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ARE NFTs DEAD? ☠️ The Aggregated Ep. 111
Recorded: May 2, 2025 Duration: 3:26:30Space Recording
Short Summary
The NFT landscape is evolving, with discussions highlighting the resilience of the community amidst challenges, the potential for innovative applications in various sectors, and the importance of partnerships and growth opportunities. As the industry navigates through a perceived decline, the focus on utility, community engagement, and creative expression remains strong, indicating a promising future for NFTs.
Full Transcription
Thank you. . Hello. Hello. Hello, good morning.
How are you?
We're going to kick things off with a debut of U League's song.
But full transparency, I've spent like three hours trying to make the basses play okay, because any high note, it's like, no, not today.
So we'll see how that goes.
I'm going to just quickly toggle noise suppression off,
because it doesn't like that either.
And then we're going to wing it.
So good luck. Falling on over years, infinite attack and scaling memory.
Falling on and decay, get together and brigade, scale it in, scale it down. Finally gone, end the game Better future is the aim
Keep us strong, don't let us down
Oh, get us, fight for us
We'll bring the best to God and I
Unify liquidity
We'll find what makes us free
We'll build a bridge, take me there
And I don't care
If you're a bull or a bear
Falling on, end of game
Get together, aggregate
Scale it in, scale it out
Oh,ing on
End of game
Better future is a theme
Keep us wrong
Don't let us down
Don't tell me don't fantasize about SDK roll ups and side chains and stuff
Don't tell you don't wanna be one of us
Vote and then discuss they quit out a box i'm not a teacher
another preacher i'm an educator i'm a big fan of the team of aggregated rocking that's secure
making sure to make it clear so that won't disappear And the game scale the game scale the ground
Oh, Polygon, and the game
That you can't see, but strong
Don't get that
Polygon, and the game
Again, again, and the game
Scale the game scale the ground all right i think uh that was it, Darren.
Yeah. I mean, it went okay at the start.
That was probably the best it went from all that testing.
Was it loud enough? Marshall said that he couldn't hear that well.
Yeah, it was
difficult to hear parts of it, but I know
you worked on that for a long time.
Yeah, that song
doesn't like me.
It's good, because I literally
had to learn how to work in Equalizer
to get
it played to stop
the high notes from just cutting out completely.
But even ChatGPT has just being like, nope, that's X.
We're going to blame Google.
If and though we blame Timmy, though.
Always.
Always. Always.
Hey, Aztecs here.
My twin.
Yeah, you've got a deeper voice, though.
Hello, everyone.
Hey.
Good to be back on the show.
Good to see everyone.
Happy Friday.
Looks like Rock's actually here too.
No way.
Yeah.
Rock, get up here, man.
We want to know what you've been doing in Dubai.
Good times.
Good times.
Well, and hopefully he comes up.
It would be great to have Rock on the stage as well. But we have a lot of awesome guests here. Did you guys just play Yuli's song?
Yep.
Ah, I missed it. Yuli, I missed it.
Most of it.
No, we enjoyed it.
I've been waiting for.
As much as we could.
I've been waiting for like six months or something
I don't know
and then I'm like literally
late to the show and I miss it
there has to
are you going to do a post for it
and release it later
yeah I mean
most probably Marshall
told me that we should like release it on Spotify or something.
And I'm like, well, why not?
The sound quality is amazing.
And I'm so happy that I was able to work with best of the best.
And thanks to Marshall, I had to record my vocals again and again to make sure everything sounds great.
So I'm pretty satisfied with this.
I think we did a great job and I hope you guys liked it.
Those who didn't miss.
Yeah.
Anyone that didn't will just kick from the space.
We're good.
We should play it again.
If we're going to do a reset in the middle of the show or maybe at the end of the show so then I get a chance.
But until then, I'm pretty sure it was
absolutely amazing.
I can't wait to start talking with everyone here, introducing everyone.
Did you guys already introduce Yuli just to start off? We haven't done any
introductions yet. you're really
not late aztec you were like i'm just barely late you're like three minutes late really okay
awesome let's let's just let's jump into this guys it's uh our nfts dead episode 111
and we have a stacked panel here shout out to quick swap and polygon for everything that
they do to make this thing run and the bd team at lda and uh let's start introducing everyone
basically if you're here please follow everyone here on the stage and click the little oval button in the bottom left-hand corner of your screen and then retweet the space to get more people in here because we want to talk about NFTs.
We want to catch up and figure out what's going on with NFTs.
And we're going to have some great conversations with all these gigabrains in the NFT space.
So to start off, I just go left to right on my screen.
So there's no like, that's the order of introductions.
Let's go ahead and introduce Kurt.
Just take 30 seconds, tell us what you're doing in this space,
and then we'll just go left to right from there.
All right. Thank you, Aztec.
I'm Kurt Walker Jr.
I've been in the Bitcoin space since 2012.
I've been mining Bitcoin since 2013
and hosting Bitcoin-related node infrastructure.
I'm kind of a token maximalist guy.
I started creating tokens in 2015,
then got super embroiled in the Bitcoin civil war
because all that kind of went to crap for a while,
and then tokens all moved over to Ethereum,
and now they've sort of made their way back to UTXO chains,
and there's stuff going on on Bitcoin, Litecoin, Doge, the various Bitcoin forks and all of that.
I am the founder of a company called Gorilla Pool. We mine the biggest blocks in the history
of all blockchains. In fact, today we had a block with like 1.3 million transactions in it just this
morning, about three hours ago. So I'm a big believer in scalable blockchain technology,
but not just for transactions. I think blockchains are general purpose tools to be used for everything.
So big fan of NFTs. I'm a big fan of uh fungible tokens and smart contracts and all that stuff but
not just a fanboy like we own a research and development firm uh developing like what i i
think really is the only way forward if we want this stuff to you know do a billion transactions
a day uh kind of thing so very happy to be here uh it's probably my i don't know sixth or seventh
appearance with this group so i'm really uh excited to uh talk
about this topic awesome well it's great to have you here can't wait to pick your brain more about
uh some of the things we're talking about specifically um the technology you know
you're talking about uh the only way to do it i'd love to double click on that soon. But to go ahead and get everyone introduced. Yuli also been on the show many times, please go to
introduce yourself.
Hey, hey, everyone. Pleasure to meet you. I'm here not as an NFT
expert for sure. I'm more into marketing, branding, storytelling, all these type of things.
I'm working with Cryptic Web3 marketing agency right now. I'm their senior marketing and account
manager and KOL manager. And I'm a micro KOL myself. Really proud of what I'm building in
this space. And I'm also a singer-songwriter, as you could probably, maybe barely,
but here, here on this space,
really doing what I'm doing.
And again, a pleasure to be here.
I may not stay for three hours today,
but guys, I'm always supporting you.
You know that.
You're my fan.
So thank you for inviting me and let's enjoy this place together. Thank you.
Definitely great to have you here. And yeah, for however long you guys can stay, it's awesome. Thank you so much for everyone here taking the time out of their Friday to hang out and share the alpha with everyone uh let's go ahead and introduce
liquid nfts talk to you guys recently in the ag fam chat did a demo day very interesting technology
love to uh have you guys introduce yourself yeah stick hi nicole hi everyone. Thanks for inviting us up. My name is Nathan Hill. I'm the CEO of the
crypto magazine, currently the largest printed crypto publication around the world. We own the
CMC group of companies and the aim behind that is to try and build sustainable and innovative products within the Web3 space.
I'm personally not a super techie.
I've been a business and marketing consultant in the real world
and in Web3 for the last 26 to 28 years.
When we look at this space, we kind of, I'm sure myself and a lot of others,
we see huge pitfalls huge problems with
um the way that things are transacted um so we're kind of here to try and resolve those problems
and obviously with the recent launch of liquid nfts being a liquidity backed nft system we thought we
would uh jump up and give our opinion but i i appreciate you um asking me
to introduce myself aztec definitely it's great to have you here and can't wait to pick your brain on
you know the future of nfts as well and uh good to talk to you again uh let's go ahead and introduce NFT Plaza.
Hey, Aztec, Chris here.
Thanks for the invite today.
Really looking forward to jumping into our NFTs dead.
Always an incredibly juicy subject.
So, yeah, I'm Chris.
I'm CEO and founder of Power Media.
We're a Web3 native news company run by a team of NFT experts. Most of us have been around this industry for quite some time now. And yeah, essentially we create and publish
unbiased NFT and Web3 content on the daily. So we own and operate a portfolio of four NFT news
brands, which all operate independently of one another. And today I'm representing NFT plazas.
So as content creators, we monitor the NFT industry on a daily basis.
We've been doing that since 2018.
Hence why I'm quite excited to not only chime in with a few of my opinions,
but also hear what everybody else has got to say around our NFTs then.
As a company, we've got two main aims.
We help onboard new users into the industry by creating educational content and guides, which is worded super simple.
So anybody can read it and absorb it without any jargon.
And obviously our bread and butter is, I guess, more to help amplify the news and messaging of existing legitimate NFT brands, such as marketplaces, games, artists, infrastructure plays.
such as marketplaces, games, artists, infrastructure plays, because I think,
oh yeah, so essentially we've got a number of services to help those types of business raise
awareness and help them achieve their goals, because without them, it's of our opinion that,
well, the industry just wouldn't survive. They are the foundation of what we're all trying to
achieve here. We all have the same goal, so we're just here to help support them i guess so we're here we're in the trenches with you with the community long
live entities long live nfts love to hear that you're in the trenches um great to have you here
and let's go ahead and continue here so we have four more people we're going to go ahead
and introduce here and then we're going to dive right into the conversation generally the way it
works guys uh i think the the formula kind of changed while i was out for several months but
i'm going to go ahead and just do it og style so it's just free-flowing dynamic conversation
just do it og style so it's just free-flowing dynamic conversation uh we ask a question and
anyone can chime in and uh sometimes you have to throw your elbow to get in if you put your
you don't have to put your hand up but if you do we'll try to call anyone we can uh we we like to
kind of think about it like we're all around a big table we're just having a conversation and talking about NFTs in this case. But let's go ahead and
get everyone else introduced. Jake Balch, what's up, bro? Good to see you here.
Number one, number one Medevixen holder, I think. Right, Jake?
Yes, ma'am. GM, GM, guys. Thanks for the invite, Aztec. My name's Jake. Been in the space for about three years.
My intro was Bitcoin and Doge, playing with that on Robinhood. Discovered Polygon through that.
Started getting into NFTs, made a small collection of my own, just trying to test out the waters.
Kind of got addicted to collecting and helping other content creators and founders do marketing
and content for other projects. Really enjoy
kind of bringing collections together to collaborate. I'm definitely known as the Medevix
of Wales, but I'm a big Polygon fan, big fan of art, art as a utility, and just huge supporter
of space and technology. I have a blast hanging out here, making content, meeting people,
and there's just so much incredible talent out there. So I'm really excited to be here in chat.
When you travel, do you carry your Medevix in, one of your Medevix in's, you know, what are the two cases?
Yes. Yeah. So I've got two of them actually being in the way I got lucky with that. So
I've got one of my, my Mixon, which is my PFP here. And then I've also got a special version. Uh, it's just my cat Silas and I've got a piece of luggage.
It's him. So I usually use that one just cause I don't know. Everyone loves it.
I love using it in the airport cause I literally get stopped like constantly.
I'm not even trying to show like no joke. Like I've had so many people ask me like, Oh my God, what is that?
And then I tell them it's an NFT and they're like looking at me like, I'm a, I don't know. They're like, what is that? You know,
it's just hilarious because they love the art. And then, uh,
then they're like, what the hell is an NFT?
So we still got a long way to go guys, but, um, yeah, it's, it's fun.
I love it.
It's a great piece of luggage and it's already traveled to Mexico and Miami.
So that's pretty fun.
No, no, no doubt people stop you with that that's why I was asking that's
like it's like totally a great advertisement for meta vixens too like what a cool thing that that
she came up with yeah Anna's always providing us a lot of uh both you know digital and uh in real
life utility I've got a set of canvases some of my favorite Vixens that I got for free for holding,
the two pieces of luggage. I also got like a man purse, like over the shoulder one.
And I'm probably blanking on some other utility, but yeah, it's been an awesome ride and by far my most valuable investment. Not even close. Awesome. Cool. Thanks for coming, Jake.
Definitely. Thanks for being here, bro. Good to talk with another og polygon og on the panel here and
can't wait to get your take perspective on nfts today uh in a second here but let's go ahead and
just introduce a couple more people here two cent timmy what's up brother uh we get to talk to you
every week uh behind the, and you help us
out a lot on the show, so thank you very much, but I'd love for you to introduce yourself
to everyone here. Yes, GMGM. Not that I didn't like Darren. Well, I didn't like Darren. I like
you so much more than Darren hosting the space, so welcome back. But I am two cent Timmy.
I started off as a Polygon community member. I would say that's my like avatar entry in the
Reddit avatar became a huge collector there fell in love. And eventually just by being super active
in the community. Now I work on the Polygon marketing team. And I love MFTs, really.
And I hope they're not dead both for my enjoyment and my wallet.
So I am very invested into this one.
But yeah, it's great to talk to everyone.
Yeah, yeah.
I hope so too, bro.
I want my JPEGs to go back up.
And I have a lot of expensive JPEGs.
So yeah, I can't wait to talk about that in the show as well.
Great to have you here, bro.
And you've done a lot of work with NFTs.
Are you going to discuss community currency at all today?
I mean, we can. I would say maybe for the end i i personally want to hear what other people
have to say if you guys are interested in like reddit what's community currency but we're really
working to activate uh communities on reddit i'd be happy to talk after or dm but like i want to
highlight the people that are here
because I get to be here every week and I feel like I can talk about it personally.
Good times. Good times. No worries. All right, brother. Well, great to have you here,
of course. Let's go ahead and introduce Minds Craft. Cool name.
Hey, guys. Super happy to be here. My name is Daniel. I usually was with Metaverse Post, if you remember this media, I was running it.
In terms of NFTs, I have some experience. We once did launch and dropped a collection of like 500 NFTs and we later created like a small gaming company out of it i would say
and there's a couple of mobile games i don't have any connection to it right now but that's my
experience with nfts but now at minescraft we are we have built a no-code platform to launch your agents. It's in the beta right now for white-listed users,
and we are getting ready to make it public.
So anybody can launch an agent in like five minutes.
And I mean like social agents, interns for Twitter,
for Telegram, and support agents as well.
Love it.
I love the agentic category and that sounds very exciting and great to have you here.
Yeah, we recently launched like Bonk Post, which is a media agent for the Bonk community. We did a
launch on Let's Bonk as well and it was pretty successful so uh you can check it out in the profile
definitely and if there's any anyone here on the panel that wants to share something that they've
been working on do you have a milestone that you recently announced please just post it to the
jumbotron above so everyone here that's listening can go ahead and just scroll through you know all
the cool announcements or big things you guys are working on.
You could also just post it up there and then reference it later on.
It's a really great way to kind of get visibility and get people to click on your account and follow you.
So please go ahead and utilize that. If you don't know how to do it, just go ahead and send a DM to Darren behind the quick swap account.
And he could probably help you out with just getting it up in the Jumbotron.
But let's go ahead.
There we go.
Got Jake's Medivix in post.
Awesome.
There we go.
So just like that.
All right.
Let's go ahead and introduce Lu luke var yes i hope i said
your name right it's a it sounds like a beautiful name thank you thank you no um you know i'm
it's been a while since i've been in the space i took a long break so to see that you know
obviously we're still going everyone's still building and cooking is amazing so some of you
may know me some of you may not like i started
off as a reddit avatar artist and then i tried to branch into my own thing my own little world
and you know what it's time to touch base i'm coming back i'm going to be making my own project
within the next couple of months building on that uh if you guys know any devs you can hit me up with that because i'm i just draw okay that's me i i just
draw i love that i love that and and so you're you're an og then how like when did you uh when
did the reddit kind of uh because it got really big when did that start what year was that? July of 2022 Yeah
Nice, nice
I was a bit late to that one because I came in as an artist just before Gen 3 was dropped
So that was...
God, that was a while ago now
Lord
April of 23
I am like the Reddit avatar historian
No, we were there counting it down in voice chat if you remember as it was gonna drop
oh my gosh timmy remembers what shortsy was written that day
okay yeah no it's been a wild one with reddit but i think it's time to build off into my own
little nft world you get me i'm going to be building on polygon so that's that's going to
be a great base for me i feel and i feel like a lot of people already know polygon as is so to start on something
people know and love and like know how to like navigate around that'll be a great building block
that's awesome to hear and uh i mean we we love art in the polygon. So I have a chat called the AgFam.
It's kind of a small curated group of people
that are like 100X users within the Polygon ecosystem.
And one of our sub chats is about NFTs and culture.
And a lot of people at Polygon know there's like this kind of uh
there's two minds like one like okay we're done with nfts and then there's like this
super vibrant uh swath of different communities that are still going they're still producing art. They are active. And you can even see it from some of Polygon's metrics and things, you know, that still doing some big things and NFTs.
So I think it's a perfect place to do art.
And I've also seen some chains recently, like Abstract Chain, produce some really great art and some great collections come out.
So there's definitely really great art and collections still being produced and communities that are very, very active.
So it's great to have you here today.
I can't wait to kind of talk about art as one of the parts of NFTs.
one of the parts of NFTs.
And if you have anything that,
that,
you know,
any,
any,
any kind of art that you've done in the past that you want to share with
this,
I'd love to see it in the Jumbotron.
Good quick click.
If you want to share it.
Lucy,
hold on,
Lucy,
can you share the,
what you shared with me a couple of months ago or that's still,
the one that I'm working on the sneakers.
Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. yeah right this involves polygon right it's funny because i was sat there thinking what can i do
what do i want to do i designed a pair of polygon nikes and i've got the blank pair at home that i'm
painting as we speak funnily enough that sounds awesome i have not used space before so i need
to figure out how to put it on the Jumbotron.
Timmy, if you could help me, that'd be great.
Or you could DM Darren behind the QuickSwap account.
Basically, they just need a post.
You know where you would go in to actually get the link of it anyway?
That little square thing with the line through it.
And you would click Copy Link.
If you just go to the top of that,
it should actually say the name of the Sp the spaces you just click that and it puts up
or you can send it to me yep either way we want to make it easy for you if we can but yeah it has
to be something you've already posted and then we can share it to the jumbotron um but you know
what guys we have not introduced OIQ marketing.
So let's do that before we jump into the convo.
GM, hello, everyone.
I'm here to complain about my NFT bags and maybe share some insights about the market if you're interested.
Pleasure to be here.
Pleasure to have you.
And we need all perspectives. It's going to be fun. Weasure to have you. And we need all perspectives.
It's going to be fun.
We're going to jump into this then.
Because I think we have introduced everyone here.
And we need someone to complain as well.
Because I guess there is some things to complain about.
And there is a lot to be hopeful about.
So let's dive in.
I think at the very top of this discussion, I'd love to dive into where we're at with NFTs today from your guys' perspectives. And we got a lot of different people working on different types of things, technology, art.
And I just want to take, I just want just want your guys perspective there's no wrong or
right answer in my opinion but you know this is just us talking about it and trying to figure out
where nfts are today i'd love to branch out after this small conversation into you know where do we
think it's going and you know like is it everything is certain parts of the nft category is going to come back
and all that but like where is nfts today uh you know are they dead are we are they thriving um
what what is uh some of the cool technologies that you're seeing uh that are utilizing the nft
standards um You know,
basically, where are we today?
So anyone can jump in.
You don't have to raise your hand.
I love how you can keep on asking the questions
and people have all the answers in mind.
And when you stop talking,
I will just share the whole opinions.
Just a quick note,
since I'll play the complainer part,
I would say,
I was happy if anyone disagrees, we have a conversation here. I would say like complainer part uh I would say I would happy if anyone disagrees we have a
conversation here I would say like NFTs as a concept is that uh I'll tell you why because
if we look at this casino area that we are right now casino I see many dislikes in the chat
so we are in this casino era meme coins are are uh are emerging every day and dying every day
so are the ideas the ideas of nfts in mind of most of the people it's something that they had
a funny picture and then it lost 99 of the value and i was just sitting in their wallet so in order to nft to revitalize
it should be maybe change the name at all and then have a new concept in people's mind and try
to win the market by this obviously there are many utilities like enc and so others and I
think many people here will share their examples but i think the name itself is dead
wow right right from the top right from the top nfts are dead man you came out swinging and i love
that and i think a lot of people are going to try to challenge that real quick though i got it i got
to shout out some people uh two cent timmy i think you're going to jump in with the rebuttal but
i want to shout out rudo a really uh cool dude in the polygon ecosystem you guys should follow him he's kind of like a
uh a leader in the polygon ecosystem and makes some really cool videos educational stuff he
works for polygon i actually don't know everything he does but i know he does something in marketing
i just want to say thank you for being here. Swiss Fortress.
Yuli K joined the listeners, but awesome to have you here.
I see the DogeChain account.
Rock is still in the listeners, and I'd love to hear him come up
and talk about what's going on in Dubai.
I see Jennifer here.
The LDA account's here.
Next Level's here.
What's up, bro? Jared, uh, rogue bunnies, Tuan, uh, also see Phil. Uh, I remember talking, having many discussions with
you in the cosmos ecosystem years back. Uh, really cool to see you here. And, uh, others is here.
Polygon community has a collection. Uh, I see a lot of the ladies in the audience. I just got to shout out some people. Two Cent, Timmy.
They're almost hibernating, but in my mind, there are two things for NFTs.
One, there's the NFTs as PFPs, which I mean, I'm still bullish on, but reasonable minds can disagree.
But I think when you talk about where the future of the tech is going, when you have RWAs, real world assets, representing on the blockchain, a lot of that is going to be done through tokenization and NFTs.
And that's where, like, that's pushing.
Without NFTs, you don't have RWAs.
And I really think that RWAs are going to unlock a huge wave of access to finance, access to lending.
It's going to open up a whole bunch of markets.
But then you're going to open up other things like, I'm just thinking digital identity is a huge, huge area where we can do a
lot better as a society. And when I think about how frustrating it is to renew your license and
wait at the DMV, if you have a digital identity on chain as an NFTft that's going to be something that just unlocks so much value and
that's where nfts are i do agree that i mean jake even said it when he talked about having an nft
like it's this weird concept that unless you're immersed in it it's tough for the average person
to come about but so is https security online or like ip protocols like people don't need to know
that they just need to know that it works and i think you'll have technologists really pushing
and diving into nfts uh you just won't hear the uh nft acronym in mainstream other than like
cheap jokes on snl where people don't understand it
exactly man so many strong points and I love that you brought up real world assets because
real world assets are super relatable I think it's going to be one of those categories that
like gaming that's going to bring in a ton of adoption can't can't agree with you more on a
lot of these points here um I see two hands up guys i i don't like choosing hands just someone
jump in and and i'll jump in it's okay we're like everyone's gonna get their time to say something
so i just wanted to clarify like i think a lot of these things need to like define terms so like an
nft i think when people hear the term nft they think of the art or the collections. And the NFT is the underlying tech that can be
utilized in a lot of different ways. And we're talking about that terminology like, well,
real world asset or digital twin or digital collectible. And there's lots of ways to treat
this. But if we're talking about the art aspect, this is actually one of those things that
people have discussed for for a thousand years,
whether art creates culture or whether culture creates art. I think they both happen in response
to each other where art will create a type of culture and then the culture will change and
grow. It'll become richer or poorer. Its values will change in some way. Then the art reflects
that. You get this wave pattern
of like a culture in ascent
and then a culture in decline.
And the art will represent that.
And I think right now,
because it's still very small,
like the digital art NFT sort of community
is tied very closely to liquidity.
So, I mean, when everybody's got an extra,
you know, huge amount of money
that they're looking to do something with
and you're like, hey, you can buy this,
you know, buy a couple of these really cool JPEGs
from this really cool artist.
Like it makes sense to spend a hundred grand
on something that could be worth a million bucks in a year
when you're sitting on an extra few million dollars.
But when everybody's poor, you know, like,'s poor, you get the middle of the bear market, nobody's collection
is going to be making any money. And that's just kind of a, we've got this kind of thing happens
in the real world too. In a recession, people aren't out there buying Rolexes and Jackson Pollock
paintings and loading the boat with these kind of things. You did that
when the market was kicking ass and you were looking for creative ways to store value.
But I think secondarily, when that market is not doing particularly well, there's lots of other
things that the technology can be used for. And I've consulted a company that's based out of Norway.
They're called UNISOT.
It stands for Universal Source of Truth.
And they use the exact same technology, essentially
the technology that you would call ordinals today.
They were making digital twins of Norwegian salmon.
And the reason for that is that salmon, specifically Norwegian salmon, it's like the most
valuable salmon in the world. It's wild caught. It's caught in the coldest waters, blah, blah,
blah. But if you can prove the provenance of exactly where it was caught and the geohash of
where it was caught is put on chain and added to its digital twin. And then, okay, what temperature
was it stored at? And how many hours did it take for it to get to dock and then what was its temperature at every different checkpoint until it was butchered
and then sold and and whatever if you can prove that provenance uh for their customers um they've
been able to allow their customers to charge uh some significant amount it's not a huge number
but you know something like 10 or 15 percent more money for their salmon because the provenance is
auditable at every step of the way. And so that's the kind of thing where there's a serious
commercial interest that uses the technology in a way that is certainly not sexy. Nobody's making
like, oh my God, I sold this thing for $1.8 million or whatever. It's like, no, you made an
extra 12% on your commercial operation.
And that's a significant number for a serious business. And they've extrapolated that out.
They also offer similar verification services for halal butchering, which is Muslim purity laws
and that kind of thing. So they've worked in the Middle East for that kind of provenance tracking.
And anything where provenance tracking of food, they're trying to make inroads into
that kind of industry.
So it also works with verifiable organics and those sorts of things.
And so I think there's another big opportunity with the technology.
When we're not in a big boom cycle for doing art.
There's also serious commercial application for the tech that is, again, less sexy.
Nobody's getting rich overnight on it, but you are actually increasing the margins of
serious commercial business.
And that also matters a lot.
So it's just something to consider.
That's awesome.
I can't wait for someone to build the market app, like where you can go to the market and you're able to just use QR codes to look up kind of like where the food came from and source how long it's been in the warehouse.
And I would actually be the nerd that
would uh look you know where did my strawberries come from but uh absolutely well and that's just
to be clear that that is what they're doing it's it's not i think a lot of the people on this call
are in the u.s uh which is um its own problem but across scandinavia and then across uh places in the middle east mostly in dubai
their technology is used in retail stores and in high-end restaurants with qr code
where you can see like this salmon i'm about to eat at this really fancy restaurant i can see
when it was caught what temperature it was caught who was the fisherman what was the boat like all
of that kind of stuff is all on chain and uh pretty cool stuff
yeah we're we must be behind then because i've never seen anything like that in the u.s but
yeah i could see how how that would be uh really useful and i think a lot of people would would
want it um but yeah i love i love this technology you know we're talking about some of the stuff
you know where nfts are today kurt you had your hand up earlier do. We're talking about some of the stuff where NFTs are today.
Kurt, you had your hand up earlier.
Do you want to jump on any of the things that someone said recently?
No, I think there's a lot of good stuff has been said,
but I think so far everyone's sort of focusing on that art aspect of it,
which is cool.
I love it too.
I've done collections i've
traded i've made money you know flipping jpegs like i i think all of that is also good but i have
a feeling that'll be the thing that is covered heavily by everyone else so i kind of just wanted
to give a contrast on like hey there's also boring commercial applications for the stuff that uh
people can also be doing so definitely i mean if you yeah i'd love to hear your thoughts on that i mean just
you know where if you want to jump into that um i know we're kind of talking from the perspective
of where nfts are today is yours more like you know where you think it's going or that that
discussion that strand i think yeah so well you mentioned too like you know where you think it's going or that that discussion that strand i think yeah so
well you mentioned too like you know some of my thoughts like i think it has to go a specific
direction so i'm i'm a big believer in in utxo based blockchains which is to say uh like a bitcoin
style accounting system and there's a couple reasons for that the the way EVM or Ethereum style blockchains work, like an account-based
system, the way it stores data is not particularly good for NFT technology because you're essentially
working on one giant computer and you're agreeing to various bits on a database that somebody
owns provably. But the data structures are really unclear from a legal perspective and also a technical perspective about ownership and provenance.
And that gets extracted away.
And that's fine.
I think if everybody agrees that this is mine and whatever, that's a good thing.
good thing but i think there's a much more fundamental aspect of bitcoin um where i've
But I think there's a much more fundamental aspect of Bitcoin.
actually been writing about this for a lot of years saying that each sat on on the ledger
is both fungible and non-fungible it's it's fungible in the sense that each sat is worth
one sat and that's verifiable right they have the same value. They are what they are. And a SAT is a SAT is a SAT. But they are also individually serialized SATs. And it's funny because when Casey came up with this concept of ordinals, he realized the same thing that I've been talking about. that, oh, if we just treat each sat as its own individual thing, then you can write specific
data to specific sats. And then that sat becomes that token essentially forever. Or even if it's
burned and then recreated, that's also a provable event that happened to an individual sat. And so
I've always thought that Bitcoin was much more fundamentally clear as to who owns what,
because you can say, this sat is in my wallet
i can prove that i own the set in my wallet and this set is this token and that's also verifiable
uh on chain and it's so at the at the very lowest level at the blockchain you can prove who owns
what and then what extrapolates off of that thing. And so I'm a firm believer.
You're talking about journals, right?
Just for people that might not know what a sat is,
Satoshi, it's a breakdown of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin goes eight places.
There are 100 million sats in each Bitcoin.
And so in the Bitcoin universe, there are 2.1 quadrillion
possible sats that can exist, and each one of them can be an NFT. And so with that,
you have a very interesting game that can be played with provable scarcity at the at the lowest level of the asset
and it's almost like when you really look at it it's almost like satoshi designed the system
like to be that like it's so like one-to-one making an nft out of individual bitcoin sat units
um like it almost seems providential. I'm not saying that it's
providential, but when you apply the technology, you look at it and say, oh, wow, this really is
the perfect application for doing these things. So I think, anyways, the technology, NFTs,
conceptually kind of need to go that direction.. I think there's also a scalability concern.
I'm a big critic of moving things to L2, L3, and whatever.
Because, again, you're trying to abstract away some of the limitations in blockchain technology.
But that also undermines the provenance and the value of your asset of your of your nft and so um i'm a
firm believer that we need a scalable bitcoin style blockchain where everything lives um for
for all kinds of reasons so i'd be happy to drill into that more but i don't want to sit and grand
stand here for 10 minutes and cause everyone to tune out it's a really interesting conversation i think we i'd
love to talk uh soon about i want to make sure i get everyone's kind of opinion on where we're at
from uh perspective on like where we're at with nfts today or ordinals or you know these technologies
inscriptions because inscriptions are very similar to ordinals but you know you could
have inscriptions on polygon there could be you know a breakdown of uh similar similar you know
like a breakdown of uh of the um of the poll tokens uh and and these nfts kind of inscribed
on the token essentially but um yeah i i like that conversation that strand i want to jump
into that at some point but um i do i think what like the way you're kind of bringing up ux uh
utxo blockchains and the the different styles of uh or basically the account mechanism and all that um is really interesting
but um yeah before we jump into that is yeah what do you want to say i just wanted to say like so
part part of the issue is like ethereum based system so polygon has matic right like that's
the token on on polygon and the the difference is is that when you inscribe on something like polygon you
are not inscribing to the token so the matic token does not get an inscription written to it it is
written at the virtual machine level so it's written at like the app level the operating system
is your your ethereum virtual machine essentially and so it's a little bit like the difference would be in a Bitcoin system, the inscription is happening to the unit like it is it is written to the blockchain.
It's in the UTXO set, which is the lowest level of the database, whereas in Polygon or any other Ethereum style system, it is written at a higher level like higher up in the stack it's a little more of like your video game money on you know if you're playing your ps5 or something like your
token in your video game is saved in your video game it's it's not some deeper lower level uh
asset that's that's stored so that's that's part of my clarification. And it seems pedantic, but if we're also talking about
having billions of dollars of value saved in these things, I think it's important to get
clarity for the sake of contracting and legal stuff or whatever, even if a lot of us are
libertarians and anarchist types. But that also matters between two people that want to arbitrate
between each other
be like no no i can actually prove i own this all the way down to the the thing i didn't just own it
in some parenthetical application layer so i think these things really matter even though again it
seems like yeah okay like that's sure we get it but but I think it will matter as soon as people start like suing each other for their JPEGs.
So, yeah, I mean, there's, I could, I could see multiple different reasons why that matters.
I mean, that matters to a collector that matters to maybe a developer that it's developing some type of, uh, it could be maybe a way to source, you know, those, those types of types of uh inscriptions or ordinals or you know
use them in some type of uh solution or so yeah i could see a lot of the legalistic approach as well
yeah that makes sense it's really interesting uh i i actually didn't know that uh exactly so yeah
thanks for the education on that no problem yeah and i don't want to derail
the conversation because i know this is supposed to be out about nfts but i don't know this is in
this is in the vein bro like uh i fully like ordinals nft this is all this is all in the same
i actually think we i like the ethereum accounting model a lot more and i think
actually think we i like the ethereum accounting model a lot more and i think nfts solve for what
kurt was talking about but like on a different side i the problem that i see with utxo is it's
really right now i don't know if it's true but i would say like it's all the research is showing
that it's almost impossible to have true privacy even with like like ZK proofs like Zcash, it's not a true UTXO model.
And I think that we need privacy on the blockchain and you can do it easier
with the Ethereum like accounting model for transactions versus the UTXO model.
Like, and that's all that I wanted to point out.
So like, I think that there's two that there's problems that you can solve for,
but the UTXO model, I think, falls short
and you're giving a trade-off in privacy,
which is also something that's super important.
And I think with NFT...
And I do agree that L2s and L3s,
there is a trade-off.
You're not actually transacting on the settlement layer.
So I'm not disagreeing with any of that,
but I think it's like, what system do we want?
And what are we,
if you have to define a hierarchy of value,
I think for a lot of people in this space,
privacy is probably above having non-fungible tokens
and that sort of thing.
So it's just an interesting trade-off that you get
well and that is that is the difficult thing like especially if you're going to have a dispute right
like hey those are my tokens like no they're my tokens and well if you know like you're gonna
have somebody's gonna have to dox something in order to get to the bottom of it and and so yes
there is absolutely a trade-off there but i think think it depends on the nature of what you're doing,
especially for commercial interests.
If you're talking about a corporation,
they're going to look at that and say, well, who cares?
We don't care. What are we hiding?
But to your DGEN trader, like, hey, I'm an Anon
sitting on a few million bucks worth of JPEGs,
and I'm flipping, I understand that too.
It's a very different conversation.
But basically, I agree. There are trade-offs. like i understand that too like it's a very different conversation but um yeah no but basically
i i agree there are there are trade-offs i think the other big one is like evm is way easier to
program for so that's that's the other big one like and that's why ethereum got as popular as
it did is a basic full stack dev can hop into ethereum and within a day and a half be like,
oh, I get this.
This is just a big distributed computer
and start to go.
Whereas Bitcoin requires you to think about it
very differently.
It's less intuitive from the get-go.
Yeah, I do have to say,
I just recently read a white paper.
I know we're getting super technical guys.
So everyone listening,
I'm going to go back to some of the general stuff in just a second.
But I did just read a white paper that was written by Iago from Bitcoin OS.
And they based, you know, from from what I can see, have solved ZK for Bitcoin and layer twos to Bitcoin
using ZK technology and their grail bridge. And basically that will enable developers that are
building solutions on top of Bitcoin and these layer twos to have privacy for Bitcoin.
It's super technical and a bit over my head, to be honest.
I'm not a dev by any means, but I found that paper very, very interesting
because I think a lot of things are going to change in the Bitcoin space very soon.
But yeah, maybe we could kind of bring it back a bit,
you know, from the technical aspect and just kind of finish up on, you know, where we're at with
NFT today. Is there any other opinions there? And then I want to move into, there's two strands
that people have been talking about that I want to dive into. One is, you know, the future of, of NFTs.
And there's all these things we've been talking about real world assets and art.
And I can't think of the, the, the word on the category I'm thinking about, but you know,
like a supply chain kind of technologies and, and all this stuff.
So the future of NFTs is one strand and another strand
is um uh kind of the the who's gonna win the for lack of better words the nft kind of battle you
know is it going to be evm is it going to be utxo you know so is it nfts or ordinals like
because and that that can be debated from you know the art level or any other level but i want to dive
into these things soon but before we jump into that uh nft plaza i think you had your hand up
the longest here did you want to piggyback off anything anyone said or do you want to kind of
uh provide a perspective on you know how you feel about NFTs today? Yeah I think Kurt raised some really good points if we're discussing where NFTs
are right now so Kurt talks about things like provenance, RWA, mainly utility. I think at some
point along this journey of NFTs with it being a nascent industry the actual underlying technology has been
forgotten and i think that's largely to do with some of the media attention that it's got around
certainly from webtoon media anyway where the focus was on the crazy priced nfts which were
artwork or pfps pictures of monkeys going for millions i think that was a real juicy story for like Web2 Media to pick up on.
The unfortunate result of that is we're now in a position where the mainstream associate NFTs almost solely with that side of the industry.
So NFTs equal JPEG, nothing more.
And yeah, so I guess in many ways like the whole like utility aspect
has been forgotten and they were treated like price must go up in many ways i think a lot what
happened was a lot of people came from the cryptocurrency communities and they sort of
understood nfts a little bit but they just treated them i guess like any other token and all the time that evolved into
i guess an expectation where price must go up like and that that was it really and people were
speculating and everything else got forgotten which is a shame and i guess where we are right
now is you could argue with what um zero iq said earlier on it it's NFTs is almost like a dirty word. I told a few
of my friends recently, like how things are going with the NFT industry and certainly the business
that I run. And they were all, oh, NFTs, really? Like, is that still a thing? Or isn't that a
dirty word now? And I was like, well, no, there's so much going on underneath the hood. So I guess what I want to add to that is there's clearly still quite a lot of need for education,
onboarding people and helping them understand that NFTs aren't just pictures of monkeys or seals or whatever it may be.
They're actually there. They have utility.
And this can really change the way that we do things.
And there's not all that much going on
at the moment with that that being said in the wider community I mean we're we're in constant
contact and with various NFT projects and people who are building underneath the hood and one thing
I will say is that the creative river is still flowing within the NFT community there's still a
lot of exciting things coming through
people trying to innovate in this space and we want to see more of that but all in all i think
although we're we are where we are right now we're very optimistic about the future of nfts
i love to hear that whoever wants to jump in i i jake i still see your hand up uh liquid nfts
oh and you know what real quick sorry guys, I still see your hand up. Liquid NFTs. Oh, and you know what?
Real quick.
Sorry, guys.
Mr. Dude, you had your hand up earlier.
And I want you to also introduce yourself, man.
Great to have you here on the show.
Maybe you could just jump in first, bro.
Because, yeah, you wanted to say something earlier.
And great to have you here.
Yeah, I wanted to.
Oh, also Alex.
I got a shout
out alex also she's here but yeah mr dude take it away yeah no i'm very excited i can't wait for
rock and alex to get up on stage and duke it out like our usual fridays those are always fun um
yeah mr dude uh don't really need an introduction in the sense you know i'm here to learn and grow
with everybody um one of the things kurt you said so much stuff that like i took and it's so great
i think a lot of nfts and where they're at can be prefaced with like at the end of every
sentence, it's like dot, dot, dot yet.
Certain things can't be done yet.
We're still like such infancy of our technology and what's going on.
And I think NFTs really bring culture.
And one of like my things that I'm very excited about with NFTss is you know i live in north america so i live
outside of toronto which is huge for like ticket sales and events and i think like that like that
is something that is huge for our industry when we think about culture nfts are culture the art
is culture the communities are culture meme coins tried to position themselves in there but what
they actually did was realize that everyone just wants to dump on each other it became a very greedy way for people to make money yada yada yada
but nfts are a lot harder to dump on your community they like they are and i come from
meme coins it's how i got in into um into crypto essentially right but i've realized nfts are
culture meme coins are not meme coins became like a way to
make money which is fine i've no there's no qualms with people want to make money but nfts are the
root of culture art is the root of culture entertainment is the root of culture power
went out in portugal and spain and what did people do they literally went in the streets
and freaking partied instead of like sitting on their phones right you can't like dump you know you can't dump a hundred nfts essentially on a floor like if jake did that
it would literally be in his own it would be to his own detriment as opposed to making himself rich
but what nfts can do is actually get rid of the scammers so we've all heard of ticketmaster scams
right this can replace that because now i'm going to prove that I sold it to Nerd Girl, to Jake,
as opposed to just some ticket that you show up and they scan it with their little QR code
scanner and it's like, oh, this is not real.
Like you just got scammed out of $10,000 for a Taylor Swift concert as opposed to
just buying and selling it naturally.
And I think like that's where it's really going to change things.
And maybe Bitcoin is used for super specific things.
Maybe it's like mortgages.
You said there's something quadrillion amounts.
So all the houses in the world are put on real estate, on Satoshis.
That's amazing.
It solves that.
And then we have Polygon NFTs, which are used for buying and purchasing.
And someone mentioned NFT Plaza. They're talking to their friends. Oh, our NFT is still a thing.
It's like, have you ever used a digital coupon? That is an NFT. It's just not at the advanced stage of where it can be. So they can only give out 100, thousand coupons right as opposed to me buying me going to
michael's it's like an arts and crafts store like literally i could go there today and tomorrow
my phone my wife's phone and get the same deal right there's there's going to be ways to essentially
control the market in a safe way to protect people which which us libertarians anarchists like at the
root of us just want to be protected from governments and scammers at the same time.
So I think we're so in our infancy for NFTs that we go on this every day.
Monday to Friday, people are on spaces talking about this stuff.
What's the state of this or that?
Like NFTs are the furthest thing from dead.
They're just in almost like a holding pattern of like, okay, what's next?
Who's going to come out with something? Where are we going to go?
And if it's art, cool, go and collect this art,
whether it's on abstract polygon, Ethereum,
or are we going to use it for tickets or mortgages?
Like people are building that and we're just trying to find them.
Man, you hit it, you hit it out of the park, bro i i do think that's exactly where nfds are today
you know and there's great leaders in the space that are building the you know the next metas or
the things that that people are going to use that are going to get tons of adoption and and yeah you
know a community culture that's all still alive and thriving um i see a lot of hands up
here liquid nfts i think you had yours uh up the longest or you haven't said anything at least
on the space so please take it away but yeah alex and jake you'll have to kind of fight it
out i don't know who raised their hand first but liquid nfts jump in real quick i don't like
hands guys just jump in you know because i don't want to
choose people i love you i don't i i certainly don't want to be rude i think jake's kind of
had his hand up and down and up and down through the whole space um but i mean you're welcome to
take it in front of me if you want jake
oh i can't hear you dude
can everyone hear me yeah i can hear you bro i wasn't able to hear jake
unfortunately i'll jump in then if he's having having mic issues um yeah i kind of agree with a lot of what people are saying and um there
was a chat earlier ron was it um iq marketing uh and kind of one thing that he said is look
all my bags are down but i think before we can go into the kind of the conversation of our nfts dead
kind of the conversation of are nfts dead and i was at an event recently in Amsterdam everyone
that you mentioned nfts to they're like really very similar to what uh Mr. Do just said like
is that still a thing um but i think what people aren't doing is they're not looking at why people
think nfts are dead and in all fairness if nfts weren't dead there wouldn't be spaces out
there saying are nfts dead like the psychology of it the the general narrative is um nfts
continuously drop in price and this is kind of one thing that we're really trying to solve
um but but you've got to you've got to kind of understand why um and where the problems are
coming from and again just my opinion but but i believe the problems are and obviously you can
look at different aspects and completely agree that uh i mean we're in talks at the moment with
concerts and people like that about actually having nft ticket in very very similar to what mr dude was
talking about but the nft industry is unintentionally set up and designed to go down it the way it's
set up it has to happen in my opinion um the the reason being is and this is again, kind of where liquid NFTs come in.
It's that liquidity basis.
The value they have is what someone else is willing to pay for them.
It's a peer-to-peer value.
And the way that these NFT marketplaces are set up is generally a content creator will go and sell all of their NFTs.
And these people are not only artists but
they're business people as well they're there to earn an income and at the point that they've taken
that they've had their income there's little to no point in them actually marketing those nfts that
have been bought by someone else so then people go to secondary markets open c
rarity blur all of these other marketplaces and the way that they are incentivizing selling
is to list them cheaper than everything else in that collection so now people are constantly at
sell pressure they're constantly chasing the market down. And the prices have to drop.
I mean, obviously, with what we've done with liquid NFTs,
it's to try and fix the industry, try and fix the market.
And obviously, we're doing that on Polygon at the moment.
We've had a multitude of other blockchains.
I'll say a multitude.
We've had a handful, so I suppose a multitude, just a slight exaggeration of other block i'll say a multitude we've had a handful uh so i suppose a multitude just
a slight exaggeration of other blockchains saying look how can we integrate into this system um how
can you integrate our blockchain because what what what we're trying to do is to solve the problem
by injecting liquidity into specific nfts so at the point that those nfts are bought the owner of that
nft the person that's minted it and purchased it they have liquidity locked inside their asset
locked inside their nft and every time something transacts on the platform it increases their specific liquidity so unlike a token it doesn't
um other people can't access your liquidity Paul you're the only person that can access it
now if you've now got a scenario where the liquidity of your let's let's say it was a
board ape the liquidity of your board ape is consistently increasing in price then from a business aspect
so does the resale value because when you resell it that liquidity moves with the nft that you sell
so you we've just effectively flipped a whole industry 360 we've created buy pressure and
every time something sells the content creator earns again consistently
and therefore can reinvest into their collection,
their art, and therefore drive the price up even further.
So it's a complete 360 on the industry
as it stands at the moment.
But I don't think it's artists.
We've got some insane artists out there.
We've got some people that are creating NFT projects
that are mind-blowing in a lot of senses,
but the general public don't want to buy them
because all they've seen is all of these 99% of collections
going down in price.
But that's not an art problem.
That's an industry problem.
And unless you have a lot of people in this space,
most people are here for the investment side of things.
And I was speaking to a very well-known influential guy
a couple of years back.
And it was actually one of the LDA guys.
It was Seth Estrada that I asked if he could interview him.
And he just said, look, I don't buy these pixelated punks and monkeys
because they have no value to me.
I just, I'm not in the business of losing money
and i think that's the general census that nfts have at the moment um that they can be used for
so many more things but if we're talking about the art and the collectability they need to have a
dollar value and they we shouldn't be completely reliant on having to have someone
else that wants to buy it in order to realize your um the monetary value with a look with a
liquidity back system you can always redeem to exit at any time yeah and the longer you're also able to to burn the nfps and take
the liquidity from uh the nft out if if needed right so like even if you can't sell it you could
just burn it and i i think you brought up a lot of really great points about you know kind of
maybe some of the issues with nfts um uh but but i i am i am wondering if like anyone has any
questions for you or like any thoughts or or even like disagrees with that um i i don't i i like
every time i've looked at your guys's technology i think it's uh i think it's really fascinating
and i think uh i'd love to see it adopted more um You know, we did a demo in the AgFam chat recently.
So, you know, I'm excited about technologies
that maybe like change the game for NFTs.
But yeah, I'd like to maybe hear other people's thoughts on it,
unless you have like anything you want to wrap up on that.
No, no, I have a habit of just talking
mr dude will tell you i've kept him on the phone for hours before so sometimes i do need to be
told okay now if you've made my point because i am passionate and i'll go on forever but um
no i think that's it i think i think the the problem is the industry and how the industry
works i don't think it's NFTs themselves.
That's a really interesting point. Alex, I see your hand up. Kurt, I think you were wanting to jump in, but whoever, Alex, please welcome to the show. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you think
about liquid NFTs or any of the thoughts that you've heard today basically we're we're talking about uh where are nfts today
kind of the general landscape also welcome to the show aida um hopefully i pronounced your name right
but uh great to have you guys here thank you it is aida aida great to have you here
beautiful name it means mother in Indian, by the way.
I'm not Indian, but I just heard I had a friend from that area.
They said that it means mother. So you can never short mother.
Yeah, that's right.
Good morning. Or back to the old school GMGM, right?
We're talking NFTs. We're back to the old style stuff here.
Yeah, so I'm a securities corporate lawyer.
Used to work at the SEC and I've run a couple of businesses and I've exited and I've been
in blockchain since 2016.
So boy, do I remember NFTs.
And I do AI and quantum computing stuff too.
And okay, full disclosure here,
I'm now actually in builder mode.
I'm actually building something in blockchain.
And the future of what I'm building
actually does involve NFTs,
but in a different context.
So I don't think they're dead,
but not in this context. So the way that think they're dead, but not in this context.
So the way that people have been using NFTs
to me has always seemed fairly clear.
They're very good for communities,
but people haven't been using them for communities, right?
For community builds.
They've been using them as promises of future wealth, right?
And they've been using them as these market tokens.
And a lot of them in the same way
as meme coins have been built. And to that been using them as these market tokens and a lot of them in the same way as meme coins have been built.
And to that extent, you know, that has been largely, you know, a failure.
Honestly, that's one of those, you know, first in, first out, you know, trying like that's that's been basically people trying to get rich on each other and dump on communities. And all of that, that kind of activity is something that retail is taking advantage of itself.
We're eating each other in that respect.
We have to understand these tools and respect them as the tools that they are and the investment vehicles that they are
and try to stop, you know, cannibalizing one another. Once that activity, should that activity
ever end, then we can actually start getting into some really meaty, interesting, you know,
use cases, one of which definitely is things like ticket sales and hidden content and stuff like that.
Some of our best use cases have been using NFTs as products,
as really interesting collectible products where you collect them as groups
and encourage people who are fans, who are communities,
to trade amongst one another so that they actually, you know, collect the whole
set kind of thing. That encourages the community to speak to and engage with one another, engage
with the community itself, tighten the community net. That kind of stuff has actually proven
hugely successful, increasing not just the value of the
token itself, but the value of the community overall. One thing that we can say is communities
are valuable. They're valuable in terms of being able to build things in later days, but also
they're valuable in terms of cash. It's one of the things that traditional markets
are only now just beginning to realize.
It's not about individual customers,
but the customer base and collective identity,
that's something that blockchain has always understood
as something that we can figure out
how to collectively capture.
And it's taken a long time for outside of this, you know, our industry, right,
to understand that that's something that we want to build.
They're coming to us to understand how to create and capture community,
not just monetize it, but use it as identifiers, right? How do we use NFTs? Like
if you pay for a concert with it, if you use an NFT for a concert, you get special swag that
allows you to get like a t-shirt that allows you to be identifiable in the real world so that you
are notable as, you know, a particular community member to other people, like a dog owner, right? Dog
owners talk to one another in the real world because there's something kind of special, right?
We kind of talk to one another. That's the same thing where if you're wearing that special t-shirt
from that band that you paid for with an NFT, you're like, oh, well, I'm like an inside VIP
member. So are you. Hey,
like we are immediately going to start talking to one another. Those are the things that have
proven very valuable. And those are the things that you can't actually, you can't sell that,
right? Like that's not even something that you can quantify, but it's such a value add on top
of these things that I don't think people are understanding
that this is not about flipping NFTs.
This is about creating identifiable brand markers that I don't think people have really
understood that on top of products, what we're creating are communities that have brand
identifiers.
So that's one thing.
The other thing that people haven't really gotten to yet is that NFTs are going to break open the music market, but we're missing some key elements.
I'm glad you brought up music because I would love to dive into that at some point today.
We are missing a few technical builds.
missing a few technical builds. There are a couple of things that literally just aren't built yet,
and everybody's building the same damn stuff over and over again that are not, it's not the missing
links that we have. I have talked about what's missing. Nobody wants to build those. They want
to build the same damn things over and over again. It drives me absolutely bananas. But there are a few key missing actual builds that have to get built
before the music side can break open. We are missing a few, like I said, few key actual
technical builds that have to happen. But then NFTs will actually crack open this market and
then we'll be able to use record labels as marketing companies, because really that's what they are. You don't need them to record music anymore. You can record
anywhere. You don't really need them to press vinyl or to create a CD. That's not how music
is distributed. It is digital, right? And then eventually the same thing is going to happen with
all sorts of content, including Netflix and all of that stuff. That's all going to happen with all sorts of content, including like, you know, Netflix and all of that stuff.
That's all going to happen as well, because really all content is digital.
And when you think about the fact that content is digital, once we finish these technical links, we can actually crack open a lot of content markets using these.
But we're not looking correctly at the business models. We're
missing business understanding, and that has always been a flaw of this area, and understanding
how business models work, what the technical needs are, what the business model needs are,
instead of just saying, let's flip it, flip it, flip it, flip it. We got to stop doing that.
The other part of this is, what is the core of an NFT? It's just a basket of rights.
And really, where do these belong? They're financial assets. And that's where what I'm
building is actually going to be using them. Because at the end of the day, these are just
financial assets that are going to end up being traded. And I want to move away from a debt-based financial market
into an asset-based financial market. And that's where these NFTs are going to end up taking hold,
I think, right? One is going to be in content trading, and the other is going to be in financial
asset trading. So when you say our NFT is dead, that's basically like saying our rights dead. Of course not. Rights aren't dead. But this idea of fast trading of these PFPs or whatever,
I mean, that's essential cannibalization. And that can only go so far. I think when we start
actually looking at what kinds of classifications we have and where people think they can actually generate the most value
for their communities, for whatever it is that they're offering. I think there's still, as I
thought there was before, as there remains, huge amounts of opportunity. There are huge amounts of
opportunity. Enormous, right? You just have to know where you're building what you're building where the missing
pieces are and then start filling in those gaps i think that's super key i just wanted to clap
can i chime in a little bit here i think there's a bigger play here, right? So as we're getting into this highly data driven, you know, borderless, I would say
technocracy is what I guess these people call, you know,
you know, country doesn't mean much is essentially based off
people's common interests, like, you know, aka community. I
mean, NFTs are just essentially going to be our credentials.
On chain identity layer, right?
So, you know, we've been talking about these AI agents, you know, A2A, MCP,
that's essentially what we're building at AIDA.
But, you know, your own chain identity layer being the NFTs are going to be
interacting with the autonomous agents, either that's financial agents
or something else. And I think that art is great. I mean, I love music and all that, right?
Essentially, these music companies or brands, I mean, they are essentially just one agent.
And then all of those things can be governed by on-chain activities. And then the identity, your on-chain identity can actually be leveraged, you know, leveraging NFT technologies.
And then, you know, I think we should just forget about art. Art is great.
But that's not the real use cases.
The NFTs are becoming the on-chain identity layer for interacting with all of these AI agents, autonomous agents.
And I think that that's where the real value is going to be.
And then I think that, you know, think of it as your passport, as your private key, as
your permissions models, you know, whatever you call it.
Right.
And then, you know, I will say it's not, I mean, it is dead in a way that the old NFTs
are dead, you know, from a few years ago.
I traded a lot. you know i lost a
lot of money because of that but uh but the new nfts that we call these you know on-chain passport
private keys or permissions all of these things are very much alive um you know i think that this
is what i will say in short is like you know they're not nfts are not just graduating you
know they're just essentially you know coming out of our school and then they're you know they're
entering into the age of you know um ai agents right yeah and that's essentially the killer app
we'll call it killer app of of all the you know with three slash ai intersection i'm gonna have
to double click on that
because I think that's where you're going,
but just in case you're not,
what do you mean by that?
Because that's not even something I've ever thought about.
And it's a really interesting strand there.
What do you mean they're going to interact
with the agentic kind of network?
Yeah.
I mean, obviously there is agent to agent, right?
We already know this, A to A,
or a bunch of MCPs interacting with each other,
network of agents, you could call it.
But then when you're as human,
like you being a real human,
interacting with a bunch of agents or network of agents,
how do they know you are you? I can say,
I'm whoever, Donald Trump, whatever. We have all these technologies available to us. We can look
like him. We can sound like him. We can write like him. We can talk like him. How do you know
that's him? And that's where I think that the NFT, the real identity, can be done through this very great technology that we invented two years ago, two, three years ago, being the NFTs.
I think like while in the one point. I would say DID is actually going to be completely different because there are so many legal risks with this.
And you do not want your ID at all locked up into something like an NFT, where the whole point of the NFT is that the ownership is linked into something that is findable.
And that's not, DID is going to be fundamentally, I think, right?
That's not, DID is going to be fundamentally, I think, right?
This is the way it's going to end up because of the different rule structures that we have to work with.
DID is actually fundamentally much more complicated than just connecting it into, you can connect an NFT with digital identity, but fundamentally your digital identity is not solely your NFT.
You can connect it to that, but it can't solely be that.
I mean, there are many tiers, right?
Think about it.
It's like, hey, you know, in the near future, I bet that, you know, to grant a restrict access to AI tools to carry, you know, your trading credentials, reputation, all these preferences.
I mean, I think you can do those things through NFTs, not the real, real DID that
Alex, you're alluding to, right? So, and then be able to, you know, you know, enable the selective
interactions with, you know, agents, protocols, and then, you know, essentially, it's your,
you know, own chain passport being attached to your DID, complementing that. But, you know, again,
when you're, you know, talking to a group of people, you know, every time, for instance,
on X, right, like, you're not showing your passport, right? You're not showing your identity
each time. I think that there are lighter way of verifying you being the human through NFTs.
identifying you being the human through NFTs.
I think that's a use case.
I don't think that's any different than another use case than art or music.
I don't think art is dead.
I mean, art's a product right now, one of the biggest products that's ever come out
of NFTs.
I mean, I don't think, I think that's a use case.
It's certainly something you can use it
for but that's not something that's the only use case it's certainly not you know better than any
of the other use cases i think that you know music is certainly a huge use case for it i think finance
is going to be the biggest use case for it but certainly i wouldn't say it's better than the other
creator use cases,
because some of those are going to basically provide freedom. Like, I keep thinking about
this group of people that I spoke with in Turkey, that it's a group of women who were who basically
were able to emigrate, because they had made enough money through NFTs that they were no longer trapped in
their country. Like, I just keep thinking about the fact that it provides a certain amount of
freedom from being trapped within borders. And that's not just NFTs. That's basically the idea
of being able to have freedom through enterprise that's not trapped within a particular border. And that's one of
the things that blockchain provides, right? Anything that's on blockchain that is business
in blockchain is actually something that's borderless business, which is an incredible
freedom, right? That's one of the things that I love about Bitcoin is that the value doesn't change over borders, which is so profound.
But I don't want, personally, I wouldn't want anyone to think that any use case that they
have is somehow subordinate to another use case because for them, the value that they're
able to generate is not less than or somehow not as meaningful
or not as important as another use case
that they happen to find with any of the technologies
on blockchain, whether NFT or not, right?
So this is a, it's, you know, a use case.
You wanna link your ID through an NFT?
Sure, that's a, you know, you can do that.
But, you know, also,
if you happen to generate a huge amount of sales through some version of NFTs, that's also a great
use case as well. So none of these are subordinate. Yeah, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just
saying that, you know, arts or music or any of the things that you mentioned could be represented by
networks of AI agents, right? And you being a human, how do you know that's a real human,
not an agent doing something? And that's where, you know, they will essentially complement each
other, the art being, you know, what we've done so far. And then, you know, we essentially failed,
like what you said, Alex. But I think that this time, hopefully, with the additional
supplemental, you know, technologies and guard reels, we can do better.
We can do better. We're not just extracting values from each other.
Yeah, but I think that a lot of things are coming together very nicely.
The timing is perfect.
I feel like a lot of, you know, it says a lot of positivities from nft uh community in general so hopefully we'll keep
it that way i just wanted to so i want to i want to jump in real quick sorry if i could um i feel
like you know we've been talking about for roughly an hour where nfts are today i'd really like to
pick your guys's brains on where nTs are going because the last kind of strands
that we were just talking about is kind of like where we're at today and kind of where we're going
with NFTs and I'd love just to jump into that but Kurt, well actually real quick, Tyler Faust,
thank you for joining us. Guys, just jump in, that's how you speak on this show, don't raise
your hand. Kurt, did you want to piggyback off something though before we kind of shift yeah just real quick i i think anybody sort of digging into
these ideas of like on-chain identity uh there's been a lot of people talking about like the nature
of contracts and you know these like who owns what and and and that kind of thing which nfts
solve uh in a basic sense but they don't solve
it thoroughly um and and i would i would encourage everybody to look into the work of ian grig
that's uh g-r-i-g-g he's one of the early cypherpunk guys that's been trying to work on
this sort of concept since the 90s so he he's been talking about um these things when it applied to like
david chum's e-cash potentially and like this concept of triple entry accounting but he very
specifically wrote a lot of um like conceptual premise stuff and best practices on these two
specific things so one of them is ricardian contracts. So it's essentially, here is a whole
bunch of logic that goes into how to own digital property, how to properly secure it, how to
properly and legally transfer it, and these kinds of things. And then secondarily, his work on
identity is crucial. And talking about how identity is never something that you completely and fully establish, even with like government identity and all of these things, like it is not a complete thing.
Like you essentially approach perfection in understanding who is who, but really all you have is an increasing number of attestations of identity.
You never actually get to, you know, that's definitely
Kurt. Like I can prove that's Kurt unequivocally under all circumstances because it, it, everything
is a filter, right? It's just like when you go to the DMV to get your driver's license, you need to
bring like a cable bill and a, you know, you're going to bring like three, four other forms of
ID. And so you're just taking the opinions of like Comcast and all these other things.
Like, yeah, I'm really me and I really live here.
But Ian defines a lot of this stuff.
And people ignore his work because I think they think that it's old, but it's super, super applicable.
And if you go and read it, it's also super digestible.
And I want to say that we've applied a lot of the stuff that he theorized,
we've applied in kind of the NFT space
that Gorilla Pool supports.
But also there are ways to do it
without specifically using NFT.
So you can have digital objects
that are not tokens exactly as well that can also be burned to Alex's point
about like, you know, maybe you don't want to have your identity connected to a thing forever.
And so you do kind of want the ability to like, hey, let's forget this thing happened for,
you know, maybe reasons that are, you know, maybe you're not shifty. Maybe, you know,
you've got a stalker. Like These are things that happen in real life.
And so lots of little things like that
that we have actually worked on.
And I think we've come up
with some pretty decent solutions for,
but I'd love to...
Do you have...
Yeah, go ahead.
Is this guy on X
that you could share something in Jumbotron
so that we could just follow?
Ian Grigg is super famous.
He's one of the original builders of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Yeah, it's been theorized that Ian probably was on the Satoshi team and all kinds of stuff.
He might be Satoshi, yeah.
Oh, wow. Yeah. He was on my showoshi team and all kinds of stuff yeah yeah oh wow yeah he was on my show three
weeks ago i interviewed him and we talked about a number of these topics too and i kind of drilled
into he also theorized the first um real world asset uh meme coin like this concept of using
flowers as money but like in in the vein of like tulips but but again this was going on before
bitcoin even existed this was like circa 1999 he was talking about using digital tokens of
of flowers that haven't grown yet so talking about like futures contracts on flowers and like
super smart guy really nice guy also but yeah i will will share some of his stuff on the Jumbotron
here in a minute. Yeah, I like quote him in my book on the history of blockchain.
Not to make you feel like you should know this guy, like he's super...
But you should. Everybody should know who he is, for sure.
Yeah, it sounds like it. So it so yeah you know on the weekends
i like to do reading a lot of readings where i you know brush up on white papers or catch up on
projects that people have been telling me to dd forever and so and i loved reading about uh
people and and their ideas you know like when uh when especially when uh they've've had a history of, you know,
really interesting or innovative kind of technologies
and just kind of parsing through that stuff.
So, yeah, I'd love to follow this guy.
Jake, I don't know if someone's trying to jump in,
but, Jake, I see your hand up, bro.
You don't have to raise your hand up.
You know that.
Please jump in this convo.
Yeah, can you guys hear me? Yes, can hear you now man yeah earlier there was some kind of uh issue but now
we can't yeah it was probably i was moving around i'm sure it was me um but yeah thanks for having
me up again um so i kind of want to circle back and talk about something real quick about how i
see nfts as kind of a journey right Because I think part of this conversation is getting too caught up in like what an NFT
has to be or what's going to work moving forward.
And I think that's boxing it in way too much.
So from my perspective, I got here back in 22 and NFTs are really booming off of the
cycle of coins, right?
So everyone's taking that liquidity.
We talked about that before, putting it in all these PFP projects
that have various amounts of supposed utility, future plans of utility, rising quick floor
prices and kind of dominating the social media angle in terms of content.
They kind of rise up and they've all kind of died off, right?
So that's how we're saying they're dead.
And I think what it really comes down to, in my opinion, is that last cycle was a big smoke and mirror sort of thing we kind of
boxed everything in is oh it's cute it's cool art and it's going to do something and so a number goes
up um and it's it's sold around this concept of culture of the art of building a community right
and you feel that on the timeline you see that you're in the discord all that's happening
um but i think in the reality of it a lot lot of these 10K collections, you're being fooled.
There's like this tiny chunk of people that actually believe that and are about that and are pushing that.
But the overwhelming holding of the collection itself is a bunch of degen gamblers, flippers, guys who have taken their profits from somewhere and want to ride the culture of what's being set on a timeline. I think that's overwhelmingly, as a holistic approach, exactly what that round of NFTs
was.
And I think where we are right now is a point where we kind of split into two sections.
We either believe they don't work because they quote unquote failed, or we believe they
have to evolve to work.
And on the first half, I want to say that, you know, to me, NFTs have a bunch of
different avenues. And so the second you say one kind works and one kind doesn't, I just,
I just shake my head. Like, I just think that's totally delusional. It doesn't make sense. First
of all, we have an entire universe of art, real world art and collectibles out there, massive
markets, huge amount of desire. There's no technology behind any of that, guys. It's all
number go up potentially, theoretically, and holding and bragging about what you have.
So there's always going to be that component with the NFTs, period.
This idea that there has to be more to it is just silly.
It's a digital collectible versus a real collectible.
And that will always have a market the same way real world ones do.
So first of all, that does work, can work, and will continue to work.
The problem is with it is that you actually have to have something that somebody wants.
There has to be some heart, some attachment.
There has to be an artist you care about, a visual style.
You are drawn to a message or lore behind that art that resonates with you,
a game that's attached to it, some sort of, you know,
whether it's a video game or a board game or trading cards or merchandise
or limited drops or special
event-based limited runs of things. All those things are hugely, hugely desirable to real
collectors and to real people who aren't just here trying to flip things for money.
And so for me, like when we say NFTs are dead, I think that fake model is dead. And that's where
we get stuck and obsessed on because that's where everyone's liquidity went
That's in everyone's wallets. That's what everyone thinks and then if T has to be
And I'll just end with this and then I'll move on from it, you know
As the medevix and whale I joined that collection very early on
and that collection was purely art and
art. And that culture was built over time by Ana's consistency and transparency in the space
that culture was built over time by honest consistency and
and the amount of involvement the community was allowed to have. The collection when it started
versus where it is today is wildly different in terms of the utility, the benefits, and how it
operates. And that's heavily, heavily driven, controlled, and evolved by the community itself
because Ana was open, inclusive, and wanted
to be a part of it rather than us just like riding along a journey, like wherever she takes us, we go
kind of mindset. And I think that's the problem with most NFT collections. It's kind of this buy
in and just, you know, be a fan, be a super fan, be all about us, whether we're up or down, whatever,
but you don't really get control and you don't really have any like say in anything so to speak and i think where we are right now is you know
there will be projects that are totally utility based moving forward i'm sure we've got the 404
angle which is interesting but i have yet to see it really work um there's lots of things going on
i just think as time goes on the concept of of AT is just in the gateway. Yep.
So like, and just for everyone here to know, this show is not sponsored.
If I take time with someone, it's really just, you know, my own selfish interest, like double clicking on what someone's talking about.
And we have no financial ties with, you know, actually, I don't think anyone here on the
know actually i don't think anyone here on the panel and uh but but i do want to highlight
panel.
meta vixens here because they are one of the uh strongest if not the strongest nft collection on
polygon and um you know i i like to purple peel a bit on this show you know this show's for everyone
it really is and for all of the technologies but you know i do have hold a
special place in my heart for polygon and the community is there and i'm very active and um
i i've always wanted to know more about meta vixens because i mean i have some um but you
know there's just never enough time in the day can you maybe just take 30 seconds to just talk
a little bit more about what metaa Vixens is doing?
I think you'd probably be one of the, Mr. Dude might know as well, but like, you know, you're probably one of the best people to know.
Because you guys actually are active.
You guys do things.
There's like competitions.
And yeah, maybe you could just 30 seconds or something, bro.
Because you guys as a community deserve to be highlighted.
I appreciate that, man.
I want to say right away, there are a lot of communities like this in Polygon, right?
I think Metavix is just the one that's grown the most, the fastest.
But there's a lot of similar models, similar mindsets in other collections.
Ice Girls is a great one that kind of runs the true.
It's kind of like a hybrid.
It's generative, but it also has airdrops and kind of functions in the way anna does i love their art alien buddy buds is another guy that's
very active doing auction style he actually sends you the real sketch that started the nft when you
uh win it so that's very cool but uh just to talk to the vixens real quick right so
vixens started three years ago i jumped in when they were only a few months old. The floor price was like 0.005 or something. She used to drop them in huge batches. It was
originally supposed to be a very small collection. And the hype just blew up. It was a huge group of
artists I was in. And it's just, it's art focused guys. My point is, is that like, there's not a ton
of true art collectors here, but're the the highest caliber in terms of
content engagement loyalty support and adding to the equation um and i see this like there's there's
few collections out there that kind of have this right because like we would argue most of those
collections are dead but like even with the gods with youths dead fellows whatever there's still
groups out there really driving those communities forward, even though, you know, quote unquote, floor prices and founders and et cetera, whatever else is all messed up.
But for, you know, with Meta Vixens, it's always been art.
So she's always shown the whips, the proof of how she creates the actual art, which I think is heavily enticing and important to any art collector, if that's your angle.
She has been transparent and available in spaces, showing what's going on in her life to some extent, things of that nature.
She's a collector herself, has supported a ton of artists on Polygon. We were really part of a
very tight-knit community back at the very beginning here. So many have moved on, quit,
shifted gears. It's just the nature of Web3. But it's always been art focused. It's always been
about collecting art, getting free art for holding, acquiring a certain amount of Vixens 13,
gets a custom session with Ana. To me, that's extremely special and important. As someone who's
a collector and artist myself, I understand the value in that, her allowing you to add your own
idea to her collection. Creates real ownership, creates real culture, creates
real lore, creates real lasting desire to be part of something.
And we've built very slow with that model.
And for most people in this room, it'd probably be too slow, not enough way to quickly profit,
not enough way to quantify the immediate value.
value. But, you know, I've collected all across chains the last three years. This is the only
But I've collected all across chains the last three years.
collection I could sell for extensively above the floor that I bought it at. And it's the only
collection that has consistently done exactly what it said it was going to do month in, month out
for over three years now. And that's a huge understated thing. I see Metavix and still actually selling uh consistently you know because like some people
say this is a uh nft winter or nfts are dead but you guys this collection is you know she
she has new drops and you know she's there's a good floor price and yeah i i just wanted to shout
you guys out you know because i don't want to take too much time because i don't i know a lot of people
i just want to make sure you know everyone's kind of getting their time to talk but
like i i do have to shout you guys out because uh medevix has been consistent they are one of
the strongest if not the strongest on polygon and uh and um you know from like a community and and
art kind of uh standpoint but oh it looks like metabixen's actually joined us
uh her ears were burning oh yeah good good times guys um you know i wanna i wanna jump into you
know where nfts are going you know like the technologies the the application, the use case, the utility, you know, I mean, community,
because like that shouldn't be undersold. Alex, earlier you were talking about how, you know,
there shouldn't be one use case that's, you know, it's, they're all important is basically the point you're saying and and i fully agree and and i uh i stand by that as well i think community is such an important
uh part of the nft scene because especially as the world becomes more digital and we kind of
like dive into this digital age and people don't actually,
you can see like the statistics and stuff of people becoming more lonely.
And, you know, I think community is so valuable. And it's such, and especially these digital communities
are going to play such a larger role in like,
not only like dating or friends or community you know in general uh you know it's
just going to become bigger and bigger so community is super super valuable and i think the people
that are building in the community side of nfts the art side um and get it right and stay
consistent and continue building are going to come out as kings as you know web 3 continues to swallow more of the mainstream
um which we all know it's good it's going to do but yeah what's your guys's thoughts on the future
of entities anyone can jump in oh hey uh the drop welcome to the show uh met vixens i actually don't
see her up here anymore but you know thanks for joining the panel for a second there.
And yeah, anyone want to jump in on this topic?
You don't have to raise your hand.
Yeah, one thing I was going to say, Aztec, as you were doing it, is one way I see it growing is I do think from the art perspective,
NFTs have such a low barrier of entry for artists that actually we're going to see an
explosion of art and creativity which i think is really cool like speak like plugging reddit
avatars because that's something i'm super passionate about like anyone can create an
avatar submit it to reddit and then sell it and like i know tyler's in the stage but like i first
discovered tyler's art through through NFTs and in my
office, I already have three pieces of his art. Right. But it's like, it's a low barrier to entry.
You just create art. You say it's like people see if they say, oh, that's cool. I want it.
And then you artists are really able to put out their work and get discovered in a way that
I think was much, much harder.
Traditionally, I mean, you,
if you are willing to market yourself and you're willing to literally,
I mean, it's a combination of a lot of things,
but like you could be an artist,
you could get on a space like this and just start talking and then you can grow that way.
I think that's a really cool from the art side and creative side that
NFTs really just allow.
And then I think another huge benefit
is we are actually going to see a lot fewer forgeries in art because you know who the artist
is when it's created and people who tyler has a very unique style of like a single line and maybe
he wants to talk about it but like i went into grok like, make me a single line drawing in the style of Tyler
Faust.
And it gave me something that was really hard to like, it could have been his right.
But if he launches an NFT collection, like from his, everyone knows that this is his
wallet and here's everything that launched.
Like, okay, now I know this is legit.
And if I'm a forger, like, why would I bother doing that?
Because no one's going to buy it in the first place.
So I think that's a, like, really cool use case for NFTs
is it literally prevents forgery from artists getting ripped off.
I mean, the Yuga Rider Rips case was an interesting example of that, right?
Like, copyright NFTs and how do you prove who created something?
I think community is also like what you make it kind of touching on what, on what Timmy was saying.
I think, yes, you can basically buy friends by like, you know, doing a wide range of things,
but it's honestly what you make it. Cause like I've, I've had different entities in the past
and been sort of not active in the
communities and then you don't you're not really you're not part of it right you're not part of
the discord if you buy in and then you just kind of do nothing about it and then I think there's
sort of the opposite is true where like you can literally just have a token that's worth like 40
dollars and be super active in a discord and have access to that discord because you have a token and so
i think it's really like what you make it as well like i think the word community has been like so
overused in that like nft bubble cycle but to me what it means now is it's something that's a con
it's a concept it's subjective it's something that you sort of create for yourself and it's a feeling
that you have and yeah it's kind of like
intangible value right like I think there's so much speculation in this space but I think some
folks do have put more value on those things than others like you know with with certain tokens that
they give access to things also I mean don't think small in terms of community. And this is one of the biggest problems, I think, in terms of of blockchain. Blockchain tends to think small, small and short term. And that is the wrong way to think. Right. Blockchain is long term. Also, your drop is not the end game. It's the beginning. It's like your MVP.
It's you just did your first go to market, right?
Now you've got the rest of the game to play, right?
That's the very beginning.
So think bigger.
If you're thinking community, think also what can you do?
What brings your community together? Remember that identity, this is a time where identity is super, super important. Identity is something that people are grasping for right now.
people have less and less idea of who they are, even in nationality, right? People have less and
less idea of who they are and the previous boundaries of who they are, their last name,
their city, their state, their religion, whatever. All of these things have meant that have defined them previously are disappearing.
And in AI, with the advent of AI and the loss of 80 million jobs, it's 50 percent of our jobs are disappearing with AI.
Your job as your definition, your identity, our number one identity maker in the West, that's disappearing, too.
So this idea of who are we is disappearing.
And the idea of what is your identity? Who are
you as an individual? Who are your peers? Who are the people that make you more of who you are?
That is something that we can help with, with this idea of creating community. Think bigger,
and don't think just within people who are in blockchain. Who's out there in the world that are part of your community and how can you connect with around, you have an identifier so that you build
community in the real world that connects both online and offline. Think about how you can
combine your community online with something that exists in the offline world, like who's out there
in a community or something that needs a community. Because right now the world in the non-blockchain world
is made up of buyers and users. Of those, the way to make them sticky is to make them into
communities. How can you make a community out of something that's just buyers and users, right?
What is it out there that you can make identity? Like, how can you give identity to things?
Right. And that is actually not just giving value.
Don't think about it as giving monetary value to your token.
That's giving like real value, something that's not saleable about your token.
That's giving permanence to your token.
Right. Because that's giving something that becomes then like a real like like what you think of as like the membership of, you know, that there's like a dining club in, I think, in the Cinderella Castle in in Disneyland.
You know that there's like a dinner club there and you have to be a member and like members you have to, it's like something that you inherit, right? Like people don't sell those things, but like, it's like something that you only know that
your family's a member because you inherit that membership.
And it's one of those things that it's like, it's special.
And it's something that, you know, it doesn't end up on the open market, but it's something
that's like only people who are in that know about that kind of thing, like Magic Castle
membership or things like that.
Something that's so important that whenever it actually enters the public realm, it's
like, oh my God, I didn't even know that you could get a membership to that, right?
So that's what you want is something where it's so valuable that it doesn't even enter
public membership because it is that valuable to the members of the community.
And you build the value that way
so that the value is generational.
Like that's the kind of thing that we have to think.
I think we have a big problem though in this space
because like this is not a,
like NFTs aren't Magic Castle memberships
because the Magic Castle service is already there.
It's already ready.
It's already built.
It's already released.
It already has a history of being awesome.
Like people already know like what they see is what they get.
But the problem with NFTs is a lot of it is like you buy in on a hope and dream that
something will eventually happen.
And those things often don't happen.
So like the long-term things that you're mentioning,
like, yes, those are great. Sometimes they happen, sometimes they don't. Like with Azuki,
it seems like it's happened and they've done IRL events. As much as I criticized Azuki in the past,
I will admit they've literally been having IRL events for many, many years now, like in real life, which is cool. And they're sticking around, they're building a game, whatever.
But then there's also projects like Clonex and Artifact and they shut down.
No one knows why they shut down.
Those entities were like super, super expensive.
And the reason that they were expensive was because people were making assumptions about
future things that would happen that didn't happen.
So like people weren't just buying the art,
they were buying the hopes and dreams of the future plans. And so then when those plans don't
happen, you get lawsuits like the one that we saw with, with artifacts. So I totally get what you're
saying, but I also think like, that's just like a little optimistic. Um, and the reality is, is that
a lot of these collections, um, becomes, uh, they sort of shut down quote-unquote rug or
whatever you want to call that i think they don't but you should actually also you can also build
the thing and then sell the nfts like which never do you know what i'm saying like actually actually
build the thing that you want to build you think you want to create a comic book or something, create the comic book.
Then sell NFTs to the comic book.
You want to create a location for magicians to collect?
Do the work, right?
Don't create the money grab.
That's really the entirety, honestly, of the securities issue of all the legal troubles that everybody's just fundraising is trying to get ahead of it crypto game. How are they going to get funding for that? So then they sell a bunch
of NFTs, they raise 40 million, they disappear for a couple of years. Maybe they rub, maybe they
build something. And that kind of model, I think, has to die. I just want to point out, so I know a
guy that publishes books on the blockchain. The group is called Canonic.
It's Canonic.xyz.
And I'm not affiliated other than just having a personal relationship with a guy as a friend.
But he, so what he does is he says what's coming.
And, you know, he doesn't have a lot of sales.
He's probably selling, you know, a few hundred copies of whatever book is being published on there.
He assigns it.
He calls it a BSBN number.
So similar to ISBN with the way the QR code or whatever they're called, the barcodes work and book numbering.
But he's not trying to make a ton of money.
And I mean, he would like to if somebody bought a million copies of the book not trying to make a ton of money. And, you know, I mean, he would like to,
if somebody bought, you know, a million copies of the book, he'd make a lot of money, but he's not
out there specifically, you know, saying like, Hey man, we're going to build this platform and
we're going to raise, you know, a bunch of money. And it's like, everybody kind of has this like
weird venture capital model about every single damn thing that they're up to where everybody
thinks like, well, you know, at some point I deserve to, you know, have my series C happen at Sequoia and then we're
going to have an IPO.
And it's like, bro, it's a JPEG project or something like it's not, it's just not that
interesting.
It's, it's cool.
It's not bad either, but you also don't deserve to be a billionaire because of it.
And like, if we, if we take real business and something like that,
the guy's probably sold 5,000 books or less
over the last four or five years that this company's existed.
But what he's allowing you to do is have immutable ownership
and provable ownership of a real asset.
And that real asset is the book.
And he's got a few serious writers.
He's got James Poulos and,
you know,
a couple other people that have written some,
some interesting books that are published.
They're physical copies or digital.
So it's both.
So you buy,
you,
you own both the digital token and then you take the option of redeeming the
token and receiving a physical book.
And if you do that,
you get a personal written message by the author and whatever, when you
receive the book, or you can just read it digitally and you can export that onto your
Kindle or whatever you use to read.
And so it's just a simple, honest business model that allows you to digitally keep the
book or, or redeem it for physical.
And, you know, it's just, it's one of these things where it's like, I feel like everything
I've said here is like, not that sexy, but it's also just an honest business.
And, you know, I think another example is, um, Breitling, the watch company.
Go ahead, Alex.
Wait, can I, oh, sorry, very quickly, just cause I have to go for a phone call and I, I'm so sorry.
Cause I would really love to hear your business, uh, your second, your second model.
But, um, just very quickly, um, on Tuesday, I'm doing the genius bill breakdown.
I couldn't because I had a client call last Tuesday.
That is coming up for a vote in the Senate by the end of the month.
So you want to know about this bill.
This is the stablecoin bill.
This is the second stablecoin bill.
We did the House bill.
Now we're doing the Senate bill.
So if you can, make it to this one. You can ask questions. We're going to go through that bill,
talk about the differences with the House bill. And the link is up at the top. Thank you so much,
everyone. Take care. Sorry to interrupt. Thank you, Alex, for being here. And yes,
guys, follow Alex. She does spaces and she's very, very smart. She was a securities lawyer.
and she's very, very smart.
She was a securities lawyer.
She's still a lawyer.
She worked for the SEC.
She breaks down some really complex things
in this space to follow her.
And real quick, sorry, I just want to shout out
that Hummingbird has joined us.
Tyler Fowle still hasn't said anything.
We got to get to you, have you say something soon, bro.
Guth, welcome from dad's community another
awesome polygon nft uh community uh and i think i shouted everyone out the drop uh i shouted you
out earlier i think you think but you've been talking and you have some really awesome points
um kurt yep so i just wanted to bring up another interesting example.
Counterfeit watches.
If you just take
counterfeit Rolexes, I think it's something like
Rolex sells a million
watches a year, brand new.
Secondary market's way bigger, but there's actually
10 times as many
fake watches that are sold with Rolex
branding on them.
That's crazy. i didn't know that
oh it's it's some absurd yeah i mean it's it's bonkers but um so if you look at swiss watches
in general like the average price is something like ten thousand dollars for a watch this is
like your basic entry point on getting a good swiss watch and breitling which is another company
they're actually older than Rolex, a serious company.
They, about five years ago, started selling their watches with an NFT. And so when you receive the watch, you receive a card with its QR code, and it contains a couple of things.
It contains the serial number that is etched onto the inside of the watch.
onto the inside of the watch.
And then it also retains its,
it's called cost certification,
which is basically the certification
of how accurate your specific watch is.
It is tested by a third party before it's sold to you.
And that typically you would receive
like a certification paperwork with the watch
and all of that kind of stays in your box and whatever.
But now all of that information,
all the cool provenance that you have received for 150
years from Breitling on paper now actually is is using NFT technology and when you sell that watch
you also just transfer the token with it and and you can cross verify like okay this watch is
actually this watch with this NFT you know and again it's not it's not making Breitling any extra money. There's no real hype
about it, but it actually solves the problem of the fact that there's maybe 10 million watches a
year that come from China that look Swiss. And unless you're an expert, you can't really tell.
But now you can very trivially, if you're buying a Breitling that's been made in the last five
years, you can just tap the card and say, oh, okay, yep, this one's real.
You don't need to go take it to some certified jeweler that can open the thing up and do this whole process.
You can literally do a person-to-person thing, NFC, tap to confirm, confirm that all the numbers match, and you can do a person to person deal very easily and so like
things like that and and there there's lots of other examples so like there's a company called
gate to chain that i've worked with we host a little bit of infrastructure uh for them so that
they are a customer of mine full disclosure uh but they're doing digital product passports they're
also a european company they're based in Barcelona, which for
anybody that's been in Barcelona, it's another very high fashion area of the world. And so
it's not uncommon for somebody to be walking around wearing $50,000 worth of clothing
around Barcelona. And they've got a Louis Vuitton bag and Balenciaga shoes and all these other
things. And increasingly, companies like that who have
similar problems with fakes, where it's like, okay, is this a $50 Chinese Louis Vuitton? Or
is this an actual $5,000 Louis Vuitton bag? And that technology that is underlying that to create
a digital twin that is integrated into the physical in some way, like are solving very real problems
with counterfeits.
And, you know, so again, like there are serious commercial applications of this technology
that, that really solve actual real world problems that again, are not going to make
anybody 10 X or a hundred X their, you know, their initial investment and whatever.
But I think people just need to be aware
that there are lots of other things
that you can do with the tech
that are not a massive opportunity
for a lone artist and whatever,
which I think is also a very, very cool use of the tech.
I'm not criticizing it at all.
I do it myself.
But there's also billions,
perhaps even trillions of dollars in the real economy just in provenance tracking that could be unlocked, locked down.
If you were to look into just the fraud that occurs in the global shipping industry, it's something like 25 or 30% of everything that leaves a port to go out to international shipment is stolen at some
point but if everything had uh this sort of basic tracking technology that it would cut that down
immensely because it'd say you know what this left shenzhen china and then when it landed at you know
port number two like five percent of it was missing and then at port number two, 5% of it was missing. And then at port number three, another 5% of it was missing and then whatever.
But then you could track all that down. You could reduce the fraud, which reduces
cost and ultimately makes everybody just that little bit
more profitable, which really matters when you're trying to run a global business
with a global supply chain. So just
another thought there. i love these ideas kurt
and to add some like i i want to add some before someone else jumps in um so guys in the beginning
of the show we talked about uh kind of where are nfts today and we're kind of talking about you
know where our nfts are going and and a bit about uh into some of these like concepts that are already
being fleshed out or used utilized today as well so anyone can kind of piggyback off this but
two that i found really interesting um one i'm trying to get uh uh i think it's is it trip behind
the the liquid nfts account am i saying that right bro is that is it trip
No, it's nice and
So that's all right dude. No problem at all
but um, I was telling trip
when when uh when uh
liquid liquid nfts was in in our ag from telegram chat doing a demo of
in our AgFram Telegram chat doing a demo of your guys' tech.
And I was telling Tripp, it would be so cool to see
you guys' magazine basically have the cover as the NFT art,
and then you have access to the magazine digitally.
access to the magazine digitally and using privacy uh you're able to like only the actual owner can
read the magazine and i actually got this idea from secret network i don't know if you guys have
heard of secret network but they're they are a uh platform in the cosmos that uses trusted execution environments, like this hardware, like these little black boxes that kind of protect the transaction and the information. movie nft and i'm totally blanking on the the uh indie film artist that produced it but
but basically it was like a horror film and um they they only created so many of of these uh
kind of like indie horror film uh you know in the the collection. And only people that own the NFT can actually watch it, you know,
because of the privacy technology there.
So I think these are also really interesting.
I could totally see like a different applications,
almost like Netflix or, I don't know, some big guys in the digital video space
almost like Netflix or I don't know,
kind of capturing some of this technology and utilizing it,
especially for people that are – because, like, the indie film scene is pretty big,
and then some of these guys, you know, go on to produce, you know, massive films. And so it would be awesome for collectors like myself
to be able to help fund early film and art
and things like that.
But anyways, there is so many interesting technologies
already out there and being utilized.
But yeah, anyone else want to kind of jump on maybe some of the cool technologies
you've seen in NFTs or maybe the future of NFTs? I want to touch on something Kurt said early.
He gave so much great information, but when he was talking about books, it's kind of funny. And
I would say it was a good entry point to talk to my wife who knows crypto but doesn't love crypto like I do is she she's a big e-reader and Amazon just came out and basically their Kindle devices.
And I could get the details wrong, so hopefully they don't listen to this and sue me for misinformation. But I believe they are shutting off certain features where if you buy a book from another
platform, you can't read it on your Kindle.
And like that to me is just like a really kind of crappy business decision because what's
going to happen is people are going to move to new devices.
And I'm saying like, well, if you tokenize books and like it just is a key to access
and read it on devices i think it's a
huge opportunity for someone who builds those e-reader devices to say like hey plug in whatever
nft you have like link your wallet um and you can have access to all these books and then
not only does it solve that problem but it also solves this problem where people are kind of exploiting digital books and uh i would say
abusing so it stiffs the author if you can have this function where they can use nfds authors can
sell nfds and then they can people can read it and transfer the books um i love that so like one
thing that we see in the real world of like i buy buy a book, a physical book, I read it, I love it, I give the book to my brother, and no one thinks that's an issue. The issue is like, if, but when it's digital, you prevent transfers, because then I could just transfer it to a bazillion different people, and then the author loses. But if I buy the book as an NFT, read it on my e-reader, like, it's like, hey, I really like this book, I want to give it to somebody else. They can read it, they can transfer it back to me. So you're still keeping the same number of books out there,
but it allows for this easy transfer. And like, I, Alex was talking about almost this community
feel of like, I read a book, I give it to you, you read a book, you give it to me. I'm like,
it's this really easy transfer where you're keeping the actual author uh they don't it's the same system as
real life physical books just digitally and i think if we tokenize books um we have a huge
like it's a completely untapped mark but i actually think people and use the user experience
would go through the roof um there We're actually working,
being that we have a publishing company ourselves,
we're actually working, and I completely agree,
I think it's a huge untapped market.
Audiobooks as well is a massively growing industry at the minute.
And we're in talks with publishers
and obviously to actually bring books into that NFT space.
But with the added benefit that each time one of these books is resold on,
the author gets paid again, that they earn even more.
And especially from, I think, the unique edge with that book then having liquidity in it, when you buy the book,
you always know it is not a matter that you've got to sell it for five cents later on down the line.
You go, well, here we go. We've actually got liquidity inside it.
So if I want to buy another book and I'm short on cash, I'll just burn this, redeem it,
pull my liquidity back, and I can buy another book with that.
And when you do that, the author gets paid again.
And again, the same with we're talking to documentary producers in regards to combining crypto TV into it as well.
So everything that kind of you guys are saying, I completely agree.
of um you guys are saying i i completely agree and there's so many like for want of a better word
web 2 type businesses um that could really benefit from blockchain technology and they just have the
wrong idea at the moment um about about the nft space and how they can utilize that for their own
commercial advantage yeah i'll just hop in here real quick i think it's
a fascinating conversation um but i don't think like the overall web 3 and crypto and nft world
would benefit from that right it would be some company that creates this technology charges big
book publishers a fee but how is that going to pump the value of like a gorilla or a dog NFT, right?
Like, I think it's the same.
It's not, and it doesn't have to.
I think it's the same issue that a lot of crypto is facing right now too, right?
Like everybody's piling in to Bitcoin through NFTs and stuff,
but they're like, where's the alt season?
And it's like, guys, the general public doesn't need
or doesn't want to know about all these different technologies
and layer ones and what all these altcoins do, right? Like they have their basic needs that
they need solved. And when retail and mass adoption happens, those basic needs are going
to be served first. It's not going to pump the weird stuff. It's not going to pump the cult
stuff, the click stuff. So on NFfts it's same thing is all about demand
right like same thing with like the books like i don't think your top 10 booksellers really are
worried about the whole nft technology or people like selling a book to someone else because they
already sell millions of copies because there's demand um so i just think it's funny that we
think it's a technology we think it's a that we think it's a technology, we think it's a structural, we think it's other problems other than just demand. Like art in the real world that has demand has no problem selling. There's plenty of liquidity for it. Yes, there are bear markets and like fine art and stuff like that, but it doesn't go from, you know, 50 million down to 5 million.
It doesn't go from, you know, 50 million down to 5 million.
So I just think it's interesting that we all, a lot of people try and put the onus on like the technology or how real life use cases will translate into it.
But that's not going to take all these assets and these thousands and thousands of collections that have 10,000 items in it that most of them are basically the same, but little differences,
it's just not going to carry over. So I don't think NFTs are dead in a long shot. I just think
that the companies in the projects that are going to benefit from NFTs being popular aren't going
to have any of the same problems other NFT projects have because there's actually going to be demand
for their product. If Disney came out with NFTs, for example, they would have no shortage of demand.
If Nickelodeon, if different arts, different brands, it's going to be there.
There's just no need for it yet because people don't care about transferring
like one of 10,000 different variations of Mickey to each other yet.
So I think it is fascinating.
The NFT, all that NFT technology you guys said is going to be key.
So it's trying to figure out who's going to build that technology and like what systems.
So that's what I'm kind of looking for is who's going to make the NFT technology for
booksellers or for other fine art and stuff.
But yeah, I just always think it's interesting that it's a demand problem, not a technology problem.
It's also a perception problem, right?
What do you say again?
It's also a perception problem
where big brands have launched NFTs.
I mean, look at Nike and Artifact.
There was some stuff with Warner Brothers like Hollywood Studios have done it.
I just think that their execution has been pretty bad.
I don't think like, just like even though these big brands have come into the space
that like their execution has been bad, their marketing is like pretty non-existent.
They're not marketing to the general public.
I think in part because they know that the perception,
public perception around entities is still pretty mixed bag to negative,
I would say.
So I think like there's that perception problem as well. Like, like there's this whole thing of like, Oh,
black mirror is getting a token. And, you know,
I don't think the general audience of black mirror are going to be
participating in this.
This is like a thing that they licensed black mirror for, but I think just crypto people are going to be participating in this. This is like a thing that they licensed Black Mirror for.
But I think just crypto people are going to be participating.
And they're like, oh, this is so cool.
But it's not going to onboard anyone outside of crypto.
I mean, yeah, because there's no use for the NFT.
Carry on, but I'm just saying there's no use for the NFT that was being sold.
Like when Warner Brothers was selling.
I remember the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade two years ago um had an nft that they did for it and i was just like you know was just
starting to build my first uh you know crypto project and i was like wow mass adoption is
happening a lot faster than we thought but the little nft that you got like what was there to
do with it like most people don't have like a dedicated screen in their house for digital art or something like that. So again, like if Disney made or Warner Brothers makes an NFT, if it's not
catering to something people want. Now, if that NFT also included like access to a park or something
like that, like Tomorrowland, the EDM concert company, they have an NFT and it's sold out and you can't get them hardly
because you have to own all four to get preferential treatment to buy the next year's tickets and
camping spots. There's true utility for that. And those things are expensive.
But I just think again, there's just a big mix of people that are making NFTs aren't making NFTs to serve demand.
They're making like what they think is cool.
And that really only works if what you think is cool, you know, a thousand other people think is cool.
Well, it illustrates.
Real quick, guys.
Serving demand is huge.
It's also the platforms.
We need more platforms, more developers to build things like Courtyard, for instance, where there's this really easy.
So Courtyard's on Polygon.
A lot of people know Courtyard because, you know, you can buy Pokemon cards on there.
And there's like this really cool way of like unwrapping these collections and stuff.
So I think we
also need that user experience so everything i agree with everything you guys are saying but
there's there's there also needs to be these platforms that create that utility uh and and
and have really good user experience like kurt i think you were jumping in real quick real quick
brother i want to say welcome, Maddie, much love.
Uh, can't wait to hear you jump in, throw an elbow in.
You got to do that sometimes on this show, art garage.
Welcome to the show.
God, bro, don't raise your hand.
Just jump in after Kurt.
So I just wanted to say, like, I think, you know, there's also a cultural problem.
Like, and it's actually a cultural problem in the real
old world like art community too is it's like you know guys like jay-z don't actually like
the paintings and stuff like it's just a it's a flex for the sake of the flex and then it's
also just a part of the portfolio right and the problem is is when you you democratize it down really far
like it's really easy to go get into a jpeg collection and so therefore there's like a
million of them and then it becomes really hard to figure out like what's a quality situation like
what am i not going to get rugged on because fact of the matter is is you know more than 95 percent
of them are going to rug you and so then it it attracts this sort of like predatory DGN culture, which undermines the real value creators and the real artists and the people that really do love the tech and the culture and their art and, you know, are passionate about their customers and whatever else.
And it's like that gets, you know, it overshadows things, right? And it's really
hard to break a cultural problem. And, you know, you get companies like Warner Brothers or, you
know, whoever who are like, yeah, we'll give this NFT thing a try. And I think when something like
their drop fails, it's just an indicator. It's not that, you know, well, you know, it's too
complicated or, you know, crypto is, you know, whatever know it's too complicated or you know crypto is
you know what like it really isn't it's it's the fact of the matter that most of the people that
are into this stuff are they're sort of larping about oh yeah i love the art or the culture or
the whatever and it's like no i love making money and i love making money from my computer in such
a way that i can kind of launder most of that money out and turn it into, you know, a Lambo or whatever that I want without having to pay the taxes on it.
And, and like, that's fine. There's always been those kinds of people in every economy,
but the problem is, is the tech has simplified that so much that it allows way too many people
to participate in it at once. And then you're also dealing with the competing values of people from all over the world.
So that's like on top of the people who, you know, maybe it's part of their culture to be like,
yeah, I mean, screwing people isn't even bad.
Like if I'm capable of screwing you, you deserve to be screwed.
And it's not even like, I'm not even a bad guy per my own cultural standards.
And like, so then you get all of that stuff wrapped up in it too
where it's like we don't speak the same language we don't have the same underlying cultural values
about anything so i'm not even like i'm behaving like a crook per your values but that's not even
so you have so many problems with this with this issue which is why at the very beginning of this conversation, I started
to say the art aspect of this is both great and it's also sort of a weird blanket.
Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're an art culture.
And it's like, well, yeah, but the culture of your art, like art creating culture and
culture creating art are two things that, again, have been at odds with each other for a thousand years. For as long as we've had a culture
that's like, yeah, we should have beautiful things in public places and whatever. And
anyways, I don't exactly have a point, but I'm more just illustrating that there is a problem
here. I think it gets to something super interesting around uh it's it's
less about making money and more about making things and that's what excites me about when we
talk about nft objects and culture and all of these different parts my favorite take on it is
the uh the old chestnut that nfts are a format. And like more and more these days when we say, what are we doing about NFTs?
It's like, all right, what are we doing to sell MP3s?
How's your MP3 collection looking these days?
That it's a format that can be so many other things.
And if you look at what has changed, not just in the music industry, but in ways that we consume pieces of songs and different rights to songs.
And that you can listen to certain songs while you're streaming on Twitch.
You can chop up certain songs for the videos you're seeing on TikTok.
And there's just all of these different ways that would not be captured if we said,
hey, there's this really cool MP3 marketplace that's spinning up where you can do really short cat videos and post them and
an algorithm in China puts them in front of people. So that's where I'm excited for folks.
And also, I apologize, I have to hop off shortly, though if I finish on my next call, I will be
hopping right back because this is fun. But yeah, really excited for the things that y'all are talking about on this call for audiobooks and different formats for what does some kind of online permanence mean for these different objects.
Well, and I think, you know, when we talk about mass adoption, too, like you make another really good point that these have always been niche communities, right?
these have always been niche communities, right?
Like even the really big versions of things that get collected,
like your Pokemon cards or magic, the gathering or, or, you know,
whatever, like,
it's not the kind of thing where every house on your block has a similar
collection.
Like maybe one guy collects classic cars and maybe another guy collects
rocks and another, you know, gal down the street collects,
you know,
whatever her niche thing is.
And like,
it's not one of those things where it's this ubiquitous,
like,
okay,
like bust out your a hundred thousand dollar collection of this cool thing.
Like,
it's just not actually a thing that lots and lots of people participate in,
in a monolithic way,
but the niche is part of why it's cool.
It's just for Warhammer 40k. Exactly. is part of why it's cool collection is just for warhammer 40k exactly but that's why it's cool like there's something cool about being part of a niche
community too like that's part of the major appeal
oh hold up natty did you did you did you did you ever play warhammer because like i always wanted
to play that i like i don't know what it draws me to oh man okay I was gonna ask you. I view Warhammer is the it's the yacht
racing of nerd hobbies it's it's what you go into when you want to just like
drop a conspicuous amount that nobody else can really relate to though one of
my hobbies is watching six-hour lore videos on Warhammer 40k because I know
how to party. Good times good times I was gonna grill you on warhammer 40k because i know how to party good times good times i was gonna
grill you on warhammer but i guess i can't um next time i wanted to you'll have to let me
you'll have to let me jump oh hey jumping in yeah yeah yeah so you haven't said anything
go ahead jump in bro oh mate you'll have to excuse me sorry guys i i've got an acquired brain injury so i find it
really hard to jump in mid-conversation and just pick up on you know all the changing topics we
we seem to get very sidetracked very quickly um which is a great thing because it means that the
conversation's rolling and all those sort of things. It just doesn't suit me.
So I just wanted to swing things back a little bit to the Polygon NFT culture.
I entered the Polygon NFT scene probably, you know, three, three and a half years ago,
very similar to Timmy.
Shout out Timmy, one of the dad's OGs from the original free mint collection.
You know, Jake as well.
I've watched a lot of what's been happening with Metavixens and a few other collections and things that he's been doing some graphic design work with.
And, you know, Jake's just a creator.
I can see that.
He likes to create.
He likes to talk about things he's passionate about.
The same with Timmy.
NFTs led me on a learning path with Polygon.
So NFTs turned into DeFi, turned into, you know, tokens, tokenomics,
wanting to really understand a little bit more about how these things work
and all these sort of things.
Unfortunately, what I've experienced in the Polygon NFT ecosystem
as such over the last couple of years, you know,
Utes was migrating over.
A lot of collections migrated over after the Luna collapse.
And then we saw basically a change in the market, a change in the meta as such, and we saw a huge extraction of value from a lot of these collections, a lot of the mints, a lot of founders minting collection after collection after collection with promises of the next thing. And I think the culture needs a little bit of a reset.
Obviously, Polygon has pivoted away from that side of things.
It's very focused on the DeFi, stable coins,
you know, what's coming with the ag layer.
So I think there needs to be a little bit of a reset
amongst the ecosystem of all these, you know, giga brains that have got up here and spoken today.
I'm certainly not one of them.
I'm just a regular sort of dad that believes in crypto, believes in the technology.
And I just, yeah, I'll leave it there.
I think that, honestly, Gus, that's what we're going through my take on you know i haven't
really contributed to the the earlier conversation about where are nfts today and
um i think that's actually where we're at we are going through a reset people say it's a
nft winter some people say say NFTs are dead,
but I think we're going through a reset.
I think that there are really brilliant people
working on some of the stuff that Kurt was talking about
and some of the ideas I was talking about.
Many people were talking about some really cool stuff
that's being developed.
And I think that in this next kind of leg of the bull market i believe we're
still in a bull market that these technologies are going to kind of rise up there's going to
be new leaders there's going to be new kind of uh uh metas and and i also believe that ip will
also believe that IP will, especially the very strong IP or more art centric kind of NFT collections
are going to, especially if they've been active and they have a community behind them,
are going to make it really big in the next leg, especially as more capital flows into the Web3
scene. But yeah, I think we are kind of going through a reset where
essentially everyone's trying to figure out what is the next steps for nfts because nfts are not
dead and a lot of people are experimenting with the technology there's plenty of uh really cool
use cases that are like building steam.
And so I think we actually are going through a reset.
It's just that there's really going to be a need for leadership in this category where the kind of like talking heads kind of guide you know where nfts go as well you know in certain platforms
uh maybe like a magic eden or or someone that kind of help um it's it could even be newer platforms
that just have you know a new meta or a new kind of use case or utility uh value that they bring
and i think these guys that that come out are going to kind
of shape the next leg of this nft kind of uh movement yeah 100 i agree i agree with that um
that sentiment and i i think you know when we talk about culture i I think what I've seen with Polygon is there's a much more mature audience.
It's much more focused on the long-term vision rather than the short-term
just flipping JPEGs and things like that.
So thanks, mate.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for the invite.
Loved all the takes, by the way, guys.
It's always good to listen to you know some strong opinions
within the space either way for or against can i just say um just touching on something that you
said earlier and kind of like you was half apologetic and like look i'm not a giga brain
i'm just a dad and i'm an investor and i think that's where a lot of this space misses
it's people like you that should be listened to it's this the whole investment side of this
it is people average joe that is investing in that's putting their hard-earned money
um and when people are saying like i'm sick of consistently investing in nfts and watching
them go down they're the people that should be listened to and it should be those kind of
kicker brains as you put it that go and go right that's what the that's what the demand is this is
what people want we should now go out and build this we should offer it to
these people and then you've got an insanely successful company i want to touch on a little
bit that and then like with the average person and then a little bit what hummingbird was saying
about um like the tech versus the demand and i think it actually don't think it's one or the
other i think it's both and i think one of the you know we don't think about it as tech versus the demand. And I think it actually don't think it's one or the other. I think it's both. And I think one of the, you know, we don't think about it as tech, but the idea of account
abstraction, and you said it earlier, as tech, when you were talking about courtyard, the reason
courtyard is so successful is you actually don't even need to know how to interact with the
blockchain to use it. And we need a lot more platforms that abstracts everything out for the average user
um and like one point i kind of disagree with it but i don't think it's going to be a platform
like magic eden or openc or like these aggregators i think projects are going to have to have their
own marketplace because users aren't going to want to go to six different websites to figure out how to mint an NFT on
one site, like join a discord here, sell it on this platform, use it on this fourth website.
Like that's not a great experience at all. We're going to need a lot more account, like sign up
with your, um, like simple wallet and just be done with it. And I think that's got yet even email.
I mean, I think, um, like actually, even email. I mean, I think like,
actually that's courtyard. I mean, Reddit has it too. Like you create your Reddit account,
they set up your wallet for you. And I think that's really where that mass adoption is. And
I think that's where the tech needs to be focused on is that user experience. Because I mean,
we have brilliant developers, but developers and like the people that are great at that aren't
designers and I think there needs to be this marriage between the two where we have this
like beautiful user experience and I think that's one of the and that goes for all of Web3 not just
NFTs but I think it's really easy to see with NFTs because there is we show their weather demand
it's just people couldn't get on as easily as they would want to.
I like that.
I mean, even credit card.
What do you think?
I mean, I used to be part of Avalanche or Avalanche,
and then we launched credit card and then saw the adoption went up dramatically.
I think something that is just so simple that folks are used to,
like my grandparents, for instance for instance i mean it's a
a random uh a plug but i had them they're in their 60s and then i had them create their first ever
non-custodial wallet um aida a few weeks ago so i mean just you know someone who is old, I guess a boomer, whatever that they are used to, we should put that as the front end,
right? Because that's what mass adoption will happen. Use the front end that most folks are
used to. The back end will work on it, right? The infra is where we need to spend more time,
but the front end can be anything. And I think that that's where like,
we should stop using all these jargons.
We should start using utilities even like I say utility
and then my grandparents asked me, what is that?
Is it electricity? What do you mean, right?
So I think we should just really ensure that,
I think there's a bit of an ego there that as a community, we want to use these fancy
terms, but at the end of the day, it's hurting us. That's huge. That's a point I've been trying to
make for years. And the reason is that you use big words because it helps insulate you as a
consultant. And I say this as somebody who makes a significant amount of my
money doing consulting, but I tend to show up and talk to the kind of people who write my checks
and be like, hey, look, if they use like three big words an hour that you don't understand,
like they're trying to confuse you because truly like very little about any blockchain technology
is actually novel in and of itself.
It's more the way that things are stacked together
that even makes it new in the first place.
And again, it's a cultural problem.
And I think it's based on the fact that a lot of people
really are here under the guise of disruption
or I like art or I like, you know, whatever.
Like it's here's here's this thing I'm selling you that's on the pamphlet.
But what I actually want is your money.
And so it's it's it's a difficult one to solve.
And you actually see this with emerging technology all the time.
Right. Like anytime somebody comes up with a new concept that they know people are going to be confused about,
then there's going to be a certain number of scammers
that show up to try to make money based on that.
But then secondarily, the problem with this tech is,
A, it's global, and B, it's really easy to use
if you have a basic understanding of like internet technology.
And so it's democratized the scamming.
And so that it just makes the problem that much bigger.
And so I think we need, well,
we need a lot more people that are honestly making tools that,
that give people simple access to simple things that don't have, you know,
some massive monetary upside.
Now, again, that's a silly thing to say to a business person.
It's like, well, if you can make a million dollars this month, why would you make five
grand this month instead on your silly local business model?
But it's sort of like my examples earlier about publishing books as NFTs.
And those books are just like, they're cool because they're books.
You're not going to flip it for 100x. It's a book, get the value out of the book, which is to read
the book or, or the provenance of your, of your, you know, Breitling watch on the Ethereum blockchain.
Like, yeah, you know, like simple things, but people just need to kind of slowly adopt those
kinds of simple things or digital twin. Like here, I I'm gonna sell you this salmon for 12% more
than I would have sold it because I can prove what water it came out of because it has a digital twin
on the blockchain so we just need real entrepreneurs and real entrepreneurship to adopt this stuff and
and make it practical for people and and that's easier said than done but that is the actual
solution so I actually I've been on this call for close to three hours i i gotta run um i gotta say thank you for rocking with us for for nearly
three hours bro and honestly love love your takes i love uh that uh you you can speak to the technical
side but also the uh you know just the general side of things as well. And we didn't get to jump
into the, the, the Bitcoin side of things, you know, ordinals, that was one thing I wanted to
dive into. So we have to have you back, you know, so we can talk a fresh one. I'd love to have that
be the main topic and go hard on it. So let's, let's make it happen. Much love. And thanks again,
everybody. Appreciate it. Talk soon. Talk soon, brother. Hope you have a good weekend. I have to so let's let's make it happen much love and thanks again everybody appreciate it talk soon
talk soon brother hope you have a good weekend i i have to shout out rock zacharias what's up man also luke uh what's up man dude we should talk nfts and gaming because that i think
gaming is going to be one of those categories that brings in a lot of mass adoption.
And we haven't even touched on that side.
It does, you know, there's a lot of synergies between NFTs and gaming.
So I'd love to get your take as well.
But real quick, Rock, can you hear me, bro?
Are you just here showing your face or can you talk?
Are you at a party?
I'm here.
What are you doing, man?
I wish. No. you talk or you had a party i'm here i wish um no um laying a bit low for the night i think i'm
gonna skip tonight's festivities have an early breakfast tomorrow uh with a bunch of the bit
angels city leaders from around the world but yeah i'm out here at dub, token 2049. And it has been a very eventful week, a very exhausting and intense week.
Yeah, where should I start?
So we had a BitAngels and Polygon-sponsored event with Tech Tuesdays.
So a combined BitAngels Tech Tuesdays polygon event.
That was pretty cool.
We had, I think, 10 projects pitch.
I think four or five of them were polygon projects or polygon grantees
or projects that were wanting to.
And then there were another couple that were projects that want to come to
polygon.
We had, let's see, Michael Turpin spoke, Sandeep spoke.
I got to interview Sandeep.
Maybe we could get some footage of that on Twitter somewhere if it's not
already up.
But that was really fun.
It was like a quick maybe 15-minute, like me interviewing him.
We didn't even sit in the chairs we
just were standing and everyone's you know around it was a very like high energy kind of uh interview
um but yeah who else we had uh brock pierce spoke at that and jamie the founder of wall street bets
and and some others um let's see Last night, we had an event with...
I was hanging out with Mario last night.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was hanging out with Mario.
Did any of that make it to social media?
I posted about just LDA bros being out making a big move in Dubai.
It's a picture of you and Shane and Mario.
Nice.
Nice. What was that, Darren?
You're just wearing socks
in all the photos that I've seen. Only socks.
Nice. Nice.
You got the
uncensored stuff.
Actually, the name of the party was uncensored.
Mike Tyson was there.
Brock Pierce.
Mario Nafal.
The Tate brothers were there.
It was pretty awesome.
The VIP area was pretty cool.
I think it was the fanciest food, like hors d'oeuvres and drinks and things I maybe have ever seen at any party I mean they
were bringing uh I don't even know if I can pronounce it properly is it faux gras or fro
fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo thank you thank
you I knew someone would get it uh but they were bringing foie gras uh like little um ice cream cone little mini ice cream
cone things around and uh oysters and it's not often i'm at a club where i'm eating a lot of
seafood you know hors d'oeuvres but i kept going for all the seafood oh there were these little
mini duck set like peking duck sandwiches oh my god it was incredible making myself hungry
sounds like a really awesome week, man. I can't
wait to hear more of the details, you know, cause there's some stuff I want to pick your brain about.
And it's really exciting because I know for, for those of you that might not know,
Rock has a lot of titles. He's very accomplished person, but he is the CEO at Lunar Digital Assets.
That's the venture studio that I'm at as well.
And I can't wait to hear what you guys cooked up over there.
Yeah, man.
Been talking to some really, really incredible projects and just some great people.
Yeah, for those who don't know, Mario, myself, and Scott Melker,
the Wolf of All Streets, and potentially a couple others.
We have offers out to a couple other really big names,
but we're starting a new Twitter Spaces show
that will be writing checks live on the air.
It should be pretty fun.
Polygon will be participating in that,
either through grants or investments to projects and uh we have several other chains uh that are signed up for this um
near and uh some others that i uh yeah i probably shouldn't be mentioning so much so early but
anyways yeah that's gonna be a fun show but, I've run into just some really incredible projects out here in Dubai.
The level of talent here is really good.
I talked to this project last night for like maybe two hours before we went to the party event.
So we were at a DNA fund event, DNA and IBCCJN, before we went to the big party.
And I talked to this project for like two hours that
is like an iteration of lightning network, but without like a lot of the baggage of lightning
network. And I'm, I'm a huge fan of lightning network. I was one of the first, um, lightning
network nodes. And, uh, but it's always been like kind of an uphill battle. We haven't gotten like
great adoption on it. It's, It's consistently growing, which is awesome.
And there's countries that use it.
But I think there's been some friction in this team.
Actually, interestingly, the founder of this team was one of the lead devs at Polygon for Polygon Edge and early CDK.
And now he's building this cool lightning network,
like iteration that seems very interesting.
But anyways, yeah, it's just been a really,
really great time out here,
meeting with really talented teams.
That was exciting, brother.
Can't wait to talk about it more, you know,
behind the scenes.
And I'm glad you're doing good.
And, you know, good luck on the rest of the trip out there.
Thanks for being here and
catching up man it was uh it's good to hear your voice but uh yeah i was actually i was listening
to most of the show um but just pretty busy so wasn't really able to talk but wanted to
jump on here i know you prompted me a couple times to come give an update from dubai so yeah
yeah awesome awesome i'm glad we made it happen it's this has been a
really great space we got 10 minutes left guys uh you know in the beginning so if you guys maybe
missed the beginning this is one of those shows you might want to go ahead and listen to the
recording because um it was really interesting a lot of uh really interesting points were made
especially about you know where nfts are today a lot of people think that nfts are dead but if you listen to this show you will definitely
find out that uh nfts are not dead and uh we also kind of broke into you know the future of
the technology and where this uh nft kind of space is going i uh rock i don't know if there's anything
else you want to conclude on or but um well just one point well one point about i don't know if there's anything else you want to conclude on or but um well just one
point well one point about i don't know if we touch i mean we kind of touched on this that
nfts aren't just jpegs you know we did you guys did talk about that but i don't know if i heard
like specifically going into how how much nfts will be used in rwas did we talk about that at all we just kind of touched it
like lightly but uh what was there you you want to discuss that for the last 10 minutes
sure i mean um generally i think there's going to be a lot of rwas that will use NFT infrastructure and, you know, token standards, um, for all this RWA stuff. I
mean, there will be some RWAs that will be fungible, but probably if I had to guess, most
RWAs will not be fungible, right? So like if you have, or there'll be like semi-fungible,
as in, you know, if you tokenizedized an apartment complex there may be a hundred or a
thousand or a million kind of shares um but there's you know now you have a hundred or a thousand
apartment complexes that you know a company may issue so they're kind of like i guess semi-fungible
in a way um and maybe you'll use things like i know we had on earlier uh are
still here it looks like like liquid nfts or you know other weird kind of new ways of doing nfts
for this rwa stuff i mean like property deeds um what else um what other kind of rwas would you want i mean like so i think royalties i think
royalties rock are gonna be a big thing for uh for nfts uh royalty interests in music and tv
and even minerals and stuff like that i think will be pretty cool yeah definitely um i liked earlier we we mentioned the watches so i there were several times in the
show where i wanted to jump in but i wasn't on stage so i couldn't jump in i left a couple
comments but like one of them you know you guys were or maybe it was um um i forget uh who but
someone was talking about uh watches and, you know, and I thought.
That was correct.
Right, right, yeah.
And that was something that Kevin O'Leary was really big on.
And I think, was it his WonderFi?
Was that his project that was doing that?
Like attestations for luxury watches, basically.
at test stations for, uh, luxury watches basically. Um, but yeah, I liked the stuff
earlier on the organic or like the different food, uh, supply chain stuff. I mean, organics,
like it feels kind of crazy when you first hear this, like, oh, we're going to track where the
food comes from and which fishermen caught the salmon and stuff. But in reality, I mean,
if you care about your health and you want to know that what you're
eating is, you know, organic or whatever other thing, non-GMO or something, if you care about
that, um, then is, wouldn't it be nice if you knew it was actually organic and not just like
someone slapped an organic fake tag on it and is selling it at a premium um for some people that would they
would pay even more like they already pay more for organic and they don't even know if it's organic
you know cindy and i joke about this all the time like all this organic food she's buying it might
not even be or i bet you only a percent of it is organic it's probably fake right well it's like a
different definition like it doesn't necessarily mean what you might think
it means with free range chicken. It just means that they're in a barn, but they're still crammed
next to each other. It doesn't mean that they're like running around in a grassy field. I think
you're super right though. I mean, like I think something with the diamond industry, like I would
love to be able to track exactly where a diamond came from every single gemstone because like the fair trade
stones are actually very difficult to track they sort of source them from multiple places around
the world lump them in together and uh yeah it's very difficult to verify that a diamond is actually
fair trade um because it may not be and basically some Canadian diamonds are getting like I guess
laser engraved
and that's how you're able to track them, which I think is really cool. But yeah, like it's another
huge market as well. Just like the food that you're mentioning. And isn't the risk, but then
don't we just move the risk? Don't we just move the, the fraud and the risk to just another
section, right? Cause like, let's say I'm a diamond miner, and I just certified that this was a fair trade diamond, even though I used 10 slaves to get it.
Same thing with organic. I mean, so again, we would need all these bodies of regulators or
like add testers that we go and inspect. So I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's a, I think the
technology is good, but you could still just scam the whole system. You just have to scam at the beginning rather than at the end so how do we i think it becomes harder to scam
though right yeah we slowly we slowly add more pieces to make it harder because right now it's
pretty simple you just buy a bunch of stickers from like some like i don't know china company
that say organic and you just slap it on i mean that's the easiest way to scam right
also something i've been wanting to say this this is something absolutely crazy but like there's actual laws like in the united states that uh allow like meat producers to say that they're organic, but basically they will buy cattle from some ranch, you know, for pennies on the dollar.
And this cattle, you know, their whole young lives could have been full of, you know, shot up with hormones and was in poor conditions. But the law allows them to say they're organic as long
as they buy them in the last five weeks of their life, bring them to their ranch and have them
grass-fed and eat organic stuff and treat them right. And then as long as they slaughter them
at that point and then sell you the meat, they can say it's organic,
you know, that it's grass fed or whatever in the last five weeks. And so you're absolutely not
getting what is advertised. So if you have that technology, you'd be able to go maybe back to
where the, you know, the calf was born, where it was, you know, born, what type of conditions,
what farm, you'd be able to, you know, obviously,
you'd hope there'd be some type of user interface that oversimplified this and made, you know,
the journey very easy to understand and verify that, you know, you're actually getting what
you're paying for. Because honestly, a lot of people are not getting what they pay for in,
you know, the general general market, supermarket.
And if you care about your health or you care about what you're eating
and things like that, being scammed.
So this technology would be awesome.
How do we solve for the initial person?
The initial person could just put all the –
they're just going to type stuff into a user interface and say,
okay, this cow was born in Washington.
I fed at this.
I fed at this.
So the NFT or the blockchain always says it was
that. How do you still verify the person that created that entry on the blockchain that that
was the truth? So of course, people are always, if there is money to be made, people are going to
scam, right? It's like earlier, I think Kurt talked about the 10 times the amount of Rolexes
than the real ones, the fake ones,
of course, people are going to try and it'll be a bit of an arms race, right? You know, we'll,
we'll make solutions to catch these things. And then some criminal or fraudster will try to find
a way to trick it. But if you at least have, right now we have no track record. We don't know
anything. We just, it's a sticker, right? So as far as I know, maybe there's, there have, I'm sure they have some stuff in place, but if at least you had someone said,
oh, we, you know, had this cow here at this farm and then, you know, some citizen journalist or
some regulator or some concerned citizen goes and checks out, is there, is, does this farm exist?
concerned citizen goes and checks out is there is does this farm exist is there is there actually
cows at this farm are they you know or someone that works at that farm says hey they're lying
this is you know they could you know be a whistleblower there would be at least some kind of
track record to go back and look at right now we don't have that you just created a whole new job
occupation of uh of source supply chain source investigator um a new job you just created a whole new job occupation of uh of source supply chain source investigator
um a new job you just created i mean but think about it now that might seem like bloat to a
libertarian like myself or something you know but but it is in fact people would pay more for this
stuff i would pay more for something if i knew with a high degree of certainty that it was actually organic,
I would pay more for it than I pay for my probably fake organic shit. So there, if there's money to
be made in that and people do care about their health, we spend more money on health, uh, and
like drug pharmaceuticals and stuff as part of that, unfortunately, but just generally we spend
as societies, you know, evolve evolve we spend a lot of money
on health and so there's there's a market for this i think 100 oh yeah big mark i know tons
of people that would be very interested in this i know we're at three hours guys we usually close
up here but uh two cent timmy um i i just want to you know thank you for being here from Polygon. And also, all the help that you do on the show behind the scenes,
Darren's very instrumental, Nerd Girl, Marshall,
just shout out some names behind the scenes that make this show possible.
We're not sponsored.
We just like to create a platform for everyone to be able to speak.
But I just want to shout you out, Tusan and Timmy.
I know you probably got to go.
It's the end of the show.
Anything you want to say?
This was a lot of fun.
I mean, I think I do say it was a great conversation,
and I do think it's really fun to hear people talk about NFTs
and not in the, like, I mean, yes, the artwork is part of it,
but it is just like a tiny sliver of what the potential is.
So I really appreciated everyone here and their insights and it was a bunch of
fun, but I'll, I'll catch you guys next week.
Much love, bro. Much love. And, and also I'd like to talk to Irina,
cause you joined right at the end.
We didn't really have enough time to talk to you.
Do you want to close us out with some last words?
Hi, everybody. Greetings from Talking2049. Yeah, it's a bit intense here, but really great to
catch up with everyone. And also kudos to Mario's VIP team of yesterday. I think we should get a telegram chat going or something were you there yeah yeah nice did we did we talk or see each other or meet or
anything I was wearing a blue suit did you get in the VIP area or the regular area? I was behind the DJ, so I missed the videos.
Fun.
Some alpha
is dropping.
Going back to the
topic today, are NFTs
dead? Actually, I just
right now, 20 minutes
ago, I was at a great
event with Animoca
and Tone Ventures.
And it's very interesting how you can ask five people in a room from different industries
and verticals like a VC, an artist, NFT platform developer, musician, and retail investor. And everyone will give you a very different answer
about what an NFT is and is it dead or alive.
The conclusion is that NFTs are alive.
They're very alive in gaming.
And actually considering that the gaming industry is in decline,
slight decline, the crypto side of it, the Web3 side of it, is very resilient.
So the investment that is flowing into Web3 gaming...
You're saying that gaming in general, globally, non-crypto, is in a decline?
Exactly.
Oh, wow.
That's what Yatsu just said.
Yeah, that after pandemia in the past three years, gaming industry was in a decline.
I was very surprised myself to hear that.
But those are the facts.
And in the Web3 space, we all talk about, you know,
gaming actually growing.
And we see chains like Mythical.
We see Pidgeot Penguins.
We actually see, you know, lots of collections launching on Polygon.
Polygon actually is one of the most resilient chains and it made, you know, big waves in 2021.
There were lots of wonderful artists and collectives.
I worked with a great team based in Barcelona in Spain.
And Polygon, like there are infrastructures that are already kind
of solidified themselves in the space and ecosystems that yes, this is the place for
NFT because of performance, because of the speed, because of the cost of transactions,
because of accessibility, et cetera.
We like to criticize ourselves as an industry, but the facts are that we are doing fairly well.
Then if we move into RWAs, there are actually here in Dubai, many conversations are actually
about gold tokenization.
And there are some OG teams.
Yesterday was a fantastic line at launch of Gemton chain.
They have been in the RWA space for seven years,
tokenizing Ferraris and assets like gold based in Switzerland.
So, you know, working with this really, really traditional funds,
asset management firms.
And the biggest challenge is, of course, regulation, legislation,
legal processes. I'm personally a big fan of real estate because my background is architecture and
urban planning. We're still very early there. But once we have the right regulation in place,
the right legal sandboxes in place, which is already happening
in the UK, for example. There are several teams successfully tokenizing real estate in the condition
of a legal UK sandbox, like Excavate, and they just launched an infrastructure. They launched
partnerships with real estate companies. And in general, thanks to what is happening right now in the US and this you know
narrative around digital assets favorable legislations and Bitcoin becoming a strategic
reserve we're also seeing a lot more acceptance of digital assets outside uh of the crypto traditional crypto space and in the
in the industries that are not easy to disrupt such as real estate because i personally was
involved in real estate tokenization back in 2020 2021 and the narrative we had you know um
closed doors meetings with some of the top real estate companies in the UK
back in the days,
and they were interested, they were curious,
but they were willing to do something for PR and headlines,
but were very, very hesitant
even to go into stage of a pilot and a sandbox
and try to push regulators for, you know, enabling
actually a real case of real estate tokenization, maybe one building, maybe introducing a loyalty
program or something like that. And yet, fast forward five years, we see the same country, UK,
opening a regulatory sandbox. So I'm on the positive side of things.
You know, after talking of being in Dubai for the last three weeks, also the AI Summit,
Art Dubai, actually Art Dubai, two cents here was a fantastic event for digital art.
And the section of digital art was top.
It was like all nft artists it was very dynamic the representation was very interesting it was full of people a lot of interest from
collectors and also they did a digital summit with talks from um primavera de Filippi with plant toys, you all know that, and some new names in the industry.
So generally speaking, I would say that I'm very bullish. I'm on the bullish side of things.
And I see the progress that we've made as the industry in the past five years and maybe when it comes to nfts are that dead narrative uh I could
only support that if we bury nft as a as a tool as a name as a tool for mass adoption and onboarding
people uh for a simple reason that there were lots of you know unfortunate drops um n NFT drops in the past, so people got burned.
So, you know, and many companies stepped, took a step back and said,
okay, we're not going to mention the name NFT.
We're going to create our value proposition based on our product.
And we're going to pitch, not that, you know, buyft and you have real ownership no own this digital piece of art
and trade this digital piece of art and the whole narrative is being built around the value the
platform or the companies offering to their customer without mentioning nft uh as a name or as a software or means of technology, because not every single time we need to know,
you know, if you compare this with an airplane, right?
Like we don't ask ourselves what the airplane is built off or what engine it uses.
We just get on the airplane because we're interested to, know depart from point a and arrive to point b
so the same people are interested in collecting the digital artwork um storing it securely
with the potential to either uh pass it on to the next generation or to sell it with a profit
or to to keep it um as an asset and collateralize something around it.
So, these are my two few takes.
Yeah, I really appreciate your takes, especially from the ground there in Token 2049.
And, you know, kind of really interesting to hear so many people are talking on the ground,
still passionately about the technology, the future, and the utility.
So I really appreciate you taking the time to be here, Irina, and share with us.
Much love, Rock.
Thank you for your takes in Dubai as well.
And Irina, we have to get you back on the show because obviously, you know,
we only got to talk to you for the last couple minutes of the show.
Technically, we've been going over three hours, guys.
The show is, we're done here.
I got to run to another call.
But I really love this conversation.
I didn't think that we were going to get this much bullish kind of conversation around NFTs.
And I've been through the technology and the future of nfts as much i actually thought
people were going to be a lot more pessimistic about this uh topic but um i'm really happy that
there is a really bright future for nfts based on did we talk though and i know i know we're
supposed to wrap up here but just really quick did we talk about I don't want to open a can of words but like our and our JPEG like is the JPEG
era of you know 10x 100x you know these kind of art things that'll like moon is
that dead so we did yeah we did lightly but you know my take there is it's i think we're in a winter i think that
will just come back alive stronger actually than previous little uh nft bull runs um because as
As the cycles kind of go in crypto and money flows in, people want to show off or they want to buy cool art or they want to join a great community.
And so I think that's just going to there's going to be another boom again in JPEGs, as you call it.
But I don't know if anyone else has any other takes.
I also want to shout out Mr. Burns for being here. here bro you join when i'm trying to shut down the show and now now i feel like uh
that we got to talk a little bit about this um rock i don't know if you want to because i i kind
of i gotta go for another uh call that i have i can stay for a little bit and talk i can stay for
a few yeah i can stay for a few i have people trying to get me to go to events right now,
but I'm leaning towards not so I can get up early for my breakfast.
We'll see.
Maybe I get lured out.
There's so many events and parties.
Aztek, shout out, man.
Seriously.
Yeah, man.
Much love.
I wish I didn't have to go, uh i do have a call right now so
i feel bad um i just want to say the very minute you were unplugging nice yeah hey much love
everyone great to be on the show thank you to everyone that makes this go you know quick swap
rock you know being a rock behind the show. Darren, Marshall,
Nerd Girl,
and there's, you know,
Two Cent Timmy was on earlier.
Much love to you all.
Much love to our community, everyone that shows up here every Friday. We do this every Friday
with Polygon.
The show's for everyone, so
invite your friends. Glad you're all here.
I hope you all have a great weekend.
Mr. Burns, take it away.
I'm going to hop off.
Later, brother.
So I just wanted to actually, like, first off, before talking about defenders at all,
Rock's last question about, you know, are we going to see JPEGs, you know, continue to do those 10X and 100Xs?
And my hot take on that is that utility, like like so i came to web3 because of utility i started
buying nfts because like i saw gamification but i mean the utility of your money going up
well no no i'm just kidding yeah but but like but now you know i think that that ultimately like if
i'm buying a jpeg i want to buy something that does something.
Like that automatic chart go up machine.
I hope that that kind of dies a little bit.
I hope that people are investing in a smarter way and that there is an actual value prop behind what they're buying.
Because it makes the whole ecosystem healthier ultimately so
you know like if nfts are minting at five bucks or 50 bucks and they're popular and it's popular
because there's utility and because like there's a reason and it's not just hype machine i think
that like you know that it's really easy to see valuation go up pretty quickly.
I mean, I'm seeing across the industry.
Right now, it's weird.
It's like kind of bittersweet where for so many years, I thought that our industry had way too much,
what's the word I'm looking for?
I guess kind of hype, you know, when, when the market would,
you know, every bull run, and this is my third cycle now, every bull run, we just have everything
kind of almost non-discriminately go up together. And I always like, yeah, it was nice. We've made
a lot of money, but you those times, seeing lots of things.
I mean, just LDAs, like projects we incubated in the last bull run, we had, I don't know, at least three or four projects do 100Xs.
Like QuickSwap did a 2000X and Polygon did a 350X.
And let's see what else.
Persistence did, I think, like a 75X, and et cetera.
So, you know, it's nice, and those were good projects,
but you have a bunch of other shit that's complete garbage going up too,
and I always thought it was not the most healthy way for an industry to build
or for any kind of business model or world to build.
So now we're seeing the total opposite,
which is it's very hard for projects to fundraise right now.
If you're in the fundraising game, you know.
It's rough out there.
It's dry.
I mean, like I put a tweet out actually last quarter
about the third quarter of Q4 being one of the lowest fundraising quarters in history of crypto.
And then things started to pick up again.
And now I think it's even worse now.
But projects, people are investing, angels, VCs, and funds.
They are investing, but they are very, this is if the
word's discriminatory now, uh, they are only investing in very specific things that are
really high likelihood of success. And I think there's like some benefits to that. I think it,
it really tightens up the industry. It really makes people have to build real stuff.
really tightens up the industry.
It really makes people have to build real stuff.
And I think it'll loosen up though,
as another point,
I do think it'll loosen up.
I mean,
the fact that our industry like Bitcoin is at,
you know,
98 K and,
interest rates are at like four and a half,
We've been quantitatively tightening and the whole world's liquidity and capital
has really dried up.
Um, a lot of fears with tariffs and all has really dried up um a lot of you know
fears with tariffs and all this it's been going for you know i don't know a year two years now
of liquidity drying up um but i don't know there's some benefits to us being like more
serious as an industry and not just funding every garbage thing that walks into the door
every garbage thing that walks into the door.
And I mean, that's reasonable.
It's smart.
Like, how is it possibly sustainable to just keep on?
How is it sustainable when we think about the optics toward, like, normies who are onboarding?
Like, they're coming in with the expectation that every single thing they're going to buy is an apple, right?
Like, not everything's a unicorn.
They're just completely not i think i think a lot of it is is that there's very few people actually i'm
seeing more businesses now building unique things but for years everyone's been doing the same thing
like meme coins or another dex or another centralized exchange and you kind of look
at this I mean um with the magazine we're very very careful who we allow in the magazine if
there's a slight um inkling that there's a red flag or or it looks like this potentially could
be a rug they just don't get in it's as simple as that but i hear over and over again i'm going to change
this industry i'm going to change the world now well you're another dex like what are you doing
that other people aren't or i'm going to launch a blockchain but we've got a thousand of them
what is your blockchain going to do with no investment that these blockchains aren't doing but i'm starting to to now say and obviously
i'm as i've said before i'm not a techie i'm a business consultant i'm a businessman i'm a
an entrepreneur a marketing consultant um so i look at things completely different and i was
parroting about five years ago saying look no business people are building in this space. That's the
problem with the space. And everyone's building with too much of a tech angle that normies don't
get it. But now I'm starting to see more of that business mentality process, which I think is
brilliant for Web3 in general. And again, coming back to nfts as well so i gotta say like i
actually love that take um there are things that haven't been built yet like i i feel like people
look around and exactly like what you were saying let's do a dex let's redo this and we'll put a
spin on it there's so we just built a security alert network. Simple.
It's a bot that connects all of the Discord communities
that are part of this network.
When one person or one like modern admin
sends a security alert alert,
all of these individuals get it
from all these different communities.
And we went from zero users
to like 120,000 in 10 days.
Nobody's done that before.
Like it's not, it's, you know, is it the best idea in the world?
No, but nobody's done it.
It's free.
And like, you have to have freaking novel ideas out here in order to build things that
people need.
And, you know, unfortunately 99% of the time people are just regurgitating the same old
horseshit and hoping that you know they're going to get investors and that they're going to you
know get their lambos so um you know it really just comes down to like actually having good ideas
or or even a moderately good idea. Yeah, I completely agree.
I've been seeing a lot of, I mean, there's so much recycling,
you guys are right,
but there's a lot of really good innovative projects out there too.
I mean, I get pitched between our venture studio,
you know, Lunar Digital Assets,
and then between the Polygon Grants program, which I serve on the board for,
and BitAngels and Tim Draper, Bitcoin Fi Accelerator and all these things,
I see, I don't even know, 200 to 300 projects I get pitched a month.
And I will say that from that angle, I'm incredibly optimistic about the future of our industry. There's a ton of bullshit out there, that's for sure. 90, probably 5% of the stuff I get pitched is bullshit. But that other 5% make me incredibly excited for humanity.
incredibly excited for humanity.
So Aztec actually pulled the brakes on shutting down the space so I could hop up and talk
about defenders.
And I just wanted to talk real quick about that.
And this kind of is in line with the idea of trying to build something that's novel.
kind of is in line with the idea of trying to build something that's novel.
And we're right on the edge.
We've been building for a long time to ensure that EVM was secured.
But Defender's Vault Assist is a 2FA multi-sig vault that stops wallet trading
even if your seed phrase is compromised.
So like I could give Brock my seed phrase,
nothing he could do to take anything out of my vault
and it doesn't matter.
And like the really nice thing
is that we have an emergency migration function.
So even if there's no gas in the wallet
with somebody else, you know,
having access to your seed phrase,
you still can fund that wallet's,
well, the smart contracts, emergency migration, and move all your assets to
a new place. And so, you know, when I think about NFTs, I think about the kind of function that
is really simple and core, you know, so that like, how are we using NFTs? Well, it's an
unlimited access pass. Very similarly to, you know, a lot of the times when, you know shouldn't necessarily start as an expensive asset.
They should have a valuation according to what their use is.
And then, yeah, if they explode later on, that's because the community loves it and they find value in it.
But overall, like, you know, I don't think NFTs are dead.
I think that like the use case of them is just going to continue to grow,
like medical cards and voting.
There's just so much amazing shit for NFTs.
So I'm 100% of the mind that NFTs are absolutely here to stay.
Nice.
All right, guys.
Anything else?
I like what you guys are building by the way and aztec
is is uh often talks about what you guys are building to us um from a context of you know
lda and quick swap and the polygon grants and stuff but yeah cool good good to talk to you
about this stuff all right guys anything else we want to cover before we wrap up for the day
well thanks for having me up rock appreciate you
my man thanks for having me also it's been a been an absolute pleasure
100%
100 are we all just stalling for darrens
Are we all just stalling for Darren?
What are we stalling for Darren for?
He wants me to
End his face, he's had enough of me
Cool, alright guys
Catch you all next time
If anyone's out in Dubai, hit me up
I'll be here for one more day
Talk to you all soon
Thanks Darren for hosting and everything
And thanks also Nicole, I think she left also But yeah, thanks to everyone who puts the show together here for one more day uh talk to y'all soon thanks Darren for hosting and everything and
thanks also Nicole I think she left uh also but uh yeah thanks to everyone who puts the show
together also Marshall in the background uh and you know Polygon uh people from the Polygon team
like Two Cent Timmy who help uh with some of the organization of the show and support uh really
appreciate everyone all right guys, guys. Bye-bye.
