Today, we had the opportunity to hear from our wonderful, intelligent, and hilarious COO, Steve Wood. He’s the guy who keeps our team running, and is a bridge between technology, fundraising, and overall NFTY operations.
Check out his interview below!
Where are you from? What’s home to you?
I honestly don’t know how to answer that question, so I’ll say I’m from the United States of America. I’ve lived in six states and have had seven different residences in the past decade, not including shorter stays in some locations of less than three months. In fact, I’m probably going to be adding a seventh state here shortly as I intend on moving again sometime in the next few months.
You could say I’ve been searching for “home”, wherever that might be, and in acknowledgement of this fact I never call where I currently live “home” — it’s merely where I happen to currently reside. Hopefully this next move is to a place I can call home. Not saying I’ll never move again, but it would be nice to not feel compelled to do so in continuing the search.
How did you get into the world of blockchain/NFTs?
A little over a decade ago, a teammate of mine with whom I played a relatively obscure sport called underwater hockey introduced me to this thing called bitcoin, which was relatively unknown at the time. They were about $2 each, and he recommended I buy some. I thought about it for a few months, then once I realized the rest of the team was jumping on the bandwagon it seemed worth throwing a little bit of money at to mess around. By that time the price had more than doubled to $5, but it was still pretty early. I remember having to go to a bank and make a cash deposit into a miner’s account, photograph the receipt, and email to them with a deposit address. Ahh, the good `ole days.
A lot of my teammates went on to start some pretty major projects, some of which are now household names for anyone involved in blockchain. I stayed appraised of how things were developing over the years and played around with the ecosystem as it evolved, including buying a set of bedsheets with bitcoin in 2014 that are totally not worth the price I paid at today’s BTC prices. I still have that receipt and look at it every now and then.
My introduction to NFTs obviously came much later, since they didn’t even exist back then. Around 2018 I started hearing about how one day, you would own the deed to your house on the blockchain. This stuck with me; I kept trying to figure out how this would be possible. Would you have to deploy an entirely new token for that house and own the entire supply to prove you owned the property? Once I realized that NFTs are what made this possible I saw how powerful this technological development could be and started paying closer attention to those in addition to your typical fungible cryptos.
What motivates you to show up in your role?
I could probably wrap the answer to this and all the remaining questions all together into a single response! But to break it down a bit more than that… one of my prime motivators for working in this space is legitimizing it.
For as long as I’ve been in crypto, it has been relentlessly attacked from pretty much all sides with no holds barred. Unfortunately, there’s pretty legitimate reasons behind the accusations being leveled.
Despite this, my comparatively extensive exposure to blockchain has put me in touch with a lot of people whose existence and passions belie the defamatory rhetoric. There are some bad actors, and I’ve met some of those as well, but most people who are in this industry are serious about it. Sadly, they must do battle in a climate that’s oftentimes openly hostile to the well-intentioned products/services they’re trying to build thanks to bad actors, the perceived threat this technology poses to the powers that be, and the legacy of crypto’s first major use case.
Blockchain, especially with the rise of NFTs, presents enormously beneficial developments if we can overcome many of the hurdles to adoption. What we’re doing here creates the potential to light that revolution.
What does NFTY mean to you?
NFTY is the means by which the NFT space can nip the shade being thrown at the sector in the bud.
After watching how a bad reputation prevented a lot of positive developments from manifesting with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the last thing I want to see is for NFTs to suffer the same fate. You can see it already starting too — theft, scams, money laundering, and similar concepts are the first thing that come to average people’s minds when you start talking about NFTs. This is a major threat that, if unaddressed, can relegate NFTs to a niche technology with minimal adoption and few viable use cases.
If this issue can be solved before it cements itself in the minds of the general public, this adoption barrier can be pre-emptively eliminated. I already see major institutional players starting to adopt NFTs and there are massive implications for revolutionizing property rights with this technology in an era where such rights are increasingly threatened, questioned, and subject to heightened scrutiny. They enable far more powerful and individually empowering financial system as well, but none of this is possible without validation mechanisms like the one’s NFTY is implementing.
In short, the tl;dr of the above is that NFTY enables a financial and property rights revolution we desperately need.
What vision do you see for NFTY moving forward?
I see NFTY being incrementally integrated into an ever-growing portion of the NFT ecosystem. There’s no reason why every platform for trading NFTs couldn’t feature or leverage our protocol to some degree. Even beyond that, the use cases for reputation and quality validation are tremendous.
It’s not just NFTs, though NFTs are arguably the most in need of these mechanism for reasons mentioned above — the information era has devolved into a disinformation era. Scams and deception are rife everywhere you turn, especially online. NFTY has the potential to fix, or at least minimize, this entire data dystopia humanity’s darker side has created.
As our protocol grows and proves its capacity, as more and more services integrate it, as the public perception of NFTs begins to improve thanks to what we’re building, we’ll start to see gradual but notable growth in one quality which binds societies together: trust. And that’s the core of NFTY; we’re creating trust in an era where that is a sorely lacking social commodity.
What inspires you as a leader?
I have a grand vision for what humanity can become. We have our demons which we fight every day at every level, from the atomized individual to the collective consciousness of our entire species, but these battles bog us down and prevent us from advancing beyond these squabbles which in the grand scheme of things are really quite petty.
This is especially true when we lose those battles, or when they are particularly drawn out and difficult. Qualities like trust, happiness, prosperity, and well-being are often casualties of these conflicts. But it as has been famously stated, no problem can be solved with the level of thinking that created it. My vision for a brighter future requires me to continually push the envelope rather maintain existing systems and work to elevate humanity’s way of approaching problems, leveraging novel processes to do so.
Rising above our existing squabbles and complications rather than trying to force inorganic change is the best, and possibly only, way to realize that grand vision. We’re at a pivotal point in our history, which becomes increasingly obvious with every passing day. Rising to the next level is the only way humanity can recognize its full potential, and I aim to be part of pushing our civilization in the right direction.
Outside of work, what are you passionate about?
I’m a bit of a workaholic, so I’m pretty much always working to some extent. Most of my contributions to various endeavors revolve around realizing the grand vision I outlined. Consequently, I’m a huge nerd with regards to technological advancements that can impact humanity’s ability to reach beyond our current limitations. Think additive manufacturing (commonly known as 3D printing), energy generation (mainly nuclear power), advanced propulsion (ion drives have a lot of potential), blockchain (obviously), and a few others.
Sometimes I do miss underwater hockey. It’s been a few years since I played thanks to COVID. I was a swimmer for almost my entire life until finishing my bachelor’s degree and qualified for the 2008 Olympics, so part of me feels like I belong in the water at times. Lately though I’ve filled what little free personal time I have with writing, audio and video mixing/editing, reading, and gaming. At some point I’ll get back into more physically demanding activities, but feel compelled to be in front of a computer most of the day until certain milestones are met which is hard to do if you’re out running or exercising the way I used to.
Baytop is the Director of Community at NFTY. She has been a long time advocate of blockchain and crypto technologies, with over a decade dedicated to innovating communities across industries from finance, to politics, to tech, to film/tv, and advocacy work. She is passionate about conscious leadership, and developing the future of communities.
About NFTY
NFTY is the first reputation-based ERC-20 utility token for NFTs. Use the NFTY Protocol to stake, advocate, and vote. NFTY is offering decentralized solutions for NFT creators and collectors.
NFTY Protocol
The NFTY ERC-20 Token is used with the NFTY Protocol to Stake, Advocate, and Vote. These activities build a user’s Reputation.
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