Zora, an NFT-based social networking platform, continues its expansion beyond the cryptosphere into the hot AI market, Dee Goens, the startups co-founder, he told Chain Reaction.
Not to be confused with Sora, the text-to-video conversion tool offered by OpenAI, Zora aims to help creators, brands and artists better monetize their content through NFTs. Last month, Zora had "just under" half a million monthly transaction users, and in the past 30 days, creators on Zora earned more than $1.3 million from publishing their content, Goens said. We also posted this episode with Goens on Zora, check it out here.
The Zora Network is built on top of the Optimism layer-2 blockchain, which focuses on the development of the Ethereum ecosystem. Since its inception in 2020, Zora has had over $300 million in secondary sales, users have mined or published over 4 million NFTs, and it has approximately 1 million unique collectors, according to its website.
But there is more work to be done. Zora co-founder Jacob Horne and Goens see crypto and AI as two complementary technologies that can benefit from each other.
"Crypto wants information to be on-chain so it can be valued and add value to the system," Goens said. “And then AI wants the information to be on-chain so that it can be freely accessed and used by the system. So we're on this kind of collision course where we want to put more things in the chain in order to effectively add value, create value.”
Simply put, to train its models and grow, AI needs access to more information, and crypto needs on-chain information to grow its ecosystem.
"We need systems that can help bring all these things into the chain, and that's what we're trying to do at Zora," Goens said. It is trying to create a platform that leads to the transition of artificial intelligence to blockchains.
Earlier this week, Zora introduced the ability for creators to use artificial intelligence to hack, which is jargon for recording or publishing a transaction on the blockchain, on its platform. That means someone can type in what they want, create the image almost instantly, and crop it a little later, Goens shared.
"This is a zero-to-one moment, one of the first passive income streams for the creators of large language models like Stability AI," Goens said. This means that these AI creators have the ability to extract value from the results of their models when users hack them, and the payouts are automatically split in half. "We're really excited to usher in an era where modelers, not just product creators, but modelers themselves, also have a way to reap the rewards of the creativity they help produce."
In general, Goens said he sees a lot of demand from NFT creators for more functionality and AI tools. "This is a completely new thing in many ways, and I think they're excited to innovate."
In the future, he said he sees an opportunity for blockchains to help verify, authenticate and prove ownership of creations — not just models, data and information, but the provenance of the media themselves.
"I think crypto could survive without AI on its current trajectory," Goens said. But he believes AI needs blockchains to reinforce its narrative around verification and authentication — and he's not the only person who thinks so.
"I'm excited to see the models on-chain and to see more open-source of those models so that we all have the opportunity to explore and inspect them in a way that we can make an informed decision," Goens said. "This opens up an opportunity for us to put our money where our mouth is."
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