The Building Blocks of the Future with Foundation's Kayvon Tehranian

And why Crypto truly DOES want to be seen 🔺🟣 🟩

Oct 27, 2021

We are thrilled to drop our 31st episode where we dive into the foundational layers of Web3 And NFTs, with the founder and CEO of Foundation, Kayvon Tehranian. Foundation is a platform where you can create, explore, & collect digital art NFTs, on the blockchain.

Kayvon also recently gave a TED talk exploring why NFTs are NOT a fad, or a scam, but in fact are a technological breakthrough and pushing forward the next revolution of the internet. Take a listen!

⬇️⬇️⬇️ Read a snippet of our conversation below ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Kayvon Tehranian is the CEO and Founder of Foundation, a platform that enables creators to use the blockchain to monetize their work and build new connections with collectors. Having worked as a creative technologist for over a decade, Tehranian started as a Software Engineer at Google and then held leadership positions at various startups before entering the rapidly evolving world of crypto. He is SUPER committed to building the new creative economy by harnessing the untapped potential of the internet, web3, and the metaverse.

In our episode with Kayvon we loved diving into:

Why creating "beautiful experiences" on top of smart contracts is so dope
FDN v1 vs where FDN is at today
What kind of directions the NFT landscape is headed
And drilling into the rallying cry for Foundation’s design process: ‘why crypto does want to be seen’

Podcast 🎙 Snack 🍏

ST: What is your philosophy behind the statement, ‘crypto does want to be seen’?

KT: The only real examples outside of DeFi (Decentralized Finance), which really attracted a very professional technical audience, there was no example of an experience that used blockchain that use crypto that spoke to an audience that was large and diverse.

And ‘crypto wants to be seen’ was really the rallying call for our design process.

In building Foundation V2, which is: give the user a well-designed but authentic experience that is allowing them to interact with the blockchain directly. And that the value proposition of the application has to map to what the blockchain uniquely enables us to do. And so, in our previous version of foundation V1, we wanted to meet the world where it was at. The idea of digital ownership was not a widespread concept, right? Users did not expect to be able to want to own their digital goods, property objects, however you want to describe it... JPEGs, as the Twitter audience likes to throw around.

But the thing that we realized in our 2020 journey was, our digital creations or digital objects are actually immensely valuable. We've just trained ourselves through the limitations of our existing internet to assume that they can't have value. But as soon as you actually challenge that assumption and say, ‘do these things actually have value?’, the answer was just resoundingly yes.

These files that people are creating, that they're pouring their lives, their creativity into, they are valuable. They're no different than a painting or an object in the physical world. We've just never had the technology to say, can this be valuable? We've had, you know, ‘right click, save as’ technology.
And so with that technology, a certain culture formed, which said, you know, digital objects, they're free and they're instantaneously infinitely replicable. And we've just all gotten used to that, but the blockchain changes that reality.

And so given that we want that future foundation being a application that allows you to truly interact with the blockchain because you care to actually own and sell and very much value these digital objects that justified all of that new friction that comes with embracing a crypto applications design.

You have to have a wallet and you have to know how to use your wallet. You're submitting gas to a shared resource. You're uploading things to IPFS. You know, these are all new behaviors that in February, when we released, every single user pretty much on the site had never encountered any of these concepts.

And so ‘crypto wants to be seen’ was really a rallying call for us to say our application justifies you learning all of this, because the value proposition of it is so unique and empowering that the friction of setting up a wallet and paying for gas fees is minimal compared to a world in which you create digital objects that can not be valued.

mic drop

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LISTEN to more of this goodness by tuning in to Episode 31 on Spotify…