and why, self-sovereign ownership is so important and interesting.
So that's what I find really interesting about it is how it's enabling a lot of things even that we've wanted to see the web2 internet world that just has not been able to be done. People are finding ways around this today, with the gaming example of selling my World of Warcraft account, at a certain level and people are finding ways to do a lot of this that they want to do already.
And I think it's kind of interesting that we're starting to get to a place where we can have some of this technology that powers a lot of it on the back end without you even needing to know.
Yeah. The interesting thing about this is that it's kind of an extension of the 721 spec, but it's not actually a direct implementation of it. It's a little more nuanced than that really. Because they're trying to maintain full backward compatibility so that even contracts that do not follow the 7 21 standard can actually be integrated with it.
So like crypto kitties, because crypto kitties existed before 721 was officially finalized and technically that one works. They do make a call that like crypto punks is not actually compatible because there's a very specific owner of method that they need to implement.
Apparently, it doesn't but there are, they call out that there could be modifications, minor modifications, but that's not the point of this proposal. So they're like, that's another time. But I think it's just really cool that they're trying to make it as flexible as possible without, reserving the right to Exclude some things just for complexity reasons.
I think just they also call it fraud some fraud issues of like, what if that account is drained or whatnot? So there will be a lot of extra security checks that need to be in place on marketplaces to ensure that. Somebody doesn't buy something that doesn't exist which is already, the case of like, you know, Runescape accounts World of Warcraft accounts, and all of those that people have already tried to sell and everything and people will buy something and then it gets drained before they even actually can change the login and whatnot. So yeah, it's definitely interesting and it's also a multi-chain. They're, they're, they have a chain ID in the spec so that you can actually use this across different chains and it still works for guaranteed uniqueness.
This is pretty interesting. Even thinking of the chain ID stuff, I think it also opens up the ability when you think about like bridging assets and things even more like that could start to get really, really interesting of like, you know, this token on a theorem owns an account, that has a polygon address that owns, all of these tokens on a polygon or something like that could be really, really interesting.
And especially around when you're starting to kind of layer in different you know, we want to use polygon or pick your layer two or arbitrum for in-game assets or for the high volume transaction kind of stuff. But we want. The kind of stalwart nature of Ethereum to be the core, character or the core, NFT or membership pass that you own.
I think that that opens up a really, a lot of really cool kind of opportunities are well as well around kind of cross-chain. Uniqueness, but, and it's been, it's been interesting though, just to see a lot of the folks that are kind of putting forth a lot of this proposal, like two of the folks, even the site to document from the manifold team and things.
So it's it's got a lot of weight and it's been exciting. There are some early players I've been seeing Playing with this and starting to use it, but I think we'll see it more and more in the coming months here
One other really big feels like we couldn't Record this podcast without talking about it just because it's all over the news lately is That earlier this month we had a partial crypto win with the court ruling in the ripple XRP case against the Court Southern District of New York ruled that the sale of the XRP token on an exchange and through a kind of different algorithms did not constitute as an investment contract and thus was not the selling of legal securities.
They did say that the original like ICO essentially and sales of the token could be construed as security. There's still some gray area there around if you're doing an ICO and making sure that like you're either selling to accredited investors or you go through the right processes to make sure that that is a registered security.
But I think for the general retail investor, crypto investor, and especially for the likes of Coinbase and things like that, if this is upheld, it's a really big deal where it's All of these coins that Coinbase is getting in trouble for selling on their exchange are not securities when they're being sold on an exchange.
And so regardless, we're also just seeing a lot of in congressional hearings and things like that, more push for needed and clear kind of regulation. So I just think this is a positive move and kind of the right direction for the U. S. Crypto regulation. And I think you know, we saw prices pump after this news, especially a ripple and lots of altcoins, but also into Bitcoin and things.
So those have leveled out, but you know, he naturally always sees that. With any big news like this, but in the sentiment of the web3 industry, at least it's been. A really big deal with at least all the folks that I've been talking to. What are your thoughts, Joel?
Well, what's interesting is the phrasing as is always true in any sort of legal dispute, but it's very clear that they wanted to be very specific and say that what is currently ongoing with XRP being bought and sold is not a problem.
It's the fact that it ever existed, which I think is actually still a problem. And still concerning because they're basically saying like, yeah, you're not allowed to register any of these, but like after they exist, sure, buying and selling is fine. But like what you did to create them is still illegal.
So that's still kind of like, okay, but there it exists. So now what are you going to do about, like, are you going to find them? Can you take them down at this point? Like it still just remains to be seen what they're actually going to do as a resolution of this, because if the problem was the creation, well, the way to undo the creation is to delete them.
But then at that point, it's like, you're now, I don't know, screwing everyone over that has been using them for the last bit and it's not their fault. It's not the consumer's fault that they launched this. It's good that no consumer is going to get in trouble for any of this, right?
For buying and selling unregistered securities. But still, I don't know if that is enough because then, it's still disincentivizes creators from doing it, which if it disincentivizes people to do it in a like rug fashion, But like even real people with good intentions, if they still don't get to do it because they're always worried about that, it disincentivizes innovation and creation.
There's still a lot of work to be done legally on this front. So I think it's, it's great. It's a step in the right direction, but we still need to figure out what else needs to be done here.
It's very weird that, like, we have to do all this jurisdictional work based on, different countries and states and everything, and, this is something that is intended to be, like, open and global, like, there needs to be a global discussion around it, not individual one. This is where I feel like the world needs to come together more like other global issues So I don't know, I think this is just one of those that we need to stop having internal conversations and start having more open conversations about it. It's a hard thing as always.
Oh yeah, I agree. And to your point, it doesn't necessarily provide any more clarity around if I am the individual launching a token, how do I do that in a new standard of digital assets and things? But I'm hoping that we get more of that by the end of this year, maybe then we need that so that we can stop disincentivizing people from leveraging this technology and kind of building on top of it.
So I completely agree.
Maybe just to, round us out here and come home. I just kind of wanted to give a shout-out to a cool project that I've been keeping my eyes on lately which is called Freeport. So freeport.app FREEPORT.app, which is a fractionalized art investment platform.
I recently got to meet their CEO and founder, And he's just an awesome guy and his background.
I had been following Freeport for some time. I am a big fan personally of, some of the companies that are trying to leverage this idea of fractionalized art. I mean, even back to Masterworks and Republic, doing some of this off like how do we democratize access to alternative investments? Basically.
Investing in art has been very closed-walled garden, for a very, very long time. And so I think anyone that's doing things in that front is really cool.
And then especially as there started to be some that were looking at doing this in a tokenized way, I became, you know, super interested in a lot of those projects. And so probably like the particle foundation was one of the first where they raised a good deal of money and purchased an original Banksy piece of art called love is in the air.
Which was graffiti on cement actually, and they, they purchased this and they ended up fractionalizing it out and turning them into NFTs and they launched the NFT originally on AVAX. I actually minted one of the original NFTs. I still hold that and it's probably one of my favorite NFTs that I own.
So I've been kind of keeping an eye on this space for quite some time around, democratizing access, but using on-chain provenance and ownership around fractionalized art. And so when I saw Freeport launching, I've been keeping an eye on them for a while. They have a handful of Andy Warhol paintings that they just recently opened up their sale for actually.
Each of them has like, I don't know, a thousand kinds of spots that they fractionalize these into. And you can buy them, they have one of the double Mickey's that's very iconic. And then also his. Marilyn Monroe's paintings, which is also incredibly iconic. Then a couple of other ones in this collection, but would definitely recommend checking it out.
The way that they're doing it is really, really interesting. It's a completely sec kind of qualified fractional share. So they have done the hard work of getting approval for the sec to tokenize these shares and go into the whole reg process. I'm pretty sure. They've got some really cool, exciting things kind of coming out in the future as well.
But just wanted to give kind of a shout-out to Freeport and kind of what they're doing. And I'm just a fan and I love this kind of new opportunity. Especially like if you go to the Freeport app, what I also love about it is. Nowhere in there does it talk about blockchain and web3, it's just an art investing platform.
And so it's super cool, how they're talking about it from a messaging and positioning perspective as well.
So what is it built on top of?
They're on top of Ethereum and kind of the backend, but. You pay with a credit card kind of all of that you can kind of go through the whole process without really even needing a wallet or knowing that's going on under the hood, which is really cool.
Colin's a really active participant in the Farcaster community and in the purple DAO. So that's actually how we got connected. It was, fun to see that and connect with him through purple. Then understand a little bit more about what they're doing at Freeport, which is super exciting.
The interesting thing about their business is that they are spinning up a lot of LLCs to manage all of this. Which is from like a legal perspective. On top of all of the building on a theorem, they're also like spinning up an individual LLC that, that is actually the owner of each of these pieces of artwork.
And then selling basically interest in that LLC, which is pretty interesting.
Yeah, exactly. It's very, very similar to if anyone's familiar with like Republic, Republic. co which is a crowdfunding, basically an investment platform for investing in startups. And then they also have opportunities to invest in real estate.
I think they might even do some art now as well, but they take the same kind of approach and it's like using a lot of that crowdfunding bill that passed not too long ago that you can raise up to, I think 5 million or something like that through crowdfunding from unaccredited investors and things.
So it's using some of that where like, technically you're kind of an investor in this LLC that owns the, Andy Warhol owns like a portion of the Andy Warhol painting. And so they've got a lot of traditional kind of art collectors backing them and kind of working with them, which is also pretty cool.
It is interesting. They actually have a way of re-issuing tokens and burning the existing ones. If you lose access to your wallet through their support, I did not see that, which is interesting. And that is one of those that's like not anti web Or anti the whole public and I own it if they can actually burn them and reissue them. It's interesting but from a like formal legal secure or safe way. If they're deemed lost stolen or otherwise inaccessible like lose access we actually we do have a way of recovering that. That is very much unlike everything and everything else in web3.
I mean they do say like we strongly suggest that you maintain your private keys properly, but they do have a way of recovering it.
I don't know if there's a cost to doing it or anything.
They also are like going through full KYC and stuff like that too. So, you know, even if you're not, an accredited investor and things like that, they're still going through the KYC process. Then you can come back and kind of verify your physical identity a little bit more, you know, than just with my keys.
Because of that, probably they have some extra standards that they're held to from like even terms and sales perspective of like what you owe a consumer and things, which is really interesting.
But I'm excited, I ended up picking up some of the shares of the Maryland Andy Warhol painting as well. So I am pumped for that.
And with that, I will wrap us up for episode 13 of the HODL podcast. Thank you all for sticking with us. And if you want to learn more about Holder, you can just go to holder.xyz. And with that, we are signing off.
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