Read the transcription of my recent interview with Blockchain Interviews.
Ashton
I’m Ashton Addison from Block West Capital for Investment Pitch Media and the Crypto Coin Show. And today I’m interviewing Alex Shkor, the CEO of DEIP. Alex, welcome to the show. And thank you so much for taking the time to come on.
Alex
It’s my pleasure, Ashton. And thank you for having me here.
Ashton
You’re very welcome. I’m excited to dive into the world of NFTs, but not any regular NFTs. This and the platform is much more than just NFTs. But what I’m most excited about is intangible assets and being able to tokenize and bringing the real world into the crypto sphere. And I think that’s going to have a huge role in expanding out this innovation that we have in the blockchain industry to people that didn’t know that they could unlock value and potential in things that they would have never expected.
So I think it’s going to be a very interesting discussion. I would love for you to kick it off for us, Alex, with an overview of DEIP and some of the solutions that you’re looking to drive into the market.
Alex
Thank you. So, yeah, I agree that bring in real-world assets to the chain to our industry will unlock, like, really unprecedented potential because we have, like, our crypto industries focus on cryptocurrency, but there are so many efforts beyond crypto, and its intangible because they are not that utilizing the real world and what we’re building. We are building a protocol for the creator economy. This is basically a protocol for tokenization in the governance of intangible efforts because all the graders produce intangibles, and if we put them on-chain and tokenize, it will not only give the opportunity to govern this asset with ours, for example, but we also will unlock liquidity for this.
This is like what tokenization does really well, this is why it’s important to bring these assets to the blockchain. These tools develop for liquidity of the assets. The industry can really boost the development of all the other industries.
Ashton
Definitely. Yeah. And that’s a great intro. And I was reading through DEIP site about the creator economy and unlocking that value. And with intangible assets, there are so many different things that intangible assets could be. Where do you start? Maybe you can talk about your focus and your team’s focus on the creator economy, what that specifically means. And where do you start with intangible assets?
Alex
Yeah. So it’s a very good question. And regarding where do we start? So, because we provide an infrastructure for others to create platforms. Tokenization of assets in any industry: movie scripts, inventions, human capital, music, whatever, you name it. But we provide not only a tool kit, but we also want to lead and show how it’s possible to use our tools to recognize assets in any industry. And we did select a couple of industries to showcase how it is possible. One industry is technology transfer. It’s basically the organization of inventions. Another industry we can tokenize is human capital: basically software for boot camps with tokenized income share agreements
We selected these two industries because they are kind of on the opposite spectrum of the asset. So on one side of the spectrum, there are, like high-risk assets with potentially higher profits like this is invention technologies and another spectrum. These are, I say, agreements that are rather a low risk but also very limited returns. And we believe that like all the others lay somewhere in between. So this way, we want to showcase how it’s possible to do this with these two use cases and let others implement their own.
Ashton
I think that’s a great way to go about it as well because, with a lot of these centralized platforms, I think community inclusion and growth are driven by community as well. It is super important to have everybody have the tools available and then be able to create what they want from those tools. And I was reading that part of this process of tokenizing the intangible assets uses NFTs, but it’s not like a regular NFT or something different about it. Can you talk about what’s special about the NFT process on de IP and how it’s different from a regular NFT?
Alex
Yeah. So because we use assets intangible from the real world, what organization process requires physical legal compliance and so on.
So we developed some regulation framework because, in order to recognize some assets, you just need to have a legal agreement that can attach some economic or governance value to the talking. So basically you can attach their rights to whom you can transfer this to whom you can license this. So whatever like any writing, any economic value, like some royalties which are coming from this asset with some profit from curation. Also, you name it. So any economic assets are recognized on our platform.
Alex
Great to know. And yeah, definitely need to make sure you have those intellectual property rights lined up when you are creating something like a creator, because that’s important, especially on the resale. You know, if the assets are being moved around by multiple people and there are NFT or you have the coding in there, then you’re going to be getting royalties, which is something that you wouldn’t normally be able to do with traditional intangible assets. Usually, once you sell it, it’s gone. So there’s definitely a huge advantage there.
Now I’m curious a little bit more on the process of once assets are tokenized and they’re using this F-NFT signature tokenization method that DEIP has. How do you actually increase the liquidity are able to sell the intangible assets easier? Is there a marketplace with DEIP or how else are you able to help boost the liquidity by tokenizing these assets?
Alex
Yeah. So it’s a very good question because basically, this is the main new peak of the protocol to boost the liquidity of this asset and at any stage because when you just develop this asset, boosting liquidity allows you to get more capital to further develop this asset when it’s done liquidity increase commercialization potential assets. So basically what we have is, as you said, already the NFT framework, which allows not only to issue NFT on a product but also fraction-like ownership of this asset. And even just by doing this, it’s already increased liquidity because selling a fraction of an asset is easier than selling the entire asset, especially if it’s an expensive one.
But it’s just beginning because once you fractionalized this asset, you can use it as collateral in our dynamic liquidity protocol to borrow stable coins against these assets. And you just log this as collateral and take the amount of stable coins, which is calculated based on collateralization ratio, and you can use it to market your products, develop more assets, and so on. This is basically a decentralized band for creators where you can just plug into this platform, register all your assets, and start getting more funding, more financial opportunities not only for you but for the world industry.
Ashton
Definitely. It sounds like great added value for the creators. And Alex, I wanted to just take a step back quickly and we’ve been talking about tokenizing. The assets. Put them on the marketplace. I wanted to get a view of where DEIP is at right now with all this technology. How far you’ve come so far with what you’ve developed? I know that there’s still much more to be built, and your team is going to be working on this as the industry grows for years to come. But could you give an overview of where exactly you’re at?
Are there already creators working on this?
Alex
Yeah. So we have been building this like an ecosystem of products for the last four years, almost already. And this year, we’re launching our Substrate-based test net. So basically all of the substrate bases is Net, and we are also launching two of our portals. Like one is those I already named. We developed human capital info in the form of income share agreements and tech transfer for equity transfer offices. And also this year, we released our constructor. It’s basically a website constructor to create for the tokenization of all assets in any industry.
And this portal will right away be connected to DEIP network. So we also link here launching our Canary network at least will help. So it depends on how this net will work. Also this year, we are launching our public talking sale. So it probably will be somewhere in the middle of November, so there is a lot of things that are coming from the DEIP team this year.
Another thing is our portal builder program. We will launch this program which will be given resources like grants for those who want to build portals for the tokenization of assets in their industry. So for imagine you’re some person from the music industry and you’re well connected there and you already know all the stakeholders in the industry and you wanna capitalize on this you wanna build a portal for the organization of music from your industry. You can
Basically, charge a fee for tokenizing every asset and basically become a portal in our network
Ashton
That’s great and I was just gonna ask about that actually you know with creator creators coming in in the early stages for the tokenization. What kind of incentivization your team has to you know be one of the first to start tokenizing and using the marketplace and growing the liquidity and so you have grants available and you know you are incentivizing creators to get on this in the early stages.
Alex
Yeah, so we are not only incentivizing creators to create Portals in the network. But for every Portal we also will help to provide liquidity for this asset. Those who will come first and tokenize their assets will be able to benefit from dynamic liquidity protocol even more because we will subsidize liquidity at an early stage so you will be able to get funding. We also will help to market this asset because we are very interested in this we were interested that our marketplace network works well and like we have a lot of usages so that’s why we’ll be helping all the way for every portal which comes to us
Ashton
That’s great to hear and I’m curious about creators that are tokenizing intangible assets that aren’t necessarily technically inclined or they’re in an industry that doesn’t really have technical expertise. Did you really focus the platform on catering to non-technical creators that might not know about substrate or NFTs and tokenization and making it as easy as possible to use the platform?
Alex
This is exactly our like-kind of approach. We want to make it look and feel like you don’t even know that there is a blockchain under the hood so our approach is to build functionality in a way that it seamlessly can be used by anyone without even technical expertise.
One of the features we have in our network is free transactions because it’s a very high barrier for people not from blockchain space to pay for example for transactions like inviting people into your DAO and so on. We realized that we need to create functionality that will allow doing things for free. Also, we’re very very much focused on UX and how to make it really a smooth experience for anyone because we want to boost adoption. We want to not only capture the existing market but also want to expand it drastically for every player in the industry.
Ashton
Definitely, I agree and with that expansion, you know as your team you’ve already been working on this for four years but I’m curious about your vision in the long term you know four to
Even eight-ten years down the road when the platform’s running there are tons of creators tokenizing and tangible assets and easily providing liquidity to sell or buy them really easily you know what do you think is going to be the key factor to success for your team in getting that mainstream adoption and being the go-to platform for tokenizing intangibles?
Alex
Recently I realized that the number one thing we need to worry about is how to be as transparent as possible, as open as possible, as inclusive as possible. Just to let anyone come to this ecosystem just to not try to be alike a middle man anywhere so that like if we’re building for example portals we want to make others also be interested to build the same portal because we just we don’t want to capture the value of these specific assets like for ourselves. We want to just show how possible to be done like. For example, if there is a constructor we don’t want to be the only constructor provider in the ecosystem we also want to try others to do the same so this is basically our approach and we believe this is like a go-to it’s a good go-to approach for anyone in the crypto industry.
Ashton
Definitely, I like that answer and for the viewers that are looking to follow along, you mentioned that there are more updates coming in November.
Alex
There’s a token launch as well as the Substrate technology. The best way for the viewers to learn more about DEIP is to get involved within the community and learn more. So basically like visit our site at DEIP.world.
There will be major updates coming soon like this September I will release the new website and there will be like also some tips on what they can start doing already right now with us.
Also, follow us on Twitter where we will be announcing our portals builder program. So if you want to build a portal for assets in your industry just follow us and we will be the best interest point for you. We will do everything possible to make the experience smooth and easy for you.
