SmartCon 2023 featured more than 100 blockchain experts and financial industry leaders including founders of influential protocols in the Chainlink ecosystem. To get a closer look at the future of web3, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino filmed a two-day interview lineup with speakers at this year’s event in Barcelona, Spain.
Tim Kang developed Sevens Foundation, NFT Embed, CUE Music and is currently building Multimedia, a new creative platform aimed at abstracting away the complexity of publishing generative art onchain. A longtime advocate of Chainlink, Kang sat down with Malandrino to highlight platforms and technologies making blockchain mainstream.
Kang, whose Beeple collection helped make NFTs a household term in early 2021, told Malandrino that while much of the hype around NFTs has subsided, the paradigm shift around how people create, buy, and sell assets onchain is just beginning.
“I think people should really look forward to being actually able to own their Fortnite skins or having a stake in the game,” he said, adding his expectation that most real-life nonfungible assets will also eventually be represented onchain as NFTs.
“Your car title could essentially be an NFT,” he said. “It just makes things more efficient.”
The biggest hurdle preventing tokenization’s broad adoption, in Kang’s view, is technical complexity and overhead.
“I think currently it’s very complicated for the average person to participate on blockchain,” he said. “We need better tools to actually be able to allow people to start participating on blockchains without all the complications.”
He believes one of those tools is Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). “That’s going to be one big piece of technology that will reduce the overhead,” he said.
With Multimedia, Kang is interested in applying familiar technologies like face and touch ID to help creators mint NFTs. “If you can create actions on the blockchain using that tech, then it allows people to easily onboard and participate,” he said.
Reflecting on his experience at this year’s SmartCon, particularly Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov’s fireside chat with former Google CEO and Chairman at Steel Perlot, Eric Schmidt, Kang was enthusiastic.
“Honestly this is, I think it’s the future,” he said, underscoring Chainlink’s role in building a verifiable web in the age of AI.
“With AI and the overflow of information, people are becoming more skeptical about trusted entities like the government or banks and it’s because there’s so much disinformation and fragmentation,” he said. “Chainlink, I feel, they work towards having information that’s verifiable and truthful.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Tim Kang.