In conversation with Satish Kataria, Founder –FANDORA.APP, world’s first Pre NFT-Content & Rights Marketplace that aims to bridge the gap between Creators and Web3 Pros.

CXOTODay has engaged in an exclusive interview with Satish Kataria, Founder – FANDORA.APP

Tell us about yourself and Fandora

I’m Satish Kataria and bring on board 23 years of experience across various verticals including brand management, venture capital investments and strategic management. I’ve been a 3X serial entrepreneur – having launched India’s first ever crowdfunding platform way back in 2010. I’m also a Founder’s Coach and have authored a book ‘UNBLOC’ – which talks about 21+ attitudinal hacks that can help fellow entrepreneurs in their journey.

FANDORA.APP is my foray into the exciting world of Web3. It is the world’s first content licensing platform for various Web3 applications.

Can you help demystify these jargons for our readers — NFTs and Metaverse!

NFTs stand for Non Fungible Tokens – and essentially represent a digital imprint (on a blockchain) of any underlying content or an asset, in a way, where one such token is different from the other and have their own unique characteristics – either in the way it physically looks or in the way it represents the ownership/rights of its underlying assets. Owing to the underlying nature of blockchain technology, when an NFT gets ‘minted’ – it becomes an immutable record, which then cannot be tampered with and is verified through a network of decentralised verifiers (also called as nodes). Today, NFTs have come to represent multiple applications across all industrial and consumer domains – enabling greater transparency in asset ownership as well as far easier, borderless liquidity and transferability of the underlying asset. From protecting the authenticity of educational certificates to enhancing the engagement of your brand customers – NFTs have come a long way since their humble recognition just 3 years back.

Metaverse, on the other hand, is the culmination of various virtual reality and augmented reality applications – which would enable its users to experience various events in a virtual setting, even if they are physically present elsewhere. Look at it like Zoom – but 100X more immersive – where you will actually be able to have your own digital avatar hobnobbing with other such avatars – all virtually. It was author Neal Stephenson, who coined this term in his book in 1992 – and since then, technologies and applications around Metaverse have increased exponentially – with predictions saying that we would be living 50-70% of our lives in a metaverse ecosystem just few years down the line – provided that the bandwidth technology is able to catch up with its requirements.

FANDORA.APP is the world’s first Pre-NFT Content and Rights Marketplace – can you tell us more about this? 

Even if I look within India – we today have almost 40 million content creators and 4 million Web3 talentbase. Unfortunately, there is very limited cross over within these two ecosystems – despite both bringing immense benefits to each other. Not even 10% of creators, globally, have yet been able to explore the vast monetisation opportunities that NFTs and Web3 can offer to them – and this is because of multiple adoption issues including technology awareness, proliferation of NFT markets making it difficult to optimise one’s Web3 asset price and protection of IP Rights.

It is here that FANDORA.APP will be able to bridge this gap – and so, one one hand, enabling creators globally to share their content and sell the Web3/NFT rights of their content – thus immediately monetising their existing content without worrying about its evolving technicalities; and on the other hand, also onboard millions of NFT minters, collectors, Metaverse studios and brands – pitch for these rights and thus get access to better content for in turn building greater value yielding and immersive Web3 assets.

Who will benefit from what FANDORA.APP is offering?

Web3 endeavors to usher in new heights of creators-audience engagement – and FANDORA.APP would be a step towards this direction. Once completely built and functional – Fandora would help following potential users:

• Creators – across the genres – would be able to better monetise their content and IP rights through Web3, without getting into technicalities and thus, better engage with their audiences;
• Web3 Professionals, NFT Minters, NFT Marketplaces and Metaverse Studios – As various technologists and Web3 aficionados built their reach and expertise in the evolving Web3 domains – they need access to better content (and the audiences of the creators) – which would be possible through FANDORA.APP
• Leading consumer brands – as they would be able to get Web3 rights of leading creators, as well as post their existing content and monetise it further through its Web3 rights. (Imagine Amul coming on board and selling the NFT rights of its famous daily ads, which can have immense collection value amongst brand fans)

What kind of technology have you invested in to build your brand?

FANDORA.APP is being built on host of MERN Stack tools as well as Polygon as the underlying blockchain – on which various smart contracts to regulate the use of content rights, IP rights and other related NFT utilities.

A guide on buying NFTs – a simple guide for the new age generation?

While this is a rapidly evolving field, following are few things one should keep in mind:

• The era of just JPEG based NFTs are over – so do not look only at the creative elements of your NFTs (though they still do matter), look for the long term value that NFTs can offer you (say utilities or exclusive access to your creator), the popularity of the original creator (so that you have a better potential base of those who’d like to further buy these NFTs from you) and finally, the acquisition price (you can compare similar NFT prices through series of 3^rd party analytic sites such as unleashnfts.com
• Again, do not consider NFTs as Get-Rich-Quick schemes. Invest in them for their underlying value – which could be either collection value or engagement value.
• Financial Holdings: As regulations emerge, NFTs would also become a medium for creators to share their financial rewards and content IP with their fans – and thus, this can become a medium for fans to now start engaging more strongly with their creators and collaborate with them to grow and benefit together.

How can content creators benefit from NFTs – GenZ and Millennial Edition

There are multiple ways that creators can benefit from NFTs. While this is an evolving medium, some of these possibilities are:

• Additional monetisation on their existing content: NFTs, with its digital representations, can bring additional monetisation opportunities for creators – as this enables potential buyers to build variations of the existing content and add further to content value.
• Active and controlled engagement: NFTs can take level of engagement with your potential audiences to a very different level. You can reward your fans in multiple ways – including allowing select NFT holders to access your chats; invite them to your events or share merchandise and eventually, share your rewards with them.
• Engagement with Gen Z: The future of content monetisation and consumption tomorrow will be Web3 (with applications such as Metaverse) and so, your NFTs is your gateway to these future generation of your fans.