Bankless - 32 - The Bull Case for NFTs | Jake Burkhman & Andrew Steinwold
Episode Date: September 28, 2020September 28, 2020 ----- Tools from our sponsors to go bankless: 🌐 UNSTOPPABLE DOMAINS - GET A HUMAN READABLE CRYPTO DOMAIN 🌈 ZAPPER - ULTIMATE HUB FOR DEFI - ZAP INTO DEFI 💳 MONOLITH -... GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS 💸 AAVE - LEND AND BORROW DEFI ASSETS ----- 32 - The Bull Case for NFTs | Jake Burkhman & Andrew Steinwold There's something bubbling under the surface with NFTs. A lot of really smart people are starting to make a lot of noise about the coming wave of NFT explosion. But what are NFTs exactly? What can we do with them? Are they really all that unique? What is so powerful about a Non-Fungible Token? Jake Burkhman, founder of CoinFund, is particularly bullish on this sector of Ethereum. Andrew Steinwold, host of a podcast exclusively dedicated to NFTs, thinks that the world of NFTs will dwarf the world of DeFi by orders of magnitude. What makes these two individuals so optimistic about NFTs? Listen to find out! ------ Resources: Bankless articles: The First $100M in NFTs https://bankless.substack.com/p/the-first-100m-in-nfts Democratization of Value https://bankless.substack.com/p/the-democratization-of-value How to make money selling Digital Art https://bankless.substack.com/p/how-to-make-money-on-digital-art Listen: Andrew Steinwold's Podcast: Zima Red https://anchor.fm/andrew-steinwold Rate the Podcast 5 Stars ----- Subscribe to podcast on iTunes | Spotify | YouTube | RSS Feed Leave a review on iTunes Share the episode with someone you know! ----- Don't stop at the podcast! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program Watch Bankless shows and tutorials on YouTube Visit official Bankless website for resources Follow Bankless on Twitter Follow Ryan on Twitter Follow David on Twitter ----- Not financial or tax advice. This podcast is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Do your own research.
Transcript
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Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance.
This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front-run the opportunity.
This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless.
David, how are you doing today?
Particularly bullish on NFTs today. I don't know why, but I just feel that way.
Yeah, me too. This was definitely a bullish episode. We kind of cover NFTs from
soup to nuts, like starting with what they are and why they're valuable and like getting into the
psyche of collectibles and why humanity has valued those for thousands of years. So what were
what were some of your takeaways? Yeah, I think my biggest takeaway is like when we talk about
Ethereum, we talk about defy, we talk about all these crazy new things that we are building.
It's easy to forget that we are often rebuilding things that have come before us, right?
Like we are not recreating finance. We are just we are just taking.
the old paradigms, the old primitives, and redeploying them on Ethereum. And NFTs, the conversation
around NFTs is very salient around this. Like humans have been collecting NFTs for as old as time, right?
We just didn't call them NFTs. We called them other things. So if you collected Pokemon cards when
you were a kid, if you played Yu-Gi-O, baseball cards, Beanie babies, coins, stamps. Yeah, all this good stuff.
Like the concept of scarce goods is written into our human DNA, right?
Like we understand scarce goods.
And I really, really liked the line from Andrew where he said, like, he thinks that the
worlds of NFT as a market cap is going to be orders of magnitude larger than defy in the same
sense that like property and items are way bigger than finance.
Like the total addressable market for just property is massive.
And so that's why Andrews particularly.
bullish on this industry. Yeah, those guys are super bullish. And something about this feels a lot
like defy and I don't know, 2018, 2019, where like stuff is getting built. It's bubbling. It's below
the surface. So it's still kind of a niche within a niche within a niche. Yet you see the organic
material here for something really incredible to be built. And you're not yet sure when this is going to
bubble over and become massive. You know, for Defi in 2019, it took a year for things to start bubbling up
and getting some mainstream attention. And I wonder if the same thing is going to happen with
NFTs, whether we're a year away, whether we're two years away, whether we're longer.
But certainly, the gentlemen, the guests that we had on our show today are ultra bullish in this
world. And they eat, breathe, and live in it every single day. Also, it was cool. I think
think is they really left the listener with with some action steps and things that you can do next to
get a taste of the NFT world. And it's it's far bigger than I thought. Like there are a lot of things
that you can do today. It's primitive. It's kind of nascent. It's a little clunky in places.
But you can see the potential there. As I'm looking towards the defy world and yield farming,
I'm expecting that energy to kind of die off at some point, right? Like be it like two months from now or
two years from now, like that energy isn't going to dissipate. So when I'm thinking of like a long-term
bull market, I'm thinking about things that kind of pick up the slack, things that add energy
when energy is needed, right? Like when the yield farming runs out of gas, what adds gas back
into the fuel tank of the bull market? And the NFT phenomenon, I think that is like the next step,
right? And we need to do, Ryan, another episode on NFTs because it's such a rich world and we really
only scratch the surface. One thing that I'm really particularly fascinated by is just the
massive amounts of intermediaries that get cut out between an artist or a value producer and a
value consumer, right? Like in the legacy world with music artists, there's like seven different
intermediaries between the listener and the artist, right? And that ends up making the listener
experience. The listener can't express their value to their artists. Their artists can't
receive the value being expressed by the listener because of all these intermediaries.
And I think the NFT industry is something that can really just streamline the connection between
value producer and value consumer without having a bunch of middlemen.
We definitely talked about that at a high level in this episode, but I think it's
definitely worth going into in future episodes.
So here's the takeaway, guys.
This is the frontier.
Chris Brininski in our episode with him called the Land of Ethereum, Infinite White Space.
And I think there is an infinite white space for the growth of NFTs here.
And with that, David, why don't we just get right into it?
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All right, guys.
head and get right into the interview with Andrew and Jake.
All right, bankless nation.
We are super excited to have our first two guest episode on the podcast.
We're going to be talking about NFTs today.
Are they the next big thing?
Is this the thing that's going to happen after Defi?
Hopefully we will find out with our next two guests.
The first is Jake Birkman, who is the founder of Coin Fund.
He's also an engineer.
He's a longtime crypto investor.
We've gotten him to write bankless articles as well.
So he's, you know, three things at the same time.
And also Andrew Steinwald, who is the founder of the Sifurmeon Fund, he invests in the
Metaverse, which we'll be talking about today, what that is.
He also writes one of the best newsletters I found that covers the NFT space.
It's called Zima Red.
Welcome to the show, Jake and Andrew.
How are you guys doing?
Yeah, doing great.
So happy to be here.
Doing great.
Thank you so much for having me.
Guys, are NFTs about to blow up?
They're kind of blowing up already, right?
So, you know, we were talking a little bit before the recording about how DFI is killing it.
And recently, Zapper published some of their, some of their, like, website statistics, right,
about how many daily active users there are and how many monthly active users there are.
And everyone kind of thought, like, oh, you know, there's probably a few tens of thousands of people
in DeFi, but the MAU's adapter were 300,000, which surprisingly high. And the DAUs were something
like 20,000. I think that's August numbers. I'm here to say that the numbers for NFTs are not
far behind. So I wrote a blog post a while back that looked at the total number of unique addresses
that used OpenC, and it was April 2020. The stats were roughly 20,000 totally unique wallets in
OpenC. An OpenC is the number one NFT exchange in the ecosystem right now. There are others.
So I looked at that and I think that that's, you know, people that you trade NFTs,
they have usually more than one wallet, just like how people in Defi have more than one wallet.
So, you know, at the maximum I'd say we're around, let's say, 10,000 to 30,000 active participants
in the NFT space right now. So, you know, there's a lot more space to grow, especially if we're looking
at the Defi numbers, which Jake just mentioned is 300.
thousand. And if we're looking at total active crypto wallets, which I checked up just because I was
curious about that number, in 2019, I forget which month, but it said, I think it was 42 million
total active crypto wallets. So the total market growth potential here is absolutely massive.
Yeah, David and I were talking. The reason we wanted to host this episode is honestly,
NFTs feel somewhat like D5 felt back in a year ago, right? So back in 2019, you know, around
this time. Defi was kind of on the cusp. You could see a lot brewing. NFTs feel like that
right now. I'm not sure whether they will burst in the same way that DeFi has lately, but those
two things are certainly super interrelated. But before we get too deep, I feel like we should just
spend a minute to define NFTs. We're using this like, you know, this acronym. NFTs, of course,
stand for non-fungible tokens.
But what are NFTs?
Maybe, Jake, we could start with you.
Well, NFTs are non-fungible tokens.
What that means is there's some assets.
Mostly we see this in kind of currencies and stocks, right,
where each unit of the asset is exchangeable with any other unit of the asset.
So if I have one ether, you have one ether, I say, you know,
if I send you one ether and you send me one back,
Is that a fair trade?
Absolutely.
We're willing to do it.
In non-fungible tokens, you have a plurality and diversity of different assets, and they're not all valued the same.
So, for example, CryptoKitties, right?
Some crypto-kitties are more rare, others are less rare, more common.
So the rare ones are going to be worth more.
Non-fungible tokens captures that idea, and I think, as we'll discuss, it extends it to not,
just art, not just collectibles, not just CryptoKitties, but to a broad spectrum of
different assets that could be understood that way. Yeah, I think Jake hit it perfectly well.
I like to describe non-fungible tokens as unique digital assets. So unlike Bitcoin and
US dollars that are totally interchangeable, my US dollars is the same as yours and my Bitcoin's
the same as yours. It's worth the same. NFTs, they can be basically, let's use an example from a
video game, if I have an NFT sword that I won from defeating some boss, and maybe it's called,
you know, flaming sword number one, then you come along, you also defeat the same boss and you get
that sword, but you have flaming sword number two. So even though they might have the same stats,
they're totally unique from each other. And in theory, the market should probably value mine
slightly more because I was the first one to defeat the boss and I, you know, have the number one
sword. And that's just the example from video games, but most NFTs that we see today are
just completely unique assets from virtual worlds to collectibles to game assets and etc.
So I think the average listener, even if they don't know like what an NFT is in the way that
we're talking about it, they are still familiar with the concept of an NFT.
An NFT is just kind of like in the defy world we like to put in confusing lingo and NFT is
definitely one of those things.
But people should really know what these things are.
Like Andrew, you gave this great explanation of like a, it's a sword that you found in a game.
some loot that you found in your favorite video game.
But in the real life, there's more to it than that.
Like art, I think, and, you know, Renaissance paintings and marble sculptures,
things that, you know, there are only one of and that one thing has value.
This is something that has been as, this is something that is as old as time.
Can you guys go into kind of the relationship that humanity has with what we now are
calling NFTs?
Yeah.
Yeah, so I guess, yeah, so, you know, throughout forever, people are always trying to verify the authenticity of certain goods, right?
And that's just been the case since probably the down of man.
And what we're seeing with NFTs that are attached to real world items today is usually they're sold as certificates of authenticity.
So I can buy a physical piece of art and then attach to that.
Maybe they'll attach some sort of NFT or, you know, send me the token.
So it's kind of a certificate.
And I think that there's a ton of use cases that will spawn.
And there are already some today that basically sell these NFTs.
And then on the background, they're redeemable for the actual physical good.
So what we see on OpenC, there's a company called, I think it's like WIV, like WIV or something.
And they're selling cases of wine from France, I believe.
And you're able to actually purchase these cases as NFTs.
And I believe you're able to redeem the actual NFT for the actual wine.
Of course, you have to pay shipping and whatnot.
So it's, you know, it kind of, you run into the same issues with traditional, the traditional inefficiencies of physical goods.
But right now, the use cases that are really exciting in my mind are kind of these completely digitally native things.
But we're definitely seeing a huge use case.
And what will be a huge use case is the more traditional physical goods with NFT certificates of authenticity.
And that can be anywhere from like rare watches to wine as mentioned or rare cars and all sorts.
Like the entire collectibles market is becoming digital.
which will unlock just so much value and be able to make people feel a lot safer,
transacting with these items.
It's kind of weird that the humans have always collected things like this.
So I had a neighbor growing up who used to collect cars, like classic cars.
And when you think of the value of a classic car, it's not valuable for its utility function.
It's not valuable because, you know, my neighbor could use it to go from point A to point B on his commute to work.
In fact, he left his cars in his garage and never drove the things.
But they had some collectible type of value.
Like, what is that?
Is that just something inherent in humanity that we treat scarce things that are unique,
that have some kind of nostalgic value as valuable?
Like, we do this all the time in the physical world,
and we're just kind of porting that same thing into the digitally scarce world.
That's what NFTs are, right?
Jake, do you have any thoughts on that?
I do.
I think if you kind of dig down into the human psyche,
it kind of, you know, I think it kind of blows down to two things.
It's like value and ownership.
There's this great talk that has influenced me over the year so much from Andreas
Antonopoulos.
I think it's called The Future of Bitcoin, and I think it's from 2015.
And somewhere in that talk, he mentions, you know,
like if you perform an experiment where you put some children on a deserted island,
they'll naturally develop ways of transferring value to each other.
They'll start collecting shells, they'll start collecting pretty rocks and flowers,
and they'll basically start using those things as a currency.
So, you know, I totally agree.
I think, like, there's some aspect of, you know, embedded in people that want to encapsulate the idea
of value in an asset form.
And then the idea of ownership, I think, extends that, right?
There's something also innate in us that, you know, that likes property, that likes the idea
of being the sole owner of a thing.
And on the internet, like, this is a view that I kind of have come around to lately.
I heard Adam B. Levine talk about it on one of these calls that I was on recently.
but he was basically saying, like, if you think about digital content on the internet,
you know, one view is that we don't really own too much of it, right?
Like we maybe own the content that we create, but we certainly don't own the content that we
consume, right?
So if you're borrowing an e-book from Amazon or you're watching a movie on Netflix,
you don't actually like own the thing.
You kind of own the license to to view the thing for a little bit of time.
And what NFTs allow you to do is just like all, you know,
blockchains enable this like strong personal ownership of assets.
NFTs allow you to create strong personal ownership of digital content.
And I think that's like a really, really interesting view.
and the reason why I think that is because as an investor,
I'm looking for markets that are high growth
and what I'm observing about this market of ownership
is that it's like very liquid, right?
It's not out there.
There's not a lot of secondary markets for digital content.
And that's because primarily the ownership of these things
is not owned in actuality kind of by most people.
And so what happens is when you take NFTs, which are digital assets that enjoy the benefit of all the advances we've made in blockchain like dexism, liquidity and trading, and you sort of start to unlock this asset class of digital assets, you create a bunch of value and unlock a bunch of value that before was completely internalized, right?
And so it spills out onto the markets.
I sort of share that take, right? So if this is sort of what I've kind of concluded after being in this space, that the thing that humanity unlocked with the birth of crypto in 2009 with Bitcoin First is digital scarcity.
Like if I could kind of sum it up, right? So the internet gave us digital communication. But what crypto gives us is the ability to have scarcity on the internet, to create, inject scarcity.
into our digital goods.
And that's closely, as he said,
associated with ownership and property rights,
and they're all kind of interrelated.
But before 2009,
we didn't even have the ability
to have a digitally scarce good.
Every good could be copy and paste it.
But through this mix of cryptography
and economic incentives,
humanity has essentially unlocked digital scarcity.
Everything's kind of falling out from that.
Like there's this game civilization.
I used to play it as a kid, right?
So you kind of level up your civilization and know that the civilization has discovered writing.
The civilization has discovered mathematics and now physics and, you know, now a nuclear weapons.
Oh, Gandhi's going to war with your civilization, right?
Like, that's how the game's played.
I really feel like humanity has just unlocked digital scarcity.
And all of these things like NFTs are just falling out of that.
What do you think of that take, Jake?
Is that the big discovery for crypto?
When I started thinking about NFTs,
I actually started at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
because I was trying to understand how digital art
sort of meshes with this idea of digital scarcity.
And what I noticed was that, you know,
if you talk about physical art,
like if you talk about the Mona Lisa,
it's a very, it's a very solved problem to answer the question,
like, where this art is.
I know exactly where the Mona Lisa lives.
It lives in the Louvre.
On the other hand, when you start to think about digital art,
you start to fall down this, like, philosophic rabbit hole
where you kind of don't know where it is.
Like, is it in the creator's, like, Photoshop?
Like, is it in the email where he sent it to the gallery?
Is it in the box of the gallery?
What you realize is that digital art is it doesn't have, like,
a place where it lives.
it's just sort of like a concept
that kind of like lives in our minds
and then it has like different
you know actualizations
of that concept which might be like
a copy of it on my computer or phone or something
and what actually blockchain technology
and digital scarcity do for art
philosophically for digital art and ephemeral art
is they find a place for it
and that place is on the blockchain
you know like exactly where it is
and who owns it
And so that's kind of like where I started in thinking about it.
And then as we develop the idea of digital scarcity,
you kind of realize that that strong ownership of it also enables you to,
you know, be entitled to the rights that owners are entitled to.
And these rights might be the right to hold, the right to sell,
the right to lend, the right to collect a royalty stream on this,
on this work, the movie rights to this work, and so on and so forth. And that's where the view of
what we call liquid IP or liquid intellectual property kind of comes from. One of the
favorite ways that I've had Bitcoin described to me is that Bitcoin is this ledger of property rights
for these 21 million units, right? And people can perceive these units to be whatever they want them
to be. But the property rights ledger of Bitcoin itself is so incredibly valuable that these 21 million
slots, right? These 21 million like parking spaces or just like units are so incredibly valuable
because of the value of the property rights system that is Bitcoin that that turns into like
BTC as money, right? And what Ethereum has done is it has generalized this concept of like digital
scarcity. And it's it's actually a funny little statement that I that I like to say in my head is that
you know, Ethereum has made scarcity abundant. Right. And so while Bitcoin is to this,
this one like monolithic property right system ethereum is this property rights platform right a platform
for property rights and what nfts are is this uh you know this very specific instantiations of one
very specific form of property right and ever since you know ever since we humans moved out of like
a hunter douter societies and into like settled lands where capital and property therefore was
established we have been like property owning beings right like are the one of the one of the
the ways that we perceive and share and grow wealth is through property, right? And so I'm just
particularly bullish on like Ethereum just as a generalized property rights management platform.
Yeah, no, I absolutely love that Ethereum as a property rates platform. And, you know,
my whole thesis is that non-fungible tokens enable a true metaverse to form because they give us
property rights, right? Whereas before, as you mentioned, like in the digital world, we had zero
property rights and you could copy and paste and you know print unlimited things and you know property
rights are the basis of all basically successful economic systems that that we've that we've kind of
seen today and um and also going back if you kind of think about mentioned the hunter gatherer days
like even back then people were collecting shells and kind of collecting stuff and um taking ownership
of these kind of goods and it's really interesting to see that maybe we have some like innate
human piece of us that likes to collect and likes to have property rights over certain items.
And so I think that Ethereum as a property rights platform is just enabling the entire virtual
world to have property rights.
And that is going to open up the door to our, you know, people call it a mirror world or
metaverse, whereas before we could, you know, we could build whatever you want in the virtual,
but you couldn't actually own anything.
Now we can transfer our entire society that we've built in the physical realm.
and port that into a digital.
And that is going to create an entire society that's completely virtual.
It's called the Metaverse.
But yeah, that's why I'm so excited about this.
I think you hit spot on with Ethereum being the platform to do all that.
What do you mean?
I've heard you say this before, Andrew, the Metaverse, right?
So is the Metaverse basically a virtual world with property rights or is it describing crypto?
What is the Metaverse in your mind?
What do you mean when you say that?
Yeah, so I like to say that the metaverse is just a virtual environment that people live, work, and play in.
So, you know, it can be any sort of, can be on a computer, it can be in a VR headset.
It can be, you know, I guess Zoom is some very, very simple form of the metaverse.
You know, obviously for a true metaverse, you want to be way more immersive and also you want to have property rates in there.
This is like ready player one, basically.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And I think that there is no one singular platform that's going to be the metaverse.
It's going to be kind of like the internet where you don't say like, oh, Google is the internet or Facebook is the internet.
It's just kind of all these things together create the internet.
And it's kind of my opinion that you can't have a metaverse without something like Ethereum for property rights.
Because, you know, if let's say Facebook made a really great virtual environment where people could actually earn money and stuff like that,
well, at any time, Facebook could delete your account and delete all your items or even Epic Games who are very kind of pro-user.
and kind of pro, you know, they want people to, you know, have more freedom.
Even if they created a metaverse and enabled a lot of this, it still wouldn't be real
unless the users actually had true property rights where Epic Games, no matter what,
could not have to delete your stuff.
Because if they can, then it's not, it's kind of like living in, I don't know,
like the Soviet Union back in the day where, you know, you couldn't really,
I don't think you could have too much, too many actual property.
And your options for business and whatnot were very, very limited.
So that's why people would want to move to America or some other country with a stronger property rights so they can build a business and thrive.
And I kind of see that with any virtual world or platform that utilizes Ethereum or other technologies that enable digital property rights.
That's when you start to get the first inklings of a metaverse.
All right.
So when you watch something like Ready Player 1 and you're seeing like the avatars run around, they're collecting coins and they're grabbing items and they're getting things that have value.
And they have an inventory.
Yeah, they have an inventory.
You're saying all of that is basically registered on some sort of crypto economic blockchain
system like Ethereum.
Yeah.
And I would say I'm actually pretty blockchain agnostic, which is funny to say.
I mean, right now Ethereum clearly gives the biggest advantage in terms of property rights
and real property rights.
I don't really think platforms like, you know, I don't want to cause controversy.
But there's other chains out there that don't provide the same guarantees that Ethereum does.
I mean, obviously there's issues with Ethereum, me scalability and whatnot, but I'm confident
those to be solved.
But you really have to have some system, some blockchain-based system or distributed ledger
system that enable these rights.
So it doesn't matter what the chain is that you're using.
What matters is that these property rights are guaranteed by the network and that they enable
this kind of metaverse to form.
Well, we're okay with a little bit of controversy, right, David?
So like something like Tron, right?
with like so or something like u.s with maybe you know 21 block producers who can censor your
transaction what you're kind of saying is that's a less uh valuable property rights system
because it's it's much more centralized much more subject to some third party control
than something like the ideal state of ethereum is is that kind of the case so like we
we have to have a credibly neutral property right system whether that's ethereum or something else
that's what you're more bullish on. Is that what you're saying?
Yeah. So, you know, for me, it doesn't, I'm totally blockchain diagnostic as long as you
have true property rights, because my goal is the Metaverse, right? So how are we get there?
It doesn't matter. I just want to be certain that we have true property rights. And right now,
Ethereum is by far the leader in that. And yeah, I think that there are some issues with, you know,
things like EOS. Just personally, I think that there's some issues with having only 21 because in theory,
there could be some group of people that kind of take control of that. And then,
your property rights are, you know, those get diminished. And so that would hurt kind of the
metaverse thesis. So, yeah, in my opinion, Ethereum is by far the best option today.
So there seems to be a lot of excitement around NFTs right now, like in the last few weeks
or months or so. What is generating all of that hype? Like, what are the platforms that
people are excited about that people are paying attention to right now?
I'm super excited about Rarable. Rarable has done some,
really interesting work in the space lately in the last couple of months. This is a team that
I've been working with all year. And this is a project that has just demonstrated that having
crypto-native models for ownership and property rights, if you will, guys. And also a token model
can be an incredibly powerful way of bootstrapping a marketplace. And basically,
what happened is that at the beginning of July,
Rarable announced that they would be launching Rary token,
and this token would be airdropped to users of NFT.
So if you have an Ethereum wallet that has bought or sold an NFT in the past,
you can go on Rarable.com,
and there's a little section in the top bar
where you can see if you're actually eligible for Rari.
They also implemented a volume mining program, marketplace liquidity mining program, which means that if you are a verified creator unraerable, or if you're a buyer of assets unraerable, you'll actually be rewarded Rarycoin on a weekly basis.
And this is shown to be very powerful.
I like to say that you can buy people's attention, but it's very hard to buy people's loyalty.
But the way that you do the latter is you give them equity, right?
you make them a partial owner of the platform that they're using.
And this is the core value proposition, I think, of Rarable as they head down their decentralization roadmap.
And what we've seen is the success of Rary has been extreme.
Just in the last week or so, they really captured a lot of the imagination of crypto artists,
and a lot of them just moved to Rarable and started minting there.
Onchain volume is up dramatically.
And it really feels like governance tokens for NFT marketplaces is now sort of par for the course in that space.
It's really, so something like RareBull is really building on this concept that we've been talking about a lot on bank lists in the DFI space of like yield farming, right?
So is it what I guess money Lego?
from DFI is rareboe really leveraging to create the success you mentioned.
Well, I'd say the liquidity mining program gets transferred from the DFI context
into the marketplace context.
And it's a little bit of a, it's a challenging problem, right?
Because, you know, in sort of in DFI, what you do is you kind of contribute capital.
and in return for your capital,
you're able to earn an APY.
So you're taking some smart contract risk,
you're taking some market risk,
you're taking some risk of the volatility
of the asset that you're earning.
And when you go into the marketplace context,
it's a similar idea,
and the abstract idea is,
you know, if you're an active participant on the network,
you earn rewards,
but even more than that,
you earn ownership of the network.
But the activity that you do in order to earn that reward and ownership is a little bit different.
And that activity is basically transacting on the platform.
So I would say what Rarable has done so far is they've sort of repurposed a little bit kind of the liquidity mining programs of DFI into these marketplace mining programs.
And there's actually a few projects, not just Rarable, but a few marketplace projects out there today.
they're doing it. One other example is what Zapper is building. But what we have seen is that these
programs make a profound impact on these marketplaces who are bootstrapping. We've seen it in
Defi as balancer investors. And now we're seeing it in NFTs as the Rarable marketplace bootstraps.
So something like Rarable, would that have been possible? So you mentioned yield farming, right? And that's
kind of a, that's just like three months old-ish in defy, although you could argue
synthetics kind of pioneered it in defy. But that's kind of a newer trend. But would something
like Rarable be possible without other defy components like say a decentralized exchange protocol
like uniswap? Or is it really building on top of some of those other pieces in DFI?
It's absolutely building on top. So what we've seen is, you know, if you rewind like six,
12 months ago, you know, the profile of your average token project that was coming to market
was something like this. Oh, I have to wait to get listed in an exchange. It might take me six
months to do that. It might take me a year to do that. I might have to pay a million dollars,
you know, in China to get listed, right? And then after I get listed, there's no guarantee that
I will have great liquidity. I might have to hire market makers. I might have to wait for my
market to form for another six months, another year. And really the onus of getting a liquid
token out there historically in blockchain has been really high, even though the quote-unquote
time to liquidity enabled by blockchain has been really low. Now, what we've seen this year is just
the explosion of decentralized exchange. And I've said this on a few programs recently, but if you
look at the daily volume of kind of crypto broadly, it's, you know, right now it's something like
100 to 130 billion dollars a day.
And if you look at the kind of the major dexes and the volume that they're doing,
they're doing something like 500 million to a billion dollars a day.
And so really we're just under like 1% of utilization of the addressable volume in blockchain.
But even with that, the time to major liquidity has basically gone to zero.
If you have great incentives in your project, if you have,
you know, if you have a popular brand, then we have seen this in the last months that just
tokens come out and they have, you know, very, very interesting and high levels of liquidity
almost straight away. In Rarable's case was immediately after the AirDrop, they got to something like
$300,000 to $500,000 of daily liquidity. And this was just on balancer and just on uniswap.
And as the airdrop kind of proliferated to more people,
and as more people were marketplace mining, you know, the asset,
and as the audience of Rary token increased,
they got up to like $6 million of daily liquidity.
And I haven't checked recently, but we can pull it up.
It looks like, yeah, just about $2 million of liquidity in the last 24 hours,
but we also have some pretty high fees on chain these days.
Andrew, where are you seeing energy in the NFT space?
Yeah, I think Jake hit it perfectly right there when he was talking about
Rare Bowl releasing their governance token.
And, you know, everything, all this really started with compound, launching their
comp token.
And then Defi just went absolutely crazy.
And, you know, myself looking from the NFT space, I was like, damn, you know, I wish I could,
you know, learn more and be a part of it.
And, you know, thankfully I do listen to guys.
And so I understood like the basics, but I wasn't really getting deeply involved.
But now what we're seeing is all these teams from the NFT space, you know, especially
rare will being the first one, they're all now kind of looking at these different token models
and what they can do to kind of bootchap liquidity and bootchrap activity and whatnot.
What I think is really cool about governance tokens, particularly in kind of games and virtual worlds,
is that I remember growing up, people would always say like, oh, man, I wish I could,
I wish I could add this feature to this video game, right?
I wish I could like, you know, implement this thing in this game or whatnot.
And what we're seeing, what I think is going to come out soon,
is that people will be launching these governance tokens for virtual worlds or games.
And the users themselves will, as Jake mentioned before, have skin in the game.
So they'll feel really, really entrenched with that project.
Plus, they'll also have input on the direction of the platform,
which that's never really been a thing before.
And I think that's incredible because you have this fun experience.
You know, you're maybe building something in this virtual world and you're really enjoying it.
But there's this one feature you really want to be implemented.
Well, you can go get all your buddies together and talk to them about it and go vote on chain and then kind of push that forward.
So I really think we're going to see a massive explosion of different NFT projects taking kind of the best aspects of defy and then launching that within the NFT ecosystem.
You guys pay attention to the NFT world, perhaps more than anyone.
And there are some really exciting, really very real platforms like Rarable that are out right now.
but what is on the horizon that also excites you guys?
Like what is coming, what that we know is in the pipeline
that you guys are really particularly excited about?
Absolutely, yeah.
So if you kind of check out our thesis that we published on NFTs,
it's called All Digital Content is going on chain.
And what we're really trying to make the point there is
that it's not just art, it's not just collectibles,
but we can extend two really.
really broad spectrum of things. And so the question becomes like, well, what's the next thing?
And we're starting to get hints that, you know, that on NFT platforms today, there's at least
one, I believe it's mint-based, where you can actually create a music NFT. And there are some
artists who, like Connie Digital, who I love, he's been doing kind of NFT digital art, but recently
he's also been publishing music in the form of NFTs. So you get the sense that, um, you get the sense
that we started kind of at collectibles, then we went to art, now we're going to music,
and there might be other forms of creative expression that can be tokenized this way.
So foundation comes to mind, right, where artists are able to tokenize some of their physical
goods and in the form of digital assets and sell it that way.
Can you talk more about foundation?
because I think that's super, super interesting, right?
And another related project we've talked about in bank lists is Zora.
We've had some artists like releasing NFTs on top of those things.
But many times these are redeemable for physical goods in some cases.
But just talk about what foundation, what Zora actually is for us, if you will, Jake.
I'm not an investor in any of those companies that you mentioned.
I just kind of been following them from a distance.
But it does seem like what foundation is trying to do, on their front page, they say,
this is culture stock exchange.
And it's really like going back to that fundamental idea that, you know, the digital assets
should be out there in the world as liquid, freely transferable, freely tradable assets.
And what kind of assets are we talking about?
creators have uploaded some of their graphic design.
There was actually a recording artist who I think he dropped either a track or an album in this way.
And again, like my broader thesis is that all digital content that you kind of come in contact with on the internet,
it will eventually be tokenized in this way.
And there's some like really obvious kinds of content, right?
There's the art, there's music.
But there's also the not so obvious kinds that we probably didn't even think about tokenizing yet.
And I think of things like tweets, right?
You know, it doesn't quite make sense to tokenize tweets yet because Twitter is a centralized platform.
But you can imagine that in the future, social media is going to decentralize quite a bit, right?
And in that case, the users will own their content.
They'll own their post.
They'll own their Insta stories.
They'll own their tweets.
And there are certain tweets that are culturally relevant, right?
Like you remember Elon Musk's tweet about taking Tesla private, funding secured?
It would be a curious exercise to try to see how much a collector would maybe pay to own that kind of cultural content.
So Jake, here's where I got to ask a question, because some people are.
skeptical of this sort of thing when it turns into digital, right? Because like the question I can
tell is in a lot of listeners' mind, when you hear you describe something like that, like owning
Elon Musk's famous tweet is what would an owner actually own, right? So like anybody who has
access to Twitter can take a screenshot of that tweet. Or if it's something like digital art,
anybody can take a screenshot of that digital art, transfer it anywhere printed out if they want
right there might be some copyright infringement involved in that but like i i guess what the the heart
of what i'm asking is if you were to own something like a tweet or digital art what do you actually
own you only uh if you ask me you own the intellectual property rights to that content
but doesn't the tweeter own that tweet in that same way i believe so so he is the tweeter is free to
sell it that's how it that's the genesis of it like if i'm a
There's no abstract difference between writing a tweet or writing a 40-page essay.
If I write a 40-page essay, and it's my own work, and it's my research, and somebody wants to reprint it, they must pay me money.
Like, I own the intellectual property to that essay.
A tweet is sort of edging toward the kind of silly side of the spectrum a little bit because a tweet is only 280 characters long.
But there's no difference between me writing an essay or me writing original content in a tweet.
Do you agree?
Yeah.
So I agree.
So one thing that we've done is something I think that's subtle, but I hope bankless listeners
paid attention to because when we start to use words like intellectual property,
we're talking about settlement that happens in a different place, right?
So the great thing about crypto and blockchain is a settlement of a transfer of something
like Bitcoin or a transfer of ETH.
happens purely on chain. So it doesn't really like you actually own the ETH that I send you, Jake,
if I send you some ETH, right? You don't require the legal system of a nation state in order to verify
that I have sent you ETH or appeal to a nation state. You actually own it. Your private keys have
access to that ETH. What's different about the intellectual property case that you just made is that
that kind of appeals to the legal letter, the legal layer outside of the blockchain.
So it's not purely settlement.
Like you just transfer some representation of a legal right and the legal right still settles
in meat space.
Is that a difference here though?
Like, because that's kind of what I'm getting at.
Like, are we just actually talking about IOU type tokens for legal obligations?
If so, that's interesting.
But maybe not quite as interesting is actually owning, you know, the thing,
the bearer asset. The answer to that is complicated. So I would say that you, we could get,
so the high levels, we could get to a place where we can enforce or potentially get to a place
where we can enforce those kinds of rights on chain. And so you will have, like the strength
of guarantee that you will have in this context of intellectual property will be quite similar
to the strength of guarantee that you will have in, you know, bearer asset level ownership of something.
So let me just say that.
I don't think we're there yet.
As we get there, I think that we will sort of naturally engage meat space legal systems.
Like, it's happening already.
If you guys know the Lao, right, those guys have done a great job of marrying a Delaware corporation together with,
a decentralized autonomous organization for the purposes of starting a venture fund.
And there's also like a really interesting opportunity here to take a look at what Aragon's been doing
and maybe integrating some sort of off-chain agreements, but in a way that is enforceable on chain.
So Aragon is a project that, you know, if anyone doesn't know, it's sort of getting at the fact that we do a lot of global commerce,
but we do not have a global jurisdiction on the internet to settle disputes.
And using autonomous organizations and blockchain technologies,
what we can actually do is we can have companies interact on chain.
And when there's a dispute, it can actually go to an on-chain court.
That exists today.
That's called Aragon Court.
And so I would say, like, in the shortest term, right,
I think people in the NFT space will be engaging meat space,
kind of property rights and intellectual property law in various jurisdictions.
And there's a lot of precedent for that now, you know, in blockchain and sort of beyond.
We will then go to or at least try to go to a sort of more broad kind of global jurisdiction
that is on chain.
And, you know, that's very speculative.
I don't know if it will happen.
I hope it does.
I think it would be like a completely fascinating experiment.
it would make global commerce so much more efficient.
And we could talk a lot about that.
But eventually, I do think you get to an enforcement of guarantees that is just as on chain as you have with Ethereum ownership.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
I'd love to take a crack at trying to kind of talk about how, you know, just screenshoting something.
And, you know, because a lot of my buddies, I say, oh, well, I just screenshot that thing.
And therefore, you know, it should be worth so much, you know, so and so.
because just last night, one piece of crypto art just set the record.
It was sold for $101,000.
And I was telling my buddy, who's not really that in crypto.
And he was like, oh, well, dude, I'm going to screenshot that.
And then, you know, I'm going to sell it.
And, Andrew, what is it?
What was that piece of art?
It was Matt Kane's piece.
It's called something about time.
I forget the actual title, but Matt Kane was the artist.
He's incredible crypto artist.
And he sold it on the platform, ASync Arts.
And he sold it to the collector of token, Android.
So I'm also very good friends with.
Wow.
I'm really, really happy about that for all parties involved.
And yeah, so what can that person do with it at that point?
They can display it.
They own it.
I guess it's certified in the blockchain.
Maybe you're getting to that.
Yeah.
So tell me about your friend's skepticism because, you know, I'm curious too.
Yeah.
So, so, you know, everyone always says, okay, you can screenshot it.
Therefore, you know, is it worth anything if I can just screenshot it?
Therefore, you know, I own it.
Right.
And it's kind of like, you know, this is not the best kind of argument, but I kind of look at,
Okay, the Mona Lisa, as Jake mentioned earlier, like, you know, that is the one Mona Lisa.
Someone owned, you know, I don't know, actually who owns that, but that is the one.
I could have a Mona Lisa exact copy hanging in my family room, but no one's going to really,
it's not that important.
It's not that cool, right?
Because people are like, well, that's not the real one, right?
And, you know, if you look at Sotheby's, because I was doing research on this,
I was like, okay, why is crypto art so exciting?
Why is not just screenshoting it actually, you know, do anything?
But Sotheby's, they have 10 kind of factors that go through what gives our value.
and three of the things that really stuck out to me were authenticity.
So, you know, determining whether or not this piece of art is fake.
Rarity, which is, you know, that's self-explanatory.
And provenance, which is the historical ownership record of that item.
So when you look at those three factors, authenticity of rarity provenance,
and you look at something like a blockchain,
these are like the absolute best thing ever for items being kind of traded on that.
It's like a whole network that has built in authenticity.
You can tell exactly whether or not, you know, if it's fake, if it comes from the correct contract, the rarity, you can look on chain and see exactly how many copies there are.
Maybe it's one of one.
Maybe there's a couple of them.
Maybe there's prints.
And then the provenance, I can see, oh, my gosh, you know, Vitalik, he used to own this NFT, and now I own it.
And, you know, it's worth so much more because Vitalik, blah, blah, blah.
So I think what gives stuff value is very different from the factors in that are different from, okay, I can just screenshot it and hold it, you know, save it as a file on my computer.
sure, you can do that, but it doesn't mean it's valuable.
And so I think there's a very direct correlation between that.
And I think blockchain solves those key aspects of what drives value so perfectly.
One thing that kind of strikes me as you're saying that, Andrew, is like,
it could be the case that like older generations just never get this, right?
So I don't think my grandmother, for instance, or maybe even my parents,
will ever understand why that piece of art you just mentioned sold for over $100,000,
right, digital art.
I don't think they'll ever understand that.
but like they understand why the Mona Lisa has value because they they grew up with you know
that being sort of the the cultural expression of value do you think it's the case that it's going
to take younger generations possibly growing up with this and it kind of a sweeping societal
movement for us to start to see authenticity and providence and rarity in digital goods that are
registered in the blockchain like it I just something about it it doesn't feel like it's going to
happen necessarily for older generations, but maybe like a Gen Z is just going to grow up and it's
going to feel supernatural. What's your take there? No, you have a great point right there.
When I speak to my mother about, you know, Bitcoin and NFTs and stuff like that, she's, you know,
she's like, oh, very cute. Like, I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah.
I have a little brother, little sister. I think they're, you know, 16 and 20 years, you know,
around those ages. I should probably know more. But yeah, I talked to them about this NFTs and
crypto and stuff. And for them, it's totally natural. They're like, oh, of course, you know, that thing
exist like, you know, why would it not? So there definitely is a generational gap. But if you look at
just the progress that we've made with Bitcoin in the past, you know, what is it, 11 years now,
that is, that is incredible because back in 2009, 2010, no one really, or very, very, very few
people thought, okay, you can have a totally native, a digitally native asset that exists,
you know, within the internet somehow. How can that have value? And now, fast forward, you know,
10 years, whatever, people across the whole world think that, you know, this thing is highly
valuable, right, being Bitcoin. And so I think it is going to take a lot of time. It's going to
take longer than, you know, I would prefer. But things just kind of happen like that. There's a lot of
mental barriers that people have to get over. But once they do, once they see the activity,
and once they hear things like $100,000 for this digital art, people get really interested.
And that interest drives more people into the ecosystem. So it's just kind of like, it's going to
take time for sure, but I think that the activity that we're going to see is going to really,
you know, make the space much more approachable in the future. So one of the big value propositions
of meet spate NFT, which we can call art, right? And there's a big dividing line between like
legacy NFTs, which is like, you know, paintings, statues, you know, some, some sort of art,
some like rare kind of clothing, you know, the Supreme brand, the Supreme brand, the Supreme brand,
has really leveraged this.
And so, as I said in the beginning of this podcast, the concept of NFTs is as old as time.
It's just we call them different things.
But digital NFTs, I'm still going to like rehash this skepticism because I want to just double down on this a little bit.
When you purchase art, right, like I have a painting in my room, right?
And it's in my room and no one else can see it, right?
I'm the only one who can look at that painting and enjoy it.
right? That's and it is, it's mine because I own it. And that same sort of art doesn't have that same
sort of like exclusivity as something online, right? And so that's why I think people are going and
taking a screenshot or in the case of like some of the gifts that are available on Rarable, some really
cool gifts that artists have put like a ton of time and labor and work into. The owner doesn't really
able, isn't really able to have more like exclusive enjoyment,
over these things than anyone who's just visiting the website, right?
And so while we can say that the value proposition comes from the intellectual property,
that seems more to maybe closer to kind of something of like a cop out,
cop out rationale, at least in comparison to what we are used to with legacy art.
No, no.
I think you two want to rebuttal that.
Okay, thanks.
So just I would say, like, move the mental model to recording artists, right?
So if you think about Taylor Swift and if you think about how popular she is,
and if you think about how she's been one of the recording artists who has really stood up for
artists' intellectual property rights, what does that actually mean financially?
Well, it means that Taylor Swift owns the royalty streams to her music.
And what she would be able to do in the future with blockchain technology and NFTs is essentially take an album.
I think her recent one is folklore.
I know my girlfriend is a huge fan.
And basically tokenize each song and also therefore tokenize the royalty stream to each song.
So you can imagine like whenever a song of.
Taylor Swift plays on the radio somewhere,
your NFT position in that song accrues
kind of an instant revenue, right?
And so once you frame the NFT in this financial way,
then it becomes just a financial asset.
It becomes something that you can value.
It becomes something that has a measurable revenue stream.
It becomes something that is susceptible to traditional financial modeling.
And then price of stuff.
discovery becomes like relatively easily. And so this goes to the point a little bit that there are
actually, there's a gamut and a spectrum of different kinds of assets in NFT world. And when you're
talking about something like a crypto kitty, I think like the value of that is very subjective.
Or if you talk about art, right, like different people might be willing to pay very different
amounts of money for the same piece. It's a very subjectively valued, you know, kind of item. And then when you
go to things that have cash flows like royalties on music and movies, or even the rights
to kind of classical artworks, but whose business it is to be lent out to galleries in exchange
for money, right? Like when you can frame those values as future cash flows, then I think the
situation kind of dramatically changes and then the value of those assets. Yeah, you kind of touch
upon if you own a piece of art and it's hanging your house, you know, you can enjoy that and
no one can kind of, I mean, someone could, I guess, but people won't come to your house,
take a picture of that and like hang it up in their, in their house. I mean, that'd be weird,
but they could. So it's kind of like touch upon exclusivity. And I think there are a lot of people
that are working on trying to figure out how we can make NFTs kind of more exclusive and kind of,
so people can't just go go and see it in your wallet and go into, you know, this area and see it
and whatnot. And for example, there's people that are building within virtual world. So like,
there's a virtual world called Cryptovoxels. There's, on a plot of land, you can have, you can put up
your art there or put up any NFT that you own on your, on your walls to kind of, you know, design your
house and whatnot. And so I think that people are building these access tokens, that only people
with the access tokens can get access to that, to that parcel, can walk inside that piece of land.
So I think in that sense, you can have this space that's only for you or whoever has this
access token and then you can put your art up there. And yeah, people can still see it in your
wallet, but people are also working on solutions from what, from my understanding,
working on solutions to kind of hide the assets in your wallet. So in that sense, it would be
totally, you know, no one can see it. It's only you. And it's very exclusive.
Because a lot of this too is about social, social signaling, right? It's almost about like the
trophy case we create. And I think that's what you're getting at, Andrews. Like, you know,
we're creating these ways to display NFTs. They're not here yet. But like,
So part of the value, David, you were saying you got was actually looking at the art piece, right?
For a lot of collectibles, it's that personal enjoyment, but it's also like, I'm wearing a Rolex, right?
That means something that says something about me.
Or I've, like, I'm in a music video and I've got the gold chain and I want you to see this collectible, like, on display because it says something about how important I am or like, you know, how much money I have or something like that.
Is that kind of what you're saying, Andrew, that these like, these cultural trophy cases almost
for NFTs have to be built first before we start to see those sorts of social signal displays?
Yeah.
You know, it's tough to say.
So basically, I'm kind of a big believer that, like the whole world runs off of social signaling.
Like everyone just kind of throughout their lives just try to kind of social signal to each other and kind of do that for this reason and that.
I think it could be because of some tribal, you know, monkey stuff that we had from way back
in the day, but I'm not quite sure.
But I think if you read, so there's a guy named Eugene Way, and he wrote this blog post
called Status as a Service, which basically talks about humans, how this innate desire
to signal status.
And right now, social media is the best method for people to signal status.
They can post on Instagram, they can post on Facebook, et cetera, blah, blah, and people
are kind of seeing someone's personality and how wealthy they are and how cool they are based
off these pictures.
And so NFTs in my mind take this to an extreme level because you can see exactly what someone owns.
And that's like a whole, imagine if I could go into your house and kind of look at all your objects.
Like it's a little creepy, but it's a whole other way to signal status.
And if you could if you could see exactly when you bought something, so if you were early into some project or early into something, then you can show, oh, I'm so cool because I'm so early.
Or you can kind of show, hey, I'm rich because I spent exactly, you know, $100,000 on this asset on this date, right?
So you could show to everyone that how rich you are.
So I think that NFTs are going to kind of evolve into this social network type of deal
because they're the most efficient means of signaling status.
And at the end of the day, I think human nature is mostly derived off of status signaling.
I know that's kind of deep, kind of weird, but that's kind of how to feel.
No, no.
I absolutely love it.
There's a thesis that I just love to talk about that's outside of crypto.
It's called the costly signaling.
theory. And it's a, it's a theory as to, like, how mate selection and sexual reproduction and
humans and all animals, like kind of what it's based off of. And people, the theory is that people
will go to very far ends to signal that they have done something costly, right? And so, like,
artwork in your home, that doesn't, you don't need artwork to live, right? Like, that's not helping
you get food on the table. And so what you are doing when you have a bunch of artwork in your home is
you're signaling that you have excess resources and you can afford such things, right?
You know, this is why peacocks have such gorgeous feathers, right?
Like, it's a massive signal that this peacock has the excess resources to be able to produce these
things.
For me, my personal costly signaling theory hobby that I get into is plants, right?
Like, I have a ton of plants around my house.
And perhaps that's my way of signaling that I have resources to be able to maintain, like a
garden, right?
Like a bunch of plants.
And so I do totally agree with you that humans love to find ways to signal that they have resources available to them.
And I think NFT and perhaps NFT art is like the new digital medium for achieving this goal.
Guys, Tinder is about to get really weird.
If everything is that, it's true.
Oh, my God.
Wow.
So we're talking about.
But I love that subject.
All right.
We were talking about like, so the metaverse of the future is going to have these influencers with like trophy.
cases of NFTs that they've purchased and that previous influencers have owned and that sort of thing,
right? That's what we're talking about. Yeah, I mean, we're already seeing kind of the NFT whales in the
ecosystem. They're extremely popular and, you know, there's a lot of creators. And that's something
I would love to talk about is how NFTs are really helping creators. But, you know, these NFT wheels,
they come in, they purchase tons of NFTs and everyone can see that and it's very, very apparent.
And people, people kind of love that. And they hold these empty wheels in very high esteem.
And I've noticed a psychological difference between NFT whales.
And maybe this is personal, but NFT whales and kind of crypto whales.
So no one really knows who crypto whales are, you know, because obviously with traditional
crypto, you're dealing with an order book and not people.
And NFTs, you're just dealing with people all day, right?
Because you need to buy assets from an individual.
And it's not just sold on some order book.
And so one thing I've seen is that these NFT whales are kind of becoming the influencers
of the ecosystem because they're the ones spreading the money out,
bringing the wealth out. People love them because they're buying their stuff. And it just gets everyone
really excited. And yeah, I think, yeah, we're kind of seeing the dawn of crypto influencers now
within the ecosystem. And I think that the people that are putting large amounts of capital down
into the space are going to be kind of these weird new social media. I don't like to use
that term, but yeah, you're kind of right. Jake, earlier, you talked about the possibility of tokenizing
a song, right? And then turning that into cash flowing royal.
royalties, which is, you know, evaluating that is something as old as finance itself, right?
And so the bull case for that makes sense to me. Can we talk about the bull case for NFTs as it
relates to creators? Like what can this do for the average artist, right? Like the, the, the
labeling industry, the media industry, the entertainment industry is just full of middlemen
and rent seeking and perhaps even extortion. What can the NFT industry do? What can the NFT industry
do for artists. In my opinion, it is a hugely democratizing technology for both buyers and creators.
For buyers, I think, let me cover that quickly. So, you know, historically, like art has been,
you know, like traditional art has been used by sort of rich people as a tax haven, right,
to store their wealth and stuff. And what I think NFTs do is they open up a global.
marketplace for art, starting with digital art, but I think it does kind of come out from there
into other forms of art, including physical art. And it lowers the price point of art. And so
if someone who is a, you know, someone who is a retail buyer who maybe didn't have an entry point
into like quality art in the past, you know, they might be able to do so in the space. But I think
like more, more interestingly, it's on the creator side that the democratization is, is really
apparent and really dramatic. And I think on the creator side, first and foremost, I think what
we do is we open up this middle market of artists who really have never even imagined that they
can use the internet as a marketplace for their art.
this way. So there's certainly people who are artists who put their art online to showcase their
talents. But most of the transactions that occur in art are not online. They're not transacted
on in that way. And so what happens is when we create these marketplaces like Rarable and others,
and we create like a lot of, we create them in a global way. What it does is it creates a lot of
liquidity for artists to actually go take their talent and convert it into money.
And what that does is, is it creates sustainable opportunities for people who want to be
artists, who have a desire to have this be like the primary activity, the primary work of
their lives to actually go and do that.
And like one of my favorite examples is there's a crypto artist named Yali Rodriguez.
she to my understanding is someone I've never met her in real life I just know her from Twitter but but she comes from New Jersey I grew up in New Jersey as well you know and she basically was one of the first crypto artists to join an investment that that Coin Fund made in an app called Additional.
Additional is essentially you know a social media feed kind of like an Instagram but where you could take and upload kind of visual content or photographs or artwork
and then it would help you turn those into NFTs.
And Yelitsa just tweeted the other day.
She said, oh, I remember kind of the first artwork that I sold on additional.
And I was actually the buyer of that work.
Now, since then, Yelitsa's, you know, she's made a ton of work, a ton of crypto art.
She's been on a bunch of the platforms that are out there.
She sold a bunch of work.
And my understanding is that she's now essentially a full-time crypto artist.
And just like giving people the opportunity to do that is amazing.
And I think she said the other day that she's actually applying to like a digital art program at this point and making that official.
So I think that creates incredible impact.
And there's a totally untapped market.
Like if you guys are like me, I like to use Instagram as a basically as a tool to browse art.
And I often, you know, in browsing, I find really cool stuff.
And I'm like, I would just pay this person, like, I would just tip them, like $10 or $20 or something just for creating a piece of art, you know, that I really like.
But I don't even have the opportunity to do that on Instagram.
You absolutely have the opportunity to do that on platforms that are blockchain-based.
Well, it's kind of a way to invest in the artist, too, right?
So basically, like, you know, what was Picasso's early art sold for?
Like, you didn't have any fame or he wasn't well known, so probably very little.
But what were his later pieces sold for?
Right.
So, like, if you invested in Picasso art in the early stages of his career, wow, what a return.
That's really cool.
Yeah, absolutely.
And we see this in the kind of crypto art world, which is probably about, I would estimate it's an
Andrew, maybe you know more and more statistics on this.
But I would estimate about like 5,000 to 10,000 people who are identifying as, you know,
as crypto art kind of creators.
And what you see is that they get like really encouraged when they find out that they can actually make money from their work.
One of the, you know, I run first edition.
XYZ, which is a digital art gallery.
And one of the first artists that we featured in,
the gallery. It's called O Savage. This is a gentleman who's an immigrant from Africa. He lives in
Dallas. His job is to drive, you know, Jesus. He's like an ambulance driver, right? But his passion is to make art
on his phone. And he uses all of these different apps and iOS Photoshop and different, like,
glitch apps to, like, put together different pieces of art. We put a,
we put together a virtual art opening for him in Cryptoboxels, and he sold a piece for,
I think it was about $350.
He absolutely couldn't believe it.
It was, you know, an amount of money that was significant to him, and he was encouraged and
continued to making art in the space.
So how much room is there for these artists, right?
Like, is this kind of like a professional sports type of environment where just the top
1% are going to be able to actually turn this into a job? Or is this something closer to the
rise of streaming where everyone wants to be a streamer and everyone can, like a decent number
of people can generate a living off of streaming? What is the like total addressable market that
you guys think about when you think about this type of revenue generating platform?
I think it gets democratized. Like my mental model, and this is not just NFTs, I think this is,
kind of media broadly, right?
We used to be in a world where we had these, like, very few,
but very famous people.
Like, if you think about Michael Jackson's fame,
you know, Michael Jackson was someone that at the height of his career
was known in, like, every continent of the planet.
You could literally go anywhere and show anyone a picture of Michael Jackson,
and they know exactly who he is.
So there were like fewer influencers and their influence was very, very high.
And what happened was that with the invention of the internet, we've sort of sped up information, right?
We've sped up distribution.
And I think the net effect of that has been that we now have many, many more influencers,
but those influencers are smaller in the sense that they serve kind of smaller audiences or more nichey audiences or more special.
audiences. And of course, like the example of that is, you know, YouTube, the example of that
as podcasting. And I think in the same way, we can apply that principle to, to these marketplaces
for digital content. I think we will have, you know, this curve kind of flattened out a bit. And
there will still be, you know, extremely famous, like crypt artists. We have that today.
but there will be this much broader opportunity for someone to come in and find a niche
and a set of people that they serve and who are interested in their creative process and
their work and have still the opportunity to make a sustainable income.
So I think that's very interesting.
Yeah, if I can kind of go off that a little bit.
So I think that the total addressable market here within the NFT space is just absolutely
massive because what I'm saying is that, you know, we're essentially going to make a mirror
world of our physical world. And so many jobs that exist are going to kind of be ported to
the metaverse, so to speak, and so many metaverse native jobs will be completely created
that we don't even know what, you know, they didn't even exist before. Like, crypto artists
was not really a job before this. And I think they were really entering the kind of the age of
the creator, because before we had, you know, the analogy that I like to use is that before the traditional
traditional art galleries.
They kind of control the media rails and the financial rails of an artist's kind of life, right?
They knew how had all the connections to the magazines.
They had, you know, they took 50% of the commission from the sales and they knew all the
collectors.
So with the internet, the creators of this stuff could suddenly now control their own media.
So if I were an artist, I can have Instagram, I could have Facebook and I could build my own
audience to gather my own media and get my own kind of fans.
But it still usually would have to be sold through a gallery.
So there's still that 50% commission and still, you know, they had all the contacts.
Now with NFTs, the creator has the media side because of the internet.
And they also have the financial rails in their power because of because of the blockchain, right?
And so now you have access to a, the distribution of the internet, which is, you know, 24-7 worldwide billions of people.
Plus, you have the financial power of Ethereum, which is a 24-7 global, uncensurable financial system, right?
So that's just absolutely incredible.
and I think that we're really kind of, yeah, as I said before, the age of the creator.
And what's also interesting is that, you know, the early web, I guess actually the web
weren't now, I suppose.
It was really about, as Jake mentioned, communication, you know, like blogging, podcast, video,
yeah, really communication skills.
But now with NFTs that were actually able to create digital things, it's all about
the builder.
So it's like if you're an artist, if you're like a 3D CAD designer, if you're, you know,
I don't know, artisans of all types, right?
And so we're seeing that this next wave of creators are going to inhabit virtual worlds or create beautiful pieces of crypto art or whatever.
And you'll have people building, you know, there's people today in like worlds of crypto voxels that are being paid thousands of thousands of dollars per each bill that they create.
And so we're seeing all these jobs be created that didn't exist.
And so I think the total addressable market for this is just ridiculous.
What's super cool about this, of course, is when we digitize things like digitize.
like digitizing money with ether and dye and Bitcoin,
then it also becomes programmable, right?
So that's something that can't happen in the physical world,
the meat space world of physical collectibles.
And when we make stuff programmable, particularly assets,
it allows us to do some really cool things,
almost like weird things.
Jake, can you talk about some of the weird things
that people are able to do with NFTs,
particularly when you combine things like fractionalization and other defy primitives with NFTs?
What sort of weird combinations are we going to see?
Yeah, so fractionalization has been an interesting trend that's kind of already in the market in various ways.
There is a project out today.
It's called arc.gallery.
I don't know if folks have seen it, but basically the idea is you want to buy a crypto punk,
but the crypto punk is too expensive.
And so what you do is you find a bunch of friends
and you crowd fund it
and then as soon as you have enough money,
you can go ahead and click the buy button and purchase it, right?
As a result, people will own sort of fractions or shards of that work
in proportion to the capital that they contributed.
And so it's kind of an application of,
I guess you would say, you know,
decentralized crowdfunding to the idea of,
of joint ownership in NFTs.
I think it's an energy.
So Jake, this is the idea of like back to David's painting or his, you know,
his bedroom.
And I'm really curious what that is, by the way, David.
So maybe you got to send some screenshots of it after.
But like I could own a piece of that, right?
We could take that NFT item, that painting and share the ownership.
He could give some to me.
He could give some to you, Jake.
You could give some to Andrew.
And we could all own a share of that.
That's what you're talking about with fractionalization, right?
That's right.
And what in practice, the way that it looks like today is basically you're taking an EERC-721 non-fundgible token on Ethereum, and you're fractionalizing it into an EERC-20 fungible token on Ethereum.
So you will own like shares and, you know, and whatever the NFT represents.
But because it's an ERC-20, it's able to use all of the existing, you know, trading and liquidity and DFI infrastructure that already exists on Ethereum and is able to deal with.
fungible token.
So you could put it on uniswap and start trading it, get a market price for it.
You can put it on uniswap.
And so there's a few things to talk about here.
Like maybe let's go to kind of the liquidity, right?
So one thing about non-fungible tokens is the complexity of pricing them, right?
Because every single non-fungible has its own sort of unique character, unique value,
unique set of people who appreciate and value it.
And so unlike fungible tokens,
the class of non-fungible tokens has always been a more illiquid asset class.
Now in blockchain, we have this amazing set of tools
that allows us to try to solve problems like that
and say, you know, how do we make these things more liquid?
And fractionalization has been exactly one of those methodologies, right?
It's like if you have something that's non-fungible and a liquid, you take it, you fractionalize it, you put it on uniswap, and then maybe you can develop a market there over time and actually create liquidity in this thing.
There's also, for me, there's kind of a philosophical question here because, you know, there is nuanced differences between owning a crypto kitty like by yourself and then owning a crypto kitty.
in conjunction with, I don't know, 200 other people, right?
And, you know, when you have direct sort of bearer asset kind of ownership, as we talked about before,
you can very quickly make decisions like, I can transfer this crypto kitty.
I can sell it.
I could lend it.
I could do something with it.
I can, I can, you know, throw it away, whatever it is.
But when you are a shareholder in a crypto kitty, things get a little bit more complicated
because now it's not just that you can make that.
decision unilaterally, you need to make that decision in conjunction with the other owners.
And so fractionalization of NFTs actually motivates decentralized governance and governance systems,
which is a totally different area of blockchain.
But in my mind, some of the questions there are like, and Andrew, maybe you have thoughts on
this as well, is fractionalizing something actually making it a little bit less valuable because
those fundamental transactions, the ability to move to sell, to lend, are now subject to this
kind of onerous governance process. Yeah, I mean, we're to stage right now that is so early that
in my mind, I'm all about, hey, let's just experiment, let's give it a trial, let's see what
happens. And so, you know, me personally, I kind of believe that I would like to own my full
NFT, but I definitely have some shards of different NFTs. I've definitely experimented,
and I think it's very cool.
I can see it being a huge use case.
But personally, I like to own.
But going off this kind of fractionalization concept,
there's a platform called ASync art,
which makes, you know,
they meant NFD art from these incredible artists.
And what's cool about it is that each piece of art
can be made up of multiple NFTs.
So, for example, if I,
there's a picture of like a sailboat and it's sailing in the sea
and it's sunny out,
I can own the masterpiece,
which has the main pieces of,
of this art piece, you know, the imagery of it.
And then someone could own what's called a layer.
So it's a secondary piece.
And let's say the layer is titled, you know, background piece or whatever.
And so I have two options for this layer because the artist has created two options.
The artist can make whatever they want.
It's fully customizable.
But so I can change it from Sunny or I can change it to stormy, right?
And whenever I want, because I'm the owner of that layer.
Right.
So even though the person has the masterpiece, then the actual piece will be changed
online. So whoever's viewing it, we'll see that change reflected. And so that's really,
really interesting where we're seeing these NFT pieces be kind of built on top each other,
like little Lego blocks, and that different people could own different aspects and actually
change the piece in real time. I think that's really, really exciting. It seems like what you guys
are also saying is that, like, as the defy space grows, all of the things will be that DeFi builds
will be composable with this whole NFT asset space. And they're going to kind of grow together,
which is super cool on the same rails.
But I want to ask the question about mainstream appeal.
So some people thought NFTs were going to take off quicker than they have.
In a lot of ways, there's been tremendous progress.
Andrew, you mentioned you wrote a blog post in bankless, how we had $100 million in NFT sales back in July.
So it's $100 million.
That's not too shabby, I would say.
but it also at the same time hasn't caught on as quickly as some might have hoped.
So for example, when are we going to see a game studio like Epic incorporate NFTs into a major game like Fortnite?
I mean, that hasn't happened.
What has to happen for something like that to happen?
When are we going to see a celebrity like Kanye West release some exclusive, Yeezy type product on crypto rails?
Why hasn't that happened yet?
Andrew, maybe we'll start with you on why some of these things haven't happened and why NFTs haven't
gone mainstream yet, what we're missing?
Yeah, on my podcast, I ask everyone, what is the biggest barrier to adoption in the NFT space?
And the answer that comes up every single time is just the kind of the UI and usability and having to deal with Metamask
and all the kind of traditional crypto, you know, barriers, right?
I think someone said Metamask is like the Fox keeping out any kind of normal, you know,
MetaMas being the Fox, keeping out any normal people from entering the NFT ecosystem.
It's kind of like that barrier.
And I think once we can get over that initial hurdle of people being able to just buy
NFTs with like a credit card and there are a lot of people working on that, but you know,
buy a credit card or just with a simple bank transaction and stuff like that or, you know,
being able to easily acquire Ethereum and acquire a die and purchase with that,
once we go over that big barrier, then I feel like then the whole space will be totally opened up
because just by virtue of being games or game-like things,
NFTs are way more, they're way more appealing in my mind than traditional crypto.
Because, you know, again, it goes back to when I'm talking to my mother about Bitcoin,
she's like, I don't understand.
And I'm saying like, down with the banks, you know, the Fed.
And she's like, I don't know what you're talking about.
But I can tell her, I can say, hey, you know, I play this video game.
And I can actually earn money from these in-game items that I have.
She's like, oh, I get that, right?
And so I don't need to tell her about all the aspects of why, you know, Bitcoin's great,
blockchain's great.
I'm just like, hey, I can play a video game and I can earn money.
And so that has absolutely massive appeal.
And people that play video games are generally younger.
And so you already have this like great portion of the population that's like prime to adopt NFTs.
We just need to make it easier to get in.
But once they do, I feel like it's going to be, it's going to be just an absurd, absurd in a good way.
And we've already seen like the first project to try and leverage.
this, right? Like, Gauzen Chained. I love that game. And I used to play Harstown. I never really got
into Magic the Gathering, but Gosson Chained is a fantastic game that really doesn't require
too much crypto-Etherium-D-Fi experience to really be able to have fun with. And they are
leveraging NFTs in exactly the way that you would expect them to, to their fullest. Yeah, no, exactly.
Gadsden Cheney is a great example because I've never played a trading card game in my life.
I didn't even really understand the concept. And I started playing.
God's and chain and I loved it. And I wasn't exposed to crypto and, you know, there's crypto on the
back end. I thought that was an amazing user experience. I thought it was great. But what, you know,
what we saw was that the actual trading of the assets was kind of hurt by the gas price. And that's
kind of why it's, you know, kind of diminished in use of, you know, recently. Because, you know,
if you're changing a or trading a card that costs a dollar and it costs you a couple bucks to send
it, you know, that's going to hurt. But again, it goes back to fixing these, these kind of
traditional issues that we have in traditional crypto. And once we get that,
that done, then I think we'll see much more, more players into the space. And going off of the,
you mentioned the AAA studio. When are we're going to see that? I think from what I've heard,
there are a number of really big time, you know, traditional studios that are working on,
games that utilize NFTs, but their number one hesitancy, and this is what I've experienced
speaking to a lot of these people, is Ethereum and the gas price. And so they're trying to figure out,
okay, you know, are they layer two solutions? Can we go to a different chain or, you know,
kind of what's the issue here? And for me, you know, it again just comes back to property rights.
So as long as the game studios are choosing, you know, a chain that's that's strong and usable,
then I'm happy. I mean, can you imagine like Gen Z playing Fortnite, buying skins, buying items,
all of these things, and then being able to trade them on like the open finance,
permissionless layer of defy? Like to me, that that's kind of an explosive combination. Like, it's
going to happen at some point. It totally seems inevitable once we start to unleash this tech stack.
But what about you, Jake? What do you think? So Andrew says UX is the bottleneck here. Do you share that
view? I actually have a really interesting data point on that. And so if you, there's a very interesting
experiment going on on the part of Dapper Labs and NBA Top Shot. And for anyone who hasn't heard about
what that is, it's basically, you know, Dapper Labs made a partnership with the NBA and they took a bunch
of highlights and great like NBA basketball moments and essentially tokenize them as NFTs.
These are videos.
And what you do is you buy kind of collector packs.
It's sort of like baseball cards, right?
They come with a random assortment.
But it's totally digital.
The website is called NBA Topshot.com if you want to take a look at it.
But essentially the experiment that they performed is to say, look, you know, we really want to go out to basketball fans.
the intersection of basketball fans and blockchain fans
are, is pretty low.
And so we really want to make this one of the best
like consumer mainstream experiences that we possibly can.
And a lot of people were nervous, right?
Because, you know, we're sort of going to try to hide the value propositions
of blockchain here.
I'm going to hide kind of the complexity,
but we also might not get through that these things have the value
propositions that these liquid, you know, tradable, transferable assets have.
And the early, you know, the early results are actually really encouraging.
Like, people who are basketball fans, they absolutely love Topshot.
And the user experience that NBA TopShed has created for them has enabled them to come
into the system, to use it, to collect the stuff, and to do it, like, through a credit card.
Now, at some point, if those users want to get a little bit more sophisticated and actually learn a little bit of the benefits of the blockchain underneath and maybe own some digital assets on chain, maybe trade these things on chain, they're going to have an opportunity to do that.
But the fact that we were able to close a bunch of these mainstreamers is extremely encouraging.
So let's wrap up this episode with some predictions.
what is going to be the thing that breaks the new cycle next?
Like what's the big thing that everyone gets hyped up about in like the next three months?
And then what's going to be the next big thing in like nine, 12, 15 months?
I think like NFT space has been maturing.
And it's been around for a couple of years now.
I mean, if you think about the first NFTs that came out,
those were really maybe like rare pepés on counterparty.
back in 2015.
So to be honest, we're about five years in.
But only, I would say, this year, have companies in the space started to actually get
proper attention from investors.
And investors are coming around and actually starting to position in the NFT space
and make investments.
You know, prior to this year, I would say OpenC was probably the, you know, the company
that kind of received the most serious attention.
from venture capital and crypto funds.
But this year, you see collaborative fund publishing their thesis on digital art and super rare.
You see coin funds thesis on NFTs and Rarable.
You know, you guys mentioned async a few times.
I'm actually an angel investor there and really, really love what they're doing.
And what I think is going to happen in the next three months is that you'll start to see more
and more funding rounds around these companies, and you'll see a lot more competition in the areas
of issuance platforms for NFTs, marketplaces, and then this exciting area of like NFT times defy,
like how do we treat NFTs as an asset class? On a longer time frame, whatever you said, 18 months,
I'm going to make a bold prediction, and I might be wrong, but I think at some point the NFT space
will actually outstrip defy in terms of volume.
Wow.
Wow.
Bold prediction.
How do we calculate that?
Because the NFT world is so much more nebulous.
Like Uniswap is this one central place where a bunch of assets can get exchanged and we can
see that volume.
How are you thinking that we'll actually be able to measure the growth of the NFT ecosystem?
We're measuring it on chain today.
If you guys go to Dune Analytics, there are a bunch of,
dashboards, we probably should consolidate a little bit more as new platforms come in.
But from my perspective, I think that looks like we sum up the main marketplaces.
Those would be open sea, super rare, rarable, maker's place, known origin, mint base, all these guys.
And that will give us a really nice picture of the GMV, the gross marketplace volume,
of NFT sales.
And, you know, we can compare that to activities in Defi.
And I agree it's not going to be like apples to apples exactly,
but it will give us a sense of like how many people are operating in, you know,
in the NFT world versus the defy world, how many wallets are operating,
you know, how much sales are going on or how much capital is flowing through the system.
So there are ways of, you know, comparing those.
things productively.
But you think the metric is going to be total volume, right?
So like Andrew put out the Post on Bankless, about 100 million NFTs have been sold.
You think more NFTs are going to be sold in terms of total value, in terms of total volume,
than, you know, defy type of assets.
Is that right?
So like broadly, I think it's about attention, right?
I think that defy is amazing.
I'm a technologist.
I'm an investor.
Like, I love quantitative finance.
I love yield farming, right?
But it's not as, this is not a set of topics that is broadly accessible to people.
I think that's also changing.
I think young people are much more financially set.
But we're all finance geeks who are into that a little bit, right?
But what I'm saying is the NFT broad spectrum is so broad.
And it's so much more understandable to mainstream users that I think,
I think once like early mainstream adoption starts getting going in earnest, you'll just see like a lot of affinity there in that space.
Yeah, I would have to say for myself short term, the headlines will probably be more high crypto art sales.
You know, we normally see sales of $20,000 and, you know, a few months back, we had the record of $55,000.
And now yesterday we had $101,000.
So I think the next few months we'll just continue to see great sales on the crypto art side.
and then six to 12 months out, I guess I would say the headlines will be more focused on these different NFT virtual worlds or games or platforms that are launching their own native tokens, kind of defy style.
And those will be really, really interesting because they're not going to be the kind of incentive mechanics used to farm those tokens, I guess, will be very interesting because maybe a virtual world will require that you will require that you will require that you battle your axes together.
or whatnot. So that's going to be really exciting to watch. And yeah, I mean, to go with what Jake said,
I'm a strong believer that NFTs will become larger than crypto, like not even defied, just larger than
crypto. And the reason being is that, you know, my thesis is that NFTs enable a metaverse. And when we're
talking about a metaverse, I really mean that I do believe the majority of the world's population will be
living inside or spending most of their time inside virtual environments. So crypto is, you know,
going to radically transform finance and value and money itself.
But that'll be the money that is used in the Metaverse.
NFTs will make up every single thing that is inside the Metaverse,
your virtual home, your virtual couch,
your virtual pet, whatever.
And so it's really the money versus the actual stuff that inhabits this place.
And that's kind of my thoughts.
Shit, Ryan, are we focusing in on a wrong thing about crypto?
Yeah, definitely.
So Bankless has just pivoted.
to NFT-only podcasts.
Guys, know that.
I mean, it's super bullish.
So how soon to a trillion, Andrew?
So, you know, we just hit 100 million.
Like, how many years is this process going to take to transition into the Metaverse?
How soon until a trillion involunt of NFTs sold?
Yeah, I would say, you know, I'm just purely guesstimating here, but I got to say probably eight to 10 years, you know,
it's going to take, because you know, back in 2017, I thought, okay, everyone's going to be using Bitcoin by 2018, right?
That was kind of my thought process.
And then you go through and you're like, wait a second, oh, what's going out here?
Why has no one to agree with me?
But, yeah, in honesty, it's got to be around eight to ten years.
And kind of the metaverse vision that I'm talking about is, you know, 50 years out.
So it's a much longer time frame.
But yeah, I'd say one trill in 10 years.
One trillion in total NFT sales, right?
not $1 trillion in like 24 hour volume, right?
Total sales.
I mean, you're much more into the weeds than I am,
but I feel like that that could happen a lot sooner than that.
I hope so.
I just don't,
I've just been disappointed so many times about why the world is not more
involved in Bitcoin,
why the world is not more involved in Ethereum.
Like, you know,
because I see it so clearly and obviously I'm super bullish on it.
So I'm like,
if I and myself and so many other people see,
see the promise of this stuff,
why has it not been adopted sooner?
And I think it just takes a lot, it takes a lot of people to, it's a huge mental leap for them to kind of get involved.
And so to be on the conservative side, I would say, you know, 10 years.
But obviously I hope it's, you know, tomorrow.
But we're going to.
Well, you know, it's like the past 40 years of humanity has been largely the transition, the slow, gradual transition in some ways of like humanity from the analog into the digital.
And that's what this is.
But now it's with scarce goods.
It's with scarce assets transitioning into the metaverse.
So, yeah, it could happen in waves.
It could definitely take, you know, decades to play out as well fully.
It's certainly going to be interesting to watch.
Guys, this has been a super thorough guide to NFTs.
It's exactly what we were hoping for.
And I think the bankless community is going to get a lot out of this.
Are there any specific projects, lastly, that you guys can name that we should be,
you know, looking out for. So avagachi is just really something kind of interesting.
Meme is another sort of NFT meme-based coin that's doing some interesting things. David mentioned
God's Unchained. But like, who should we have on this show? Who should we be talking to?
What projects are most interesting? If you could just quickly rattle some of them off, Jake.
Absolutely. If you guys are interested in that niche of like NFT times D5, if that's attractive to
bank list listeners.
Check out aneptify.com,
NFTIFI.com.
This is a place where you can go
and you can deposit an NFT
and get a loan against this.
It's one of the earliest sort of DFI projects
that uses NFTs as a first-class citizen.
Also, there's a company called NIFTex.
What they're basically doing is they're creating
the ability to fractionalize ownership
in different NFTs and then to pool shares
of those NFTs together.
you know, into an index that investors can easily invest into without having to sit and like
maybe evaluate every NFT artist one by one. I mentioned ARC gallery. If you are, you know,
if you like the idea of like co-owning art, check that out. If you were a creator yourself,
mint some NFTs on Rarable or maybe try a dynamic NFT on async.art. And if you're just kind of
of getting started in blockchain and you're a basketball fan, you know, check out and be a top shop.
Andrew, what would you add? Yeah, I think Jake did a great job there. But I would say I'm very,
very excited about blockchain-based virtual worlds. And I see them as kind of these user-owned
future social networks. And I would say, Cryptovoxels and Somnium Space are the ones to check out.
Cryptovoxels and Soundium Space. I've not heard of Soundium Space. Sounds interesting.
Guys, thank you so much for spending time on this topic.
We're definitely going to be doing more on bankless about it, but it's been a pleasure to have you both.
Thanks, Jake.
Thanks, Andrew.
Thanks, Ryan and David.
Thanks so much, guys.
Cheers.
All right, guys, action items today.
This has been quite a lot to digest.
But fortunately, we do have a lot written on the subject on the bankless substack newsletter.
So we will include links to how to make money on digital art, how to make bank flipping crypto, how to make
money in crypto gaming, including the article that I mentioned that Andrew had written about
passing the 100 million marks. So you can start looking at NFTs that way as well. We'll also
include links to all of the projects that Jake and Andrew just mentioned. So you'll have that
in the show notes too. Risk and disclaimers. Guys, NFTs, defy assets in general, it's all
risky. ETH is risky. Crypto is risky in general. You could lose what you put
in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're
with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.
