Ben Straley, founder, and CEO of digital asset platform Thred joined Cheddar News to discuss the company’s operations.

Closing Bell

Digital Asset Platform Thred Makes Understanding NFTs Easy

N. F. T Search and Discovery platform thread announced it launched last week. Now this startup says it wants to be the destination of choice for creators and consumers to find authentic digital asset collections and projects. The reds platform is also community sourced, It uses machine learning to rank and FT collections on the ethereum and polygon block chains. You can use it for free right now, it's in open beta, which is a term that's used when a product undergoes its final round of testing while being available to use by the general public. Joining us Now is Ben Straily, he's the founder and ceo of thread. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, I'm excited to be here. So thread launched less than a week ago. What has activity on this platform been like in the past few days? Uh so glad you asked that question. Um we've been really excited and thrilled about the early adoption that we've seen from uh communities of of active collectors who have been in the space for a long time and also new users that are just sort of curious about N. F. T. S and finally have a platform that they can turn to to uh discover um these digital assets and N. F. T. S that are relevant to their lives and and worth owning, which is really sort of central to the problem that we're trying to solve. I understand the thread has compared its platform to Yelp and Tripadvisor. It allows users to review and rank collections, How does that work? Yeah. One of the things that's really exciting about thread is that um by collecting these ratings and reviews from consumers, one that content provides greater information that others can use to really decide what N F T s are relevant to them, what N F T s are trustworthy. But more important because all of these N F T s live on a Blockchain thread is able to actually identify the reviews that are coming from uh collectors that have actually owned the N F T. S and others that may have not uh ever had any direct experience with the N F T. And if you think about, you know, amazon verified reviews or when you're using one of those other search sites that you mentioned, One of the things that you always would love to know is well, is this a real review? Is this, is this an authentic review? Um and we solve that problem at thread. So you can come to thread, you can read the reviews, you can engage in the conversation around these different entities and collections and have confidence that what you're reading is authenticated and verified. And and real and your solution to this problem, what makes the trustworthy, what does it have to do with the AI and machine learning technologies? How does that power this process? Yeah, that's a great question. And that's really where the RND or the development and the idea for thread really came from my background and the background of a number of other folks in the team is in personalization and and ai solutions and systems. And when we looked at what was happening with N. F. T. S. And in the space we realized there was an opportunity to bring um AI and machine learning uh to bear on this uh problem of discovery. And so what we're using the Ai to do is essentially recognize patterns in um uh consumer behavior, collector behavior that indicates that a specific N. F. T. Or a specific collection is the authentic collection and is a desirable collection. Uh And then based on those predictions that the Ai model uh and models are making were able to rank the desirability effectively of every collection on the ethereum and uh polygon block chains which is sort of step one in the discovery process and then the other piece is relevant. So A. I. Applied to this data and the community data to really identify what N. F. T. S. Are gonna be relevant to the lives of an individual group of consumers. And so our threat brings those two things together, relevance on the one hand and uh ranking on the other to produce really reliable and trustworthy and useful. Um uh search results. We don't have that much time. But just a quick quick question 2022 it just wasn't a good year for the crypto mark, the F. T. X. Collapse weighed really heavily on the entire crypto world including digital collectibles with valuations. Just plummeting, how will thread navigate these challenges? We don't have very much time but this is an important question. Yeah, I'll be brief. We you know, we believe that this market is a huge market and you look at what's happening with games and collectibles and art. Those those markets have already sort of made the transition in terms of adoption in the space. The one big problem that is going to unlock more activity and more value is this discovery problem which is what is gonna bring more consumers to the table. I will say over the last couple of months, what we've also seen is big brands like Starbucks and Porsche and pomo made an announcement this morning are entering the space in a big way and I think that's also going to uh drive a greater adoption and a return to the sort of growth that we were seeing um a year and two years ago, fascinating stuff. Thank you so much. Ben Straily Founder and Ceo of threat