Perhaps NFTs are an even bigger revolution than Bitcoin - Aleksei Korobeinikov, CTO of Cloud NFT

Sphere of non-fungible tokens is one of the most controversial now. On the one hand, it is considered over-hyped, fraudent and speculative. On the other hand - it is said to have numerous possible use-cases and perspectives. Tried to figure out the truth with Aleksei Korobeinikov.  

1. Tell me a bit about yourself and how did you come up with the idea of creating a service for NFTs?

My name is Alex, I'm a CTO of Cloud NFT - cross-chain ecosystem to aggregate NFTs from all marketplaces, mint and exchange the NFTs with developers onboarding. I have led blockchain developmer teams of up to 20 persons. Some of the names you may have heard are Ethereum Plasma, Celo, Breaker, Remme  and worked as a CTO at Zokyo, Blaize, DeHive and YieldApp.

Once at a conference, we chatted with the second Cloud NFT co-founder Peter Bel and shared our thoughts on the problems of the NFT market. It turned out that we had similar views on these problems and most importantly on how to solve them. Thus Cloud NFT was born.

2.       On November 25 there will be a token sale of your Cloud NFT project. Why did you decide to fundraise in this format?

We are big fans of decentralization in our team. So we think that the community should be the main driver of the project. We don't just sell tokens. We invite them to participate in the life of the project. Maybe in the future, we will come to a real DAO and tokensale is the first step on this path.

3.       There is a bad reputation for ICO - many projects make scam-exit, many fail to meet deadlines and disappoint their users. Why do you think it will be different with Cloud NFT?

Our team has a track record of running successful tokensales and building working products that are quite successful. We aim to play the long term - the real value of our product will not show itself in a month or a year, but when NFT becomes a mass phenomenon which will definitely happen. In addition, all of our C-level employees have extensive experience and reputation in the cryptocurrency world. And the last factor - the team tokens as well as the investments from the strategic sale will have a 1 year of cliff followed by 10-month liner vesting.

4.       Despite the relative youth of the NFT market it already has its own whales such as OpenSea, Rarible and others. How are you going to compete with them?

I believe that these sites have such a tremendous success only because they were the first to ride the wave of hype around NFT. Many of the popular sites remain inaccessible to most users because of their complexity and the high gas fees. It reminds me of the days when you had to download a blockchain or install a node to accept cryptocurrency. Now anyone can buy crypto with a bank card and a few clicks.

We offer a completely different level of service: Cloud NFT is an ecosystem where you can do all your NFT activities in one interface. Marketplace is not enough, users crave a user-friendly and intuitive infrastructure for NFT. Our service has no gas fees  (which is crucial for many users), there will be a built-in marketplace aggregator, the ability to create your own NFT, NFT Wallet and more. Everyone will be able to find in our product something important for themselves.

5.       So the marketplace won't be the core element of your product?

The marketplace is more of an important, but complementary element. Our efforts are focused on building a user-friendly ecosystem. All actions with NFT - from creation to sale, can be implemented in one interface. For this, users will have a dashboard with basic functions, a wallet, a marketplace for the exchange of digital goods and a unique solution - cross-chain aggregator. Let me remind you that all the actions within the ecosystem will be done with zero gas fees. In addition, we are launching a business API - a solution that will allow you to use our platform as the basis for your projects. Unfortunately, almost all you can do with NFT token now is to buy and sell it.

6.       Is the target audience for your product experienced NFT users or newcomers to the field?

In fact, our product is suitable for everyone: for experienced users, we offer a convenient system for working with their NFTs. For newcomers we provide an intuitive interface and good onboarding. In our product, you won't even need to have a cryptocurrency wallet to own NFT. Don't forget about businesses - for them, the NFT sphere is often as inaccessible and intimidating as for ordinary users.

7.       I completely agree that the field of NFT scares many people away with its complexity. Do you think this situation will change in the near future?

I'm pretty sure it will. One of the biggest problems with NFTs is the lack of understanding of their real benefits. This situation will not change by itself, but we will try to do our part to popularize this sphere: we are going to run educational programs on the basis of Cloud NFT. There is no final decision in what form we'll implement it yet, but I consider educating users as one of the priorities, which will help not only us as the product developers, but the industry as a whole.

8.       What do you think about today's NFT market?

The market is still chaotic today. Due to the lack of NFT use cases to solve real problems and the dominance of speculators, NFTs cannot develop in their organic way. On the other hand, thanks to the high-profile news, the broad audience learned about them. This brought in new investors, which is always positive for the market. Let's be honest, it's hard to estimate how long would it take for non-fungible tokens to get as famous as they are today. I believe that we are at the very start of the market. NFTs are not yet used by businesses for licenses or copyrights, are not used by governments to confirm identity and e-governance, and do not help to conclude contracts and act as evidence. This area still has a very long path of development, and we were lucky to see its origin with our own eyes.

9. I can say you're pretty optimistic about this sphere. Do you see any possible obstacles?

I believe that today the market is hampered by the lack of regulation, not enough knowledge about the area among users and the very chaotic market that I talked about earlier. Another factor is the lack of a convenient and accessible infrastructure for NFT but we'll fix that soon (laughs).

10. Do you think NFTs will be able to show even greater growth in 2022 than in 2020-2021?

I believe that it will be so. And this will be explosive growth. More recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is no longer Facebook but Meta and will focus on the metaverse. And NFT fits perfectly into this concept. Everything that used to be passports, licenses, contracts and documents will become an NFT in metaverse.

11. So you think that in 5 years NFT will still be popular, and not be forgotten as many Internet trends?

Definitely. NFT is not Ice Bucket Challenge, TikTok trend, or even digital art. NFT is about licenses, copyrights and authenticity. Perhaps NFT is even a bigger revolution than Bitcoin.