Common Goals of the Partnership
Danielius: Welcome Jared, before we talk about our partnership, could you tell us a few things about Vera Labs?
Jared: Of course, at Vera Labs, we do NFT financial services. We're interested in expanding what's possible with NFTs, beyond buying and selling. Currently, we give services for renting, borrowing, and lending NFTs and we will introduce “Buy Now, Pay Later” in the near future.
Danielius: That’s awesome. Now, our partnership will focus on creating a course on NFTs and the financialization of NFTs. And, we are happy that our community will be able to access this course and learn the newest trends in financial services of NFTs. They will also understand how to use these trends and practically perform them on the Vera Labs platform.
Jared: Yes, and I think that's one area where we note the overlap in our two companies. We do offer these NFT-related services but it has no point if users don’t know how to utilize these services. That’s why we want to spread information and turn people on to these possibilities. So, it's great that we can create a course on your platform about NFT financial services and point people towards the things they can do on Vera. What we want to achieve together just makes a lot of sense, indeed.
Danielius: Attention is really scarce in the crypto world. So we understood that we need to flip the traditional education model in the metaverse and pay users for learning. Since the attention is short, we enable our users by incentivizing them. The financialization of NFTs is really a great lever to boost the entire crypto market, and people should benefit from the know-how in this matter.
Jared: I think the same way. You see people getting motivated with different kinds of economic models, and they are quite popular. So, it only makes sense that people will choose a platform where they can learn while they earn. It's a great idea.
Danielius: The education aspect is very different in models like Play2Earn or Move2Earn compared to what we aim for — Learn&Earn. We are starting by educating users about crypto while showing them how to have fun in the space. For that, one of the tools we plan to have is the NFT items. Such as NFT avatar upgrades, NFT building upgrades, and also land as well. Of course, we plan to enable our users to rent out the land.
However, we don’t have a solution for NFT renting yet so we think Vera Labs is a potential technological partner in this space.
Jared: That sounds fantastic and we're happy to share either the technology or the knowledge, depending on what your needs are. We can definitely talk about that in the future.
Renting, Borrowing, and Lending NFTs
Danielius: I guess now it's a good time to dive a bit deeper into the financial services related to NFTs. What are the current state and the future regarding that? You have also mentioned the borrowing, lending, and renting models Vera Labs offers. Could you elaborate more?
Jared: Probably the main product we offer is renting and mostly the way that we offer it is we do a lot of business-to-business (B2B) services. For example, one of our partners is a gaming metaverse. They wanted to give their users an option to rent NFT items.
Let's say that either I don't have enough money to buy an NFT that I want or maybe I'm just not sure if I actually want to buy it yet. We offer a rental service for a much lower cost, they can rent an NFT and get all of the benefits of owning it for a short amount of time. Our smart contract will allow the NFT to be taken back out of the user's wallet if they break the terms of the rental contract.
The same way a car rental works or other rentals that you're familiar with.
Danielius: Would you also get the benefits or utility when renting it out? For example, if we enable holders to access a course on our platform, would people who rent the NFT be entitled to the same benefits?
Jared: Exactly. People think of buying and selling NFTs as the main things once you own them. Even more, they think you can only use your NFTs as a profile picture or a display. But there are other utilities too. For example, the Bored Ape community hosts live events and you have to be the owner of the NFT to enter those events. And so yeah, the rental would also give you that benefit since the NFT is in your wallet. Whatever benefits are given to holders of the NFT are also given to you during that rental period.
This means beyond just being able to display the NFT, whatever real world or other utility that it has is also given to you during that time. And this is probably going to be most of the way that our services get used in the future.
Danielius: What other utility do people attach to NFTs? What else would it enable you to do?
Jared: The ones that we're concentrating on the most now are live events. We're working on forming some partnerships with other projects that focus on such events.
As people keep thinking of new ideas and new things to do with NFTs, then the use case for our services will keep expanding too. Imagine, someday you buy an NFT and it's your proof of ownership of a house. You can basically mortgage it or rent it using our service. There are many possibilities as the NFT space and utilities expand further.
Danielius: Do you think about somehow helping people to secure their NFTs? Maybe the wrapped NFT is a safer version to be used. Maybe you can have double-wrapped NFTs for an extra security measure. What do you think about that?
Jared: I think more security and more peace of mind are always good to have. It's certainly one of the major concerns of our users right now. Currently, we just offer one wrapper. Our code has been audited and reviewed by third parties, so we have that level of assurance as well. But yeah, that's certainly an idea.
The Future for NFT Utilities, Metaverse NFTs, and Crypto Education
Danielius: Maybe one day it will be the reality. What's next for you, what's in your roadmap for the next couple of months or years, and what people are looking at?
Jared: I think we can definitely look forward to the “Buy Now, Pay Later.” That'll be the next big service that we are going to launch. And we're just always the whole idea behind the rental market. We're also very interested right now in highlighting the real-life use cases for our services. You'll probably see us performing examples of that and publicizing it and promoting it as well. Lots of exciting stuff coming up for us the rest of this year. Stay tuned, we will definitely keep you all updated.
Also, I would like to mention that I'm most curious about what's the experience for educators who want to come on to Learnoverse and what opportunities will we have there.
Danielius: So the idea is that anyone can become an educator. In the real world, you have a lot of safeguards in order to become a professor. But in Learnoverse, anyone can start teaching. That's how our platform is built. Any user can start creating a course and then publish it in the marketplace. And soon enough, when we launch the Learn&Earn token economy, it will mean that people will be earning per course completions instead of selling the courses.
We are more excited about opening up the content library because for the last five years we have experimented with various ways of helping instructors to earn and also enabling our community to learn.
Danielius: On top of that, we are building the metaverse for the social experience because we believe that in traditional education the social part does not work. The metaverse brings the opportunity to make this happen because you have seen this in the gaming world. Players do stuff together and they are part of a bigger community. We believe we can achieve the same. I guess that's the model that we are building.
Jared: I think that sounds really interesting, especially the social aspect. I just had this experience a couple of years ago in online learning, where the social aspect was missing for my students. Just being near other people and having that experience together was not there. So I think having the metaverse for this purpose is a really important aspect.
Danielius: We also look at the open metaverse. It means that once you build your identity in this metaverse or bring part of your identity from elsewhere, you can also unlock opportunities in other methods.
So hopefully we are becoming the next LinkedIn where we know your crypto learning CV. Based on that, you can unlock many other learning or work opportunities. This is very exciting because we are using a decentralized content strategy. In other words, enabling people to become instructors. We have the logic behind creating the largest educational institution in the world with the power of decentralization. It's not easy to do but the basic premises are there.
