How Village Roadshow & Other Big Brands are Embracing Web3 with Rick Junnier, Blocktrust

Transcript

Nick Abrahams:

Hello everyone, and welcome again to the show. Today, I am absolutely delighted to welcome Rick Junnier, who is the Head of Growth at BlockTrust. Rick, welcome to the show.

Rick Junnier:

Thanks, Nick. Great to be here.

Nick Abrahams:

And now, BlockTrust. We see a lot of BlockTrust popping up these days, as mainstream organizations seek to embrace Web3. Can you give us a bit of a sense regarding what is BlockTrust? What’s the history there and size and those things?

Rick Junnier:

Yeah, a good place to start. BlockTrust, we’ve been around about two years now. We were principally founded by two guys, Mike Alexander and Mike Haywood, the Mikes, and where they come from and where we all come from is really important to our story and really to what we think is our value proposition. Mike Alexander is a former CEO of Jefferies Bank. So, 35 years in investment banking and…

Nick Abrahams:

It’s a natural segue from investment banking.

Rick Junnier:

Yeah, exactly.

Rick Junnier:

That’s right. And then through some investments that he made, ended up being a part of the EO’s ICO back in the day. If you don’t know that story, they raised $4.2 billion.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah, that was enormous.

Rick Junnier:

Yeah. The problem with that is that Mike as an investment banker said, “Hey, hang on a second here. There’s no ‘there’ there.” Mike stepped in and became CEO of that business and then proceeded to invest about a billion dollars of those funds in Web3 companies around the world. And so, Mike went around and saw about 2000 Web3 companies and made significant investments in a lot of the brands that we know today, whether that’s Axie Infinity, ImmutableX, Polygon, et cetera. Mike has a long background and deep understanding of Web3 and the use cases there, but also a really deep appreciation about the risks that come with building in Web3, particularly for brands. That’s really where the trust comes from is that we only work with large brands and as we say, we like to protect the brand at all costs. So, we’re really focused on things around risk, compliance, KYC, AML, payment rails, et cetera. We speak big brands and when we do the program, some of which we’ll talk about later, we make sure that everybody’s in the room: the board, the general counsel, the ceo, et cetera.

Mike Haywood, he founded LiveHire, an ASX listed company, a SaaS company, but also had employed some Web3 technology back in the day. You could think of it as a talent wallet. Basically, everybody who has their wallet with the talents that they have in it, employers will then validate that those talents exist and essentially remove the requirement to go check references and to test for capabilities because if somebody’s validated in the wallet, then it’s true. So, those guys got together during COVID and shared their experiences and as true believers in Web3 also thought brands need a lot of help with this. How can we take advantage of the things that Web3 provides, but to do so in a way that manages the risk and the compliance around Web3 to protect the brands? That’s where we come from and the team that we build are all of 20, 25 years of experience and everything from brand strategy, technology, legal compliance, finance as well. We also do a lot of tokenomic modeling for organizations, which CFOs love in particular.

So, we’ve created this fantastic team of individuals that know how to work with boards and senior executives. And then, we’re building a white label Web3 technology stack that’s basically off-the-shelf, Web3 is a service, if you will, wallet digital marketplace, and we’ll talk a little bit more as we go, but also things like gamification, loyalty engines, all the things that big brands are going to need to stand up to connect with their customers, to create community, to drop tokens, to manage tokens, and then to drive loyalty within the community using tokens and smart contracts. At this stage, we’re a bit of professional services helping brands think about how do we translate our corporate strategy into a Web3 strategy, but also a pure play Web3 technology company as well.

Nick Abrahams:

It’s so refreshing to hear that because well, I guess, one of the themes that keeps coming out as we talk to big brands who are embracing Web3 is they are looking for enterprise grade vendors and technology solutions. That’s been I think a maturity step for the Web3 world over the last 18 months or so, whereas before, that’s very much a cottage industry. Now, organizations like yours seem to be being able to give that level of comfort to big brands that they can set off on this journey, which is not without risk, but they can do it in a way with enterprise grade solutions.

Rick Junnier:

That’s right.

Nick Abrahams:

What’s been your experience with brands, I guess, over the last year in terms of the level of interest? Have you experienced a significant growth in that interest in getting involved in Web3?

Rick Junnier:

Yes. A lot of interest, a lot of caution as well. [inaudible 00:07:03]-

Nick Abrahams:

Cautious interest.

Rick Junnier:

Yeah. A lot of-

Nick Abrahams:

Don’t want to get too carried away, which is good. You don’t want to be the person who took people into a disastrous second lifestyle experiment that burnt a lot of money.

Rick Junnier:

Yeah, especially because we’ve been saying for a long time that we think of the web in three different phases. But I think you can probably think of tokens in the same way in that when they first started out, like a CryptoPunks or a Bored Ape Yacht Club, it was really around value created by scarcity. I mean, there’s certainly buzz in community. Some of the things around community and a lot of them are scrambling to now add what we view as the second phase of NFTs or tokens, which is utility like, “Oh my gosh, a picture of something, even if there’s only 10,000 of them, isn’t really worth much. And so, let’s add some utility around that.”

Nick Abrahams:

Rick, don’t let the degens hear you say that.

Rick Junnier:

Yeah, I know.

Rick Junnier:

Well, I think there’s certainly value and they forged the way for all of us to understand what’s possible here. I’ve got a whole bunch of these things myself. And so, I’m a recovering degen [inaudible 00:08:34]. But for brands, for them, it very much is, how do we bring on mass adoption into Web3 and how do we help people to want to have these things? Because they’re nervous. Consumers are nervous about making investments in tokens and NFTs that they’re going to lose their money on. We think that the third phase is really around how do you create value in the context of fandom and loyalty, meaning NFTs and tokens get you access to things that you otherwise couldn’t get access to and ideally, in real-life experiences that brands can uniquely provide to their customers and to their fans.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah. Well, we might get onto that in just a moment. Just to get a bit of a sense as to how BlockTrust fits into the ecosystem, your website talks about the complete turnkey solution, which sounds very attractive because one of the things that I’ve seen with big organizations is they’ve got a creative agency who’s got a technical capability that they hire in from somewhere and so forth. It’s all a bit of a mishmash. What’s the proposition of BlockTrust to a big brand looking to invest in Web3?

Rick Junnier:

Yeah. So, it almost starts with education. We’re running, probably averaging three or four, what we call master classes a week right now.

Nick Abrahams:

Wow.

Rick Junnier:

Yeah. Those are with boards and executive teams around the world. Usually, we’ll start with either a CEO or a chief marketing officer reaching out through their network or to some of our customers to say, “Hey, you guys have done something that seems really interesting here. Who did you work with? How did you get here?” And so, they come to us. Before we really start talking about what’s possible and all the things that you could go off and do in Web3, let’s make sure that everybody’s who’s going to be a part of this program for it to be successful, first, is on the same page around, what is this? Where did it come from? We go through this process of talking about, what was Web1? Forget about what’s Web3, what was Web1 and what was Web2? That’s really the only way to get to why does Web3 matter as you go on that journey.

So, we take them on that journey. We talk about the blockchain, where it came from, what it is, level one, level two. We go through all of that. We talk about the Metaverse, what it is, what it’s not, what we think it might be. We talk about this concept of value in the context of fandom and loyalty. We spend a couple of hours with executive teams going through this. We then give them a bunch of homework because 95% of them, they don’t have wallets. They’ve never bought crypto. They don’t have any NFTs. And so, we give them a homework, which is really a recipe guide for how to enter Web3 safely, give them a couple of challenges, so they go off and they go through that experience. We then run another, anywhere from hour to a couple of hours, depending on how many questions there are, what we call the dumb question session because like all of us that went into Web3, we’re all just rummaging around trying to figure out what this is.

Nick Abrahams:

You feel a bit ashamed about what it is that you don’t know and you’re like, “Who am I going to ask?” It feels a bit tight, the community and so forth. It can be quite difficult to break into that community. Some folks are a little bit looking down on folks if you don’t get it as such. So, it’s a brilliant idea.

Rick Junnier:

If you’re a CEO of a ASX company, who do you turn to, to get advice in understanding about what this is? For many of them, they can’t even ask their CIO, right?

Nick Abrahams:

Right.

Rick Junnier:

Yeah, they’re probably going to get the best answers from their kids. We run this dumb question session, and then after that, once everybody’s armed and the ideas are flowing, we then run an ideation session, have a structure to that. So as you think about all the different things that you can do with your brand, let’s start to get those onto paper. Then we build out this Web3 vision. We could launch NFTs, we could do fan tokens, we could do fantasy gaming, we could do a Metaverse play, et cetera. We just get all of that out, we map all of that out, get everybody really excited about what’s possible.

The really important thing for brands is to make sure that the first step into Web3 feels like an extension of the brand because many brands, they want to do something, we can talk about why that is, in Web3. They’re just not sure how and they’re afraid that if they do, do something that their market share is just going to plummet. They’re going to get a bunch of bad press around it. They’re trying to avoid that. Many brands have spent years and years and years and millions of dollars building their brand to be a trusted brand, then to move into this space and to get it wrong, it’s deeply problematic for executives. We also go through this process to say, “What is your brand? What are your brand attributes? What is your strategy? Let’s talk a little bit about your customers and your customer segments. Let’s talk about within those customer segments, who are going to be your early adopters? So, where do you start versus where do you build to?”

We talked about the Cricket Australia program, when we were working with them, we said, “What’s your sweet spot?” They said, “People, 35 to 50 years old.” We said, “Okay, well, people that are 35 to 50 years old aren’t going to get into NFTs. So, let’s talk about other customer segments.” They said, “Well, boys and girls who play cricket.” We said, “Bingo.” Boys and girls who play cricket are also playing Roblox. And so, they understand what Web3 is and they understand the role of technology in their life. They’re also buying cricket player cards at the news agency. And so if we can just digitize those, we can give some exciting benefits to those. And then you have a kid who says, “Hey dad, I got the Pat Cummins card, but I also get to go have lunch with him,” or, “I get to go meet him.” And then, dad’s going to say, “What? How did that happen? How can I get me some of that?”

We also talk to brands about what’s the right place to start? What’s the offering that you provide to each of these segments? And then, we go through a process of understanding what technology they already have, what communities do they already have. How are those communities performing? And then, we figure out what is that right first step into Web3. We like to start small, we like to test, we like to learn, and we like to build over time with the brand. That’s the whole process that we use to take brands on the journey. Some brands, when we get to the end of it, we just say, “Yeah, there’s not really ‘there’ there right now. Maybe, we wait a bit.” They need to go away and do some soul searching on their side, but we give them a really clear view as to what’s possible and help them think about what they need to manage in order for a program to be successful.

We can then deliver all that. We’ve got the technology platform, as I said. We can integrate with all the systems as well. We work with marketing teams, we work with branding teams. We can partner with brands, creative agencies. So, we can play any different role that we need to play. We can do the whole turnkey thing. We can act as advisor. We’re advising a lot of brands on this. We’re writing RFPs to build consortiums, or we can do the whole turnkey thing. At the end of the day, we think that Web3 and the associated technologies will change the world, much like Web2 did and the social communities that Twitter and Instagram and all those companies have built. We believe that this is the opportunity for brands to create and own that community for themselves. We’re deeply passionate about it, and so what we really care about is how can we help brands go on this journey and do it safely and also be successful in starting the journey.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah. I love particularly the analysis you did there around who are the customers, because the folks that come in and they’ve got a lot of off-chain customers and it’s like, “Well, who’s going to buy that NFT?” I mean, you’ve got a lot of people there who don’t have wallet. You’ve got this massive barrier. So, it makes great sense. You’ve got some great brands on the client list. Maybe, could we kick off with Village Roadshow and how you helped out those folks?

Rick Junnier:

Maybe, let’s before I answer that question take one step back, and then we’ll take a couple jumps forward.

Nick Abrahams:

Sure.

Rick Junnier:

When we talk to brands, we like to think of Web3 strategy as having four layers of the pyramid. The base layer is community. It all starts with community and this is a major tenet of Web3. It’s all about the community. Now, a big part of the community is taking back the community that now lives on Instagram and Twitter and YouTube and a lot of these Web2 communities. And so for brands, they’re spending increasing amounts of money to talk to their community and getting diminishing returns from that. They’re also then having to pay for that data to access that. And so for a brand, you can spend millions of dollars a year and a lot of people that actually follow you won’t see that content, even though you’re paying to try to get it out there. If you’re on Instagram or Twitter, there’s just so much coming at you at all times.

So, the first part is to build that community and that community is also going to give you that first party data. Cookies are going away, social networks are throttling access. So, brands are just craving this first party data. Community is that first base layer that we like to build. That could start with somebody buying an NFT and then that’s the start of their community. For many, we’re just releasing a fan token. For most brands, you won’t see us talk about NFTs or tokens or Web3 or any of that. It’s get the app and buy the thing. For most of the brands, we start all of them in Fiat. You use a credit card. That’s how you get started because NFT is a bad word and…

Nick Abrahams:

Oh, yes.

Rick Junnier:

I don’t know about you, but when people are like, “Oh, what do you do?” I’m like, “Oh, I work in Web3,” they’re like, “Oh, NFTs. Great. You’re one of those guys.”

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah. Oh no, there’s a lot of bad blood out there around that. We’re starting to see that term change, aren’t we? Digital collectibles and so forth.

Rick Junnier:

That’s right.

Nick Abrahams:

There’s a lexicon that’s now developing, so we don’t have to say those letters.

Rick Junnier:

That’s right. So, we like to start with that community piece. Next layer is ownership. Ownership’s really important. Psychologically, when we own a part of the brand, if we own a player card or… We’re building programs with some very large retailers, particularly like bottle shops. Then we’re partnering with FMCG producers where when you go into the bottle shop and you buy whatever you like, you get an NFT. That NFT could be a bottle of wine, it could be a case of beer. You build out your virtual cellar or your virtual brewery, and then we gamify that. If you build that out, then you can get access to winery tours or a free case of beer. So, ownership is really important. Again, ownership is one of the major tenets of Web3, this idea that I can own a digital asset.

Nick Abrahams:

Absolutely.

Rick Junnier:

It’s an opportunity to create loyalty because at the end of the day, ownership is an exchange of value between the person that produced it and the person that owns it. That’s really important for loyalty. So, ownership is that next layer. The third layer is engagement, and this is really where more tokens come in: loyalty tokens, proof of attendance tokens, proof of authenticity, proof of participation, proof of purchase, those tokens that allow people to be recognized for my participation in the community and to be able to level that up. The top layer is loyalty. If you build the community, you engage the community, they feel like they own a part of the community, own a part of the brand, they’re being recognized for their participation in the community, then we provide them benefits and rewards based on their participation. Ideally, these are in real-life experiences that money can’t buy. This isn’t the classic spend more money to get a coupon to save money [inaudible 00:23:50]-

Nick Abrahams:

Right. So, it’s not 10% off.

Rick Junnier:

That’s right.

Nick Abrahams:

[inaudible 00:23:52] pay customers.

Rick Junnier:

That’s right because-

Nick Abrahams:

It’s [inaudible 00:23:55].

Rick Junnier:

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, loyalty programs don’t drive loyalty. I don’t know about you. I have a loyalty program with all the airlines and all the retailers, and so that doesn’t necessarily drive my loyalty. I go to the nearest shop based on what I need more often than not. So, you just-

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah, and you just collect the loyalty points and you use them, but it’s all by happenstance. It doesn’t drive you to behave in a certain way.

Rick Junnier:

Yeah, that’s right. You can’t spend them either. You can’t spend loyalty in other ways. Now, some loyalty programs have developed partnerships with other loyalty programs, but we see a future where there’s this really interesting dynamic of being able to spend your loyalty tokens wherever you want. Those are the four layers: community, ownership, engagement, and loyalty.

Then if we go back to your other questions, when we look at Village Roadshow and we say to brands, “What are you trying to solve? Let’s start there. What are your problems? What are your opportunities? And then, let’s talk about if Web3 can solve or not. Why hasn’t the stack of technology that you already have solved the problem? And then, why Web3?” We’re just always asking that. We’re not the Web3 hammer looking for a nail. With Village Roadshow, we’re doing a few really fun things there. First is get your Village Roadshow key, which is really just to get your free token, your free Village Roadshow app. If you go to one of the theme parks, then we can airdrop in an NFT into your wallet. They’re launching a new ride called the Leviathan here shortly, and so-

Nick Abrahams:

Sounds appropriately scary.

Rick Junnier:

Yeah, that’s right. And so, we can drop in the Leviathan card into your wallet. That Leviathan card will start off as an egg and then the more you ride, that NFT will dynamically grow into a number of different kinds of leviathans. And then as you get more mature, all benefits are going to then start to show up in your wallet. That might be free merchandise. It could be free food and beverage. It could be free tickets to another park. The other thing that this allows us to do for many brands is start to drive some of this crosspollination across the number of brands that they have, once they understand customers and their preferences, and be able to skip the queue for these rides.

Nick Abrahams:

Fantastic.

Rick Junnier:

Yeah. With Village Roadshow then, it’s about them understanding everybody who comes into the park. We’re working with museums, we’re working with some big events that are coming up. We work with a number of different sporting codes. There’s a difference between the people that buy the tickets and the people that actually show up. The people that actually show up, you don’t really know who they are. You don’t really know what their preferences are either. And so with something like the Village Roadshow key, when somebody comes to the park, they download the app, they ride all the rides, we reward them for that.

In the future, we also might do things like scavenger hunt around the park that allows them to redirect traffic, because everybody’s going to want to ride the Leviathan. So, what if we were to drop something into somebody’s wallet that says, “Hey, go over here because you can get this benefit.” [inaudible 00:27:50] is also a really exciting part of what we’re doing as well. You can think about really interesting use cases for this in retail, where suddenly we can create a lot of excitement about aisle six, which from a retail perspective, aisle six isn’t worth very much. All of the most valuable real estate is at the end of the aisle. And so, we can also do really interesting things that allow brands to drive traffic flow within their venues or within their retail footprints. A lot of really interesting things coming there.

Nick Abrahams:

Oh, that’s amazing. On the Village Roadshow solution, just in terms of the user experience, because obviously, setting up an NFT wallet is a bit of a hassle, but the way you’re doing this is you just download the Village Roadshow app and it’s all in the app. So, you don’t have to have a separate NFT wallet as such?

Rick Junnier:

Yeah, no NFT wallet. You just get the app, and then we just collect a little bit of KYC information and then we’re off. They don’t know that they’re using a blockchain. They don’t know that it’s an NFT. Very straightforward. And then normally, what we’ll do with these kind of loyalty programs is we like to get as many people in as we can. The first step is free, just get them in the door. Then from there, you can start to gamify the levels. The more you ride, the higher levels you go. You can buy your way to different levels as well, or we can ask for them to reveal some of their personally identifiable information, so we can start to put two and two together, understand more about the customer or the fan.

And then, this is where the big data play is that we view tokens as… you can think of them as in real life cookies, meaning that when you browse all over the website, all over the internet, you’re getting cookies dropped here and there, and then ads start to pop up and say, “Hey, would you like this, or would you like that?” Now, I’m not sure about you, but most of those ads are weird and wrong for [inaudible 00:30:13].

Nick Abrahams:

Or relate to something you’ve already bought.

Rick Junnier:

Yeah, that’s right. That’s my [inaudible 00:30:17].

Nick Abrahams:

You buy one vacuum cleaner, all of a sudden, they think you’re in the business of collecting vacuum cleaners.

Rick Junnier:

Yeah, that’s right. For one of the airline programs I’m a part of, they keep sending me offers for a blender. It’s like, they must think I need [inaudible 00:30:31].

Nick Abrahams:

You love blenders.

Rick Junnier:

Love blenders. You need five at least. So we view those as in real life cookies, meaning that for let’s say, Cricket Australia, we’re also doing their program, we can understand who comes to the games, who watches the games. We can put a QR code on the Boxing Day test match, and if you scan it, then you get this. That tells us who they are. If they’re buying merchandise, then we can understand what merch they like. If they’re buying player cards, we understand who their favorite players are.

If they’re participating in the community, let’s say, discord, we can connect into that as well and really get a complete picture about behaviors and preferences of customers. This is where the loyalty engine piece comes in I was talking about earlier, we can then use those data to provide at scale very bespoke and personalized offers to consumers, and then we can measure the uptake of the offer. That becomes really powerful then for sponsors. We’re also doing the NBL program. We’ve got a few more here that aren’t public quite yet, but this is really exciting for sporting codes because they can go to their sponsors and they can say, “In the past, you could take your ticket stub and go get X and neither the ticketing company, the sporting code, or the sponsor knew if that was effective at all.”

Nick Abrahams:

Oh, really?

Rick Junnier:

Yeah.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah, those promotions.

Rick Junnier:

There’s no way to complete the loop there. But with blockchain, we can really measure that. It allows us to create new revenue streams for brands, because if they own the community, it’s like they own their own Facebook. If Facebook is a community and Facebook understands their users and they understand the user preferences and profiles that they can then target ads into, then why can’t big brands with millions and millions or billions of customers do the same thing? So revenue generation is part of this, but you have to build that over time. When we work with brands, we don’t advocate doing a big NFT drop and making a bunch of money. Now certainly, you can generate new revenue streams through the sales of NFTs, but this is much more of a long play and certainly an opportunity for brands to have a number of different revenues, to generate new streams of perpetual royalties.

Nick Abrahams:

Yup. It’s quite a different way for brands to think about their customer base though, isn’t it? To think about them as communities. I feel like previously, brands have thought about customers as customers and there’s segmentation and so forth. But actually, the ability to bring a community together and to foster that community, are you seeing that as being a bit of a shift in the thinking of CMOs?

Rick Junnier:

Yeah, there’s this idea and it’s funny because when we run these masterclasses, it’s just amazing to watch the penny drop for…

Nick Abrahams:

I bet, yeah.

Rick Junnier:

For executives where they just put their hands on their head and they go, “Wait a second, what you’re saying is that I can have my own community that we own, and then I get all the first party data associated with that community and I can speak directly to them and I can understand their preferences and I can understand their behaviors, and then instead of using all of this money out into the internet, shouting into the void, I can think of this differently. Let me take a piece of that…” To be fair, the Web2 social networks will continue to be a part of our future. They’re not going away. They’re actually a wonderful customer acquisition channel and brands should continue to spend money there.

But what that allows them to do is to say, “Well, now I can spend a certain percentage of money on acquisition, and then I can spend another portion of that on my existing customers and driving growth within the customers that I have, and then measuring the uptake of what we’re offering those customers.” So, they get really excited about that. And then, CIOs put their hands on their head and they say, “Wait a second, you’re telling me that we don’t have to worry about data security anymore?” We can talk about why, but Web3 provides this opportunity for brands to get that risk off of their risk profile by getting all of this stuff onto the blockchain and allowing people to be personally responsible for their personal information.

Nick Abrahams:

Obviously, it’s a massive opportunity for more data on potential customers and so forth. What’s happening with actually getting that data into a format that you can actually use and interrogate? Are there businesses that will pump that direct into the CRM and you get that view of the customer, or is that going to be a pure play CRM proposition?

Rick Junnier:

Oh boy, that’s a huge opportunity.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah. Well, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. It just strikes me as we’re getting all this data, but existing CRMs, as great as they are, don’t necessarily have that channel. Anyway…

Rick Junnier:

Yeah, that’s a huge opportunity. When you think about how does the world work today, the world works by advertising on social media, desperately trying to find people to get some information and data about them, to put those into a marketing automation solution, to then market to them usually via email, which we’re all trying to unsubscribe and [inaudible 00:37:19] those emails, and then hopefully, to get them into a CRM where we can continue to collect data about them. That’s all going to completely change with these communities. And so, a big part of what we’re building into the platform is this data analytics feature. There’s a couple of tools out there, but like many things in Web3, they’re quite immature. Part of what we’re building is this, how do you… You can’t look into the wallets, because this is into the personally identifiable information of your customers, unless they choose to reveal that.

You can certainly see everything on the blockchain and the loyalty engine, which has a bunch of machine learning in it as well. If I know that, Nick, you have all these behaviors and I have a long history of who you are, and then I come along and I start to look a little bit like Nick, it’s going to start to test offers based on my behaviors. If I nibble on those breadcrumbs, it’s going to start to automatically segment me and to start to provide those bespoke offers to me without marketers really having to get involved. What this allows marketers to do is to think about, what are my segments, what are the offers that I want to try and test with them and then let the machine work in the background, and then to be able to see the analytics on all that. How effective is that? What are people buying? What are they not buying? What are they selling? How much are they selling it for? Those kinds of questions, but a huge area of opportunity there.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah. I’m very conscious of time. Maybe, just one last use case. I know we can’t talk about brands and so forth, but some of the work that you’re doing in the fashion space sounded fascinating.

Rick Junnier:

We’ve seen the Guccis and the fashion world’s really taking this on and a lot of the things they’ve done, I’d characterize as more brand building. Standing up a store or an experience in the Metaverse could be on brand for some brands and certainly in the fashion industry, doing digital wearables and things like that. Being able to wear, I don’t know, an Alexander McQueen outfit into the Metaverse could be very much on brand with them. But when we talked to the fashion industry, the thing that we heard, number one is counterfeiting is a huge problem. And so, how do we combat that? The second thing is that the secondhand luxury goods market is about a $70 billion per year industry and the people that are mostly winning there, again, are the Web2, the eBays, of the world.

What we’re building there, number one is a certificate of authenticity NFT. We have a technology that as these products are coming off of the floor, we take an 8K high definition image of it. We can get down to the pattern of the leather, where it crosses the button, so we get a digital fingerprint of every item. We then link that to an NFT. So early next year, with a number of big fashion houses that we use this technology, you’ll get a certificate of authenticity with it. That’s number one. Number two is that these big brands don’t know who their customers are. Let’s say, if I buy my wife a handbag for Christmas, I’ll probably buy that from a David Jones. David Jones, they know who I am, but they don’t know that my wife has the handbag and the manufacturer certainly doesn’t know who my wife is.

And so to be able to register that certificate of authenticity, and obviously we’re working through, well, what utility comes along with that to incentivize my wife to register the certificate of authenticity. And then let’s say, she gets tired of that and wants to sell it. Then we’re creating a marketplace where people who want to resell their luxury goods can do that. It gives the buyer confidence that it is an authentic product, and then it gives the brands that secondary revenue from the $70 billion a year market. And then, it allows them to connect with the secondary buyer as well.

Nick Abrahams:

Perfect.

Rick Junnier:

Then they own the community. They know everybody who owns their product, and then they can start to talk to that community about new products that are coming out. They can start to get a profile of who are the people that buy our secondary products, and can we start to move them into buying our primary products? Yeah, really interesting use case for Web3 and one we’re excited to get announced and launched early next year.

Nick Abrahams:

Oh, it’s a fantastic story. I think a lot of people, with blockchain particularly, it was always like this solution in search of a problem. Now, weirdly with digital assets and NFT technology, we’re seeing a lot of big companies actually embracing blockchain and so forth. That’s been fantastic. Rick, I’m entirely conscious we’ve gone on for a long time. I’ve taken a lot of your time. Were there any other particular examples you wanted to give or [inaudible 00:43:26].

Rick Junnier:

Well, I can go on all day. I love this topic.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah. Why don’t we call it quits then? I feel like there could be follow-ups as you release all of these fascinating new technologies and solutions into market. I hope this isn’t the last time we speak, Rick, but thank you very much for spending the time with us today. I guess, if people in organizations are thinking about Web3 and so forth, maybe just some final thoughts, some examples? I mean, who does BlockTrust… What sort of organization? I get the sense it’s very big brands would be coming your way, but is there any sage advice that you would give big organizations and CMOs looking into the space?

Rick Junnier:

Well, it’s certainly a very exciting opportunity. I guess, the advice that we say to all brands is really start small. Really ground yourself and your customers and what they want. Obviously, be careful not to create financial assets that are going to create issues for both the brand but also customers. We’re here to help. My whole day is talking about these things with CMOs, heads of strategies, CEOs, and boards. And so, we deeply understand the interests, the risks, and I think we’ve got some great processes that many brands are using to navigate this, to find out what that bullseye is for them in terms of that small first step into Web3.

Nick Abrahams:

Yeah, terrific. Rick, your energy, enthusiasm, and proven expertise has been fantastic. Thank you very much for spending time with us today.

Rick Junnier:

Thanks, Nick. Talk soon.