Our founder's spotlight series continues with Brian Krassenstein of NFTz. Brian is a co-founder, along with his brother Ed Krassenstein, Martijn Van Halen, Bas Van Halen, and Wouter Van Halen

What is NFTz?

NFTz is an NFT marketplace that blends non-fungible tokens with decentralized social media seamlessly.

The current NFT space is fragmented. 

NFTz aims to fix that by leveraging a decentralized identity and portable social graph. We differ from other marketplaces as we believe that curation is key.  Users should be able to organize their NFTs and manage their connections however they’d like.

What's your Background?

I've been in Crypto for ten years and have been building communities online for nearly 20 years. 

I've also run numerous companies within the media space and had several successful exits. 

NFTz is our first official Web3 project.

What are you building on DeSo?

We believe the future of the blockchain industry is interoperable, and we're building towards that with NFTz.

NFTz is uniting communities and marketplaces in a streamlined way that makes collecting, creating, and selling NFTs easier and more unified across all chains.

NFTs are inherently social because of the communities that rally around them. 

However, it's hard to be social when you have to pay high gas fees, and most interactions happen off-chain.

All of that is now possible with DeSo.

While we started on DeSo, we're in the process of integrating numerous other chains while also bringing NFTs to the metaverse. 

Doing so will allow people to freely navigate from chain to chain with minimal friction, opening the door to mass adoption.

Why did you choose DeSo?

Building on DeSo was a no-brainer because of the flexibility it affords us. 

The tools it offers developers, and its scalability provide exactly what we need to achieve our vision. 

Moreover, thanks to smart services, you can build on DeSo without learning solidity. This allows us to focus on UX improvements instead of learning an entirely new programming language.

DeSo is the fastest syncing blockchain due to HyperSync, and no other chain can scale in this manner. Transaction costs are close to non-existent.

What do you like about building on DeSo?

We meet and interact with many amazing people daily since everything revolves around the social element. 

We've met more awesome, caring, and intelligent people on DeSo than we met when we had 1.6M followers on Twitter for four years.

What are some use cases for your app? 

Imagine if OpenSea had social features where people could comment and interact with NFT communities on-chain.

For example, during an NFT bull run, people could comment and interact in real-time on OpenSea instead of in a Discord chat.

That would bring more eyes and engagement to NFT projects while bringing trust and transparency to investing and trading.

NFTz and DeSo make all of that possible.

Additional upcoming use cases include bringing NFTs into the metaverse with our 3D virtual world and a forthcoming integration with Ethereum and Solana.

Why is building out decentralized social media important?

The internet is about the decentralization of information. 

Similar to how Bitcoin opened the door to decentralizing finance, DeSo opened the door to decentralizing social media.

Web3 and decentralized social take things further and empower the user rather than corporations. 

Owning our data is the future. 

People should have the right to own and monetize their data instead of corporations. 

NFTz is on a mission to empower creators by providing the tools to change all of that.

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