“A ray of sunshine in a tumultuous crypto year”: NFT Fest co-founder Greg Oakford
It’s a heady time for the cryptocurrency market at the moment, but perhaps this week’s NFT Fest Aus – one of Australia’s biggest crypto industry events – is just what the space needs to help lift sentiment.
Stockhead chatted with co-founder Greg Oakford ahead of the two-day conference, which kicks off on Wednesday November 23 in Melbourne’s St Kilda.
Hi Greg. There are a few days ahead for you and the NFT community in Australia. But is the timing of NFT Fest a bit unfortunate given the dominant FTX fallout headlines?
Yeah, it’s funny, because the other week, when all the FTX stuff went down, I remember just getting confirmation from a few notable speakers at the last minute, and I felt on top of the world because of it.
My first knee-jerk reaction to the FTX news was that it wasn’t going to be so good for the party. But a week or so removed now, and it’s very clear to me that the energy surrounding the festival hasn’t waned at all. And you know, we actually sold the most tickets the very day a lot of the FTX news came out.
Do you think it’s because there is still a lot of interest in the NFT sector regardless of what else is happening in “crypto”?
Yeah, I just think the NFT space in general is a stickier community than maybe the crypto space at large. And I think it’s because there is one a lot of various meetings and interests within the NFT space that drive it – for example, generative art collections, PFPs, gaming and music NFTs, sporting NFTs. It brings in many different aspects and use cases than fungible tokens in my opinion.
And so I think it comes at a good time because there’s been a lot of doom and gloom and a lot of noise about crypto in general. We hope that NFT Fest will bring a ray of sunshine to end what has been quite a tumultuous crypto year, with many highs and many lows.
Everything you need to know about NFT Fest 2022 🦄
November 23-24 in Melbourne.
120+ speakers, 3 rooms, 2 days. for tickets.
Let’s dive in 🧵
— NFT Fest Australia | November 23 and 24 (@NFTFestAus) 11 November 2022
A huge NFT melting pot
You have a large selection of speakers and topics on the agenda. You’ve already mentioned some NFT stories, but are there any details about the party that you think stand out?
Overall, we’re just really excited to sort of facilitate a huge NFT melting pot. For example, there are some great people from across the gaming spectrum, people representing from the biggest leagues and sporting codes in Australia, even New Zealand Rugby flying over.
Kav Temperley from Eskimo Joe will talk about music NFT. And then you have generative artists and artists from the traditional art world moving into NFTs, crypto educators and those who are focused on business and building brands… it’s just a very interesting vibe to have all these different types of people together.
Conferences can often be catered to one niche, but this is not like that – we’re throwing everyone into the same facility and I think it’s going to be quite exciting. I think it’s going to lift people’s spirits overall.
What do you think or hope people will take away from it all?
Sometimes you go to a conference and you make great connections and potential new business connections – and that’s something we strive for, for attendees. But also often at conferences, people don’t leave after seeing some memorable content.
So we are a content-led conference, and our speaker selection says a lot about that. Our basic desire for attendees is to not only walk away with a few new connections, but with three to five things they hadn’t learned before and hopefully stumble upon a handful of speakers they’d never heard of before and found very interesting.
Do you still see a lot of positivity for NFTs in Australia in this current climate?
Yes absolutely. Kieran Warwick (co-founder of Illuvium) was actually on one of our Twitter pitches a couple of weeks ago and said that globally we’re punching above our weight in Australia – well with a lot of things, but also in this context.
Just look at some of the startups and people in the industry here. People like Kieran, DCL Blogger, Betty from Deadfellaz are building out the early stages of what looks like it could be quite an iconic brand. You have a lot of great artists – for example, Danielle Weber, who introduced ‘The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, on the red carpet in New York just a few weeks ago.
Then there’s the AO Art Ball – Tennis Australia’s project in January this year… to me it remains one of the most underrated NFT projects I’ve seen in my time. There is a lot of NFT innovation happening here in Australia.
A shift to a “lack of internet”
What do you say to people who tell you they don’t really get NFTs and just see them as insanely expensive jpegs of cartoon monkeys and the like?
My answer is that I understand that point of view, and I understand people’s fear or confusion about, you know, why is this silly monkey picture or cartoon animal worth this or that dollar figure?
I’m old enough to remember the world without the internet. And for the last 25 or 30 years, we’ve all grown up using an internet that was all about abundance. It was Napster this, Limewire that – rip this, Google Image that. In other words, we are used to getting things for free and we are used to just copying and pasting everything.
With blockchain, we are now moving over the next few decades into an internet of scarcity, where you can actually create scarce digital assets.
Do you think it’s hard for people to get their heads around it?
Surely. I found it difficult at first – it didn’t happen overnight for me. But I think that when you can shift your brain from an internet of abundance to an internet of scarcity, and you can create scarce digital assets, I think that’s a real unlock.
And that’s because, all of a sudden, you can go, for example: okay Greg has AO Art Ball, but his buddy doesn’t. His buddy can tell you to right-click and save, but then he doesn’t get all the benefits that Greg, as the true owner, gets. And we can verify who the true owner is thanks to blockchain technology.
But that’s my message – it’s about trying to shift your brain from the internet as we know it to a new version that can facilitate the ownership of scarce, secure, verifiable digital assets.
