RAIR Hopes To Attract Enterprises to its ERC-4337 Compliant NFT/DRM Solution

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Full-text transcript of David Berlind's Interview with Garrett Minks, founder of RAIR Technologies

David Berlind: Today is Monday, February 12, 2024. I'm David Berlind, and this is the Blockchain Journal podcast. And today, we will be speaking with Garrett Minks, who is the founder of RAIR Technologies.

But first, I just want to let our audience know that with our videos, we include quite a few QR codes. Those QR codes appear at the bottom of your screen. They also appear at the end. Please feel free to use those not only to get in touch with me or whoever my guests are because we use the QR codes to link you up to their Twitter and their LinkedIn accounts, but also you can use those QR codes to find this content on the web as well as some of our other great video content on blockchainjournal.com.

So, thanks for joining us. And, Garrett, I want to thank you for joining us. You are launching something called RAIR Technologies. Thanks for being here to tell us about it. Why don't you tell us what RAIR Technologies is?

Garrett Minks: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for having me, David.

So, absolutely. So, in a nutshell, RAIR Technologies provides enterprise NFT marketplace infrastructure. So rather than an enterprise, say, needing to go out to an OpenSea or Nifty Gateway or one of these places, they can actually deploy their own, you know – really a homegrown solution – that they fully control all of the data for. So, a lot of people don't know, but when you log into things like OpenSea, they take all of your data and keep it to themselves. So, we're trying to solve it.

Berlind: So, I'm familiar with both OpenSea and Nifty. You mentioned Nifty. And maybe let's back up a little bit and talk about what in your mind are the most important criteria that enterprises need consider when they're thinking about putting their NFTs out there to engage their customers or for a loyalty program, whatever it may be. What's the criteria that's most important for enterprises to consider?

Minks: That's a great question. First, really, just to understand, you know, the new medium that they're using, which is an open public blockchain. So when they understand that, then you can start working backwards to what are all the permissions that you would need to configure to interact in the public medium and then really, how do you want to manage and control your data? What do you want to show publicly? And then, what are things that maybe wouldn't necessarily want to show [the] public?

Berlind: We've taken a close look at Nifty Gateway particularly because they are the NFT infrastructure of choice that was selected by the Starbucks Odyssey program. And when we went through the whole program, [and] experienced it, we noticed a bunch of things that would appeal to enterprises. That's kind of what I'm getting to in terms of the criteria.

So, a good example of that would be Starbucks, [which] is able to white-label the entire user experience. So, it looks like it's their NFT marketplace versus Nifty Gateway's marketplace.

Another example would be that you can engage the assets – they call them stamps – not NFTs, with US dollars. You can buy them with US dollars and fiat currency, as opposed to needing cryptocurrency. The login is rather seamless. It's a little clunky, but it starts with having a user ID on the Starbucks rewards program.

So these are the criteria I'm thinking of. And so I'm just kind of curious in your mind, like what are some of the things that would be most important to an enterprise when they're making their choices? Because as you pointed out, OpenSea is a little more of an open market. You're just kind of, like, loading your assets up there, but they're in control of everything. They're in control of, well, you know, what different cryptocurrencies can be used to purchase the NFTs. They're in control of the NFTs, of the look and feel there? They're in control of a lot of things you generally speaking, you have to engage with a separate wallet, right? Like you, you have to like your MetaMask or something like that on OpenSea, whereas on Nifty Gateway, they essentially set up a custodial wallet that shelters the end user – many of those end users being Starbucks consumers who don't know a whole lot about cryptocurrency or wallets or anything of that [nature]. They kind of try to hide the complexities of that. So what have you done in order to make it easier for enterprises and, ultimately, their customers or whoever it is that they're trying to address in their audience?

Minks: Absolutely. So Nifty, of course, offers a quite amazing product, and they've been around in the space for quite a while. I would say our differentiation really comes from how close our nose really is to the Web3 grindstone.

So, you know, when you're really looking at how to deploy these systems, there is a lot of really fast-moving technology, undercurrents in the space. And, a few things to mention: there's a thing called smart accounts, which is a very new technology. It's really only been approved in the last nine months or so. We've really jumped all over that technology stack.

That actually allows you to... Like you said, make it easy for users, basically abstract their accounts from needing to know seed phrases.

Berlind: You're talking about account abstraction, ERC-4337?

Minks: That's right.

Berlind: Yeah, okay, go ahead.

Minks: Yes. Yes, it's a wonderful standard that we have really embraced and I think [we] embraced much quicker than a lot of other folks where, you know, rather than being able to provide a user a quite limited, very, very locked-down custodial experience, we can actually really bridge the best of both worlds and more self custodial experience for the user and the ability for them to interact with the wider Web3 – wider Web3 audience, but still inside of a controlled environment.

Berlind: When you say interact with a wider Web3 audience, what's an example of that? Because I think, as you're pointing out, like if we look at the Nifty Gateway user experience, you can buy NFTs from Starbucks, then you can trade them with other members of the Starbucks Odyssey community, you can trade them for US dollars, or in some cases with cryptocurrency, if you really want to do that. But it's not so easy to take those same assets and move them out onto an open marketplace like OpenSea.

I've tried it. It's it's a little bit clunky, and also, you don't even kind of get the graphics. So there's some sort of – to me at least – there's some sort of breakage in the way they're putting the images on IPFS or wherever it is they put them. But what is it that when you say interact with a wider Web3 audience, you're talking about making it easier to work with people who are not necessarily a part of some enterprises NFT program?

Minks: You really hit the nail on the head with that one.

As you know, when you create something inside of Nifty Gateway, Starbucks Odyssey app, it really is kind of trapped inside of there. And then they do give you this kind of export to external wallet function. But 99% of users, of course, aren't going to do that. When you do embrace the smart accounts, you're actually... you're giving a user a future-proof wallet. So the enterprise won't have to rip out that system and then build a new smart accounts-based system; they'll already have the future-proof one.

So, through granular permissioning, it can work exactly like the current Starbucks Odyssey program say, but in the future, Starbucks would then be much more future-proof. And, if they wanted to convert their Starbucks points to Delta points – things like that – those are only uniquely possible with interoperability, and interoperability is only really possible with smart accounts.

Berlind: Right. So, and when you say that you're using the ERC-4337 specification. It's sort of a standard for Ethereum; they call it account abstraction. One of the things that it enables is the ability to log into your wallet or log into your – whatever it is you're holding. I don't know if you're calling it a wallet or not, but with your... with the social sign on. So what are you guys doing? How are you making that easy for end users?

Minks: Absolutely. So, as you know, the technology does exactly that. Sign in with Google, or even in the Starbucks Odyssey use case, sign in with your Starbucks app. That is then interacting with a smart account on the blockchain on your behalf.

Berlind: Right.

Minks: And with our system, we help with a lot of the granular permissioning things – unhook it from this account, hook it back up to that other account.

Berlind: Do you – on the back end – do you have the technology that integrates with whatever the identity management system that an enterprise might be using? You know, maybe they're using Microsoft’s identity management, or they could be using some other system. Do you make it easy to tie into that so that once people are... Like you mentioned Starbucks. One of the issues with Starbucks is that just because you're logged into the rewards program doesn't mean you're logged in to the Odyssey program. You actually get a separate login to Odyssey.

One... But you have to start all the time with your Starbucks Rewards ID just to get into the Odyssey program, just to be accepted into it. But once you're in it, you have a separate ID that lives on the Nifty Gateway system, and that's a little confusing because now you have two separate IDs. You're actually getting emails from two separate systems about engaging the Starbucks brand.

So, do you make it easy for enterprises to tie into their existing identity management system, so you log in once on that system, and then you're plugged into everything that you normally had through that login as well as the NFT capability?

Minks: Right. So you make great point about the nuance and white labeling. So, of course, you can slap your own logo on something and call it a white-label solution, but we're actually deploying the smart accounts on the behalf of the enterprise.

Berlind: Okay.

Minks: So it's their full... It's their full stack. So, there is no dual solution. They're actually deploying their own smart accounts natively. They're just using our APIs to kind of help them do so.

Berlind: I see. All right. So, I also saw in the press release that was forwarded to me... You guys just launched, right? I think I saw the... It's brand new, like maybe a week ago today?

So, I saw in the press release some mention of DRM – digital rights management – and I even went and visited the user experience and I saw a tab for video. So tell us a little bit about what you're doing there because you don't normally hear about DRM or see a video tab on a marketplace. Let's talk about those two features.

Minks: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for asking, because that is our core original technology that we launched with. So we've been in research and development, building this thing for almost... almost four years now. So, even prior to the whole, whole big NFT hype cycle.

And the thing that originally got me excited about NFTs was that I was like, wow, you could use serial numbers on a blockchain to then unlock, you know, unlock things and rather than having a centralized kind of corruptable database to do so, you could use the blockchain. So that was all of our original technology stack that we built was all of this DRM-specific infrastructure. And then we realized, later on, that you can't just provide the DRM; you also need to provide the NFT creation solutions. And then we realized, Oh, well, you need to be able to trade and execute those the same NFT serial numbers.

So... But going all the way back to the sort of genesis of our company – and that's kind of what we have our patent around and such – is we have an entire fully closed-in DMCA compliant DRM engine. So, not only can an enterprise deploy, you know, their NFT serial numbers, do these smart account things that we were talking about with our system, but they can also lock all of their proprietary data inside of it with our DRM system.

Berlind: So, give me an idea of why you need that. Like, what's a real use case where an enterprise would want to do something like that?

Minks: That's a great question. So, of course, we started in the more media... "media type" use case, but I'd much rather give a more interesting example, the thing that we're working on...

Berlind: Okay.

Minks: Right now, a medical use case, actually. So, this is instructions for use for doctors to learn how to do surgeries and things. So we're actually using our video player for that right now. So we end-to-end encrypt the content, and then we make sure that only the doctor with the right credential can then click and access the video. And then we track on the blockchain exactly what wallet accessed it for how long. So, you know...

Berlind: Okay, so the doctor has a wallet. That's their credential. Their user credential. They may not even know it's a wallet. You could obfuscate that piece of it. But then they use that wallet and then do they need something like an NFT to... Are you token gating the the content in some way? Like, what's going on in the background there?

Minks:That's exactly what we're doing. So, we are placing an on-chain identifier that says, "This wallet needs this token to watch this piece of content."

Berlind: Okay.

Minks: Yep. And as you know, with smart accounts, the doctor would never even really necessarily need to know that's the way the system is working...

Berlind: Right.

Minks: But that's how it is working behind the scenes.

Berlind: And so, is the token an NFT that unlocks it, or is it some other kind of token?

Minks: Absolutely. It is just a regular standard ERC-721 interoperable NFT. That's what we use to check the credential[s].

Berlind: Okay, so if you're an enterprise and you have some sort of content that you want to make sure is only available to the people who are authorized to have that access, it sounds like the workflow is: first you set them up with a wallet – and they don't even know they're getting this. They're just sort of like logging into the system, using, as you point out, the abstraction capabilities of [ERC-]4337.

They're in the system. They do have a wallet, and at the point that they are granted access to some digital asset, [it] could be a video, maybe it could be some other kind of content. You issue them an NFT, and in the background, everything knows, "Okay, this person with this NFT has the rights to view this particular video." But, all of that's on chain, and so they're the way you kind of give them access to the underlying gated content?

Minks: That's exactly how it works.

Berlind: Okay. All right. I'm just trying to read between the lines because sometimes, you know, like, we have to explain this to our enterprise users and audience members because generally speaking, they don't have a really strong understanding in many cases of how blockchain works. And, you know, one question they would have to ask is, "Why do I need blockchain to do this? Why can't I just do this with some other digital rights management system, something proprietary that lives behind the scenes, people log into my network, you have a user ID and a password?" And because of that, we know which assets they have access to. I mean, you see that all the time. You see that on today's big media networks, Netflix or Hulu or anything like that. You know, you don't get access to the cloud unless you have an ID in the system, and then and you're a subscriber and all that. So, what is the big deal about blockchain here?

Minks: That's the proverbial "Why Web3? Why blockchain?" question. I think that inevitably comes up. And, you know, of course, there's the philosophical open transparent database that we can all trust. But in a more kind of brass tacks enterprise level, it's much more secure. So, you know, we know exactly what wallet is watching what content when. It's kind of like, why you don't want to buy drugs with Bitcoin. It's that similar mindset.

So I'd say it's the most secure DRM system that's really ever been created because we have a public record of, you know, of all of the access for all time. And then... And then it's, at that point, like I said, in the very beginning of our conversation, what parts of that data are private and stored on a secure cloud and not issued publicly, like all of your analytics behind who's doing what, and then what does an enterprise choose to publish publicly to then interoperate with other enterprises, potentially sell that data.

Berlind: Okay. I saw a video tab. I'm assuming this... I said earlier, but maybe I was wrong. That this would work with other digital assets, for example, I think of a media company. Blockchain Journal is a media company, and we deliver all sorts of assets to our end users. And we are looking at how we are going to integrate blockchain into the back end of Blockchain Journal, and I'm thinking, "Well, I could use this, a technology like this to grant access to members of Blockchain Journal, [to] certain videos that other people don't get who are not members." You know, basically you gated access kind of situation. Or what about PDF files or other types of digital assets, white papers, etc? Are you going to expand this to include other kinds of assets besides just video?

Minks: A great question. Of course, we started with video as it is like 80% of the bandwidth on the internet and seems to be what most people most people consume the most.

Berlind: Sure.

Minks: But, certainly, the core DRM technology – can you see this, can't you see this – is absolutely expandable to any other... even AR, VR, you know, whatever else. Fundamentally, we're checking on the blockchain "Does this credential exist, and if it does, then provide access."

Berlind: Okay. Can we get a demo?

Minks: Absolutely. I'd love to show you...

Berlind: That'd be great.

Minks: ...show you a quick demo. We've got some...

Berlind: Some teed up on the screen share.

Minks: Absolutely. Anyone...? Perfect. So I will move over to one of our demo servers here where you can just see we have a whole kind of hodgepodge of interesting content. We basically use the server to put little examples of what we're doing, and then in a production use case, you would see instead of our logo, you know, different color scheme, different logo, things like that. But maybe...

Berlind: The logo of the company. So if it's an enterprise that wants to do something, like [a] big retail company or something like [a] consumer products, consumer goods company, that they would be able to kind of put this in[to] their look and feel.

Minks: Absolutely. Absolutely. And unlike some of the bigger players like Nifty Gateway, of course, we have dedicated developers that can even take it completely from our API endpoints and rebuild a front end from the ground up. But yes, this is the basic look and feel that we kind of customize color schemes and light mode, dark mode, things like that.

So, I would love to show this. Hotel Transylvania is a use case here real quick.

Berlind: Okay.

Minks: Just load this guy up. So, we were actually in the Sony... Sony Astar blockchain incubator [from] last year, which was really, really exciting for us. And they were nice enough to give us these assets, of course, to use only in a demonstration use case. But, you can see here that on the surface, that looks quite a bit like a regular NFT marketplace experience.

Behind the scenes, of course, we're creating all of these assets, minting them, doing all the metadata. As you mentioned earlier, doing the metadata in an open format where other marketplace aggregators like OpenSea can pick these things up.

Unlike some of those other ones, we have much more granular kind of creation tools here. We can see that we're actually minting these specific NFTs on the Astar (ASTR) blockchain.

If there's a particular EVM network – so Ethereum Virtual Machine-specific network – that an enterprise is really excited about, we can, of course, integrate with that one as we've done with this blockchain here. You can see that we've got...

Berlind: So the EVM standard is kind of what you're tying to there. It doesn't matter which chain it is. As long as it supports EVM, you're good.

Minks: Absolutely, absolutely. It takes us just a couple of days to copy-paste smart contracts, but yes, we're compatible with all of them.

Berlind: But what about ERC-4337? Like...for right now, that's only on Ethereum. The other networks... There are a lot of pieces of it that are not fully up and running in a very public way. So, there are placeholders to kind of keep the technology running. We've been experimenting with the technology. So, if the network doesn't support ERC-4337, then what?

Minks: That's a great question. And, actually, some of the more consulting side of our business, we've been helping the Astar blockchain folks try to get [ERC-]4337 up and running on their network. So you bring up a great point right now. It's really only like...

Berlind: Bundler. Bundlers, for example. The bundlers are all third-party services. There's no like central bundler.

Minks: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, right. In... In practical terms, we're basically on Polygon, you know, with the technology stack at this point. Because they... they're the only ones that really are low cost. Low cost, scalable, that also support ERC-4337, and so...

Berlind: Okay.

Minks: Yeah.

Berlind: So then, when you said – like the example here, I think you said was the ASTAR chain – would that really work in the real world? Can you put... Can you break up things? So, like, you've got the account abstraction and all that working on Polygon but you've got the assets on a separate chain?

Minks: That's right. So, if I were to log out here and then do the social login flow and say connect my wallet with Google, it's going to dump me in and automatically put me into a Polygon... a Polygon wallet. So, that's kind of the flow right now. So, we have full support of everything MetaMask based and then as the stack develops, and, as you know, smart accounts are really only about nine months... nine months old.

Berlind: So okay, So I'm not sure I got the answer to my question. Can you... Can you use Polygon to handle all the ERC-4337 stuff but still pick a different chain for where you keep all... where you're minting all your NFTs and stuff?

Minks: Right. It really needs to be all kind of kit and caboodle on the same... on the same...

Berlind: Same chain.

Minks: Same chain. Exactly.

Berlind: So... So just... that comes back to this thing. Yes, you're compatible with EVM, but today, anybody who wants to use your solution is kind of married to Polygon until the other chain support [ERC-]4337

Minks: Yes, that's a good way to put it. Everybody's kind of racing to get the support. I saw an interesting graphic from Alchemy that Polygon is like 92% user share of all of the smart accounts that have been created so far. But there are certainly experiments going on with optimism.

Berlind: Well, that wouldn't come as a surprise since a lot of the networks don't support [ERC-]4337 yet.

Minks: Absolutely, absolutely.

Berlind: Yeah.

Minks: So... Which sort of gives their network quite an advantage at the moment.

Berlind: Okay. All right, well let's keep on with the demo. I'm sorry to interrupt.

Minks: Oh no, no worries at all. No worries at all. Let me log back into kind of my more administrator account here... And yeah, let's go check out maybe something that you would be able to nicely watch if you owned one of these NFTs.

So right here, we just have a single kind of nice trailer video that plays here. So what's going on behind the scenes that looked quite low-friction to the user, [a] typical kind of video experience. But, behind the scenes we were actually checking if there was the correct credential that the user needed to watch this video, and then checking on chain, providing that access, and then streaming the content, and then, kind of... of course behind the scenes here we have, you know, our more, you know, more administrator-type tooling area...

Berlind: Sure.

Minks: Where you can see all the analytics. Here's all the wallets. Here's all the timestamps. Just here's how many people watched the content. Even interesting things. We have a[n] AI face-scanning thing that we've integrated, so we can actually require users to be 18 or not to watch the content. So, things like that are all available behind the scenes here.

Berlind: Okay. Well, I am very interested just on the [ERC-]4337 front.

Minks: Sure.

Berlind: I haven't seen a whole lot of turnkey applications like this actually making use of [ERC-]4337. So, it's exciting for me just to see an enterprise solution of the nature of this one that's out there that's also leveraging [ERC-]4337 for some of its more enterprisey features at a lot of people. Because it's hard to get your head around that account abstraction specification. It actually does so many different things. You know, the bundling piece of it, by the way, just bundling transactions by itself is very interesting.

So that's a great demo. Thank you for doing that. If I'm an enterprise and I'm interested in this, what's going to cost me?

Minks: Absolutely. Well, the proverbial answer to that is it depends.

Berlind: It depends.

Minks: So, you know, we... We quite pride ourselves in really digging into the weeds and making these things a little bit more custom – custom and boutique – depending on what they need. But, you know, regular out-of-the-box is just a SaaS, a SaaS model, nothing... nothing particularly crazy.

Berlind: Okay.

Minks: So, so yeah.

Berlind: But on a... on a negotiated basis, are you...

Minks: Absolutely. So, the exact front end that you saw, just with your look and feel and logo and color scheme, is in the kind of low thousands of dollars a month, and then you get your own giant box.

Berlind: Right.

Minks: Yeah.

Berlind: But with the APIs, which by the way, I think that's a cool feature too, which is... As a website operator, I really like it when content management systems can be headless in the nature that you described so that you just use APIs to get to everything. So I think it was very fortuitous of you to think about that in advance in a way that, "Hey, look, you just want to work with our APIs." There's a whole API layer here, and you can snap that right into whatever it is you're building. So is that an increased level of financial commitment that's required in order to work at that level?

Minks: Yes, it is, just because it takes a little bit more resource from our developers to troubleshoot versus having the kind of integrated... streamlined experience. But that is the right way, I think, to develop software. So there's 55 API endpoints behind the scenes that basically make everything that you saw in the demo possible. Everything from minting the NFTs, adding the metadata, doing the streaming, querying the DRM, all of those are available headlessly if enterprise is large enough and wanted to basically shortcut their development time, they can just use our APIs behind the scenes.

Berlind: And the video technology is your own video technology, like streaming and all that? It's not some other service? [It] looks like it's your own.

Minks: Yes! Yes. So, our patent pending is around our unique implementation of Apple HLS. So, you know, fundamentally, it is Apple HLS, right? So we don't want to make a new video standard because then it wouldn't be supported by every device on Earth. So we use the HLS streaming stack, which means it can stream on your phone, your TV, your computer, anything like that. We just do this one extra little check to basically look on the blockchain to make sure that you have the right credential.

Berlind: Great. Well, thank you very much for the demo today and for the explanation of what you're doing. And I wish you great luck in your future here now that you're off the ground and running. Where can our audience members find you on the web?

Minks: Absolutely. So our website rair.info has everything that you need to learn about us and we're all of the other places. Our Twitter handle is at RAIR Tech – r-a-i-r-t-e-c-h, and Telegram, LinkedIn, all the others, you can find those from our website.

Berlind: All right, just for kicks. What's the back story behind the spelling of RAIR, R-A-I-R?

Minks: Certainly, so I actually think of DRM as a way to contain artificial intelligence. That's the two... the two R's that are basically holding it in.

Berlind: Oh, I see. So the AI in RAIR is for artificial intelligence, isn't it?

Minks: Yes, yes, it is. Or at least how we as humans can use DRM to preserve our provenance.

Berlind: All right, well, Garrett Minks, the founder of RAIR Technologies, provider of enterprise-grade NFT marketplaces and other DRM technologies, [and] some other stuff going on there. Thank you very much for joining us today on the Blockchain Journal podcast.

Minks: Thank you so much for having me, David.

Berlind: As I said earlier, everybody, if you want to find the full transcript of this video, you can come to the blockchainjournal.com website. We have it up there if you want to kind of read through it as text or cut and paste anything. We have lots of QR codes on this video at the end; we'll put them up there for you so you can find me, you can find Garrett, you can find all of our content on either blockchainjournal.com, on YouTube, you can even find us on the various podcast infrastructures like Apple Podcasts, now YouTube Music, that's where YouTube (Google) has moved its podcasts. So we're pretty much everywhere with our multimedia content. And if you have questions, we're easy to find. blockchainJournal.com. Thanks for joining us.