Alex Salnikov – Rarible Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer

Launched in 2019, Rarible is one of the leading community-centric multichain NFT marketplaces. As an aggregated multichain marketplace, Rarible is unique in that it supports NFTs on Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Tezos, and Immutable X. Rarible also offers users the ability to create their own marketplaces in just a couple of clicks.

Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Alex Salnikov sits down with Brian Friel to talk about Rarible's rich suite of products and services, his current views on NFTs, and where NFTs are headed next.

About Alex:

Alex Salnikov is the Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Rarible, a top-ranked community-centric NFT marketplace. A blockchain trailblazer and an active developer in the crypto space since 2012, Alex previously served as the Chief Technology Officer of CoinOffering, the first company to offer its shares in the form of blockchain assets. With a BA in Computer Science and an MA in Data Science, Alex’s specialties span a variety of sectors including market analysis, decentralized finance, NFTs, and tokenomics. 

Show Notes:

01:06 -  Who he is and how Rarible started

04:38 - How Rarible differentiated itself from othe marketplaces
06:30 - Community marketplace products

10:20 - RARI foundation. What is that? Can you dive a little into what that's all about?

13:39- Rarible DAO and the RARI token 
16:10 - Multichain NFT marketplace vs single chain
22:17 - His current view on NFTs. What is exciting?
25:39 -  What is limiting NFTs?  

27:42 -  A builder he admires in the ecosystem

Full Transcript:

Brian Friel (00:05):

Hey everyone and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, Developer Relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Alex Salnikov, the Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Rarible, one of the leading top ranked community centric NFT marketplaces. Alex, welcome to the show.

Alex Salnikov (00:28):

Hello. Hey Brian. Thank you so much for having me today. It's going to be an exciting talk. Thank you to our listeners for connecting and to hearing our chat. I'm excited.

Brian Friel (00:41):

I'm excited as well. This is a great time to be having this conversation. Right about this time, Phantom is gearing up to launch its multi-chain beta out to the public and you guys are super well positioned for this being one of the first NFT marketplaces to take a very multi-chain approach. I want to get into all that today with you, but maybe before we go into all that, let's start with a little bit about you. Who are you and how did you start building Rarible?

Alex Salnikov (01:06):

I have a computer science background. I've been getting my degree in one of the best economic universities in my country before moving to the United States, and that was the most pro-Western liberal part of university. And I guess that laid a big foundation for me to be predisposed to crypto because the crypto is very openness, pro-liberal environment. And even before that, during high school I was trying to earn money online and I had a lot of troubles with just accepting payments. Everybody was like, Hey, give us your passport and KYC," and, "Oh, you're not 18 yet. We can't really work with you." That doesn't make sense at all to me.

(01:49):

So in the first or second year in my university, I discovered crypto, never left the space. It was 2012. I can say that I'm born crypto, never done anything else. Fell down the rabbit hole as soon as I read Bitcoin white paper because of the very fruitful background that I've been growing in. And yeah, started doing startups with my college partner. We did a lot of cool stuff that eventually grow into Rarible. I mean not exactly grown into Rarible, but our experience of doing projects led us to do Rarible because of the following of the natural progression. There was exchanges like DeFi stuff and NFTs. So we tried all of that and NFTs were the most consumer native out of all that. DeFi is for nerds.

(02:42):

And NFTs are for people. We always had been doing something for nerds and we wanted to do something for people. And I'm joking. It's not that I'm disrespectful. We wanted to do something for people and it was just so much fun. We traded a little NFTs and my experience of facing obstacles with online ownership, it made so much sense when you have an item and you can change the wallet. You enter the same 12 words into another wallet and you have all the same NFTs with you, you don't like the marketplace, you connect your wallet to another marketplace. So it feels maybe not that important. Many projects saying, "Okay, we'll do email and password." But this idea when you can change your tools and have all the same environment, this is what sells you that vision because you feel like you are the owner, not someone else is the owner. You feel control and ownership and that is the key part of all the NFT market.

Brian Friel (03:45):

Yeah. No, I totally agree. It's that ability to exit anytime and not requiring the permission of somebody else. That's really cool too your experience early on with online businesses, especially in a foreign country. Where did you grow up, by the way? What country did you grow up in?

Alex Salnikov (03:59):

Russia. One of the most restricted.

Brian Friel (04:02):

Yeah, trying to operate an online business as a teenager in Russia, it's probably one of the best educations for the value of this kind of stuff. That's awesome to hear. So you mentioned you're in university, you start 2012 in crypto, you're going through iterations with your co-founders on DeFi, then you get to NFTs. And I agree, NFTs was really one of the first mainstream consumer applications of crypto that it kind of clicked for everybody. Let's talk a little bit about Rarible. So when you guys started Rarible, what was different about Rarible that you guys decided to do at the time from some of the other marketplaces that were out there?

Alex Salnikov (04:38):

Rarible was probably one of the first five NFT companies that went out there and back then, OpenSea was around, SuperRare was around, a couple other platforms were around and there weren't almost any NFTs. So you had all the wallets, you had all the collectibles, tabs on your wallets, all the infrastructure, on ramp marketplace, but it was almost none NFT. There was a couple copies of CryptoKitties basically. And even if you wanted to create an NFT, you needed to either deploy a smart contract yourself or you needed to go to SuperRare, submit an application to get accepted, wait several weeks and then to create something.

(05:26):

And for us, after spending that much time in the crypto, it was a little contrarian to the openness and all the values that you bring. You're the owner. You don't want to ask anyone before creating an NFT. So we just did a simple experiment. We created a page that allowed you to create an NFT, no verification, no questions, upload your picture, upload your name, description, royalties, and connect the wallet, deploy your own smart contract and deploy your own token and all that just direct access to the chain without any intermediary. This just blew up. Apparently the crypto people resonated with that vision.

Brian Friel (06:10):

That's awesome. I love that. I think that's a good segue into some of the features that you guys have going now as well. So you started that kind of self-serve, create your own NFT marketplace. You guys have continued that same sort of spirit with your community marketplace products. What are some of those? Can you give us an overview of those products that you guys are building for the community?

Alex Salnikov (06:30):

The whole story goes more or less like this. Just a year after Rarible is life, we are taking a look at the market and we understand that the potential of NFTs is just so much more and so much wider than art market, than PFP market. We are very early at this point of even discover of the market what's possible with NFTs. And we understand that the more the market develops, we will need different verticals, like best for gaming, best for tickets, best for art, best for music, best for everything. And just naturally I feel like a big part of our team, the big part of the company DNA is technical. Both our co-founders are technical by background, our CTO, head of product, a lot of technical experience, a lot of just even math and physics background. So when we were deciding, "Oh, let's build a marketplace," without even realizing that we created an indexer that reads all data on chain, stores all NFTs in our database. Because it felt like, "Okay, let's do it."

(07:41):

And turns out that's a big strength that we have as a marketplace and that's one of the hardest part for other marketplaces to go and actually to use. That's why we created product, which is called Rarible Protocol. We wanted to go down the layer of infrastructure and power the next generation of NFT products, be it this platform that you want to build a wallet, like Phantom for example, and you need to have API to access, "Oh, what are even the current users NFTs that he owns? Or what's the market data for these current NFTs? What is the floor prices for the current NFTs that they own? What is the metadata for them?" So this product is called Rarible Protocol and it exists for two years now.

(08:26):

The next thing that we learned is that there's still pretty heavy stack to build on top of that protocol. If you want to create a marketplace, you need that API and moreover, you need to have a great UI on top of this. And a great UI still takes a lot of time to build. That's why we went ahead and created the UI offering too. Here is your protocol, here is your API, and here is your UI to create your own marketplace.

Brian Friel (08:53):

These are all tools that are being used by creators essentially to have their own community centric marketplace that's powered by Rarible in the background.

Alex Salnikov (09:01):

Yes. At this point, we have almost 2,000 marketplaces created with this infrastructure, both UI and protocol. There is not much, maybe 10 projects that is using Protocol directly without the UI, but quite extensively. I think like Coinbase Wallet hits us pretty hard with some API calls and several others. So all this is just all this shared vision that we want to power the next generation of apps, of marketplaces, of protocols. The community marketplace today is a no code tool. A creator can come if they have their own collection and create a marketplace using our UI and UX without actually even writing any code. You can deploy your own marketplace in minutes tomorrow.

Brian Friel (09:48):

That's awesome. I love that. So you have all these tools which for most people who are interested in maybe creating their own NFTs, the infrastructure set up and the software side of things is usually the biggest hurdle. So you guys are eliminating that from people's stack. You guys also have this white glove service. I know that's being used by a number of NFT projects, some even on Solana that shout out to Degenerate Ape Academy who has built their own marketplace with you guys there. And then you guys have this thing called RARI Foundation. What is that? Can you dive into a little bit about what that's all about?

Alex Salnikov (10:20):

Yes. Yes, of course. Wow, we have a lot of things. Shout out to Degenerate Ape Academy, a great partner. They've been actually maybe the second or third project to use our white glove solution, the first on Solana and the biggest on Solana. So we love the partner. The very foundation, so as many of you know the Rarible issued this thing called RARI governance token quite early in the days. And the idea is that this is the governance token for the Protocol. It is fairly standard, as we know, route for the projects to gain security and credibility and neutrality. So why Curve is great, because it is fully on chain, you don't need to trust anyone and it is community owned. You have an exposure to the activity that happens on Curve with Siri.

(11:25):

Usually the companies that do that in order to prevent the conflict of interest, you want these companies to be separate. You want to have a lapse company that is doing software and you want to have a foundation that is overseeing the actual governance and the token, and this is what RARI Foundation is. If you would go to RARI.foundation, you would see everything regarding the token incentives, the fully on chain governance. It's a cutting edge governance that we created. I don't know if our listeners are familiar with the VeToken model. It's vote escrow token. In order to vote in the foundation, you need to log your area for the certain amount of time, and the longer you log them, the more Ve RARI you get because you are committed to be with the project long term you're looking for two years. The votes of people who are known to be committed for two years are much more valuable than votes from people who will not be here tomorrow. I think Curve pioneered with this model and we at RARI Foundation actually created the first solid implementation of the VeToken model.

Brian Friel (12:36):

Oh, no way. I didn't know that. That's awesome.

Alex Salnikov (12:37):

So if you want to launch the VeToken model, you can come to us and we would help you to set up DAO. And it's not easy today. A bunch of projects sit on the tokens that cannot be even used in voting because they don't have the snapshotting mechanism. I know we're getting into the weeds, but if you created your project several years ago and didn't think that you will use it in Adel, it might not be possible. And by adding VeToken, using OpenZeppelin Governor and using Tally as the interface, you can have a full featured, very robust DAO that is fully on chain that can operate budget, that can operate treasury, and that will weigh much more committed votes in favor of those that are not committed. It's great.

Brian Friel (13:24):

That's awesome. So the purpose of the Rarible DAO and the RARI token, as I understand, is that you guys have plans for this over time to take ownership of this Rarible Protocol that we talked about earlier. Can you talk a little bit about the current state of that?

Alex Salnikov (13:39):

It's all started kind of blended together. There is Rarible, there is Rarible Marketplace, there is Rarible Protocol and the governance and ownership of that is blended. So the end state is there is RARI Foundation that has fully robust on chain governance that overtook the Rarible Protocol and governance of the Rarible Protocol. The Rarible is doing laps, it develops the protocol, it develops the code. It submits the proposals to the foundation sometimes like, "Oh there is a new version. Can you please approve that?" And today the RARI Foundation has full control over the undistributed supply of RARI, something like around 40% of the network, and the full control over the governance processes and the branding and IP of the token. That's the step one.

(14:31):

The step two would be establishing participation requirements. There are certain activity requirements at which we can say, "Oh, now the foundation is ready to overtake the Rarible Protocol." And then RARI Foundation will overtake it and Rarible will just operate the front end on top of that. So that's the end state and end goal where we're going. Yeah.

Brian Friel (14:52):

That's super cool. Well, it seems like you guys have been on this track from day one with your community minded perspective here, so it's really cool to see that being laid out in front of everything.

Alex Salnikov (15:03):

Yeah, it is not easy. We had all this community spirits, but this is more or less the duration of the DAO. Even the first was signaling DAO and it was signaling, but there was not much execution done. The second was an onboarding DAO. We've been doing grants to work on protocol and there was a lot of participation, there was a lot of people working at the DAO, but the effectiveness was quite low, just too much coordination. This is the third version. Yeah.

Brian Friel (15:32):

So I want to take a little step back here and talk about how you guys have been multi-chained basically from day one. This has been something that wasn't always the norm, especially coming from Ethereum very much focusing on Ethereum and maybe other EVM chains. You guys were one of the first to recognize Solana, integrating there, then taking a step further, adding Tezos, Immutable X, and this comes at a really interesting time because as we're recording this show, Phantom is gearing up for its multi-chain launch. I want to hear from you, how has it been building a multi-chain NFT marketplace, and what insights have you found in building that that might inform you what you think the future of this multi-chain versus single-chain narrative will play out?

Alex Salnikov (16:11):

Yeah, this is a great question. We started with adding the second chain that was flow as early as Autumn 2021, so quite early. And of course, the narrative behind multi-chain is always easier. There is Ethereum. There is a lot of artists that are unhappy with paying a hundred dollars of gas prices to create their NFT. So what do we do? We adopt a faster chain and the future is going to be bright. Not that fast.

(16:45):

I guess the biggest learning of multi-chain development is that it's quite easy to buy that narrative that we will abstract away the blockchain from the user and the user doesn't even need to know, the same way the user doesn't know that we use HTTP when we run a website or HTTPS, but we're not there yet in terms of the community. A lot of these chains, they are networks. They're networks of communities and these communities have values and these values are sometimes even opposed to each other. Somebody compromised decentralization in favor of speed. Somebody compromised speed in favor of decentralization and it gets even political. There is not much intersection between these blockchains, at least yet.

(17:31):

We're seeing more and more of conformity. Say at some point Ethereum and maybe Cosmos and maybe Arbitrum and maybe Polygon and Solana at this point are almost equal chains in the sense they're commonly accepted as being cool. The more the subset of okay chains are growing, the more we can grow towards the multi-chain vision. But before that, it was like you support the chains, but users of one chain, thinks that the users of other chain is almost like political enemies to you. So this is the biggest learning, bootstrapping the network on the new chain is much more hard than we could have expected. We tried going that route and multiple projects followed that route. I think OpenSea followed that route and struggled to get a meaningful market share from Magic Eden on Solana. Magic Eden added Ethereum and struggled to get meaningful market share from OpenSea on Ethereum. Now everybody's going to Polygon. We'll see how it gets there. It's much more interesting.

(18:43):

But yeah, we're seeing convergence obviously, but it happened two years after we added the first chain. Doodles migrated to Flow. We're seeing some convergence between ease in Flow. But again, this happened two years after we added that. We were a little ahead of time to get there.

Brian Friel (19:03):

Yeah. You guys were early to all that. I am curious though, you mentioned there's this narrative that some people have, definitely not everyone in crypto, but it's like, "Oh, in the future we're going to abstract away what chain you're using." And it's just like you're using a normal website and it doesn't notice anything. Do you buy that narrative? Do you think that is still coming despite all the differences between chains that we have today?

Alex Salnikov (19:27):

I don't know. Honestly and truly, I don't know. It feels like at this point at least EVM chains are all getting abstracted away. If you connect Ethereum Wallet or Rainbow Wallet, they would display the balance across all the chains just like a single shared (wallet). And you'll see, "Oh, here's my Optimism balance, here's my Polygon balance, here is my Ethereum balance." And then the next point would be bridges. MetaMask just added bridges so you can move things across these chains. This is definitely happening among the EVM chains. We haven't seen this happen among... I guess you are very well positioned to make that true for Solana and Polygon and ETH. So that is great. We're seeing this happening for sure. And even OKX Wallet. If you connect OKX Wallet, I loved that innovation and I'm dying to see that innovation among every other wallet. They don't ask you to change the network. I don't know why we need to ask people to change the network. Please don't ask people to change the network. It's impossible for a newcomer to understand.

Brian Friel (20:32):

Well, Alex, you'll be very happy to know that you'll never be asked to change your network in Phantom's multi-chain version. It all happens behind the scene. You just connect once it's considered connected on all chains. So we'll make it happen for Rarible. It will be a great showcase for all of that as well.

Alex Salnikov (20:48):

Thank you. Thank you so much. Let's collectively push MetaMask or the whole market.

Brian Friel (20:54):

Yeah, absolutely. A lot of this stuff is not intuitive. You're already getting people who are maybe coming to crypto because they like an NFT, they have a lot of questions about crypto, they're not sure. And then showing them these network change popups in their face, it's probably the last thing they need. And it's all about making this a safe and intuitive and familiar experience so that we can grow this thing.

Alex Salnikov (21:17):

There are two things that are almost impossible for the newcomer to overcome. It is the stuck or failing transaction. A failing transaction is okay, you can just resubmit it. But a stuck transaction, you need to wait until it goes so you can submit the next one. I've seen countless people just drop on that and this change of the next one.

Brian Friel (21:40):

I couldn't agree more.

Alex Salnikov (21:41):

It's so bad.

Brian Friel (21:41):

Yeah. That's something that we all have to fix, I think, as an industry. And we definitely have our take on those two problems. So we'll share you a beta code after this is done so you can play around and get your feedback on it. But yeah, I'm excited.

(21:54):

I want to switch gears a little bit to talk about how you see the NFT market evolving. You sit in a really interesting spot because as we said, you were very early, not only to NFTs, but to crypto. You're starting this in playing around in crypto in 2012. You've been early to the NFT marketplace scene. What is your current view on the NFT meta per se? What excites you about NFTs today?

Alex Salnikov (22:17):

It's a great question. More or less the whole story of NFT, we had CryptoKitties, which I actually believe is a way more advanced NFT than all that we currently have. It's living things that have DNA that can breed on chain and you can own them. Wow. After that, we take the giant step back. Okay, it's too hard for people to understand. Let it be just pictures. Let it be just art, and that went out. Art has a product market fit, very clear generative art, plain art, one-on-one, open additions. The current meta of open additions is through the roof, but it is all the same category of art. Quite clear. The simplest use case to make you get the idea of NFT.

(23:10):

The second biggest use case is PFP profile picture. Again, great one. It's virtual clothes for your digital identity. I find that the biggest cool thing about NFTs is that your digital you can own digital things that are directly owned by your digital you. And Twitter integrated that. Amazing. Instagram integrated art. I think Reddit integrated but not fully yet. So a PFP digital avatar. Great. And sadly, this is the only two use cases that work for NFT today. Maybe the third small one is memberships. You can have NFT membership. And that's it. Nothing else has yet worked. There are a lot of discussion. People usually think, "Okay, what's next? Or let's connect phygital. Let's do physical and digital at the same time."

Brian Friel (24:05):

I haven't heard that, phygital. That's funny.

Alex Salnikov (24:07):

For me, this is not as exciting. It is definitely what's needed. But the digital world evolves much faster than the physical. And by the time we have this, "Oh, digital, let's do an NFT for the house." So you need to have laws and it would take 10 years to get laws in place and during that 10 years, we'll have metaverses that are far more advanced than it is now. So it's just this part of the market, it's growing. It's faster. So to me, something that excites me a lot is something like CloneX is doing. You have a 3D avatar that you can import into the different metaverses and that would be you. So digital and native virtual use cases that have not been possible before. PFP have not been possible before, the interoperable between platforms PFP. The digital art have not been possible before. So some new use cases that have not been possible before that will utilize NFTs is what excites me. Games makes a lot of sense. But I don't know, CryptoKitties was such a cool project. There have got to be more to NFTs.

Brian Friel (25:21):

We got to get back to that same spirit for sure. I'm curious, do you think there's any one thing, like one bottleneck that's holding the NFT sector back? Is it something on the wallet side? Is it something just on the user education front, technology, or do you think this just takes time to iterate on?

Alex Salnikov (25:40):

I think the main value prop of NFTs is the standard. It is looked at everywhere as the same item. And this is the biggest bottleneck as well. We're coming up with the smart NFTs, so the smart NFT, every wallet should adopt it, every marketplace should adopt it, and some projects ideally should adopt it. So just the cooperation, the intersection of projects to adopt the same idea. I've subscribed to the newsletter that's called This Week in Ethereum, and I think that's one of the best newsletters out there. I read about new developments of NFT standards. Almost every week, there is something. Composable NFT, rentable NFT, this NFT, that NFT. And when I look at this proposal, I understand that several years need to pass before we will actually see any of these new NFT standards adopted.

(26:39):

So we will all need to come up with some addition to NFT standard that we all love and that we will all adopt and that will not be as hard as composable NFT of like ERC 998, or 988. That is very complicated, and very complicated standards do not get adoption. So some small increment, some better standard and a wider adoption of that standard. So complexity. Getting back to your question. Complexity. Yeah, complexity and coordination. Yeah.

Brian Friel (27:10):

Yeah. Complexity and coordination. Coordination across a lot of different people. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, that's a great insight, especially for us as we're gearing up to go multi-chain and supporting NFTs. So we're going to have to take a deep look at a lot of those different standards that are coming online and continue to iterate. So Alex, I just want to thank you. This has been a really great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the show. One last question that we ask all our guests, and I want to hear this from you as well is who is a builder that you admire in the Web 3.0 Ecosystem?

Alex Salnikov (27:42):

Vitalik. I might come to some better answer, but-

Brian Friel (27:48):

You are the first person to say Vitalik on this show. So the spotlight's yours, you can take it.

Alex Salnikov (27:52):

I'll take Vitalik. He's built so much and his article... I've been recently diving into the article that explains how ZK works. I recommend it to everyone. They say that, "Oh, the next decade is going to be ZK decade." So just try to digest it, understand how it works. It's going to change a lot of lives.

Brian Friel (28:11):

That's a great answer. Well, we all have our homework assignment after this. Alex, thanks so much for coming on. Where can people go to learn more about Rarible?

Alex Salnikov (28:19):

It's always on twitter.com/rarible or twitter.com/insider0x. That's my personal Twitter, if you want to follow me. Rari.foundation is the biggest and exciting part that just started. So there's going to be a lot of development on that end. We're going to be East Denver. Let's meet. It's a great place to catch up.

Brian Friel (28:41):

I love it.

Alex Salnikov (28:44):

Yeah. And I feel like the second part of our talk is better than the first. Let's skip to the second part, guys. Maybe we can put that into-

Brian Friel (28:52):

Yeah, we'll get that in the show notes for sure. Awesome. Alex Salnikov, the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Rarible. Thanks so much for coming on.

Alex Salnikov (29:00):

Thank you for having me, Brian. You are a part of an amazing team that built an amazing product that actually have chances to compete with the giants that we all know are really hard to move. Good luck with that. Let's not change networks, please.

Brian Friel (29:15):

Yeah, let's not change networks. I love it. That's all. Awesome. Thanks so much.

Alex Salnikov (29:20):

You're welcome.