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Johnna Powell Of ConsenSys NFT, Providing Next-Level Leadership In Web3 & NFTs, Plus: Anthony Duca Of Cavrnus, And More…
ConsenSys has emerged as not only one of the leading contributors to blockchain technology and the ecosystem of Web3. They have also, emerged as global thought leaders in technology and beyond. Today’s guest, Johnna Powell boasts a PhD from MIT in Electrical Engineering and brings a wonderfully fresh and intelligent perspective to what’s going on with NFTs today. Listen in to hear what she and ConsenSys are up to–a plethora of wonderful endeavors. Keep listening for hot topics where we interview Anthony Duca Of Cavrnus and find out about his passion for creating beautiful metaverse capabilities that are simple and frictionless to engage with across a diversity of device types.
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Johnna Powell Of ConsenSys NFT, Providing Next-Level Leadership In Web3 & NFTs, Plus: Anthony Duca Of Cavrnus, And More…
**NFT curious readers, read this episode and find out how ConsenSys has spent almost a decade enabling developers, enterprises and people worldwide to build next-generation applications, where named Satoshi Nakamoto and Ethereum intersect in the history of our guest, and how Cabaniss has built a metaverse for the ages with seriously realistic and seamless visualizations. All this and more on this episode. **
**Don’t forget, we put together a gathering at NFTLA that brought out thousands of the world’s most innovative doers in the NFT space. Head to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, bolder, better, but also as intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles on March 20th to the 23rd, 2023. See you there. **
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**This episode features Johnna Powell, Co-Head at ConsenSys NFT, the world’s largest pure-play blockchain company that enables developers, enterprises and people worldwide to build next-generation applications, launch modern financial infrastructure and access the decentralized web. Johnna, welcome to the show. **
Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here.
It’s a pleasure. You have a cool backstory. We’d love for you to take a minute and share about it with us and lead your way to how you’ve found your way to ConsenSys.
I have a bit of a mix of technical background and business background when I did my PhD in Electrical Engineering at MIT. Before jumping over the dark side of consulting at McKinsey, my PhD was in Millimeter Waves Circuit and Antenna Design for High-Frequency Imaging. The work was very deep and classified. I wasn’t able to share it with a lot of people.
I began feeling as though I was looking for something that was going to give me breadth versus depth. It was enabling me to climb out of a deep technical rabbit hole. Not that that’s bad. A deep technical rabbit hole is wonderful, but at the time, I was looking for more breadth. McKinsey, at the time, was recruiting heavily at MIT. I was finding that a lot of my peers, whom I respected a lot were taking the route of consulting to get a stronger business background.
I wanted to take the leap and luckily, I got a job there. While I was there, I got a lot of experience in business acumen, analytics and solving a lot of hard business problems. That stuck with me throughout all the roles that I’ve had since. I ended up finding blockchain in late 2016 or early 2017. I still feel like I was super late to the game, even though it seems a bit early.
At the time, I was working for GLG in corporate strategy. I was there because McKinsey’s partner had recruited me to come over there and help build up his business unit. At the time, I was familiar with Bitcoin because it was discussed at MIT. When everyone first hears about Bitcoin, dismiss it. They think it’s imaginary money and doesn’t make sense.
While I was familiar with it, I hadn’t embraced it until I started seeing it featured in news articles. That was targeted toward people who were investing in gold. At the time, I was following gold markets. It was right around the time it had passed this major gold boom. I became more intrigued by Bitcoin and blockchain. I signed up for this Bitcoin conference at MIT that year.
At that point, I locked myself in the heightened library at MIT and read this book. You are probably familiar with it. It’s Andreas Antonopoulos’ book called Mastering Bitcoin. From there, I was convinced that this was going to be a super enduring breakthrough in technology. It was much like the internet. Reading through all of the technical details and making sense of the math resonated with me. I decided right then and there, at that Bitcoin conference, sitting in my old grad school, that I have to commit myself to find a way to work in this field.
Around the same time, GLG had Joe Lubin as a guest speaker. He was speaking about Ethereum, blockchain and all of its various use cases. People were going into this talk like he was this huge celebrity and he was, but everyone was super excited about him being there. At that point, I was so inspired. ConsenSys was still a fairly young company at the time with this beautiful utopian vision of decentralization. I decided right then and there that I needed to go work for Joe.
That’s how I came to ConsenSys. I didn’t approach Joe and ask for a job. I took the old-fashioned approach and applied for an advisory partner position at ConsenSys. I felt the job description was written for me. It required a mix of consulting and technical background. It didn’t require a substantial amount of blockchain experience. It was understood that these were the early days and they weren’t going to get a ton of experts in blockchain at the time, so you would learn it on the job.
I was fortunate enough to get a response right away from ConsenSys’ recruiters, had a whirlwind of interviews set up and fortunately, got a job offer. I haven’t looked back since. Since I’ve been at ConsenSys, I’ve worked with a number of Fortune 100 clients on various parts of their blockchain journey from ideation to product build, worked on securities issuance company, lifecycle management platform, carbon credit trading platform and a bunch of different things. I got excited about NFTs. A few years ago, I started doing a number of things in the space, including partnering with Palm and HENI and Damien Hirst on The Currency NFT drop. That was exciting. I don’t know if you are familiar with that.
Yes, that one’s cool. Did you get one?
I got 3 and redeemed 2 of them for the physical. That was one of the most successful NFT initiatives of its kind. It was six times oversubscribed with a price appreciation of 10X to 20X. Believe it or not, it had a market cap of $600 million at its peak. After that, ConsenSys decided we needed to have a presence in NFTs since we didn’t have a presence in NFTs.
I spearheaded the acquisition of Treum. I don’t know if you are familiar with Treum, the Founders of EulerBeats. This is a groundbreaking platform in the generative arts and music rights and royalties space. I co-lead the NFT business unit along with Tyler Mulvihill. The team is wonderful, phenomenal and extremely talented. That’s my path into ConsenSys.
Great telling of that story. It’s such an open-ended question and it’s great to have a well-played answer to it. Thank you.
I can certainly relate. I also cut my teeth in management consulting for about twelve years before looking for something a little more disruptive and tangible. All those skills from consulting are very relevant, in my opinion, to the world of decentralization NFTs. Let’s face it. Similar to consulting, we’re building the boat while it’s on the ocean.
That’s essentially the nature of this industry at its current state. It’s pretty amazing how much of an impact ConsenSys had in the space for a very long time. I would love to get more perspective from you on how ConsenSys is enabling people to build on Ethereum and collaborate worldwide and how you look at the space and your role within this space.
It’s been wonderful being at ConsenSys because the ethos is so strong. We’ve very much embraced Web3. We don’t see ourselves as a centralized company. We like to believe that ConsenSys is one of the major leaders in enabling people to build on Ethereum and also collaborate worldwide. Essentially if you’re operating in blockchain and particularly on Ethereum, the chances that you’re working with one of ConsenSys’ products are high. We highly value and prioritize collaboration.
We liken ConsenSys to a flywheel. One end is focused on developers and the other end is focused on users. The developer end is powered by Infura and other services that help developers build Web3 apps. MetaMask is our consumer gateway for many of those apps. On the consumer side, MetaMask is the world’s largest gateway to Web3. They have tens of millions of active users. We have Quorum, which you might or might not be familiar with. That’s the number one DLT private and permissioned blockchain used by enterprises. Also, we use that to build the Palm Network. We also have a billion plus in tokenization projects, launches, digital assets and currencies as well.
On the developer side, we have Infura, which is over 350,000 developers using the managed infrastructure. This provides API endpoints to the Ethereum main net. They have a higher volume of transactions on Ethereum than any other provider, with multiple millions of downloads of our blockchain software. We have over 100 companies using our Smart Contract Audit services. We have Truffle, a dev environment for Ethereum with millions of downloads.
There are a ton of products that enable development on Ethereum, but also, in terms of collaboration worldwide, we partner with virtually all of the large EVM-compatible chains. You name one, we’re probably partnering with them and all of the ones that we believe are going to be winners. That’s through our Programmatic Enablement Program.
In addition to all of the partnerships and focusing on developers to build on Ethereum, we’re also backed by JPMorgan, MasterCard and UBS. We work with the largest global banks. We have a large consortium across the board. We like to think we have expertise up and down the stack through L1 Ethereum.
No shortage of impact in the world. That’s for sure. This inflection point right in front of us here is going to enable your reach to expand that much further, probably exponentially, I would say. That’s the merge. It’s upon us. It has started and should be completed if all goes well. It has a massive anticipated impact on sustainability, security and scalability. What does it mean for NFTs overall and also for ConsenSys?
This is the culmination of so many years of work. Our transition from proof of work to proof of stake is a fundamental restructuring of the world’s largest purpose, blockchain. In an instant, the energy requirements of the Ethereum network are going to drop by 99.95%. The importance and impact of this are so tremendous. It’s like you’re flying the plane and changing the engine mid-flight. It is very difficult.
This is the culmination of years and years of work. This is a network that powers thousands of applications and millions of daily transactions. It underpins hundreds of billions of digital assets. This is the first time a system of this size will essentially eliminate its carbon footprint through innovation and redesign alone. NFTs are a piece of this massive puzzle.
What does that mean for the world of NFTs? The most obvious one is environmental sustainability. That’s been one of the largest pushbacks across the ecosystem but importantly, security and scalability. With respect to sustainability, you can think about it as proof of work. If you were to think about how energy is used and how much we’ve reduced it, proof of work uses approximately the same energy needed to power a US house for a week, whereas proof of stake uses the same amount of energy as making a pot of coffee.
It’s a world of difference. You’re not going to have all the pushback that I’ve seen. When we run corporate NFT projects, you usually see a lot of negative sentiment from consumers saying, “This is not sustainable. How dare you? This is so irresponsible.” That’s gone. You’re not going to see those kinds of arguments anymore, but with respect to security, the merger is going to make Ethereum five times stronger in terms of security.
The cost and difficulty of attack are going to increase by fold overnight. That grows as new validators are going to stake ease to protect the network. It is 90% more cost-effective. With respect to scalability, the merger is one piece of an overall series of activities that are going to help improve scalability. It lays the foundation for all kinds of innovations that are going to make Ethereum faster and more affordable.
The reason all of this is so critically important for NFTs is that it helps Ethereum become future-proof. What do I mean by that? Many partners that our teams and I talked with are looking for something that is going to be future-proof. They ask, “Where is Tezos going to be? Where is the x-chain going to be? Why do I want to take the risk when Ethereum has next to all of the liquidity, but some of the main pushbacks have been around security, scalability and sustainability?” This is going to enable it to be future-proof, which is great.
It’s exciting and long-awaited. A lot of people are watching the price of Ethereum go up and down and hedging their bets on which chains to use for NFTs and how to plan for the future. It will be exciting when this happens.
I don’t know that people realize, especially in general, how many NFT projects are on Ethereum that are built on Ethereum. It’s well over 90% still or 95%.
When you include EVM-compatible chains, it’s almost that. It’s gone down a little bit with Solana and a couple of the other chains, Axie Infinity as well. It’s well over 90% when you include EVM-compatible chains.
Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain
It’s aligning so many things there on why wouldn’t we build on Ethereum? Why would we not launch this project on Ethereum? You’re starting to take those, “Yeah, but.” “Yeah, but this. Yeah, but that.” We’re eliminating those. It’s such a big thing. I’m honestly surprised that the mainstream media isn’t talking about it more that it’s happening right in front of us. It’s a monumental shift, but I think they’ll look back on this moment and be like, “This is a major inflection point in the world of Ethereum and crypto in general.” It’s amazing stuff.
You don’t see a lot of mainstream media talking about Bitcoin happening. You see the effects of it much later, maybe six months plus after the Bitcoin halving happens, every single time almost. Maybe that’s the same thing with Ethereum. People are sleeping on it and don’t quite get the impact of it. It is a complex concept to grasp, especially if you’re not familiar with blockchains. It is a long learning process to understand all of the implications and appreciate the difficulty in implementing all the changes.
**Public perception moves slowly. It’s almost like a guarantee. It’s interesting to watch how it falls out. We’ve been impressed with the way that the mainstream has adopted and talked about NFTs over the past couple of years since we’ve been involved. That’s been impressive, from starting this podcast and seeing people not know a thing about it to sitting in a bar and watching some sporting events where commercials are talking about NFT. It’s fascinating. ConsenSys is trying to honor and reward core developers who worked on the protocol upgrades that led to the merge. I understand there’s a special NFT involved that they would receive and would mark the milestone. Can you tell us more about that? That sounds very appropriate. **
We’re excited about recognizing all of the core developers who made the merge possible. It calls for celebration. It’s a landmark moment in Web3’s history. It’s a testament to decentralized software development. We want to do this to thank the open community of developers, researchers and so on who put in seven years of dedication and innovation to make the transformation possible.
To commemorate their efforts and share this moment with the community, we’ve commissioned a series of NFT illustrations. They depict these elaborately detailed worlds that embody the benefits of the merger. The themes are sustainability, security and scalability. The first one that you mentioned is the limited edition drop. This is minted specifically for the devs.
ConsenSys has a gift to them, many of whom work for ConsenSys. It’s a token of our appreciation. Their names are going to be included in the metadata of the NFTs and this is going to be airdropped to their wallet. We hope they appreciate it and save it. We thought about doing it as a sole bounded token, but who knows? They might want to give it to their kids one day, so we wanted it to be transferable. We’re excited about that one.
Is that something we could take a peek at or is that art to be rebuilt? We didn’t get that deep in our review.
You should be able to look at the art on ConsenSys.net/merge and see a sample of all of that art.
With the giveaway, everyone worldwide that appreciates Web3 and the momentous nature of this event can also mint free NFT. It’s a green NFT on the Mainnet. How do they go about doing that?
You would go to the same website, ConsenSys.net/merge. You should see everything. There’s a countdown. I believe the merge is scheduled for September 13, 2022. You’ll see a countdown towards the launch. You can click on Remind Me To Claim My NFT. We’ve already had 400,000 signups, believe it or not, for this NFT launch. We wanted to be very careful about not creating complications here or gas wars.
This is going to be open mint for 72 hours. We wanted to make sure it’s going to be accessible to everyone and easy. Anyone who might not necessarily understand, you still have time to download and ask people, “How do I get this NFT?” You can mint as many as you want. If you want to gift some to your grandma, you can. It’s meant to be not something speculative. It’s meant to be something that’s commemorative and it’s for everybody.
It’s a momentous occasion that people will look back on and be like, “That was a moment.” There are only a few of those here so far in the history of crypto.
It’s a good litmus test for ConsenSys to know what Ethereum wallets are active with people that are paying attention to what’s going on in the world versus wallets that someone forgot about a few years ago.
Who knows how many wallets have been forgotten? With Satoshi Nakamoto’s wallet, he’s probably not going to be claiming this merged NFT, but it’ll be interesting. There’s also one other. We’re minting a one-on-one NFT to commemorate the merge. It’s going to be minted on merge day. It’s an attempt to leverage the moment for a greater good, mint the snapshot of the moment. What we’re going to do with that one is auction it off to a cause that can extend the climate and sustainability impact of the merge. That’s another one you can watch out for. We’re going to be auctioning it probably on OpenSea and you’ll be hearing about it later.
This is going to open the door to so many different things here for ConsenSys in the future. What do you have in the pipeline coming off the heels of the merge like collaborations, partnerships and new features? What’s going to be going on?
There are so many partnerships. I’m not of liberty to speak of it yet. Some of them are in the music space. We’ve got a lot of cool musicians that we’re looking to partner with. Some are in the sports space, so we’re extremely excited about it. We can’t speak publicly about it but suffice to say, the world is bright. It’s incredibly exciting, even in the depths of the bear market.
We’ll be all ears waiting patiently for those.
I have not.
I’m doing great.
I thought that was your Zoom background.
Eathan, those look familiar.
We can have a blizzard.
I can turn it back on.
Thank you.
You can certainly follow me on Twitter. I’m @JD_Powell_. That’s my Twitter handle. You can look me up there. My name is Johnna Powell. You can probably find me easier that way. Instagram, @JD.Powell. More importantly, look up ConsenSys.net. You can navigate to our NFT side and see everything that we’re doing in NFT and across the product suites at @ConsenSys on Twitter. That’s probably enough.
Likewise. Thank you so much.
Important Links
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Episode – Past Episode
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Living Tree NFT – Twitter
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LinkedIn – Cavrnus, Inc.
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Twitter – Cavrnus, Inc.
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@JD_Powell_ – Twitter
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@JD.Powell – Instagram
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@ConsenSys – Twitter
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Spotify – Edge of NFT Podcast
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iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
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@EdgeOfNFT – Instagram