Lucky Lead: NFT Market Overview, Memecoins & Auras with Jeremy Cowart

Recorded: May 8, 2023 Duration: 0:35:40

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GM, GM. Thank you for joining us here this morning. We're going to start the show here in just a few minutes. We'll give it a few for folks to filter in. Get our speakers up on stage. While we wait, here are some tunes.
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Good morning and welcome to the Lucky Lead. Today is Monday, May 8th. Well, it was a bit of a quiet weekend in the NFT market. It was a louder
weekend in meme coins. It definitely feels like attention has shifted. But there are some really cool collections coming out in the NFT space this week. And I'm very excited to be highlighting one here on the show today. I see some friendly faces out there. Hunter,
Alex, thanks for joining us. If you don't mind sharing, retweeting the room, I'd love to get some more folks in here. We've got a big conversation coming today with Jeremy Coward talking about his NFT project. You'll see him up on stage with us. Excited to get there. As a reminder for any new listeners out there, we do run this show every weekday Monday to Friday.
at 10 a.m. Eastern. It's a 30 minute show covering all the major news in crypto, web 3 and NFTs. This show is meant for those interested in discovering the space, those actively buying and selling in the crypto and NFT markets and those here just doing research. I'm your host Tyler D. I'm joined by my amazing co-host. We've got Emily loves crypto.
a Web 3 security expert and co-founder of the foolproof app. We've got Logan Hitchcock, Reppin the Lucky Trader account he is our editor-in-chief over at LT and we've got Ghost, content star over at Lucky Trader, quiet well, meme coin, insana, enthusiast. Still rockin that knock, amigo, Ghost, good morning, how you doing?
Good morning, man. You keep saying I'm deep in these mean coin streets. I just bought it just like everyone else I've never done it before so not that not that deep but I watched my bags go down like everyone else and got caught up in the euphoria this weekend so But touch a lot of grass doing well had a great weekend. We went from euphoria to pain very quickly here These cycles are just moving at war
speed. We'll get into that here in a bit. I'm also very excited to welcome artist Jeremy Coward to the show. We will be talking about his upcoming project Aura's here later on. I'm super excited to get into that as well. So before we get there real quick
What's on dock at four today? We're going to start with the NFT market. It's ice cold. We'll talk about the meme coins dumping take some guesses at the new blur collection and then get into that combo with Jeremy before we jump in ghost any housekeeping items today. Yeah, as always, Tyler does a great recap every morning of the NFT space in his morning minute newsletter. So we've got that pin to the top.
to give that a subscribe if you haven't already. And then we've also got our AI authority account up into the top there. If you're interested in AI, go check out that account. Same great team from Lucky Trader covering all the exciting developments in AI. So give the subscribe to the newsletter, which comes out every Friday and then the Twitter account for all the latest in the space. Goose, thank you for that. All right. Well, let's#
right into our top story today. It's the NFT market cool down. So if it feels a bit quieter out there on NFT Twitter or in the market, well that's because there aren't many people actively trading left. Certainly unique daily traders, daily NFT sales and overall trading volume on ETH are at their lowest levels in
several months. So one of the numbers looked like I wrote this up in the newsletter this morning using some data from the C launch, Dune dashboard. But looking at Saturday specifically, daily trading volume is at 7700 ETH, which was down about 90% from local February highs. We saw daily unique users
at 3881 down 87% from local highs and daily unique sales at 8393% from local February highs. So basically a full 90% retrace here from the local highs we saw in February after blur farming and season two began.
In fact, Blair users, their sales and volume were all down from their pre-incinital levels as well. And we've talked about it, and, you know, Sam, M.T. Stats, and the I.C.s talked about this at length. But Blair paying people millions of dollars a day to simply trade NFTs via their token incentives has led to traders leaving and droves. It's pretty hard to imagine
would be the consequences, yet here we are. So, this is quickly taking a look at the board and how basket of some of the top entities have performed and held up over the last 30 days. So, here's about a sample 12 to 15, along with their four price change in the last 30 days. So, punks are at 54.
E third down 6% but Dins is holding at 54 they're down 17% board 8 so 47 down 20% Azuki's at 15.1 plus 6% Mutants at 10.8 down 17% squiggles at 8.87 down 8% Captains at 6.9 up 5% Pudgy ping ones at 4.3
Up 1% Digitigoccus Genesis 2.88 minus 36% Clonex 2.75 down 4% Doodles 2.57 minus 8% Moonbirds 2.35 minus 27% Menotherdeeds 1.15 down 24% So so basically most of the major high volume in
to those. I think we talked about the drivers. The price of ETH was effectively even on the month, so it's not a US dollar repricing causing this. It feels like it's a combination of meme coin mania, consistently high daily gas prices, and then just some of the overall blur market manipulation by Wales leading to
people is kind of leaving the train space. That feels like the driver. I'm curious, and I want to open it up to our speakers, thoughts on the market, any end inside. Emily will go with you first. I really think that the cycle is resetting, and we're not going to see much
action in the way of NFTs. I think that we're going to go through a big, defy timeline. And the only opportunity that NFTs really have is to embrace the additional functionality that comes with the
you know the the literal ERC 721 and 1155 checklist that that puts them into that bucket and that just never happened. People weren't utilizing the technology that came with it. They truly were shakwins with JPEGs and blur just kind of ripped the
ripped the wall off people's eyes to show that. I think that the art collecting component is still there, but even that royalty conversation, people were relying on a web to variation of royalties. I think NFTs truly have to get their act together if they plan on coming back.
It makes sense. There are some reminders, some analogies to the 2021 market. I think a lot of folks left in the season in spring 2021, D5 became popular and then of course, 70s had their major bull run. It's a little bit harder to see
what that catalyst is right now. But there are some similarities. I'm curious for your thoughts, any end in sight. Have you been trading any NFTs at all over the past few weeks? No, I haven't really made any moves. I mean, I think it's really hard, especially with the gas situation right now, for like the average trader who doesn't have a
big bag of eath to be making moves because it just eats your liquidity so fast. It's really hard to get in and out of trades when you have to pay .08 or .05 and gas. It just adds up really quickly. I think that's a huge driver right now, but I kind of agree with some of Emily's points. I also like to see what types of communities are still around in the NFC space, and that was such a big driver#
of growth of people really wanted to be part of something and obviously that's a lot easier when the number is going up. But I still think that there's some communities around that will stand the test of time and look at some of the prices of like Apes even though they're down significantly like there's still close to a hundred thousand punks or still close to a hundred thousand dollars. That's a lot of money so I don't think we're dead here and
And I do think that we'll have a resurgence eventually. But I was surprised to see. I thought that more of like the Pepe wealth that was created like kind of overnight in this last like two weeks would flow into some sort of NFTs kind of seems like a Malady's. Surge a little bit in that ecosystem. And I know a lot of those coins were created by that ecosystem.
But not as much as I would have hoped, I think. Yeah, I think that's kind of a wild card that a lot of folks are waiting to see is there's certainly a portion of the NFT base who has done well in this Pepe surge with some of these other coins, but it's not entirely clear if there
rotating it back into our PFPs. Ghosts, you did note that a few collections will stand and test the time. I'm curious from that list I read any that are kind of jumping out to you given their performance in this kind of in this pullback other than punks and age which you already mentioned. I mean, I think meanwhile is a really
interesting one to watch. I've been bullish on meme land for a while, but I think if they drop this meme token kind of in this meme coin type craze with that name, and I think that that could also kind of interestingly bridge the gap between meme coins and NFTs because I think that it'll have use cases within their NFT projects and the other like whatever
types of side projects that me, Blanda, Nondack are cooking up there, but I think it will also act as like a great meme token because just the cash tag of meme is a great meme in itself. So I'm interested to watch that one and I think that could kind of interestingly thread the needle there. Yeah, I mean that's likely one of
the more interesting storylines here in the next few weeks and months that could be a driver for a PIP project. So we'll definitely be watching that one on the topic of mean coins here quickly. So Pepe was officially listed on finance on Friday. We were talking about during the show, I think it peaked live during our show on Friday actually.
I think right around 1.8 billion it was down to like 949 this morning. So we saw about a 50% retrace. It is just, I mean, it is wild at these coins. A, moving up so fast, but also seeing these pullbacks just rapidly. I think what really stood out to me is how much volume
you, Pepe has done since it's been listed on Binance. So just in the last 24 hours, this thing did like $940 million in volume. So for some perspective, Dogecoin did 300 million in that time frame. So Pepe, Pepe, three X more daily volume than Doge. And then NFT, the entire
Ethereum market on Ethereum saw 450 million in non-wash trading volume in the past 30 days, and that's according to crypto slam data. So Pepe did about 2x the volume of the entire NFT market on the ETH in the past day. So I think that now that the question is how long is this going to last?
folks are kind of torn, have meme coin tops was Binance listing Pepe the top here or things just getting started. Go story Emily, you know I'm curious for your thoughts. If you think this still has some additional legs or if things might be starting to cool down. Yeah I'll profit this by saying that I am
not a meme coin expert by any means and I don't think anyone really knows what's going to happen or can accurately predict it. But I do think that among the meme coins that we've seen surge, I think Pepe probably has the best chance of having staying power and I don't think you get to like a 1.8 billion market cap and what we saw with all that traffic and like you just mentioned with the volume, I don't think you get there without#
it go away in the matter of a couple days here. I know it's really easy to have a short-term outlook on things and like we saw this weekend like all of a sudden we're bleeding and it can change really fast but I think that we're not done with Pepe. I'm a little bit more concerned about the other coins just keeping the attention on those and I don't know. I
I sold out of turbo this morning a little bit and I didn't take enough profits when I was up. I got caught up in the euphoria, but I'm trying to be more conscious of that. But I do think that I don't think we've seen the last of Pepe in my opinion. Yeah, I think I'm with you there. You know, it's hard for me to say a coin that did 940 million in turn in the morning yesterday#
eighth out of all crypto tokens on the board behind Bitcoin, ETH and the stable coins basically. Hard to say that's that it's over, but certainly we'll see. That's a very important driver for attention relative to the NFT market as well. Well, I think we covered that in
enough detail here this morning. I do want to get into our conversation with Jeremy, but before we do that, let's quickly read the headlines. Today's top news powered by Lucky Trader. Trading Wyme is just over 10,000 ath on Sunday as most NFTs fall one to three percent. Pudgy Ping-Wins announced a new deal
be represented by talent agency WME to help make the brand a household name. Memeland has teased its meme tokenomics, including a 69% distribution for the community, trying to capitalize on the meme coin, Mania. Blur is adding a new collection to his Blend program today with speculation
anything from D. Gods to board Apes to even knock amigos. Onchain monkey share new details on how secure spots on its rise list. Ahead they're upcoming Bitcoin met and then in other crypto news crypto fell on Sunday Bitcoin down 3% at 27,960. Eat down 2% at 1860. Interestingly,
Bitcoin, Bitcoin fees have spiked as over 11,000 tokens have been created and traded on Bitcoin as BRC 20s surge. Ghost, any of those headlines that caught your eye, any predictions for what Blur's going to be adding to that? I don't know. I mean, I could see it, you guys. I know a lot of people are speculating.
some sort of meme land stuff as well, but I don't think that meme land is going to do that. And they've kind of been anti-bler farming and things like that, so I'd be surprised if they were one of the partner collections, or I don't even know if it is a partner collection or if their blurs are just kind of picking and choosing which ones they want. I think Pudgy Penguins announced in that deal and continue to#
We kind of just mentioned how those different collections, like which ones we're going to have the staying power. And I think the ones that we constantly see having the most attention on our timelines will be the ones that can navigate this time. And I think Pudgy Penguins is a good example of that. We've seen Frank DeGods always have the attention economy. So I'd be betting on some of those people that are really good at
the stadium is spotlight. Makes a lot of sense. We will be watching that here today and reporting on it on the show tomorrow. All right. Well, I want to welcome, right before we get to our common with Jeremy, I passed over Emily during the meme coin thought. So Emily, any more to add? Oh, no, I was just going to comment on NFTs. I have very little faith in
any NFT project that isn't going super hard on buildings and web 3 infrastructure to support themselves. And like I still talk to projects every day that are choosing web 2 solutions, it's just, it's a very bearish sign to me. So I guess we'll see when someone, you know, chooses to embrace the technology or not.
Well, speaking of embracing technology in cool new ways, I'm very excited. I think it's a great saying to bring Jeremy Coward into the conversation here today. So just a quick overview for folks who may not know Jeremy. He's a renowned photographer having to work with subject
ranging from Barack Obama to Taylor Swift to the Kardashians, publishing Rolling Stone, The New York Times and Time Magazine for his latest venture into the NFT space. He has created his collection "Ora's" in record-setting fashion. I want to read this quick blur from his website. So on May 2nd, just last
week, Jeremy created ORAs, which are 10,000 completely unique NFTs. First and just 20 minutes start to finish without relying on any gyrative code. It was also the first time that Jeremy has ever publicly revealed his creative process that he has spent 10 years privately developing in his studio. It's the kind of thing that you have to see
to believe. And I can definitely confirm that I've watched some of the videos. It was awesome. So just, you know, quickly summarizing it for myself and I want to hear this from Jeremy. Jeremy's basically a one-man shot for the creation process, not using a team. Instead, he did the following. He used himself as the PFP and main character for these photos. He wore all
white, including a white mask, he leveraged some patent pending lighting techniques, three layers of projection, and a 130 foot $5.90 LED volume screen set behind him, and then edited the photos instantaneously into eight different styles using a pre-built custom app. So he effectively embraced the concept of rarity and traits in typical PIP
projects created his own through lighting, through background projections and external things that happened around him during this live event. And a live crowd got to watch it all go down in front of the Nashville last week. The videos looked awesome. Jeremy, welcome to the show. I'd love to hear kind of how you
You know got to or maybe just get start with this is some quick background on you and your path to this project man Thank you so much for having me. I'm stoked to be here. I've been listening for a while and I'm just honored to be a guest today. So yeah, where is man talk about horrible timing?
especially in the context of Yel's combo this morning my goodness. But yeah, Horace is a crazy idea I had back in January. You know, I've been building this process for a very long time and you know, I've been in this space for a couple years now, but I'm
It was really in January, like man, I think I can do this 10k and at the time I thought I could do it in 10 minutes, but it turns out the camera and tech aren't quite ready to go that fast yet. So I started testing and I realized I could hit more in the under
20 minute range and so yeah I was off to the races to build a team, build a project I've had even though I am a bit of a one-man show in terms of the creation process it took a massive massive effort with a lot of people involved to
to make this happen and I'm so grateful to the team but yeah if you are actually just tweeted a link where you can actually see the full 10k collection on one single web page and you can kind of browse and see the monstrosity of
have data that was captured in 20 minutes. And so I built a movie, a images that played on the projected onto my body. I was wearing like you said all white, so that my whole body was essentially a projection outfit.
including my face. I used AI and my own art, my paintings and photographs to project about 10 images per second, both on me and the LED volume screen behind me. So basically with that
You know created was a different image every single frame and it was changing hats literally hats Changing body positions. We had prisms Rotetti in front of the lens using robotics Gosh, oh the different lighting styles to our lights would probably
during the process. Yeah, there's all this like actual rarity built into the process. And so it was insane somehow it all worked. Yeah, insane is the right word. And I definitely encourage folks to check out the video on the Oras
website, just to even just a couple of minutes to see how this went down. Jeremy, I'm curious. What was the 20 minutes like for you? Did it go by in a blur? How are you feeling during the live event? Yeah, all day it actually was not working because even
I've got the fastest, you know, MacBook Pro on the planet, we got the fastest camera and even with the very latest in gear, it was not working. Like we were just running into issue after issue all day long, even up to 4pm before the event. And I was freaking out. Oh my gosh.
So it was so stressed because you know we had a lot of audience of 200 people coming also to attend and a live broadcast and so it just wasn't working. So anyway, we kind of miracle last minute at all it all came together. So then during the actual performance, you know, there's a lot
this hype and this video ends and it's so whole start happening the entire screen behind me went black it was not working like the five nine dollar screen was not working and so literally in the in the replay of the broadcast you can see the first three minutes like every bit nivity and
the audience knew they had a lot of them performance but none of the girls was working for three minutes and finally everything just magically took off and it happened and what that started after that three minutes I officially shot a tin can in under 20 minutes.
That's amazing. I was gonna ask, did you get the final recorded amount of time? So it did end up coming in under 20 minutes? Yes. It did. Why me once again, once the screen started working.
Yeah, I was like, you know, 18 or 19 minutes because we're also, I would pause the camera to, you know, change hats and adjust a few things and I'd keep shooting it. So yeah, we did it.
So I'm curious. So how did you so you mentioned you originally thought you could get it in the 10 minutes? That didn't quite work. Right. So how did you kind of do the math to figure out the time block? Yeah, just lots of lots of testing with the various cameras that tried the Canon R5, the Canon R6 and the
in our three in the canon. Our three is the fastest of the three cameras. So Edge had to keep testing in my studio to see how fast it could get things to go. So now maybe let's
Let's talk a little bit about post-production. The NFTs were created live during the event. You had your editing software creating the different visuals. But then the team is helping you assign some rarity. How are you going about that process?
Maybe share some of the more of some of the rare traits versus the more common. Yeah, well because it was shot all shot analog, you know, you can't use code to assign the traits. And so I really over the last six days had to hire a team of about 20 people.
around the country to literally go in and manually assign all of the various traits you can't even use AS to do that. So I had to have all these people, you know, one image at a time assigning nine different trade categories.
manually. So, oh, even, yeah, even the way I edited the photos is a really true. So I had one editing style where the image is getting inverted, another one where I like it. Jacked with the curves and its old
like kind of psychedelic looking and then all the other editing styles are more kind of traditional. When it's black and white, when like this kind of like old school, CPS vibe and then the other are these just kind of normal editing looks that I go with.
And so yeah, I had a custom script/app built that when I finished shooting at night, all the editing was applied right away within five minutes of the last photo being taken. All 10,000 photos were
it in not only with the eight different editing styles but with rarity applying. So in the app, you know, I was able to tell it only applying, you know, 3% to the inverted look, I think is like 4% to the chaos, which is like the psychedelic look. And this
then so I did use a little bit of generic code for about 140 images. I manually chose images to be scrambled with generic code and so there's some where they have all these
like weird rectangles and squares kind of like combining multiple orcs together and then I built 10 images that using generative code that are combined with like paint splatters. So there's literally just 10 of those. See
Yeah, and then there's there is a one of one and that images the only the only image just out of the test like a month ago. It's wide on white. So it's the only like all white aura. Oh wow. So there is that Easter egg and there's somewhere.
So are you happy with the outputs? I mean, I know I saw some of these and you were tweeting a bit over the last few days. I mean, something's just incredible. And it's crazy that they were able to come out of this live process, right, that you didn't really know in advance what would come. So how are you feeling about the
the app does do you have any favorites? Yeah, I'm spending my whole career kind of ho humming my work. I kind of have a usually like my work, you know, I get bored of my work. And so this was like the first time that I think like, well, like I'm like really damn proud of this but it works. So yeah, I'm, I
couldn't be happier with the end result. The end result, especially to look at the full body knowing it was created in 20 minutes, is really 10 years.
But yeah, I mean I couldn't be more happy with the work itself I Kind of loved that tagline 10 years and 20 minutes Because it really is that I'm curious so were there any big surprises that came out of the event, you know, certainly I know you walked just through some of the chat
and how the screen went blank there. Were there any surprises from any of the outputs or anything that happened during the event? - Oh, hundreds of surprises from the output. It's a minus/fanthilized five days having to go through the M just one by one and that just was...
Very surprised by many of many of the images but also surprised by the reaction That the people had to the event. I mean there were people in the room like crying like lots of people crying like I didn't realize what a kind of what an emotional
experience of is going to be had this beautiful music playing by Christina Spanay. She's a classical artist and NFT artist and so you know with her music playing overhead and yeah I guess it was just you know to see an artist whether it's me or would you
we just don't really get to see many visual artists at the top of the game top of the crap doing their thing live in front of you start to finish that's not most artists are behind closed worse in their studio doing their thing and so I guess to open that up
and invite the public and which was a much more impactful emotional thing than I realized. It's amazing to think about. I think we need more of this. We need more transparency and honesty and not only docks themselves, but docks in the creative
process. I'm totally with you. I think that's what stood out to me the most about your creative process and this event. It was choosing to do it live in front of a live audience. I thought it was so cool. I was the reason why I wrote about it in the newsletter last week. I just had to cover it.
So I'm happy that it went off so well and that folks in their alive in the room got to enjoy it. I'm jealous. I wish I could have been there down in Nashville because I've watched the videos. It looks amazing. You know, I'm curious before we wrap up here, what do folks need to know about the myth?
Coming up and anything else to leave our listeners with? Yeah, the the mint is tomorrow actually on OpenC directly to it's a partnership with OpenC on one of their one of their drops. So 11 a.m. Central time is public mint.
And 10 a.m. is is a lawless meant central Tom and a lawless price will be cheaper than public meant so people can still just barely still get on the law that they get on my pre meant which is in
Twitter bio I think you can go jump on there because I'll be exporting the list here shortly so definitely jump on the LL list if you want and yeah let's hope that you know there's still some lovers of art and historic projects I know it's a rough moment
in the space, but I'm very hopeful that this is the type of project we've definitely never seen this kind of PFP before. And I've seen a lot of people say this gets me excited about NFTs again. And my hope is that a lot of people will have that feeling tomorrow.
Well, that's certainly great to hear. And of course, you know, the market has pulled back, but at the same time, you know, there's less competition for new and unique projects. So I think you've got that, you've got that going for you. Well, I really appreciate you coming on. This conversation's been great.
The Or is product just looks awesome. So folks, if you're interested, go check that out when it meant here tomorrow. Well, folks, we are out of time. That is our show for today. But before we close, what's what's dropping? We've got the memes by 6529.
at 11 a.m. If gas holds holds up. They did post poem Fridays meant. We've got Fushino reality by Sam Z in the art blocks world. We've got the floor app adding Salona support here today. And then we've also got Matt here.
Chris, newest myth, socks is coming today as well. So a little bit of a slow start that the Curator dropped today from Sam's e. 255 amp C's launching at 0.238 and then it seems like that map theory,
will likely be the mint of today. And of course, start thinking about Orra's coming tomorrow from Jeremy. All right, folks, that is it. That's our show. We'll be back tomorrow morning at Tinney and Eastern. Thanks to our listeners. Thanks to Jeremy. Thanks to my co-hosts. Everyone enjoy Monday. Let's make a
a great day. Bye everybody.