NFT-based social networking platform Zora continues to expand beyond the realm of cryptocurrencies into the hot artificial intelligence market, startup co-founder Dee Goens told Chain Reaction.
It is not to be confused with Sora, the text-to-video tool provided by OpenA. Zora aims to help creators, brands, and artists better monetize their content through his NFTs. Last month, Zora had “just under 500,000” monthly transacting users, Goens said, and in the past 30 days, Zora creators have earned more than $1.3 million posting content. He also posted this episode with Goens on Zora, so check it out here.
Zora Network is built on layer 2 blockchain Optimism focused on growing the Ethereum ecosystem. Since its founding in 2020, Zora has generated more than $300 million in secondary sales, users have minted or posted more than 4 million NFTs, and it has approximately 1 million unique collectors, according to its website.
But there is still work to be done. Zora co-founder Jacob Horn and Goens believe that cryptocurrencies and AI are two complementary technologies that can benefit from each other.
“Cryptocurrencies want information to exist on-chain so that it can increase in value and add value to the system,” Goens said. “And AI wants information to be on-chain for systems to freely access and utilize. So we're on this kind of collision course, and we're not effectively adding value. We want to put more things on-chain to add and create value.”
Simply put, AI needs access to more information to train and grow its models, and cryptocurrencies need on-chain information to grow their ecosystems.
“We need a system that helps us bring all this on-chain, and that's what we're trying to do with Zora,” Goens said. We are creating a platform that will lead the transition of AI to blockchain.
Earlier this week, Zora launched a feature on its platform that allows creators to use AI to mint (the technical term for recording or posting transactions on the blockchain). Goens said this means someone can type in what they want and an image will be generated almost instantly, then created right after.
“This is a zero-to-one moment and one of the first sources of passive income for creators of large-scale language models like Stability AI,” Goens said. This means that these AI creators have the ability to extract value from the output of their models when people create them, and payments are automatically split in half. “We're really excited to be at a point where not only the creators of the output, but the modelers themselves, can benefit from the creativity they're creating.”
In general, Goens said he sees a lot of demand for more AI capabilities and tools from the NFT creator side. “This is completely new in many ways, and I think they're excited to innovate.”
He said he sees an opportunity for blockchain to help verify, authenticate and prove ownership of creations, such as models, data and information, as well as the origin of the media itself, in the future.
“I think cryptocurrencies can survive without AI in their current trajectory,” Goens said. But he believes AI needs blockchain to strengthen the narrative around verification and authentication. He's not the only one who thinks so.
“We are excited to see models on-chain and open source more of these models, so we can explore and inspect them in a way that allows us all to make informed decisions.” It gives us the opportunity to do that,” Goens said. “This opens up opportunities for us to use our money freely.”
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