Building NFT experiences on AWS

Yanni: Everyone, there really isn't, isn't a good session without some tech difficulties. So, very glad we have that, that means we have good luck. Um so while we're pulling it up, I just wanted to introduce myself and get us going. So my name is Yanni. I am the head of global web three for go to market in AWS. And so we don't have a lot of time today. Some of you may have been on our more extended talk BLC 101 this afternoon. Uh and if you haven't, you can check it out on YouTube after the event, we had made like a much more comprehensive overview of what web three is, what kind of industry use cases we see out there, how to build web three applications on AWS and so on and so on.

Um I have a very dear guest with me today Jason Tedros who is a senior director for mixed play and emerging technologies in uh Mattel. So Hot Wheels, Barbie, all of those uh favorite brands. Uh he's the guy that's been driving a lot of the innovation around web three and we'll talk about what that is and how in the short time that we have. Just wanted to give a bit of context before we get started.

Um so as far as just to level set on what we are talking about, we're talking about web three, which is the next level up from what we call the traditional web two experience, right? If web one was just an ecommerce website that you can just maybe buy at web two being like a social media app that you can actually interact with. So you can do posts and you can do likes so you can actually interact, but it's still a very central based entity like Meta or Twitter x that owns the platform that monetizes on the platform. Whereas the premise of web three, the ethos of the community is being able to have a fully decentralized network in which every one of you, the participant in the network is actually a co owner kind of like owning a stock, right? You're becoming a co owner of that and you get rewarded based on your contributions to that.

So think about a social app like Twitter, that would be fully decentralized in which you can actually get rewarded with tokens or cryptocurrency based on how much you contribute back to the network. That is the premise of web three, cryptocurrency is one element of web three, but it's not everything. And so one of the things that we saw as a technology area is called NFT. I don't know how many of, you know what NFT is. NFT is a non fungible token. Unlike a fungible token, like a dollar, if I give you a dollar and you give me a dollar back, it's essentially the same value and we can exchange those without any hesitation. Whereas a non fungible token, any token, any NFT has a unique value based on its own ID, on its own set of metadata, properties, characteristics and parameters and is therefore distinguished from other NFTs, right?

So using this technology which was hyped or started the bull run in 2021 when you know, people started using open uh marketplaces like Open Sea for NFTs to do trading and buying and sharing. Um and then all kinds of um social applications and community projects like uh Bore Apes or Doodles or any other of the famous NFT projects that people started buying. But at the back scene, some of the bigger brands started to take a closer look at what they can actually do with NFT technology as a more sustainable way to get things like customer engagement and loyalty platforms up and running. And so that's what we're going to focus here. We're going to focus on how brands like Mattel is actually embedding their NFT and web three technologies to elevate what is currently the customer experience across digital and physical.

Um and so we're gonna go into that and show you a quick demo of what we can do on the Mattel website today. But before we do that, I just wanted to see if we have the deck up and running. We have to log in. They want us to do it from this one. Alright. Alright. Can you see that? Great.

So, just to talk about a couple of use cases, right? Some of the things that happened like this year, 2023 you might have paid attention. You might have not like Starbucks, any of you who's a, a Starbucks fan or has the loyalty platform, you get points, what they've done this year, they created Odyssey. Odyssey is like the web three version of an elevated experience on top of your existing Starbucks rewards program. And that goes through a journey in which you get taken through a series of like questions and journey for like exploring the uh the roots of Starbucks as an organization. And then at the end of which you get like as soon as you accomplish the task, you get points back and you can actually use those points to get to redeem for a specific value, whether it's a discount, whether it's something else, right?

Similarly, if you look at uh uh Ticketmaster, everyone buys live ticket shows. And Ticketmaster this year, Ticketmaster has launched a new feature called token gated access ticket purchasing. They started off with a uh Avenged Sevenfold fail in which they actually had the potential buyers acquire an NFT completely separate on a marketplace and then come to their platform with this NFT which then unlocks certain benefits like discounted tickets and other benefits for the holders of this NFT.

Only lastly, if we look at Nike this year they have created or maybe it was late last year. They created a platform called Swoosh dot Swoosh. What is dot Swoosh dot Swoosh is next generation platform which enables you guys to become co creators of Nike brand of their community. Why? Because you can design your own shoes using their platform, not only that you can show those designs and you can actually sell those designs. And Nike might even manufacture physical real shoes based on your designs and you can monetize of these shoes being sold. That is what the community aspect of web three. That is the promise of we three right there.

Um it's still in its infancy, it's not very mature, it's still something that's evolving and a lot of other brands and Jason is going to speak to that are looking at ways that they can use this technology to even further take this to the next step, more loyalty, more community, more rewards and more ownership for you guys. The consumers hope that makes sense then really quickly on the stack.

And uh I'm gonna actually hand it over and do the transition to Jason because what I'll talk about is like if you need to build an application for web three it looks really simple. It really is not, right. So like any other application stack, there is quite a few pieces starting from the blockchain itself. So you have to pick a blockchain. There are many blockchains out there, including Ethereum and Solana and Polygon and Avalanche and others. Then you got to run a certain set of infrastructure to get access to these blockchains. Uh usually that would require an RPC end point. It means you gotta run a server, you gotta have storage, you gotta have database. That's something that's like an undifferentiated heavy lifting. That could sound simple, but it really isn't.

Then probably you would want to get exposed at the data layer. What is the data that is on the blockchain? Looking at historical data, looking at real time data, looking at token um balances, looking at per wallet transactions or what they look like. All of these information that your web three application, whatever it is will probably need in order to do and function properly. And then finally managing a blockchain requires key management. Having a token or having access to a token is only being provided by having a private and public key available. Managing these keys is not an easy lift for anyone. You could lose these keys. And there goes your well, if it's cryptocurrency, then your cryptos if it's NFTs your NFTs, there are solutions out there that help simplify that in abstractions that are called wallets. Whether it's like self custodial wallets in which you are owning your keys or non custodial or full custodial wallets in which another entity is taking ownership on your keys and then helping abstract all these complexities for from you.

Uh and then of course, your application on top. So I'm gonna hand it over to Jason just to walk you quickly through some of those challenges that they had to go through and show you a little bit like just a touch of uh what the web three capabilities they have on the Mattel platform. So with that Jason, thank you.

Jason: Thank you so much. It's oh, I apologize. Alright. So first let me talk a little bit about the Mattel marketplace. Mattel marketplace is a dedicated collection site for our Mattel collectors where they can buy browse and trade their digital collectibles. And it features a full catalog with rarity and addition info collection based achievements and secondary marketplace for trading. We're gonna get demo that in just a second. But these capabilities really allow us to have a relationship with the customer, not only from the first sell, but all the way through post sell and hopefully into the next generation. And with that, I'm gonna take you into a quick demo.

Uh can you maybe just get me into the other screen? Uh it should have been right behind there. There you go, there you go. Perfect. You to wait. So I won't take you through all the glory details here. But suffice to say this is a Shopify website, right? All the classic web, two things that you might be familiar with. But really here's the key where the magic happens once the user is signed in, you can see a couple of orders here. One of the most recent orders is this virtual collectible for Lamborghini, which we're running right now. But I can show you an order history where we actually had an event recently where that was token gating. You can see here one of the virtual collectibles. This was at one of our Legends events where we bring all of our collectors in to see the real Hot Wheels vehicles. Those collectors were able to scan a QR code and be able to claim this order and I can take you through actually that process right now.

So once we move into the next flow here, no pun intended. What we're really doing is doing non custodial signing on the blockchain. This is not Mattel minting things on your, on your behalf. What we've done is we've integrated identity services, things like Cognito directly in with our Magic partner to build an identity service that allows you as the customer to sign your own NFTs in on your system. Oops. And as I'm approving this, what I'm doing now is just claiming my order. What that's doing is it's minting the NFT actually into my wallet. We say it's crunching blocks here. But there's many systems participating in this. You can imagine we need to log this into Salesforce, be only able to support our, our, our customer interactions for support. We need to pick these from the inventory from warehouse systems. And ultimately, let's see if the demo gods will let us do this today with the internet, but we'll claim a pack. If not, I'll take us through. Alright. Let, let's just assume maybe that that happened, uh, while we're at it here and let me get a, uh, a new website.

So if, if that pack had actually been claimed, we'd be able to go through an open experience. And that open experience is actually, oh, there it is. Ok. It's back. That open experience is really then gonna go through and you'll see our virtual pack here. I have one pack available and now I can actually open that pack. And as I open that pack again, what I'm doing is I'm burning the pack that I just claimed. Oops, sorry. And as part of that process, we're able to actually mint the new cards into the user's wallet. And so you'll see new cards come in animation showing those. But again, no email delivery, no participation on our behalf. We don't have long lead times other than the waiting here, but we'll mint these cards right into the pack shortly. And once those cards that are, are in my wallet, I'm actually able to then take them to our virtual marketplace that I mentioned earlier. So you can see here in my items, I'm gonna have several cards available to actually post to actually trade. I guess the internet's not working great here, but I can take each one of these and now I can post them on our secondary market. The key, the critical point here is unlike post sales where we would end at Walmart, we can now continue that relation, relationship with a customer all the way through into the secondary market where they might be traditionally selling those on eBay and they can sell with our collector community right here.

And so for example, you can see that we have several collections where users can go in and find the card that they're looking for. You can see if we look at high to low. There's some really, really uh high bets, I guess on someone buying some of these. But what's happening here is a loyalty system. Fundamentally, each of these cards are part of a collector, a collection and each of these collections can only be completed by either buying the primary packs or ultimately going on the secondary market to buy the items they need for their collections.

And the key is that we've linked these collectible cards with physical collectibles. So for every card that you might collect and at, at one of these, that might be very rare or they might be part of an overall collection, you'll actually receive a physical card that's actually in low number runs. So you're automatically guaranteed, not only to have the, the digital twin of the card that you can trade, but also a physical card that a again being a low run has a lot of value.

And so if I go back here, maybe to see the cards that were in my pack and I apologize, we didn't get to see that animation, but you can see, it looks like I got an ultra rare right off the bat. So that was a really great uh opening experience. And one of the items that I could post right up on the secondary market today. Um good odds if you're a VP. That's right. We have some secret sauce, I guess.

Um so, you know, just to take you through the collection and this is obviously a work in progress. As you can see, it's a beta, but you can see all the way back to series three. I wasn't really a big collector. And again, I apologize, the internet's loading a little slow, but you can see if I go all the way down here to some of the newer ones. Hopefully that'll load. I've completed my series five road rally collection. And because I did that will be able to uh airdrop these users tokens that they can actually redeem for those cars. And again, because it's a loyalty platform if they didn't receive that top car, just like I did, they'll of course receive opportunities for discounts or future events.

And so really, again, I just want to reiterate, we see this as the new cookie for, for example, that we can interact with our customers long running into the years in the future. And we can have a collector's experience that's not built upon third party systems and have that single voice with that. I'll hand it back. You wanna talk about the, yeah, we can, we can go back to the slides. There it goes. Ok. Yep.

Alright. So just really focusing on results and outcomes. We've had six sold out series launches to date. What that means is we have 1.5 million NFTs in circulation. That's not too bad for a legacy company starting off and this validation has really allowed us to understand what our customers want to build that unique value and relationship with our customers.

Again, we built this as a reusable platform. This isn't the Hot Wheels platform. This isn't ju this is the Mattel platform. So we have an opportunity to scale that across our brands and our brand partners as you can see as we just did with, with Lamborghini and the platform is part of a broader ecosystem where you could see things that we might be doing in the future.

We're going to embrace this evolution build upon that building for things like play gamifying things, whether you're starting your collector's journey, eager to compete with your custom build racers. We plan to make that possible in the coming years.

So with that, thank you. Unfortunately, our time is up but we are planning to take questions um right now, like we're gonna be around for the next uh however, you guys need so feel free to reach out and, and come talk to us offline while these guys are sending up the stage for the next one. Thank you so much for.