New Episode: Calvin Luk | NFT Marketplace as a Service

The Curious Learners Ep. 14

Hi everyone, hope everyone had a great weekend.

Commerce has undergone through significant transformation in the last fifty or so years. During this period, among other things, where we shop has also changed. It moved from physical centralised locations to online centralised ones first and now moving at a fast pace towards distributed locations on the internet.

There is little doubt that what we have seen in commerce of physical goods will be transposed to that for digital goods. Yes, of course, I am talking about NFTs:)

In a very short period of time, we have seen obscure platforms turn into giant marketplaces (e.g. Opensea). However, it seems we will not wait too long before we see further disruption of this model.

The argument is that when a brand or a creator already has a large customer base or audience, they might not need to be present on large marketplaces for curation or discovery, to the extent their buyers come to them directly. It is obviously very early days in the space of digital goods and we are yet to see emerging business models with different discovery, curation and distribution theses.

Have tried to explore this concept on this episode of The Curious Learners.

My guest today is Calvin Luk from Refinable. It is a decentralised NFT marketplace operating across multiple layer-1 chains.

Calvin and I discussed the future of NFT marketplaces, where white-label technology solutions might be more favourable for brands, creators and project owners.

Also discussed the following interesting topics:

- Difference in customer adoption between Asia and Western markets
- Gaming ecosystem as a key partner for higher utility from NFTs
- How partnerships with Web 2.0 brands increase value proposition for both sides
- Shopify model for future of commerce in web 3.0

Please enjoy my conversation with Calvin Luk.