Bankless - APECOIN—Bullish or Bearish for CryptoPunks? | Zeneca, Andy8052, Scott Lewis

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

In a massive week for Bored Ape Yacht Club studio Yuga Labs, they acquired CryptoPunks & Meebits from Larva Labs, as well as releasing their community token $APE. With ApeCoin and a massive inflow of intellectual property, the NFT space is spinning with buzz and speculation about what this all means. Today, we have Zeneca_33, Andy8052, and Scott Lewis joining State of the Nation to get to the bottom of this monumental event. What does this mean for Punks and Apes? What about intellectual property, ownership, and value? And lastly, are we seeing the dawn of a new age of digital monopolies? In this chaotic landscape, a rational and steady approach to understanding is always a winner.  ------ 📣 ZERION | Trade Across 7 Networks and 500+ protocols https://bankless.cc/Zerion  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/   🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  👀 POLYGON | LAYER  2 DEFI https://bankless.cc/Polygon   ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across   🦊 METAMASK | THE CRYPTO WALLET https://bankless.cc/metamask   💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger   🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix   🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 8:00 Panelists 12:03 What CryptoPunks Want 16:44 Brand Management 22:01 Applebees 26:52 Creative Commons License 32:00 Best Rights Strategies 40:00 ApeCoin Launch 46:20 Is $APE Overvalued? 54:58 Yuga Labs Deck 1:00:52 Financials vs Monopolies 1:04:31 $450 Million Raise 1:06:45 Panelist Projects 1:10:00 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Scott Lewis: https://twitter.com/scott_lew_is?s=20&t=kXCI6sgHk2MMkG_PZKekSQ  Zeneca_33: https://twitter.com/Zeneca_33?s=20&t=kXCI6sgHk2MMkG_PZKekSQ  Andy8052: https://twitter.com/andy8052?s=20&t=kXCI6sgHk2MMkG_PZKekSQ  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Hey, Bankless Nation, welcome to another State of the Nation episode where we talk about something hot that is going on in crypto. Today's episode, what could be hotter than this? The Apes bought the punks, David. Okay, Yuga Labs, biggest NFT acquisition in history. One for the history books in all of crypto, I think, made a massive purchase of Cryptopunk IP from Larval Labs and also purchased some punks and other assets along with that, I believe. we're going to be talking about that today. David, what's the topic and who do we have in our conversation on today's state of the nation? Yeah, this has really caught the NFT ecosystem by storm. People always speculated that at one point in time some NFT brands will start buying the IP of other

NFT brands, but I don't think anyone expected that the second largest, the biggest brand that has come out in the NFT mania, the board apes, would buy the most original, most OG IP out of the Cryptopunks from Larva Labs. It's like Ethereum buying Bitcoin. Wow. Sorry, maybe that's a biased take. So there's been a lot of just questions about what does this mean? What does it mean for people to own NFTs, but have that be separate and distinct from the

IP of those NFTs? What is Larva Labs going to do with the Cryptopunk IP? Do the Cryptopunks like this? Is this bullish for Cryptopunks? And are the Cryptopunk owners allowed to know? not like it, yet it still be bullish. So we're going to unpack all of these things on today's state of the nation. To talk about these things, we have Zeneca 33, who you guys probably are familiar with. He's a frequent contributor to the overpriced JPEG's podcast with Carly Riley. Overall

NFT connoisseur owns more apes than he does punks, but owns both. So there's that. Also, coming in, you guys know Andy 805-2. He's the founder, co-founder of Fractional, which fractionalizes NFTs. He's got a punk. He is perhaps on Team Punk. And of course, last but not least, we got Scott Lewis, co-founder of DefiPulse, Slingshot, and Hype. Hype is an NFT lore platform, if you like to talk about your NFTs and give them stories. Also a Cryptopunk, a diamond hander, perhaps also on Team Punk. So these are our three guests. They're going to give us their perspectives as what this means for Cryptopunks, what this means for Yuga Labs, and what this means for the NFT ecosystem some overall. It's that last piece that I think is the most interesting case study overall.

What does this mean for NFTs, right? This is a fantastic case study. We get to see this play out in real time. Also, speaking of real time, David, you ever lose track of all of your wallets? Oh, all the time. All right, man. This is a way where you can always keep track of your wallets in real time. This is called Xerion. You just plug your Middumask wallet in, plug your ledger in. You get access across all of your wallets. Now, that was a beautiful thing on Ethereum alone. I've been a Zerian user from like day one as soon as they spun up an interface. But now the problem I have is I've got all of these wallets across layer twos and other side

chains as well. Well, Zeran has added the ability to aggregate those wallets too. So I actually know what's in my wallet. This is not my wallet. This is an example wallet. I kind of wish it was mine because pretty okay NFT profile. But you can see here, I could just flip from Ethereum to optimism to avalanche with a click of a button. I also have the ability to like bridge.

And this is huge too. This is the year of bridging, isn't it? Where if you want to go from Ethereum to Polygon, you can do that in one click in Xerion as well. So David, what should folks do with Zerion? Yeah, there's a link in the show notes to go load up your wallet. And it will tell you everywhere that you've ever engaged with across all the chains and it'll let you do all of your things, all your multi-chain things, all in one spot, including look at all of your NFTs that you might hold in different wallet. So not only does it let you look at all your wallets on all of the chains, but it also lets you look at all of your assets across many, many wallets across many, many chains.

So it is the ultimate aggregator to, it's like a battle station, Ryan. It's like, you know, it feels like you got like multiple screens. You're at a command and control center. That's what zero is. Makes you feel like a badass, basically. And this is cool. In the NFT section, you can actually look at the value of all your NFTs by Floor Price. They added that feature recently.

So go click on the link, connect your wallet to digital. Zirion. David, I got to ask you the question I ask before we begin all of these state of the nations, which is what is the state of the nation today? Brian, the state of the nation is branding. And I actually think that this is the crux of the issue because board apes are a brand. Cryptopunks are a brand. And that's really what IP is. And so when we are discussing what this means for NFTs, what this means for the apes and the punks, we're really discussing the value of these new metaverse brands, these new digitally native brands that exist exclusively on the internet rather than transcending or starting physically and then moving on to the internet these are

starting on the internet and these are really the fundamental questions of brands in of themselves so Ryan we are just the state of the nation is branding we are branding the future right now that's super good I know a term you've used in the past here is this this term called headless brands so we're exploring a new type of brand right this is like a new age digital clout how to acquire it and I think the story of what happens with the apes and the punks will become super relevant into the future as the Metaverse builds out. As crypto builds out, as we figure out what the hell we do with these digital property rights, guys, we're going to talk about what all this means in just a minute with our fantastic panelists. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

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Hey guys, we are back exploring this massive acquisition in the NFT world. Apes by punks, what does that mean? We've got some excellent panelists. I'm about to introduce you to before I do. Want to go over a few quick things in case you haven't been following what's been going on. So on March 11th, Board Apes Yacht Club creators, Uglab labs, they just announced their acquisition of Cryptopunks and also Mebits, which is a sub-cryptopunks type of brand. collections from Larva Lab. So that happened on March 11. To give you guys some context,

Cryptopunks and Board Apes are like the number one and number two NFT projects. And it's not even close. You know, everyone else kind of trails off. So punks, their market cap is around $1.6 billion for all of these punk JPEGs, okay? Massive amount. Apes, if you include the Apes ecosystem at large, is just under that $1.4 billion. Okay. So we're talking $3 billion, dollars worth of digital property rights. This is massive. This is close to 20% of the entire NFT market. These are our two brands that have really entered mainstream consciousness. You see a lot of celebrities sporting NFTs that are either board apes or or cryptopunks in some cases. So we want to talk about what this means because for Yuga Labs, for board apes yacht club

holders, Ugalabapt immediately revealed their plans to grant all holders of crypto punks, basically the same commercial rights that were available to the Apes, which the punks didn't have before. We're going to get into that. Ugal Labs has also said, and we'll see if the community believes this, that this acquisition is going to be really good for punks and also really good for apes. So let's talk about what this means. Is this good for apes? Is this good for nfts?

Is this good for NFTs? What does this mean for crypto? We're going to go over all of the information. implications. I want to introduce you to our guest. The first is Zeneca, who's an NFT connoisseur, community leader. You've heard him on Overprice JPEG's podcast with Carly Riley, Zeneca. Welcome. How you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. I've heard Zeneca, you are maybe Team Ape a little bit skewed, but you also hold punks too. So maybe it's not accurate to call you Team Ape. Yeah, I bought my punk like two months ago. So a very recent

addition to the punks, but I have both. Awesome. All right. And then we have Andy 805.2. He is the founder of Fractional, fractional NFT platform. He's also been on bankless before. More team punk, I think. Andy, how are you doing? Yeah, I'm good. Thanks for having me back. Definitely, as far as my bags go, skew team punk. That's awesome. We also have Scott Lewis, who's the co-founder of D5 Pulse,

also Slinghot. He is a Cryptopunk Diamond Hander. Team Punk, I think, Scott, do you have any apes? I do not have any apes. I really like the project, but do not own it. All right. Well, these are our panelists today. We're going to dig into this topic. First, guys, let's talk about this first issue here, which is like commercial rights to owners versus unwanted brand managers.

This is kind of a contrast point that we're going to talk about a little bit. But as we do, I think it's important to ask the question, what we're. are punks actually missing before? What did the punk community want? Were there some licenses that they didn't have, some abilities they didn't have that they really wanted? Zeneca, why don't we start with you for that question? Yeah, I mean, I think that's, it's tricky to answer because the punks or the punk community, it's a large community. It's like thousands of people and different individuals have different wants and desires. I think certainly there was some subsection that did want are greater commercial rights because maybe they wanted to, you know, turn their punk into a brand.

And under the, under lava labs, they, they couldn't. Lava Labs, you know, had restrictions on what you could do with your punk. But on the other side, I think there's probably a considerable amount of the community who are pretty kind of happy with how things were with like this hands off approach is like, there's crypto punks. There are, you know, we're not trying to commercialize it. Lava Labs are not trying to do anything crazy. Yeah, I mean, again, I think.

if things had continued as like larva labs were hands off and doing nothing, people were probably fine. But over the last year, we saw Lava Labs like make some questionable decisions and that maybe ticked off a few punks holders as well. It's hard to say, honestly. Andy, what would you add to that? Yeah.

And I think that covered it really well, to be honest. I think a lot of what Cryptopunks owners really wanted more than anything was just for larval labs to like at the point where they were clearly they weren't building massive things for it just to like kind of never talk about. them again. And I think the real issue people took was, okay, we don't have rights, but you're also doing weird things and making like take down requests against punk derivatives and that kind of stuff was really the crux of what some people took issue with. So Scott, what would you add to this? What kind of rights did the punk holders actually want? Yeah, I think there were like two or maybe two

and a half like kind of like solutions that people were hoping to see. I mean, the first was that I think a significant portion of security. I just wanted punks to go CCO and sort of let, like, let everyone use any punk imagery however they wanted. And then I think there was kind of like one and a half options that were different types of ownership. One was just sort of like, which I was actually in favor was the Yuga Labs style full commercial rights. And then I think there was like a little sort of community that would really preferred kind of the rights go to a Tao that punk holders would then govern. And sort of like full community rights, but more like collective ownership rather than individual ownership.

And yeah, I guess like in a maybe is that irony. When Yuga Labs bought it, we ended up getting Yuga Labs style like full commercial rights, which, yeah. So there's something I definitely want to drive home about the nature of punks that is, I think, is a really integral point of this story. Cryptopunks being the very first profile picture NFT project before so many people even wore their punks as their profile picture. It was the first OG project that came around.

And before really NFTs had the monetary value that they have now. And so it has this branding, it has this culture, it has this style that's very unique. very crypto-native. They're pixels. They're called punks. It's a reference in my mind is a reference to the cypher punks. And it's very decentralized, which is very true to the nature of cryptocurrency, where the Larva Labs never took a leadership position.

It never considered the crypto punks as their project, but as something that they just birthed and gave to the world. And so that was kind of the ethos that I think really attracted a lot of, you know, early OG crypto people and kind of why crypto punks are associated with like the kind of the Ethereum OGs. Yet that wasn't totally pure because as you guys have alluded to, Larva Labs were doing things that while they did kind of have this hands-off approach, they didn't also completely unrestrict the brand of cryptopunks to be let loose. And so this, I think this is really the crux of the issue where when Yuga Labs purchased the Cryptopunks IP, some people are on the

side of, this is great. Now we have somebody actually allowing Cryptopunks to have the full commercial rights. And then there are other people who are like, well, Cryptopunks have never been about having a brand manager. We don't want any leadership position on our decentralized vibe. And so I'm wondering, a question to you guys, which side of the of the, of the, of the, of the, of the aisle, do you fall on? Do you think that this is a bigger offense to have a brand manager to taint the Cryptopunk brand? Or are you more interested in seeing what a centralized team can actually finally do with

the Cryptopunk brand? Zendika, I'll throw this to you. I think to what Scott was saying before about how there's a camp wanting the Cryptopunks to go CCO, I would have, I think, like to have seen that just because, as you mentioned, sort of this was born out of like the OGs, the early, the Cyphepunk, movement. And I think the community was really into like the decentralization aspect of it. And even with lava labs, they were largely hands off until this year, as far as I'm aware. And then Yuga comes in and is sort of taking the board eight Yacht Club model and just applying that directly to Cryptopunks. And we

haven't seen, you know, what other plans they might have. I think that they alluded that they're planning to be relatively hands off. And this is the first just big thing they're doing, giving full commercial rights. I mean, I think there's definitely a time and a place for centralized entities to take ownership of a brand and steer it in a certain direction. Yuga has done that excellently with the board apes. But I think to me, it's probably not the right approach for the crypto punks. I think I'm a huge fan of CCO. And I think that they would thrive more under that model than just going, you know, hey, it's similar to the apes. We're going to take it. We're now considering it our brand, I guess. And we're going to see what we do with that.

Andy, similar question to you. Which side of the aisle do you fall on? Are you bearish because we have an unwant-wanted brand manager? Or are you bullish because now punk owners are going to have commercial rights? I've actually had a pretty big change of heart here from when it first happened to now after just having more time to reflect on it and talk to people and think about it myself. But I think kind of at the start, I thought it was not great. I didn't really love it.

I think that definitely somewhat hurts the narrative of punks as it kind of, I think there's like now kind of this chink in the armor to just the idea of being like the OG project that did stuff because the IP has changed hands, at least just like in my mental thinking about it. And so to me, I was like, oh, that's not great. I don't like it. But then kind of, as I've thought about it more, I think the fact that punk's were even, the IP was even for sale in the first place just makes me think that things probably wouldn't have. been run better by Larva Labs long term. And in my opinion, Yuga Labs are like the premier NFT company and studio. And if like punks had to go anywhere else,

I would want it to be Yuga Labs. And so kind of just like from the mindset that I think Larval Labs selling them to someone else and then that other group making them CCR or whatever is probably worse because it still creates the same like potential negative things around just Larval Labs not. wanting the IP anymore and all of that without having this really, really great smart group of people who are well funded and are going to do cool things, building and doing stuff with it. So at this point, I think, like, kind of of all the realistic scenarios that could have happened,

Ugal Labs buying Punks is like pretty one of the best. So, Andy, are you kind of like just like, oh, better than Disney buying it, something like this? Yeah, it's like, I don't, like, based on my understanding, I don't think that there was a world where Larva Labs was just like, hey, you know what, we don't want however many hundreds of millions of dollars we could get for this IP, we'll just make it the CC0. And so like kind of just accepting that that wasn't a possibility, I think this is basically the second best possibility and overall way better than anything else that could have happened. I think that's a nuance that a lot of people have woken up to as a result of this, where, you know,

people think like, oh, you buy your NFT and cool, you own the NFT. a lot fewer people are realized that there is IP associated with the entire set of those NFTs and that IP is owned by someone even if you own the NFT the IP is owned by someone else

and personally I woke up to this fact as a result of this news and now are reconsidering and so Andy kind of what you're saying is exactly what Ryan said is that at some point in time that IP is an asset that will be owned by someone somewhere

and so if Larva Labs goes under goes out of business it gets auctioned off it could have been bought by somebody that we don't like. I'm reminded of the Martin Skellig guy that bought the Wu-Tang album, and everyone hates him, right? Like, we could have had some internet villain purchased the Cryptopunk IP. Who? Who's the worst purchaser you could think of?

The guy that bought the Constitution. How about that guy? And so, Andy, what you're saying is like, well, Yuga Labs has been shown to be an excellent steward of an alternative NFT IP in Board 8s. And so, you know, perhaps this is actually best case scenario. Is that kind of more or less what you're saying? Yeah, I think like I still have some relative concern around centralization of all the massive

IP under one company and all that. It's not ideal. But kind of giving them the benefit of the doubt in a lot of ways, there aren't very many companies or organizations. I think I would be more happy to see on Punk's IP. Yeah, totally. There's a take from DC investor that I want to read off. And Scott, I want to get your opinion.

He knows on it, because I know you and D.C. investor talk a lot, at least on Twitter. He says, as a result of the Yuga Labs, buying the Cryptopunk IP, I don't expect everyone to understand, but it feels like my favorite corner bar just got turned into an Applebee's. Scott, do you share these sentiments? Not really. No. I think it's like I think sometimes it's like the social the social dynamics of NFT collecting and like the different people that self-select into a collection. There's like a there's like a lot of like they track kind of different types of people and they're all like their own little tribes in a sense with overlap.

It's a lot of overlap. And so I think sometimes it's like easy to get caught up in like the stereotype of like a punk holder and a, board ape holder and like maybe forget about the fact that like you know there's like a lot of traits in board ape that came from punk right and like it seems clear to me that you go labs understood what punks were when they were making board apes and like i would still think there's of course risks that like they mess up the brand and that's true of anyone that acquires a brand that's not the original founder or in Larvalap's case there's also is the original founders mess up the brand.

But I think sometimes like because we have so much emotional attachment to the JPEGs, we kind of forget that like being a brand manager is a job you want done by professional and like like like Supreme and North. and Timberland and vans are all owned by the same company and lots of other brands. But like, you know, North Face is still North Face. Like, in my eyes is like just someone that like knows the brand. And like I think like I just want someone that's going to be like a good professional job. Is that better?

Is that Scott? Is that better than a Dow owning it then? Like because, okay, so you go labs and we're maybe going to get to their slide deck at the bottom because that was kind of leaked. And it's like, it's like, it's bad ass, man. It's pretty hot. It's pretty amazing. And you're like, okay, these guys can execute. These guys are on it.

These guys are nailing it. But like, is that better than a Dow owning punks, let's say? Do you think the centralized brand management actually has some execution strengths? And maybe a decentralized like group of punk holders wouldn't. I haven't been that impressed with Daos being brand managers. in defy at least. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like it's something the,

like not messing up is something that's really hard for someone that's not like a professional at doing this. And there's a lot of weird situations that have counterintuitive solutions. And I think if you're looking at like all the, all the defy doubts and sort of like how they ran into like some really bad public dramas that hurt their brand values.

and like you're like just like LL L L LR Labs did and like I think both of them were like really trying to do a good job it's just like what seemed like a reasonable thing to do was not at all a reasonable thing to do it like versus a career professional that would take the same approach I think like the things that are really important for me is like liking the deal is that one like

people can actually invest money in their punks and like be able to like use them long term and not get like that image that they create and the lore around that image create kind of ripped off by whoever down the road. And I think that creates like a lot of like really cool stuff. And I think it's it's more like like pairing that with what is already a very like crypto punctualty does its own stuff. Right.

Like they're not waiting for someone else to like when dev's going to add utility to my NFT. Right. And so it's really like unlocking and like creating like a better. incentive structure within the crypto punk community, then like, you know, having a party at a great location that we all get to attend. Yeah, I got it. And I do wonder if like this, the centralized brand manager thing might be like better. Maybe that's the way brands do need to be managed. You mean, look like a brand like Apple. And it came from like, you know, Steve Jobs, meticulous curation,

like the brain of kind of one individual in a very small group. One thing I, you want, to talk about really quick is this the CCO that you guys have mentioned more than a few times. So CCO stands for Creative Commons license, I believe. I'm wondering, Zeneca, if you could just school us a little bit on the CCO license. So like you don't have to get into all the details, but with a CCO license for my punk, does that mean if I were a punk holder, I could like make money on it? Could I license it to a movie house or an animation studio or a video game company? Does it unlock me to do those sorts of things? So how does CCO unlock individual NFT holders? So I'm not a full expert on CCO, but my understanding is that, yeah, as we see on this chart here,

CCO, CC0 means that the content is in the public domain. There's basically there's no license, there's no rights reserved, anyone can basically do whatever they want with the IP. So in the form of, say, uh, board apes, lava labs, uh, Yuga Labs owns the IP and they give a license to all ape holders. That license allows ape holders to have full commercial rights to do whatever they want, to monetize their ape. But it's still a license given by Yuga. You can at any point withdraw that license. They can restrict that license. They can, Disney can come along and buy Yuga and change that license. So you're still sort of beholden to the parent company, the centralized entity.

With CCEO, there's no, there's no license. It's just that this content is now in the public domain. Anyone is free to do whatever they want with it. So generally the way copyright works is that creative work will go into the public domain, become CCO, I think like 75 years. after it's created or after the creator has died or maybe both or something like that. So that's why if you go back, you look back at things like the works of Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, you know, things like that.

They're all in the public domain. Anyone can come along and create a piece of a work using that IP and no one can sue them for it. This newly created IP, that can be licensed differently. So if someone creates a like the Sherlock movies, you know, those new movies, are not in public domain. That's a new form of IP. But it's the original, you know, the very fundamental part that anyone can use. And so when it comes to NFTs, we have some collections that have full commercial rights, so apes, now punks and me bits. And then other collections where they're CCO. So cryptodes, MFs, nouns. And basically what that means is that, again, anyone can do

whatever they want with it. And so the owner of, say, I have cryptode. Or cryptodes, I, if someone wants to monetize it, they don't need my permission. And if they monetize it, I can't go after them and say, you know, I want some money back. And neither can, you know, the team or the founders of any of these projects. It just spawns creativity because no one is held back, basically. Yeah, so just to unpack that a little bit more, we were talking about this before the show just to really unpack this and get into the details. And they're actually kind of interesting because there's, there's relation to the ethos of crypto in of itself. Board apes and crypto-punk owners, this actually isn't yet true for Cryptopunk owners.

Yuga Labs has not yet given this new license. They just have stated their intention to. No one really doubts them just to clarify. But board apes and crypto punk owners, mutant apes, and everyone out of Yuga Labs, as in like, me and my crypto punk and Scott's Cryptopunk and Andy's Cryptopunk, those are

our Cryptopunks and we hold the commercial rights to our Cryptopunks. As in no one can go make a movie using my Crypto Punk as a main character without my Express Commission, mission. And that's different from Creative Commons Open, which are the MFers, the Crypto-Todes, which are public domains, as in anyone can use my MFer to do anything that they want and they can adapt and change and do anything. And it's very much the most decentralized complexity

at the edges version of Creative Commons. And kind of the bull case for NFTs that have Creative Commons opens is that there are zero restrictions on represent. and reproducibility, and that is a little bit like kind of like how we are trying to reduce the complexity of having as many nodes as possible with blockchains. Like how easy is it to reproduce this? And we all know the importance of memes and virality in crypto. And so that's CCO. And so, but that's not Cryptopunks or Board Apes.

What Board Apes are in Cryptopunks is that I have the power over the NFT that I own. And so it's definitely a different ethos baked into these different creative commons opens and what they really means for NFTs. It's so funny because I see the value in both, right? It's like I see both, both, like the original Larva Labs, that just flat out sucked. But CCO versus, you know, full commercial license, I could see advantages to both. What's your take, guys? Like I'm asking the panel, which is better?

What do you think? And Andy, do you have any thoughts on this? I think like you were saying both really have their merits. You know, Punk 4156, who's a huge proponent of CCO, one of the things that he talks about a lot is kind of the power of like memetics. And when you're not being, you know, when you could basically make anyone can make a derivative of anything in the project, it generally is probably good for the original thing that they're making a bunch of memes about or T-shirts or whatever. It's like free branding for your NFD. So if I have some NFT that I bought for 50th, if I bought a noun, and then Supreme decides to put it on a t-shirt, I think it's like pretty good advertising for my noun that I own. And so you can make the case that while I'm not explicitly making money from that, their freedom to do whatever they want without having to ask me is still valuable.

But I think there's also kind of the other side of, you know, what if someone just makes an exact copy and people decide that this exact copy is the only one that's valuable and you don't really have a way to stop them. I don't really know. I like CCO a lot. I do think that there's, especially with significantly larger brands that already kind of have the recognition that they are important, like a punk or an ape.

CCO isn't necessarily as important for like spreading the word about what your thing is or seeing it kind of distributed everywhere online. But I definitely don't have like a super strongly held opinion that one is better than the other. Scott,

do you have any thoughts on this? Yeah. Yeah. So, like, everything, and he says, is correct, of course. And it's like, for commercial rights, it is a tradeoff that other can't people can't, like, freely do small things with the NFTs. But I think it's like sort of the difference. Like, yeah, if Supreme is going to put your NFT or your NFT collection on a shirt, you want to do it. And that's great. And I think we sort of saw that with now and stuff. and sort of that Budweiser ad, like they kind of gave them the noun, and then they put it in the ad, and you saw a glass for like a second or two in the ad. And that was great. But I think, like, doing the really big things with the NFTs,

like if you had full commercial rights and kind of maybe in perpetuity, which maybe is where we're going eventually, hopefully, you could actually build a clothing brand around the NFT and that be the brand. And so it's like, it's like if I want to use your NFT somewhere and get exposure, it's great CCO. And I think since CCO also a little more closely aligns with sort of the ideology, ideology, and ethos of the decentralization movement, it's pretty good for bootstrapping a project. But I think like the really chunky upside is when members of the community integrate the image of their NFTs in like real sustainable, scalable.

things they're doing, whether there's businesses or different types of projects. And kind of like, it's harder to do that with CCO because if I make a whole, like, if I make a different brand from a CCO, NFT, someone else can just kind of like use all that value I'm creating and when they put it on their own products too. And so I think it's like a difference between like depth for full commercial rights versus breath of exposure for CCO. So, guys, I, Ryan, yeah, you want to say something before we close up? I was just going to say it's super fascinating that like board apes is taking the strategy

because it does seem to be the case that like board apes is going after the chunkier upside as as you're saying. It's like just going through their slide deck earlier. And the celebrities that own apes right now just blew my mind. Like I'd remembered when some of these purchases were made, but like like Bieber owns an ape and like It's this whole list of celebrities. So if they can get the celebrities to start incorporating their own individual board Apesen to their brand, right, with a full commercial license, that's just like exactly what they're going for. So I totally see that it meets the strategy.

Anyone have anything else to add on that before we move to the next thing? I'll just add one thought on CCO versus full commercial rights. And I think that, I mean, yeah, I agree with everything that's been said. It depends a lot on the brand and sort of like the vision that the creators and founders have. Like some projects just make total sense to not be CCO. Like I always use Cool Cats as the example. They're a really cute, family-friendly type project. And so not only is like when you go CCO, it means anyone can create anything.

And it also means that they can create something that might taint the brand. Like someone could create, you know, these adult themes, you know, cool cats killing each other and murder and like you can't go after them. You can't say anything. It's like now and if gains popularity, now that's the brand. And it's out of your control. It's just like it's taken on a life of its own. And I think if you have a team that has like a really a direction they want to take it in

and maybe they have a creative director and build that a brand, it really is important not to go to CCO, at least to begin with. And I think. Yeah. I think that's a really good point. We've seen some really, really interesting stuff start to come up around lore and storytelling with individual NFTs from collections. And there definitely is value there for them not having that be full CCO and really be letting the community, whether it's like Jenkins of L.A. or like the Bobu from Azuki or something, where that community who owns it really has the full say into what is this brand building, what is the story we're telling, all that kind of stuff.

Well, guys, there's a whole other part of this story. And that's really the story of Yuga Labs and what their plans are for the future. because from what we can tell from Yuga Labs, they got plans for the future. They have, as of last week, they've airdropped the ape token and the ape dow to ape holders. So we want to get your guys' opinions on that. But also, it's really important to note

that Yuga Labs owns five out of the 20 top NFT projects between Cryptopunks, Boreparks, Burt Apes, Mutantapes, Kennel Clubs, and Mebits. Those are the biggest NFT IP that exists. And one company, one centralized company, owns it all. And so we want to get your guys' thoughts on that. And really, what does this mean for the future of

Yuga Labs? And we've alluded to their deck that got leaked. And my conspiracy is that got leaked on purpose, because it's a really hot deck. And we want to get your guys' opinions on what's all going on all in that realm of the universe. So we're going to get to those questions right after we get to some of these fantastic

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Grants program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a unique grant at Uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap for sponsoring bankless. All right, guys, we are back with our NFT community leaders, and we want to turn this conversation to the grander story of Yuga Labs, but starting with the ape coin. Apecoin and ape Dow was launched last week.

And the tweets read, Introducing ApeCoin, dollar sign ape, a token for culture, gaming, and commerce used to empower a decentralized community building at the forefront of Web 3. Apecoin is owned and operated by the ApeCoinDAO, a decentralized organization where each token holder gets to vote on governance and use in the ecosystem fund. Holding Apecoin is the only requirement for membership in the ApeCoinDAO.

Guys, no question. just preliminary thoughts, ape coin, like crazy or expected or what's up? Xenica, let's start with you. I mean, it was expected in the term in the sense that they said it was dropping Q on. So we knew it was coming, most likely. In terms of the extent of it, it's crazy. I don't quite know what to think. I think we all, there were all sorts of wild theories. Like people were speculating and speculating like what's it going to be. Is it going to be one massive thing? is it going to be like a staking thing, is it going to be a Dow. I think it's really smart that the way they dropped it in the form of an airdrop to

ape holders, mutant holders, plus like plans for this ecosystem fund, as they call it, that will be governed by the Dow. And then, you know, they want to build out all these different things, you know, in the Web3 space in terms of like culture and gaming and stuff. It's sort of like a Dow, but they've got this board of like this fully stacked board of people who are just like consummate professionals and can, maybe help steer the initial direction of things. And they launched with like a bunch of proposals for how we want to set up staking.

And, you know, they mentioned a marketplace and all sorts of cool things. I don't know. I think it's, it's very exciting. It's an experiment, to say the least, but it's exciting to follow. Andy, what would you say does this allude to with Yuga Labs plans for the Apes and the Apes ecosystem? And any other general thoughts that you might have on Apecoin and Ape Dow? Yeah, I think one of the things that is a bit,

weird, I don't know how to think about it, is like, kind of this separation that now happens between what is a board ape in like the Yuga ecosystem and what is ape coin in the ecosystem because they're not completely coupled with each other. Apes were able to like get ape coins and seemingly in the future will be able to stake and earn more. But they don't like have governance power in whatever Aped out, at least right now they don't. I'd like to see a proposal to make that happen. I think that'd be interesting.

But I mean, I think it's really cool. It's definitely kind of at the forefront of how do you take an NFT community and turn it into a real Dow that's doing things and building. I'm just like personally really curious to see how they continue to build out the relationship between ape coin holders and ape holders who may not necessarily have the same incentives or alignments if they don't like both own apes and ape coin. Scott, there's a, I want to get your take on the distribution of this. We have 62% of Apecoin went to an ecosystem fund. That sounds like a community treasury. 16% went to Yuga Labs. 14% went to launch contributors.

I'm guessing that's just like agencies and third parties that help them launch the thing. And then 8% went to BordApe Yop Club founders. How are we feeling about this distribution? Any opinions on that? I mean, I think it's all right. I don't understand. I don't think we know what Apecoin is yet. And maybe there's new cards that are waiting to be turned over.

And they know what Apecoin is going to be, or they're going to realize that Apecoin has to be a bit more than it is right now. And I think the distribution is fine, all right? Because, I mean, like the ecosystem, the community pools, like you can sort of just like forget about that and then take the percentage and the other things. I think the launch contributors also included adventure of funders of Pucal Labs. So that's a lot of VCs in the distribution. And you know, they have responsibility to their LPs to return capital in the form of dollars probably.

So that they won't be ape coin holders forever. I mean, probably some of them will be, but not all. So I don't know. I feel like I'm like not looking at a full plan right now. And I'm not sure if they realized that or not. Well, I think that's all generally run-of-the-mill VC distribution type stuff. So maybe perhaps the distribution isn't totally an anomaly. But what is an anomaly is the market cap of this thing is as of today, it's at $11.5 billion,

which is a high number, I would say, for an airdrop. It's actually kind of made the whole, if you've minted a board ape and then and held it and gotten all the other airdrops that have been involved. It's been one of the most successful investments of all time. And so I'm here personally sitting watching these, I don't have an ape, so therefore I don't have any ape tokens. I'm sitting at watching this $11.5 billion valuation. And I'm kind of wondering if I, am I, just like I was sideline for the entire ape run from

0.08 to where it is now to 100th. And I'm like, wow, am I seriously about to be on the sidelines once again? And so question to you guys is like, is this $11.5 billion valuation ridiculous? Or do you think there's perhaps something under the hood here that skeptics might be missing? Zeneca, can I start with you? I feel like it's kind of both. It seems very ridiculous on the one hand. Like it just launched.

We don't know what it does. And it's got a higher market cap than like, I don't know, Avey or just some ridiculous things. And then on the other hand, it's if they can execute and build what they're like, it's sort of like, it's a huge community thing that's like widespread and sprawling. And like we, we all know the power of memes like Doge and Sheba. A lot of people like compare, you know, they said, well, Doge had a market cap of 50 billion. Now it's like 20 billion. Of course, ape can be higher.

But at the same token, it's kind of ridiculous that Doge has those market cap. So you shouldn't necessarily be trying to compare and compete with that. But it does prove the power of like this network effect and this community effect when, you know, doge rose to prominence because people are having fun with it. Everyone was on social media and tweeting about it and Elon comes and tweets about it. Now, with ape, it's, it has some element of that where the NFT community at large are like very prevalent and talking about ape coin. It's spilling over into the regular part of crypto.

It's spilling over in a celebrity life. Like, imagine if Bieber starts tweeting about ape coin. If Eminem, well, Eminem's not going to tweet about ape coin. You know, Jimmy Fallon mentions it on his show and stuff like that. All of a sudden, you now have this meme power, which has, you know, it's mean power plus. Like they're potentially going to be building this whole ecosystem and have gaming and maybe bring revenue streams in.

If you can start spending Apecoin in games and other things, I don't know. I think it's it is ridiculous, but I wouldn't be shocked if it goes up long term. Yeah. Andy, do you think we are stepping into the world where every single NFT project mince their own currency? Like we just kick that.

We just kick that off with the start of Apecoin. Yes. I think basically none of them will do nearly as well, or not none of them, but most of them will not. I think my understanding of most of the speculation around ape and everything right now is generally around the potential metaverse stuff that they are building. There's a very large rumored land sale that was in the docks and everything. And so I think when you compare ApeCoin to, say, like, Sandbox or Gala or some of these other, like, Metaverse gaming projects, the fully diluted valuations are, like, actually not that dissimilar. And so, like, then the question is, can Ape and whatever you guys building for the Metaverse be better than those games and have a strong remote? and I think the answer is like maybe.

And so that's like kind of where I think a lot of the value is kind of speculatively coming in, is that this is going to be the thing that powers this massive metaverse with the most popular NFTs in it with like probably the best moat because of that. Whereas, you know, some other random NFT project doesn't really have those same type of engines as to why their ERC20 token would be important or valuable. And like up until now, most projects that did have tokens, it was. just like farm the tokens to be able to mint more like babies of the collection or something and like without really much else going on.

And so I think that there is a couple things about Yuga and board apes and what they're building in particular that has like positioned them well in the sense, at least based on like what people are speculating, that not a lot of other projects could duplicate very easily. Andy, I have maybe a follow-up question to that, which is sort of the skeptics hat, is like, what if they're just minting a token because they can mint a token and like get billions of dollars because of the meme, right? It's like, why does an NFT project, they already have a token? It's their NFT. It's called a non-fundurable token.

It's a token, right? It's one, you know, one purchaser, sort of one, one NFT holder. It's, you know, why do we need a non-fundgible token? piece of this. Like, I understand it just suddenly generates billions of dollars given the meme, but is this kind of like more futility token stuff that we saw in 2017, 2018, where all these projects just launched tokens because they could and because the market wanted to buy tokens? What's your thought here? Why do you think NFT projects actually need a separate, fungible ERC20 accompanying their project? I think most probably don't. I think you can probably

make the case that board apes also probably don't. I would say like no one needs. If you already have one set of tokens, you probably don't need another set of tokens. You could make it work some other way. But I do think there's like this interesting potential decoupling of like community and governance, kind of thinking about like there's a subset of people who really want to be in the BordApe Yacht Club community and go to the parties and have it as a profile picture and talk about all the hype and Snoop Dog and all that stuff. And then maybe those people who like are legitimately interested in the governance of like how do we build out this metaverse world and how do we decide on who we grant IP rights to for different things or whatever else they're building. And

those two groups people aren't necessarily going to be the same. And so maybe long term, what will realize is it makes sense to separate those two communities where they both can be stakeholders and have different sets of tokens that kind of offer different things where one is governance and one is like the social clout. This is really cool. Like, for example, I don't see a lot of people flexing the number of ape coins that they have. You see some people doing it. But you don't see most people doing that, but a lot of people have board apes as their profile picture.

And so it's just maybe just different use cases for different things that are happening long term. And a lot of that is like speculating on a much larger world that requires governing and all this stuff. So who knows what will come of that. But that's kind of my, if I had to defend them. I think another way to illustrate that is that, the apes, if we're taking a metaverse approach, and I think when we take a look into the Yuga Labs

deck, you can definitely see intentions to building out a metaverse. And so when we take that perspective, the apes, the non-fungible tokens, the NFTs, are like the nouns in this universe. And then we have the ape tokens, which is like either the currency or like the upside exposure

to the universe, which includes governance, decision-making, kind of just how like, you know, capitalist power. And then we have NFTs, which are the items, the nouns that you are, that run around in this universe. And so I think with the intention that I think we can have, have pretty strong assurances that Yuga Labs wants to build out this digital world. Perhaps, Andy, that dichotomy of just like, you know,

people that want to have money and capital and power and governance over this ecosystem is different than the people that want to run around with their Bored Ape avatars in this universe. You say that? If I can just add. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, one last thing. It's, yes, there's already tokens, but in the ecosystem, there's like 38, 39,000, like board apes, mutants, and dogs. And the cheapest one, a dog is like seven, eight, eth right now.

If someone new wants to join and be part of the board apiope yokelub ecosystem, there was, there's not really an easy way for the average retail investor to jump in. I mean, yes, there's fractionalization. It's messy. It's just like, it's hard to get exposure to this ecosystem prior to an EEC20. And now it's like anyone can jump on Coin Basin for $11.50 have one eight coin token, etc. It helps grow, I think, at the ecosystem a bit. Yeah, it lowers the barrier to participation down to basically the absolute minimum because that's what fungibility does.

I want to take a peek into this deck because it's really, really, if you believe in the future of the Metaverse, you can see that, in my opinion, the Yuga Labs is on a race to produce the first version of the metaverse. When we talk about the metaverse, we all kind of wave our hands like, oh yeah, the metaverse that's coming. But I think if you look at this deck, Yuga Labs has the intention of winning the race to actually building out a

metaverse. And so some of the lines that they come that they have, oh, I actually deleted the lines from my notes. But it basically tells a story of just like a team with ambitious plans to be the first version to the metaverse. And so they're just talking about

all the different physical land, excuse me, digital lands, which, you know, perceive our physical in the Metaverse, along with the ownership of IP, how board apes are being owned by celebrities. There's land auctions up for sale. We now have the board ape currency. We have board ape culture going outside of the internet and into the real world. We have physical events like ape fest and like the yacht party, but then also just like the potential for Metaverse events and Metaverse experience. and they claim that we are actually already living in the metaverse.

And so what's missing is some sort of instantiated visual land with goals and stories and purposes. So guys, when you see these intentions out of Yuga Labs and kind of get the gist of this deck, what do you see is the future for Yuga Labs? What are they building towards? What are their ambitious plans? Zeneca, I'll throw it back to you. I mean, it said it right there, a meta RPG. So it sounds like they're building this interoperable gaming metaverse,

which they released this video clip trailer, I think, a day or two after this got leaked, which, yeah, to your conspiracy theory does seem kind of planned. But it sort of shows off how there's, there's bored apes, there's world of women, there's cool cats, there's cryptodes, punks, me bits, and all of them are like in this car or whatever together. And it just shows like the potential of all these different brands and IPs coming together in quote-unquote a metaverse. the Metaverse, and they're adding a layer of, you know, gaming and ownership into that

with, you know, there's a land sale that they talk about in this. And then there's all sorts of like economies that they're basically building a new economy using Aitcoin as the currency, I suppose. And yeah, it's just, it seems awesome, honestly. As someone who grew up in 90s and early 2000s playing, you know, MMOPRPGs and games and stuff like that, this, it just sounds extremely exciting to me. It's like something I've said before. It's like, you know, the internet, up until NFTs really and games. It's sort of like we've been playing in play mode. And now it's like this is like real. It's like poker.

You play with play money, but then you play with real money. And it's like it's a different game. And I feel like we're playing a different game now. Andy, when you see some of the vibes that are communicated in this deck, what are you seeing out of the future of Yuga Labs? I really like the deck. I think that they're the general way they were thinking about this open, permissionless world and all of that is how I would, if I had, if I had to kind of give my wishes for how the final metaverse that people end up using would be would look. I think in general, it's incredibly ambitious. And I have a lot of friends from gaming and building games like this is hard and takes a really long time. So that's the part of me

that wants to be skeptical and just be like, this is going to, you know, whatever, everyone reading this is like, wow, this is crazy. You can't wait for it in 2023. I wouldn't get your hopes up. Like, it probably will take a bit. But in general, I think kind of the thing that I've always gone back to with them is they've executed better than anyone else in the NFT space, in my opinion. And so I'm not really, you know, I'm not happy to, I'm not going to bet against them in this as well. But it's definitely extremely ambitious. And I think, but I think they laid out everything really nicely. And I'm super expected for it.

You know what this reminds me of, and this is totally unfair to invoke this. but I'm going to do it anyways, but the Pixelmon universe was kind of the same pitch, where you had the NFTs living in this digital land. Kevin. And, well, that one turned out to be a complete, you know, not a complete scam, but basically the bare minimum amount of deliverables to kind of check the boxes and left everyone very dissatisfied. So maybe it's fair to say that this is the more honest goal of the more honest intention

of building out what the Pixelmon universe promised. But now that we, now it's coming out of Yuga Labs, I think we have a lot more assurances that they are actually doing this with strong resources, strong intentions and honorable intentions. Scott, what's your, do you have any takes about that? I think I just really double down on what I was saying. This stuff was really hard to build. Like, like, Ugo Labs has done excellent at building this, like, social brand.

But it feels like they probably need to acquire someone for, like, low, low, nine figures. to actually build this. And those deals are not, not easy to, like, close on. And I think it's really hard to, like, have an organization that's, like, really, really, really good at, like, one type of business and just be like, hey, like, you know, we decided we want to beat Facebook at building, like, hard new technologies. That's really big challenge.

and yeah there's a difference between like planning and promoting the fire festival and actually like running the fire festival if you guys are familiar with that documentary from a few years ago I want to ask you another question

because going through this deck you're just like also blown away by the raw financials here I mean like look at this pretty nice net revenue margins there on the on the on the budget of like 2021 and 2022 for people who are, you can't view this on YouTube, right? 84% profit margins.

Like what kind of, what kind of digital business? Not even the Googles of the world are even close to 84% of profit margins here. It's, you know, astounding when you're running a brand. And I guess this is kind of a question that David was getting to you earlier. Now we have Ugo Labs that owns five NFT projects of the top 20. Are we in crypto? Are we worried about, like we're always talking about decentralization here. But it looks like there's an empire that's building, an NFT branding empire that's being built. Should we be worried about this at all?

Or is it fine for one company, one branded manager to monopolize so much of the NFT market cap in Mineshares? Zeneca, what do you think about this? I think, yes, we should be a little worried and cognizant that this is happening. and this is also like we've all been talking and raving about you know how well you guys has executed and how great of a company it is it's they're a year old like if that like board apes launched less than a year ago so while yes they've done excellently executed well built up a ton of trust in goodwill who's to know where they're going to be in five 10 years obviously i have an enormous amount of trust in them um but there's that word again trust we are trusting them to

take steward of these brands and build out something um and then not say to someone that we all hate, not sell to Disney or someone like that. What happened? What would happen if that happened, Seneca? It's an interesting point. Because they could, right? They theoretically could. This is also a conversation in the NFT space, which is like, well, if larva labs can sell

the Yuga, then a bigger fish can of course acquire Yuga. And where does every big brand always end up? It's like Disney, right? So what if Disney were to acquire Yuga? What happens then? I mean, the real thing, thing is we don't know, but presumably they would have their own opinions on the IP licensing, and it might not be as fantastic as we're used to. But you've got to imagine that,

yeah, I mean, honestly, we don't know. They could come in and really just, again, because we don't own the IP of our apes or our punks. Yuga still owns it. They license it to us. So if whoever owns Yuga owns that, and that's something that can't really be reconciled until unless we look at CCO projects. And yeah, it's this conflict, this paradox between, you know, NFTs. And we keep saying it's true digital ownership. It's true digital ownership with an asterisk unless it's CCO, I think. So I think that's something that punk 4156 is always talking about, how like when you,

when you separate the NFT from the IP, it's like, it's just, it's not cohesive. It doesn't really fit in the grand scheme of things. But I mean, again, something I say is like we live in a centralized. world, no matter what, like, we're all citizens of nations that have laws and regulations that at the end of the day we have to adhere to. So as much as we love to tout decentralization and absolutely everything, there's always some elements of centralization that are like a necessary evil, at least probably for the next 50 years. And I'm willing enough to place enough trust in Yuga to, to, you know, own some apes and have some exposure to the ecosystem and be excited by it.

But I think, yes, to answer your little question, we should be a little bit weary of this movement. Guys, the perfect thing just happened when it comes to live streaming about Yuga Labs because Verge, as a recording, just released. Board Ape Yacht Club creators raised $450 million

at a $4 billion valuation. This is just now dropping from the Verge. And they actually answer some of the questions that we were being having here, where they are, Yuga Labs is partnering with a few different gaming

studios to bring this new world called Other Side to life. Other Side is an MMO RPG meant to connect the broader NFT universe. They hope to create an interoperable world that is gamified and completely decentralized, says a co-founder of the Board Apes Yacht Club. Yeah, so that news is pretty big. $4 billion valuation raised $450 million to build a corner of the Metaverse. So it's super convenient when big news drops, right? as you are live-string about it.

That's pretty cool. Watch out, Facebook. Yeah. So does that mean, does that mean, in the long run, the IP and the royalties have to end up in Apedow? Why would that mean that, Scott? I mean, how can you have a completely decentralized world where one corporation owns all the IP forever?

Yeah, the decentralized. They did just throw that. be decentralized word out there very, very flippantly. Not just decentralized, completely decentralized. So I remember Yuga came out a few months ago and said that their vision for the BordApe Yacht Club, at least, was for that to be fully decentralized. Yuga itself wouldn't be. So maybe, I don't know how that fits into this.

Is the valuation of Apecoin probably speculatively based on owning the IP of Bored Apes, but also perhaps Cryptopunks too? me bits? I'd be more okay with that, but I wasn't called ape coin. But I think if ape coin goes to $100 and then goes back down to $8, they're going to have to think about it. All right, guys, I think that we'll probably have to wrap it up here. But before we do close, you guys each have your own respective NFT platform that you guys are working on. So we want to give you guys a chance to kind of promote that and talk about what you guys are doing in the world.

of NFTs. Zen Academy. You want to tell us about that? Yeah, Zen Academy is a platform, a community that is focused on providing education in the Web 3 and specifically the NFT space because of how difficult the learning curve is for a newcomer. We've all been there. We all have friends who come to us and ask, you know, a thousand questions.

And I wanted to create a community that, you know, focuses on education and content that's found in like logic, reason and not like the hype and speculation in FOMO. So it's a membership community, but we are, you know, opening the doors as much as we can to people who can't pay for the membership. Yeah, come check us out. Just follow me on Twitter and all the links are there. And we will get your Twitter account into the show notes. I believe it's already there. Scott, you've been working on something called hype.

You want to tell us a little bit about hype? Yeah. Yeah, so hype is sort of like a platform for like for lore and a little bit deeper than like the basic metadata. that's part of like 721 standard. And so like if you're starting an NFT project and you want these, some of the NFTs that backstories or other things, other information bigger than just metadata, different types of media in the lore,

hype can be a platform where projects and owners can enter lore about the NFTs. And then the projects can take that as like an API and integrate that into their, their website experience and then also that API is available to anyone else in the space, analytic sides or secondary markets as a way to kind of create a more kind of more contextual experience around a decision to like own or love more or understand a series or collection. Shout out to the Dow Punks out of Bank with Dow, who I believe have done a fantastic job adding their own stories and lore to their NFTs. Andy, coming from the YouTube comments, a lot of people really want your hat. Tell us about fractional. Yeah, our hat is the rarest

thing that I own, I think, even rarer than my JPEGs. But at NFT, NYC this year, I'll have a couple available for some fun challenges to find me. But yeah, fractional is a platform for community ownership of NFTs. Kind of our big goal with all of it is to try to make these trustless and kind of automated experiences where you can buy into interesting communities and things that are happening. We lately have been seeing a lot of interesting stuff with lore, actually, Scott, and so we should definitely talk more sometime. I think just like kind of interesting ways for people to kind of build and create their own small communities around ownership of a particular NFT or a group of NFTs and kind of in the

same thing we were talking about with ApeCoin as opposed to Board of Yacht Club, hopefully give people a little bit of an easier entry into some of these projects. That's fantastic. Well, guys, thank you so much. This has been a big news. I think in the NFT space, really important for the bankless community to understand what's going on. It just will guide so many things that they decide to do next, whether they're investing, building, or just journeying into the crypto space even further. So we appreciate you spending some time with us today. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thanks all for that's fun. Bankless Nation, of course, none of this has been financial advice. We don't know whether

you should buy ape coin or not, have no idea whether an $11 billion valuation is worth it. But we do know that all crypto is risky. So is ETH. So is DFI. You could definitely lose which 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.