S1E15 Creating an NFT Crypto Collectable Business with Brendan Cooper from Panini

The fascinating story of how a $1bn company, famous for sticker books and trading cards, launched its own Blockchain business. Brendan is incredibly knowledgeable about Blockchain, DLT and Crypto, and he managed to convince a very traditional business to take the leap straight into Crypto Collectables - and he's got much more planned for the future. We talk about why they chose Hyperledger Sawtooth, how he helped Panini Executives to 'level up', and where wallets, mirror nodes and Zero Knowledge Proofs fit in his technology roadmap.

In this episode, we discuss:

- The history of the Panini collectables business

- Brendan's early Blockchain inspiration from Crypto Pepe

- Important adjacencies: Rare cars, artwork and fractional ownership

- Why 'Panini Coin' (or CoopCoin) never made it into production and the problem with the 'Crypto' moniker

- 'Levelling' up the Panini Executive Team to become Blockchain experts

- The reaction of traditional customers and the crypto community

- Why Panini's platform uses Hyperledger Sawtooth, Ethereum's UX and scaling challenges, and using mirror nodes for public verification

- Collectables technologies to keep tabs on: public protocols, crypto collectables, privacy solutions, DeFi and ZDP

- Future considerations - bearer instruments, custodial services, live sports feed oracles, full crypto, DAOs?

- What Fortnite should have learned before launching digital collectables

Links to topics mentioned in this episode:

Brendan's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendantcooper

Panini Blockchain - https://www.paniniamerica.net/blockchain

OpenSea - https://opensea.io

Starkware - https://starkware.co

International Standard Content Code - https://iscc.codes

Social Identity of Objects - https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170024485A1/en