Jim, Jim, thank you for joining us here this morning.
We're going to start the show here in just a few minutes.
We will give it a few for folks to filter in.
Get our speakers up on stage while we wait.
We're going to start the show here in just a few minutes.
Good morning and welcome to the Lucky Lead.
Today is Tuesday, February 20th, and we are back after the long weekend.
Folks, it is a sunny and warmer winter morning here in Chicago.
We're hitting the mid fifties today.
This stretch of weather, fairly unbelievable for us Chicagoans who are used to much, much
You know what else is unbelievable?
Low cap PFP price action on Ethereum after a major leg up last night, that $14.5 million
Pretty unbelievable in this art bear market as well.
And oh, you got acquiring proof.
Well, that certainly wasn't on the bingo card either.
We're going to break it all down on today's show.
I see some friendly faces out there, Strobe, Phantom, Woody, Marco, thank you for joining
us as a reminder for any new listeners out there.
We do run this show every weekday, Monday to Friday at 10 AM Eastern, covering all the
major news in crypto and entities.
I'm your host Tyler D and I'm doing today by some amazing co-hosts and it is macro Tuesday.
So we've got a full house.
First up Emily loves crypto, a web free security expert and co-founder of foolproof labs ghost
content star over at lucky trader quiet well deep in the AI streets.
And then Logan Hitchcock, he is our editor in chief over at lucky trader.
He's repping the lucky trader account.
He's been covering the space in depth for years.
Logan, GM, how you doing?
All right, well, I can't hear Logan, so we'll have to get him cycled back up here ghost.
I'll throw it to you, GM.
How are you doing, Justin?
I couldn't hear Logan either.
So maybe he needs to recycle there, but I hope you had a good weekend.
It feels like a Monday today, but it's good to good that it's actually a Tuesday and we're
coming on to some inspiring price action to start the short week here in the US.
So we're stoked for that folks.
We've got D's on with us here today.
He is our art connoisseur, our director of vibes, his not drugs bags went back on sale
One of the not drugs bags is sold out again in the other bag.
There's a limited amount left, but it's nice to see the people liking the bags.
Those things are moving like hotcakes.
And folks, we've also got Peter Jennings on with us this morning.
He's the lucky trader, co-founder, founder of several companies, our resident macro expert.
Peter, Jim, how are you doing?
I'm doing great at the gym early and excited to chat with you guys.
Well, we're going to get into it here in a second.
Before we do it's a special show.
Today's show is brought to you by our newest partner, NFT perp.
Whether you're eyeing a pudgy pain win or predicting a reversal in the market, NFT perp
has you covered, allowing traders to go long or short.
Yesterday, they announced the next step of their V2 launch moving to whitelist access
and with V2, you can expect true perpetual futures, advanced order options, and of course
Both traders and liquidity providers will earn their VNFTP token on the V2 platform
and it will be the more lucrative the earlier you join.
We will be talking to Joe from NFT perp later in the show to break this all down in more
Before we get there, what is on the docket?
What are we talking about?
We're going to start with some macro.
We're going to hit the Yuga news.
We're going to talk autoglyphs, e-PFPs pumping, gaming NFTs pumping, more airdrop news, and
then we'll get into our conversation with NFT perp.
Before we do that though, Ghost, any housekeeping for today?
As always, if you enjoyed the show, Tyler does a great rundown of the NFT space every
morning in the morning minute newsletter.
You can get in that pin to the top of the spaces.
I'm not going to go into a long read.
I'm just going to do a quick kind of bullet point list here of some of the items jumping
out to me and then I'll get Peter's thoughts.
So on more of the macro side, we've got some big earnings coming up this week.
I believe Nvidia is coming soon.
Crypto, of course, pumping hard this morning, ETH hit 3,000.
I think it has since fallen slightly below.
Bitcoin was close to 53K.
I think it retraced a bit as well.
In token or airdrop news, StarkNet opened this morning at a wild $2.2 billion market
Just an absurd opening there.
Last week we had Sora launch, AI coins kind of went wild across crypto.
And then in the election markets, it seems like Trump continues to grind up.
We've got Nate Silver saying Biden is now on the track to lose.
So those are five kind of bigger ones I'm watching and NFTs, of course, we saw you go
That's been all over the timeline.
Yesterday, we saw a $14.5 million sale for a full set of auto glyphs.
We saw the Pudgy Ping wins briefly flip apes over the weekend before getting reflipped.
Again, we saw low cap PFPs pump last night after a Sinkistow airdrop announcement.
And then that pixel launch in the web through gaming sector seemingly led to a spike in
We saw some ordinal leaders pump on Bitcoin after some ETH whales came over, MadLaz dominating
on Solana and then blast.
They moved the approval date for the big bang competition because so many developers applied
in just the latest bullish signal for blast.
So that's kind of a quick rundown, Peter, I'll throw it to you just kind of quickly.
I know you don't have a whole lot of time this morning.
What stands out to you, kind of what are you watching macro here this week?
I think by far the most important event this week is Nvidia earnings.
Nvidia has been a huge part of driving just the entire market up.
The growth in Nvidia from a pure dollar perspective is just absolutely astronomical and they've
exceeded expectations every time, but now the stock is priced so expensive that even
a little squatter, you know, not just blowing with expectations would slow it down.
So I think that's the most important thing.
There's other huge companies like Walmart, et cetera, this is a huge week of earnings.
So watching that and seeing how crypto prices go, I mean, the ETH move, I think, is probably
I think there's just a lot of speculation that we're going to have ETF and then of course
just the ratio with ETH to Solana, ETH to Bitcoin kind of got out of whack.
And I think, yeah, the Nvidia earnings are by far the biggest thing for the macro overall
just in terms of U.S. markets this week.
Yeah, I think those two are big ones.
Peter, just maybe one quick follow up.
Have you been following the blast action, the rush of developers kind of moving over
there that the TBL, I think I saw TBL is up to 1.8 billion already.
I'm curious, have you been looking much at that or any thoughts?
Yeah, well, I feel pretty stupid.
I was an angel investor in Blur and did not get in on blast.
And it's really cool just to see what Pac-Man the two had built.
And certainly looking at staking ETH over there, I was actually talking to Jeebs yesterday
He just gave a thumbs up.
So I will probably be moving some assets over there.
I tried to bridge assets over in the past, but ended up not following through.
And I definitely look more into it today.
It takes like 30 seconds.
Thought process being, hey, there's a few days left.
Maybe we'll get an air drop.
You just take ETH over there, Jeebs?
Yeah, I just took OSF's code through a little bit of ETH over there.
I'm actually thinking about putting more in just because the unlock is so close.
I was trying to put Blur in there initially.
That's why I initially did maybe two months ago, a month ago, but I didn't look like
I couldn't figure it out.
Well, the Blur, you have to go on the Blur website.
You got to take a day trip outside of America temporarily.
I like to go to Mexico, go to the Blur website, take my monthly angel allocation, stake it,
come back from Mexico, and then watch the points go up until next month.
But you do it on the Blur site.
Basically, since our November unlock, I've been just taking every unlock and throwing
That's going to feel good.
I mean, it feels better than what I did with the other unlocks.
Well, I didn't know what I did with the unlock, so better than me.
Blur Cabal had no info about Blast.
There was no like, hey, boys, trust the plan.
It was, hey, it's radio silent.
Everybody for themselves.
And then we all learned in our group chat together that, oh, cool, Blast is a thing.
Hey, did any of you guys hear about it?
Oh, did any of you guys hear about it?
Keyboard got to hear about both and invest in both.
Man, a rare L for the Blur Cabal.
I think what some of them jumped out to me yesterday, Blockraze, the folks aren't following
He kind of got somewhat famous from having a massive whiff bag and he's a pretty good
shit poster, but he was kind of talking about like, what's each beta?
Are there any popular eth beta trades?
Do you think Ethan is going to pump here?
I think the one that he got the most of his replies was Blur.
So I think folks thinking that that Blur may continue to pump against eth here, which is
certainly an interesting trade.
Jeeves, I think your quest has come up on stage.
We'd love to welcome you to the show here.
Thoughts on what's happening with Blast.
Blur, what's on your mind?
Thanks for bringing me on.
I'm curious what you're seeing in Blast.
So far what I've seen, obviously, there's the Big Bang competition where if you go to
Blast's Twitter, they're showing all of these projects and they're highlighting some.
They're then going to be promoting a bunch of them.
So I think from a strategy standpoint, I'm kind of waiting to see what comes out of that.
It looks like they're going to be giving out a bunch of ecosystem tokens to those different
projects, and then going and distributing them for users.
So I think there's a few strategies here, but my biggest strategy is one, try and find
some of the interesting protocols, see if you can get an early, maybe write angel checks
And then two, it seems like whenever these do come out and get released, you really want
to kind of go hard on the ones that Blast is actually promoting and then giving additional
tokens, essentially juicing you to go use.
Yeah, I think that strategy makes a ton of sense.
I guess from a farming perspective or a lower capital requirement standpoint, I think something
I've been looking at is just really just trying to keep a laundry list of all the major protocols,
NFTs, tokens that are kind of tied into this ecosystem, getting them logged, and then ones
that don't really require capital, just kind of going through a quick signup process, because
You don't really have much to lose, and then to your point, starting to spend a little
bit more time in the projects that folks, on the timeline, your high signal, people
you follow, they're saying, hey, this one could be the real deal, and starting to spend
more time, perhaps more capital there.
I think one thing that's going to be very challenging, like unless you're a massive
ethewell, deploying capital and farming and dozens of these Blast protocols is going to
be tough, so folks are going to have to pick and choose, certainly.
I think one thing I've noticed, too, is a lot of these protocols that are spinning up
over there seem to just be like forks to forks, so they just have to be careful.
When you go through the docks, a lot of them just seem to be stating what seems to be like
obvious protocols that you've used before on ETH or other places, but then they're just
boosting the idea of the native yield concept, and I do think that's going to unlock some
innovative use cases, especially around NFTs.
I think there's been some cool stuff that people are experimenting with, with locking
up ETH, the yield going back to the founders, but be weary of a couple of these protocols.
A lot of them are just coming over for attention compared to actually being something really
That's a good point, and especially we're all going to have to pick and choose, again,
the horses to go after, so doing some DD.
I think there's some hope that, since this is a competition, that hopefully the BLAST
team will filter out some of the noise, but it's probably going to be difficult, and I
don't really know how many teams are going to get through.
I think it's going to be quite a few, but man, it is coming up.
I'm also curious on the NFT front.
I think when ETH was lagging in popular sentiment, a lot of it was tied to just high gas fees.
Traders getting sick and tired of it, but if there is a way to start trading NFTs on
BLAST with much lower fees, I think there's going to be a huge appetite for that, certainly.
Deez I'll throw it back to you.
Have you been going after any of the new protocols announced on BLAST?
Are you more passively staking, or are you doing anything more active?
No, I'm just following them right now, and similar to you, just looking for...
I don't want to get into this meta where I'm feeling heavily incentivized to shill 25 different
ref links every day on the timeline, and all I've really seen coming out of the BLAST ecosystem
is like, here's the new platform, here's your new ref link, fill this motherfucking thing and
let's get some points. I like points, don't get me wrong. I do like my reputation a little bit.
I really don't want to be one of those people who is just spanning ref links of shit that I
don't even use. I finally shared some BLAST ref links because it's like, okay, I'll put some
ETH in here, I can share this, but I don't want to share just ref links for platforms I've never
used before that don't have a working product just to, you know, create more vapor hype before
they go live. So I'm kind of trying not to, you know, get called into shilling all this shit
because I see it on the timeline every day like, oh, here's my blaster code, oh, here's my other
code, like tap into this, like, oh, you know, here's another inverted pyramid and if you invite your
friends and they invite their friends and their friends invite their friends and they're all under
you and we're getting fucking big points. Like, I don't really want to go too deep into that.
Yeah, I hear you. I shared, I think, a couple ref links on my X last week and I did feel a
little dirty about it. It is difficult to come online and just do that every single day.
There's people out there, it's like, they're just shilling five different products a day.
I will say, like, I'll share the things I use. Like, I've shared my 10 sort link a couple times
and like 30 people have signed up for it. So like, you know, things like that, I don't mind sharing,
but for products that don't exist that I can't even use yet, like, I really don't want to be
sending ref links and trying to farm those points. Yeah, I think there's levels to this. And
certainly there's a difference in showing your blast link or your tensor link versus the 25th
different project launching on blast with, you know, the same yield and unknown website. I think
a lot of the websites are even like the same style. So it's fairly clear that they're kind
of coming from one primary team. Ghost, I'm curious for your thoughts.
I feel the exact same way. And I'm not even one who tweets that much or posts a lot. And I still
feel weird just posting random shit, even when like something like blur like wants you to tweet
out like what your point allocation was or whatever it is. But then you see things like
portal the last couple of weeks, which everyone was so annoying about and posting all over the
timeline and just showing it and you feel like those people are just like doing something that
they don't believe in. And then it looks like they're gonna get a massive bag. So I feel like
this, well, while this looks very annoying, I don't think it's going to go away because there
are little opportunities like that that will pay out in the long run. So it's just a tough situation.
But I hate that stuff, too. Well, portal one was interesting. Yes, I put out maybe five tweets
about portal. Like I tried to do it in a way that wasn't raw, raw point farm. Look at me.
Let's farm points. You're going to retweet my shit. We're going to get points. But I did put
out a couple of tweets of like, wouldn't it be funny if this tweet is worth money in the future
at portal? And those got a good amount of points. So we'll see what happens.
Unbelievable. Well, congrats on your generational wealth for sending out a few tweets.
Deez. We're not jealous or coping. I was up in my friend tech ivory tower and too good for portal
and just did zero portal posting whatsoever, even when like high signal folks like Cyrus
were getting involved. And that was probably the signal in hindsight that, hey, it might be worth
firing a couple portal posts out into the Twitter sphere. So egg all over my face on this one. I
said Max Payne is friend tech a friend tech token going to zero portal sends to the moon. And that
seems like a realistic scenario at this point, which will certainly be max pain for me. Yes,
a portal trading at a dollar on a whales market. I think I saw it at like 75 cents yesterday. Sam
anti stats. I'm curious rate your levels of cope for the, this portal early price action.
Literally zero. I just could not have less cope. I just do not care. I made a decision early on
that, you know, people weren't following me so that I could waste their energy on this.
I unfollowed a lot of people who did it. I just was not vibing with that whole thing. And I'm in
a fortunate position that I don't, I don't need that money. Like I'll get money elsewhere, but
I'm like literally zero cope. What's up. I appreciate you not unfollowing me.
I think I did these, but I got, I, I, I even have all these, I kept a list of people who
I, so I could follow them back, but there was, I still remember walking around Hong Kong and being
like, like looking at my phone and my whole feed was this. And I'm like, y'all are way too rich
to be horn out your feet like this. And I'm sorry, I'm being a Dick here and you guys are making
money. And I, I had no doubt that people were going to make money, but I just value like my
followers and I'm not going to waste their time on it. So I'm being, I'm being a bit aggressive
here. It's not my intention. Cause I literally like, like I said, I found everybody back who,
it was a good call though. It didn't like get rid of a lot of people who I did not follow back,
but this might be a bit aggressive, but I, I, I, it just wasn't for me. I have zero, zero code.
You had your R A a stark list and you're just going to bed every night thinking about all
them dirty portal farmers just rat the net list. I was just like, yeah, they're way too rich for
this. Come on. Like there's so many airdrops out there. It was like under $2,000. We had to do it.
We had to do, we didn't know if we were going to come back. Like it, it was looking bleak.
I was like, Cyrus, Cyrus and I argue a lot. Like Cyrus is my homie. And like, we, we,
we, we have a discord chat, just the two of us were, I mean, we'd be on a ton,
but, uh, he was just like, you're so maker. I'm like, this is, I know exactly what's going to
happen. You know, we're going to make money. It's just not, this just is not the one for me.
But yeah, I'm with, uh, yeah.
No, very fair. I feel like you don't have the same levels of, of FOMO that I typically give
into. Uh, so not, not totally surprised, uh, Sam, maybe somewhat of a, uh, kind of changing
direction here, but kind of coming back to blast a little bit. Um, so stark debt opened at $2.2
billion market cap this morning. Uh, and as I understand it, their user base has already fallen
like 90%, uh, kind of based on how they rewarded their community and users. I'm curious, like what,
what do you think this means for blast? Uh, like, do we all need to raise our targets? Have you
started looking at any like numbers? I've like, I've kind of always, it's very hard to know
to predict a lot of this stuff, but yeah, I'm like super bullish on blast. I think like the
way they're going about it, like they're creating a lot of, I, they're creating a lot of real
activity over there. I feel like the, like, I feel like the way they're doing it with giving
6%, I say 6%, I don't know the actual number, but let's just say, yeah, 6% to spin, 6% to
developers. Like those, I know a lot of like real people, like real programmers who are like
building apps that it's not like those apps are just going to go away the minute, the minute they
get their token. You know, I feel like the way that they're, you know, obviously when people are
motivated by airdrop, there is a lot of risk of fallout after it happens, but this is like a
much like you have real companies being built here with real investors that aren't just going
to disappear when the token drops. And I think it's much more sustainable than like giving a
community airdrop or something like that. You know, like it's, so I don't know. I feel like,
I feel like I'm bullish on blast. And if he preppers laughing at me, but I'm bullish on blast.
I think the way they're doing, it's going to work well. Yeah. I mean, I think everyone, I think it
you almost have to, to be bullish on blast. I think that question is how bullish are you on blast
at this point? I kind of threw my estimate at a $10 billion FPV. And based on that, I like,
I was looking at like 60% APY for every USDC deposit. So if you end up getting to 20% or to
20 billion or higher, then you could be looking at like a hundred percent APY for US dollars
deposited. And this is assuming a $10 billion valuation and 6% of it goes to the spins. And
I think that Pac-Man is going to want to reward the spins. He's going to want to like, there's
so many doubters out there. There's nothing that this guy's going to want more than heavily
rewarding the people who did the things he asked them to do. Like the same thing happened with
blur. So I don't know. I think I still have not put a referral code on my feed. I want to,
because I want to get more blast. I really want to, but I just can't bring myself to do it.
But yeah, if it makes you feel better, nobody will judge you for doing it. Like there's,
if you scroll through the blast leaderboard and look at all the people who refer to them,
it's all the biggest people in the space who have, you know, tens of millions of dollars already,
like, it's the launching big brothers, it's the OSS, it's the danglings, it's the CVOs, like,
they're all there. Like, you're not hurting yourself. I got, I got, I got to allow myself
to make some money, right? I work hard in this space. Maybe it's time to get that work. Yeah,
you're, you're a mercenary now. You're not officially, you know, nobody thinks of any
other entities when they think of you, you can be your own person. I'm not making those massive,
massive proof dollars anymore. Can't hit the game. But here's, here's like the real question I have
is like, how much DeFi, TVL and activity do you think this draws away from optimism and
arbitrary? I mean, I'm not as deep in the DeFi crowd, but I feel like a lot. And I think,
I guess they'll, unless they're just, you know, massive bag holders or kind of, you know, drinking
the Kool-Aid on those chains, like, why wouldn't you go to the chain with the most incentives and
rewards? And like, we're going to see more incentives from Pac-Man and team, right? Like,
we know that, you know, he's a master of this. So there's going to be more to come. And I'm
curious for your thoughts. Yeah, just making sure you can hear me. Yep. Yeah. There's a lot of
reasons that you wouldn't go to another chain. If you're a builder, mostly it has to do with like
builder infrastructure on these young chains. They just lack the inherent tooling that you need
to be successful as a builder. And it leads people to having to make them themselves, which leads
people to making a lot of mistakes, which leads to exploits. So I would say that that is the number
one reason that you wouldn't want to switch from something like optimism or arbitrary where people
have been building those for quite a while now on to blur, especially if you're a builder. And if
the builders don't come and they don't have what they do try to come and they don't have what they
need, there is an inherent level of risk that retail is normally unaware of. Yeah, no, I mean,
that is a good point as well, Emily. I think certainly a difference in perspective from just
your users versus builders and what's going to make you move over, though we've already seen
the demand for builders and devs to start moving over to blast. And of course, those tokens played
a huge role in that. Well, we've got a few minutes left before we get to our conversation with the
NFT perp team. We have to talk at least briefly about some of this NFT action. We've seen several,
I mean, so we got pudgies moving above 20. They're kind of neck and neck with apes right now. We saw
a huge pump in the low cap PFP sector yesterday, kind of coming after the Sinkist Dow announcement.
It seems like the hot new trend is if your project is getting airdrops and if you think they are going
to get more token airdrops in the future, then there is a rush to buy those collections. All
while, ETH is pumping to 3K. So, you know, kind of a little bit surprising, but these, I think you may
have, it may have been a shitpost. I think you commented that you can't wait to see your
ETH entities lower in ETH terms while ETH continues to run. I'm kind of curious to you.
Was that a shitpost? Do you think that is how this is going to play out?
Do you have valid concerns of what might happen if ETH goes on a real heater here?
Yeah, I mean, most of my bags, I'm really just watching punks, squiggles, I guess Sam Spratt
ecosystem. That's where the big ticket items are for me. So, we've seen a couple of punks sale
over the last day, but they're pretty much where they were at. And I don't, you know, squiggles,
there's all these underwater winds. I don't know what's going to happen with these. I'm just kind
of patiently waiting. But it is awesome to see shit like, I don't know, like the sappy seals.
I got on Blair this morning, and you know, moonbirds are up, what 71% this week,
sappy seals are up 50%, wrecked guy are up 40%, a bunch of our little bags are getting airdrops,
like, I, there's a wrecked guy airdrop that I saw yesterday, maybe one of the first things I
never got for owning a wrecked guy. So I would be much more bullish on like the, you know, sub two
eath collections that could more easily, you know, go up another 50% or 100% or something,
rather than like the grail shit. Like, I don't think it's gonna be a lot easier for sappy seals
to go from one eath to two eath, and it's going to be for punks to go from 57 to 114 or whatever
the fuck. Yeah, I think that that makes a ton of sense. I actually kind of follow your advice there.
I think that the place I got wrecked the hardest in 2021, what was taking gains and then just
firing at high value NFTs, like 10 eath, 20 plus, which then, you know, fell off quite a bit. I'm
much more in the camp of taking, taking shots in the lower range, it just feels like potentially
safer. And I think that's kind of what we're seeing here. What is interesting, I think there
was this very common sentiment that most PFPs would not return to their 2021 cycle levels.
And I mean, maybe not the very Pico top ones, like our apes going to get back to 150, that's
hard to see. But for the, for the low tier and the mid tier, could they all get back to two, three,
four eath? I mean, that seems like it's possible at this point, you know, depending how some of
these airdrops, depending on how the market goes. I guess one other major event we haven't touched
on, they're staying diesel to you if anyone else wants to chime in. So 14 and a half million
dollars for the autoglyphs, a massive sale in a market that's been pretty bearish for most
generative art. You know, you mentioned your squiggles bag, I think I started thinking, so
like, what's next? Are there autoglyph data plays out there in the NFT market? Do you think there
could be spillover to squiggles or anything else? Or do you think autoglyphs is just kind of off on
its own at this point? I mean, we've kind of seen these higher end, I don't want to say idiosyncratic,
but there's been higher end sales over the last month or so. I forget the, I don't know if they're
all R2D2 or what the other account is that was buying them. But for the high end stuff, I feel
like we're really just hoping for more of the Alan Howard's of the world to be like, hey, I want to
put $100 million into really expensive shit that might be even more really expensive 10 years from
now. So I don't know what the autoglyph beta is. I don't know if that's fucking we've talked about
either rocks has to appear. I don't know if it's either rocks. I don't know if it's, you know,
punks or high end, you know, the densos that there's only six pallets of or what, but I think
that market is a lot harder to play than like, oh, I can buy cheap NFTs that DGen sold buy and
gamble on. Like, you know, the autoglyphs, you're not really getting that DGen gambler crowd of
people to be like, yeah, yeah, it's time. Like, I'm going to put 200 plus teeth into this thing.
Well, we had the one who exited because they sold their autoglyph into the wheat bed and then
slammed it into like 80 little pudgies. That was a good trade in hindsight too, right? Like that
worked out perfectly for them. If I remember correctly, I think they are up on that trade
right now. I think they could buy the floor autoglyph like 230 and be up. So yeah, it's certainly a
good trade. Yeah. Well, pudgies are 2.1. Yeah. If you would have told us that over the summer,
like little pudgies are like 0.3. And we're just kind of ignoring them. Now they're 2.1.
Oh, a wild run up. Yeah. I mean, you could have bought them forever at 0.2
or below. And it just shows how fast things can move here in this space. Last question for you,
Deez, then we'll move on to the second part of our show. We got a little bit of action on Bitcoin
this weekend. In the NFT scene, it seems like Lior, perhaps a few of his friends moved over.
They started buying up some of the leaders, primarily quantum cats, node monkeys, and some
Bitcoin puppets. And then over on Solana, we saw MadLads take a next level up that the clear leader
over there. I'm curious which of the three blockchains from an NFT perspective, eighth Bitcoin,
and Solana feel the most interesting or strongest to you right now from an NFT investment standpoint?
I mean, in the shortest time period, it feels like ETH has been the strongest. If you look at the
last week, the low cap collections on ETH, I think, have been the highest gainers relative to,
I mean, on Solana, we've had MadLads definitely having a great week. But there isn't,
I don't see a lot of that like spilling over to their other collections. Like, you know, MadLads
are now at 205 Sol, but I don't see any other collections over the last seven days really
making any similar moves, other than pandas, which are cross chain. So Solana is probably the one I'm
least excited about over the next week, just given how the last week has went. Bitcoin, the ordinals
feel like they're stable coins. Every time I check ARSIC, they're between like 0.07 and 0.08
over the last week. Quantum cats, I think, have been maybe the most volatile. I've had friends
coping that they paid 0.3. Then they went down to, I don't even know, they're like 0.18. People
are ready to fucking end it. You know, two days later, they're back at 0.25. Now they're back at
0.2. They're the most volatile one, it seems like, of the bunch. Puppets and node monkeys,
they just feel like fucking rocks at their respective prices, which I think is a good sign.
Like, if Bitcoin's up 20% plus, and these are the same price in Bitcoin, then these are also up 20%.
So I'm not too mad at that. I'm glad that they're not dumping.
Yeah, I think very well said. I think I'm probably a little bit more partial to the ordinals'
eco right now. But I will admit, I think there are more infraday opportunities on ETH. Like,
you're seeing more big moves. The ETH NFT market is moving faster right now. Like, that is a fact.
The ordinals market feels very slow. But I think the moon overlord, he's been bullposting ordinals
for quite a bit, quite a long time. He was basically saying that the number one PFP on
Bitcoin is like $10,000 right now, which is equivalent to what, like three or four ETH.
That doesn't feel like that's going to be the highest level we see in the Bitcoin NFT ecosystem
this year. And I do tend to agree with that. I do love the charts Stan has been putting out that
showed the top 20 market cap of the floor-based market cap of the projects. And ordinal maxi
biz being in the top 20 was something that kind of caught me off guard today. But I mean,
it makes perfect sense, like 0.7 some ETH. So there is one high, you know, market cap project
in the top 20 there. And it's OMB, it's not moon overlord's bag. So he probably won't speak about
it. I love moon. Moon's the guy who got me to buy node monkeys, but he's like just super bag
biased. So always read his tweets with a grain of salt. Like, I don't know if he's ever mentioned
ordinal maxi biz, but they're the one that has the highest market cap them and nodes.
Yeah, that's very fair. It seems like it's still fucking expensive. Yeah, it seems cheap in Bitcoin
terms, but it's like still a big fucking project. And I think that the unit bias on Bitcoin is what
might be able to propel some of these projects higher. It's like you look at puppets 0.065,
it feels tiny. That's a tiny number. It's much less than one. So you don't even have to do the
conversion and just scoop some of these up. If my ladies can go to 80s, the puppets can go to
half of Bitcoin. Man, what a world that would be. Certainly rooting for it. On the OMB note,
I think you're right. I think the OMBs are much more of like the early ordinal communities. It
feels that way. It feels like the youth natives who come over in the last few months haven't
really been going after that set. At least that's my read. And I think that's partially why we don't
hear it as much in our echo chambers. But clearly it is the leader. Well, folks, this has been a fun
macro conversation kind of running down the headlines here from this weekend. I want to
switch gears and talk with our friends over at NFT perp. But before we do that, let's read the news.
Today's top headlines powered by NFT perp trading volume on ETH came in at 22.1 million dollars
yesterday. Solana saw 8.3. Bitcoin was next at 8.2 million. Rec Guy and Sappy Seals were the top
movers on ETH jumping 28% and 24% respectively. Bevels up 23% to 2.65 ETH in the art sector.
As we mentioned, a set of 10 Autoglyphs sold for $14.5 million on Monday in a broker deal,
one of the biggest empty attractions of all time. And the buyer paid $1.43 million for them in
February 2021. So a 10X on his $1.4 million investment. Blass announced that as big bang
competition winners will be revealed on Friday, February 23rd. Quantumcast did lead action on
Bitcoin tallying 14 Bitcoin in volume. They jumped to 0.244. They're down to 0.22 now. Nodes are at
0.188. RSIC at 0.074 and puppets right around 0.065. Magic Eden did tease the ability to train
runes to trade runes natively on their marketplace in the future. Solana AFTs did mostly chop with
MadLads leading at 0.207. And then over on NBA Top Shot, the demand is still there. Their freshman
gym packs have been selling for 7X, the mint price, and a sign of some rebounding demand.
In token airdropping points, there's the Stark token claim went live this morning.
Sinkist Dow announced an airdrop for holders of Pudgy Penguins and Little Pudgy's. BAYC and
Mutants, Saffy Seals, and REFCI. The Pixel token went live for trading yesterday. Opened at a $440
million market cap, $2.87 billion FDB. Portal went live on whales, saw trades as high as a dollar.
Metastree's newly launched Ascend program has reached $10 million in deposits. And then Arcade
completed its snapshot for its clash of claims with whitelist details for their Arcade token claim to
be published later today. In crypto news, we kind of covered it. Bitcoin around $52,300.
ETH touched $3,000, Seoul holding around $110. We saw MoG briefly reach $100 million yesterday in
market cap before retracing, leading meme coins on ETH. And then the first Web 3 game has made it
to the Xbox store with Gunzilla Games, which did leverage Avax for its guns test network,
set to go live soon. All right, that was a rundown of the headlines. Well, it's time to get
into our conversation with the NFT perp team. If you don't know NFT perp, they are the first
perpetual futures decks for NFTs, allowing traders to go long or short NFTs without owning
them. We've got the founder on here with us, OX Jose. Jose, GM, how are you doing?
GM, GM, how's it going? Glad to be here. Thanks for having us.
Yeah, I love having you on here. I think we've got Hellmass on from your team as well. I want to
just kind of dive right into this. So if folks aren't familiar, NFT perp was the first to the
NFT perp game. It was a massive unlock at the time. I am curious, Jose, why did you want to get
into NFT perps? Yeah, so I missed the board eight mints. I actually missed the run and
was salty the whole time because my friends that are based in Taiwan were very high on it. I
completely just faded it. And I thought it was quite overvaluing one of the short, but there's
no place to do it. But beyond that, I joined an NFT collection Dow called Super Dow. And as a
collector, I think I felt that the market was very inefficient at the time. And this was like 2021
and the beginning of 2022. So like the midst of the NFT bull run. I thought the NFT market
was inefficient. Trades are expensive to do. There's only open C fees are high,
royalty fees are high as well. And you have to be only going long in order to make profit and you
can't short anything. So I thought NFT shorting mechanism needed to be created. NFT finance wasn't
really a thing back in the day. So I would say we're one of the first NFT finance protocols.
We landed on NFT perps as an idea. And then I think this is like, I read this article from
Dave Light from Paradigm about the idea of floor perps. And that really validated my idea of
this is a market and we can pioneer and create and test if people wanted this. So we pushed out
our V1 towards the end of 2022, which was November. And it ran for about eight months or so. We did
over a half billion volume. And ended up sun setting in V1 due to protocol design issues and
flaws. But now we're back with V2 and down to play again. That's the reason we got into NFT perps.
And one other thing I'll just highlight too. I missed out on the mint of Moonbirds and I bought
a market on the first day. I think my entry was like four ETH. Round tripped it. Went up to 32,
didn't sell. And I believe in KRO, didn't sell. And I paper handed it towards the end at like
two ETH. So there's that. I wish I could short NFT Moonbirds when it was live. But yeah,
that's a little story there. I mean, it's a real use case, right? Like, you know, if you're heavily
invested in a collection like Moonbirds, that was that 40 ETH. If you could do a short to kind of
hedge your bags. I mean, it makes sense, right? I was in a similar position as you. I bought several
on day one. And also round tripped the gains. I just wasn't good at hitting that sell button in
2022, unfortunately. Yeah. So I think that just speaks to NFT perp itself in terms of use cases.
It's not just for traders. You could be a collector. You could really believe in the utility and the
project and the art itself. You want to secure your profits, right? You don't have to sell.
Take a short position and be dunking in control. So that's one of the things that we want to lean
into. Yeah. And I think another, I've got one budget right now. I don't have 20 ETH to buy
another one that's free and liquid. But if I think they've got a shot to level up to 25,
well now I've got another mechanism to throw at least a couple ETH into that bet
and still benefit, which I love. So I was an NFT perp V1 user. As a user, I'm sure there are
listeners out here who used V1 as well. What can they expect with V2? What's different from the
first launch? Yeah, absolutely. So V2 really highlights on the different sources of liquidity
that we're piecing together for users to interact with. V1 was a protocol-owned liquidity type of
VAN model, which has been proven. It's not scalable. It's a flawed design. And we learned
a lot from our V1 experience. So V2 in a nutshell, it combines two sources of liquidity for users to
take and bet against. So the first one is a AMM. So it's pretty similar to Uniswap V3 concentrated
liquidity AMM, where liquidity providers providing liquidity at different ranges. It could be
relatively concentrated. It could be passive on a full range basis. So when traders comes in,
they will actually take market trades against these LPs on those ranges. So the other liquidity
source is the decentralized order book. And the reason why I would say this is decentralized is
because this is completely on-chain. It's not an off-chain order book, settlement done on-chain.
And you have that decentralized set up. This entire order book is literally on-chain.
Every order is a state variable that you have to modify and send transactions to to modify
essentially. And what we've done is the entire matching engine is also on-chain. So when a user
comes to NFT perp, take a long position or short position, that direct size of that trade gets
routed through in between AMMs and decentralized order book where there's best pricing available
for that trade. And what you get is essentially combining of two different mechanisms of AMM,
like why do we want AMM in the first place is because there's always a liquidity available
and there's decentralization. And then the benefits of having an order book is it's
proven. It's very scalable and it's really good at price discovery, for example.
So we're combining these two for V2 and we're calling it the Fusion AMM. So we're incredibly
excited about V2 and bringing this live to everyone. And one more thing I'll add is you
can also be an LP in the insurance fund for users. So the insurance fund for V2 is entirely
external LP provided. So that really is a big step up compared to our V1.
Well, Jose, thanks for kind of going into a little bit of the technical detail there.
Certainly helps to kind of look under the hood a bit, maybe kind of pulling it back
high level a bit. When we first started talking, I was curious how NFT does differ from some of
the other perps protocols like Wasabi. And I think you are all friendly behind the scenes.
I am curious, what are some of the key differences from those who may know that that protocol,
but are not as familiar with yours? Yeah, 100%. So Wasabi is a on-chain
leverage trading protocol. And the way it works is they actually utilize floor protocol,
those you tokens or new tokens that are fractionalized and sitting on uniswap pools.
And what they do is they have essentially lenders that are willing to lend out
ETH and also lenders that are willing to lend out the underlying tokens. So borrowers can come in
and get an under collateralized position to go long or short on a token directly on the spot
market. So whatever you trade on Wasabi, it directly settles and has price impacts on the
spot market. So any price movements on spot markets, you directly have P&L associated with it.
The difference with perps is that perps is entirely independent market. So we have our
own perp prices, we have an index price, essentially the perp price truck close to it,
and then the longs and shorts pay funding or receive funding to each other periodically.
So that's the main difference. So you can have a different sort of strategy, if you will,
if you want to earn funding in the right way. And you can also have delta neutral strategies
if you want to deploy between perps and spot market. That is the core differences.
That's helpful. And I was chatting with Logan here, you know, ahead of the interview,
and one piece he was specifically interested in was your in-house Oracle for more precise
valuation. So I am curious if there's anything else you could kind of elaborate on kind of what
went into the development of that. I mean, it seems like a very core part of the infrastructure.
Yeah, so this is something that I can also touch on, like our differences with Wasabi.
Wasabi, you know, uses the floor token, which is a mechanism that we've seen in the past,
similar to NFTX, for example, where you're essentially wrapping your NFT into an ERC-20,
and you have this ERC-20 market for it. They have that on SushiSwap, I believe, and some of the pools
are on Uniswap. And Flowing has it, you know, their abundant amount of liquidity as well,
which I think is incredible. Like what I've done for the NFT space is amazing in the sense of,
like, allowing liquidity to be plugged in for different markets. And the benefit of that is,
like, you're able to tap into a lot of different collections very quickly and tap into liquidity
very quickly. The key differences, I would say, and I will highlight, is we focus on
volatility and accuracy and latency for our oracle. So ideally, you want your oracle pricing
to be reflective of spot market activities on Blur, for example. And what Oracle looks like
essentially has three different data types that we're ingesting. So one is sales that are happening
on NFT markets within a band close to floor prices. So if there are any standard deviations,
outside of some deviation prices that are above floor or below floor or way above, way below,
those are excluded from our sales data. And then we track token IDs, we track wallet addresses to
filter out watch treats to prevent any sort of manipulations on the sales data alone.
And beyond that, we also have the bid and ask prices on Blur, for example. So you can get a
clear sense of what the sellers are asking and what the buyers want to bid into. With these
combined, you can get like a more accurate and real time data of what the sales market will look
like in some of the sentiment. And then beyond that, you apply to a volume weighted average
across marketplaces and get a sense of like, yeah, Blur is dominating, but sometimes like
opens these to another bit more. So finding a careful balance of the two and of them all really
gives you a nice balance of like what marketing is telling you right now. So with these three
different data points, we apply a median value into our Oracle pricing. And what that means,
why do we use median instead of mean? Like median means like literally the middle value of three
values, right? And then you have, if you use mean value, it means if any of these prices move,
it changes the average. So that could be manipulated. So that's the reason why we chose
median value. So any sort of like funny actions going on, on massive sweeps and whatnot, it will
impact the Oracle on a minimum level until confirmations follow. So our Oracle pricing
tend to focus on like real time market data, like latency, and also like accurate as well. So that's
like a little bit about Oracle. Well, thank you again for kind of taking us through the details
there. I think it is eye opening for those who are kind of deep in the eco and want to know
how these protocols actually work. So I think that is very helpful. Hell, Massa, I want to throw it
to you, give Jose a break here. I am curious kind of how you got plugged into the team and then
second part of the question, incentives. I know that's something a lot of our listeners want to
hear about. So kind of why folks should start trading on the NFT perp, but I want to welcome
you to the stage and hear a little bit more. Yeah, yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us.
Yeah, so my story is kind of interesting. So I was I was actually at 1KX prior to joining the NFT
perp. So 1KX is actually the lead investor in NFT perp. And during my time at 1KX, I spent a lot
of time in NFT finance. So I've been building, I launched one of the largest lending dows at the
time in NFT finance called Goblin Sachs back in, I guess it was late 2021. So yeah, got connected
with Jose and knew like that, know that like the CTO like I've known since like 2019. So it's like,
it's actually like kind of interesting. A lot of the guys that I built stuff with in NFT finance
now work at NFT perp. So it's kind of like a group of friends over there. So yeah, like,
after after leaving 1KX, it was kind of a natural progression, I wanted to stick in NFT finance. So
yeah, developed a strong relationship with the guys and and moved over to NFT perp, I guess it was
it's probably June, June or July of last year. So I've been with them for for some time. And
yeah, just like before we get into the incentives, want to give like a huge shout out to
really Jose and the team like it has been months of grinding since we sunset v1. And yeah, like
it's it's finally great to be to be able to ship like a full, you know, product redesign all the
way from, you know, the UI to like, then really like the the entire like product design is
different. So it's, it was basically shipping a brand new product. So yeah, like really like hats
off to the team. And everyone who's been patient with us for the for the last, you know, number of
months. And then jumping into incentives. So yeah, it's actually it's actually pretty funny, like
was listening to, obviously, you guys earlier in the call. And, you know, you guys were talking a
lot about points. So a few things. So we're not doing points. So we actually have like a contrarian
take to points like points are great for abstraction and speculation. And like they serve their
purpose. And like Pac-Man is a master designer of incentives. When we design like our incentive
schemes, we took like, I mean, I took a ton of inspiration from him. I think it'd be like stupid
not to. And so like, yeah, like, I think like in a nutshell, like what we're incentivizing with our
alpha is trade trading on the platform, depositing to the insurance fund and the AMM. And what you
see on the leaderboard is what you'll earn in our token. So it's no points. It's literally our token.
You know, it does like it does remove this speculation component of it on our end, which
which I think we're okay with. Right. So, you know, like we did we did raise, I guess it was
March of last year, we announced it late 2023, right before V2 came out. And we're going to
go out and raise again, I'd say pretty soon. So you guys can kind of like speculate on that. But
really, it's like, yeah, at the end of the day, like points. Yeah, like we, at least for me,
I feel like they're a little bit played out and wanted to do something refreshing.
Yeah. We love it. I really, I mean, points are the points. Pac-Man does it well. I think at the
end of the day, folks want tokens, right? So just kind of being direct and to the point who's not
going to be on board with that. Emily, I think you have somewhat of a related question. So why don't
why don't you jump in? Yeah. I was curious about how the model works if you're able to provide
liquidity without providing something like an actual loan against NFT. If you're using
automated market makers and, you know, if any of NFT perp is modeled on Uniswap V2 or V3.
Yeah, I'll take that question. So just like any other perp platforms, including DYDX or even
Binance, Perp, Liquid, Hyperliquid, all the assets provided to NFT perp are cash-based.
So you can think of providing liquidity on the AMN. Instead of providing spot assets, you're
providing a number of ask and bids into a market. So if you're providing, for example, liquidity
into the pudgy AMN at the price of 20 and the range is between, let's say, 15 to 25. You can
think of your ETH as being split in between 15 to 20 and then 20 to 25 on both sides of
longs and shorts, series of them like being stacked on top of each other. And all your open orders are
backed with cash, essentially. So wherever the price goes up or down, you essentially end up
with an inverse position in your margin backing those as a cash position. So just to clarify,
you always end up with a full spread. You can't target a specific price and almost treat that as
a rare position, kind of like a rare NFT. Yeah. So for clarity, we trade full prices on NFT perp.
There's no individual NFTs, like a rare NFT perps on NFT perp yet.
Oh, I meant more like a moon shot, right? Like a unexpected, super high price range
that you're the only person providing liquidity against that position for.
Oh, yeah, you can. Yeah, you can absolutely provide liquidity between the price of 100 to 150
when the current price is at 20. Those liquidity will not get used. So those won't be active,
essentially. And kind of like Uniswap E3, you can provide liquidity on very, very high ranges,
but those won't really get used. So you're not generating any fees.
Got it. Well, that certainly is interesting. Another way to potentially play it kind of based
on your personal situation. We've got a few minutes left. We talked BLAST earlier in the show.
I believe, Jose, that NFT perp through their hat in the ring for the Big Bang competition.
I'm curious. Anything to share on that note, what would a BLAST integration potentially look like?
Yeah. So when BLAST first announced their protocol, I thought it was really interesting.
Because this is something that I want to chime in a little bit when the host and speakers of the
show early on was talking about how this would take away liquidity from other L2s. And I think
one thing can be made, from my perspective, because we're looking at the BLAST competition,
and I believe the word native yield in their ideas and briefing for the competition was mentioned
37 times in one page. So they really want teams to focus on native yield,
which is BLAST is what it's all about. So working out the math as a perp protocol,
how much can you really get on a native yield? And for us, it's actually not that high. So we had to
get creative around what we're highlighting in our BLAST deployment. So with that being said,
what makes it really interesting is for those lending and borrowing protocols,
and also AMMs, because those are specifically where high TBL would occur in different protocols,
and those extra 1%, 2%. So for context, you're getting a baseline 4% native yield on ETH deposits
on BLAST. And you can opt in and out of by deploying a contract as a protocol,
if you wanted those users to directly get ETH, or you can, as a protocol, you get those ETH
passed to you and you distribute back to users. And on USD, I believe this is 5%. So those are
quite lucrative if you're comparing it to other lending and borrowing protocols or other AMMs
that you're providing liquidity for. So from that perspective, I think what that means from a retail
perspective user space or being a taker or experience using an AMM or money markets is
you actually get better rates. So what I'm assuming a lot of the TVL will be larger on BLAST in the
form of AMMs, the form of lending markets, which usually means the interest rates will be lower,
usually the slippage will be lower on other AMM markets. So from a retail perspective,
probably trading and borrowing money or et cetera, gets you better rates in general. So that could
potentially bring in a lot of default users, in my opinion. Now, jumping back to what we're doing
for BLAST, I can share this because I think this is something that we're pretty excited about.
We are doing a NFT perp equivalent of drift draw. So drift has this lottery type of engagement,
where if you're trading on drift for every dollar you trade, you are entering in this lottery,
where I think there's a grand prize draw every week, but it's been accumulating. So it's quite
lucrative. What we're thinking and what we've designed here is essentially for every point
where you're trading on NFT perp, you're issued a NFT ticket to the grand prize every week.
So the more you trade, the more tickets you get. And the grand prize is comprised of native yield
that the protocol combined TBL generates, and also our NFT perp tokens as well,
developer rewards from BLAST that we're receiving, we're giving it back to users.
There will be in there as well. And then a portion of the protocol fee that we're capturing
from our end will be going to the grand prize. So what happens every week is there will be a
12 hour window where no tickets can be generated, because one week has passed,
and we'll determine who the finalists are. And we use pith entropy, which is a similar thing to
Chainlink VRF. They're the sort of the BLAST version of Chainlink. They're doing a lot of
Oracle infra provision there. So we're using entropy from pith to decide who the two finalists
are going to be. And the finalists essentially get to make a decision if they want to split
with steel, the final price. If they both choose to split, they share. If they one chooses split,
the other one chooses to steal, the one that steals get the whole thing. And if they both choose to
split, they get very little money, and then the rest roll over to next week. So just a little bit
about what we're doing with BLAST deployment, and we'll be focusing a lot on BLAST users is we think
those are probably going to be a lot of our ideal customers.
Wow, a little prisoner's dilemma. Yeah, I know. That was great. Thank you for
walking us through that. The prisoner's dilemma in the raffle is a fun twist. And I think you
got to highlight, I think the trend I'm watching for, I think it's going to play out is if folks
already have eighth locked on BLAST earning 4% yield, and then there are other protocols building
on top of it that are offering better yield in fairly safe-ish environments. I think we were
going to see folks move over and use those protocols just to get higher yield. I think
it just makes sense. I think we're absolutely going to see it. Jose, we are a little over time,
but before we go, I do want to give you a chance just to tell our listeners what's coming next
for NFT Purv. V2 went live yesterday for the whitelist phase. What do folks need to know?
What do you want to leave our listeners with here? Yeah, 100%. So real quick,
the alpha program is live. That means you can access your protocol if you have an invite code.
And I know the show was kind of shedding on invite codes earlier. I'm going to do a shameless plug
here. You guys that are listening, people that are here, you are going to be able to get
access through the LuckyTrader ref code. Actually, we'll drop you guys a link. You guys
can post it later on. The code is going to be LuckyTrader, all caps. You guys can access the
alpha program, which will be live for shortly before we open to the public. And the alpha program
is incentivized. So if you trade, deposit into AMM or insurance fund, you are going to get a
share of the tokens that we're currently distributing. Beyond that, look out for our
blast deployment. There's going to be a ton of stuff happening. We're really excited to share
it with everyone. But yeah, for the time being, thank you guys for listening and thanks for
having us. Yeah, this was fantastic. Certainly some exciting times over at NFT Purv. And yes,
we were joking around some ref link codes. But I think I did call out that there are
levels to this and there are certainly protocols which I feel much more comfortable sharing
those ref links and NFT Purv definitely in that category at that level. I know an established
player in the space. So we're super excited for you guys. V2 is finally here. It's starting to
roll out on a larger stage. So NFT Finance just continues to get pushed forward and traders are
going to have more and more options. So we're excited about that. We're excited for the blast
integration. Wish you all the best, folks. That is going to be it for today's show, though.
Before we leave, what is minting today? Today is a slower day of mints and events. We had the
Stark token claim go live this morning at 7am Eastern. Screensavers at 9am. Tijo's Diaries of
Compulsive Obsession coming at noon Eastern. And then CFW's Palette is coming tonight at 6pm
Eastern again. It's a slower day of new NFT drops, mostly focused in art here to start the
short holiday week here in the U.S. I think the highlight today already happened with that Stark
token claim. So if you are eligible, make sure you go check that out. It opened up quite, quite high.
Folks, that's it. That's our show. We'll be back tomorrow at 10am Eastern. Thanks to our listeners
for tuning in. Thanks to our partners, AFT Perk, for coming on today. Thanks to my co-hosts.
Thanks to Dee's. Thanks to Sam. Everyone, enjoy your Tuesday. Let's make it a great time.