The co-founder of the firm, Dee Goens, stated on Chain Reaction that Zora, an NFT-based social network platform, is continuing to venture outside of the cryptocurrency space and into the burgeoning artificial intelligence market.
Zora is a text-to-video technology by OpenAI that promises to assist creators, companies, and artists in better monetizing their content using NFTs. It should not be confused with Sora. According to Goens, Zora had “just under” 500,000 monthly transacting users last month, and in the previous 30 days, content creators on the platform earned over $1.3 million from submitting their work. Check out the episode we posted with Goens on Zora by clicking this link.
The layer-2 blockchain Optimism, which aims to expand the Ethereum ecosystem, is the foundation upon which the Zora Network is constructed. According to Zora’s website, since its founding in 2020, it has amassed over $300 million in secondary transactions, had over 4 million NFTs coined or posted, and has over 1 million individual collectors.
However, there is still work to be done. Goens and Jacob Horne, co-founders of Zora, consider AI and cryptocurrency as complimentary technologies that may enhance each other.
“Crypto wants information to be on-chain so that it can be valued and add value to the system,” Goens said. “And then AI wants information to be on-chain so that it can be freely accessed and utilized by the system. So we’re on this kind of collision course where we want to put more stuff on-chain, in order to effectively add value, create value.”
Put simply, AI requires access to more data in order to train its models and expand, and cryptocurrency needs data on-chain in order to expand its ecosystem.
“We need systems that can help bring all of these things on-chain and that’s what we’re trying to do at Zora,” Goens said. It is trying to create a platform that ushers in the transition of AI onto blockchains.
Zora announced earlier this week that creators may now use AI to mint—a technical term for documenting or uploading a transaction to the blockchain—on its platform. According to Goens, this implies that a user can input anything they want, have an image created practically quickly, and mint it soon after.
“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 these AI creators have the ability to capture value from their models’ outputs when people mint them and the payouts are split in half automatically. “We’re really excited to usher in an era where model creators, not just the creators of the output, but the model makers themselves, also have a way to reap the rewards of creativity that they’re helping to produce.”
Goens stated that he generally observes a high level of demand for additional AI capability and tooling from the NFT creator side. “This is a net new thing in many ways and I think they’re excited to innovate.”
He stated that he believes blockchains will have the ability to help in the future to validate, authenticate, and demonstrate the ownership of creative – not just for models, data, and information, but also the source of the media itself.
According to Goens, “I think crypto could survive without AI in its current trajectory.” However, he and others believe that blockchains are necessary for AI to support its story about identification and verification.
“I’m excited to see the models on-chain and see more open sourcing of these models, so that we can all have the opportunity to investigate and inspect them in a way where we can make an informed decision,” Goens said. “That opens up an opportunity for us to put our money where our mouth is.”