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Tammy Yang Of Numbers Protocol - A Decentralized Photo Network, Plus: Instagram NFTs, Sequoia Backs Magic Eden, Crypto Unicorns Play-To-Earn, And More...
As NFT makes its way into the mainstream, issues such as the right-click and save of images are bound to arise. In this episode, Tammy Yang introduces a decentralized photo network to help make digital media traceable and verifiable. Tammy is the founder and CEO of Numbers Protocol, the leading platform that brings authenticity to digital content spaces. She joins Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger to explain the importance of maintaining integrity and transparency as it opens up to the public and how they’re leveraging Web3 to do so. They also discuss industry hot topics, including Mark Zuckerberg’s plans for Instagram NFTs, Sequoia backing up Magic Eden vs. OpenSea, Crypto Unicorn’s Play-To-Earn, and more on NFT going mainstream and what it means for the space.
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Tammy Yang Of Numbers Protocol – A Decentralized Photo Network, Plus: Instagram NFTs, Sequoia Backs Magic Eden, Crypto Unicorns Play-To-Earn, And More…
This episode features Tammy Yang, the Founder, and CPO of Numbers Protocol, the leading platform that brings authenticity to digital content spaces. Tammy is a Data Scientist and a Particle Physicist, PhD graduate from Manchester University. Before founding Numbers, she worked for Canonical, Viscovery, and DT42. She is a software engineer, tech lead, AI developer, CEO, and Founder.
Numbers’ is building a decentralized photo network for creating community, value, and trust in digital media. Numbers Protocol redefines digital visual media as assets and is the backbone of a suite of tools for registering and retrieving images and videos in the Numbers network. Tammy, you are very impressive. We won’t talk about particle physics but that will be a fun tangent to go on.
Tammy, we are so excited to have you at NFTLA. I am excited about your talk. It is one of the ones where I looked at the schedule and I am like, “That is one I want to be at personally.” We will let folks learn more by going to NFTLA’s site and schedule. Hopefully, they will feel the same way. Let’s get to know you and Numbers Protocol to kick things off. This is a massive undertaking that you have chosen to take on but with your background, that is not surprising. Tell us a little bit more about how this venture came to be.
Thanks, everybody. I am happy to be here. We started this journey in 2019. At that time, there was a lot of misinformation talking about blockchain technology. That is where we started because we think that Web3 technology could be the key to bringing the traceability and the verification of digital media.
Can I ask how this transition came between your past career in particle physics and getting into this domain? Was it the people that you knew? Was it an interest that you picked up? Is there some inextricable linkage? Can you tell us about that transition?
Numbers is the second company I founded. The first company is DT42. That was an AI company focusing on providing edge AI. As everyone knows, the fuel of AI models is data. While I was working in particle physics, I was working in a giant accelerator. My work every day is dealing with a lot of data. I am super familiar with data. When I was working for the AI companies, there were questions that came to my head, “Where were these data coming from? Why am I sure that I can use this data to turn the AI model? Who owns the data? Who owns the model?” Those questions came into my mind. I can never find the answer.
I am not sure if you have experienced training an AI model. In training an AI model, you have a lot of images, for example. There are people in those images. You feel weird. The questions are, “Have you ever asked these people if they want to be part of the AI? Are these photos properly licensed? Where are these photos coming from?” You will never be able to trace that. I had a lot of questions when I was working in the AI area. In 2019, we’ve got the opportunity to found another company, which is Numbers. That is why we like to address these issues of traceability and verification of digital media.
The closest I came to training AI models was the class I took at Columbia University. It is PhD level Advanced Topics in Theoretical Neuroscience. I learned enough to know that the people that were focused on that knew a lot more than I did. It takes a lot. I had to brush up a lot on my matrix calculus. It was impressive, especially among those people. Can you tell me a little more about Numbers’ vision and how that relates to the world of NFTs? Where are you headed with this?
In the Web2 world, every photo you see online is like a piece of object lingering there. There is no history attached to that. That leads to a lot of problems, such as the misinformation problem. There are a lot of reasons behind that. I don’t mean that Numbers alone will be able to solve that big problem. One of the reasons for misinformation is that it is very challenging to trace the history of digital media. Our vision is to use Web3 technology because the nature of Web3 is open and transparent. You have an open dataset, and everything is traceable. Our vision is to use Web3 technology to build a photo network where images and videos have their own histories and certificates.
You will be able to trace that and then link that to NFTs. I am sure you also know the reasons either. It is not only what happened but there has been a long problem that people just right-click and save any random photo and then sell it in an NFT marketplace. For example, there are a lot of random logos selling in NFT marketplaces without any permission of the companies or the projects. These are scams but the key problem behind them is because if there is no traceability of the digital media of these photos, you won’t be able to know who owns these photos and wherever these photos are coming from. How come you are sure that you can buy these NFTs?
For example, verifying the contract is a very common way to verify the NFT you buy. If we have to rely on the centralized verification of the contract, we lose the meaning of the decentralized technology. For us, the vision is to make digital media traceable and verifiable. In that case, we believe that it will bring a new layer of trust to NFTs. People will be able to find out more history and the authenticity of the NFT you are interested in. Also, that is not just the authenticity problem. You can find out the whole asset history, not just the token transfer history of the NFT you purchase. That could be something interesting.
The whole concept of integrity within the digital sphere has been around for a long time but oftentimes, it has been very difficult to execute to, 1) Provide that underlying integrity and, 2) Communicate it. How else are you working to make sure that things have integrity but also that it is easy for your users to understand that this is something authentic that they are looking at, it is validated, and it has integrity?
We also spend a lot of time learning how to make things right. We started by working with some of the news media projects. For example, at the end of 2020, we worked with Stanford’s Starling Lab and Reuters to create a project for archiving the 2020 US presidential election photos. In the beginning, we tried to work with experienced people who have a lot of experience in this area and also people from the university or the lab who has a long history of research on how to do it right.
We added a good user experience design to the app and also learned from Web2 applications how to make the user experience good and simple. We learned from many different sources. In the end, that comes out to our products. We will try to provide a good tool for users which is easy to use. Take a photo, and then you will be able to have a native Web3 photo. That is the goal we are trying to achieve.
It is a noble goal and a big vision. That is for sure.
It is pretty impressive. It is something I would like to learn more about. I have a lot of folks in our network that are into photography. You are taking a special approach to all of this in terms of what is possible. Let’s talk about some of the latest happenings with Numbers. The Numbers Network Actions is live and enables a bunch of cool NFT capabilities that you alluded to. Could you tell us more about that?
Network Actions is something super important for Numbers. In the Web2 world, if you are a photographer and you want to share a photo on Instagram and then also sell it at Shutterstock at the same time, you have to upload the photo twice because after uploading, they exist on different servers. That is the key difference between Web2 and Web3. In Web3, you only need to upload once. You will have a unique identity of your asset and own your creation so that you will be able to use it in many different services.
That is why Network Actions is very important to us. The users of Numbers Protocol can take a photo using the app and then connect to many different photo services. We call this service Network Actions. This service includes our listing to the NFT marketplace or some simple action such as printing a real copy of your photo. You can, for example, keep it on Web3 permanent storage. There are a lot of things you can do in the Web3 world and all these photo services. We hope that you will be able to access it very easily through the Network Actions’ functions.
I don’t know whether we will get to this but it seems like you would save a bunch of space potentially. You could almost have a test function when somebody goes to upload a photo and have a system say, “This is already in the system here. We don’t need to upload this again. Here is where you can find it.” That is pretty awesome.
The key point is not only to save some storage space but also, for example, once your photo is uploaded to Instagram, how many services you can use depends on the decision of Instagram. In Web3, because you own your creations and copyright, the ownership is much better defined than in Web2. It allows us to create an open ecosystem. That is important. This open ecosystem allows you to use your creation or photo on different services. That should be something very different and interesting.
You announced the world’s first Web3 search engine for NFTs. Can you tell us how you define a Web3 search engine and tell us about yours specifically?
The main products of Numbers Protocol are two. The first one is the app where you can take native Web3 photos and connect them to many different ecosystems through Network Actions. Once you have the photo created, then the second thing is to have a tool to explore it. That is the NFT Search Engine. The search engine we built already has more than 20 million records and assets. You can imagine it. It is like Google Reverse Image Search which is specifically for NFTs.
If you go to NFTSCAN or OpenSea, what you will see is how many tokens are minted by this contract. That will be the information you can get there. In the NFT Search Engine we built, what you can find is how many tokens are associated with this image. This information is special in this search engine we have. Going back to your question of how we define the Web3 search engine? The Web3 search engine in the future, we imagine should be something that gives people the answer to what you are looking for instead of something that the engine guesses you are looking for.
For example, the technology allows us to do that because every asset has this unique ID in the Web3 space. Every image has its identity, not just the token. When you are looking for the token or the information related to this image, we can give you exactly the results that you are looking for instead of asking the engine to guess what you are looking for. That should be something different between Web2 and Web3 because if you allow the engine to guess what you are looking for, then that gives some room to manipulate the results.
Decentralized Photo Network: The nature of Web3 is open and transparent. You have an open dataset and everything is traceable. Our vision is to use Web3 technology to build a photo network where images and videos have their own histories and certificates. You will be able to trace that.
I don’t know if we explicitly stated it or covered it for too long but the potential here is fascinating, especially when we look at the concern that has been arising over the years about deepfakes or misinformation out there. The landscape of media and communication is getting very cluttered. It is hard to tell what is the truth and where things came from.
Immediately, when I think about this, I think about a future where media outlets for the sake of wanting to be considered a reputable media outlet, will have to reference the original video footage NFT that their footage came from or photo and so on. Even if it is a short clip of what somebody said that makes them look stupid or something, they can always go link back to the original footage easily and say, “Here is the context if I wanted to find it.” That is pretty powerful. Pretty is an understatement.
I can give you one example. There is a very interesting NFT you can find on our search engine. It is some game element because it was a small potato, and it was sleeping. It was an interesting case. The interesting part of that NFT is because the search engine returns you the results of how many tokens are linked to this image and also the contract, the owner, so you can see its history. We found that starting from September 2021, a contract keeps minting this sleeping potato.
There are many NFTs created for that potato. You might think, “This is common. Sometimes the same image will be minted for NFTs.” That is pretty common but starting from October 2021, other contracts are minting NFTs for the same image, not just one. You can find 4 or 5 contracts in October 2021. Sometime later, it was even listed on Foundation. It has become a mystery because every time it is minted, it is a different contract.
The reason why I am trying to share this is that if you go to OpenSea and then see an NFT, what you can see is just the token history of that. Web3 technology allows you to know more because, with the example of that sleeping potato, you can see the whole history of that. It is not just the history of 1 token or 1 contract but the history associated with that particular image.
Mapping that to the misinformation or fake news problems, what potentially could happen in the future is you will be able to trace the history of every image and know when it was first captured, who created that, Photoshopped it, and then uploaded it to Instagram. That is the future we would like to see where you can trace the history of the photo, know what you are reading, and then have better information, see the bigger picture of the event or the news, and know the full picture of that.
Tammy, the word on the street is that the Capture App is completely integrated with Numbers and everything. Anybody can use that and have all the full functionality of the Network Actions. Tell us a little bit about that. What is the user experience like, now that it is fully integrated?
The way we designed it is we tried to make it a very simple tool so that everybody can experience taking native Web3 photos. The user journey is like any photo app. You press the camera button and then take a photo. It will collect information such as the location if you disclose the location or the time the photo was taken. It will register those to the blockchain. You can choose the minted NFT from the app. If you want to use any Network Action, such as listing it in the marketplace, you can also choose a Network Action and use it in the app for your photo. That is the user journey of the Capture App.
We always talk about this on the show, an easy button for using these features is so important for folks. In the scenes and even signing up for crypto wallets and all the stuff that you have to do with so many different companies and services within the space, it is difficult for people. I’ve got to think that this easy button that you are creating across the board is massively helpful with customer adoption and usability. Kudos. It sounds amazing.
We can’t end a conversation about the potential of a product like this without at least touching on the metaverse side. Maybe you could elaborate on what Numbers’ approach is to the metaverse and how you look at that dimension.
The vision of Numbers Protocol is to make digital media traceable and verifiable. We believe this is going to be something important if we want to build a healthy future metaverse because we believe that without a protocol like Numbers Protocol, there will be a lot of right-click and save images popping up in the metaverse. That is how we connect Numbers Protocol and the metaverse because we believe it is important to bridge the existing photo world to the metaverse where you want to see authentic content. This time in NFTLA, we will also showcase a very interesting feature. We launched a metaverse. We call it NumberVerse.
It is a space where you can browse some nice creations. It is a virtual exhibition area. In NFTLA, we will bring a headset where people can view that virtual world. If you use the Capture App, take a photo, and use Network Actions to submit it to the metaverse, then it will immediately be sent to the metaverse if the internet works. We are a bit worried. There will be a lot of people there. The internet connection might not be as ideal as we expect but as long as the internet works well, in principle, you will be able to experience that. Take a photo, and then it can appear in the metaverse with all these integrity records.
If you try to imagine the internet flowing to 2,500 to 3,500 people at the same time, it does seem like a little bit of an intense visualization. I would like to see the particle physics behind the scenes going on there. We are almost wrapped up with the regular part of the interview here but there are a couple of more questions. What ecosystem partners are you working with or coming down the pipeline? Is there anything interesting you can share?
We partnered with a lot of news media previously and then also worked on some of the very good news media archives with different partners. In 2021, because we saw there is something in the NFT space where we can help, we started working with NFT marketplaces such as the biggest NFT marketplace in Avalanche, NFTrade. Also, we worked with NFT marketplaces like Featured by Binance and several others. NFT marketplaces are the main partners that we are working with.
One of the things that we always like to ask folks is about their inspirations. Outside of what we have talked about, what gets you inspired around the world of NFTs in particular companies, ideas or concepts that you see in our near future?
It is just the start of NFTs, so I do see a lot of interesting scenarios of NFTs. For example, a friend of mine was trying to get an NFT, which is interesting. It is a shoe NFT. If you get that and keep holding that NFT, then every three months, you can get new shoes. After getting five shoes, you are forced to sell them or required. Otherwise, you will stop receiving the shoes or something like that. It is leveraging NFTs and making shoes as a service. NFT is a very interesting media, and a lot of people love it. There are a lot of many interesting ideas around it, such as this shoe NFT.
It is Coke.
Yes.
It is our token.
It is Coke again.
It is our token again.
Smile.
Is it bringing happiness?
Yes.
Sometimes I am a bit too calm.
Sleep.
Should we hit the next one?
Let’s do it.
Should we hit the last hot topic?
We should. Let’s do it.
I can’t wait to try it.
Important Links
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NFTs will be on Instagram soon, according to Mark Zuckerberg – Article
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Sequoia Capital Sees a Weakness in OpenSea’s NFT Dominance – Article
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Tiffany Huang – Previous episode
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Crypto Unicorns Closes $26 million Token Sale Ahead of NFT Game Launch – Article
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LobsterandBeer – YouTube
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Spotify – Edge of NFT
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iTunes – Edge of NFT
About Tammy Yang
Particle Physics PhD, strong logical thinking and good at math, machine learning and deep learning.
Advanced user of Python, LATEX, Linux shell scripting. Extensive experience with C, C++, Javascript.
Docker, Git, familiarity with open-source development tools and methodology, especially those in common use for Ubuntu and Debian package maintenance, including Debian packaging tools: APT, dpkg, debhelper.
Fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese.