Zora, an nft-based social media platform, continues its expansion beyond the cryptosphere into the hot artificial intelligence market, Dee Goens, co-founder of the startups, said in chain reaction.
Zora, not to be confused with Sora, the text-to-video tool offered by OpenAI, aims to help creators, brands, and artists better monetize their content through NFTs. Last month, Zora had "just under" half a million monthly transacting users, and in the past 30 days, Zora creators have earned more than $1.3 million publishing their content, Goens said. We also published this episode with Goens on Zora, check it here.
The Zora Network is built on the Optimism layer 2 blockchain, which is focused on growing the ethereum ecosystem. Since its founding in 2020, Zora has had more than $300 million in secondary sales, users have minted or posted more than 4 million NFTs, and it has around 1 million unique collectors, according to its website.
But there is more work to do. Zora co-founder Jacob Horne and Goens. ai-plus" target="_blank" rel="noopener">see cryptocurrencies 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 the ai wants the information to be on-chain so that the system can access it and use it freely. So we're on this kind of collision course where we want to put more things into the chain to add value and create value effectively.”
Simply put, to train its models and grow, ai needs access to more information and cryptocurrencies want on-chain information to grow their ecosystem.
"We need systems that can help put all of these things together and that's what we're trying to do at Zora," Goens said. He is trying to create a platform that will usher in the transition from ai to blockchains.
Earlier this week, Zora launched on its platform the ability for creators to use ai for minting, which is slang for recording or posting a transaction on the blockchain. This means someone can type whatever they want, generate the image almost instantly, and create it shortly afterward, Goens shared.
"This is a zero-to-one moment, one of the first sources of passive income for creators of large language models like Stability ai," Goens said. This means that these ai creators have the ability to capture value from the results of their models when people mint them and the payments are automatically halved. "We are very excited to usher in an era where model creators, not just the creators of the outcome, but the model creators themselves, also have a way to reap the fruits of the creativity they are helping to produce." .
Overall, Goens said he sees a lot of demand from nft creators for more ai features and tools. "This is something totally new in many ways and I think they are excited to innovate."
In the future, he said he sees an opportunity for blockchains to help verify, authenticate and prove ownership of creations, not only of models, data and information, but also the origin of the media itself.
“I think cryptocurrencies could survive without ai on their 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 that.
"I'm excited to see the models come online and see more open sourcing of these models, so that we can all have the opportunity to research them and inspect them in a way that we can make an informed decision," Goens said. "That opens up an opportunity for us to put our money where our mouth is."
This story was inspired by an episode of TechCrunch's Chain Reaction podcast. Subscribe a Chain Reaction in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to hear more stories and advice from the entrepreneurs building today's most innovative companies.
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