Building a Web3 Marketplace with Cloudinary and IPFS

Daniel Duan, who is the head of engineering at Legitimate, has helped build out a truly innovative Web3 marketplace. The Drops by Legitimate project allows artists to create non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for their physical products, such as paintings, photography and even wearable items.

As the artists’ product images are delivered via Cloudinary, Becky and Sam from Cloudinary’s Customer Education team sat down with Daniel for this DevJams episode. They discuss all things related to the Drops project, including a walkthrough of how Cloudinary works with IPFS for optimized, accelerated image delivery through various caching mechanisms.

If you are looking for a great developer-focused introduction to Web3, NFTs, cryptocurrency and the blockchain, you won’t want to miss this DevJams episode!

Sam Brace: [00:00:00] Welcome to DevJams. This is where we talk with developers that are doing some amazing things when it comes to website development, mobile app development, and as you’re going to see, development that is starting to get into the blockchain and involving NFTs. But what that ultimately means is that they’re probably using Cloudinary in those projects in interesting ways, which is how they got on our radar to be in a DevJams episode.

My name is Sam Brace. I’m the Director of Customer Education here at Cloudinary, and joined of me as the co-host on all of these DevJams episodes is Becky Peltz, who is our curriculum program manager for developer education at Cloudinary. So Becky, welcome to episode. Glad to have you back.

Becky Peltz: Hey, glad to be here.

I really like this whole project. I’m super excited about it. It took me a while to totally understand [00:01:00] it before to get a understanding ahead of time, I had to read some blogs and so I’m really looking forward to hearing Daniel explain this cause I think there’s a lot of concepts here that we need to build before we totally can appreciate what’s going on here.

Sam Brace: I agree with that because it’s a multi-layered project in many ways, because they’re doing certain work in the blockchain, so that makes it a web3 project in certain ways. They’re doing certain things with non fungable tokens, also known as NFTs. They’re working with certain marketplaces where certain details can be sold.

They also have an aspect that’s tied to physical goods as well as digital goods. It’s a very cool project that we’re doing with Legitimate with, we have the tap project that we’ll show here. We have the drops by legitimate, so there’s a lot of different things that are here, but what it ultimately shows is that when we’re looking at media management and delivery, there’s a lot of new ways to be thinking about it that Daniel’s gonna talk through in this episode.

But [00:02:00] also it shows how spaces like that are things that Cloudinary and other vendors can definitely live in and be very, very helpful when it comes to those projects. So there’s tons of data here that he’s gonna share. So in my opinion, out of all of the episodes that we have shown, this is one of the ones that you may need to pause, go back and listen to again, because there’s so many nuggets of knowledge that are shared throughout this piece.

Becky Peltz: And having Cloudinary on web2 and interfacing with the this application on web3 allows you to really kind of understand the difference between them, and then why we still need both of ’em, why we still need web2. So it’s really, really great learning here.

Sam Brace: Absolutely. Absolutely. And if you thought web3 was only cryptocurrency, oh my gosh. Daniel’s going to blow your mind, let’s just put it that way. Cause like I said, I can’t say it enough. There’s a lot happening here. This very cool, [00:03:00] cutting edge project. Let’s get into it. Let’s talk to Daniel and learn more about Legitimate and all the work that they’re doing over there.

And then once Daniel and Becky and I wrap up, don’t turn off the episode because we have some key takeaways for you that will help summarize the points that are raised and maybe help you with your next project, especially if you’re trying to get involved with any of the things that are involved with the blockchain, NFTs and more. So see you in a little bit.

Daniel, welcome to the show.

Daniel Duan: Hi Sam. Thank you.

Sam Brace: So Daniel, before we start getting deep into this project, and there’s so much to talk about when it comes to what Legitimate is doing between the various projects that are you guys are taking part of, I do wanna take a chance just to talk a little bit about you.

So tell us about you and how you got into software.

Daniel Duan: Yeah, so brief intro about me. I’m Daniel. I’m the head of engineering here at Legitimate. I got involved with Legitimate when Calvin, the [00:04:00] CEO and founder, also one of my good friends from college basically pitched me the idea of connecting the digital and the physical through the use of NFTs and blockchain.

And I think right now, it is an exciting space to be in because there’s a lot happening on the web3 crypto blockchain front. And also because we get to work with a lot of cool artists and brands and providing them with the technology that can really unleash their creativity without having to worry about the technology and the technical side of things. In terms of where my technical background is, I studied computer science at UCLA years back.

I spent some time at Squarespace doing content management system related things, really focusing on performance and usability of the websites that are built on Squarespace and also the building experience on Squarespace. And then after that, I spend some time at goat.com, which is a sneaker resale platform [00:05:00] because they are an e-commerce platform, performance and usability is really front and center in the product roadmap. And a lot of times we try to optimize the checkout flow to be easy to use and also as fast as possible. So more users get funneled through that process and ends up converting more transactions that way.

So, that’s a little bit about me.

Sam Brace: So I can see some of the connections between some of the things that we’re gonna talk about where having something like Squarespace where obviously it’s driving websites, easy to use interfaces, make it simple for people to publish, moving into the sneaker space, obviously we’re gonna be talking about physical goods and fashion and a little bit here, but what was the thing that got you interested in some of the other aspects of what Legitimate is doing?

Like NFTs, web3, working with the blockchain? What, what got you going here?

Daniel Duan: Yeah, so I think a lot of the newness of the web3 and also just how early on we [00:06:00] are in this blockchain technology, it really allows us to drive the behavior or what is the definition of a product on the blockchain.

So that in of itself is really exciting. And then the other part is that I get to use some of the learnings that I had from the previous jobs in, in this new job as well. So, a lot of the processes around like authenticity and around e-commerce and sale, we’re actually doing that with the marketplace

part of the protocol that we’re building on Legitimate, where we help the creators sell the physical NFTs that they create. And on the other hand is the website building experience. So we do allow creators to customize the experience that pops up when a Legitimate tag is tapped with a phone.

And so a lot of that is the website building experience and being able to host different types of content and also optimize for that as well.[00:07:00]

Becky Peltz: So now that we’ve heard about your background and you have a really strong background in e-commerce, can you show us your products? Can you start to talk about your tap and drop products and the artifacts that go with them?

Daniel Duan: Yeah, so let me share my screen here and I can go right into it. So, the company website that we have shows the typical interactions that you can do with the physical NFT product that we have. So the physical NFT is comprised of two components. One is the digital NFT that comes with the product, and two, the physical chip

that we encode and integrate onto the products themselves. So, for something like a sneaker or a painting, the tag could be either placed on the shoe in here somewhere sewn in, [00:08:00] or it could be attached to say, like a flat surface on a painting. And with each of these trips, it emits a single use link that the user can then scan with their phone and it pops up on their phone,

and view the provenance information, the item information, details, things like that. And also additional exclusive content that maybe the creator might want to include as part of their digital experience as well. And, with this chip, because the links that it emits through the NFC tag is a single use link that ensures that the chip cannot be duplicated and the one to one connection between the NFC and the NFT is always there. So, the user can tap it, by putting their phone near the NFC tag, and then it’ll bring up a special site that we have for them.

Becky Peltz: So just to get a bigger perspective here, what you guys are [00:09:00] doing is bringing retail into the blockchain and therefore blending physical and virtual.

And the chip is a conduit from the physical into that virtual, and you have this tap product that allows a person to, with a cell phone to read that

chip. And right. Access. Yes.

Daniel Duan: So, the tap site is part of the customization that we allow the creators to do.

So a lot of the cooler things that we’ve seen with what people have done is some artists, maybe they do performative art. So the end product that they create is only part of the story that they’re trying to tell. The painting process or the creation process is the other half. And being able to include that into the chip with a video that’s shown when a person taps the tag with their phone. That’s really powerful and that’s something that traditional art doesn’t really benefit [00:10:00] from,

and I think we are able to create. So this is just a demo tag that we have here, because this is on the blockchain, you can see that we meant the NFT and whoever is the owner of the NFT will also show here. And on OpenSea, you are able to bring up the provenance, how many transactions it’s been through, which previous wallets have owned this NFT and things of that nature.

And through the use of this blockchain, you are able to trace the previous sales, transactions and things like that. Yeah.

Becky Peltz: You’re both bringing the retail into the blockchain. You’re providing this extra digital experience.

I know you also are using this to provide authenticity for the artwork.

Daniel Duan: Yeah. So let, let me show you the chips actually. Cause I think that will answer a lot of the questions around how this actually works. [00:11:00] So we, we have two different types of chips. One is a really thin flat sticker and the other is a plastic more durable type. So with these stickers, we usually advise to the creators to integrate it under a product label or things of that nature.

Whereas the chip, you can see it has a little bit of thickness, but something like this could be sewn in maybe to like a clothing tag on the back of a t-shirt or like inside a suit jacket or something like that. And through these chips right here, because you are able to, let me bring up my phone so I can show you the actual tapping experience with these NFC tags that we have.

Anyone with a smartphone can bring up the website through the tapping, and then see the actual information of each tag. So this is a demo one that I just showed off earlier and [00:12:00] the user can see that Legitimate minted it. The Legitimate currently owns this one, and they can go into OpenSea and, and take a look at what other metadata or provenance information that’s displayed through OpenSea.

And because it’s an NFT, it works on other NFT platform as well, not just OpenSea. So

Becky Peltz: anyone familiar with reading QR codes on their phone is gonna have no trouble picking up this information on the blockchain?

Daniel Duan: Yeah, I, I think this is actually easier than QR codes because you don’t have to even bring up the camera.

On the newer iPhones, you put it next to the tag, it will pop up. That’s nice. Yeah.

Sam Brace: So I’m seeing the overall flow that we have here. We have something that, it’s a physical space item where we have, as you said, it could be a painting, it could be a piece of clothing. Someone has tapped it. I would imagine that’s the right terminology for what they do.

They bring that up onto their [00:13:00] mobile device and they’re able to easily see all of the details to it. As you were saying, pointing them to the NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, but how are you handling the overall development of this? Like how did you connect all of these different pieces together?

And I can also see there’s of course, imagery and video of all of this too. I’d love to know some more about the underlying components of this overall structure.

Daniel Duan: Yeah. So, we do host our images on IPFS, which is a distributed file system. But because the distributed file systems aren’t usually built to scale in terms of performance, we put Cloudinary on top of that to help us deliver the images in a fast and optimized way.

I do have a component that I have pulled up here where, actually, let me find this. So, let me share my screen one more time, and I can go over the component that we do have to show the image. [00:14:00] So, on IPFS, the image URL that we do have in our backend is usually something that starts with IPFS.io, something like that.

We do run our own gateway that fetches the image from the IPFS, passes it through our domain. This is mainly to ensure that the Cloudinary side of things, it doesn’t fetch from other domains and other people use our account, and usage data on our Cloudinary account, right?

So with that image that is fetched, we asked Cloudinary to basically say, pick the best file format that is for the end user device and also the best quality that you think is, you know, optimized for whatever delivery of that content. And then we ask for a specific set of file sizes, and we let the browser determine which is the more optimal resolution to [00:15:00] display.

So, we start with 200, 400, 800. It goes up to about 4,000. And, that is the native resolution that we shoot these product images and things like that at. And if you imagine 4,000 times 4,000, we have transparency in our images that, and we upload these in PNGs. They’re about eight megabytes.

And to deliver that is insane to end users. And so, fortunately Cloudinary makes it really easy. We basically tell Cloudinary all these parameters, and most of the time for Chrome and for newer Safari users, I believe it delivers in AVC image format. It ends up being somewhere around 2000 times 2000 couple hundred kilobytes.

Super easy, really quick. So that’s what we’ve been using Cloudinary. And one of the things that we do also want to migrate onto eventually is the the video asset that we have. And I think Cloudinary [00:16:00] also offers a pretty cool set of APIs to do that. We just haven’t had the engineering bandwidth to do that product migration.

Becky Peltz: And by way can I mention that this GIF that you just shared, you’ve actually shared with us. So we’ll be able to share with the audience that this is code that they can look

Daniel Duan: at. Yeah. And I think a lot of that is usable across, not just us, but anyone else as well. So I hope that helps.

Becky Peltz: It does. Yeah.

Sam Brace: One thing that, I want to unpackage with this because I think we said it, and I know what it is, you know what it is, Daniel, but IPFS is something that might be new to a lot of developers, especially if they haven’t gotten involved with web3 or the decentralized space in some ways. Can you explain a little bit more about what ultimately IPFS is and why, maybe it’s a vital part to doing something that’s going to be similar to your business?

Daniel Duan: Yeah. So in terms of companies that do run in the web3 [00:17:00] space, we want to decentralize as much as possible when it comes to our providers, our services, things like that. So that ultimately the images and the assets that do come with the NFTs live as long as possible. And we can do that through IPFS because they are distributed, multiple people can host copies of a single file, and when you request it through the IPFS protocol, any one of these people can send the file back. And how it works is really, it’s like going into a room full of people and asking like, hey, do you have this file?

If you don’t, you ask the next person and sometimes these people will help you ask their friends, family, people who they know to fetch this file for you. And I think that’s the cool part of this distributor system where it just fans out until you find this file and then it gets back to you.

Now the [00:18:00] downside to that is that it is obviously slower to ask multiple people versus one single service like Cloudinary, and I think that’s fine for long term storage, but for you know, more immediate needs like an e-commerce store or like a digital user experience, I think, Cloudinary plus IPFS, that’s the better solution.

Sam Brace: And I was just gonna say that, I like, Daniel, way to summarize exactly what I was going to summarize it, because it does seem that when I’ve seen NFT marketplaces, others that are doing things with NFTs in different ways, sometimes where they try to shoot holes into the way that they’ve developed their architecture, develop their business is they say, well, wherever these images are hosted, wherever these videos are hosted, that you might be purchasing as non fungible token,

it’s where if that goes down, you lose your asset. But I think by making sure that you’re focusing on performance [00:19:00] aspect with Cloudinary, but also ensuring that your file always is there because of this decentralized aspect, that part of IPFS, it adds this really nice blanket of security, in my opinion. So I do think they combined very, very well.

If you get into this type of space.

Daniel Duan: Yeah. And that’s pretty much why we use it. And I think a lot of marketplaces or other projects, they end up standing up their own like image service. And I think that’s a huge level of effort and also just cost and other things like that where for us. It makes more sense to just pay a vendor, get the guaranteed service that we do get and move on to other things that we do need to build custom.

Sam Brace: The other thing I wanted to ask you about is I saw right at the top of the gist that was there, you’re building everything with React, it seems like. What do you know about like the decisioning? The reasonings that that Legitimate decided to go down the React path? Because that is one area that we find a lot of our [00:20:00] developers that are involved Cloudinary, we’re always trying to figure out what new framework, what new things should I be building my project against?

And you seem to have chosen React. What was the reason?

Daniel Duan: Yeah. So, we think that a lot of the things that we’re building in terms of the product side is very new, that we want to build on a foundation that’s reliable and also well supported. React has a huge ecosystem of testing libraries, tools, build tools, optimization tools.

And Facebook is still actively developing on it, creating new features and things like that. So it’s a very solid foundation to build on versus other newer frameworks and things like that. And it’s also easier to hire developers for, easy to find API vendors for, you know. Like Cloudinary, I think you have docs that are specific to React. So we can just copy and paste the code instead of saying like, well, in [00:21:00] this framework, how does this translate with this JavaScript API. Do I need to write a new component, new util, things like that. We don’t have to do any of that.

So, I think that’s great. And there are also a bunch of other external vendors that, that we do use as well. And they mostly all support React. So that’s been pretty great in terms of just engineering velocity as well. One thing I don’t think I shared yet is the drop side of things, which is the platform that the creators of our NFTs can use to sell and transact their physical NFTs, their creations.

So let me share my screen again and we can go through that and also some of the technologies that power that as well. So this is the drop site. It runs on Next js, which is the server rendered version of React, basically. And we chose that because it is an eCommerce site, where you get to bid [00:22:00] on different products and creations that artists brands have created and things like that. And because, we do want to convert users into bids, speed and reliability is front and center for this platform right here. And, also a lot of the marketing side of things, we do want to optimize in terms of processes and this is where builder.io came from. So a lot of the content that you see here on the site that’s more marketing related, these are actually all builder.io blocks or, pages that are configured. And I believe they are one of Cloudinary partners as well.

So just want to highlight that they’ve been very helpful in reducing the amount of, you know, engineering efforts spent on marketing content.

Sam Brace: Yeah, and I, that’s one thing that’s I think very smart that you guys have done, because obviously you’re the head of engineering. You’re someone that understands developers, you’re a developer yourself.

But the people [00:23:00] that have to ultimately maintain a lot of these websites, they’re not developers in a lot of cases. They’re people that are tied to marketing. They might be tied to understand just content management and be able to put a nice user interface, essentially a wrapper around the content management system, like the way the builder provides it.

It’s a very good technique to try to get more adoption rather than people saying, Oh, that CMS is so hard to use. So I think you’re doing a lot of really smart things by building up this infrastructure that I’m seeing of Legitimate, by including some vested vendors for sure.

Becky Peltz: You’re running with Next.js and Vercel is also a Cloudinary partner, so we are all in a mesh here with this.

Daniel Duan: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think my philosophy here is that if I can pay a vendor to do something, it’s cheaper and easier than spending our own engineering time to build the same thing out and possibly a lot more reliable as well. So I think some of the cooler content that we’ve done, with builder.io io here is like, say, you know, we want to embed a video [00:24:00] showing how the tapping mechanism works.

Like this is all builder.Io. We spent five minutes putting the builder.Io block in. That’s it. And I think for one of the items here, we also included a promotional video that is also part of the marketing effort that we did here. And this took two seconds to upload. That was about it.

And we did also like two different revisions of this video. And the marketing team was able to just do that themselves. We didn’t have to spend any engineering effort to swap the videos in and out. So, that was really great as well.

Sam Brace: Like I can see looking at this drop site now that we’ve seen an example of like a product, you’ve kind of gone into the product detail at this point.

I can see why you shoot the images at such a high resolution. It’s where you want be able to zoom in, see the textures, see the actual fabric detail that’s associated with it and sometimes that’s not necessary. So that’s why I love what you’ve done with the different [00:25:00] breaks that you have for your sizing that you go all the way down to 200 pixels in width all the way to 4,000 pixels in width, or up to 4,000 pixels in width.

And that’s because you legitimately need, no pun intended, all of those sizes. So, I can see the purpose here for sure.

Daniel Duan: Yeah, so I think for purchasing artwork especially, like you want to see the nitty gritty details. You want to see texture, why someone created something or just like upfront and close when this is hanging on your wall, you know, what do you see?

And I think replicating that online as much as possible really makes sense for us.

Becky Peltz: I’ve heard this website drop referred to as the Christie’s or Sotheby’s of Web3, and it makes me wonder about the problems that you were trying to solve when you moved retail into web3, because there is that link there.

Daniel Duan: Yeah. For the transaction that are happening for physical items on Web3, [00:26:00] I think that’s the difficult part of the equation where we have to make sure that the buyer gets the NFT and the physical item together and that when, that is resold or transferred again, that both things go hand in hand.

And so we do have a locking mechanism that’s built into all the NFTs, physical NFTs that we do create, where we ask that the new owner of the digital NFT tap the NFC chip that’s on the physical item, in order to unlock the metadata after the transfer of each NFT each time. And because we lock the metadata that comes on the NFT side of things, we incentivize people to fetch the physical item,

and also own both of ’em at the same time. So they are able to unlock the digital side of things and because their wallet address or their Ethereum name resolution [00:27:00] resolves to their own wallet, if someone else owns the digital version but not the physical item, it incentivizes them to also grab the NFT instead of selling two of them separately.

Okay.

Sam Brace: One thing I wanted to ask you about, cause Daniel, this is a very eloquent situation that you have here. You’ve created this amazing pathway to create this connection between physical and digital goods. And it’s gonna be working for the emerging technology that we have, but, in terms of developers, of course when they’re going through and developing something, it’s almost experimenting as they’re going along the way.

Is there any like big roadblocks that your team encountered when you were going through developing all of this that you feel like maybe would be good for others to not do or not encounter that roadblock in the future? Cause I think it’s definitely where, I feel like if I were to try to do what you guys have accomplished, I would fall on my face immediately.

Like there’s just, there’s so much greatness that’s happening here. So [00:28:00] give me any, anything that our audience can learn that you’ve learned along the way.

Daniel Duan: Yeah, so I think a lot of the major roadblocks are related to just how new web3 and the tooling and development environment and things like that are. And so like we’ve encountered a handful of bugs in the web3 libraries that we’ve used things like, how do you test making transactions on the web3 in an automated fashion, doing integration tests and things like that. There aren’t really established patterns to how to do these things just yet.

And I think as time goes on and the technology matures, we will see those coming up. But for now, I think everyone in this space is defining their own pattern and trying to get through as much as possible. So it is exciting but also pretty challenging.

Sam Brace: I agree with that. I think it’s where, like to my earlier comments about people poking holes and certain [00:29:00] parts of how secure unsecured NFTs are, I think it’s not to say that those vendors may have done anything wrong, it’s just where we’re learning so much about this space as you’re pointing out. It’s something where it’s fast, it’s growing, and of course there’s gonna be bugs along the way, or things that we don’t realize that’s even a bug or an issue.

So I think that makes tons of sense, why that would be a roadblock. And in some ways it almost feels unanticipated where because you are in web3, you almost have to be willing to deal with some of the bugs that come from it because it’s going at such a fast pace. Am I correct about that?

Daniel Duan: Yeah, I think, in terms of developing any product, whether it’s creating a library for developers to use, or for us putting physical NFTs out into the world, you really don’t know what people are gonna do with it until you give it to them, you know? And a lot of times, like some people might wanna screw with it and mess with it and see how they break.

Other people might try to create interesting use cases for specific things that we might have not imagined. [00:30:00] And enabling all that, putting it in front of people so they can play with it. I think that’s all part of the product process at the end of the day.

Becky Peltz: You know, another thing is a lot of what we read in the news is about the web3 and the prospect of buying currency and making profit on the currency going up. And what you’re doing is you’re not focusing on making more currency, but actually just transacting within that space. And so if capital flows into that space, it’s as the result of retail transactions, not just people trying to buy and grow their value of their currency through that.

Daniel Duan: Yeah, the value of our platform is really in the value that we create for our creators and partners who leverage our technology. So in essence, the people you know, who should really benefit from our technology are just creators. And hopefully, this increases the value of their artwork, their [00:31:00] creations and things like that.

But we don’t plan to be like a speculative coiner yeah or any of that. Very

Sam Brace: different.

Becky Peltz: I know, because you provide an authenticity by linking it to an NFT, linking the physical product to the NFT. In a world where people are getting into online consignment and they want to know that what they’re buying online as a used product is that very expensive purse or whatever, your development could lead to quicker ways to have that authenticity, to make that authenticity come true.

Daniel Duan: Yeah. Like the demo that I showed you earlier, anyone, you or I, with a physical tag and also a smartphone can verify the authenticity of something. I think that’s really powerful to put in the hands of consumers, right? So we don’t have to go to, say a consignment store or a professional authenticator to say like, oh, this is a real [00:32:00] thing.

Yeah. And in terms of the value that brings to that product now, because you’re able to authenticate yourself, you don’t have to pay the resale price of say, like, any of these consignment platforms that, that most people currently have to.

Becky Peltz: Yeah, and you’re gonna be willing to pay the asking price when you know that it’s an authentic good so to speak.

Daniel Duan: Yeah.

Sam Brace: So Daniel, I think we’ve covered so much here today and I know that hopefully our audience will start diving into Legitimate and all the projects that are associated with what Legitimate is doing and hopefully they also get a better understanding if they are planning on dipping their toe into the web3 waters, how they can be working with media in a better way.

Very similar cause I feel many of the things that you showed are absolutely best practices that when you are going into that space. Is there anything else that you can think of that you could say, this would be very important for audience to know, or anything that you wanna drive people to for more information [00:33:00] about what Legitimate is doing?

Anything. This is your time.

Daniel Duan: Yeah. So, we do have a company blog as well, blog.legitimate.tech. I can share that in a little bit. We actually just got done creating our new blog. This is hosted on Squarespace. It has a little bit of technology highlights around, what it is that’s powering our technology, but we really want to highlight the artists and their stories, and why it is they create and what they create.

So a lot of these artist spotlights are really on them. So that is a good place to get information on Legitimate and what we’re up to. We do have social links, Twitter, Instagram, we are on TikTok now as well, and LinkedIn. So find us on our company website and the links there to follow us.

Sam Brace: Wonderful, and I hope everybody does continue to follow the work that you’re doing. When we came across this [00:34:00] project, I was very inspired. I know Becky, I don’t want to speak for you, but we were both love. It’s great. It’s really cool. So I would say keep up the great work that you’re doing, Daniel and the entire Legitimate team as well.

And I hope to see some awesome things in the next few months, because this is a just in the time that we’re getting and talking with you as we were talking about this episode, it’s where there’s been big leaps and bounds of what you guys are doing. So you guys are moving at a very rapid pace, which is also very, very exciting.

Daniel Duan: Yeah, thank you for having me as well.

Really appreciate the time that both of you take to showcase what it is that we do and a lot of the cool things that we also do with Cloudinary as well.

Becky Peltz: Yeah, well we love seeing that you’re using f_auto, q_auto cause you’re optimizing for the web, so.

Daniel Duan: Thank you. Thank you.

Sam Brace: Becky, my head is spinning with all of the awesome information that Daniel was able to share this here.

And it just shows how [00:35:00] passionate they are about what they’re doing by showing off what artists are building, what their artists are creating, and showing awesome ways for people to be involved in that through their marketplaces, but also the authentication aspects of it. There’s so much here.

Tell me what got you going? What are your key takeaways from episode?

Becky Peltz: I like the idea that you could buy a hat and along with it, you could get the whole digital experience of how the hat was created. We definitely appreciate the authenticity

part of this whole process, but also the fact that you are getting these NFTs and they do contain lots of interesting information that just goes along with the physical product, and just the whole idea that you can actually pair digital stuff with physical stuff, with a little tag that you can just wave your phone pass and then pull in that whole digital experience.

So there’s a lot here and I think it’s gonna be really neat when this really gets into the hands of consumers.[00:36:00]

Sam Brace: I agree, and I think there’s so many angles that you can take with it, because there are some people that are very focused on authenticity, where we’re saying, hey, if I’m purchasing this unique brand, this specific brand, I want to ensure that it is what it says it is.

It’s just not a knockoff. I didn’t buy it from some cheap market or something along those lines. It’s to say, yes, this is real. This is exactly what I expected it to be. But I think the thing that Daniel talked about in his episode that wasn’t necessarily readily apparent to me was how this type of experience that they have going from physical to digital and creating that digital experience with

the consumption of that and also being able to be part of that, build that relationship with the artist and the person in a deeper way, I think is really even possible with a face to face interaction because now they can be contacting them. They can send them details about the next things are coming out.

They can explain the building process the way it took to be able to purchase the hat that you [00:37:00] mentioned. There’s just a lot here that I think will really expand the fashion space, the artist space in new ways if projects like Legitimate are really embraced.

Becky Peltz: Yeah, well, there’s a lot of people into consignment now too, and being able to authenticate when you want to charge a larger amount for it, that’ll be really nice.

You can do that without bringing in a bunch of experts to actually look at the goods. So that

Sam Brace: Yeah, Becky, that’s completely true. Wouldn’t it be nice to see like a big, big consignment situation, like a Poshmark or an Etsy be like, make this technology and, and

expand it and help all of our people that are selling vintage wear, maybe wears that they’re producing themselves, that are artists made. Like I could just, yeah, there’s so many applications to what they’re making here. Like maybe this is something even bigger than what we anticipated. Right.

Becky Peltz: Yeah. Yeah. I clearly see it as a very disruptive type of thing. Like somebody got a really innovative idea and they’re delivering on it. So that’s [00:38:00] really neat. It was really cool to hear him. Talk about those technologies, though, as you mentioned, the NFTs and then the IPFS. I really never understood that.

I didn’t even know what the acronym was, but inner planetary file system, that totally changed my view of a lot of things. Okay, so we’re talking about moving when we wanna put this images that are out on web3, on the web2, we need to move them from the interplanetary file system into something like Cloudinary.

And so we got to see that. And of course it’s done with all of the technology that we see and use a lot, React, Next js, and then a lot of technology that I don’t see a lot, but is just nicely blended into all these applications.

Sam Brace: Absolutely, and it’s one of those areas where this is a technology that is rapidly being iterated [00:39:00] upon new people, new vendors, new overall influencers are coming into this space that is web3. I think it’s one of those things where, as we said, we didn’t really have a firm understanding before talking to Daniel about what IPFS is.

I think even some of the marketplaces that they had, that was the first time I had ever seen some of those. So it’s definitely an area where if you’re feeling like, oh, this was all new to me, that’s fine. It’s new, it’s interesting and it’s showing that this is a space that yes, vendors like Cloudinary that really did a great job with web2.

It shows that it can work great in web3 too, but it’s where you have to be able to play with it and start to understand how the technology you love and use every day can fit into this new space.

Becky Peltz: Yeah, it could lead to a lot of things. Just the appreciation for the artist and the crafts people out there that are creating things.

You know, the idea that they could get those into the market and really own them and [00:40:00] actually follow their movement through different consumers. If that happens, it’s really exciting.

Sam Brace: Absolutely. It absolutely is. And I think the one thing that is also really cool about this be is that, it shows that web3 of course, meaning that you can read, you can write, but now you can own.

Right. Which is very, very different than the way that the web was looked at previously, where we had read, then we had read write. Now we have this whole new aspect to it when it comes to ownership and authenticity. Yeah, as we’ve shown in this project, but it’s not just some of the things that the media talks about on a regular basis like Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum if they’re lucky to be mentioned or things like that.

It’s not just about crypto. It’s not just about cryptocurrencies. It’s about all sorts of things and it just, this is scratching the surface of what’s gonna be available with the blockchain and web3 technologies for years to come. So I’m very excited to see this growth. Going

Becky Peltz: back to your point about the [00:41:00] owning, starting in the beginning, web1, I can remember the big term was content is king.

That was like this term you heard over and over because, you had to get something to put on your webpage. And that seemed in web2 to move to, hey, let’s get our users to write the content. And we were happy to on social media and now we are seeing, hey, maybe we can let people own that content and we can still build a business around that.

So that’s a really neat evolution.

Sam Brace: Yep. I completely agree with that. And hopefully we see this continue to evolve in ways that I can’t even anticipate, frankly. Maybe into industries that we can’t anticipate. But this is showing an amazing application. At least in the fashion space and also the space when it comes to creating unique pieces of art.

So once again, Legitimate is awesome. Good job, Daniel and the team, and hopefully this inspires you. If nothing else, to check out the great work that they’re doing. So now that you’ve gotten to the end of the [00:42:00] episode, thank you. Thank you for taking it all the way to the end with Becky and myself. And of course, if you had a great experience, go ahead and like and subscribe to any of the various episodes that we have here in any of the places where those episodes are delivered, such as Spotify or Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, even our own Cloudinary Academy.

And of course, stick around because we’re gonna be putting out more episodes highlighting amazing developers like Daniel and others on future episodes of DevJams. So thank you again and take care.