Many new artists compare themselves to the big names and think they can become NFT millionaires overnight. It’s just not realistic, be prepared to work hard and don’t get disheartened if your work doesn’t sell immediately or even after a few weeks.- Thomas Espach
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: When one of the first two living artists with the most expensive artworks in the world David Hockney was asked about his thoughts on NFTs, he replied: “ I call them ICSs- International Crooks and Swindlers”. What is your response to this and other NFT critics?
Thomas Espach: So this is an interesting one because people like David Hockney are threatened by the NFT ecosystem. They’ve realized that it could take from their pie that they don’t want to share.
The creative economy has forever been closed to exclusive groups of people like him, and for the new world order to come in and say that other people can have that too, these pie-holders have to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt in a pathetic attempt to protect their slice of the pie. To other NFT skeptics, I have one thing to say: educate yourself.
People laughed at Bitcoin in 2010, it took 5 years for even the smallest level of adoption among the technologically focused community, and now it’s one of the most desirable assets in the world, driving the future of decentralized living. NFTs are still early, and their use-cases are only just being explored. They’ve already proven to be a feasible solution to ownership and chain-of-custody, and only more will follow as time goes on.
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: Could you give more introduction about yourself?
Thomas Espach: So my name is Thom, I’ve been a software engineer for about 5 years working in the cyber-security space. I got into writing smart contracts and blockchain apps around 2019 and haven’t looked back since! I’m also passionate about creative coding and artistic practice, so my love for what Lovada stands for goes deep. I’m mostly responsible for the technical direction of our platform, including site improvements and user experience.
NFTs aren’t a get-rich-quick scheme or even a side-hustle. To us, they’re a new, super-powered way of true ownership in the digital world, take advantage of that. – Thomas Espach
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Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: What’s your advice to creatives, especially emerging Nigerian artists trying to penetrate the world of NFTs?
Thomas Espach: For young and emerging Nigerian artists who want to get into NFTs I recommend first focusing on your work. The core principles of NFTs are based on high-quality artwork. Try not to lose sight of why you’re doing this, and don’t set your expectations too high. Many new artists compare themselves to the big names and think they can become NFT millionaires overnight. It’s just not realistic.
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Be prepared to work hard and don’t get disheartened if your work doesn’t sell immediately or even after a few weeks. Patience is a virtue! Stay true to your motivations and passions, and if you ever feel like you’re doing it for the wrong reasons, then maybe you need to take a step back and reflect on what it is you’re doing and why.
NFTs aren’t a get-rich-quick scheme or even a side-hustle. To us, they’re a new, super-powered way of true ownership in the digital world, take advantage of that.
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For young and emerging Nigerian artists who want to get into NFTs, I recommend first focusing on your work. The core principles of NFTs are based on high-quality artwork. Try not to lose sight of why you’re doing this, and don’t set your expectations too high.-Thomas Espach
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: What are three knowledgeable pieces of information you can share that can help a creative or an artist make a breakthrough on your NFT platform and others?
Thomas Espach: The first thing is to have a strong portfolio that well demonstrates your artistic style and practice.
Secondly, don’t be afraid to write about yourself, tell us who you are, what you do in your spare time, what drives you, and what makes you tick.
Finally, stay true to yourself and don’t try to change your practice for the sake of NFTs. We’ve seen some amazing artists create spinning bitcoin logos instead of the actual work they want to make because they think it’ll help the work sell. Create the work you love, don’t compromise your creative talent to “breakthrough”, and just be yourself!
I’m actually a South African-born national, my roots lie in African culture, and with the lack of opportunity for artists to make a living in African countries, we want to be a platform accessible to them… With that said, we’re focusing on global marketing, with efforts being placed less on developed western countries and more so on the developing world as we believe this is where we can make more of a difference, since our platform is the perfect choice for less privileged artists as we have no minting costs, so artists don’t need to put any money down to get involved.- Thomas Espach
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: What motivated the establishment of LOVADA?
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Thomas Espach: Our motivation is very much rooted in the disingenuous nature of the majority of the art market, though this has also evolved over the last year as we’ve also seen the NFT market revolve around incredibly high-value sales, pricing out the smaller collectors. We strongly believe that art should be accessible to collect, and should be equal and fair for all parties. We aim to help artists make a living from their works, while at the same time making it easier for everyday people to get into art collections. Being an art collector is an amazing experience and has always been something that only the most affluent of people could afford to do, but we want this to change through Lovada.
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: What is the history behind the foundation of LOVADA?
Thomas Espach: Well, Lovada started as a passion project between Jorja and me. I was getting into NFTs in 2020 and was picking up on some challenges with user experience and affordability.
Specifically, gas prices were exceptionally high, and a lot of work was super expensive. People were talking about an “art revolution for the masses”, but what I saw was the NFT platforms following in the footsteps of the very places they claimed to hate.
At around the same time, Jorja was witnessing first-hand how galleries would financially exploit her and oppress her creativity by trying to mold what works she could create, and together we had the realization that we needed to act fast, so we put our skills together and out of that, Lovada was born.
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Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: Would you also agree that the COVID-19 lockdown aided the boom of NFTs?
Thomas Espach: I personally believe COVID-19 played a role for sure, but I also think it’s mostly driven by the crypto market cycles. So in 2020, we saw the bitcoin halving event which has historically led to a new bull market cycle and that’s exactly what we saw.
However, to compound that, millions of people were locked in their homes for the months leading up to the bull market and retail investment sky-rocketed due to several factors (boredom + more cash flow due to not going out).
This meant that many people were able to invest in, and make money from, crypto-currencies, which naturally led them to NFTs as another alternative investment opportunity.
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: Tell us more about your cofounder?
Thomas Espach: Of course, I co-founded Lovada with Jorja, she’s a fine art graduate with significant experience in the art world. She’s one of the primary motivations behind our inception, as she’s experienced the exploitative nature of the art world first hand and strongly believes in making a difference. Jorja handles liaising with artists, coordinating and curating our exhibitions, and also has the say in the design of our platform and our branding.
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: There is a lot of talk around the Ethereum mining farms not being environmentally sustainable. How difficult is it to make NFTs transactions safe for the environment?
Thomas Espach: It’s very true that Ethereum mining farms are far from sustainable (destructive might be the word!) However, transacting NFTs doesn’t have to be.
There are many proofs of stake blockchains out there that provide sustainable NFTs, along with many layer 2, roll-up, or sharding solutions that massively reduce the impact of transactions.
With a combination of these things, NFTs would become cheaper and better for the environment than ever before. Sending an NFT will be equivalent in consumption to sending a Whatsapp message (and it’s not far off that on Lovada already!)
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: Your marketplace already is environmentally sustainable. How does LOVADA NFT Software make the platform safe for environmental sustainability?
Thomas Espach: To answer your question, we are actively using a three-part plan to help battle the environmental impact of NFTs on our platform:
1. We use Mint-on-Sale or lazy minting- this means works don’t hit the blockchain until they are sold. This reduces the number of tokens that get minted onto the blockchain without the need (i.e if they don’t sell).
2. We run our application servers using Google Cloud Computing which uses 100% renewable energy, so our platform has a 0 carbon footprint.
3. We currently delegate 100% of our profits to GREEN stake pool (our environmental stake pool partner), which donates 10% of their yearly income to environmentally conscious causes. You can read more about this on our blog: https://medium.com/@lovadadotart/lovada-nft-marketplace-partnership-with-green-stake-pool-6705c7b4a915
We also have several other things in the pipeline including carbon offset efforts and charity work that we hope to announce in the coming future.
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: Most of the ETHEREUM NFT platforms claim they would be environmentally sustainable by 2022. Would you say many NFT marketplaces are not eager to make their NFTs safe because of the expenses?
Thomas Espach: Obviously the world revolves around money, so expenses are the root cause for sure. It boils down to the fact that Ethereum has a strong developer ecosystem, and so creating an NFT platform is many, many times easier than on other more sustainable blockchains.
It’s even possible to create a marketplace without writing any smart contracts, and because time=money, you’re right in saying it’s due to expenses. There are also other factors such as how Ethereum is the largest coin by market-cap that supports smart contracts.
So if you want to capture the largest part of the collector market it’s logical to choose it. These are all the kinds of risks and challenges we had to take up when building Lovada.
Sending an NFT will be equivalent in consumption to sending a Whatsapp message (and it’s not far off that on Lovada already!)- Thomas Espach
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Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: What year did you fully develop and launch officially?
Thomas Espach: Lovada has been built over the last 11 months. We have been working tirelessly to get the app ready since January, we launched with our genesis auction back in September and have been running small-scale curated auctions since then.
We strongly believe that art should be accessible to collect, and should be equal and fair for all parties. We aim to help artists make a living from their works, while at the same time making it easier for everyday people to get into art collections. though this has also evolved over the last year as we’ve also seen the NFT market revolve around incredibly high-value sales, pricing out the smaller collectors. Being an art collector is an amazing experience and has always been something that only the most affluent of people could afford to do, but we want this to change through Lovada.- Thomas Espach
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: LOVADA and CARDANO sound very unique, what was the inspiration behind the names? Do they have special meanings?
Thomas Espach: So Lovada is a portmanteau of Ada Lovelace – the woman who is largely considered the world’s first computer programmer. As a female co-owned business, we have a deep respect for what she accomplished in her life, and our platform name is a homage to her. Cardano however, is the name of the underlying blockchain that we use and is named after Gerolamo Cardano, another massively influential historic mathematician who is regarded as the grandfather of probability and statistics. (Inspiration is answered above I think?)
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: Seeing the level of attention NFTs are getting since 2020, how does it make you feel?
Thomas Espach: Haha, it’s a very weird feeling! Jorja and I are so excited to be part of this innovative space in its infancy.
It’s such a rapidly moving and evolving world, it can be hard to keep up and maintain sanity at times, but we’re just exceptionally thankful to be here, and we only have our artists, collectors, and supporters to thank.
The way we feel now is probably a combination of adrenaline-fueled excitement combined with a touch of fear: how fast-paced the NFT world is and the fear of uncertainty. We never thought we’d even make it this far, and we don’t know where the world will take us in the next years, so the fear comes from the unknowns in this crazy space!
Jorja and I are so excited to be part of this innovative space in its infancy. It’s such a rapidly moving and evolving world, it can be hard to keep up and maintain sanity at times, but we’re just exceptionally thankful to be here, and we only have our artists, collectors, and supporters to thank.-Thomas Espach
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: Asides from being one of the first Clean-NFTs marketplaces, What would you say are three distinguishing attributes that make LOVADA the best NFT marketplace?
Thomas Espach: What makes Lovada special, is firstly personality: as co-founders, we’re very active in our community. We speak to all of our artists and collectors and consider them as part of our family. We’re incredibly grateful that they put trust in us and so we try to reward them and pay them back for their service to us.
Secondly, equality is crucial to us. Although we are a curated platform, we do this just to vet that artists are legitimate, we put social and geopolitical backgrounds aside when we onboard artists. We believe in an unbiased art market for artists and collectors, and this ethos rings true in our onboarding process.
Finally, our technology: we are working on making our platform one of the most sophisticated out there. We’re already one of the only NFT platforms with full-featured advanced search and filter functionality, an interactive 3D model viewer with AR/VR support, a randomized featured page that doesn’t bury artists, and shared collaborative minting where proceeds are split evenly between multiple artists.
We’re working on introducing elements of randomized mystery NFTs, a machine learning-based recommendation engine, combined ownership rewards, and more!
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: Many creatives in Nigeria where I am from, especially artists struggle with joining the NFT marketplace. Can you help with information on how a creative can get his book or her digital content on your marketplace?
Thomas Espach: Of course! Our platform revolves around committed, hardworking individuals. If you want to be on our platform then all you need to do is prove that you’re devoted to art and creation, and the rest will follow. You don’t need a large following, or a polished website, just a portfolio and a passion.
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: Why should someone reading this interview consider creating, exchanging, and transacting on your NFT marketplace place?
Thomas Espach: If what I’ve said already isn’t enough of a reason to use Lovada, then we can add that we’re in the process of establishing one of the first NFT reward systems where contributors to our platform get paid a proportion of our profits depending on how much you buy, sell, and partake in the system.
This is not in place yet, but when released, it will be backdated, so early adopters will get the most rewards! This is part of our aim of being more than just a marketplace, but a self-sustaining eco-system with a non-hierarchical power construct.
What makes Lovada special, is firstly personality… Secondly, equality is crucial to us. Finally, our technology: We’re already one of the only NFT platforms with full-featured advanced search and filter functionality, an interactive 3D model viewer with AR/VR support, a randomized featured page that doesn’t bury artists, and shared collaborative minting where proceeds are split evenly between multiple artists.- Thomas Espach
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: How do you intend to help promote NFTs in Africa?
Thomas Espach: We’d love to get our voices heard more in Africa. I’m actually a South African-born national, my roots lie in African culture, and with the lack of opportunity for artists to make a living in African countries, we want to be a platform accessible to them.
We’re still working on our marketing strategy and in the process of working with a marketing specialist since it’s not really something Jorja or I have much professional experience with. With that said, we’re focusing on global marketing, with efforts being placed less on developed western countries and more so on the developing world as we believe this is where we can make more of a difference, since our platform is the perfect choice for less privileged artists as we have no minting costs, so artists don’t need to put any money down to get involved.
We hope to also help promote African artists on our platform by doing things like tailored auctions featuring African artists, and not just on days like the 24th of January when everyone else does it.
Jekami Adetiloye Oluwatosin: Asides from environmental sustainability issues that your marketplace has improved on being one of #CleanNFT platforms. What other problems do you aim to solve or are you solving?
Thomas Espach: For us, we’re trying to solve the problems of creative oppression, mistrust, illicit activity, and create equal creative collection opportunities in the wider world. (If that sounds ambitious, that’s because it is!)