Ardian Tola talks Arkstreams, Canonic on special pop-up CoinGeek Livestream

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After taking a hiatus from livestreaming, CoinGeek’s Chief Historian Kurt Wuckert Jr. made his return on April 28 for a special pop-up livestream with Ardian Tola, the creator of Arkstream and the recently launched Canonic. This livestream is very special because Tola makes a big announcement—Canonic has launched the NFTs for “I Know This Sounds Crazy,” the very first book released on Canonic.

Tola is an up-and-coming Bitcoin businessman as well as one of the best thinkers in the space. He kicks off the livestream by talking about his journey into Bitcoin and what Arkstream is.

“Ark is still in beta, a closed private beta. We are not prepared to talk about its roadmap but keep your fingers on the pulse. Right now, it’s basically a place where you can store the most important information that you find, on-chain,” said Tola.

“For example, if you find an article, you can store that article on-chain in your private encrypted, drop-box–if you want to think about it that way. You can [also] discover data; [the] data you discover can come from the Arkstream itself or other streams within Bitcoin, so think of Ark as an aggregator of information, where you can find the best information available on-chain, save it there, and keep it for future reference to build.”

“The best descriptor that I’ve heard of [Arkstream is that] it is a tool for magicians, and if you understand the power of ideas and the power of memes to shape reality, then you understand that there’s a lot of power in having a layer where you always have control over a certain [cache] of information that you can then access time and time again.”

Tola also discussed Canonic, and the very successful release of “I Know This Sounds Crazy,” the very first physical book with an accompanying NFT released via Canonic–a marketplace where authors can “self publish on Bitcoin.”

2/ Canonic begins as a marketplace that lets you self publish on Bitcoin. The digital work is immutably stored on Bitcoin $bsv, creators earn in Bitcoin, and build on top of an interoperable and decentralized layer where distributors will soon compete to sell their work.

— Canonic (@canonicxyz) March 17, 2021

“We had a limited run of the book, 100 copies, and whoever purchased the book, they got an e-book, and they got a promise for an NFT. The big reveal is today we launched the NFT of that book and now all of the first individuals who purchased this, now they will be able to physically redeem the book, or, they can sell the NFT on the secondary marketplace that we have on Canonic,” said Tola.

“This is a very important book, not just for the history of Bitcoin but for the history of publishing, because it’s allowing Bitcoin to change what publishing becomes.”

Beyond publishing, Tola and his team are looking to disrupt ISBN. ISBN is the unique identifier that connects all of the publishing industry. Distributors, publishers, and sellers use the ISBN to identify books and the value associated with those books. But Tola and his team have created the BSBN—the Bitcoin standard book number—a mechanism to identify books on-chain. 

Tola goes on to talk about disrupting the publishing industry and how Bitcoin makes it possible to accomplish that disruption. He also talks about philosophy, or as the Bitcoin community has recently been calling it, squares and circles.

Overall, Ardian Tola’s conversation with Kurt paints the picture of what both Arkstream and Canonic are and what they are on the road to becoming. Tola also mentions what we may be seeing more of on Canonic in the future as well as how the philosophy he speaks about in the episode ties back into Bitcoin.

This livestream gives the audience a great opportunity to learn more about Tola and his Bitcoin businesses, and I would recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about how Bitcoin can disrupt the publishing and data storage industries as well as individuals that like squares and circles.

Check out previous episodes of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream on YouTube.