NFT Labs Talk: Conversation with the Lead Author of ERC-721 Standard William Entriken — The Zooming Out
NFT Labs: Do we need other blockchains other than Ethereum? If not, what do we need?
WWe just need the movement of the tokens. Or the loan is secured or not, that’s about it. So blockchain is very mature. There’s really not that much more you need to add and when we’ve got all these different blockchains competing with each other. They’re all just copies of Ethereum. Then we’ve got other ones that aren’t copies of Ethereum and there’s zero traction on them and they wonder why. It’s just because we have enough blockchain.
Now we need more scalability and so there’s several solutions to that which one will win and the others won’t. And that’s where we are with technology. So technology is basically a solved problem at this point aside from scalability, aside from choosing which scalable solution we want. Everything from now on is advocacy. We just need to explain these things to people we don’t need new contracts. You can use the reference implementation of ERC-721 and ERC-1155. Something like uniswap is an important one you can just take these and just use them forever.
NFT Labs: How do you use it for Pharma? Is blockchain ready for Pharma?
Pharma just needs to track these things, so everything that they’re doing is downstream from the blockchain.
Pharma is using it so Merck Animal Health, which is part of Merck announced that they’re using this in production, not like a test like actual production for animal vaccines or antibiotic. So there’s animal vaccine. You shoot the animal and then it tracks the quantity available through the supply-chain of where it is. And this is already done on blockchain with NFTS. The only thing is they elected moved to Ethereum mainnet which is extremely expensive. So they’re using a rollup or some technology like a rollup, it would be the path for that. But there’s no more that we need to do except inspire people and show them the path, so this is always been my role which are workshops, advisory and showing what’s possible and then these discussions.
Because we’re done, you know, these things work, they’re ready to go. They’re immutable, they’re transparent. They solve the specific problem that they have and if you want to use it. You just use it.
To be honest, the tokens are the most important part , I mean, we just want to know who owns what? Then we got a couple of rules around it. When are you allowed to get the things and then we have a couple rules around. Who’s allowed to access things kind of like a towel or like a key escrow? That’s it. Everything else are just details. Yeah, everything else is just pretty pictures and those are great. They add a lot of value. But they’re not really the smart contract stuff, yeah, and you could do that elsewhere.
Yeah, it’s not just me. Thanks for all being inspired together. You’re changing the world by teaching people. ‘Cause I was changing the world by writing articles. You know every time you teach that’s 10 times more people. So I’m starting with a few people and then we had hundreds and thousands and millions you’re doing the work so you’re doing more.
NFT Labs: How do you think and estimate the whole NFT market capitalization?
I mean NFT’s trading has already past a billion dollars a week. I agree that is about how much these are art houses have been traded for 200 years. Sotheby’s and Christies now there’s a big one in China. In 4 years, we’ve surpassed all of them. So there’s not that much growth left. There’s not going to be another thousand times growth after that. You know, we can’t make a $50 trillion market in artwork, because there’s just not that much money on Earth. We’re already in many billions of dollars. We don’t have another room for thousand X growth over the next 3 years. So for the growth, it obviously won’t slow down and has already been the number one place for artwork on earth. So there’s not much room left to go in terms of art and money, in terms of market places. You can go up another 10 times or 100 times but not a thousand times.
NFT Labs: Then, what’s next?
But this other use cases are way larger than our work. Imagine 10 years ago, you were talking to your grandma, she said the art world is going to take over the world. And you said, well, we’re going to take over the manufacturing or something. So that’s where we are, that’s where the growth is. But manufacturing is not going to be like a thousand extra turns on NFTs. They’re just going to be implementations. These other applications will be very different than the art world.
NFT Labs: Is there a market for splitting the copyrights of NFT?
We’re talking about securities. I agree there’s room for that market. But what I’m trying to tell you is that you can buy CryptoPunk and somebody else can buy it for twice as much money and then you make a profit. I agree the amount of growth that is attached to these type of products. The way that CryptoPunks encrypted cookies might’ve been yeah, yeah, I agree. So it grows in volume, but not in profit.
That’s just the normal part of the innovation curve so the early adopters get a lot of profit. There’s a lot left to do. There’s a lot more going to work on. But it’s not going to be as investable or it’s going to be a lot more common. And it’s going to be just something everybody uses. So it will get less exciting as time goes on which is fine.
NFT Labs: How will NFT make the world a little different?
I’m happy with that because when you’re changing the world. Yet, people don’t notice it. The technology that happened is going to forget about me, They’re going to forget about NFT. And they’re just going to know that when you buy stuff. It’s not fake when you trade things you know it’s real. When you buy something you know who created it. These will just be things in the future. Right now, you buy things you have no idea where the stuff is made. It says made in China. It’s not made in China. It was assembled in China. It was made in Switzerland or Africa and then they moved it to China, they assembled it there.
In the future, it will just have a little bit more visibility into where it’s made and who makes it and other attestations.
It says my lip balm is made by shea butter? Does it actually contains shea butter? I don’t know. But in the future, we should be able to verify it. We will solve these problems by using blockchain tech.
Allergic people will forget the technology, but the technology helps.
（This interview is published by two sections, if you haven’t read the first one, here is the link: The Zooming In — — the Degen Story of the Initiation for ERC-721 Standard Writing and its applying to Pharma）
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