How to Actually Mint an NFT. Interview with Roy Hui, Founder of Pellar

Transcript

Nick Abrahams:
Welcome, everyone. I am delighted to be joined today by Roy Hui, who’s the founder at Pellar. Roy, welcome to the show.

Roy Hui:
Thanks for having me, Nick. Pleasure’s all mine.

Nick Abrahams:
Very kind. Well, Roy, we’ve known each other for a very long time. We go all the way back to dot-com days almost. So you’ve obviously been an incredibly successful serial entrepreneur. Maybe a little backstory, the Roy story. How did you get to where you are now, with Pellar being one of the key technology service providers, to particularly the NFT world?

Roy Hui:
Yeah. Interesting question. I don’t think I am that successful, but I think I definitely have the scars to show for it.

Nick Abrahams:
You’ve had a number of businesses, for sure.

Roy Hui:
That’s right. That’s right. And I think every failure or experience makes you a little bit stronger for the next journey.

Nick Abrahams:
That’s true.

Roy Hui:
So I would consider myself as an engineer. I have a computer science background, and always super fascinated about technology, emergent technology, cutting edge technologies. So I have this belief of, instead of waiting for something to happen, you should make it happen. You should participate. There’s no-one better than you to try to make things happen. So I think that’s the common element with a lot of things that I have done over the years. I think originally when you and I met, Nick, we were building a video gaming social network, and that was really before the word social network exists. So connecting people, adding gamification elements, introducing new media, the whole Web 2 days. And that was really exciting and interesting, but we just couldn’t figure out how to monetize it.

Roy Hui:
And I think today there’s a whole different channel of monetization enriching that community, which I think eventually we’ll definitely get to in the context of this call. And over the years, I’ve certainly tried to make things happen rather than waiting for things to happen. And that’s actually what came about in 2017, when friends of mine asked me if we can help them with a crypto capability. So I think even during the gaming days, Bitcoin was around, so I bought a few to… Essentially incentivizing our community administrators. And I’ve been super fascinated by the technology from an infrastructure technical application perspective. And when the ICO boom happened in 2017, we decided to go full steam ahead into this new craziness, that I think hasn’t really stopped yet. Really saw crypto being the future of money, and that has kept… It has definitely been really, really exciting.

Roy Hui:
And in 2021 when, again, friends of mine told me about NFTs, suddenly that light bulb moment switched on in terms of, crypto or digital currency is the future of money, this is the future of things. And you use money to buy things. And it’s so obvious. All of those problems that we had, in terms of trying to rationalize real estate or create education certification, or all those non-fungible things that we were trying to do, suddenly became a lot easier with the whole NFT technology. And that craziness hasn’t stopped yet. It just felt like the dot-com boom, the Web 2 boom again, that excitement, that energy in the whole NFT space.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. No, I agree entirely. It does feel that boom time of Web 2 boom. But I got to say, I think the difference is now, I can remember back then we would talk about a 10x outcome as being a pretty good outcome, and now I’ve had meetings with founders over the last couple of weeks and they’re talking about a 1000x outcome. So we’ve certainly moved the goalposts a lot, and some of the businesses, even the Australian crypto style businesses, have had those 1000x outcomes. So it is an incredibly exciting space.

Nick Abrahams:
Let’s drop into some detail about some of your recent projects. I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Ridley Plummer on the show, he’s the leader of the Australian Tennis Open’s NFT project, and so you and the Pellar team were involved in that, and I think they basically dropped 6,000 digital tennis balls and so forth. Great success, probably one of the better NFT drops of any Web 2 organization in Australia. Could you give us a little bit of background, how were you involved and how did that project come about?

Roy Hui:
Yeah, sure. So we worked with a partner on this particular project, and they’re a team of very talented people with a lot of fantastic ideas. And Pellar, our team, essentially formed this partnership to provide more of a technical capability. And in that equation, we bounced ideas with each other and spoke about feasibility and what can be done with the technology and how we can push the envelope a little bit further, to deliver some of the craziness that we managed to achieve. And I think one of those elements in the blockchain NFT smart contracting world is, once you deploy a piece of code, you can’t change it.

Roy Hui:
And from a technical perspective, it is super, super difficult. In the Web 2 world, as you would say, every time you have a production deployment, you always prepare a window for contingencies, because nothing’s ever perfect. You always plan for the unforeseen bugs or traffic, and things like that. And in this whole new NFT blockchain world, you deploy a piece of code and it has to work 100%. And that’s pretty crazy. You can’t change the code after you’ve deployed it. And we’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way, but with the Australian Open project, it was a flawless execution. And you don’t see that very often. You deploy something to production anywhere in the world, in any technical project, it just works perfectly 100%. And that’s something we’re really proud of, and we have a fantastic team to support us to make that happen, and it’s really cool.

Nick Abrahams:
I’ve never heard someone, or a technologist, talk about it in quite those terms before. So where I end up in my discussions with technologists often is, “Well, that’s what the smart contract does, and it’ll be in the smart contract.” And I’ve always wondered, it’s got to be a lot of coding that goes on, because we are talking about multiple eventualities or multiple possible outcomes of any particular thing. So actually going through all of those possible outcomes and coding for them must be incredibly difficult.

Nick Abrahams:
And maybe to give folks… Because I know with the tennis Open, there was a lot of fascinating and very novel things, and also with NFTs, the whole proposition now about giving the NFT some utility. And I think they had this great thing where, if you owned a little piece of a notional tennis court, and if the ball of a particular match hit your piece of the court, then you got that match ball, and so forth. What’s the process for, maybe if there’s someone in the audience right at the moment that’s sitting in the marketing department of a big Web 2 type company thinking, “We should get into the NFT space,” how does that work in terms of, what is the big picture, and who generates that idea? And then I guess your team come up with, what’s the art of the possible? How does that all come together?

Roy Hui:
Yeah, it’s a difficult formula. Because everybody had different incentives, different KPIs, and different things that they want to do with their lives. So unfortunately there isn’t a golden rule for a larger corporation. I would probably consider two approaches. One is jumping in. Let’s do something small, that you can fail, and it’s okay to fail, and participate and try to understand it. Because I’ve spoken to many people that want to participate in the technology, but they’ve never minted a NFT or owned an NFT. I think that participation, by doing it with your own hobby collections, or creating a very small project, whether it’s selling one NFT as a test, or selling 10 NFTs as a test, something that doesn’t impact the overall corporate brand [inaudible 00:10:04] label as a test could help you, or people around you or the board or decision makers, to have a much better understanding of the process.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:10:14]

Roy Hui:
I think that’s… Yeah. Sorry.

Nick Abrahams:
And just, how does it work… And I think that’s great advice, too. And we’ve even seen folks like PwC and KPMG buying NFTs or buying places in Decentraland and Sandbox and so forth. So I think we’re starting to see organizations get that idea of, if we want to be in the Web 3 world, we need to actually take some risks, and it is difficult. Maybe from a technical point of view, without going too deep into it, what actually have… Let’s say you want to do an NFT drop. What does that look like? Do you get the code off the shelf? Is it relatively simple? Is there a smart contract format you can just grab? What’s the process that you go through?

Roy Hui:
Sure. You’re right, there are lots of libraries and standards out there, which you can reuse, and that provides a level of confidence when you deploy the smart contract, because it’s been tested hundreds of times in the past, and therefore the chance of something failing is relatively low. There are also fairly large public platforms which you can participate, that already has that process bedded down, so OpenSea, Nifty, or even I think Shopify is introducing NFT minting capabilities. But every project that we do, we try to push the envelope a bit. So with that default framework, it’s great, but we want to do something more, and those are the things that nobody has done before. And that’s what makes us super excited about coming to work every day and challenging [inaudible 00:12:04] but also I think innovation is super critical in this industry. That’s our essentially competitive edge.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. And I think that innovation aspect is critical, because I think what we’re starting to see now is there’s been a flood of copycat NFTs hit the market, and the audience is sort of… I think they need more, and that’s why that utility aspect of NFTs is so important. Do you have a sense of… And not asking you to reveal your price list or anything like that, but for a Web 2 organization that wants to do, let’s say just almost a proof of concept, I guess, as a small project, how much money should they be budgeting in terms of external support for that? Is it hundreds of thousands of dollars? What’s the ballpark?

Roy Hui:
Yeah. I will say hundreds and thousands of dollars. $10,000 would be a good starting point. There are free solutions out there, so you can certainly get a internal resource, dedicate a couple of weeks to learn about technology, and get something online. There are certainly offshore resourcing which you can consider, that are in the range of thousands of dollars, which can take a WordPress site or whatever it is, add some plug-ins, deploy some existing contracts, to get something off the ground. But for a larger proof of concept and doing it right, you need to have many different capabilities in that equation. You need to try to build a online presence, tell the story, have good copywriters, have great designers, have great UX, and so on and so forth. So just on top of the pure technology aspect, there are many other costs that you have to stack up to make the project successful.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. Yeah. And not the least of which is things like building a following on Discord and so forth. I mean, one of the sporting [inaudible 00:14:13] had a bit of a problem just recently with their drop, where they hadn’t, I guess, put together their Discord channel correctly, so there was a few issues with that. So it does seem like there’s… On one view of it, there’s the technology, but as you say, there’s all these layers of support that you need. Because with folks who come to me to talk about the… I’m never super excited about people just doing it themselves, because there’s such a skillset to it, and you want it to be successful.

Nick Abrahams:
I guess, what would your… Just leave this for the Web 2 organizations, but if they are looking to get into Web 3 via an NFT project, what would be your suggestions to them, if they want to do something small and [inaudible 00:15:10] do they call up, do they go through their marketing agency? How should they think about the first steps, and I guess critical things that they should think about in order to have a successful NFT project?

Roy Hui:
Yeah. As I was saying, maybe there are two angles with it, and the first one on being a lot of the consultancy, the agencies, are building that capability. So it’d be cool to talk to somebody in this industry that’s able to execute a project. And the other direction is more of a, let’s leave all of our baggage at the door. Let’s completely rethink what does the future look like. And that’s a really, really exciting picture. I think the Henry Ford quote is, “If I listened to my customers, I would just build a faster horse.” [inaudible 00:16:11] I want to build a car.

Roy Hui:
I think the future is inevitably more and more NFT crypto entangled, and that new value system is changing. In more of a Metaverse world, more [inaudible 00:16:30] social media will be changing towards more that you can have better ownership, and that value going through, building a community, is flipping on its head. And that’s where it’s super exciting. Instead of selling a customer something, making them line up at store, potentially they can buy NFT which shows that they are your truest fans, your most loyal fans, and potentially through the commercial that’s generated through this sale, they are given things over time that are exclusive to them. And I think that high level strategy consulting element should be considered first as a alternative approach than just jumping in.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned the word community, which comes up a lot in the Metaverse and the NFT world and so forth, doesn’t it? Which is, build your Discord community, build your communities. And so is the best use case for this, or the best analogy for this, is what we’ve had originally with loyalty programs? And so you’ve seen, there’s some wonderful loyalty programs out there, but are NFTs really just a massive expansion on the loyalty program idea?

Roy Hui:
I think the technology is so wide, it can be used for many different purposes. And yes, in a way I think it will replace membership, the concept of I can buy a membership, I can resell this membership, and every single resell of this membership attracts a loyalty for the collective. And in a way you can recognize your most loyal customers, and potentially you can accrue points whilst you hold this membership, and these points can be represented as tokens of some kind. So that could be execution of NFTs. But NFTs could be applied to everything. So many other use cases. Digital things, or your education certification, or your small ownership of that building down the block, many of those things.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. Yeah. This is slightly off topic, I guess, but in terms of the use cases, one of the ones which I’ve been looking at recently, which I think is fantastic for NFTs, is particularly around information, our own personal data. And so there’s some interesting organizations looking at, say with digital twinning of your own person and your own health data, and that idea of protecting your health data and other data with an NFT, and then that gives you control over it, so you can then determine who gets to see it.

Nick Abrahams:
Because right at the moment with data, the problem that I always have is that we hand it over, let’s just say health data, we hand it over to our healthcare providers, and then we clicked an “I agree” around their privacy policy and so forth, but we lose control over it, and we hope that the folks who we give it to comply with their privacy policy, but we’ve never read them. I’m a lawyer, I never read those either, so I’m with everyone else. We just happily click the “I agree.” So the law has not been able to physically give us that control of information. But do you think it’s possible using NFT-like technology to actually put a technology wrapper around our information, which could then, pursuant to a smart contract, allow us to determine who gets to look at that information?

Roy Hui:
Yeah, I think there are… I’ve definitely seen companies attempting to solve this problem. I personally think it’s not a easy problem to solve, particularly in the open blockchain networks that we predominantly use today, because all the information is public and it’s accessible, and once you’ve given somebody access, that information could be very difficult to take away. So potentially it’s an alternative network to what we currently use day to day. And I think maybe towards the end of this year, when we have more zero knowledge proof, which is a type of tech technology which provides validation of data without exposing the data, a lot better than what we currently have, as a Layer 2 solution with very low transaction fees, very fast transaction speeds could further broaden the uses of this technology. But yeah, NFT is not a technology which will solve all of your problems, but I do think the health data thing is a important problem to solve. Just not sure about what technology to do it on, as of today.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. No, fantastic. Now, you’ve worked done some fantastic projects. I guess, maybe just looking at a couple them. So WallStreetBets and their NFT drop. So folks who are listening might remember WallStreetBets as the Reddit forum that pushed the GameStop stock up 600-odd percent, burning a bunch of the short sellers last year. So a fascinating gathering of people, if you like. And how were you involved with WallStreetBets?

Roy Hui:
Yeah, very similar involvement from a technology perspective. Not only we were able to execute the minting website, the smart contract, but also try to challenge the technical envelope, push that envelope a little bit further as well, in terms of we had these plans of moving all the art to on-chain, so just like what the recent CyberBroker project did in making all of the art into SVG format, so type of vector based format that can live on a blockchain, as opposed to live on a pointer, some blockchain points to a external file storage, IPFS solution where a lot of the technology resides today. And also doing some interesting [inaudible 00:23:36] smart chain to Ethereum bridges, so you can port assets over different blockchains. So those are the little innovations we added to this project, but it’s a very fascinating project trying to experiment with DeFi, and if you have these tokens, you can add additional yield to the DeFi elements that you conduct, and things of that nature.

Nick Abrahams:
Just that mention of the tokens and DeFi, and I must say, the tokenomics that is happening now, and I see it even in the transactions that we’re working on, where part of the purchase price for a business may be tokens and so forth, or you’re doing a fundraising and tokens are what the investors are getting. And the tokenomics around it is fascinating, because you effectively have to almost rethink what share ownership looks in that space, so what tokens trigger anti-dilution protections, and what tokens can and can’t be issued into the future. Do you see a lot of talk around tokenomics and so forth in your world? Is there a lot of focus being put on that?

Roy Hui:
Yeah, certainly. We’re actually deploying the ERC-20 governance token today, for…

Nick Abrahams:
Well done. Here’s one Roy made earlier.

Roy Hui:
That’s right. Not for ourselves, for a client of ours. And they’re actually raising capital from very well known VCs, and as their percentage of their allocation investment, they get the equivalent in tokens, so exactly the scenario that you were talking about. And we’re seeing that more and more every day, and it’s super interesting, because you can obtain liquidity on day one. Individuals or founders or internal staff can… I mean, you can implement locking periods, which is hard locked, and there’s nothing that you can do to unlock it.

Nick Abrahams:
Because it’s in the smart contract, Roy.

Roy Hui:
Exactly. It’s technical, it’s a piece of code. You have to take down the whole Ethereum to take down that locking thing. It’s binary, it’s either true or not true. So if time passes this period, your tokens get unlocked. Which replaces a lot of your legal contracts that I’m sure you’ve seen in your days. And once the tokens are unlocked, you can send them to anybody around the world, and you can provide liquidity on a DeFi protocol like Uniswap or SushiSwap, and anybody in the world can buy your tokens. So you can sell it to your friends, you can sell it to other investors, and that liquidity is, I think, a groundbreaking technology, which in a startup world we are not seeing enough yet. But I think in the future, we will see substantially more of it.

Nick Abrahams:
I agree. I’m very… It’s enormously challenging to me from a lawyer’s perspective, because we’re very familiar with shares, and shares have a whole raft of laws and so forth associated with them. Whereas when we’re helping organizations that are minting tokens or giving out tokens to investors, and we’ve done it where they’ve… Token option plan, so where the employees get tokens, either in addition to or instead of equity or shares. And I got to say, the employees are far keener on the tokens than they are on the equity, because you’re giving your equity in an unlisted company, so it’s an illiquid asset. Whereas the tokens, as you say, you can just go on a DEX and once they vest they’re immediately liquid.

Nick Abrahams:
So it’s incredibly exciting, and I think for many organizations, they can think about what are the options that they can do to create another asset? So we understand cash, we understand shares, and now this idea of tokens through tokenomics. And what about what’s happening with Slumdoge? What are you up to with those folks?

Roy Hui:
We’re just across so many different projects, and that’s one of their earlier ones. Slumdoge was particularly interesting because I think the founder promised the community with a airdrop, and airdrops are… It’s a terminology to give a NFT or something else to the existing holders. And when you do a airdrop, there’s a cost associated with it, because the person or the technology who is paying for this NFT issuance needs to pay for the cost of that transfer. And when you multiply that by the number of token holders, and in this case, I think there are 10,000 NFTs, so we need to do essentially do 10,000 transfers. And at the time…

Nick Abrahams:
So that’s gas fees? Is that what you… Yeah.

Roy Hui:
Yeah. That’s right, gas fees. So at the time, Ethereum price was quite high, so it was about $4,000-ish, and to do 10,000 transfers, it was going to cost in excess of more than a $100,000 using the traditional norms. So again, this is about a technologist seeing a technical problem. How do we solve it with technology? So we were trying to optimize every little thing in the smart contract, changing a number from a 16-bit number into an 8-bit number.

Nick Abrahams:
Oh, wow. It gets that detailed.

Roy Hui:
Yeah. Trying to do every single thing that you’ve learned, because it’s almost like the early days of computing, you have to fit this much code into this floppy disk. Things that don’t exist anymore, but in this whole… We’re still super early in the blockchain smart contract world, where we’re encountering those problems, in terms of how do we do something really, really efficient? So we were able to reduce the minting cost by 5x, airdrop cost by 5x, and that saved substantially for the project overall. And that was really cool to execute.

Nick Abrahams:
Brilliant. It’s interesting, too, that idea of constraints often drive innovation. When you’ve got unlimited resourcing, then you don’t have the drive for innovation. So both with WallStreetBets and Slumdoge, much in those particular NFT drops, talking about they want people to have diamond hands and not paper hands. And so can you just talk a little bit about that? Because it’s obviously a philosophical thing that comes from the crypto world, and comes in the NFT world. Just explain to folks, what does it mean to have diamond hands versus paper hands, and why is that so important?

Roy Hui:
Yeah. I think supply and demand… I think a lot of people listening to your show, probably understand supply and demand. And diamond hands essentially means hold onto your stocks, your tokens, your NFTs, for as long as possible, riding up and down the waves as the market goes through its high volatility and turbulence, where paper hands is responding to the fear, the uncertainty, the… What does the D stand for, in FUD?

Nick Abrahams:
Doubt. Yeah. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Yeah. Exactly.

Roy Hui:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Reacting to that, and selling short. And I think that because it’s such high volatility, it’s super low in supply, many of these projects, you’ve got to consider there’s only 5,000, 10,000 things that are sold. So when there are people selling, it triggers more people selling, and therefore it just increases supply. And when the demand is finite, and when there are active… Very little attention that people are spending per project, the demand is even more small, fewer. So as you have an increase in supply, decrease in demand, the price will fall, and therefore it will trigger a cascading effect of price falling, a negative spiral of that asset. So I think all the project founders would encourage you to hold onto the asset rather than selling. And that’s the term paper hands. So diamond heads holding onto the asset, as opposed to selling short.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. It’s quite a strong philosophy, isn’t it? It comes back to HODL and so forth within crypto. There’s a long term belief in the community around, whether it’s crypto, whether it’s NFTs and so forth, that the trend line is up and to the right, and so you should hold. It’s a fascinating proposition to put forward to, I guess, potential investors and so forth, which is saying, “We want you to hang on.” I mean, every company would like that, but it’s very pronounced.

Nick Abrahams:
Maybe just getting… You talked about markets going up and going down, and the NFT world has had a little bit of a flattening out recently, and so, the big legacy NFTs like apes and so forth are holding up well, those price points, but otherwise the market has had a little bit of correction. And much has been made of the fellow who bought Jack Dorsey, the Twitter founder’s first Tweet, he paid US$2.9 million for that, and then put it up for sale, and I think got less than, and $10,000 as an offer, so withdrew it for sale. So a lot of people are pointing to that as odd. He paid 3 million and can’t sell it, it’s not worth 3 million. Do you think it is a bubble? Do you think we’ve hit peak NFT fervor, and it’ll drop back to being something a little bit more normal? Or where are we at?

Roy Hui:
It’s hard to comment on the market as a general, because there are so many different elements of the market. In the grand scheme of things, I think we’re still super early in terms of where we are with a global audience, the overall art market, the overall bonds market. There’s still a tiny fraction of the overall wealth that’s in crypto today. So in the grand scheme of things, I think it’s still the super early days, and there are lots and lots of volatility, purely because the market is so small. There are elements of the market, if you’re buying another adjective animal type of project, bored monkeys or whatever…

Nick Abrahams:
We’ve done… Just because it has an animal in it, or an ape, doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful.

Roy Hui:
Don’t do it. Don’t do it.

Nick Abrahams:
So that would be a lead indicator that you shouldn’t do it.

Roy Hui:
I mean, there are many different projects that are bubbling and trying to make noise and fighting for your attention. And when that space is very well occupied, it’s relatively…. I think I have a bit of confidence to say it probably won’t do as well as it did last year. But when you have more well known artists, more artists who have shown success in the past, or entrepreneurs that have a demonstrated track record, like Kevin Rose with PROOF Collective, and recently last night just announced the Korean investment from Seven Seven Six, the co-founder of Reddit, that $10 million investment into PROOF Collective. I think projects with well known individuals who have a demonstrated track, I bet on those projects. And get rich quick schemes, probably it doesn’t last forever. It’s still around, we’ve seen many of these popping up here and there. But I think the investor maturity is actively improving as well. So probably six months ago, I would definitely jump on that [inaudible 00:37:13] project, but today, not any more, because I’ve had my share of losses. So I think over the past week we saw the success of Moonbirds, and that’s something that’s really, really hard to ignore.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. It’s a big number.

Roy Hui:
It generated hundreds… Yeah.

Nick Abrahams:
Couple of hundred million dollars they raised from that.

Roy Hui:
Hundreds of million dollars. Last time I checked, more than $200 million, that was through transactional volume over the span of days. And that shows there is still lots and lots of interest in this industry. Yeah. Interesting market to observe, regardless.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. I think one of the things that’s critical that you said too, is knowing the team. So some of these projects, they’re anonymous. I can’t begin to imagine a world where I would give my money to someone who was anonymous. That doesn’t seem to make any sense. So, I think that idea of the team… But as we always say with this, we’re not giving financial advice, so best wishes to everyone on that.

Nick Abrahams:
You mentioned artists, and obviously we hear a lot of stories about how NFTs and the NFT technology is a real game changer for digital artists. Can you talk a little bit about… And I know you’ve done a lot of work with artists, and some of the great ones. Why is NFT technology so good for artists? What’s the opportunity, and how’s it actually panning out?

Roy Hui:
Yeah. We started a platform called drp.io early last year, and we’ve launched a few different collections on the platform to celebrate the artists, and also to sell their artwork as NFTs on the platform. And we have a artist, a pretty famous Portuguese street artist by the name of Vhils, launching their mint about a couple of weeks from now. And he’s a street artist that would paint huge murals on the side of the building, then blow the building up, and capturing all of that in a cohesive art form. And doing that from a physical perspective, it’s pretty difficult. You need a lot of buildings, you need to have dynamite. You can’t do it every other day.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah, yeah. No, that’s an investment.

Roy Hui:
So from a digital production perspective, it’s [inaudible 00:39:58] little bit easier if you can monetize your brand or show your perception or perspective through a digital medium, but at the same time, the quality of art doesn’t deteriorate over time. It’s digital. And actually, just step back a bit. I think we are in this super interesting part of our human history, transitioning from physical medium, physical art, to digital medium, digital art. And that transition might be 50 years, 100 years, but we’re in that transition right now, literally right now. And so for a emergent artist, or for artist that is a next generation, it might be still important to do art from a traditional… Watercolors, oil paintings. But I think digital medium will be getting better and better, and it will probably be a much better medium to work on, because it doesn’t deteriorate.

Roy Hui:
So from a artist’s perspective, there’s that medium, there is the longevity of art. There’s also provenance. This artist created this piece of art, and it has exchanged two hands prior to getting to you. And these are the transaction fees, as well as the prices these transactions occurred. That problem is super interesting. It’s just what we had before, but with a receipt for every single transaction.

Roy Hui:
And lastly, the most important thing I think, it’s commercials, removing the middleman, so artists can create a voice for themselves. They can participate on Twitter, create a Discord channel, build a community, be vocal, participate in Twitter spaces, and market themselves, as opposed to going through a gallery, going through another institution, and taking a lion’s share of that equation. So being able to capture all of the revenue as opposed to having somebody else taking the majority of the revenue, I think that’s a game changer from a artist’s perspective.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. And I guess the ability of the secondary sale percentages as well, so every time your art is on-sold, you get a piece of the action.

Roy Hui:
Exactly.

Nick Abrahams:
That’s amazing.

Roy Hui:
Yeah. One more thing I think we probably don’t see too much of is, art traditionally has been static. You draw on the piece of paper and it just stays that way, but from a programmatic perspective that art can change. And that’s super interesting, because you put technology and artistic vision together, where you can go… If the weather is turning autumn, the leaves on a tree can turn yellow, and winter, the leaves… So you can create something a bit more dynamic, and responding to, for example, crypto prices or how heavy the block is, blockchain. All kinds of really interesting things can come this way. And when we talk to others, it opens up their imagination a bit, because it doesn’t need to stay now. It can change over time, which is interesting as a medium as well.

Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. We could actually see the Mona Lisa age in real time. That’s fascinating. I have not thought of that as a possibility, but it’s quite right. It takes away that static nature of art, doesn’t it? And makes it very dynamic.

Roy Hui:
Now, speaking about one of the great artists, you’re involved in an Elvis NFT. Can you tell us anything? I mean, obviously, anything to do with Elvis is exciting, but are you able to talk us through at all about the Elvis NFT project?

Roy Hui:
Not too much, unfortunately, but I can confirm we’re working on the Elvis Presley NFT launch, hopefully in the next month or so. It’s a celebration of Elvis Presley, and it’s really, really cool.

Nick Abrahams:
Oh, fantastic. I’ll definitely keep an eye out for that. That sounds brilliant. I guess, just finally, things are very busy with the Pellar group, and so is there anything in the pipeline that you wanted to talk about, what you’re up to, or what’s happening [inaudible 00:44:22]?

Roy Hui:
Yeah. I spoke about Vhils briefly, the Portuguese street artist. I think that will be a fantastic initiative. We finally launched our game with the Red Village guys. So it’s a play-to-own game where the collectors can buy NFTs as characters, and they fight each other, and there’s a little bit of wagering as part of that equation. So that’s super exciting to be working on something so innovative, because not only your NFTs are images, they’re 3D characters and they fight each other. And these characters get experience points and they level up, and there’s all kinds of possibilities of them summoning and breeding other champions, and they’re all kinds of really interesting dynamics that come out from a gaming perspective. We’re working on two Metaverse projects, one based in Thailand, with a fairly large conglomerate called the [inaudible 00:45:27] project. I think that’s super, super exciting as well. It defines the future of digital economy within your country, and that’s as exciting as it gets. But yeah, lots and lots of things going on, and it’s super exciting to be in the middle of it all.

Nick Abrahams:
Fantastic. Well, Roy, thank you very much. I guess for those listening, if you do need an organization that’s at the top of its game as far as technology and Web 3, do reach out to Roy Hui and the team at Pellar. And with that, Roy, thank you very much for being so generous with your time. Wish you all the best. I’ll keep an eye out, certainly, for Red Village and also the Elvis NFT. So, thanks very much.

Roy Hui:
Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Cheers.

Nick Abrahams:
Cheers. Bye.

Roy Hui:
Bye.