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WOLF THURSDAY AFTERNOON SPACES
Recorded: Sept. 14, 2023 Duration: 2:00:43Space Recording
Full Transcription
Dude, that's funny.
I was going into my, like, invite for DM, and I was typing in NFT God, and then you were already in here.
Bro, I want to be the most reliable, the most on-time host there is.
You're my kind of guy.
That's how I live my life right there.
I run on Tom Coughlin time.
You're not five minutes early.
Exactly.
And the grind doesn't stop.
I literally tested positive for COVID, like, three hours ago.
But grind does not stop.
Here's the secret.
Don't tell anyone you have and just keep living your life like normal.
I would, except I was supposed to go to a concert tonight with, like, eight friends.
So I didn't want to give it to all of them.
So I was like, sorry, guys.
Who are you going to see?
I was actually going to go see this.
I would call her Undiscovered Artist, who I found, and that I have, like, all my friends hooked on.
And she's an EDM artist called Alley Cat, except Cat is spelled C-B-T.
And she's just really been blowing up lately.
Really good EDM.
Like, gnarly beats is how I would describe it.
Alley C-B-T?
So A-L-L-E-Y.
Like an alley.
Yeah.
Found it.
And then C-B-T.
Yeah.
Found it.
She's only got, like, maybe, like, 10, 20 songs out, but absolute bangers.
And the tickets are only 16 bucks.
So I'm not super worried that I won't be able to make it.
But sad, you know, when these things happen.
But you know what?
There could be worse things.
I get to hang out with you guys here on stage.
Just added to my Spotify playlist, I'm excited to see you gridded out a COVID-led space.
That's going to be – that shows your grit.
I've got it.
I've got it.
I'm excited to get right into the thick of it.
So I wanted to start off, actually, Alex, with you, because you put out a tweet, which
you actually, I think, just retweeted recently.
And you talked about changes that are coming to X.
There have been a number of changes, in fact, already happening in the last – it seems
like 48 hours.
They changed how you can view engagement on a post.
They changed how you can see likes, comments, views.
I'm not totally certain why these changes are being made in a specific way.
And I'd love to discuss why we think these things are happening in the way that they
are.
You also put out a post with these great mock-ups involving mainly tipping, I think, was
one of the big things that you were focused on there and showing how people could go ahead
and tip.
But then there's also stuff like tweet cred and reputation and revenue and stuff like
that.
So maybe you can kind of kick us off with, first off, why they're making the changes
that they are making.
Penny, let me drop you that other co-host coming to you.
And then maybe talk a little bit about some of the things which you were outlining in
your post.
Yeah, for sure.
So I put out a post a few weeks ago with like talk about transparency, something Penny talks
about a lot, something I talk about a lot.
And someone created a mock-up under it of what they thought it would look like.
And it was like the sickest mock-up ever.
It just looked so natural.
And I can pin this here.
And I DM the guy.
I'm like, listen, your mock-ups are sick.
His name's Danny.
I credit him in the post I just pinned.
I have a bunch of ideas of what I think X will look like in the next 12 months.
Can you just like create mock-ups for all of it?
And within 24 hours, I sent him the ideas and he sent me back all the mock-ups and they
were fucking awesome.
Pardon my French.
And so I put out the post yesterday with, you know, just based on what I see in the
code, based on what I see in the algorithm, based on announcements, leaks, rumors, what
Elon's talked about, I predict X in the next 12 months will look exactly like the post I
just pinned to the top, which is around better transparency, where you can see as you're
typing things out what will dock you, what will dock your tweet cred, what will hurt your
reputation, as well as improved monetization.
Clearly, Elon wants us to be the financial hub of everything you do.
And it only makes sense that, you know, that financialization is used to reward creators.
The better the creators are rewarded, the better the creators that will come to the platform.
Right.
You see that with YouTube right now.
YouTubers are making millions and millions of dollars, and that's causing a lot of people
to go there and create videos.
I think better monetization is coming to X than is on YouTube and will lead to better
creators coming here.
And so in the post, I have things around tipping on posts.
So, you know, we have X coins.
A lot of people talked about before.
In the concept of X coins is there's this middleman currency called X coin that you can
use to tip creators.
Someone writes a post that you find really interesting.
You click like a super like button and it sends them, you know, a certain amount of X coins.
Elon has debunked that an X coin will exist.
But he also said that the concept of X coin will happen, though, where instead of having
this middleman currency called X coin, you'll just actually just send money overall to people
for it.
And so I have tipping in there.
I think spaces are going to get monetization as well.
It only makes sense that if you're going to monetize tweets that you'll monetize spaces.
And Wolf, I think that's pretty good news for you.
I think your revenue will probably skyrocket when they implement monetization of spaces where
if someone says some pretty cool shit, you can tip them or send currency to the hosts.
And that really, you know, that might seem small, but I think that just absolutely skyrockets
the possibilities.
You know, why would I work for New York Times and get paid $20 an article when I can just
go on X and host a space and report there and get tips from the thousands of people that
listen to me when I put out cool news or say something interesting, the monetization reward
system is just so much better that way.
So point being, I rambled on a little bit there.
Transparency and monetization are the big focus over the next year.
In that post, I put out a bunch of mock-ups.
And I think the face of X looks completely different 12 months from now and radically improves
how we use this platform.
Yeah, I am just interested to see what the scene looks like if, if and when they do add
tipping onto spaces.
If we just see the number of spaces being hosted on our timeline go from, you know, mine's typically
five to 10, let's say.
I think it would be probably more like 40 to 60.
Penny, what do you think?
Well, I plan on, you know, moving heavily into spaces already.
We've talked about this to some extent.
I think that there's not another platform with the potential to, you know, sort of gather
a following with regular tweets or, you know, posts, but then move on and be able to have
in-depth discussions where people are coming up on stage and answering questions and you
can bring up randoms and, you know, famous people and whatever.
And it's just a mix.
So I'm really, really big on spaces.
And I definitely agree with you that, like, they're only going to grow from here.
When a guest or a speaker can, you know, participate in tipping, I think that's definitely going
to take it to the next level.
I think that, you know, we're super early and anyone who is interested in monetizing, anyone
who is a good speaker, they're definitely going to be looking to host spaces in the future.
I'm super excited about that and super excited about all the transparency stuff.
When I saw the mock-ups that Alex posted in the pinned comment there, I was just like so
happy to see someone actually visualize or put on, you know, a mock-up what I had had
in my head for so long.
I think that that makes such a huge difference and to hear Elon talk about that recently at
the all-in pod that, you know, like we're, we're, we still plan on being fully transparent
and just some of this stuff was, you know, a little bit too embarrassing to release to
begin with and working through a bunch of the old nasty code.
You know, I, I've always been optimistic, but I think I'm even more optimistic than ever
that we're headed in the right direction here.
Love the ideas.
Yeah.
Default.
Yeah, I just want to throw my two cents on this.
I actually talked to Alex MFT God earlier about this.
I think it was like last week or the week before on how I, I really think for one is
that not a lot of people have been utilizing the like live streaming feature for like, you
know, like video streaming.
And I think that's really underplayed.
And I really think that that's going to be getting boosted up.
I even surmised that that might start popping up at the top, like spaces would.
And, um, so I'm like already kind of positioned to do that, like start doing like live trading
and stuff on that.
And also, um, with, if the tipping feature does become like a real thing, you know, in
marketing, you usually see like one to 3% conversion rates, but this is different.
And I'm really interested to see the data because this will be onsite.
This won't be conversions via going through a link to offsite.
So I, I don't know what the percentages would be, but I think they would be a lot higher
and it'd be like overall just like a net benefit for the space and content creators.
Yeah, that's an interesting idea there.
Do you follow Brian?
Yeah, I, I love the mockups.
Um, I, I think that's something that is important, especially that, that, uh, analytics page for
total earnings, like, I don't think people realize like all the possible avenues for
earnings, uh, that there will be.
And, and, and something that isn't included are ads within videos.
So if you're posting videos, I know Ashley down there, she posts a lot of videos.
If you actually allow for ads and videos like YouTube, that's a whole other line.
So you have subscriptions, you have profile and reply ads, you have video ads, uh, you have
tipping, uh, I think like all of these added up, a lot of people could actually make a career
on X, uh, moving forward.
I know several people already have, are making $2,500 or so a month, uh, just with subscriptions.
So add that to ad revenue, video revenue and tipping.
And I mean, you could, there's easily hundreds of people that could be making, uh, close to
six figures, uh, in the long run over the, over an annualized period.
Yeah, it's hard to tell how many people it's going to be possible for.
I also think that there's a higher level conversation to be had here as well, which is, you know,
we've seen it from Elon's own tweets that Twitter is still definitely struggling with
that monetization.
This isn't a company that's just like, you know, Apple, right?
Like, Hey, here's a bunch of money we're making every quarter.
We have a hundred billion in cash sitting there.
Sure.
We can have a creator fund, right?
Like this is a company that's still kind of teetering at the moment.
And it's fascinating to hear them having this discussion.
And I'm sure that internally they have a finance department that is like crunching numbers.
You're like, okay, if we do this, what is it going to bring in?
Right.
How do we justify these back and forth pieces?
So that's, you know, as a finance person, just where my mind goes.
Yeah.
Brock, go for it.
Yo, yeah.
Lots to talk about.
I think like in video ads is new as of a week ago.
I don't know if anyone's noticed that.
So, so that's good to see.
On the topic of, of spaces and live video, like what default said, how it'll be discoverable
at the top, Andrea did post that, that, that would be the case.
The other thing with spaces and like tipping and just spaces in general, it's on the old
Periscope engine, right?
Like back in April, I, I had a space with one of the founding members of Periscope.
She, she works at OpenAI now, but like some of the limitations we have is because it's
the old Periscope engine.
And like, like we asked her, why can't we have more than 10 speakers?
Right.
And she said, it's just a, it's like a bandwidth thing.
It's just the way it was coded.
Cause it's so old.
They like, we asked her, we have more.
She's like, all right, easily.
But she said, well, then what happens is the latency, it becomes like a, you know, worse
experience.
And we, we all know how glitchy spaces already is, but, um, um, live video, they're definitely
pushing.
And like, I think like, if I've been, I actually owe an employee a loom video cause I wanted
to show them something like, um, I think super chats would be cool.
Like Twitch style.
Um, like, cause, cause right now, I don't know if anyone's used restream or stream yard, uh,
comments in live video don't port through OBS or they don't show like on an onscreen chat
box, which like, if you're a Twitch streamer, you kind of need that to interact with your audience.
I think right now they can that like current live videos go to like the post comments,
I believe.
So they're, they're working on something there, but, um, the fact that they're focusing
on live video is good because it is the Periscope engine.
So that may lead me to believe they're actually digging into the code there.
And then we can start getting, um, a better spaces experience because it is the same engine.
It's, it's both Periscope.
So yeah, it would be cool to see the ability to tip and like Brian, Brian and Ed, I know
we spoke months ago, uh, about just tipping a post.
Like that would be, that would be great.
All these monetization options.
I think like, once this is all done, it's going to be unreal.
Like even think of like a Twitch streamer, right?
Like usually they're just confined to the Twitch platform.
Well, X is an entire social, uh, like an entire social platform behind it.
So if you just had a live video, then you could go off posting on that exact same platform.
So I just think there's so many things they can, um, they can tap into and it's, it's
cool to see like it happening in real time, but there just is so much and they've already
done so much in so little time.
So could I just chime in really fast on something?
Yeah.
So like before I got unbanned from, uh, Twitter, uh, or X, uh, I was on a web three platform
and they had tipping for posts and people actually made a decent amount for how many people were
actually there.
Uh, but something that they also did, which was kind of interesting is they allowed the
original poster to tip his repliers and it would rank the replies by the amount of tip
that you gave to, to them.
So like, that's another interesting idea because you basically allow the original poster to curate
his replies by tipping them, which gives incentive, especially if you really like a post.
So just something else that could be possible, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Brian, I think like if, if like even micro tips were a part of the, like the ecosystem,
it would almost help filter out the garbage, like, you know, bad stuff.
Cause you're not going to send money to someone who says something like obscene on your post.
Yeah.
And if there's, I was just going to say, and if there's a verification, a better verification
process, you don't have to worry about bots just like tipping themselves over and over
again, especially if it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And like with machine learning, it'd be pretty easy to find out if someone's trying to like
juice their own stuff.
You know what I mean?
So I, like, I think, I think if they added in the algorithm, like how many subscribers
someone has, there could be something there too.
Cause if someone's willing to pay a creator, even if it's a dollar, um, like maybe if your
subscription is $10, well, that's like 10 points for one subscriber and $1 per subscriber
is one point.
Like, I think you could almost filter good creators or good content or people or content
that people actually like based off their subscribers, you know, on the backend.
Anyway, I'm kind of going off, uh, off a trail here.
I'll let you, uh, go on.
Yeah, you're good.
Ashley, go for it.
Um, I just like, I noticed the video ads, um, recently and that was something like, I feel
like for the longest time, like the people that were mainly rewarded for, you know, um,
their content was like thread writers, um, that was like, or, or viral posts, like some
of the top creators that were, you know, making things or making money from this app were that.
And now I feel like the, the battleground is even, uh, I mean, that sounds, sounds brutal,
but, um, you know, like, like you, for example, you do spaces all day, every day and, you know,
you've already made it a business and now it's going to be even better for you because you'll
actually get tip from your audience.
Like, you know, and that's the beautiful thing about what Elon is doing with X.
Like, I love that he's consistently adding more, uh, monetization to the platform.
Um, and, and I think that once we start getting people that are like really big in the space,
like, can you imagine if Mr. B started posting his videos on X first, like that will not only,
you know, obviously give him pretty good revenue, but if he makes more money off of X and YouTube,
that will bring millions of people to the platform.
Like, I feel like we're so in crypto, we say this all the time, but we're so early.
What makes it so interesting though, is like X isn't the first platform to monetize, right?
Like YouTube's been paying ad revenue forever.
Twitch has been doing donations forever.
Other platforms have been doing all these things already, but what makes it so exciting
is the fact that it's all going to be in one place, right?
Mr. Beast can come on here, put on a YouTube ad, get that ad revenue.
But then you can put out a tweet and get tipped on the tweet.
Then you can live stream and get donations from the live stream.
There's no platform, or they go on a space after that and like get donations on the space.
There's no other platform that comes remotely close with that kind of flexibility.
And that is what, even though every other platform is doing these things already,
it's a whole paradigm shift just because it's all going to be in one place where I can put
out 20 different types of content on my feed and make money 20 different types of ways.
And that's what's truly going to make this a unique platform that, you know, I've said
it several times.
I think this eats every other platform alive in the next five years.
I truly do.
Why would I post on YouTube when I can post it on X, make money a hundred different ways,
combine that with other content that attracts people to one place?
It really is, as Ash just said, we're really early, but the whole paradigm shifts once you
have this all in one place.
And they have the potential to do this in the next 12 months.
All they have to do is just add these interesting little monetization things to all the different
types of content.
Well, look, I mean, I think it was fair to say that there are some downsides towards monetization.
Like, I know you guys have been talking a lot about the positives, but I mean, just for
my own personal use of Twitter over the last, like, few months, I mean, have you guys
noticed, you know, people kind of trying to game the algorithm system and, you know,
the actual content itself kind of feeling a little bit weak?
I'm curious if you guys have thoughts on that.
Without Googling, name one thing this country has produced.
Dude, Evan, you know exactly what I'm talking about, dude.
Yeah, it's happening right now.
Real quick, real quick.
I want to get some of the hands that were waiting for a little while and for a second.
But one thing I did want to point out, because someone mentioned this, I think it was Brock,
maybe, the chat feature of them having, like, a Discord-style chat with mods and stuff like
that.
I should show not, over a year and a half ago, I had a call with the Twitter Space team
talking about that being built out, talking about what I wanted to see on it and all that
stuff, and never came to fruition.
And to be honest, that team's mostly been fired.
But they do seem to be implementing stuff at a much more rapid pace now, so I have a little
bit more hope.
Like, that posting on desktop, which only came three weeks ago, I was told that was
coming in February of 2022.
Like, things just did not happen.
Yeah, go for it, Evan, and then I want to hit Lucas.
Okay, two things quickly.
One, Twitter X has actually had ads on videos for over a year now.
I know a couple creators, it was a very slick program, and they have been getting paid for
And they were getting paid more money than they're getting from the just posting that they're
getting now.
So, ads on videos have been a while, I just haven't expanded it at all.
I don't fully understand why they're doing the video live stream in its own separate format,
as opposed to kind of combining it with spaces, adding video to spaces, and doing that.
And one other thing, Wolf, I feel like you can count, they have updated everything, so
many places, so much stuff, except for spaces.
You can count the new features we've had that Elon took over on one hand, I feel like.
But, yeah, quick rundown there.
Yeah, you know, it's the smallest team, I believe, at Twitter, is spaces.
I think that there was a confirmation at one point from an insider that there were three
people left working on it after the initial cuts that Twitter made there.
There was a three-person spaces team.
So, you know, not a ton of thought being put there, and hopefully they're fleshing that
out.
But, yeah, go for it, Lucas.
Hey, thanks for having me up here.
So, you know, it's funny that, like, a lot of this stuff already exists on Twitter, you
know, the tipping features and things like that.
All it has to do is be ported over.
It's not as difficult as you think it is.
And this isn't like rocket science.
We're basically just building a, you know, a creator platform, which is already here,
right?
All you're doing is adding features from other products that are out there.
Like, we were talking about YouTube and then, like, putting up, like, comments higher if
they pay a little bit more, they tip a little bit more.
Like, all that stuff still, all that stuff already exists on all these other platforms.
So, it's easy to, like, copy, you know, I would say it's easy to copy and paste most
of these things that are already successful.
And I have a hard time believing X is going to be, until they put in, like, brand protection
and safety guidelines on this platform that protects the brands from, like, malicious
activities such as horrible comments, horrible retweet, anything that could be deemed as toxic
to a brand.
They're not going to come pouring on to here until that's fixed, until you're able, and
especially if they're talking about, like, removing blocking and only using mute stuff,
like, that's not going to work.
I promise you that's not going to work.
Fortune 500 brands hate the idea of people being able to, like, just say whatever they
want without being able to moderate that.
And Twitter is absolutely going the opposite direction.
Not to say that ads won't work on here, because they already are working on here, right?
And I talked to the Twitter Spaces people, at least people that were working on it about
two months ago, and they've been deprioritized on Spaces.
They've been more prioritized on getting accounts and monetization to share.
Basically, they're creating an ad network, right?
And we are the publishers.
I don't know if you guys know how an ad network works, but advertisers connect to publishers
and there's software in the middle.
And in this case, we are the publishers, right?
And back in the old days, you know, 2012, old days, the ad networks were like websites.
You know, it's like yahoo.com and msn.com, all that stuff.
And you would bring in advertisers to connect with software that then connected you with all
these other platforms.
That's what we're doing here, too.
Instead of websites, we are singular islands onto ourselves publishers.
So this isn't like, again, this isn't rocket science.
Ad networks have been around for like 23 years or something like that, maybe longer.
And with that said, also, it's like, I have a really, really hard time believing, and I'm
not saying it's not possible, because we can already have Spaces, and I love Spaces, obviously.
I've done 6,000 plus hours in Twitter Spaces.
Being able to monetize Twitter Spaces already exists.
Like, you can actually have a space that only allows subscribers into your space.
So if you guys wanted to monetize Spaces or anything like that, you could actually do that.
You could actually say, hey, subscribe, and I'm going to go host a space for subscribers
only.
That's interesting, because here's a possible idea of how to do that, too.
And make sure people monetize is what you could do is open a space, have it open for
about an hour, and say, okay, everybody that's in this space, I'm going over to my private
space, you know, community paying members only.
So if you guys want to join me there for the talk I'm going to have after keeping this space
open for an hour, I'm going over there to have an hour and a half, two-hour conversation.
Whoever subscribes can join that space.
Spaces is one of the highest converting systems on the planet right now, as far as I'm
concerned.
Social audio, you convert top, middle, bottom of the funnel within 30 to 60 seconds, right?
I was talking to somebody two days ago, and after talking for like 15 minutes, he DM'd me
and was like, yeah, let's do a consulting call.
I had like three of those in the last, you know, week, because of talking on spaces.
So it definitely converts, right?
That's the value I see here is video and that kind of content.
I'm not sure about, like I said, I'm not really sure about the brands themselves, like
coming on here and like dropping ads and stuff like that, unless you build a partnership with
those brands themselves.
Because again, working with Twitter a little bit is slightly toxic right now.
One, I love Twitter guys, or sorry, X.
I love X.
I'm not hating on X personally.
I'm just saying brands, like again, Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 brands will not risk their
reputation coming onto Twitter and letting these people, you know, basically hate, tweet
back at them without like some kind of brand safety and protection in place.
Just an FYI.
Yeah, good points.
Yeah, Evil?
Yeah, a lot of different things to talk about.
So like Lucas, I've done thousands of hours in spaces.
I mean, we ran a 24 hour a day space for 286 days straight, however many hours that is.
So, you know, that's in addition to like all the other spaces we've done.
So I would say I'm probably pretty expert on kind of like what's wrong with spaces and
features and so on and so forth.
I will say that it was a struggle to monetize that space.
Like it was really, really tough.
Now, granted, we were trying to do something a little bit different.
We weren't trying to do like paid, like paid promo spaces, you know, like a show space or
whatnot, which made it made it more difficult to find like we tried to find advertisers or
sponsors, I should say, for more like kind of passive, like passive sponsorship.
But it was really tough.
I will say that I'm a little skeptical of kind of the vision that's being painted of
like, you know, you're tipping all over the place and, you know, you're tipping for tweets
and you're tipping for spaces and you're tipping for a newsletter and you're tipping for this
and tipping for that.
Like that just sounds like fatigue to me, to be honest.
It doesn't sound fun.
And I would be willing to bet that like you're going to see a very, very low conversion.
And I just say that because like even with our space and to put this in context, like
we were getting between five and thirty five thousand people a day in that space.
And, you know, we tried different mechanisms, right, including things like, hey, why don't
you just send us, you know, like some crypto to this wallet, like tip us basically, right,
or donate or whatever to support the content that you're spending, you know, in some cases,
12, 16 hours a day listening to.
And that conversion was very low.
Right.
And I'm not that I'm not that shocked by it just because I think that there is a tendency
to feel a little bit over monetized, especially in a platform where you now have a premium
subscription.
Right.
Because what you're telling me is like, OK, pay for Netflix, but then also tip all the
creators who are putting the shows and then tip the actors in the shows.
And, you know, it's just kind of like, I don't know, you know, so I'm a little I'm just
a little skeptical that that there's that much enthusiasm on the the tippy side or I
guess the tipper side as opposed to the tippy.
And then kind of the second thing I'd say is that look for I think for content creators
like Mr. Beast and whatever.
I mean, yeah, maybe.
But I think they're just going to passively take advantage of a platform if they can.
Like a lot of those deals are built around things like exclusivity.
It's like if you look at what's going on with Twitch and Kick right now, it's all about
exclusivity.
You know, I don't think Elon's about to, you know, step up and tell Mr. Beast that
he's going to cover his, you know, YouTube earnings to get an exclusive contract on X
maybe.
But, you know, I super doubt it.
So I think big creators will just continue to, you know, push their content over multiple
platforms if they have the option.
But, you know, I don't see I don't see why there would be a reason that he would, you
know, abandon YouTube or focus on on this platform or any other platform for that matter.
Well, here's the thing about tipping is one.
No one's forcing anyone to tip.
There's not going to be tipping fatigue because no one is being forced to tip.
If you look at platforms like Twitch or even YouTube now, who's built out a really good
gaming sector, you have people like Dr. Disrespect making millions of dollars a year off donations.
It's not their entire audience sending donations.
The way it works with a lot of tipping is there's a few big whales that drive.
That's right.
You know, they're really big fans of the creator and they send a lot of donations to them.
So, you know, and also I do think there is enthusiasm to send money to the creators as
well.
Because I got tons of asks as before I got approved for the subscribe button.
Like, hey, when are you going to do the subscribe button?
I really want to subscribe to you.
And I opened it up and day one, I got 60 subscribers.
So I do believe there is enthusiasm around wanting to reward creators.
And I do believe that there won't be tipping fatigue because no one's going to be forced
to tip.
But you see it work with every other platform.
It's been proven out.
I think you're missing what I'm saying, right?
I'm not saying that there won't be people that do tip and I'm not saying that you won't
have whales, right?
But like your example of Dr. Disrespect is great.
Look at Dr. Disrespect's earnings as an individual creator on YouTube versus the total number of
creators on YouTube, right?
Like that's the chart that's interesting.
It's not what one person makes, right?
It's what the average person is making within a vertical or an industry, right?
And what you see on YouTube or Twitch is the same thing you see in television, movies,
music, like all sorts of other creative platforms where you've got a small group of people that
are making a lot of money.
And I'm not begrudging that.
I mean, like, hey, man, if you can make six figures on X, God bless.
Like that's dope, right?
But most people aren't.
And so what I'm talking about...
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that's never going to change.
That's going to be the way every monetized platform works until the end of time.
But the way it works is the people, the fish, you know, in the water are always going to
strive to be those whales that are making millions of dollars.
But you have to ask yourself this, right?
Like, let's say that I'm your subscriber, right?
So I'm already paying $8 or $12 for me personally, a premium subscription to this platform.
Now I'm also subscribing to you.
Now I'm also paying to be in your spaces because the NFT God spaces are the best.
And now I'm also tipping you on your tweets and I'm also tipping you on your newsletter.
I mean, that's the fatigue I'm talking about.
I'm talking about even within, even for you, right?
Like, even if you're making great content, eventually, right?
Like, I'm going to get tired of paying for things or even being asked to pay.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think the tipping thing is interesting.
I don't think...
I want to switch a little bit off tipping fatigue.
I'm not sure I'm going to get too far there.
But I will point out, since you guys mentioned Dr. Disrespect, that dude is massive.
I don't know if you saw, he went and, like, played with, like, the 49ers or something.
He was, like, taller than all of them.
The two-time.
Big ass.
Yeah.
He's, like, six...
Really tall, the fucking guy.
Yeah, he's 6'7".
He has a 37-inch vertical jump.
And he's also the two-time champion.
Six-foot-eight, by the way.
Two-time back-to-back.
Two-time champion, though.
He's the two-time back-to-back champion.
I love that guy.
I watch him all the time.
1993, 1994.
All right.
Let's go back to Penny.
And also, by the way, I just wanted to point out for everybody, I appreciate everyone...
I know we have a big panel.
Some people were mentioning to me that they...
It went a little too long last time.
So I'm going to do kind of that hard stop at one and then, like, move to my next topic.
So we've got about 30 more minutes.
So I just wanted to mention that.
But I love the way we're moving around here.
Also, commitment from Dr. Disrespect wore the headphones the entire time.
Never seen without them.
All right.
Penny, go for it.
And then we'll come over to Chris, who has a chance to speak.
And then I think we'll have hit everyone by that point.
So we'll just cycle around hands.
Thanks, Wolf.
I wanted to go back to something.
I think it was Lucas that was talking about the brands not being willing to come to X.
So I'm going to push back a little bit on that.
And I think a big part of it is related to trust, right?
So conversion rate is another thing that you talked about.
And I trust ads on X more than on any other platform because I know they're going to get
community noted if they're ugly, right?
If they're false advertising or whatever.
And that means that I'm going to be much, much more likely to buy something from an X ad.
I think more than more than worried about like brand safety and if there's an ugly tweet or
whatever, everyone just wants to convert.
That's what ads are for.
So if the ads on X are the most successful, then that's where people are going to come.
Already a bunch of Fortune 500 brands are moving in the direction towards X.
Apple came back and I think Starbucks is going to get started and there are a bunch more.
So I'm really optimistic about the ads on X, whether or not, you know, quote unquote blocks
get removed or people can put nasty tweets.
I think most of the time those things are going to get buried.
And at the end of the day, if the eyeballs are here, if people are buying things here,
I think eventually there's going to be like a native store.
I don't know if they'll, you know, make some kind of deal with Shopify or make their own.
But I think if you can buy things directly from X, that's what matters more than anything
else.
So, you know, that was the point I wanted to make.
Yeah, just real quick.
I like that you have an opinion on that.
And I have an opinion on that, too, because like I think conversion is the most important
thing.
I've been saying that for like the 23 years of marketing I've had here so far.
But from my point of view and your point of view, it doesn't matter, right?
At the end of the day, the brands don't care about actually conversion like you think they
do, especially Fortune 500 brands.
They actually do a lot of branding campaigns.
Shockingly, I know it sucks, to be honest with you, because I actually like the idea
of like, you know, I usually say branding campaigns are performance campaigns that failed.
That's all it is.
And people just want to look good, you know, on that.
But I could tell you brands actually do care.
A great example, I have one example that I can tell you right now, like Wells Fargo is
a brand that would never, ever come on to Twitter and market because of the sentiment
that's already built against them.
And if you put them on Twitter and they run ads on Twitter, they will be annihilated by
these little alt undocked accounts.
And no one wants that.
And that's the reason why these brands work with Meta.
They work with TikTok.
They work with LinkedIn because there are brand safety things in place where you can
mute somebody by keywords across platforms and it will eliminate the ability for them.
They can comment all they want.
They can still see their comment, but the comment is hidden from everybody else.
And that's what Twitter needs to implement.
And also blocking like that needs to be in place.
Like social media is a place where I mean, that's why they actually still have that regulation
in place while why social media, you know, I think it's regulation 240 or something that
that exempts social networks from actually operating as regular businesses.
And that's because, you know, that that system came with blocking and all these other features
that protect brands.
I promise you for my ad network experience.
And again, I've had a lot of experience in the ad tech space.
They will never advertise if they find out they're advertising in a place like Twitter,
they will instantly like cancel and never work with you again.
And then they'll tell everybody because the fortune 500 brands, usually they actually
chat a lot with each other.
If you do something that breaks their rules, they'll share it with all the other fortune
500, fortune 1000 brands and be like, yeah, don't market there because they were running
our ads on something that was like related to this.
So, I mean, I promise you that's just the way it works.
I agree with you again.
Section 230, the communications.
Yeah.
230.
My bad.
Sorry.
Sorry about that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kristen, hop in.
Yeah, I just think this is this is great.
I love hearing what Lucas and his experience have to bring to the table because as much
as X is fighting just for the common person to have, you know, an opportunity to to launch
themselves and do well, like Lucas is bringing back more of the practical of just the way
the industry works.
And I am very curious just to know, you know, how are we going to move forward with this
the AI and just the different I think we saw the AI insight forum and and just different
regulation and things are changing up all the time.
And I would prefer not to have such a stringent place where advertisers are 100 percent the
only people that are being favored.
I like to see that that X is actually taking in our voices and how things move forward, but
how we're coming to the table and finding like a common place to move forward instead
of just like going onto a platform where the platforms are not really transparent and
telling you how things are and you just kind of have to go with it.
So I do appreciate this space and I look forward to more coming from it.
Yeah.
Loving the combo here.
All right.
Who do we have?
Is it Rudy?
Tommy?
Who do we got behind the stock to its account?
Yo, it's Tommy, dude.
All right.
I want to play like devil's advocate.
And this isn't a position that I necessarily like believe in personally, but I would like
to hear you guys debate against it because I think it's been very one sided.
And so from the perspective of, OK, I'm going to pick Sunrise Trader as an account on Twitter
that I really like to follow because he produces great content with the form of trade ideas
and charts every day.
So let's say all of a sudden the monetization angle becomes real and the tipping angle becomes
real.
And he picks up the fact that, OK, this one guy is tipping me a lot to do a lot of analysis
on a very specific niche thing that only this guy is interested in.
But because, you know, he's profiting so much from a monetization point of view, you know,
it'd be stupid for him to post any other content outside of that.
And so he ends up going from an account that used to produce a wide variety of content just
because that's what he'd like to do for the sake of the game.
And now he now caters his content towards the people that are going to tip him the most
because he understands that that's how he's going to make money.
And all of a sudden, from the community point of view or from my point of view, just kind
of an observer of the platform, like now my experience kind of gets worse.
So I'd like to hear you guys just argue about that from the community point of view, like
how does it serve us with the monetization and the tipping stuff?
Ooh, Brian, do you want to touch on that first?
Yeah.
So like I so going back to the Web3 platform that I was on, it stuff like that did happen
where like you'd see people getting tipped by other people and then those other people
would kind of cater their content to better suit that person or those group of people.
that were tipping them.
So, excuse me, I'm a little out of breath.
I'm at the gym.
So I think that it's definitely something that was going to happen.
And it's something that I feel might not be a positive.
Did that answer your question?
I might not have heard everything you said.
Alex, you can pop in here too.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of negatives that come with monetization for sure.
You're seeing it right now.
I forgot who brought up the point, but yeah, quality of content's gone down 100% over the
last month or so because of monetization, right?
People are spamming, you get impressions, this and that.
You see this with a lot of other platforms, though.
It really is a short-term problem where we have this shock to the system where all of a
sudden there's money in the system, people are like, holy shit, I can make 15 cents by
tweeting for the next 10 months?
This is crazy.
And you see people kind of just spamming and the quality goes down.
But what naturally happens over time is it starts to get filtered out.
People start creating better content.
That starts getting the attention.
The people who are spamming going, you know, without Googling, tell me how big of a poop I
made this morning, that starts to go away, right?
And people stop giving that attention.
And I think you've already started seeing that here where a lot of that spam is starting
to go away.
I mean, you saw the alien names yesterday.
That was kind of annoying.
But that was happening without the monetization, no matter what.
And yes, when tipping goes, you're going to see 100,000 posts of, I'm going to give one
person who tips me $100,000.
Let's see what happens.
And you'll see a billion of those posts.
But then again, over time, people get bored and the intention will move away from it and
move back to the high quality content.
It is the way it works.
The last time we were talking, I was talking about how incentive models can change content,
right?
And content will bend towards incentive models.
But I mean, I guess it sounds like you're saying that you'd agree with that now more?
I've always held the opinion that there's short term problems and there's monetization
that eventually fades away.
So let's bring in Brock real quick.
Hey, yeah.
Great space.
Wolf, Alex, Penny.
I just wanted to bring, since we're talking about the algorithm and monetization, and me
and Shane, we've restored ads on like 15, 20 accounts now.
So we kind of have a pretty good handle on this stuff.
We have a development team.
We're working on an app now.
But as far as transparency goes, one tip I'll give to everyone on stage and everyone in
the audience, everybody should have the setting.
It's in my pin post, but it's the hide sensitive content.
You want that checked off so that when you see a post on your feed that is sensitive, you
don't want to touch it.
That'll get you in trust and safety trouble.
Like TweetPred is one thing, but then there's trust and safety, which is usually tied to ads
from all the accounts we've fixed.
We've noticed this, and it kind of ties to engagement.
So if you're wanting to kind of help your algorithm, quote unquote, you want this setting off.
So it's in my pin post, but I'll go through it real quick.
And this isn't available on iOS.
So if you're on iOS, you could open Safari or Chrome tab, but you can do it on Android
or computer.
If you go to settings and support, settings and privacy, then what is it from there?
It is privacy and safety, and then content you see.
There's a setting that is displaying media that may contain sensitive content.
You want that off.
So then moving forward on your feed, you'll see that sensitive.
You don't want to touch those.
That'll get you in trust and safety trouble.
That can get you shadowbanned.
Your reach will decrease.
Too many of those, you get in deeper and deeper trouble.
You'll end up losing ads, all that stuff.
So I just want to point that out since we're talking about the algorithm.
Everyone should have that setting off.
If you want a better breakdown, I think it's my pin post right now.
Yeah, it is.
Just wanted to point that out there just so everyone in the audience knows that.
So you're staying safe.
Since we don't have the transparency stuff yet, use that setting.
Yeah, that's a good point for people to have on.
Hey, okay, Lucas, you got a quick comment?
Yeah, I just wanted to go real quick.
So you're saying you can help people re-monetize their accounts off of Twitter?
How do you do that exactly?
I don't need a 60-second breakdown.
I was just curious.
It's my pin guide.
You just start going back and deleting stuff.
I don't want to go too far.
Yeah, I would say connect with Brock.
He's doing some interesting stuff.
Yeah, I know.
We can move on.
Move on, yeah.
I'll throw out the voucher.
All right, Ashley, let me come back to you.
And then I saw your hand up before Penny, so I might have to go back to you.
But go for it, Ashley.
I was just coming back to the quality of content.
And, you know, I think that, like in NFT God's case, his content gets regurgitated every single
place, like I feel like.
And I think that, you know, I know that I think this has already been said that content
will improve, but I think it's better that we have bad content because then when people
see your good content, they'll be like, oh, my gosh, and they'll be much more appreciative
of it.
I know when I see a bad YouTube video, I'm really happy when I see something good.
And then I heard somebody talk about tip fatigue.
And, you know, if you look at TikTok, for example, those NPCs, they get paid all the time,
a lot of the times by the same people.
One of the best examples of this, obviously, is Pinky Doll.
But there's another guy, the Glizzy guy.
I'm sure y'all have seen him.
A lot of people send him multiple tips because they're not sick of that, whatever he does.
So I think that all the, like the bad content will boost the good content.
And I think that I honestly don't think that there will ever be tip fatigue because of people.
People spend their money on stupid shit every day, all day, every day.
Sorry, you broke up.
So I thought you stopped speaking.
I just want to double down on one of your points, Ashley, that I really love.
Like anyone complaining that content quality has gone down since monetization's gone in
needs to totally shift your way of thinking.
You know, at the end of the day, social media is a lot of game theory.
That's why I personally love it is there's a ton of game theory involved in getting attention
and getting ahead.
If like no one in the NFL complains, oh, all the other teams, they're doing these really
boring plays that are really predictable, right?
They get pumped about it.
Like, OK, all our opponents fucking suck.
Now we can get ahead.
It should be the same mindset with social media.
I get pumped when everyone just starts copying my shit and doing the same boring stuff and
without Googling, tell me this because now my competition stinks.
And when I put out content I worked really hard on, it gets noticed more and it stands
out amongst all the bullshit.
So I'm I'm more I'm way more than ecstatic that people's qualities going down because
of monetization.
Now my good quality content stands out more.
Now I can make even more money on top of that.
So I think it's a good thing for anyone who's a high quality content creator on here.
Well, it's a big yeah, that was if that turns out to be the case, because I mean, currently
speaking, you know, that's that's not the case, correct?
What do you mean?
Well, it's short term.
Well, I mean, think about it this way.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Just you just go to your example, Alex, you know, like in the current environment, you
have the monetization scheme currently does reward that person.
You're doing a lot of the reposting of the kind of low quality content.
And you're saying that over time, if that switches, then you'd be in the kind of receiving
end of that.
Well, somewhere in the middle, my engagement and monetization has gone up progressively
over the last two months, because I've been shifting to things people want to see, which
is I've been doing deeper dives into the algorithm.
Every day I spend hours looking at the algorithm code, trying to find different insights to pull
out.
And I'd argue my content quality has gone up.
And with that, my engagement and the money I've been making.
And I think that's because the quality of my content has gone up with it.
You know, yesterday I put out this post as all these mockups and all the replies, wow,
these mockups are really high quality.
This is high quality content.
And so I'm saying is, yes, people who put out the shitty content are getting engagement.
But I also think that people are putting out the high quality content are getting more
engagement on top of that because it's standing out more amongst all the crap.
When you evaluate your own content, I'd love to know what you kind of look at to identify
like, OK, this is kind of high quality versus low quality, because I think that's really
tough for me personally to evaluate my own content like that.
Obviously subjective.
But I look for one thing and one thing only.
And that's storytelling.
How well am I telling the story of my content?
Because the most important metric in the algorithm is time on content.
So the better the story you're telling, the more likely the person will spend reading your
content beginning to end.
And so before I hit post on any piece of content I put out, I go, how good is the story I'm
telling here?
Is this going to keep people interested beginning to end?
Are they going to walk away feeling like the payoff was worth it of this story?
Did I raise the stakes high enough of this story where this is interesting enough and
people want to see how it pays off?
And so I look at it purely from a storytelling perspective of how well did I tell a story with
this post?
And also, you know, using pictures as well in conjunction with long form posts can work
really well, especially because you can kind of segment them throughout.
Like I did one yesterday, which was like a deep dive on Elon as a person.
And I used like a picture of him in the top.
And then when you open it, it goes long form.
And it did pretty well.
It had like a quarter million views, like 750 likes.
So I would say, you know, whatever you can do to stop people from scrolling past your
post, the better.
Like I had someone I was talking to the other day who was asking me like, hey, I think I put
out really good trading content.
Why isn't I never get more than four likes?
I looked at it.
It was literally just like these one sentence, like taking spy calls here at this level.
And it was the most scrollable past content like I'd ever seen.
It was like a one liner.
And that's all they did all day.
And I was like, no wonder nobody engages.
There's no color.
There's no pictures.
You're not putting a reason.
I was going to say, I think a lot of people miss that factor.
It's like you might have good content, quote unquote, as in like the actual like information
is good, but you're not displaying it in the proper way.
And I wanted to say earlier, like before Alex got on to it was I think that the standard
deviation of like the ups and downs, of course, there's always going to be a rush of people
towards any new thing.
But people aren't dumb.
So we know when there's copy posts on our feed, and I think that always over whatever
short period of time gets filtered out.
People get tired of it.
They'll unfollow these people.
They'll move towards the more high quality content creators.
So I've like seen that also in my own content where I've really started to decrease the amount
of threads, but I put 10 times more effort into my threads.
So people automatically like have an anticipatory factor to me putting out that kind of content
and they know automatically that it's going to be quality content because I put so much
time and effort and do a deep dive, not just like a surface level like, oh, it's one, two,
three, four, five, like just basically they copied somebody else.
But it's like, oh, this is actually information I did not know that nobody else had done or
gone into or any topics that they hadn't covered yet.
So I'm really like just for me, it's really obvious just how it plays out.
And people will either, you know, figure this out or they won't.
But I think some of us are already like ahead of the game because we see where the trend
is going.
And it's pretty obvious to me.
I've already started unfollowing people for the same reason, right?
Like since the monetization has happened, I noticed more copy pasting than ever before,
more reposting of other people's original content.
And at a certain point, like if that's all you're doing is reposting stuff from other people
and everyone else is doing the same thing.
You know, it's one thing if there's one aggregator, but if half the accounts are aggregators,
then it gets old quick.
And I've definitely already started unfollowing.
So I think it's trending in that direction.
But I also want to back up what you said about like deep dives on original content.
I discovered Alex, NFT God, because he was the first person that I saw like actual screenshots
of lines of code from the algorithm.
He wasn't just like making up this or that.
He went in and dug through it and he found value for all of us.
And that's like what people ultimately will be looking for.
And over time, we'll be able to curate our feed to the people that are actually providing
value.
It's not so obvious the first time you see someone repost that that's all that they do.
But over time, you know, it definitely happens.
So I think, you know, we're just at the beginning of that now.
And, you know, they'll also be like the recommendations that come from the platform will start to be
people who are not getting unfollowed for doing this over and over again.
I believe that the algorithm will move us towards better behavior.
Interesting concept.
OK, let's hit Brian real quick.
Then we'll hit evil.
Probably have a few minutes after that.
Yes.
So like going back to tipping fatigue, I think we will also be getting crappy post fatigue.
But like tipping fatigue, I get that.
I think that will be an issue.
But there is something that I think differentiates X or will differentiate X.
And that is that X is going to be basically a bank account.
So any user that wants to basically store their earnings in X can do so.
So instead of having to like actually charge a credit card every time that you're going to
tip somebody or buy a subscription, you're basically going to be able to just use the
money already in your account and cash it out whenever you want.
At least that's what I assume is going to happen.
Something else somebody pointed out about exclusivity and and how like if X actually went out and
did that, then maybe they could bring Mr. Beast on.
But like I think that is probably not a good idea.
Then people are going to feel like other people have unfair advantages.
I do know like Tucker Carlson came came on about, I don't know, like three months ago or
There's a lot of rumors that, oh, Elon made a deal with him, whatever.
I actually talked to Elon about a month and a half ago because I knew another journalist
who pretty big journalist who was more left leaning, who wanted to maybe do something like
Carlson has done.
And in those discussions, I found out that there was absolutely no deal with Tucker.
He's not making anything other than whatever everybody else is.
Of course, Elon is boosting his post.
But I mean, that's that's at least better than I think actually paying him 10 million
dollars just to come here.
So just some just some information there.
But that's pretty much it.
Got it.
Yeah.
Evil.
Yeah, I actually just wanted to kind of circle back a little bit to something that Lucas was
saying and Brock was saying and kind of tie those two things together, because I think
it's I think the brand story on X is is going to be a very important one.
And I know that that is the more boring thing to talk about, because people want to focus
on individual creators and creativity and UCG.
And like, I'm a big proponent of all that stuff.
But at the end of the day, like as a business, X needs to make money, not give away money.
Right.
And so when you're thinking about like the sensitive content stuff, I think that's really
interesting.
Right.
Because what you're what you're essentially saying from a brand perspective is that's a
little bit of a trap.
Right.
People can mark things as sensitive as comments on your posts.
But I can't look at what those things are to moderate them, because if I look at them,
I'm going to be, you know, flagging my account as some kind of bad actor account within
the system and then, you know, and then hurting my reach.
Right.
So like that, that loop, that negative incentive loop is the kind is exactly the kind of thing
that will keep brands like off of any platform.
Right.
If you're telling me that I can't tend my own garden and I can have people that are posting,
you know, hardcore porn or whatever in my comments, but I can't even look at it to see
what it is to moderate it, because by looking at it, I'm going to, you know, ding myself
like those kinds of those kinds of incentive loops.
Like they're just they're just not conducive to, you know, brand safety or advertising.
Like I just think as a practical matter.
Right.
So I think some of that stuff's going to have to be resolved.
I personally would love to see, you know, them them come up with different classes of
accounts.
I think it's perfectly fine to say that, like, you know, this is a business account.
It behaves differently.
It has different rules and different levers.
You know, maybe there's some things that it gets to do that other accounts can't do.
But there's tradeoffs around that.
Right.
You know, whether that's doxing or corporate documents or whatever it is.
Right.
But I think that there are solutions for this kind of stuff.
I do think that the kind of like one size fits all mentality that has existed in Twitter
historically, I think it's been has been bad.
Right.
You know, when they put in the the old verified account system, that was even worse.
Right.
Like I think it started from a good place, but it kind of ended up with, you know, you had
essentially accounts that could do whatever they wanted.
And then pretty much everybody else.
Right.
So I think that there are there are ways in which you could, I think, just recognize the
realities that some accounts are going to want to have tools at their disposal that other
accounts don't maybe don't even care about or don't even want.
But I think until that kind of stuff happens, you're still going to see a bunch of resistance
at the brand level.
I mean, I'm going to concur with, you know, Lucas that from, you know, having worked at
Big Tech and Fang, a lot of these companies, I mean, they're just it's not worth it to
them.
Right.
You know, one hundred thousand dollars in revenue versus, you know, billions of dollars
that they're making a quarter like they don't care.
They would rather not risk their brand at all than than deal with it.
Let me pop in here about two minutes left here.
But one thing which I think is going to evolve out of this for sure is going to be kind of
what Shane, who I see his hand up, is building, which is basically going to be a dashboard
or some type of tool that's going to help people optimize their accounts for monetization
and walk them through basically step by step.
Like, here's what's going on.
Right.
We're running a report on your account.
You need to do this.
You're using these words.
Right.
And it's that's going to be an actual product.
And I'm sure that something like that exists for YouTube.
I'm not personally using it, but I think it does probably.
Shane, do you want to give us a quick minute before my next?
Yeah, 12 seconds.
So, hey, I'm actually viewing the content or viewing the show more or sensitive tweets doesn't
hurt you.
It's only engaging, liking, replying, retweeting.
So, I was just responding to what Brock was saying, which was that accounts should turn
off this view sensitive because viewing the content was a negative.
It makes it easier for you to spot it and not accidentally engage with it.
That's why Brock's saying turn it off.
But, you know, you can look at it all day long and it's not going to affect you.
Okay, got it.
Yeah, I guess as long as you're not interacting with it necessarily.
So, to my co-host, I'd love to kind of come back to you guys real quick here.
Alex, what's kind of the big takeaways you think, initial things that people should start
doing at this moment to start optimizing their accounts towards it?
I think the big thing right now is, as some people said, quality content is really low
right now.
And I think there's a lot of people trying to be algo influencers and tell you this and
that of what you want to do.
So, at the end of the day, what makes X such a great platform is the personal connection
between people.
And I really think the people who are going to get ahead in the content arena now is the
people who can create personal content that tells a really compelling story.
So, if you're on here and you're like, oh, I want to be an influencer and I want to give
advice.
I want to tell people how to grow.
There's a billion people doing that already on X.
It's boring.
No one cares.
Right?
Be yourself, create personal content, be vulnerable, talk about your successes in your past, talk
about your failures in your past, and be a human being.
And that's going to make you stand out amongst all these bots that are on the platform right
now that are just going around trying to, I gained 15 followers in the last year.
Here's how I did it.
Like, it's just boring and no one gives a shit.
So, be a human being, be yourself, and create personal content, and I think you'll get ahead
easily in the algo.
I couldn't agree more.
I think that's exactly the same message that I would give.
You know, you could post a video on YouTube, and even if you are vulnerable, you're not
necessarily going to be interacting with people as much in the comments, or at least that's
not traditionally what I've seen there.
The coolest thing about the platform that we're on is that it's a lot about the conversations,
and that means opening yourself up personally.
You're now able to actually connect, you know, with people on responding to their comments,
and I think that that, like, that connection is really special, and I haven't seen that
on any other platform.
So, I think if I was going to give advice to people, it'd be, you know, very similar to
what he said.
Provide value to begin with.
Get really good at telling a story, because it doesn't matter how interesting your life
is if you can't tell the story properly.
So, you know, I would say that's a skill that's underutilized right now, and then just build
those connections.
It's super important, like, we're all people here, and, you know, we like to have friends,
and what better place to connect with people from all over the world if you have shared
interests, and it doesn't matter if someone is in, you know, China, or India, or Pakistan,
or Mexico, or the United States, you can get together and talk about whatever it is you're
interested in.
I think that's just, like, such a special thing.
So, that's what I would focus on.
Perfect.
All right, really well put, guys.
Huge thank you to the whole panel today.
I love doing these.
I think, Alex and Penny, for next week, maybe we make the full space, the full hour just
dedicated to deep diving, how to optimize your account, how to prepare, how to write
content that's high monetizing, how to host spaces that are high monetizing.
I would be fully open to that.
Love to have, you know, Brian, Ed, sorry we didn't get to you today, but I'd love to have
you on for that next one.
I do have another space that's starting now.
As people can see, I did go ahead.
I just changed the topic.
I've got another co-host that's coming up.
Welcome to The Life of Wolf.
We run spaces about 10 hours a day, new topics, most hours.
So, thank you again to the panel.
I am going to transition into our next one.
I've got some new speakers coming up as well.
So, I'll need a couple of speaker spots, but always appreciate everybody that takes valuable
time out of their day to come educate.
And I think that the comments really reflected how much people appreciated you guys doing it.
I saw people just saying, love being a fly on the wall, absorbing this information,
and of course, getting it for free.
And who knows, maybe some of y'all will tip us in the future.
But for now, I'm going to go ahead and roll into my next space, which is going to be with
Lucidal.
So, I'm excited for this one.
We've actually had them on in the past.
So, some of my audience is probably pretty familiar with them.
They're building a marketplace for investors, specifically investors looking to invest in
luxury collectible.
So, I know, entirely different topics from what we were just talking about.
We're rolling in, but this is how we like to do it.
I like to keep it fresh on spaces.
So, to the Lucidal team, I just want to make sure real quick, can you hear me loud and clear
as your mic working?
Yep, absolutely.
Can you hear me good?
Yeah, yeah.
You sound pretty good over there.
Maybe a little bit of white noise in the back if there's a fan or something near you.
But overall, your sound does sound pretty good.
So, welcome to the stage as well.
Drew just popped up here.
Shout out to Evil.
Evil, if you want to take off, no worries.
Lucas, if you're sticking around, appreciate you.
I think a couple more speakers are coming.
Mary Beth, I see you in the audience if you want to request up.
But let's hop right into this.
So, we're chatting with Lucidal.
Lucidal was originally conceived as, again, a DAO.
Obviously, it's in the name.
Decentralized Autonomous Organization.
For those who are not familiar, the idea is community members drive decisions, right?
So, pretty popular concept that's become more and more regular over the last couple of years.
And their DAO's primary objective is to grant users and oracles access to real-life products and services through blockchain technology.
So, I think that this is probably one of the most sought-after use cases of blockchain technology is the ability to invest in real-life goods and assets, right?
But being able to do it through partial ownership.
So, it's kind of almost like ETFs, in my mind, being translated into the world of Web3.
Specifically, they are really doing this through ALTR, which is their branch that is focused.
It's a DAAP.
Basically, it's been developed by Lucidal.
And that's for purpose is to digitize and provide liquidity for physical assets on the blockchain.
So, for example, right, let's say I have a really expensive watch, right, or a Ferrari or something like that.
It can be something that I don't necessarily want to part with, right?
But what if I need liquidity, right?
I have this really expensive watch.
It was, you know, given to me by my grandfather.
I don't really want to sell it, but I can use some liquidity.
So, I can basically use this to essentially give up partial collateral and basically get liquidity without having to sell them, right?
So, it's creating a whole new market.
That's what we're going to be diving into today.
So, let me turn the mic over back to the team at Lucidal.
First, please definitely start off with an introduction of yourself and your background.
I think that with any business concept, no matter how good it is nowadays, we know we're investing in the people behind it.
I think it's why people like Wolfspace is they're investing in me.
So, I'd love to hear from you a little bit more on your background, yourself, the team, how this came about, how you started building it.
We'll take it from there.
Hello, guys.
Hello, everyone.
My name is Dax.
So, basically, yeah, I think you made quite a good intro about the project and about what we are building and what we want to achieve.
But, yeah, myself, I've been involved in the blockchain ecosystem since 2016.
I've been investing, working, studying projects, and then working as consultant for many different projects.
I now serve as consultant for many different companies in the blockchain ecosystem, starting from stable coins, going all the way to DeFi projects, exchanges, and so on and so forth.
I also work with institutions, governments to support them with the licensing and the establishment of the new laws and tax rules for the crypto ecosystem.
So, having said that, I'm also a collector.
I'm a car watch and wine collector.
And among the team, actually, we have mainly people involved in the blockchain ecosystem, but also people involved in the luxury collectible space.
So, this is why we wanted to launch a platform like this one.
But, yeah, let's say I'm finished with my intro, so I'll let you speak now.
Yeah, let's talk about it.
So, walk me through a little bit more of the background on the team, the people that are being pulled together to put this together.
What have they worked on in the past?
Why are you all the right fits to build out this type of concept?
As I said, I mean, myself, no need to introduce more about that, but among the team and the supporters and the founders and the DAO participants, we have many collectors, dealers in the luxury collectible system.
So, basically, we have access to these collectibles, but we have access also to the information needed to certify, evaluate all these type of collectibles.
So, on the other side, we have our devs coming from a long experience in the DeFi space, in Solidity specifically.
So, they are very good in developing applications with Solidity language.
And, of course, we have then our front-end, full-stack devs, back-end, and so on and so forth.
So, the team is composed by 15 people.
We have people in charge of events, people in charge of the codes and the tech stack, people in charge of the strategy, like myself, and then, of course, all the community managers and so on and so forth.
So, basically, we are the right fit, why?
I mean, we are not perfect, of course, like any team in the world, but we feel like we have the right connections, the right knowledge to bootstrap these type of concepts and to make it effective.
Within the blockchain ecosystem, because, of course, we have a lot of connections, a lot of relationships within the blockchain ecosystem.
Just think that Polygon, Sandeep, the founder, invested directly in the protocol.
So, we are able to work with this kind of people.
And also, of course, we are able to work with auction houses, brands, thanks to our connections in the luxury collectible space.
Perfect.
Okay.
Appreciate the initial introduction there.
We actually have our first question from the crowd already, which I love.
And, by the way, if you're in the audience, you can feel free to drop comments in whatever way, shape, and form you like.
I'm going to take this one, and then I'll go over to Drew.
First question from the crowd was, you know, you argue that this is creating a whole new market.
Do you see this as creating a new market?
Is this taking – is this – is it – they're basically arguing that this is duplicating a traditional market with blockchain tech.
Does this exist in traditional markets?
It's why does blockchain tech make certain items possible that aren't possible in a traditional market here?
And I'm assuming, you know, obviously, you're the right person to ask.
You've gotten the due diligence into the traditional than this side.
So, what is this really changing, and what new market is it opening up?
You know, the initial idea for us was to democratize in the space of luxury collectibles and being able to give access to people to this type of luxury collectibles that, in real life, it's very difficult.
Because if you don't have the knowledge, you don't have the right network, just think about vintage items, vintage watches.
I mean, there is a lot of, you know, fake watches, a lot of people trying to leverage on this misinformation, you know, to try and create these watches, these cars that are fake.
So, for us, it's very important to provide and bring on our platform all the experts that are necessary to understand these, you know, steps and these perks of their collectibles they are buying.
And usually, you know, if you are a collector yourself, you just need to find those resources.
And usually, these resources are super valuable.
So, it's not easy to be able to know the people.
And even if you know the people, it's difficult to get the right information.
And it's actually expensive to get the right information.
But with us, thanks to our connections in the luxury collectible space, this is very easy because ourselves, the team, the partners, the founders are themselves part of this, you know, big group of collectors, auction houses and brands.
But this is not the most innovative thing that we can bring with blockchain.
So, this is just the power of aggregating multiple players on a unique platform.
But the top thing we can do is that by tokenizing luxury collectibles, we basically give access to these collectibles to multiple people.
So, think about a watch that may be unique.
So, there is a one-off.
You may have the infinite money.
But on the other side, if no one is willing to sell that watch, it's unique.
So, you won't be able to acquire that piece.
And even if the first guy is going to sell to the second guy, then still, whoever wants to buy that watch in the market, let's say there are 10, 20, 50, 60, 100 enthusiasts that are willing to buy that watch.
They will need to fight and they will need to offer to this guy.
But then to tokenization, we can actually digitize these items, tokenize them, split them into fragments, into shares.
So, anyone can participate with their network, with their portfolio in acquiring a piece.
So, a percentage of $50 million painting, 50% of $30 million cars.
So, basically, thanks to our functionality and thanks to blockchain, we are able to digitize, tokenize these luxury collectibles and make them accessible to the wide market.
And this is not just for crypto users, but it's also useful for traditional users that may be willing to invest in these luxury collectibles.
But maybe they don't have $30 million, $5 million, $1 million to buy a watch, a car, or a painting.
But this way, they can put their $50K, $10K, $500 to purchase this luxury collectibles, thanks to blockchain.
Yeah.
I have Drew up here, who's definitely a blockchain expert, if I've ever met one, so certainly understands this topic well.
Drew, what's on your mind?
Yeah, no.
I appreciate it.
Super, super interesting.
I have a ton of questions, so at any time, anyone, definitely feel free to interrupt me.
So, I really like what you're doing, and I feel like the commodity and the luxury space has really been neglecting the integration of blockchain,
and not the integration of blockchain to become a decentralized luxury brand,
but to do exactly what you're saying, to have, you know, provability province on a public leisure and, you know, kind of crack down or, you know, use this tech to, you know, prove that this is legit, it's real, get rid of the scams, get rid of the fakes, the prominence, all that kind of stuff.
So, the first question is, you know, I see on your website, you have this Rolex watch, beautiful watch, 500 fractionalized assets, it looks like, on the blockchain, and it's going for 195K.
Okay, while this is fractionalized, and why this is for sale, who is in ownership, and who verified the watch?
Is that you yourself?
Do you use a third-party entity?
Because normally, for example, if I was going to fractionalize my ape, right, or let's just say a board ape, you know, that's $50,000, a lot of people can't afford that,
so I break it up into 100 fractions, I can put that on-chain, in a smart contract, and have all this automated, so the moment that it sells, every 100 splits that goes out, they're automatically paid,
there's no centralized entity, or there's nothing needed for me in order to do that, I'm not the ownership of it, to where, hey, you know, if I say, yeah, I'm just going to sell it and take all the money and run, it's, you know, impossible.
Absolutely. I think that you touched a great, great topic for this platform, and one of the main, you know, problems that newcomers in this sector would need to challenge and to resolve,
but thanks to our deep connection in the luxury collectible space, we were able to onboard articles,
and I'm talking about auction houses, like Christie's, Sotheby's, Philips, and all the others
brands directly, so the watch brands, car brands, dealers in the space, so basically we
have a community of articles that always certify the collectibles that are sold within the outer platform,
so how does the platform work, and how does the process work, actually, so
you cannot be, you know, you just go to, on the platform, you are a collector, and you decide to sell your item, it's not possible, so
you need first to pass through a selection that will be voted by the DAO, and this selection,
through this selection, you will have to demonstrate that you have the right
knowledge, that you have your business, you have to be a dealer in the luxury collectible space, specifically
for watches, cars, painting, whatever you're selling, and then the community will approve
you to be a dealer on the platform. Once you are a dealer on the platform, you cannot sell all your
collectibles, you will have to select one, and the team will give you as lot to sell as a drop, so
basically we don't have multiple collectibles on our platform, as you can see, since you went through
the website, we are just starting with that, so basically we give you the chance to be
part of our drops, so we generate the right noise, we market the item, because we don't want that item
to go unsold, because this is one of the main things that we want, to have all the items sold out
immediately once we publish them, so we focus step by step on a single item, we promote it, we certify it,
thanks to the help of these oracles, and all this information will be then stored inside the NFT
certificate, so inside the NFT certificate, not only you will have the ownership certificate of the item,
that will actually give you the ownership of, or the multi-ownership, because you could buy
a percentage of it, but it's also tied to the authenticity certificate, to the valuation of the item,
the location of the item, where are the items stored, so the item won't remain in the hands of the seller,
so the item before being able to be sold on the other platform, they need to be moved
in a safe storage facility, a third-party safe storage facility, that is inside custom zones, so
that are overlooked by authorities, and you know, they need to respect certain
to maintain thresholds and limits, perimeters, and so on and so forth, and basically that item is stored,
maintained, right temperature, right humidity, right maintenance, if we're talking about cars or wines,
for example, and then whenever someone owns 100% of the certificate, then they can go and claim the
physical item, so we rely on this external structure of oracles that is needed, of course you don't need
something like this for about Ape, like you were describing, because that is already inside the
NFT, so you know that that's the actual collection, you just need to go and check the address of the
contract and you know that's it, you know. For us, it's very important to provide reliable information
and to work with reliable partners to provide such information.
Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay, appreciate that, and I also see it looks like the
the fractionalized assets are on Polygon, probably because you want to avoid gas fees for
Web2 people getting smart. Are those individual NFTs, like 721s, or are those fractionalized like 1155s,
and also at that point, does the buyer deposit the money to you, and then in exchange you buy the
NFT back in order for them to get their liquidity, or what's the process for that from like,
okay, I buy a fraction and then now I get the, you know, investment opportunity to get my liquidity back?
I will start with the first one, so basically we work with both NFTs, so 721 and 1155. We use 721
for certificates, full ownership certificates, so whenever you are able to acquire 100 percent,
the 100 percent ownership of a collectible, then you will get a 721 certificate, but whenever
you buy a fraction that NFT, we have an internal smart contract that will split it in multiple 1155.
So basically, we use both depending on the case, depending on the ownership of each item.
Secondly, yes, we are on Polygon first because of the fees. Of course, as you were saying,
then it's very easy to do multiple transactions without having to spend too much gas fee.
And also, we are on Polygon. We could have chosen multiple chains, but we are on Polygon also because we
have been invested, so part by Polygon, by Sandeep, by the team, by some of the VCs that are behind Polygon.
So for us, it's very important to respect also some sort of, you know, trust within our ecosystem
and our investors. So this is why we are on Polygon. But our idea is, of course, to go multi-chain to make
everything more accessible. And also what we are implementing now that will be available in the
next future will be actually the fiat on and off-run service. So anyone coming outside the blockchain
ecosystem can participate in the functionalities, can provide liquidity, can purchase items, can sell
items without the need of having a crypto wallet or whatever. So thanks to this on-ramp service that
is provided by a third-party provider, then anyone is able to participate in this space. But how does it
work? So we will not settle transactions with fiat. The fiat will be converted automatically into crypto
and then crypto, so in our case USDT, will be used to settle transactions. So I don't know if there was
another question? Yeah, just two quick ones. So I also see it looks like the fee for y'all is 3%, which,
correct me if I'm wrong, I think that's, is that lower than the average for what y'all are doing?
And then the second question, then I'll pass it. What's been the feedback? Like, you know, I mean,
a lot of these people are obviously, you know, on the higher end, luxury, I mean, you know, pretty,
pretty expensive things. Have they given positive feedback? Like, wow, this is pretty cool. We're
we're using Providence, like Gucci and other, you know, I think like Louis V and Chanel and other ones
are switching from paper certificate of authenticities to NFT, like NF tags, right? And QRs that lead to
blockchain. Has it been receptive? Have people been like, oh, why the hell are you doing this? That's stupid.
Actually, I mean, there is a lot of tension around this, because it's, I think, one of the only ways to
be able to certify properly luxury collections. We actually work with big brands, not in the fashion
industry right now, but only we believe in those collectibles that are really valuable. Otherwise,
it doesn't make sense to fragmentize a $10,000 piece. It makes sense to provide fractions and
this functionality for items that are valued over 1 million, over 10 million, over 50 million,
because then, I mean, only maybe zero points, I don't know, a percent of the population is able to
acquire those pieces. And thanks to our functionality, I mean, anyone with at least $500 is able to
participate in what we are offering. So we want to attract as many users as possible, starting from
the lowest tier to the top, of course, because if you are selling a $50 million car, even if you are
a multimillionaire or a billionaire, I mean, you will have to think about it twice. But thanks to our
functionality, you can start step by step. I don't remember the first question, sorry.
Oh, the fees, the fees. So basically, you saw that we have a 3% fee, but basically, that is on the
on the buyer, there will be a fee that we get also from the seller. But it's basically a dynamic fee,
and it will change based on the relationship you have within the platform. And this relationship is
basically valued based on your, let's say, on your experience on the platform. So on how many tokens
you have, so how many products you sell. So in basing on your, based on your trust,
on your activity on the platform, then you can have your fee reduced.
Really good stuff there, Drew. Oh, Kyle, I see you coming up on stage as well. Hey, Mary Beth,
what's going on by you? Have any thoughts you want to throw into mix?
Hey there. Hi, Mary Beth Salas here. Thank you so much, Gov. And good to meet you, Lucidao.
So I was just curious, how are you conducting any community outreach growth activities or any type of
marketing activities? So we are just starting. So for us, it was important not to be, you know,
involved and associated to meme coins or the NFT market, because it's something that is not working
very well right now. And we are not a meme coin or an NFT, a traditional NFT platform. So basically,
we decided to build first the functionalities that are being delivered right now. So in the next few
months, we will have the full scope of the platform operating. And we are starting with our events,
with our PR strategy, with these activations, like for example, GAMA, we're doing now this part of our
marketing strategy. But basically, this is more crypto related to attract more community into the
project and to explain this platform to a wider user base. But basically, we love to work with
real life events where we try to activate communities also in the real world. So not only people active in
the blockchain ecosystem, but we try to be present at real life events where luxury collectibles are
involved. Just to give you an example, in May, I think many of you saw that it was a viral campaign
that we did for the launch of our marketplace to advertise our marketplace. We chose a pretty nice,
I would say collectible, but the marketing campaign was insane. So basically, we chose a Ferrari 40.
That is one of the most popular supercars, hypercars from the 90s, from Ferrari, limited in 1200 pieces. And
I would say the one that all the people from the 90s remember and love. And we chose that car,
we put it on board a yacht during the F1 Grand Prix in Monaco. So basically, we had a huge
coverage, we have a huge coverage by television broadcasts, live broadcasts, and PR outlets,
and so on and so forth. And this marketing stunt went viral everywhere. So on X, YouTube, Instagram. So
we like to be associated to this kind of events, because it's there where we can find the right
collectibles, but also the right audience for our platform.
Oh, that's really cool. I'm glad that you mentioned that. By chance, if you are working on your event
roadshow or calendar, I'd love to get connected with you regarding perhaps partnering for
very specific types of events. So that'd be really cool. That's cool if I DM you about that.
Oh, of course. I mean, we are interesting. We are now developing our marketing strategy. As I said,
we weren't focusing on that, because we think that it's way more important to have the functionality
ready before, you know, launching functionalities. But yeah, so feel free to, I mean, I will have someone
from the team to text you in the end, so we can keep in touch.
Thank you so much. Awesome. Love it. Okay. Keith, good to have you up here, man. Curious if you have
any thoughts, anything you want to throw into the mix, if you kind of dove into any of these
marketplaces that allow for that fractionalized form of investing.
No, I haven't really. I've just been kind of learning, honestly, when I've been listening to you
guys. It's been a great talk. I feel like I really learn a lot in your spaces, Wolf.
So I really appreciate you having me up. But yeah, I mean, the only luxury collectibles I've
invested is it's like Immune Ape and D-Gods and stuff like that. But those aren't the same
thing that we're talking about here. But yeah, I appreciate you guys having me up. And thanks
again, Wolf. And I love these spaces that you do and really bring a lot of education and knowledge
to the space. So yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you, Keith. Yeah. So let me flip it back
at you, Lucidal. I want to talk about things that are moving forward. So right now, you know,
kind of looking back in January of 2023, the first test of digitizing and fractionalizing
a luxury collectible was conducted. I believe that this was the centerpiece, right? That was the vintage
Rolex Daytona 6265 from the late 1970s, still in mint condition, never worn before. That was provided
by the watch boutique. That might be the one that Drew is referencing. And basically 30 enterprising
users participated in the test after being waitlisted. Then, you know, this was actually close to when we
did our last base was the Formula One Grand Prix in Monte Carlo in late May 2023. This event featured
the iconic Ferrari F40 provided by Car & Car on the 50-meter yacht, the Quinta Essentia,
in the harbor alongside the racetrack, right? And this created a big buzz as well in the scene of
the car being loaded onto the yacht by a crane. This got it onto the cover even of the latest single
of Central Sea, who was a rapper, right? And that was at the top of the UK charts for weeks. So clearly,
you have been creating a lot of buzz. That has not been a problem lately. So just when I wanted to
point those out, and then in June, more recently, that same car, I believe, was digitized and offered
to the LTR community for purchase. And within the first 48 hours of the sale, a user actually
acquired the entire car for $2.5 million. So I'm curious, do you typically allow, can some
user just come in and buy the whole thing as the goal to make sure that it's fractionalized? Or
is that just kind of an option, right? Because it looks like someone just came in and bought the entire
thing. So I'm curious, do you want these to be fractionalized? Do you want a bunch of people
to own them? Or are you just kind of putting liquidity on the market and where that liquidity
comes from? So be it.
You'll need to unmute.
Dave, question for Lucidao there. If you're able to unmute.
Yeah, sorry, guys. I was unable to unmute. I don't know why.
So basically, yeah, we allow this type of
either by fractions or the whole item. So of course, that's not the unique F40 that there's
in the market on the market. So if there is a lot of interest towards that specific collectible and
anyone is interested in fragmentizing and buying fractions, then we can evaluate to
put another car for sale for fractionalization.
So, I mean, the car went sold out immediately thanks to a unique owner. Actually, this owner
chose the buy and drive functionality. So basically, he burned the NFT certificate so he could claim the
physical items. So it was also a way for us to test the whole infrastructure. So and we were super happy
about that because, you know, being a decentralized marketplace, we need to be sure that all our smart
contracts are working and are audited. So before being able to launch everything, we like to do these
tests and to try out all functionalities. Because in case, let's say multiple buyers were buying and the buyout
function were was going to happen made in two years.
It was going to be a problem. So for us, thanks to this, we have tried the regular fragmentation
thanks to the soft launch with the Rolex Daytona. That is not the typical item we would want on the
platform because it's only a $200k watch. And what our target, as we were saying, is to sell items that are
well over one million. And then the car was another, let's say, not soft launch was like the official
launch. But it was the first time we were able to test a full ownership certificate.
Got it. Yeah. So I was just kind of walking through the timeline there. And I wanted to turn
that into things that are coming next. So now, like you mentioned, you're at the Supercar owner
circle event in Malaga. That's going to be happening. But talk to me about the next year,
right? Ideally, what's going to be happening over the course of the next year here? What are some of
the assets that you aim to have go up? What are some of the milestones you're looking to hit?
So basically, the Supercar owner circle event just happened last weekend. So we were able to connect
with 60 supercar owners and to present them the platform, because it's something very useful for
for them. Right now, we have spoken only about the marketplace functionality. So the fragmentation,
the full ownership, the buyback, the buyout, so the possibility of claiming the physical item.
In the end, I think it's a pretty cool thing. So it's not like you just keep it digital. So one day,
you could actually acquire the full item. But then what we are focusing a lot right now is actually the
digitizing functionality. So basically, it's the same functionality we use to digitize collectibles
that are offered by dealers to our community. But we offer this functionality to any type of
collectors, any type of user that is coming to the platform to digitize their collection,
to manage their collection. So basically, you go through a form, you provide us your data,
and then we digitize your collectible with your pictures, we have our experts checking in,
providing the valuation and so on and so forth. This is a functionality that we have launched,
we are testing and will be effective in the next few months. And this is actually a mean for the
second functionality that we are launching in the next few months, since we're talking about Roadmap,
that is the lending platform. So the lending platform basically allow you to use your digitized
ownership certificates as collateral for loans. So basically, you can generate liquidity out of your
price collectibles without having the need of selling them. And this, I think, is where we will be
focusing for the next year and building the community there, because there is a wide
range of users, collectors that are willing to generate liquidity out of their assets.
They either cannot sell them because they have, you know, particular relationships with the brands.
So if you buy a new Ferrari, if you want the next one, you cannot sell your Ferrari, you have to keep
that, demonstrate that you own the Ferrari before getting the next car. And thanks to this functionality,
you just digitize your item, you don't sell it, but you still generate liquidity out of your collectible.
So we think that, for us, it will be very important to bring a lot of people digitizing their items so
that, you know, they can manage their collection. And for us, it's a big way to see the market,
to analyze data and to get data about the luxury collectibles ecosystem that we know. But I mean,
it's very important to know what our users are collecting. And then, of course, the landing
functionality that will include many more users within our platform, because then many collectors
will come because they want to generate liquidity. But on the other side, we will have also liquidity
providers that, you know, are going to provide liquidity in exchange of an interest and the revenue.
So we will be focusing mainly on attending events, fixing, you know, bugs and establishing the tech
and being able to establish our brands throughout these events, like the Formula One, these events with
Supercar Owner Circle that we for sure will attend in the future, auction houses. So we'll be attending
this year auction houses where people can immediately decide not to claim their item physically, but to
get it shipped to one of our safe storage facilities and, you know, have the digital certificate instead of
of the piece itself. Why this is important? It's super important because thanks to this, you don't have
to pay VAT, for example. So if you buy an item that is based in Switzerland or whatever, and you have to import
it in Germany or in France or in the US, then of course, once the item passes through custom of your
country, then you will have to pay import and taxes on that item. Thanks to the custom zone we are
working with where these items are located, VAT is suspended. So basically, you can easily trade your
collectibles and invest in your collectibles without having to think about VAT and spending more money and
liquidity within your collectibles.
Okay, perfect. Thank you. All right. I know we had another question from the crowd, Keystone and
Nano. It sounded like you have some questions around protections of the items. Would you like to ask that
now? Yeah, sure. I can just do a quick mic check to make sure it's working. Yeah, we got you.
Okay. So revolving around your, the real life assets, and I'm not sure exactly how you guys hold
them, but I'm sure they're protected. But the two things that I would like to know is how you deal
with, because they're high value ticket items, the depreciation of them, if they are items that can
and would depreciate. And then also, what is, like, do you guys do insurance based for, you know,
like natural disasters, or fires, or problems that are kind of outside of the controls that
you can put in place? Like, how do you handle that?
Sorry, guys, if there's some background noise, I hope you still hear me well.
Yeah, you're good.
But, but basically, it's actually a good question. I think it's more, the value affects more the
landing functionality, because if throughout the loan period, this item goes down in value, then
whoever is the liquidity provider will, if let's say that the item goes the fold, so the, the borrower
is not paying back, the original owner is not paying back the loan, then the liquidity provider
or the market will, will value that item lower than the actually, the borrower amount plus interest.
But thanks to our experts, we always are super, let's say, we try to be super safe with the valuation of our
items. So, the general valuation we do of our items is always, let's say 10-15% down in respect of the
market valuation. Plus, the loan to value you can get out of a loan is usually between 35 and 65, 70%.
Therefore, depending on the liquidity about the item, depending on the history of the index price
of the past 10 years of the item, we can evaluate to give you a certain loan to value. So, let's say
that, you know, your item is valued to 1 million already in altars valuations, your loan to value is 50%.
So, you will get 500k as a loan. Then, with the collectibles we are talking about, we're not
talking about the Bored Apes or whatever other NFT or other collectibles like sneakers or whatever,
that will go down or fluctuate a lot. So, they can go down and up in very, you know, short period of
times. The items we select, they usually grow steadily 10-15% per year. And if they have a
drop in value, it's just a maximum 10-15-20%. So, from the initial valuation. So, we try to select
these items are real world assets. So, we're not talking about anything, you know, that is digital
right now. We're talking about art, we're talking about cars, we're talking about wines, watches. So,
I think that this makes the big difference in the pricing.
Did you have any other follow-up questions there?
Yeah, the second, sorry, there was also the question about the insurance and the storage. So, basically,
all our storage facilities, our third parties, providers, auto codes, call them as you want
them. But they already have their insurances. So, in order to be in business, they need to provide,
they are obliged to provide these type of insurances for theft, fire, external causes whatsoever. So,
that needs to be there. And, of course, we only work with reliable, you know, partners.
As if you have a custom, let's say, license. So, where we, it's called, technically,
free port storage facility. If you are a free port, you have to go through certain checks
within authorities, local authorities, nation authorities, like, for example, in Switzerland,
Hong Kong, Dubai, wherever. And so, these partners are usually super reliable. So, we are happy to
work with third parties rather than leaving the items in the hands of the initial seller. That,
of course, is reliable to us. But, you know, still, we'd rather want this item to be in a super
secure safe within a super secure partner.
Keystone, do you have any thought there?
Yeah, that pretty much answered most of it.
So, my gathering from that is you're essentially doing, when you list stuff, you're doing a
risk versus, you know, liability versus on the asset, you know, all your checks before you
before you decide to list something, which I think is actually a really smart decision to do.
So, thanks for having me up. I appreciate that. That was the last of my questions.
Perfect.
Yeah, we'd rather, just to close on that, we'd rather focus on quality rather than quantity. So,
our marketplace, I don't expect it to be the open, open sea for real world assets, NFTs. So,
we would like to have a few collectibles, start with few, being sure that everything is working,
and then maybe in the future, expand even more. But for now, we like to check every single aspect.
We like to have multiple experts checking on the same item. We maybe spend more in, out of our fees,
we spend more in, you know, shipping the item all around and being sure that we have the right checks
in place, you know, rather than have problems in the future. So, we start low, we start with few
items, but then once all the protocol and the process is working, then we can expand even more
to multiple users, multiple items, and so on and so forth.
Awesome. Hey, Kyle, great to see you on stage, and Tom as well. Tom, feel free to throw up a hand
if you have anything you want to throw into the convo. I know we were chatting a little bit.
Kyle, do you want to throw anything into the mix here?
Sure. Yeah. No, I appreciate, Lucidal, you being here and talking about a very interesting industry.
From a macro perspective, I wanted to start just by getting your thoughts on the current climate and
what it means for your protocol. Because you've launched, you're presumably growing at this point,
but we've seen a lot of the luxury collectibles pull back a little bit in 2023. And so, I just wanted
to hear your thoughts around what that means for your protocol, because I could certainly see
an angle where people end up leveraging their assets more when prices are pulling back a little
bit to get some liquidity without necessarily selling their asset. But certainly, you'd think
that with lower prices, there's maybe less activity. So, I just wanted to hear your thoughts
on those types of dynamics and what that means for you guys.
I think that these dynamics are very important, but they affect mainly the mass market. So,
we are talking about collectibles that are serially produced every year in thousands,
if not millions of pieces. Like, for example, if we are talking about Rolex, they produce over a
million pieces per year, like modern Rolexes. So, we wouldn't focus on modern watches or modern cars. We
rather focus on limited editions, so we know are finished. And actually, these market dynamics
won't be the same for this type of collectibles. So, if a collectible is 50 years old, then it's
one of five, one of 10, one of 100. So, no one can produce more. Maybe many are lost, many are broken,
or are not well-kept. So, we'd like to apply scarcity in all the products we sell and we trade on our
platform, so that our users will not experience these type of performances that are happening right
now because it's a fact. So, in the last two years, we have experienced a big growth in the real world
assets, in the luxury collectibles, but also a lot of them, of these brands lost a lot in terms of
valuation. So, but by focusing on these vintage pieces or modern classics, modern vintages, so we
think that we are a bit tackling and blocking this market behavior.
Cool. And so, then the other side of the equation here, and certainly this may not be the best
example. So, if it's not, again, excuse me, but I think of fine art and a lot of the relevance
there. And there's a lot of platforms that try to fractionalize art, for example. And one of the
common pitches from them is that the fine art industry, or you could also use fine wines or
whiskeys I've even seen, which may or may not be in the realm that you guys work in, but they're at
least similarly related. In those types of industries, they, you know, a lot of the argument is that they
are not correlated to the traditional market. They perform very differently. In most cases,
they appreciate strongly over time, regardless of market climates, because of the point that you're
making that it's scarce. There's only a limited amount and it's, it's high value in the sense that
it is a real world asset that could be redeemed in theory for, for what the actual physical product
is. My, my concern with those types of business models is that by reducing the barrier of entry
for the average person to participate, I think you're actually creating a higher correlation to
those markets that they argue they're not correlated towards because of the fact that you're bringing in
the average person that isn't buying in for the longterm. It's probably a bit, bit shorter timeframe
and it's going to be more affected by market swings than the average person that would buy
an entire bottle of a 40 year old whiskey or an art piece. You're likely losing some of the benefits
that came with that underlying asset that kind of, I think doesn't necessarily get accounted for.
So do you, do you factor any of those things in? Do you think that that's a flawed hypothesis or
maybe is that not relevant at all? Just wanted to hear your thoughts on kind of the global environment
around some of these things. And if fractionalization provides, it really does provide a benefit
or if it could kind of dilute some of the opportunity.
Um, I think it's, uh, of course it will, uh, create a bit of downside and I hope that our platform will be able to,
um, be, uh, uh, let's say, uh, changing the way we see this market because thanks to our more,
you know, accessibility to these collectibles, then of course, uh, I believe that, uh, uh,
there will be more correlation, um, uh, with the, with, uh, the luxury sector and the luxury market.
Uh, but I think that will be just, uh, an upside. Maybe the downside will be that these items will, uh,
be less stable, will fluctuate, fluctuates a bit more, but in terms of valuation, we are talking about,
uh, be way bigger multipliers because, uh, if we're talking about, I'm a wine and spirits collector
myself, I am starting with art, uh, but I'm not experienced with that. So, uh, before launching
the art category, we'd rather want a specific article, like, you know, a big auction house,
like Sotheby's or Christie's, whatever, uh, to support us on launching that. And we are already in talks with
that, with these brands, because we, we are already in talks for actually the other departments,
cars, watches, blah, blah. Um, so, uh, but yeah, I think that, uh, it will just benefit the market,
of course, uh, would be less, uh, stable assets, more fluctuation, but in terms of valuations,
the starting price, let's say, would be a way higher because instead of having 20, 25,
40 people worldwide bidding, uh, for a unique piece, a unique, uh, uh, Picasso painting, then you have
millions of people, uh, being able to acquire that piece, you know? So I think that, uh, you know,
the liquidity that will be driven inside the market would be huge. Um, and once we are able to make
this, uh, uh, uh, platform known to the most, then, uh, I mean, we, we can, uh, experience some
interesting times. Interesting. Thanks for your answers. Appreciate you being here. I've learned a lot.
Always good having you on Kyle. Appreciate the questions there. Okay. We've got about eight
minutes left here. If anybody on the panel does have any other questions, feel free to throw them
into the mix. Uh, one of the questions, which I always do like to ask here is people like to do
their due diligence into obviously the company, the team, the website, uh, what's a good place,
obviously beyond the website, which people can go to for people to read up about you. Are there
articles, are there audits, are there pieces like that that people can use to dig into and really
gain a better understanding of everything that you're doing? Um, so we are recently launching
the, uh, our Git, uh, docs. So basically there you will find everything about the project, about the
contracts, uh, explained in a, you know, easy way, because if you are a dev or a tech guy that wants
to deep dive on the contracts, we have our, uh, GitHub, but that is already, um, uh, available.
So anyone can go and check that. Um, and we have been also audited by top tier, uh, companies in
the space. So, um, uh, it's, it's very important for us to be reliable because when you start talking,
uh, with brands, when you start talking with, I don't know, I just joined names here, but if you
start talking with Ferrari, with Audemars Piguet, with, uh, whoever, Patek Philippe, you need to be
reliable because they have a big, uh, reputational issue coming here. So, um, uh, they would want
to do their own check. So for us, it's very important to be, uh, super, uh, on point with, uh,
uh, the tech, uh, audits with, uh, legal, uh, audits of our platform. So for example, we are working
with MME, uh, that is, um, legal, uh, uh, advisor based in Zug in Switzerland. That was just to,
to give you some references, um, um, was the legal, um, uh, company advisor that incorporated the
Ethereum foundation back in 2012. So they have a deep, um, experience in blockchain applications and
also real world assets, tokenization, NFT. So they work with all the big players. Uh, but yeah,
so our Git docs is, is coming. So there we, you will find a lot of information more, um, uh,
rather than, uh, what you find on the website. We have our own forum where we push the proposals.
The nice thing about our platform is that for anything to happen, we need to go through a
community proposal. So, uh, it's, uh, all driven by also the treasury. So the team is not able to
access the treasury, not even one dollar, one USDT without the approval of the, of the, of the
community. So basically usually what we do, we propose the budget for the next two, three months.
We say what we are going to do with that budget. We propose a certain investments in terms of
marketing investments or, uh, tech audits or, uh, you know, salaries, whatever we need to pay.
And then the community will vote towards that. So for us, it's very important to be transparent.
And this is why, uh, with the launch of Git docs, uh, other than webs, the, than the website,
you will find, uh, way more information. Thank you. Okay. Uh, Keystone, sorry, your hand go up.
Yeah. So this, this, um, so for the case of somebody that holds a fraction and loses their wallet,
how would the team handle that situation? If somebody is acquiring all the fractions to
essentially claim the real world item, um, and one was just lost to the nether completely.
So we have two ways to, to interact with the platform. So the first way is to, by doing the
simple wallet connects. Uh, so, uh, for anyone that is familiar with the DeFi, uh, basically you connect
your wallets, your MetaMask wallet or whatever, uh, to the DAP. Um, and in this case, I mean,
you are the owner of your, uh, private keys and we cannot do much, uh, out of it. So if you lose,
uh, your, uh, wallet, you're done. You cannot get back your asset, but in K we have a second way to
interact with the platform, that is the social login. So basically you can log in via your email or,
you know, Google account or Twitter or whatever. Um, and thanks to that, we work with a third
party, uh, provider that provides, uh, addresses. So basically you, um, you are tied automatically to
a new, uh, newly created wallet where the private keys are owned by these third party providers.
So in case then you lose access to your account, it's just for us, you know, um, to, to, um,
create a new password for you. So we did this because we know that there may be more experienced
user in the blockchain ecosystem that may feel more, um, secure by having their own wallets,
by owning their private keys. Of course, you're, you're not keeping your wealth. Uh, so you're just
using the platform for your, uh, collectibles investments. So, uh, I mean, um, it makes sense,
uh, also to, uh, uh, go through the social login so that, you know, that, uh, uh, everything is managed
securely. And, uh, um, uh, I mean, uh, then you can, uh, recover, uh, your assets if you ever lose
your access. That's awesome. Okay. Let's go to Drew. Oh, there we go. Twitter. Um, what kind of
crypto do you normally deal with? Is it just, I know you mentioned USDT, is it just primarily USDT
on, on Polygon and for the treasury who, who's in control of that? Is that, is that a multi-sig
with the team members? Are you doing that on-chain via DAO with some of the DAOs that actually do it
on-chain snapshot? It's all on-chain. So it's our, uh, basically we started with the, uh, compound
DAO. So basically we made a fork, but, uh, uh, we improved it, uh, our way. So with, uh, with the, uh,
uh, peculiarities we, we needed for, for our own structure, uh, but basically, uh, having the
treasury owned by the DAO, you don't need the multi-sig because of course, uh, then to be able
to access the, uh, the vault with the treasury and to transfer some of that outside to make payments or,
uh, pay for events or whatever, then of course you, you would need to, to go through, uh, a voting.
And the voting lasts for three, four days because we have our time log. So, you know,
all the users can evaluate what to do, uh, with, with their participation in the ecosystem.
Um, but yeah, so as I said, uh, we have, uh, basically only USDT, uh, because we'd rather,
um, um, um, you know, we don't want to, since we, the, the overall goal of our platform is to bring
stability and to bring real value in the world of, uh, cryptocurrency, because what we have seen
is a lot of poncy, a lot of mint coins where, uh, the underlying value is zero. So, uh, for us,
it's very important, uh, on the other sense to, uh, you know, uh, to bring these luxury collectibles
that they have a great value in the, in the traditional market, maybe not a lot of liquidity.
So thanks of, uh, you know, the bridge between these two, uh, sectors, we actually can provide
liquidity, but they provide substance, they provide value. So, um, uh, the same thing we're
doing with our treasury management, we only have USDT, uh, because we want to be sure that,
uh, you know, uh, it's stable, uh, we are not going to lose, uh, 80% of the treasury over
the period of two months, uh, you know, so, uh, we, we'd like to be safe, uh, this way.
But of course, being a doubt driven, uh, uh, platform, then anyone, if, uh, the quorum is
reached and anyone proposes to buy Bitcoin with the treasury, then of course, if the community
wants that, we can do it. All right. I got to pop in right here. Cause we're actually coming up on
my next space, which is going to be on ace, the kids link. I see Dan Snyder in the audience. So
just letting you know, we're going to jump over to Jordan space here. Uh, loose Dow is a pleasure
having you on again. We covered a lot of great material here. I hope everybody got all their
questions answered. Thank you, Drew, Kyle, Tom, Keystone, Mary Beth, and Keith for being on for
this one. Appreciate you all. Uh, loose Dow, any quick final comments before I, uh, close this one
out? Uh, yeah, of course. Uh, I mean, we weren't able to, to go through an AMA with the, with the
community, but feel free to come, uh, um, uh, in our, uh, Twitter X or discord, telegram, wherever,
uh, ask your questions. The team is, uh, able to help you. And, uh, I mean, follow us on our
journey because we think we'll be super interesting. Perfect. Thank you so much for
being on. Appreciate everybody who's been hanging out with us. I'm going to hop over to ace the kids
space with seeking alpha now, and I hope that you will come and join us there. Thank you again to all
all the speakers. All right.
Host
Speaker
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