Anthony Georgiades Once Thought Ethereum Was “Fluff,” Now He’s Helping Solve Big Problems as Co-Founder of NFT ‘Vault’ Pastel Network
How the blockchain’s future could help keep NFTs alive
When Anthony Georgiades first came across the Ethereum whitepaper in 2015, he dismissed it as “a lot of fluff and potentially a quasi Ponzi scheme.”
He was studying computer science for a master’s degree at the Wharton School, and had worked in venture capital, but it wasn’t until he saw Ethereum in its test phase – and specifically the Golem Network – that he understood this new blockchain’s capabilities.
“It just clicked,” he said to me in a recent interview. “It was a 180 that completely made sense overnight. I was totally wrong at first, admitted I was wrong, and acknowledged that blockchain was going to transform how businesses interacted. Web3 is different because you’re creating new markets and you’re creating opportunities that didn’t exist before, and so the underlying potential opportunity is somewhat limitless in that regard. That’s what inspired me to get involved.”
Today, Georgiades is trying to help solve big problems in the non-fungible token ecosystem – how NFTs are stored and whether they are actually authentic. He’s doing this as the co-founder of Pastel Network, a decentralized layer-1 blockchain that provides NFT infrastructure. Its two main components are Cascade—a permanent storage solution for NFT data—and Sense—Pastel’s solution for NFT authentication, which combined have helped the company process over 1.5 million transactions.
“We’ve been seeing meaningful growth, but we’ve been seeing it in a very unoptimized environment,” Georgiades said. “We’re going to unlock a ton of growth, having secured three more partners last quarter—Polygon being one of them—and we’re focused on locking in another large L-1 or L-2 this quarter, which we’ll announce in the coming weeks.”
The storage issue for NFTs is not well known, but the digital files are typically housed off chain either in a decentralized fashion or on centralized servers from Amazon or Google. What’s permanently on-chain is the hash function that points to the off-chain NFT location, but it has historically been expensive to store actual digital files on blockchains. Pastel is hoping to change that.
Its network is comprised of 139 SuperNodes which have processed over 2,000 Sense requests and over 14,000 Cascade requests, with transaction growth moving at a clip of 50 percent run rate growth, Georgiades said.
Pastel has carved a niche for itself by focusing on specific problems within the NFT world, said David Kroger, senior vice president of financial services firm StoneX.
“While Alchemy and Infura provide foundational blockchain connectivity, Pastel adds a specialized layer for NFTs, offering permanent storage (Cascade) and authentication (Sense),” Kroger said in an email. “Alchemy and Infura are the highways of Web3; Pastel is the vault where NFT value is preserved and authenticated.”
One NFT project Pastel helped preserve and authenticate was last year’s launch of hockey legend Bobby Orr’s collaboration with acclaimed artist Paul Gerben.
Read more: Investor Demand for Alchemy Equity Drives Value to $10.2 Billion
Georgiades, who is also a general partner at Innovating Capital, a technology fund focused on disruptive companies and digital assets, first got his hands dirty in the Ethereum ecosystem by writing some source code for the Golem Network, diving firsthand into blockchain from the lens of a developer.
He then launched Innovating Capital, which has incubated Pastel Network since its inception. The company has made an assortment of investments in the web3 ecosystem across different avenues and is quite keen on the infrastructure level.
“There’s so much left to continue to build and we’re still extremely early in certain avenues of the market,” Georgiades said. “We’ve been entirely focused on laying the foundation for true distributed systems globally that can effectively scale across the world and provide accessibility to any corner of the market.”
A lot of growth in Ethereum in recent years has been geared toward making the network faster; what Pastel has focused on, however, is making blockchains capable of holding more data on chain.
“In the case of Pastel, we’d built a thesis around the need for an application-specific blockchain focused on permanent distributed storage with the ability to run a lot of infrastructure that was tied toward digital collectibles and slow moving tokens in the market,” Georgiades said. “There had been so much innovation in general L-1s and scaling vertically, but not a lot in terms of scaling horizontally.”
Innovating Capital began looking for investable opportunities but couldn't find any, so it decided to incubate Pastel to solve those problems, Georgiades said. That helped them land projects like the Bobby Orr NFT series.
From the company’s web site
“Going after some of those higher profile talents was a byproduct of having our existing infrastructure and is something that sort of just happened, came together and made sense,” Georgiades said. “There were a lot of skeptical counterparties in the traditional world that were hesitant to move into the blockchain space without some hands-on understanding of it, but more importantly, they understood the potential shortfalls from macro level—like security and loss of assets.”
But Georgiades believes Pastel’s technology has been important in solving a lot of those key frictions and pain points. The more Pastel and the web3 industry have grown, the more Georgiades has seen the wave of skepticism about blockchain lessen, though he said adoption in more traditional circles is not as robust as it is in other sectors.
“A lot of people who are skeptical or stubborn—the vast majority of the time—are set in their ways,” Georgiades said. “The ‘a ha’ or lightbulb moment for everyone is very different depending on the journey someone is on. What is the key indicator? Is it JP Morgan saying they’re supporting crypto, or is it Bitcoin reaching $70,000? All of these things are different, so I try to push the education and understanding as much as possible.”
To help educate investors, Georgiades presents a “What Is Web3?” talk that walks people through the ins and outs of the technology, why it exists and matters and what it means for the future.
“It’s purely educational,” Georgiades said. “But it’s [with the] understanding that a lot of people are going to remain stubborn and skeptical and you’re not going to really capture or acquire certain individuals, irrespective of how much you try.”
That reality has led some companies to abstract out the “blockchain” element of their product so that skeptics won’t realize they’re using the technology.
Moving forward, Pastel is working on a plan with an unnamed layer-one blockchain regarding where the network operates as well as moving from proof of work (PoW) consensus system to proof of stake (PoS).
“We’re basically a hybrid chain at this point but we’re making a full PoS move to a more well-known hub module based program,” Georgiades said. “Pastel is on an island that has built a lot of amazing infrastructure, technology, tooling, data storage, and Inference—our self-hosted LLM modules—which is really exciting. But it’s difficult to get to that island and we want to get it on shore. So that’s the big transition we’re working on with the L-1 and we’re super pumped on what that’s going to do for Pastel’s accessibility and integration with mass web3 enterprises and ecosystems.”
lead image: Anthony Georgiades