Zora, an NFT-based social network platform, is continuous its expansion beyond the crypto-sphere into the recent artificial intelligence market, Dee Goens, the startups’ co-founder, said on Chain Response.
To not be confused with Sora, the text-to-video tool offered by OpenAI, Zora goals to assist creators, brands and artists higher monetize their content through NFTs. Last month, Zora had “slightly below” half one million monthly transacting users and within the last 30 days, creators on Zora remodeled $1.3 million by posting their content, Goens said. We also posted this episode with Goens on Zora, test it out here.
The Zora Network is built on top of the layer-2 blockchain Optimism, which focuses on growing the Ethereum ecosystem. Because it was founded in 2020, Zora has had over $300 million in secondary sales, users have minted, or posted, over 4 million NFTs and it has about 1 million unique collectors, in accordance with its website.
But there’s more work to be done. Zora co-founder Jacob Horne and Goens see crypto and AI as two complementary technologies that may profit from each other.
“Crypto wants information to be on-chain in order that it could actually be valued and add value to the system,” Goens said. “After which AI wants information to be on-chain in order that it could actually be freely accessed and utilized by the system. So we’re on this sort of collision course where we wish to place more stuff on-chain, with a purpose to effectively add value, create value.”
Simply put, with a purpose to train its models and grow, AI needs access to more information and crypto wants information on-chain to grow its ecosystem.
“We want systems that can assist bring all of this stuff on-chain and that’s what we’re attempting to do at Zora,” Goens said. It's attempting to create a platform that ushers within the transition of AI onto blockchains.
Earlier this week, Zora launched the power for creators to make use of AI to mint, which is jargon for recording or posting a transaction on the blockchain, on its platform. This implies someone can type what they need, have the image be generated almost immediately and mint it shortly thereafter, Goens shared.
“This can be a zero to at least one moment, one in all the primary passive income streams for the creators of huge language models like Stability AI,” Goens said. This implies these AI creators have the power to capture value from their models’ outputs when people mint them and the payouts are split in half mechanically. “We’re really excited to usher in an era where model creators, not only the creators of the output, however the model makers themselves, even have a approach to reap the rewards of creativity that they’re helping to supply.”
On the whole, Goens said he sees a variety of demand from the NFT creator side for more AI functionality and tooling. “This can be a net recent thing in some ways and I feel they’re excited to innovate.”
In the longer term, he said he sees a chance for blockchains to assist confirm, authenticate and prove the ownership of creations — not only for models, data and knowledge, however the origin of the media itself.
“I feel crypto could survive without AI in its current trajectory,” Goens said. But he thinks AI needs blockchains to bolster its narrative around verification and authentication — and he’s not the one one who thinks that.
“I’m excited to see the models on-chain and see more open sourcing of those models, in order that we are able to all have the chance to analyze and inspect them in a way where we are able to make an informed decision,” Goens said. “That opens up a chance for us to place our money where our mouth is.”
This story was inspired by an episode of TechCrunch’s podcast Chain Response. Subscribe to Chain Response on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to listen to more stories and suggestions from the entrepreneurs constructing today’s most modern corporations.
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