Ep 52: Connecting Creators with Their Communities with Kyle Tut, Co-Founder & CEO of Pinata, An NFT Management Platform

In a world of expensive data storage, Pinata's cofounders take a leap of faith, quitting their jobs to build a platform that makes data storage on the blockchain more accessible and user-friendly for NFT creators.

"When you're right and you're early, it's the exact same thing as being wrong." -Kyle Tut

Kyle Tut is the cofounder and CEO of Pinata, the number one platform for NFT Media Management. In 2018, he and his cofounder Matt launched Pinata at the Hackathon East Berlin and won. They serve over 2400 users worldwide and have more than 120,000,000 files pinned on IPFS.

In this episode, you will learn the following:

1. How Kyle and Matt founded Pinata, a platform for NFT Media Management, and won a hackathon in 2018

2. How Kyle Tut's experience with blockchain technology led him to start a blockchain consulting company

3. How the development of NFTs created an opportunity for Pinata to grow significantly

This is Kyle Tut's story...

In 2017, Kyle Tut left his job to pursue his interest in blockchain technology. He met Matt at a hackathon in New York and convinced him to quit his job and join him in building a blockchain consulting company. The two eventually stumbled upon the idea for Pinata, a platform for NFT Media Management, and won a hackathon with it in 2018. Despite their early success, the company struggled for two years to find funding and gain traction. However, they persisted and eventually found success when NFTs started taking off in 2020. Pinata is now a well-established platform with over 2400 users worldwide.

In this episode, you will learn the following:

1. How Kyle and Matt founded Pinata, a platform for NFT Media Management, and won a hackathon in 2018

2. How Kyle Tut's experience with blockchain technology led him to start a blockchain consulting company

3. How the development of NFTs created an opportunity for Pinata to grow significantly

Connect with Kyle:

Pinata: https://www.pinata.cloud/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KyleTut

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29k2C1JXyg4

Free Download:

The Words of Web3 - A comprehensive glossary of terms used in the space https://mailchi.mp/9d043022b5a0/words-of-web3

Connect with me:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drbrooksheehan

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DrBrookSheehan

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/drbrooksheehan

Transcript

[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Welcome to another episode of Dr. Brook on the Block. It's time to grab a seat, buckle up, and take a ride with me through the wild, wild west of the Web3 universe where we're going to learn all about coins and tokens, NFTs and contracts, digital real estate in the Metaverse, and so much more. There is a lot to get through on the bluff, but I am here to pave the way and help you avoid those nasty pitfalls and rug pulls so you don't get hurt. I'm going to also introduce you to some interesting characters along the way. Are you ready? Your ride starts now.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Hey, Dr. Brook here with another epic ride through the wild, wild west. And today I am joined by my copilot, Kyle Tut Tut, who is the cofounder and CEO of Pinata, the number one platform for NFT Media Management. We're going to get into that more today, but in 2018, he and his cofounder Matt launched Pinata at the Hackathon East Berlin and won. So super congrats on that. And not only did they win, but now they serve over 2400 users worldwide and have more than 120,000,000 files pinned on IPFS, which stands for Interplanetary File System. Kyle Tut is going to give us a brief overview of what that means and what that technology is. He's based out of Omaha, Nebraska, and he loves F1, which I do, too. So maybe the first question is what's your favorite F1 team?
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yeah. So my favorite F1 team is actually McLaren. So I've been an F1 fan for a very long time, going back to like, 2000. So not to be one of those guys that's, like, the people that came in from Netflix weren't fans.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Sorry, they are fans, but definitely because I came in at like, 2005, so I know the feeling of where you're at right now.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yeah. And so I didn't like Ferrari back then because Michael Schumacher was the equivalent of what Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton is today. And when Lewis came into the sport in 2007, I just was absolutely enamored with him in the history of McLaren. And so I've always been big fans of them. And then obviously my driver is Lewis Hamilton, though now it seems kind of like a bandwagon pick, but at the time it wasn't.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 I got you. So when I first started, my favorite driver was Felipe Masa, who drove for Ferrari. He's no longer with the team, and since then, obviously, I probably am bandwagon, for sure, Lewis Hamilton. But the guy is literally killing it. And his story is one to really like. It's so inspiring to see how far he's come and what he's doing. And, I mean, congrats to that team. They're doing massive big things. Cool. So, Kyle Tut, back to you, because I could sit there and talk F1. So thankful that you're here. Grateful for you to be joining us on this ride today. And I always love to ask my copilots on the podcast what their origin story is into Web3. How did you dive into this rabbit hole to get here?
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yeah, so my story goes all the way back to when I was an intern in college. I was in a start up kind of role in Omaha, and I was working in this office called Silicon Ferry News, which was like a startup news office for Omaha in the Midwest. And one of the founders there had actually bought Bitcoin back. And this is all the way in 2013, and he was just talking about Bitcoin, and I got interested in it, but I never bought any or anything like that, but it kind of planted the seeds. And then in 2015, I bought some Bitcoin on Coinbase and was interested in it. But I was never, like, a trader or a finance person. I just really kind of liked the concept of the technology. And then when I learned about Ethereum in 2016 and like, smart contracts and everything that it was supposed to enable, I was just instantly sucked in into it. And the way I was learning about it, being an Omaha, I didn't have, like, a Meetup group I could go to or anything like that. So I was just spending a lot of time, like, late at night on some subreddit and on Twitter, like, learning about this technology and trying to get as informed about it as I possibly could. And then I felt comfortable enough by April of 2017 to quit my job. And I just said, hey, I'm going to jump into this completely. I believe in this technology regardless of crypto prices or whatever, and I'm going to jump in and try to build a company in this space. So I didn't really have a specific plan that I wanted to do, but I definitely was really interested in the technology and thought that I had a lot of legs and would eventually be a place that I could build a company on.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 That's incredible and way to take a massive leap of faith to leave your job and go, okay, well, I know I want to do something in Web3. And there was probably not even terminology like Web3 back in 2017. I know there's a lot of new words and new things that have come out more recently in the last few years. But just to be able to understand that. Well. This blockchain technology is going to be super life changing and such a huge paradigm shift from the current Internet that we know today. One. Two. As we are moving into that and then saying. I'm going to build a company in this space. And that's what you did. So 2017, quit your job. So, Pinata, was that even an idea on the table, or did it even start to manifest?
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 No.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Okay, tell me about that.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 So I was, like, all in on Ethereum and, like, I said smart contracts. I thought it was a very interesting thing that you could automate payouts and everything that smart contracts do. And so I didn't know what IPFS was or anything like that. The first thing I did was I actually contracted I got on like, upwork or something like that.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 And I contracted with a software developer. I think they were out of Berlin at the time. And I was like, hey, can you just build me a simple they're called Raspberry Pi. There are two little small computers and with Bluetooth Communication we had one Raspberry Pi in front of another, and then when the other one went in front of it, or A was in front of B, or B was in front of A, however you wanted to put it, it would then do a payout. And it was actually running it was running some simple smart contracts and doing payouts based on the order of the computers. That was the first thing I did because I was just like, I want to I'm not technical, right? So I'm like, I basically need like, little toys to kind of play with this and kind of try to wrap my head around it. And then after that, I flew to a hackathon in New York because my underlying thought was, I need to understand this technology much deeper than just reading about it on Twitter or read it. And so the best way to do that is to be around blockchain engineers and people that are in the space deeply. So I flew there since there was nobody in Omaha that I could really rely on and was able to kind of build out a network and kept doing that and eventually stumbling through a bunch of hackathons and different ideas that I had was eventually able to land on Pinata and we can kind of get into that story later.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Okay, well, I kind of want you to give in the story now.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 I know. As I was saying that, I was like, we're probably just going to keep going.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Where did Matt come in? So you're in New York, you're at the hackathon. Like, somewhere along the line, Matt shows up in the picture, germany is in the picture. Where are we at? Like, let's connect that.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Again. Being based in Omaha, there just wasn't a community around Crypto and Blockchain. And so for that summer of 2017, I just spent it flying around and going to these hackathons and trying to put me in the place of where something would happen. My deal was like, if I just show up, something will eventually happen. And I was able to meet a bunch of really interesting people and was able to network and do really cool things in the space. However, I still live in Omaha and I was lonely and I was like, you know what, I need friends here so I don't have to travel all the time. And so I started the Blockchain Meetup group in town in 2017, that grew to four or 500 people. It was actually quite incredible how much interest there was. And Matt was one of the first people to actually reach out to me. And Matt is a software engineer by background, and he reached out, he got drinks with me, and I was like, hey, you should come with me to these hackathons. I'm going to, because the space is incredibly vibrant and it's a real thing. It's not just something you read about on the internet, there's a bunch of energy behind it and people and so I had him go with me to a hackathon called ETH Waterloo in late 2017, early 2018. It actually at the time took down the Ethereum network and was quite a moment. And so he came with me to that and then I convinced him to quit his job.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 And Joe, I know you're such a bad influence.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 I know.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 No, you're not. It was a joke.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 When we get deeper into the story, there are definitely questionable moments of if that was the right decision for him and for me. But we persisted and survived and everything is a lot better now. So quit his job and what we did is we just started a blockchain consulting company. So Matt knew how to code and I knew how to go out and call people and ask if they needed help with blockchain applications and so doing that, doing the blockchain consulting and then still going to these hackathons, I'm going to say hackathons a million times on this podcast, but it's a very core piece of the Pinata story and Matt and I story. And so through that, going to these hackathons and blockchain consulting, what we figured out is that storing data on chain is really, really expensive. So if you want to store just a gigabyte of data on Ethereum at the time, it would have cost $4 million. And your iPhone has hundreds of gigabytes that it can store on it, or terabytes even. And so it was just really expensive. And so what people were using to store data offchain was a protocol called IPFS or the Interplanetary File System. And the reason they do that is because you can't really use traditional storage providers like Clouds, or traditional clouds as most people think of them, because there's some security parameters that IPFS provide that traditional clouds don't. And so everybody was using IPFS, but it wasn't very fast and it wasn't very stable at the time in summer 2018. And so we were just like, hey, let's just make IPFS as fast, as stable as possible. And that was the simple idea. And we ended up launching Pinata at the E. Berlin hackathon in 2018 and ended up winning that hackathon. And we thought at the time when we won, you know, that we were going to like, take over the world and raise a bunch of money and everything was going to be really easy after that, and that was not the case at all. We get back to the states and we try to raise money. We're not really able to raise money. Nobody knows what we're doing. Nobody knows even why we exist. And there are a couple of factors with that. One being it was, quote unquote, crypto winter in late 2018. The space was kind of dying out a little bit, and then NFTs weren't the use case yet, and NFTs, they existed, but the community of them was super small. You could probably call up every single person in the space at the time. And so we just didn't have a big market. Nobody actually really needed to use us. And so we just struggled. And I always talk about it as Matt and I knew we were right, but when you're right and you're early, it's the exact same thing as being wrong. And we just happened to survive long enough, and we're resilient enough for over two years where we weren't making any money. I was living in my parents basement, trying to just kind of survive, and we were just trying to make money where we could. And eventually, though, NFT started taking off, and when that happened, pinata was able to take off with it and grow quite significantly. But it was a tough two years there between winning the Easterland hackathon and NF. T's actually becoming something that anybody actually understood, because even all the way in 2019, early 2020, I have like, pitch decks out there, and we didn't talk about NFTs, we knew about them. I wrote my first blog about NFT's in 2017, but the VCs didn't know what NFS were. So we just said gaming is like how we kind of phrased it. Yeah. And yeah. So it was just a very, very different time period compared to today.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 And I would say we are still very early on, even with NFT. So the magnitude that pinata and we'll get into what it is, the listeners understand what the technology is doing, but even the magnitude that pinata can grow into in the next five years, ten years, as the technology continues to continue to blow up. But kudos to you, like, holy freaking cow. To like, quit your job. Now your co founder has a job. Now you both are living like, on top Ramen and barely surviving. I'm sure there were moments at which you guys were hopefully there were moments in time where you guys were both kind of keeping each other going despite it being such a winter period in your own personal lives, not just the entire crypto winter, but you've managed to stick it out.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yes. For us, it was weird because we were sitting there and we're like and I'm sure many founders experience this, and a lot of companies fail. I think I've had like, five failed companies at this point. So you're not always able to just ride it out and eventually be right. But Matt and I were sitting there and we knew that something like this was going to happen. And when I say something like this, we knew NFT or some version of it was going to happen and we knew they were going to need IPS and ultimately need to use Pinata. But it's just when you're sitting there every day and the clock is kind of ticking and your bank account is going down and you're like, when is this day going to come? I spent every day just calling people and calling people and calling people and trying to talk to them about why they would or wouldn't use us and just trying to understand what they were working on. And so it was one of those things of like compounding returns where it was like, eventually enough people knew who we were. And as the space exploded, we were there at the early stages of it. If we hadn't spent those two years just surviving and we just started in 2020 or something like that, I don't think we would be here today. We wouldn't have been able to make all those connections and kind of build our brand that we were doing at the time. And so, yeah, you had to put in the hard work and again, just resiliency. Sometimes people ask me, what's a trait of a good entrepreneur, and now I just think it's resiliency. It's not like the big idea or like any of this other stuff. You just got to survive and it's difficult to do sometimes.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 And another piece of that is just like moving through the mental gunk that kind of gets stuck in there and bent, spinning your wheels and doing all that kind of stuff mentally. And so it's just kind of moving through that. And thankfully, you've had people in your life that probably have helped kind of get you to the point where mentally you're able to at least lean on people when those times are tough.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yeah, absolutely. Obviously I had Matt and Matt had me, but then on the personal side, she's not my wife and at the time was just a girlfriend, but was completely supportive. And then my parents were also very, very supportive. But when you're like, at the time I'm 26 or 27, living in your parents basement, it doesn't feel that cool or awesome. I wasn't failing by any means, but it didn't feel great. And as you mentioned, kind of the mental aspects of that is kind of difficult as you put your business clothes on and go to the coffee shop to meet with somebody and you know, you just came from your parents basement. That weighs on you as you're taking that coffee meeting. Right, but at the end it was all worth it, totally.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 And you would do it all over again. I don't even know you that well. We've only been speaking for the last 25 minutes or so, and I already can feel that about you. So with that, tell us what Pinata is. How NFT creators or companies, businesses that are getting into the NFT space now, how are they utilizing Pinata? But first and foremost, what is it and then how are they utilizing it?
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yeah, absolutely. So we are the home for NFT media, which means that we manage all the files associated with NFTs. So to kind of keep it simple, an NFT is a token that sits on a blockchain and it is pointing at a file or image or whatever it is somewhere else. And for the majority of NFTs, that's somewhere else is IPFS. And then we just make it really fast, simple, easy for developers to use. But we also have nonchnical tools as well, so nontechnical people can upload content to us and attach them to NFTs. What we do is whether you're uploading images or videos or audio files or pretty much any file type you can imagine, we make sure that you can distribute that at scale very fast in a simple way. One way I like to kind of explain it to people is like, you couldn't sell a YouTube link as an NFT, but you still need all the capabilities of YouTube, which is like being able to stream video to potentially millions or billions of people, making sure it's fast, making sure it's stable, like all those types of things. All of these NFT projects need that. And that's ultimately what Pinata provides for the NFT projects, is being able to distribute content at scale for the projects and make it simple and fast and all those kinds of things.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 So when you talk about distributing content, you're talking about, so let's say I launch an NFT project. We're going to use this as an example. On the Tezos blockchain, that's my favorite blockchain, by the way. On the Tezos's blockchain, I launched an NFT project. And now I want the community in which the people that have bought my NFT project, let's say 5000 people, I want them to be able to get access to the perks and the benefits and all of the content that is associated with that membership or that NFT that they're holding. I would use Pinata to have them. Like, it's almost like the membership site is built on Pinata for them to kind of see all that content.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yeah, whatever the content type might be. And what a lot of people don't realize is like, if you're viewing content on some of these NFT marketplaces, you're probably viewing it from Pinata. Sometimes the NFT project themselves will have a direct relationship with us. They'll upload their content to us. And then if you're viewing it from the marketplace, or maybe it's in your wallet or wherever you're viewing it, it's most likely coming from us. We're serving and distributing the content to the end users. We have kind of other relationships, but that's normally how it works. So whether you're viewing it on the wallet, the marketplace, or you're on their website itself, and looking at the NFT, whatever the NFT is, it's most likely actually coming from us, and ultimately it's on IPFS itself.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Okay, so you're saying like in viewing the actual piece of art, but a lot of these NFT projects, one of the big things that they'll do, especially to create hype around the project, twitter, twitter spaces, YouTube, all those channels that you've said. So when you're talking about them being able to have that community access that material, are they having them go to one portal where they can see the videos, where they can see the tweets, where they can read the post and do all the social media engagement like web tile in a Web3 world?
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yeah, so what we've typically seen is they use Twitter and Discord for the social aspect of it. And then especially with like private content now and token gating, I'm not sure if you're familiar with that term, but serving content based on whether or not you own the NFT has become a very common thing. And so we help people with that as well. So NFT project will be like, hey, I'm going to give my token holders private content that only they can view. They will upload it to Pinata and we will serve it based on whether or not they have the NFT itself. And so you'll get to see the content based on checking whether or not your wallet has it. Another way you can look at it is if you're thinking about maybe sharing content with Dropbox, or sharing content even like when you're sharing content on Instagram, you know, there's all this infrastructure and stuff that Instagram runs to ensure that you get access to that content. We do the same thing. It's just in a Web3 paradigm for these NFT projects themselves.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Got it. So they have the ability to kind of create their own site, so to speak, utilizing Pinata software. So then my community of my NFT holders, let's say I have up to 5000, 2500 are founding members. So they get exclusive content that they have access to, again, like you said, based on whatever is in their wallet, their particular holding. And then the other 2500 may get so many features, but not all of the content. And that's built on your back end, but my front end information would show to them. Got it.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 And the one thing that we're really, really big on, and we went out and interviewed a bunch of people in the space, and what we realized is if we're going to do this NFT thing where the creator of the content, the NFT project themselves, they don't want anybody else's brand to be in front of theirs, right? So the NFT project itself wants their name to be out in front and they don't want it hidden behind a platform. So they don't want it hidden behind YouTube or Instagram or whatever it is. They want their name out front. They want to interact directly with their community and have a lot more kind of agency or control over that experience for their token holders. And that's what I think is actually really cool about the Web3 space and NFT's in general is people have a lot more agency over their projects and how they serve content and what type of content they serve. There's little things like instagram. If you think about Instagram, all the photos have to be a square, right? Or at least initially. Now it's a little bit beyond that. But with NFTs and with Pinata, the opportunities are endless and the file formats in the way it looks and all of that kind of stuff is pretty endless. And what's cool is people are kind of building their own playbooks of what's successful and what's not. And creativity is, I think, being rewarded in this space much more than it was in web, too.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Absolutely. Plus, I mean, not only that, the creativity, but the community that they can build on their own and not have fear of being deplatformed or things happening. Like you said, their brand being put out there by YouTube or being hidden behind the Instagram windows. There's all of that. You mentioned token gating. And just for some of my listener base, these are a lot of crypto curious people, like learning a lot about NFT, learning about crypto blockchain technology. So essentially what Kyle Tut is saying there with Token Gating is think of it in this analogy may not be the best, but just think of it like your Starbucks rewards program. So you have the gold card at Starbucks and you get X amount of stars for every coffee purchase you make. Well, if you're just a basic Starbucks goer, you don't get all the perks that people with the gold card or with the gold star status get, where they get the free drinks on their birthdays and all of that. So essentially, that's what Token Gating is in Web3. Maybe Kyle Tut, if you have a different analogy you'd like to use, but that's just kind of it's almost like you get the privilege of entering an extra layer or get like a privilege into a special club, so to speak, in the Web3 world.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yeah, I think that's a great analogy. And one other one I use is with any of these Web Two platforms, all of your access is based on whether or not you have an account with them. So you have a YouTube account, you have an Instagram account, you have whatever account. And with NFT, instead of needing to have that account with that platform, it's saying, hey, you just need to have this NFT and then that gives you access to whatever it is. And so it allows individual creators to kind of have the power of permission to get the permission how they want based on NFS. And it's a very easy thing to do. And I think that's again, another exciting thing is you're giving people smaller projects, smaller entities, the power that these large platforms used to provide. And now you have the ability to customize it and do whatever you want with it.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Awesome. Yeah, okay, so kind of shifting gears a little bit and just to kind of set in some of these ideas. So you talk about, you know, what Pinata is doing in terms of being able to content share with an NFT project. Now, if I build my NFT project on Tezos, and I have the smart contract on Tezos, that IPFS address would be pointing towards a Pinata Web address or like a Pinata something on the back end, right? Am I understanding that correct?
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yes. So this is kind of where IPFS gets cool with IPFS. The way it works is it's a content addressable file system. So I won't go too deep into that. But essentially IPFS names files based on the file itself instead of where it's stored. And so you can kind of think of it like the old way to store files like the Web two way is if I live in Omaha, Nebraska, I would be Kyle Tut Omaha. And when I travel to New York, I then all of a sudden become Kyle Tut New York. And my name changes when I travel. What IPFS does is it gives each file a unique Identifier, a unique ID that only that file can have. So I am only Kyle Tut Tut. And when I'm in Omaha, I'm Kyle Tut Tut. And when I'm in New York, I'm Kyle Tut Tut. It doesn't matter. And so that's what IPFS does. It gives this Identifier to the file. And so what you do is you put that Identifier in your NFT on Tezos and it just points to that content. And that content could be on Pinata. And a lot of people use Pinata because again, we're fast and stable, but it can also be on another IPFS node somewhere else. So there's a bunch of IPFS notes out there that you can pull this content from and get access to.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 It very cool. So you guys aren't necessarily in charge of the whole Minting process. The Minting process would happen. People buy their NFTs on Tezos. The secondary market a lot of people use on Tezos is called object.com. And so they would buy their NFTs on Object and then basically be able to have everything kind of point to Pinata for the content, all of the Perks, all of the benefits. The utility for that NFT would basically be house on Pinata.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yup. And with Pinata, we don't meant right, we only manage kind of the content associated with MSDS. And what that's enabled us to do is we get a very broad view into the space. So we have plenty of users on Pinata are in the. Tasers ecosystem. We have ethereum and solana and name a blockchain somebody has probably built with it and used us to do it. And the other thing is we let people kind of experiment with what their NFTs are capable of anchor because we don't mince ourselves. And so again, we get a pretty broad view into the space and it's pretty incredible, all the experimentation that we're seeing with our users and how they're building NFTs and what they're doing with them.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 That's great. That's so awesome. OK, question decentralization. So Pinata, of course, NFTs blockchain technology, the whole idea around it is decentralization. Like not having something in a centralized location that can be destroyed by an act of God or the government or like all these things that we have information all over the place with Pinata, is there some sort of centralization there that it's kind of playing in a decentralized world? It's bringing everything together, but yeah, how do you overcome that to where it's 100% centralized?
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yes. So we're like a centralized company built on a decentralized protocol. There are certainly amounts of centralization that we're doing on top of IPFS. The one thing that we always kind of talk about with IPFS is they can be as decentralized or centralized as you want to make it. And if people want to build resiliency, they can replicate nodes, IPFS nodes themselves or use other providers. And as long as you know they have those IDs, they can grab the content from Pinata. Or another we're technically called an IPFS pinning service, another IPFS pinning service, or they can run it themselves. And so it's really kind of up to the individual projects of how centralized or decentralized they want it to be. But at the end of the day, we are a centralized company running on a decentralized protocol.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Okay, cool. So then to kind of cement this in a little bit in my own mind, and I'm learning so much from you, Kyle Tut, so thank you for that. Is then basically because you guys don't handle the mint and I handle the mint on the back end with Tezos and Tezos is a decentralized blockchain, then if Pinata, God forbid, something happened or you and Matt decided, you know what, we're going to the Bahamas through this project. We're not doing anything anymore. I'm leaving Omaha, Nebraska for good. It doesn't mess up the actual project in and of itself. It would just kind of essentially like no more content delivery network.
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yes, this actually happened in the Tezos's ecosystem. I think it was on Penn, or I'm forgetting the marketplace, but the marketplace developer kind of just like was like, hey, I'm out, I'm not going to support this anymore. And so all of the NFT creators were like, well, what's going to happen to my content? It was on IPFS, but it wasn't on Pinata. Yeah, and so what we were able to do is come in and actually replicate all of that content because we could just grab those content Identifiers, replicate all the content, and ensure that the content stayed up and it didn't disappear or anything like that. And so, again, what's cool about IPFS is somebody can be in charge of it, are responsible for it, but it's very easy to allow other people to be in charge and responsible for it. So when bad situations like the one we just talked about happens, we were actually able to save all of that content and people were able to take responsibility for it and have more ownership and autonomy over the content where you couldn't do that in a web to kind of paradigm or a Web Two world. So, yeah, it's a really flexible kind of protocol that we have a lot of fun with. We think it's really cool. Obviously, there's things that go wrong, but there's also plenty of opportunity with it.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah, it sounds amazing, and it's comforting to hear that you guys can do that. Well, I don't know if it's, God forbid, necessarily, but if Facebook went down, all of those memories you posted for the last two decades of your life and all those pictures, it's, like, vanished. There isn't a technology system that would be able to take all of that information and put it like you talked about with Pinata, like moving some Web3 company or guy decides he doesn't want to run the marketplace anymore, and now you can take the data and move it. So that's very cool. I'm very excited to see how Pinata continues to do amazing things in the space. And when I get an NFT project launched, I'll be pointing things in your guys'direction, right?
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 Yeah, we would love to help you.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Yeah, definitely. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you would like to hit on? I obviously want my listeners to be able to follow you, connect with you, those type of things. But anything additional to that that I didn't ask?
 
 [Kyle Tut]
 No, I think we covered it all, and, yeah, they want to reach out or follow our story. Obviously, you can find us on Pinata Cloud. And Then I'm Kyle Tut Tut, K-Y-L-E-T-U-T on Any Of The Platforms, anywhere you'll Find Me.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 Awesome. Well, thank you, Kyle Tut. Thank you so much for being here. And for those of you who are on this ride and have taken this journey through this space with me multiple times, you know the drill. As we pull this train into the station, make sure you grab all your belongings and exit to the right, and we will see you on the next one.
 
 [Dr. Brook Sheehan]
 You made it. Congratulations. That wasn't so bad, was it? I hope you laughed and learned a little bit more about this Web3 Universe and how simple and fun it can really be. Would you be so kind as to leave us a review and share it with your friends? And family. It would mean so much to at this out to more people as we embark on the greatest transfer of wealth that has ever happened in human history. Can't wait to see you on the next one.