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Codex CEO Mark Lurie Talks Ethereal and the Future of Blockchain Art

This article was first published on CoinCentral.com

By Steven Buchko

Mark Lurie, Codex Protocol CEO

Mark Lurie has an impressive resume: Harvard alum, Lofty founder, and now, Codex Protocol CEO. Codex is a blockchain-powered registry for unique assets. It establishes a permanent record of provenance for items ranging anywhere from fine art to bottles of wine.

About a month ago, the Codex team organized a blockchain art auction at the Ethereal Summit in New York in which they raised over $190,000 towards the Foundation for Art and Blockchain. The highlight of the auction: an ultra-rare CryptoKitty fetching a $140,000 final price tag.

Coin Central’s Steven Buchko recently sat down (virtually) with Lurie to talk about the auction and get a better sense of the value blockchain technology brings to the art world. They also touch on Lurie’s entrance to blockchain and art as well as his plans for Codex moving forward.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Codex protocol, we dive a little deeper into the project in our interview with Codex COO Jess Houlgrave.

Lurie’s Entrance into Blockchain

Lurie is no stranger to the art world. After receiving his MBA at Harvard, he started and sold Lofty, an online marketplace for fine art and collectibles. It was during that time that he learned the ins and outs of the industry and experienced first-hand the difficulty in dealing with art collectibles.

Blockchain has been on his radar for a while as well. Lurie notes, “I bought my first Bitcoin in 2011. I then lost it all in Mt. Gox. But I was interested in what was happening, and I knew that blockchain could solve a lot of the problems in art collectibles.”

However, the growing popularity of tokens and ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) is what led Lurie to create Codex. “The token can actually ensure adoption and adherence to a shared standard because it aligns incentives. That [adherence] enables a blockchain-based solution that solves a lot of the problems I saw at Lofty.”

Even though Lofty and Codex live in the same industry, Lurie faces a new set of challenges in working with blockchain technology.

“In startups, we learned a long time ago to be lean and iterate fast on technology. But with blockchain, you have to plan more ahead because it’s much harder to iterate.”

You would think that a non-technical industry such as art would be adverse to adopting new technology, but that hasn’t been the case. Lurie outlines that the key is to describe the value that the technology brings, not the technology itself.

He adds, “Sometimes we get distracted by explaining blockchain first when we should take it back to business fundamentals and explain the value proposition instead. That’s how we’ve been able to get a lot of our adoption and get engagement from the art and collectibles world. You’ve got to make an easy to understand user experience.”

Ethereal Art Auction

As mentioned earlier, Codex co-hosted an art auction with the R.A.R.E. Digital Art Network at Ethereal in May. When asked about the goals for the auction, Lurie responds with a few objectives they had in mind.

The first was to launch and showcase the Codex product. The bids and payments were all done in cryptocurrency through the Codex protocol. And they successfully generated the first art titles on their blockchain registry.

Another goal of the auction was to endow a foundation dedicated to supporting creative endeavors related to blockchain and digital art. Lurie comments, “There’s going to be so much digital art that arises due to blockchain because you can make it scarce. It’s exciting to see a whole new category and new medium rise up. So, we’re really excited about that part of the blockchain foundation.”

Lastly, the auction exposed many people to the blockchain art world and demonstrated the growing popularity of new art classes like digital collectibles.

In response to the $140,000 CryptoKitty, Lurie explains, “People value scarce art. Is it so strange that a CryptoKitty goes for $140,000 when a Picasso can go for $100 million? The fact that you can make digital art unique means it can have collectible value which is an amazing thing. I think there’s going to be a lot more art and collectibles like CryptoKitties…and one day it’ll meet the levels of mainstream artists and art.”

Codex’s Affect on the Art World

In today’s art world, you need to consult an expert to track and prove the authenticity of a piece of art. It’s slow, expensive, and prone to error. Codex is changing that.

Lurie describes the protocol as “a decentralized registry for unique assets, starting with art and collectibles… We store provenance information so that everyone can easily do business with those assets. Once you have a title, you can prove where you got it. And that means you have verifiable information about it and get access to services that read that data – insurance, asset-backed lending with liens, artist royalties, buying and selling, escrow.”

Lurie believes that these improvements will lead to a creativity boom.

He continues, “That’s going to expand art and collectibles enormously because it’s cheaper to transact, you can get loans against your art, and you can prevent fraud. So the market expands, and what’s amazing about a growing market is that it leads to more money in artists’ pockets.”

And this isn’t just a pipedream. The Codex team plans to have the protocol integrated into 5,000 auction houses that sell $6 billion worth of artwork each year. They’ve also partnered with ten companies (so far) that are building apps and services for Codex title holders. These services include overnight appraisals, fractional ownership, and asset-backed lenders to name a few.

One Final Message

When asked for any parting words to our readers, Lurie only has only one point to make,

“If you’re a crypto holder, art is a really cool thing to own and to invest in. It’s an uncorrelated store of value, and it’s something that I think your readers should seriously consider. And if they do want to consider it, Codex is a great place for them to go to make sure they’re doing it in an easy, trustworthy way.”

Thank You

Thanks again, Mark, for speaking with us and working to further blockchain adoption. We know that the Ethereal auction was just the first milestone in a long list of things to come. We wish you and the Codex team the best of luck.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steven Buchko is a managing editor at Coin Central and a blockchain investor. He’s also the co-founder of Coin Clear, a mobile app that automatically turns your daily spending habits into cryptocurrency investments.

 

Blockchain Affiliate Marketing: Boosting Profits for Publishers

This article was first posted on CoinCentral.com

By Sarah Rothrie

 

Blockchain affiliate marketing platforms are some of the latest to exploit new technology to solve old problems. More than 80% of online brands and publishers now use affiliate marketing, and yet it accounts for only 5% of the spend on digital marketing globally. Why would this be the case?

Well, like so many other industries, affiliate marketing is dependent on intermediaries. In this case, the middlemen are the affiliate networks. However, there are now several companies releasing blockchain affiliate marketing platforms that do what blockchain does so well. It will eliminate the middleman – and the fees that they take for their service.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

For the uninitiated, affiliate marketing is a way for brands to promote their products online. How it works is that a website (the publisher) will put a link on their site promoting a particular product or service from a brand (the merchant). When a customer clicks on that link and makes a purchase, the publisher gets a commission from the sale.

It’s popular because it creates a win-win scenario for merchants and publishers alike. The merchant is paying out commission only based on sales performance, unlike many other kinds of advertising. Once the links are set up, the publisher can earn passive income from their website.

Some very well-known sites started off life in this way – take Skyscanner for example. The high-profile success of many affiliate marketers is another way that gig-economy millennials can try to generate some side income.

What Is an Affiliate Network?

For a brand to launch an affiliate program at any scale, it must create a means for publishers to install tracking cookies and have a secure login area independently of the online shop for publishers to track sales. All of this creates barriers to entry for merchants. Enter the middleman – the affiliate network. CJ Affiliate and Clickbank are two of the biggest.

These big players aggregate both publishers and merchants to connect them to one another, in the same way, that Uber connects a rider with a driver. For the provision of this service, the affiliate networks generally charge between 10% and 25% of the commission paid. It’s a pretty payment for what is a mostly passive service. Given that affiliate publishers are also dependent on services such as PayPal to receive their earnings, what they earn at the end can be subject to even costlier deductions.

One of the best-known use cases for blockchain is to eliminate the need for a middleman – in the case of Bitcoin, it removes the need for a bank or clearing house. In the case of affiliate marketing, some savvy startups are now seeing that it can eliminate the need for the affiliate network.

How Do Blockchain Affiliate Marketing Networks Operate?

There are several new players in the market, and each of them has a slightly different model in place. However, smart contracts are the standard feature. In the case of Ethereum-based platforms Hoquand RefToken, blockchain creates smart contracts automatically upon the generation of a lead or sale. One new player, Attrace, is developing a custom blockchain that will generate a smart contract each time a user clicks an affiliate link.

Smart contracts will also be able to govern the terms of the affiliate sales agreement between publisher and merchant. So, for example, the percentage or amount of affiliate commission to be paid, and perhaps the timing of the payment, are controlled by the smart contract.

The smart contract will be able to automatically attribute the sale, and execute the payment of the affiliate earnings by deducting digital funds from the merchant and paying over to the publisher. The commission can be paid in cryptocurrency. Or in the case of Attrace; it plans to offer an option for receiving earnings in fiat currency. Payouts in fiat would potentially lower the barriers to using such a blockchain affiliate marketing network for publishers who have not yet adopted cryptocurrencies.

Why Make the Switch to Blockchain Affiliate Marketing Solutions?

All of the blockchain affiliate marketing networks can promote themselves on a substantial reduction in fees over the traditional affiliate networks – in some cases as much as 95%.

However, there are other issues that blockchain-based solutions can solve in addition to saving fees.

Reduce Fraud and Disputes: One of the most reported issues from both merchants and publishers. Publishers complain that their sales may be under-reported, and their earnings withheld. Blockchain provides a permanent record of transactions. A record like this means less likelihood of disputes over whether a sale was successful. Particularly if click-tracking becomes the norm, this will significantly increase transparency.  Merchants and publishers can see which clicks resulted in both sales and non-sales.

Speed: Currently, it can take weeks or sometimes even months for publishers to receive their payments. In some cases, it takes as long for sales to even register on the affiliate network platform. It is also common for affiliate networks to impose minimum payment thresholds. Therefore, publishers can wait a long time to get paid. Blockchain allows payment to be made in real time, or the payment schedule can be automated with smart contracts.

Increased Value Creation Between Merchant and Publisher: The traditional affiliate networks stand between publisher and merchant. This means that the two parties never have the opportunity for a direct discussion about creating more value in the relationship. For example, transparency of which kind of links or ads perform best, or how best to market new products.

Even if a publisher is the number one best source of sales for a particular merchant, they have no opportunity to differentiate as the affiliate network sits between and can mask the value offered by different publishers. For example, one publisher may generate a small number of lifetime customers that may be worth more for the client than a more substantial volume of one-time clients.

Decrease Barriers to Entry for Smaller Merchants: The traditional affiliate networks care about generating commission. So they usually demand that merchants pay a minimum threshold to qualify for their platforms. Blockchain-based services can afford to operate without imposing such limits.

These new players entering the blockchain affiliate network game clearly believe that this is an industry with much potential. In addition to innovative content marketing solutions like Steem, there are still new ways that blockchain can enhance existing content marketplaces.

The author, Sarah Rothrie, is a freelance blockchain writer and full-time nomad. You can usually find her near the food.

Ledger Co-founder Thomas France on Coin Support and Staying Ahead of Hackers

By Alex Moskov
This article is originally posted at CoinCentral.com

Thomas France, the Co-founder of Ledger, finds himself at the helm of a company responsible for creating and selling the Ledger Nano S, one of the bestselling cryptocurrency hardware wallets.

The wallet has earned some substantial street credit from the likes of Tim Draper and has attracted thousands of happy users. An unofficial mission statement often heard from France is that the company is here to help cryptocurrency holders sleep easier at night, which so far has been true as the wallet has proven to be incredibly resilient to hacks. However, with this statement in mind, it begs the question of how easily the Ledger team can sleep at night with thousands of hackers lurking in the shadows attempting to find a loophole that would give them access to potentially billions of dollars in token value.

The following interview with Thomas France was conducted at the 2018 Draper University Blockchain Intensive.

What strategies do you have in place to stay one step ahead of the constantly evolving hacking attempts?

Basically, what we want to do at Ledger is provide the best possible product for people to have their coins stored safely. What we’re doing is that we’re putting the bar as high as possible to make sure the keys are secure. There are no things and no system that is unhackable. It’s not something that exists, but it’s just putting the bar as high as possible.

We are constantly improving. We have some people that are auditing the code all the time. We have the bounty program where people can help to find some of our vulnerabilities. We’re basically building the right framework to raise the bar as high as possible.

How do you prioritize which coins to add support for on the Ledger Nano S?

It’s interesting, in a way, that we provide the APIs for people to build support directly for their coins. What we’ve seen lately is that we do not make the blocking ourselves but it’s more the community that works on the blocking to support for their coins, generally on their own wallets.

We’ve got the easy way to make the integration. In terms of choosing which coins to support, it’s based on factors like the popularity, the market support, the number of integrations within the space. It’s mostly based on factors like that. The number one is that we provide the right tools and the right SDK for people to submit support for a coin on their own.

I’ve seen it with the NEON wallet for NEO. It’s built out by independent developers.

Same for Stellar, same for some other coins that will be supported soon. I think we’ve got like tens of teams working on support for their coins from Ledger.

You guys have thousands of users. I’ve got a couple Ledgers myself. You’ve got the users, you’ve got the active cryptocurrency traders. Do you have any plans in the future to add an exchange component to the Ledger service?

Right now, we’re really focused on what we’re good at. It’s been on securing crypto and providing the best possible experience. Short term, we’d be revamping the application directly to make it easier and more user-friendly.

We build some API for people to integrate with services like that, so potentially that’s something that could happen. We also have some integration with all the decentralized exchanges, so people can use our products on the relay runner or on the relayers on EtherDelta. So, you already have those services for using Ledger with decentralized exchanges.

How can we make the whole cryptocurrency storage more user-friendly? I think the Ledger Nano S has done a lot to take one major step, but in terms of mass adoption, it’s still a little confusing. Even the front-facing products are still a little bit difficult to onboard new users.

I think we went from one stage which was basically when you wanted to store your crypto, if you wanted to do it the right way, you needed to buy your computer, make sure it had no connectivity, boot it, install your wallet, generate your keys and use this computer solely for the purpose of signing a transaction.

Now, you can use a wallet that makes this process an order of magnitude easier. For the next step, it’s always a question of it being easier to give the keys to somebody else, but if you want to have the keys and keep your keys on your own, you will need to take a few extra steps because you have some more freedom to have your keys and you have more responsibility and there are some steps that you will still need to go through.

You will still need to make the initialization of your keys, you will still generate your keys. We want to stand in that process and to make each step easier. The recovery process to find some strategies to make sure that you can generate them and store them in different locations in the best possible ways and have some different components where you don’t need to have the device to check your account or just for the signing.

Also, the ability for people like my mother to have more cryptocurrency because they’re used to centralized governance which is enforced by banks which you cannot have on the Ledger right now.

The journey of Thomas France and Ledger will be interesting to follow. As a beacon of security and stability in a digital world that can get crazy at times, it’s important to understand how Ledger evolves with the ecosystem.

If you’re currently holding your bitcoins in an exchange wallet or software wallet, it’s highly recommended you explore hardware wallets as an option. Check out our Ledger Nano S to get a lowdown on the value and specs.

The author, Alex Moskov, is the Editor-in-Chief of CoinCentral. Alex also advises blockchain startups, enterprise organizations, and ICOs on content strategy, marketing, and business development. He also regrets not buying more Bitcoin back in 2012, just like you.

Recall a recent workplace interaction and write a paper that summarizes the interaction

Recall a recent workplace interaction and write a paper that summarizes the interaction. Include the following in your summary:

•Noting information you read in Tannen’s article and the text, identify verbal communication patterns in the exchange.

•Did you notice the influence of power in the communication?

•Classify the communication as effective or ineffective and support your rationale.

•Would you classify this as an intercultural communication exchange? Why or why not?

•How do the relationships affect workplace communication? Length: 5-7 pages not including title and reference pages.

References: minimum of 3 scholarly resources. (1 reference should be Tannen, D (1995). The power of talk: Who gets heard and why.)

ADVANCED SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT

1) Review some articles on landfills and on compost piles. This assignment is not about summarizing these operations but about analyzing and comparing the differences between these two fundamental principles of solid waste management. Describe when and why each of these fundamentals is appropriate for use to manage municipal solid waste. Include in your discussion details about the differences of microbial mechanisms, the end products of degradation, and of factors that help and harm the performance of these operations. How effective is each one? (Your total response for all parts of this question should be at least 500 words.)

2) A community of 62,000 does not have a municipal recyclinge program, and they it sends all of their its refuse to the municipal landfill. Will the landfill generate enough natural gas to meet the needs of the city if the municipality needs to annually generate 10 million cubic meters of natural gas (methane) and the city collects all of the methane that is generated? How will this affect the population of the city? Explain your answer. (Your total response for all parts of this question should be at least 300 words.)