Web3 Will Revolutionize Media & the Creator Economy | Aptos Ash Pampati

one hundred percent reserve. You can review their transparency report. Uphold also offers an amazing rewards program where you can earn up to five point two five percent on stable coin. This rewards program also allows you to get twenty four hour early access to new tokens that they list, and to participate, you just simply have to open the app once per month, deposit fifty dollars once per month, and trade fifty dollars once per month. And the stable coins

that they support includes Ripples, r l USD. You can earn up to five percent on that stable coin and five point twenty five percent on USBC. So if you do like to learn more about Uphold and all the great services they offer, visit the link in the description. Welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host Tony Edward, and joining me today is Ash Pompati, who is the head of ecosystem at the app tossk Foundation.

bit better. Tell us about yourself, where you're from, and your professional background.

in love with. I was actually vpning it for twelve months prior when it wasn't available in the US, joined as one of the first marketers there to lead growth marketing, and then graduated over to the big mothership of Google to focus on music product growth across the company. And then I've been in Web three professionally since twenty twenty two and now here at Avtos Foundation leading the ecosystem.

the agency they had over their business. And I saw our artists and musicians kind of stuck in this stasis. They weren't extracting enough value from the Internet in terms

of modernization. They weren't able to decide where their content could be, they weren't able to own their fans, and so that was a nut I was trying to crack over the seven and a half years I was over there, And then about twenty twenty one we saw the NFT craze happening on eth but I was actually introduced to NFTs on Solana and so in my kind of research, because every year, you know, I was the one who would compile all the fresh ideas to present to the

CEO and say, hey, we need to do this. Here's the justification. So even starting in twenty twenty one, I was like, we need to explore Web three. There's a burgeoning creator economy over there. I don't think that YouTube is set up to actually attract this segment of creators, and it's the first time we've probably been boxed out

from a true native Internet creator economy. And so you know, I was doing my explorations, I was obviously seeing NFTs kind of break through the mainstream, but I was onboarded through Solana, so Magic Eden and Phantom, and in that experience, I kind of experienced the opposite of the horror stories I would see on Reddit of people trying to buy NFTs, whether it's like paying exorbit in gas skees or high

floor prices or transactions not coming through. You know, I went into Phantom, I went into Magic Eaton, bought my first NFT and the ux was as smooth as what I was accustomed to as a Web two user. And that's when I said, okay, like I need to fully jump in both feet in this space. I can't wait till YouTube, with all of its diversified interest areas to kind of come along with the new economy that's building

that's being built out here. And so I left fully two feed in joined a company called Metaplex, which spun out of Solona Labs, which was the base layer of token infrastructure for Solona. So that's how I got introduced and very quickly jumped in the boat to work professionally.

generating on platform. You know, advertising is this big beast, right, And really the majority of revenue from advertising comes from like seven big CpG brands, right, And so those folks have a very specific opinion on where they want their content to be exposed and where they're willing to pay for that premium inventory. And so for creators, they may flood into that zone for a period of time, but they also may graduate out of it. When they have

a more niche or loyal audience. And so what we were always trying to figure out is when a creator kind of either before they hit that that leap into the public mainstream consciousness where they're at the front page of YouTube and they're alongside like you know, you know, Netflix shows and HBO shows and they're creating content on par What can we do to create sickness? And so

there was a lot of thoughts around digital goods. There was a lot of thoughts around you know, paygated content for exclusive you know, I can subscribe, I can pay to subscribe to mister Visa channel to get exclusive content. But you know, from my personal opinion and not speaking on behalf of YouTube, this was always a hard challenge to solve for the creator in the sense that they were already working so hard to get into that mainstream exposure.

Like the amount of content you need to create, and I'm sure Tony you know yourself, right, Like the amount of velocity you need to have to push out content to stay on be That's like you're basically like running on a treadmill at full speed, and you're probably any money you're getting you're putting back into the content, right, So what additional capacity does the creator have to like start to support new verticals that may have different modernization principles,

And so you have to do that balance of Okay, I need to get into the mainstream, right, I need to break through on the front page algorithm, and it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of time, and there's tons of people competing with me.

Can I clone myself right to like actually so you know, support these other verticals And the majority of the answer was no, Like creators didn't have the capacity to say, now I do content for paygated folks, or now like I have a bunch of new things to like sell

digital goods, And so for me, that's that's generally. I think a core insight from that was the way in which web two generally works, which is like broad distribution model works for a few, and unless you're that few, you're kind of out on past to pasture with being able to like earn a living being a creator. And so my perspective it was there needs to be a new model, and that model needs to be needs to be supported by great professionals working in it.

see eventually YouTube and all these platforms are going to have to capitulate in one way or the other to integrate into Web three because I don't know.

creating their own content. They're like scanning the data, they're seeing what people are vibing with and they're like making a movie or a show like in the next three months, and like they made it, you know what I mean. And that's what's on the front page. The question to me is can they continue to do that if they don't have a pipeline of long tailed creators continuing to engage with the platform. And so from my perspective, I don't know what the time horizon is on whether that

becomes a problem, but eventually you could imagine it would. Right, So if you don't have a two way economy and you don't have two ways signal, like your algorithm isn't just it isn't going to be as good to produce the thing that the user or your viewer would want. And I think an element to that is can I be a creator on your platform and not have another job if I only have a thousand subscribers? That's that's the question, right, Like can I earn a living right

being someone who only has a thousand subscribers? And maybe I'm not creating content to have a million subscribers, right, And I think that's like the question yet to be answered, and I already see it, Like you know, I'm from the music industry. From a tech perspective, you don't see you see a lot of artists now who could have been great getting a job and stopping artists like you're seeing that every single day, right, And The question is what happens when when that thing prolongs for a period

of time. And my perspective from where I've always worked is nothing good happens. We don't get good experiences, we don't get good content, we don't actually build interests that are unique as people. But I don't know the time horizonal when that would be felt or when a huge company like YouTube would feel like they need to make a shift.

the tipping point for mainstream adoption? And I don't know if it has to be other brands out there, whether it's in the sports or gaming world where they onboard a ton of people on chain with via NFTs and then the public in general becomes more educated and aware of this, and then they're like, hey, why can't I get it from mister Bees and mister Beest then says.

know ever know was there. Now principally we had to start to peel back that notion because now you have creators, You have creators who became brands, you have music, you have all of these things that are meant to want to be everywhere. Right, So not just YouTube, but if YouTube has to have everything there, it really creates a big risk exposure for them to like just basically keep paying upwards and upwards of everything you know, of licensing

to like keep everything there. So I think where I kind of from my vantage point at the company, we kind of sat and said, actually, you know what, it's

a distribution platform. So like, if you're an artist and you have an album coming out, we don't need the whole album on there, but you should probably create a video that's compelling, that's interesting, or a series of videos that fits with what we know, the algorithm rewards to push people to that thing, and we always kind of positioned it as advertising that pays, you know what I mean, if you invest in the platform and you push the

right content and you actually understand how thumbnails work and like how the algorithm is triggered, and what atomic networks of creators you have to have promote you, and how comments like input into like your velocity for viewership that can be a jumping off point for you to like push people to deeper experiences. And by the way, you

get paid, like that's monetized and everything. So it was kind of a slight nuance in terms of how we pivoted our positioning because I think that's true, right, and I think a lot of people use YouTube as that front door to like push something elsewhere. Yeah, but you know, if YouTube continues to being effective distribution platform for creators to push people in different areas, it will always be important.

you and the folks at apt halls going knocking the door of these companies saying, hey, let's explore web three together.

from one community to another. There was so much communal activity right that bootstrapped all these products while phantom like magic eaten like you know, and really set the foundation for I think what like truly financialized communities became with for mem coils, right, and that kind of like sprouted out.

I think for a blockchain like aptoss, you know, we need to push to where we think the puck is going, and so you know, I think for us NFTs we a vibrant like you know, collection and community of NFTs on app toss. But I kind of see them as a way in which to have a signal within the ecosystem of loyal supporters that are highly networked that if you're a new project coming to app toss and you

tap into those, you'll immediately be distributed. It's kind of like these micro radio towers, right that have a brand presence online because everyone has a PfP or you know, can socially signal and there's a discord where people are like meeting up and talking all day about every topic

in the world. So I think they're important to basically be these radio towers to help ecosystems bootstrap and also just represent the brand of aptosts from a bottoms up perspective, So I think in the traditional sense of what NFTs were represented as, that's still important, but on the technology perspective of what an NFT is to me, it is the way I think about it is it is a better retention mechanism which would thus give you better monetization

of your customers. Right. So I think about it as every you know, B two C or B to B app like in web two, right, they have, you know, if they're a good operating team, they really have a tight growth funnel analysis and they monitor each element of that right of to say, okay, when someone signs up on day one, what activities are they taking? Based on those activities, what's to drop off to day two retention?

And then you zoom out all the way to thirty day returned And now you're all of a sudden thinking about retention overall for your product, and you make decisions and fts to meet are, if executed the right ways of core technology a better way to drive retention and less churn from that moment you log in and use the app. Right, And so I think as a core technology, they're actually going to be an accelerant to how scaling B two C or beat it be apps actually drive monetization.

dynamic NFT is that maybe the longer you're a customer or you're loyal to the brand, the NFT continues to unlock and open up new things for you. So it's not just okay, it's static monkey japag, but it's more than that, right, and it kind of like a digital key so to speak. It just unlocks new features and things the longer you're a customer.

if I want to pay. It could be an identity of you within a community, so you have a unique PfP that's like one on one and you're part of a community that everyone else has a different one on one and that's you, you know, like I'm punk xys,

like you know what I mean. And so I think the concept of what is an identity and a truly permissionless and trustless world, NFTs have brought a lot of context to but I certainly think there's tons more room to establish what the what I guess like the killer use cases?

money across that ecosystem. Well, you need a blockchain to do that, and you probably need a currency on that blockchain to do that. So app toss was principle by principle, the exact architecture of what was being built at Meta, And obviously in twenty twenty that project was shut down, and so what happened was app toos fun out and became available to everyone as a highly performance L one.

I would say the way I think about app tooss is, you know, you had you had Ethereum, which was smart contracts, right, but you know very now looking back, hard to use for any scalable use case. Right. Then you had Layer twos kind of building on top of that. Then you had Solana, right, and a few other chains, but Solana is the one we know which was basically like no, this needs to be like amazing ux and we're really fast.

And then there's this another tranch of blockchains which are even faster and more performance, and aptos is one of the leading ones. I would say. The thing that adds additional context to aptas's specific architecture is move, the native programming language of Move and Move was developed at Meta specifically for them because they needed a higher level security on the smart contract level to manage possibly the trillions

of dollars that would pass through their economy. So smart contract architecture outside of that was not sufficient for Meta's use case. So we are the bearer of those fruits. And when you think about apas's positioning in the market, I would say, in the past last couple of years, we've really built a lot of headway with institutions that really see blockchain as the future to power their business.

So companies like black Rock with the middle front, or Franklin Templeton and Ave now who is going through governance to come to MAInet as the first non EVM chain with app toos. They all look at security and performance and reliability, right, They're not making any sort of guesses in this framework, and so when when you audit and kind of look at aptos from that context, it's a

no brainer in terms of those things. Now, when I think about when I think about where we want to go, what we want to do as a network is establish establish successful businesses and founders on app toss. So that's kind of my job, like building an ecosystem. What does that mean? It's having successful founders and projects within the ecosystem, building on the app tost network and pushing the mission forward in their opinionated way. That's really kind of the next phase of rep toss.

that away to make it easier. With highly performance l ones, the goal is to not have or need an L two to manage a task, right, That's why we were built. That's why you know, the beauty of why we were built is we were built to handle like Instagram or WhatsApp level like of connectivity. Now, I think there are ways in like what you what people do is they build protocols or applications on app toss, right, So if you had if you were building in the trading space,

you would build a protocol on top of that app tooss. Right. So app toss is the network. You build a protocol to manage the network a certain way, but you don't have to manage a blockchain, you just focus on your customer, you focus on your use case, and the rest is kind of set for you.

Now they're making like tens of not hundreds of millions of revenue. That's because of the built in network and liquidity right that ecosystems have managed to do. The question then comes down to, Okay, that next layer of enterprise or businesses or retail users, what will it take for them to do simple things right for for in their

day or for their customers. And when I think about what that is is privacy is a big piece, right because blockchains are uh you know, it's a record of something happening, but you may have a reason to make sure that record isn't fully public or let's say it needs to be partially private. Number one. Number two is

the transactions themselves. You know, if you if if if we are using on chain rails to send payments to my landlord, right, do I want that transaction to be public that every every month I'm sending so and so to this address that this is my address? No? Absolutely not right like and so I think, uh, the the I think we will see a ton of there's already a lot of company is that are already thinking about privacy,

as you know, in the blockchain space. But I think you will see more ideas from networks like us on how to manage these controls and how to leave choice up to the customer, the builder, right or the user to toggle them because I think we are not going to get a wide scale mainstream adoption by having every all of the information publicly for any bad actor to go and you know, use for their own advantage.

have because you mentioned, you know, up toss is history and genesis coming out from Facebook and things like that. I don't know if you can answer this, but there was a report recently about Facebook looking to go back to that DM project, maybe not in the same capacity, but doing some sort of stable coin. Now that stable coin legislation's on the way, are you guys going back to your colleagues or the folks their Facebook saying hey, this is the chain to do it on or anything like that.

And I don't know, I don't know if there's gonna be oversaturation, but it's fascinating. What do you think of you know, maybe Microsoft is going to go next Google, I don't know, creating your own stable coins.

you know what I mean? Like, and so I don't think it's more I don't think it's about saturation of number of stable coins. It's more about what are those stable coins pegged two in value? What are they anchored to? And so that's why I think you see so much openness right today in terms of stable coin regulation. I know that's still yet to be determined, but obviously we in the industry are very excited about where we're sitting in terms of the doorstep, in terms of how that's

executed across a variety of verticals. You know, let's see, right, Like, sure, like every company can have their stable their own you know, unique stable coin, but but why, right, what are they trying to do with it? The natural need now today, as we sit for the foreseeable future is, you know, unless everywhere accepts stable coin as a transfer of value,

you will always need to on and off ramp. It's fiat and like pay your house to do this thing, right, So I think it's still still kind of TBD in terms of the actual execution.

of the recent developments news items that I saw around app toss and versus two hundred million dollars in a new DeFi grant or defight grants and investments.

foundation side. And my perspective is trading within crypto markets as a product market fit for multiple cycles that is only going to accelerate in terms of adoption with the institutional interests. Defies the backbone, but there will be additional ideas and use cases brought into the fold. Right, So when you think about what is defied today, you know, it's risk tolerance versus yields, it's trading crypto native assets.

You know, maybe in other ecosystems it's trading you know, creator assets or mean coins, or speculating on trends in the market. And so what I think is what I believe is going to happen is you're going to see highly liquid assets start coming on chain that have been off chain equities, gold, things in between. And so for me, what I wanted to basically state is we are fully invested in seeing a diverse and robust, defied trading ecosystem.

And in that kind of post, I kind of detailed some of the elements of products and use cases that we need. And so every day from the app tas foundation side and my team side, we go and try to find founders building in those interesting areas. And so you know, the fund is kind of broken down as a signal in the sense that we invest in these projects, we also help accelerate those projects to come to market

and things like that. So that's like a huge focus for us is having a robust trading environment on app toss and we believe that US as a blockchain finally brings the technology to a web to like experience. So trading on robin Hood is no different than trading on a crypt native app, but instead here it's fully decentralized. You have a much more diverse portfolio of assets you can participate in, and you can participate in interesting defive experiences

as well. So that's kind of what our focus has been. And that was the flag in the sand to show where we're going.

saying that right an EI driven white label event infrastructure platform. You guys formed a partnership with them.

festivals and what happens after. And so for us, that's an exciting project business to bring on app toss And for them, they can't go on any other any blockchain. They have to be on the fastest and most performant blockchain, right because their consumer is not someone who's going to tolerate something going down. They could just use something else,

right and web two to manage that experience. So Runa is kind of a flagship partner that we're bringing to the ecosystem, but it is a representation of products and founders that we believe can thrive on apps us.

tolerance and return in a systematic way? Right? Because using or even interacting with define, no matter what ecosystem and you you are in, is not even remotely close for just a regular user who has one hundred things going on the other day. Right, So I think about AI as a way in which to enhance that experience, to broaden the customer made base, to bring more people in.

Same thing with payments. You know, when I think about from an agentic framework, if they're supposed to do things for us, what do they do when we when they need to pay for something? What are they going to do? What is an agent going to do? Are they going to go to a bank and then get into your account. No, They're going to use blockchain, they can use your stable coins.

They're going to do micro transactions like you could imagine a world where I don't know self driving cars, right, everyone is in a self driving car and my car I need to overtake this car. Maybe this car needs to pay a micro transaction to that car so it can actually you know, coordinate between each other. This is a very radical example, but you can see where I'm going with it. What are they going to use. They're going to use blockchains and on chain rails because you

can send a scent for no cost. Where can you send a scent to someone In traditional banking rails, you can't send a cent to anyone. AI will need to write. They will need to be able to send things at that level and at a higher frequency to manage the

coordination of the Internet of things. I think there's a third area, which you know, I haven't gone that deep into, but you know you have all of these you know, large language models like chat, GBT andthropic and Rock and all of these things that all have their own way

of kind of coming up with what you want. What if you were someone who said, I want to take this from chat GPT, I want to take this from Rock, I want to take this and I want to localize my ll M. And there's things blockchains can do to increase transparency of code across those things, and developer tooling to help people who want to build I don't know, their own personalized LLM, but that's a much more greener pasture in terms of what can be done.

be tokenized. How do those things get utilized in a defined environment for a regular user. That's an area in which that we're hyper focused on. When I think about payments, what I'm really looking for is, you know, the next founder or project that's going to build the next HR payment software fully on chain, or the next P two

P payments app fully on chain using stables. And one of the ideas that is interesting for me with kind of the adoption and pull forward institutional and mainstream interest in stable coins is there are markets in the world that need stable coins from an existential perspective. Their local currencies debate, their government can't be trusted. But there's high intellectual capital in those markets, right, There's a broad culture

of education and innovation and all these things. And so with the adoption of stable coins and kind of this true global economy what you're going to start to see is the average revenue per user right in Web three outpace in the average revenue per user in Web two in emerging markets, right because Web two can't solve this problem.

So you know, unless an advertiser can monetize and pay the top dollar fee for that inventory in that market, or that user can pay twelve dollars a month for a subscription, there's no answer to generating revenue from those users directly in emerging markets. In Web three, that's going to be different, right, You're basically going to have stable coins as like the way in which to transfer value

at speed and reliability. The folks that are building or innovating or incubating in emerging markets now have higher purchasing power, and you can basically start to see unicorns just be built solely in these localized markets, which is going to be fascinating to see. So that's kind of it's less of a roadmap because we're not a product and tech company, but a focus of where you'll see us onboarding new projects.

CEO of Aptos Labs. I'm very grateful to him for going and speaking to the public who have tons of variant concerns right in terms of their market, their economy, how they're going to put food on the table, and being able to explain blockchain in a way in which that they can understand and also start to apply to

manage their own outcomes. That's where we're at, and so we're moving past this bubble of Okay, there's a select few here, they're really powerful users, they're very loyal, they're very vocal, they're very high signal, and we're moving to a point of there are people with a lot of things on their mind and a lot of other things they do, and they're interested, but how do we relate

to them? So that's why I think now is really important for the entire industry, no matter if your naptos ecosystem sol on, ecosystem theory, and ecosystem to all kind of come together and start to explain this thing in uniform terms. So that's you know, at the end of the day, this blockchain can be widely, widely accepted and adopted.

up questions here for you. First, If you could create your own metaverse, the theme be.