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Seth Goldstein Of Bright Moments, The Physical NFT Gallery DAO, Plus: Berkeley Nobel Data NFT, NFT High School Athletics, NFT In Travel, Ikonick Bravado Deal, And More...
How can you use cryptocurrency in real life? If you’re in Venice, you’ll soon use crypto Venetians from your local NFT Gallery! The show’s guest today is Seth Goldstein, the founder of Bright Moments, a DAO-based NFT Gallery. Seth discusses with Eathan Janney, Jeff Kelley & Josh Kriger how they plan on unlocking value from merchants and service providers in the local community. You can use your NFTs to get in the VIP line at the club next door. Or get a special appetizer! Join in the conversation to bring NFT to the forefront.
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Seth Goldstein Of Bright Moments, The Physical NFT Gallery DAO, Plus: Berkeley Nobel Data NFT, NFT High School Athletics, NFT In Travel, Ikonick Bravado Deal, And More…
**This episode features guest Seth Goldstein, a founding member of Bright Moments, the Venice-based NFT Gallery DAO that opened its physical doors in May 2021. Seth is an early internet pioneer, visionary entrepreneur, successful Angel investor, mentor, and artist himself. He is committed to creating opportunities that harness and leverage technology for everyone. For years, he has successfully built businesses that evolve the way people use technology to improve their lives. **
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Seth, it’s great to have you here.
It’s great to be here, Seth, with you in person. This is the first time we have a live guest/host experience. COVID is ending. The gallery is down the street from me and it’s cool to be here. I went to your opening event. That was a lot of fun. People are ready to socialize and drink. That was very clear.
DOWs are programmable corporations. Click To Tweet
The pendulum is starting to swing the other way. It hasn’t swung all the way the other way, but by the time July 2020 comes, there’s going to be a lot of excesses.
We didn’t get a chance to experience it. Tell Eathan, I, and the readers what the story is with Bright Moments. How did it even come to be?
There’s a couple of factors that went into it. We’re all coming out of a deep, depressing pandemic. In our case here in Venice Beach, the only thing that was open in the dark days of the fall in December 2020 and January 2021 was Menotti’s Coffee Shop on Winward right by the boardwalk. I would trudge out every morning with my partner Christie or whomever and get our coffee. That’s where we meet people who were also trapped for the day. That’s where a lot of the conversation started. I had moved out to Venice from the Bay Area. I started to meet people here in front of the coffee shop. There’s a guy named Stan who’s an AI/ML researcher. There’s a guy named Greg Cipes, who turns out as the voice of Beast Boy and Michelangelo of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
We know the guy who sang the song for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Louie and Liam, his son, run Menotti’s in Townhouse next door. It felt like a community, even in those dark days. As I started to meet people, at the same time, out of curiosity, I was starting to explore NBA Top Shot. I was buying and starting to sell some Top Shot Moments. On top of that, I was taking photographs of the sunset by the breakaway in Venice. A friend of mine used to work with, Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures, suggested that I take some of these synthetic videos I was making of the sunset and mint them as NFTs on Foundation. I did that.
I remember back at the end of January 2021, one of the NFTs that I had minted. I woke up the next morning and it was sold for 1 ETH. I stepped back and said, “This is a new file format.” There’s a big unlock that’s happening with NFTs, where the same type of file or asset class that I was buying and selling on NBA Top Shot, I was also creating and selling through Foundation with my photographs. The light bulb went off. As we come out of the pandemic, wouldn’t it be awesome to create something for the community in the form of an art gallery where instead of having to have physical paintings and artworks, you could have large displays with Wi-Fi and change the art constantly? Given the fact that each of the artworks was an NFT, there could be a QR code attached to it. People coming to this gallery could scan them, learn more about them, and even buy them. That’s a long-winded way of saying how it came about.
I heard an interview with people and he was talking about the idea of, “Isn’t it cool that now with NFTs, you could have multiple galleries showing the same artwork at the same time?” He talked about it in both a very liberal and then a potentially sanctioned way. For example, he said, “Anybody could show my work anywhere they want. That’s a thing and you could do that unless there’s some license around it, but you don’t have to do that. There may be space for artists then to come in and say yes, but if you want to have an officially sanctioned show, there’s also maybe a way to do that as well.” It offers interesting possibilities.
That observation is a good segue to the fact that you went a step further. You created a DAO for this gallery. Our readers are probably wondering, “What is a DAO?” How did you come up with that?
DAO is Decentralized Autonomous Organization. It dates back to 2016, the original MakerDAO that caused a lot of trouble in the world of ETH in terms of a fork. The whole concept of a DAO, in the same way that Bitcoin is programmable money, DAOs are programmable corporations. They are decentralized, on Chain, and all tokenized. They operate and they’re governed by the voting of the token holders. My whole career was doing startups in the traditional sense, which is either a C-Corp, S-Corp, or an LLC with Angel Fiat money, seed capital, venture capital, and then getting acquired.
I’ve been fascinated by not just the currency speculation of the crypto world but the utilities. How do we learn from decentralization and apply that to organizational behavior, leadership, and building holistic, healthy, and sustainable communities that have profit motives but are flatter than your typical startup, where you’ve got 1, 2, or 3 founders with the bulk of the equity and then one investor with the next bulk of equity? It trickles down and the people doing the work have less and less.
One of the hopes here by doing this as a DAO is to be able to engage the community, who are all bringing different values and advantages to this community. It’s not just that you’re an accredited investor because we’re not selling tokens. We are providing tokens to different members of the community who are helping to open up this gallery. Somebody might be the one who’s doing all the physical implementation of the screens, hanging them, and organizing them. Somebody else is curating different artists for display or working on software for displaying the NFTs. There are different people bringing different things to the table, but they’re all being rewarded with BRT Tokens, which are the Bright Moments Tokens of the DAO.
I have a follow-up question about the DAO. I haven’t been part of a DAO yet. I would love to be soon and maybe even build a DAO in organizations where I know there is voting and debating. Sometimes it could get overwhelming. It’s hard to get things done because of all that. How have you seen that play a role or haven’t you? Do you have any experience or thoughts about that in terms of getting things done and also letting people have a voice in it at the same time?
NFT Gallery: Each of the artworks are an NFT so there could be a QR code attached to it.
There’s a concept that I’ve taken to heart in terms of what they call progressive decentralization so that it starts centralized. I started this and handpicked a group of people to get involved. That circle of people is expanding, but ultimately, it will be fully decentralized such that I won’t have any more influence or power as anybody else. We’re all going to have an equal amount of tokens in the DAO. In terms of tooling and structuring the organization initially, making sure they’re all good eggs and that there’s a diversity of opinions that’s not all yes people, that’s what I’m bringing to the table as an OG serial entrepreneur. Moving forward, they’re going to be key strategic choices we have to make in terms of awarding artist grants or choosing what other cities we want to expand to, which will be voted on by the DAO.
The way that works in our case, very simply, there are 40 different members that each have 25,000 BRT Tokens. In order to vote on a proposal, you need to be able to show that you have 25,000 BRT Tokens in a token gate to Discord channel to be able to enter and then vote on Chain through Snapshot. The tokens are your admission ticket to being able to vote as a member of the DAO. In the old world of starting a company, you have a board of directors, observers, and cofounders. You have to file things with the secretary of state. The way that decisions get made is oftentimes behind the scenes in a conversation with your lead investor or cofounder. There’s a level of radical transparency here with the DAO that makes it exciting. Given some of the unintended consequences of hypergrowth capitalism that we’ve seen with Facebook, Uber, and WeWork, we all want a kinder way of doing capitalism. I hope and believe that tokenized communities and DAOs, in particular, offer that.
We heard you have your own NFTs, as well as having your governance tokens there. These are called Crypto Venetians. Can you tell us about that?
The primary user experience is as an NFT Gallery. People come in and they can see NFTs that are brilliant and beautiful on large screens and are compelling and engaging in ways at looking at them on your iPhone and desktop. That’s step one. We’re open from n 12:00 to 7:00 every day. We have art openings every Thursday. There’s a lot of programming scheduled. We’re having the TAO of DAO Speaker Series here. The first use case is somebody walks in off the street and scans a QR code, which brings them to BrightMoments.io, which is our website. On our website, you can see what you’re looking at on the screens in the gallery. You can click on one of those tiles and see that piece on Foundation or SuperRare. You can see if it’s for sale or it has been sold. It’s a traditional NFT-viewing experience socially.
For whales or people that are already buying and selling NFTs, that’s fine. They already have their MetaMask or Rainbow Wallet on their phone. They have ETH in their account to be able to pay gas fees. What about the majority of people that are NFT-curious that come in the gallery that may not be ready to buy a $3,000 or $500 NFT? How do we engage them in moving from being crypto-curious and NFT-curious to having a crypto Ethereum wallet opened and owning an NFT? What we decided to do along the lines of CryptoPunks and a lot of these other projects is to mint our own collection of NFTs. They’re called Crypto Venetians. We have an amazing illustrator who has designed them. They’ll be generated as a smart contract on Art Blocks. There are 200,000 possibilities of which only 1,000 are going to be minted and listed.
The idea is starting. Everybody up to ten people a day in the gallery will get a magic ticket, which will have two QR codes. One will be, they’ll scan it with the Ethereum wallet on their phone and it will reveal one BRT Token. They will then send that token to the second QR code, which is an Ethereum smart contract address to mint their own Crypto Venetian that will get revealed to them in the gallery. We’re the art gallery of the future as we are a consumer bank in the future, wherein in the old days, you go to Wells Fargo or Bank of America and they give you a passbook, savings account, and maybe a toaster. In the new world, you have to open up an Ethereum wallet, write down your passphrase or private key, and fund it with some ETH so that you can pay the gas to mint a Crypto Venetian or buy and sell an NFT.
Guys, no morning meetings until I get my Crypto Venetian. I’m hoping there’s one of a Venetian holding a Menotti’s coffee cup because that happens to me. The best coffee in Venice and my go-to spot is the place that Jeff goes. He likes their chai or hot chocolate. He’s not even a coffee drinker and he likes the spot. I need my Crypto Venetian with a Menotti’s coffee. How hard will that be to get?
First of all, you have no control over which one you’re going to get. It’s truly random. It’s generative art. I would love to open up this conversation here in the show. Maybe we’re seeing the evolution from NFTs as being a speculative asset to being something more utilitarian. You don’t just own a Zed horse. You can run them, breed them, and make money off them. It’s the same thing with if you didn’t get Meebits. You could in the open market, but if you had CryptoPunks, that gave you the utility of getting a Meebit when they were minted. Now, we’re seeing with the Bored Ape Yacht Club. You can’t buy the merchandise unless you can demonstrate that you own one.
What we’re trying to invent here with these Crypto Venetians is how they can unlock local value from merchants and service providers in the local community. When you show your CryptoPunk, two Menotti’s, maybe that opens up a secret menu. If you show it at Townhouse the club next door, you get in the VIP line or you go to Gjusta and you get a discount or some special appetizer. How do we make these NFTs like a loyalty card for local experiences and then knowing that we’re only going to be issuing 1,000 Crypto Venetians? Every time we open a new gallery in New York, Berlin, Tokyo, or Miami, we will mint another 1,000 Crypto New Yorkers or Crypto Japanese, which will be local characters that will be tied to that community and try to engage with the local community and not just live in the Metaverse.
Jeff, Sarasota has got a good art scene. Maybe you need to open up one of these NFT galleries over there.
You’ll earn a token by coming to the Gallery and starting the process. Click To Tweet
It’s a huge one with Ringling Circus and the Ringling College here. It’s a little known but with massive art influence here. I’m already talking to people here about it and trying to bring NFTs to the forefront. We’ll talk about it on some Hot Topics later. There are not a lot of people that know about NFTs, even though it seems like they do. Seth, to clarify, when someone comes to the gallery, that is what affords them the opportunity to acquire a Crypto Venetian. They just have to pay for the gas. It’s their presence that unlocks that opportunity. Is that correct?
We want to tie it to somebody being here and not randos speculating remotely. A lot of what we’re trying to figure out and prototype here is, as the world comes out of quarantine, how do we want to engage socially and culturally? The location of the Bright Moments genesis gallery is almost equally distant from the boardwalk in Abbot Kinney. I think of it like, “Coney Island needs Hauser and Wirth, hierarchy and mass culture.” We’re very much trying to tap into what the world looks like post-pandemic. NFTs and cryptos are not going away, but it’s going to come out into the open. It’s going to be something that we do together as people, not that we do it isolated behind our screens at home. The extent to which we want to be leaders, we want to be leaders there figuring out safe and hygienic ways for people to connect. Not only is there no reason that these crypto-NFT experiences should be solo, but there’s much more richness when people physically and socially come together around some of these ideas and new asset classes.
The coming together thing is so interesting to me. We’re coming out of this pandemic and remote-only environment. The community is at the center of all this. What other plans do you have to help nurture the community for owners of Crypto Venetians and patrons of Bright Moments?
I’ll give you a couple of examples and these are prototypes. One is we had an opening and a great live jazz band. It was a celebration of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who was an out jazz saxophonist from the ’60s who wrote that great album called Bright Moments and a great track called Bright Moments. That’s where the idea of the name of the gallery came from. Carlos Niño, who’s a music producer and DJ, put together three amazing musicians. In almost ad hoc, we had this idea of, “Why don’t we take the flyer for the event and mint it as an NFT on Foundation with all the proceeds going to the live jazz performers?”
While the concert was happening, there was a live auction on Foundation of the concert poster. Foundation didn’t have splits implemented yet, but we would have used that. Instead, I just split the proceeds to four ETH wallets of the jazz musicians. One of whom already had one. Three of whom opened up new ETH wallets to get paid for the gig. Another example, we’ve got a DAO member dinner. Travis Lett, who’s an amazing chef and a visionary entrepreneur who created Gjusta and Gjelina, is going to be cooking. We started talking about, “Do we make these 40 people come to the dinner? Is each plate its own NFT with a QR code on the plate that you buy and then you fill your plate with food and all the proceeds get immediately transferred to the kitchen staff and waiters?”
We want to use this physical location as a way of prototyping new ways of using NFTs in non-traditional ways that are more rooted in day-to-day life and thinking about ETH as a Visa card or PayPal. We want to do as much on Chain as possible. We know there are gas fees and there’s a lot of volatility in the price of ETH. As a community, my feeling is, the more we’re doing on Chain natively using ETH wallets and NFTs as a file format above and beyond artwork, the better we’re all going to be positioned in the future. We’re probably going to build IP and products here that we could roll out in other locations in the future.
Do you guys have a Discord channel or someplace for community members to connect?
We do have a Discord channel and Telegram. The logistics of distributing the Crypto Venetian NFTs start with giving visitors to the gallery a BRT Token. You’ll earn a token simply by coming in and starting that process. That’s a way of getting you into the community as well.
Have you started to get any inbound interests for galleries elsewhere?
We’re starting to. My sense is New York. The locations that seem to keep popping up would be New York, Tokyo, Miami, Mexico City, and Berlin. If there’s any reader out there that is interested in NFTs, galleries, and DAOs, please follow up with us. We’re looking to grow quickly and take a lot of lessons. If you think about what Bright Moments is, it’s an MVP of a product. It’s a pop-up. We have space until the end of September 2021. We’re building a lot of software based on what we’re learning from live people coming through the gallery.
We have realized, for example, that the native way of experiencing NFTs in a real-world gallery format is like a playlist. It wasn’t obvious to me, but now it is that you have 30 to 40 NFTs like you have 30 to 40 songs in a playlist. The playlist can be grouped by genre. It can be 3D rendering NFTs, the most expensive NFTs, the most valuable LeBron James Top Shot Moments, or the most recently purchased CryptoPunks.
There are infinite ways of slicing and dicing playlists of NFTs the same way you would do with Spotify playlists. We’re making tools to make it easy to create NFT playlists across different platforms and then ways of displaying those playlists. Ultimately, if we have 10 to 20 galleries that are all live then one artist, creator, or celebrity will be able to drop an NFT and have it go live to people across multiple locations at the same time. That’s exciting.
**It makes me think of **SuperWorld
Yes, this is going to be fun.
I’m ready.
That counts. It has clearly had an impact.
**It’s not to be confused with pickleball. **
Let’s do it.
I appreciate the answers, Seth.
They can go to BrightMoments.io, which is the gallery website. Instagram is @BrightMomentsGallery. SethGoldstein.com will tell you more about me. I have another project I’m working on that will play off of all this in the future, which is NFTInsurance.io, which is a way of underwriting insurance for your NFT assets in the same way you can purchase flight insurance or buy insurance for things in your house. You’re going to want to insure your digital crypto assets as well. Otherwise, I would love to have people come by and show up in person here in Venice. Thanks for the opportunity to share some of this.
Thank you.
Important links:
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@BrightMomentsGallery – Instagram
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iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
About Seth Goldstein
Seth is an entrepreneur, investor and mentor. Over the past twenty years, Seth has created a number of pioneering companies, including SiteSpecific which was one of the first Internet advertising companies, and alt data pioneer Majestic Research.
In 2011, Seth co-founded Turntable.fm, the pioneering service which made music listening social, and which evolved into his next online music product, Crossfader– the first global remix community.
Seth is an active angel investor, and in recent years he has worked with the US State Dept to foster entrepreneurship in emerging markets such as Egypt, Turkey and Greece. He lives in SF.