NFTs are the latest craze in the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. The trend has reached so far that Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey is currently auctioning his first tweet as an NFT and the highest bid at the time of writing is around 2,5 Million.
Therefore, the listing of Pastel couldn’t come at a better point in time. Pastel Network provides a secure platform for digital artists to monetize their art and for collectors to collect digital art with the help of NFTs. Unlike a majority of NFTs, Pastel is not relying on the Etherum blockchain for its tech but is relying on a proprietary blockchain drawing inspiration from various other chains such as Dash and Zcash.
On Tuesday, March 9th 14:00 UTC we welcomed Jeff Emanuel, CEO of Pastel and Anthony Georgiades to our telegram channel to learn more about Pastel.
Below you can find a summary of the most important things we covered.
Question: What’s the history of Pastel?
Answer by Jeff: “The history of Pastel goes back to 2018 before people were talking much about NFTs. We could already see the limitations of ETH based projects with their high fees. It also struck me as crazy that none of these other projects actually solved the problem of storing the art image files securely.
To this day, most NFTs actually just have a link to some centralized server like on Google or Amazon Web Services that actually store the image file. What happens when those links eventually go dead? You won’t be able to get the art images themselves in 15+ years.
In Pastel, there is a built-in, decentralized storage layer that is run by the Masternodes as a group. Large portions of the Masternodes can disappear and we can still always reconstruct the image files. And because there is no external dependency — everything is done natively in the project — we can make much stronger guarantees about the images being available for the long term.
Anyway, the inspiration to start Pastel was to make something that was accessible to everyone, even poor artists and collectors.
Question: What’s the exchange’s viewpoint on NFTs? Fad or future?
Answer by Danish: We think NFT’s are the future. There are so many applications for it. We’ve already seen what top shots has done, Jack Dorsey auctioning his tweet, and what pastel has done for art. I think NFT’s are going to be the big thing over the next decade
Question: So would you say this is what differentiates Pastel from other Projects? In addition to not having to rely on central storage linking to something like AWS or Azure?
Answer by Jeff: The duplicate detection is a huge differentiator, and very hard to do technically. Our system uses advanced statistical methods and 7 different deep-learning image models. On top of that, Pastel will have built-in, trustless, decentralized trading of artworks in return for our native cryptocurrency, PSL.
Pastel is also a Masternode project, which means that anyone can help run the network itself. You just need to own 5 million PSL and a fast machine connected to the internet, and you can set up a Masternode and earn a portion of the block rewards. As more users start their own masternodes, it will make the network more decentralized and robust and reliable.
Question: What will Bitcoin.com Exchange provide to Pastel’s token and platform, both on an exchange level, and community level?
Answer by Danish: We’re excited to offer PSL on our exchange and support their trading community. And as we’ve said from the beginning and something we’ve stressed to every project, we form partnerships, not just listings. so PAstel will have our full support whether on exchange-related activities or from any of our available means be or social media, news or anything in-between.
Question: I joined an event on Clubhouse about digital art / NFT. One case that becoming common was told: Downloading art pieces from open social media sharings and tokenizing it as if owning by the way and selling via NFT marketplaces. How does Pastel Network deal with such situations?
Answer by Jeff: This is a tough issue because we don’t believe a truly decentralized system is compatible with traditional copyright systems. Basically, the best way to secure your artwork is to register it yourself on Pastel, and then our duplicate detection system will prevent others from registering the same or slightly modified art. We will have a ticket system where users can “petition” for relief if someone steals their work, but that would be optional and up to the Masternode operators (and enough of them would need to vote to do anything).
Question: How do you plan on attracting (qualitative) artists to use pastel?
Answer by Anthony: We are allocating funding towards our artist onboarding as you alluded to. This includes the commission of campaigns by tackling specific art segments of the market (for example southeast Asian ANIME art communities).
Basically, the art market is so fragmented both in terms of the types of art and the geographies/demographics etc. Which is a challenge, but also an amazing opportunity.
We have been basically ‘attacking’ the market in terms of these communities, trying to manage each with almost ‘ community members ‘ and running specific campaigns or promotions for each.
Question: How to add my NFT to the Pastel network?
Answer by Jeff: Our software for this won’t be released for another 2–3 months. Most of the back-end engineering work has already been done though, we just need to finish up some work on the storage layer and finish the interface work.
Question: Only getting users, holders etc is not everything. In my opinion, a project needs to deal with solving a real-world issue or problem What is the problem that your project primarily focuses on? Only getting users, holders etc is not everything. In my opinion, a project needs to deal with solving a real-world issue or problem What is the problem that your project primarily focuses on?
Answer by Jeff: Yes, we are solving NFTs (creation, trading) in a better way, with lower fees and more features. If we do a good job then we will attract lots of artists and their fans (collectors) to Pastel.
Question: It’s easy to make a token but it’s really hard to make this token valuable? So what’s your strategy to make your token more valuable and what’s your plan to maintain token price and supply?
Answer by Jeff: We agree, and that’s why we have been working on Pastel for 3 years to add lots of innovative, high-tech features that will make the network more useful to artists and collectors. In addition to driving usage, I already described how PSL coins are burned every time someone buys an artwork (1% of the purchase price) or sells an artwork (2% of the sale price). Over time this will reduce the coin supply, which has a theoretical maximum of 21b coins.
Question: Pastel Network claims to offer a solution that makes it possible to monetize digital art, but I’m not sure how that will be possible when copies can be made or forged so easily? What mechanism have you put in place to help ensure that artists and collectors exchange their works in a secure way?
Answer by Jeff: You can read about our duplicate image detection system on our wiki (pastel.wiki) or in our whitepaper.
Question: On moving forward through your roadmap, what are your most important next priorities? Does the PASTEL NETWORK team have enough fundamental (Funds, Community, etc ) to achieve those milestones?
Answer by Anthony: So to start with what we have achieved thus far — we have built out the underlying architecture (combining the best attributes of z-cash and dash), we have fully deployed our cNode system (which underpins the entire system), and we have rolled out the trading system for registering, storing, and trading art.
In short — we are a fully functioning, self-contained blockchain that supports decentralized trading. We are doing some final tests on the pyNode piece (the art trading part) before being released in production in the coming weeks.
Our pipeline: First in terms of development, this includes many key milestones such as rolling out a web-based (vs. desktop wallet) application and then support for various file types (videos, audios, gifs, etc.). Then we also have specific technical implementations we want to tackle like Loaded POW or the use of steganography to encode SPHINCs signatures as QR codes in images. We have enough funding to achieve all of this and then deploy our go-to-market / adoption strategy 😊
Question: In an article on Medium, you mention that “Pastel is more than just an NFT marketplace”. What are the characteristics that make Pastel transcend beyond simple art commerce and stand out from its competitors?
Answer by Jeff: Because we are an integrated platform for registering, validating, and storing the artwork, not just for buying and selling it. And because we have our own native currency token (PSL), it allows us to do many things that would be impossible or impractical for a project built on top of Ethereum. Because we run our own network, we can do things that are extremely computationally expensive, such as duplicate image detection, that would be absurdly expensive (if even possible) to do on Ethereum given the price of gas now.
Thanks to all our guests for taking the time to join us and to the participants for all these great questions. Congratulations to the 5 who’ve won the best question! We will be in contact soon.
In the meantime, if you want to learn more about Pastel, check out their website, their wiki and join their community.