Bankless - Moonbirds and the Future of Utility NFTs | Kevin Rose

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

Kevin Rose is pioneering the intersection between the NFT ecosystem and content creation. Kevin founded digg, the news aggregator site that innovated community-curated content in the early days of Web2. With a macro perspective on all things digital, Kevin has thrived as a builder and investor on the cutting edge of the internet.  The recent launch of Moonbirds is shaping up to be the best NFT drop of 2022, with a flood of volume and lofty valuations. In this episode, we dive into why it worked so well, as well as the lessons learned and actionable takeaways. We also score some advice for Bankless as fellow crypto-native content creators! The premium of Utility NFTs is growing rapidly, and we’re witnessing the growth in real time with innovative projects like Moonbirds that build upon previous successful projects. Aligning communities, creators, tokens, and value is how we onboard 1 billion people into crypto, and pioneers like Kevin are helping us pave the way. ------ 📣 THE GRAPH | Graph Day in San Francisco | June 2-5 https://bankless.cc/GraphDay  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/   🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALED ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🏦 ALTO IRA | TAX-FREE CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA  👻 AAVE V3 | LEND & BORROW CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/aave  ⚡️ LIDO | LIQUID ETH STAKING  https://bankless.cc/lido   🔐 LEDGER | NANO S PLUS WALLET https://bankless.cc/Ledger   ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 7:30 Kevin Rose 11:10 What is Proof? 18:14 Tokens, Creators, Communities 26:15 The Revenue Model 32:35 Diamond Handers & Tokens 39:57 The Moonbirds Launch 46:52 What’s Coming 50:55 Lessons  57:00 How to Launch an NFT 1:03:40 Utility NFTs 1:11:30 Bankless NFT? 1:17:17 On The Horizon 1:19:12 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Kevin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kevinrose?s=20  Proof Podcast: https://www.proof.xyz/  Moonbirds Launch: https://decrypt.co/98112/kevin-roses-moonbirds-ethereum-nft-launch-generates-280m-in-two-days  Proof Collective: https://opensea.io/collection/proof-collective  Proof Website: https://collective.proof.xyz/  Moonbirds: https://moonbirds.xyz/  Dune Dashboard: https://dune.com/sealaunch/Proof-Moonbirds  Moonbirds on Opensea: https://opensea.io/collection/proof-moonbirds  ----- 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. We've got a hot episode for you today with none other than Kevin Rose. Kevin just launched one of the biggest NFT launches ever. I think definitely the most successful launch of the year. It's called Moonbirds. We're going to talk about how he did it. What made it so successful? David, some stats here, man, before we begin. Okay, so the best NFT launch of the year, 280 million dollars worth of primary and secondary trading in two days. Okay. So this just did. what more than more than board apes did in the last 30 days. And it did it in a 24 hour period of time. 59K per moonbird right now. It might be like 50 to 80K. Leading the open sea charts, over $177 million worth of trades. Kevin's got his hands into a couple of NFT projects, right?

The first was with Proof Collective, which we're going to talk about. And the second is this PFP profile pick type of NFT experience. called moonbirds. And that's the one that that's mooning right now. But proof is doing pretty well, too. Anyway, so much to talk about. What are you most excited to discuss with Kevin? I think that's going to be especially relevant for bankless listeners, because if you are a content consumer, this is what Kevin is making an ecosystem around. He's making an NFT ecosystem with the moonbirds, the profile picture, but also his scarce like 1,000 unique membership NFTs. And he's just making a tokenized community around the content that he creates and overall just like a tokenized community.

And so this is very, very relevant for the world of Web 2 or excuse me, Web 3 content consumers because these products are for you guys. And so I'm going to be just tapping into Kevin and seeing the lessons that he is learning because Kevin is on the frontier of tokenized content and tokenized communities in Web 3. So we are bringing him on to hear about what he has learned on the frontier and taking it back. We all have something a roadmap to go on as we go on the frontier. Yeah, this is amazing. I think this episode is going to be full of alpha because whether you're part of one of

these communities, there's massive opportunities for you. Or if you're a creator, we're actually going to ask him like an hour of free consulting with Kevin, like, how do you do this? If bankless wanted to launch an NFT for its community, right? How do we do that? I literally want to ask those questions. Exactly. Like, I want to pick his brain because he's got a couple successful ones under his belt.

and he's doing it with a long-term vision here. So it's not sort of a quick pump-and-dump sort of thing. Like he's got a lot of utility that he's injecting in these NFTs, and he's put together a fantastic community. So it's going to be a great discussion. David, got something else going on, and that is Graph Day, which is coming up. This is a conference by the Graph Protocol.

Okay, it's happening June the 2nd in San Francisco. It's a four-day event. And I think this is like part, conference in Graff Day and June the second. And then also part hackathon. What else should we say about this conference? The collection of people that are going there is fantastic. Kevin O'Waki, we all love Kevin. He is going to be at this conference. We also have Sam Williams from Rweave, Michael Sina from Ceramic, Arjun Buktoni from Kinext, Camry Russo as well, another defy content creator. And just the fact that the graph is throwing a hackathon, it's just, it's great to see app layer stuff.

throwing hackathons because hackathons are just the great way to outsource development. Reese and Mark is actually one of my personal heroes in this space, so he's going to be there. So if you are in San Francisco during June or you just want to be there, June 2nd is when it starts. It goes to a four-day conference. Wave 2 tickets are out. So you've got to get your tickets. There is a link in the show notes. Also, bankless.c.c.

slash capital G graph, capital D day, graph day, bankless. dot CC slash graph day, but with the capitals. And is where you can get your ticket. Yeah, that link will save you $50 on this ticket. So there you go, right in the box. David, got to ask you the question before we get in this conversation with Kevin. What is the state of the nation today, sir? Oh, Ryan, the state of the nation is pioneering.

Like I said, Kevin is on the frontier. He has discovered some cool new things, some cool new primitives for community engagement, community content creation. And he is bringing this information back to the center, back to the like, this is kind of how I think about these things is people go out on the frontier. They discover some gold and then they come back to bankless and tell us about what they've discovered. Yeah. And so we are broadcasting the gold that's on the frontier. And so this is why you are definitely going to listen to this episode because on this episode we are pioneering into the frontier. Yeah, super excited to pick his brain about all of these things. Guys, we will be back

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and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto crypto IRA to invest in crypto tax free. Just go to IRA.com slash bankless. That's A-L-T-O-I-R-A dot com slash bankless and start investing in crypto today. Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you to coming back to the show again. Kevin Rose. He's an internet entrepreneur, co-founder of Dig originally, but now he's a Web 3 V-C. He's been on bankless before. He's the host of the Proof podcast, mentor of NFTs in the proof collection, which we're going to talk about. And now today, we're going to talk about Moonbirds. which is absolutely living up to its name, is absolutely mooning. In the last 24 hours, or a few 24 hours ago, it actually did more volume than bored apes

in the last 30 days. So absolutely phenomenal success. Kevin, it's great to have you on bankless. We're excited to talk about this. Yeah, glad to be back on. Thanks for having me, guys. Really appreciate it. Hey, you having fun, man.

Is this fun? It's the time of my life. Like, for me, this is like what I love to do. The scariest part was the sale. what I love to do is build products. And that's what I've done my entire career. So going out and building products for this community is just going to be a blast. It's my favorite thing on Earth.

This is really cool because I feel like you are pioneering in a lot of ways the building product side on the NFT, like utility, bringing utility to NFTs through the community. Just a couple of stats to rattle off for people who haven't been following what Moonbirds has done. We're about to explain it. But $280 million worth of primary and secondary purchases in two days. A moonbird is going for 60K right now. That's an EF terms. Absolutely crushing it on OpenC.

So leading the charts. I think one of our big questions coming into this conversation, Kevin, because we want to unpack the secrets of NFT here, right? How did you do it? Can you teach us? Can you show us your ways? How did this actually come about what is the secret combination to success here? It's a good question.

Honestly, I didn't expect it. To be honest, it was one of those things where we had started off with a community in building proof and the proof collective. And that was our first NFT drop, which was the 1,000 members. And we really got this amazing community of hardcore NFT collectors that serves as the backbone of this drop, like people that were really excited about the things we were building. And then I think that if you take a look around it, who's building in the space, there's a lot of big promises from a bunch of different teams. and people are looking for, I believe, people that have built credible things in the past. You know, you want to pick a team that, you know, is going to deliver and live up to all the hype and expectations. And so, you know, I think about Dom and all the great work that, you know, he's done, you know, he created a loop,

but he's done so many other fantastic products prior to that. And some of the other builders that you just look at and you're like, okay, I trust you because of what you've created, you know, over the last couple decades. and I feel very fortunate that people trust what we're about to embark upon and what we're going to build. And it was that that led to just so many people being oversubscribed and we were going to do a Dutch auction initially. And then we realized it was just going to turn it into a gas war. And then we had to flip it to a raffle. And then once it went out, we had no clue what the secondary volume was going to be. If you had asked me the day of, I probably would have said, well, we'll end up at around, you know, two-eath or so.

And then it immediately shot up to five and then 10, then 15. and then it just kept climbing. So it was shocking. But, you know, I do realize it's not lost on me that there is a lot of hype here. And so it's on us now to go build and really fulfill everything that we, the roadmap that we've put out there. Kevin will have already said this in the intro, but I kind of view you as a pioneer who went out into the margins, the fringes of the Web3 universe and discover something cool. And now you're coming back here to tell us all about what you feel. found, which is very appropriate for somebody who also made Dig, one of the first, like,

bottom up style websites of the internet. And so, you're following through on your brand is somebody who's been on the frontier of the internet since day one. And there's so many different elements about what you've built, right? There's the proof community. There's the proof NFT. Now there's moonbirds. And each one of these things represents what feels like a, a Lego that stacks on top of each other.

And we're going to explore each of these things and kind of how they relate to each other, like how the Lego stack upon each other. And what really gets me excited about this story is as somebody who came into this industry in a non-technical fashion, realizing I was never really going to be able to learn how to code because I just didn't have it in me. It was always going to be content production that was going to be interesting for me. And there was always on the horizon, something about content production and tokenization, somewhere as soon as we figure out what that thing is.

And it seems to be that you figured out what that is. And so that's going to be, I think, the theme for the episode. But before we go into the details, can you just give us the overarching scope of proof, the whole thing? Like, what are all the pieces? What are all the components? Because we're going to dig into each one of these things. So when you view the system, what is the system? What is proof?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that's a great place to start. So proof started off as just a point. podcast covering all things NFTs. And it was driven from my personal passion to interview artists and creators and had them on the show to talk about their journey and their passion for creating whatever it might be. So I was very fortunate that, you know, over a year ago to have, you know, the founders of art blocks on and the founders of Quantum and just Flamingo Dow and a lot of the really early kind of pioneers and builders in this space. And, you know, it was actually the Cryptopunks

episode was really fun too when I had those founders on as well. So, it started off there and then I quickly realized that we were just building a pretty massive audience. I mean, we kind of hit the market at the right time in that, you know, NFTs were starting to pop. And when they did, then, you know, that went from 25,000 viewers to 50,000 to 100,000. And it kept growing. And I realized that these are all people that are interested in collecting NFTs. And some of them are really passionate and really hardcore. And there's a bunch of different groups out there, different discords out there that are

focused on information around the collection or collecting of NFTs. But the problem that I saw is that there is just so many new projects that are dropping every single day and every, you know, every single week. Anyone armed with Photoshop these days can create an NFT, right? And the majority of the groups that you find out there are focused on quote unquote alpha groups, right? And those groups are about trading. They're about trading. Oftentimes they can talk about flipping. They can, you know, it is about how do you get into a project, score that three to five X, potentially get out and oftentimes move on to the next thing. And so for me, that's not really that interesting to me. That's not what I want to focus on. Like what I want to prove to be about

is really about that artist's story and about the long-term collectibility and why you should care about a particular artist. And so I wanted to get into their backgrounds and go deep on that. And so when I wanted to create a private discord, which became the proof collective, it was like, let's not create an alpha group because I just, that's not in my DNA. Like I'm a believer in NFTs for the next, you know, holding for the next few decades and beyond. So let's create something that is about like-minded collectors that want to talk about, you know, curation with kind of a point of view. So like just really about going deep and finding those projects when you buy an X copy, which one should you consider that you're going to hold for the next, you know, 15, 20 years.

That type of conversation. And that's what launched the Proof Collective. And so that launched in December of last year. It was 1,000 NFTs. They looked like little membership cards. And if you held one, you had access to this private discord. And so that is what kicked off this entire thing. After the podcast had already been out for like, you know, almost a year at that point.

And I did a Dutch auction. And so I said, okay, I'm going to sell these Proof Collective passes. It'll be, you know, five ETH. and ETH was less expensive back then, working with its way down to eventually 0.1 Eth is where it would have bottomed out. And they sold out at one Eth is where it ended up. And so we got to work. And we said, okay, let's start building. And so with that, we launched the private discord.

Later, we launched several different collaborations that were unique to proof collective holders, one exclusively with Heart You, which is a great artist. We did one with Hackatow and probably another three or four others that we launched. over the last few months. And granted, we're in April now. So we're only really four months into this. We launched the actual membership kicked in January 1st. And then the idea was how can we take this capital and not put it in our pockets, but every single dollar that was raised actually went right back into the company. And so what does the company do? The company does a handful of things. We go off and we obviously, we've talked about the private discord, but we also are going to hold an annual NFT conference in LA called proof of conference. That's going to be crazy. It'll be free for

proof collective holders. We're hiring full-time analysts. So we're about to close three full-time analysts that we've narrowed it down from 20 applicants down to three. They were going to be responsible for doing what we call proof deep dives, which are these really deep analysis. It's almost what you all do at bank lists on the defy side, where you go really deep and give people the understanding and the analysis. But rather than we don't want to, we're not defy experts. We're on the NFT side. So we're going to go deep on the NFT side and tell you who is X copy. What are their Genesis piece? And then really work with these upcoming utility drops and these other PFP drops and help you sort through all the garbage that can happen out there and really elevate the best

ones and give you these really deep, concise like TLDR briefs on on why you should be collecting and holding these particular NFTs. It's almost like a forester research back in the stock days, but for NFTs. And then, you know, early access to our podcast. And then we do exclusive projects like Grails was the first project that we launched, which was really cool, where you didn't know who the artist was until you actually mented the piece and you had to have a proof pass to be able to mint it. Then we launched moonbirds.

And so every proof collective member got two free moonbirds with their pass. We have a future metaverse that we're building the code name right now for it is called high rise. And so the proof collective is kind of that thousand person like backbone to all the things. that we do if that makes sense. It does. It really seems like you said you're trying to just not get into the whole like, all right, you get in at this price.

You buy this NFT and you get out at this price. It seems to be a lot like more like paid research, right? Like some people pay like a lot of money to have journals, you know, send them the best research that an industry has. And it seems to be the Web 3 version of that. And Kevin, I'm wondering if you, how much, how prepared or how, like, you know, how prepared or how like scared perhaps you were of turning this into a token, right? All of a sudden, there's a token or NFTs that trade on the secondary markets where previously you were

a content producer with a community around that. But now you're a content producer with a community around that with an NFT badge for membership and also the moonbirds. Did that decision to go into on-chain tokens that trade on secondary markets? Like talk about the weight of that decision. Yeah, I mean, think when you launch something like this, you never know what the adoption's going to be. And all I know is that the nice thing about what we do as product builders and what we've built over the years in terms of the products that we've, you know, created that have touched literally tens of millions of people's lives. We know that we can deliver on that piece. And if we hold true to that promise, then the price will take care of itself. So I don't follow

the token, the NFT prices like of the proof pass. Of course, I'm looking at moonbirds right now because it's just insanity. And like, of course. I'm going to check that out. But it's, it's, I don't check it every single day. And it's because I have, I've worked to do. Like we, it's time to let's go. Let's get to work. And, and at the end of the day, you know, we is, we've laid out what we're going to

create and then we have to go and execute. And I think that the price just will fall where it falls. Like it's, I hate to see like there's this, there's this danger, I think, if you're a creator of, of one of these projects where if you're chasing this token price, like it must hit this or, you know, I have to get this much value extracted out. We actually would rather take in less revenue and have a more stable community than the roller coaster. So what I'm really proud of, one of the terms that I'm proud of, or figures I'm proud of right now is if I go to, I'm clicking out right now, the Proof Collective on OpenC, we have 933, 3,000.

unique holders out of 1,000. That's a 93.3% unique holder rate of our proof collective token. That is awesome. And you can compare that against any other big PFP project and it's always much lower. Moonbirds is obviously much lower right now. We're going to get that up. And the reason I love that is it's less churn. Yes, that means there's less revenue because obviously we don't get those royalties.

But we're starting to get to know each other as a community. and the goal is to create these like lifelong bonds and relationships and share information and intelligence. We believe that people coming together can create a collective intelligence that is better and stronger than anyone individual. And that's held true so far. And that's what we're going to continue to build. That's super cool, Kevin.

And I think we have so many questions. This is just on the proof side of things. We're also going to talk about moonbirds. But I want people listening to the podcast. There's probably, you know, two camps. of people. One is there's a lot of creators out there with communities and involved in the communities. And they're scratching their heads and they're looking at what you've done with proof and what you've done with your community and, you know, NFTs. And they're trying to think about, okay,

how can I launch something like this for my community? What does that look like? Putting themselves in the mold of a creator. There's also another group who's like, okay, I'm part of a really interesting community and I want to participate more how can I gain opportunity entering that community so I think we want to address both of those but there's more of this story too so like with proof itself how did you get the curation right so you said 933 members but like you've kind of built this thing in concentric circles right where it's like it starts with a nucleus it's you maybe a few others on your team at proof and then it expands to like I'm 1,000 core proof members.

And now you've got 10,000 PFP. So you're sort of building from this concentric circle of fans, if you will. You know, the 100 true fans, the 1,000 true fans, out with like that. How is that important? What's your secret to good community curation? Because I think a lot of people,

if they launch a token or an NFT, they will get those, you know, Telegram, NFT, pump and dump groups that aren't necessarily incented for the long term. have a really hard time creating a nuculus for their community. Can you talk about that? No, it's a great point. And I think that, you know, you and I, you over at banklets are in a similar position where you have people that listen to what you say because you have a proven track record for talking about high quality projects. And you, by the nature of you just not

talking about the pump and dump type stuff, you don't attract that crowd. So when I was doing the podcast around proof in the early days, there's never been a. single episode about flipping about how to make money, you know, with, there's never been a single episode about how to pay extra gas to get into something really fast. Like, we just never did that. And so it was always about the artist's story. And that attracted a lot of these long-term holders, like the people that were really into that style of collecting. Because diamond handers, yeah, the diamond handers, the ones that see this is the first inning of, of, of a great story that's going to play out over many decades. And so when you have that,

your core, then you can introduce them to this product and you don't on purpose give allowless spots to alpha groups and to flipper groups and all this stuff. Like that was by design. Like a lot of collections will go out there and engage with these these flipping communities to try and give them access and spots. And that's great for your initial sale if you, if your only goal is just just grab some money and run. But if you want a real durable community, that's that's not the way to do it. But you all have kind of done that with bankless and what you've done. I mean, you're on the token side, right? But with your Dow and like you have that trust, you can easily do this.

And to your point earlier about other communities that could do this as well and people that are looking to do this, I think this is, it's early days and that it's tough because I was talking to Tim Ferriss about this actually because he's got a massive podcast. And I don't know what percentage of Tim's base would be into NFTs. But I know there'd be a thousand people for sure. That would be hardcore. probably 10,000 or more. So this is just a new way to think about monetizing and a way to get off of that ad drip. And the reason why I have had such a hard time with advertising in general is it forces you to make bad product decisions that are more about retaining your eyeballs and selling your customers than it is about really building things that are really going to be beneficial to them. And so, you know, when I had Dig, I launched Dig in 2004.

It became the first social news site before Reddit. You know, we grew that to 38 million people a month. And we still weren't profitable with 38 million people. We only had 50 employees. And 50 may sound like a lot, but not for someone that's servicing 38 million people, right? And so, and it was because, you know, we were living in this ad world and there was just no way to monetize what we were doing. And we were slow to monetizing it.

And yes, we could have gotten to scale and eventually gotten there. but we made bad product decisions because of that. And so this is a beautiful new world where we don't have to sell out our users any longer. And we can look to that kind of recurrent revenue that comes with the royalties. So this is so cool. And I think a lot of creators are hearing this and they're just getting really, really excited about the potential for their communities. But let's talk about the revenue model, if you will here, because this is a switch. You called it the ad drip.

And that's how a lot of creator communities are, you know, funded, right? For example, bankless bankless has ads. Other podcasts have ads. That's one way to fund a community. The other way to fund a community is sort of through a subscription service. You might have a substack. You might have certain community members paying for premium benefits. Oh, I pay for your newsletter.

I read it all the time. Well, there you go. It's like Sam Harris as well. Like he's got a very successful podcast. And his thing is like, hey, I'll give you a taste of the podcast. but if you want the full podcast, you become a, you know, a premium member to my community. And these models have been successful. So you got the kind of the, you know, revenue model one of ads, revenue model two,

of premium subscribers through traditional payment rails. What is this new third revenue model that you're opening up? So take us through proof as an example. So you did that original NFT sale. You received some amount of ETH from that sale as revenue. is kind of like, I guess, seed revenue. And then is there a royalty attached to proof? How does that work?

And then what does the community receive? Because now the floor prices like 84 for 84 Eth for a proof membership. So I imagine the community received the majority of that upside. How do the puts and takes of the revenue model work for a creator when you're doing something like a proof membership? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, essentially the good news is when the price of, of the actual membership goes up when they do churn and it's slower because they're not

many as many are selling. So, you know, I would say out of the thousand, maybe I had to go look at the numbers. I couldn't even tell you. I haven't been swamped in Moonbirdsland, but it's maybe, let's call it three or four passes move per week. Then you get a percent of that. And you can define that any way you want. And so we set that on the higher side at 7.5 percent. And we received that back into the company as revenue. So we have to recognize it as revenue. And then that is what we use for everything. So there's like no ads on the podcast, even for the people that aren't members. There's no ads on the podcast.

And we use that to fund all of our future initiatives, whether it be the conference and all the things that we're going to go off and build, right? So that is kind of how that gets funded. And then in terms of the users that are collecting these, you know, they receive a whole slew of different things over time. So with Grails, for example, we launched something called Grails where there were 20 different artists. and as the proof collective holder, you got to pick one to mint.

We didn't tell you who the artists were. The secret is that four out of the 20 were top five grossing artists of all time on the NFT world. And so we had a very early prototype of the Larva Labs, the creators of Cryptopunks, their autoglyph. And it was called the protoglyph. And so one of them, and it didn't look anything like the, because it was a higher fidelity, but it was one they couldn't put on the blockchain back then because it was too high resolution. And so we had their early prototype as one of them. And so the people that meant to that,

those are going for over $100,000 in the secondary. And so they received that in their wallet. Some hit $200,000 when they first went out, which is crazy. And so they received that in their wallet. And that was part of the upside that they received as a holder of the proof collective pass. So the products that we turn into NFTs, whether it be Grails or our future Metaverse or Moonbirds, which they each got two of, which, you know, are now valued at 20 or 30 grand, whatever they are, USD per Moonbird. They go back to the proof collective holders.

So they receive that in forms of, in a form of just value that comes back to them as holders. In addition to all the information value that comes out of the membership and the meetups and the group, we've had 20 international meetups now with proof people getting together, which is just crazy. it's uh we're actually hiring a head of ahead of like meetups and we have to have a whole services team now around these different meetups and functions that we're going to be doing have you ever done like a back of the envelope calculation and how much value you've driven to to approve i have not it's got to be like just 100x at least it's more than the one if they paid for the if they bought in back then but you're saying for creators who are like a little worried about getting off the ad drip model like this is enough revenue to accomplish for you as a creator to

accomplish the goals you set out and to like pay a team and to staff somebody for meetups and to staff some analysts it's it's just working out from a revenue side to be able to fund this operation as well yeah yeah i mean i think the proof in general is if i had to guess and i'd have to go talk to our accounting folks i would say that the collective pass is probably brought in around seven or eight million dollars in revenue since january wow which is of this year of this year yeah which is great um and so that you know but you'll see i i should probably do like a public like show people what we spend our money on because we're going to do we're going to throw one of the best nfti conferences in the absolute world coming next year conferences those are

very expensive so ryan carson who is our co-o he used to throw a future web app's conferences back in the day i mean Zuckerberg spoke with them ev williams like all the greats have spoken to his conferences and they were fantastic and the first thing he said to me when he joined and he knew he was going to throw a conference he goes as long as we don't have to make money doing this conference would be amazing he's like because they barely broke even and they would have to charge like you know thousands of dollars to attend but they would have to spend so much money on staff and venue and all the logistics and operations of you know record all the video production and streaming and all the stuff that goes into a massive conference and so yeah we're excited so this isn't just

money, it's important to note that even though we make this money, it doesn't come back to us as individuals. I mean, we get a salary and I'll be transparent. I pay myself $50,000 a year from proof. That's my salary. And the purpose, though, is like we want to go build something massive here. So we want to reinvest those funds. It's about going bigger and broader and doing this better than anyone else. And that's the kind of goal here. And part of the value you've been able to drive to your community coming like with those the mints the autoglyph mint and what was the name of that project again where the the mints grails yeah uh i would imagine that the reason why you were able to uh attract that opportunity for your community is because of the nature of the community that

you have collected around proof again they're not they're not the flippers they're not the nfti flippers so the people that are saying hey we have some nfts for your community have some assurances that your communities are not going to flip these things. Because you've specifically curated a community of very strong NFT experts that are very qualified consumers of these NFTs, that these NFT projects would be very, very interested in having this particular community be a holder of. So what you've really done is you've really curated the best consumer possible

of the NFTs and saying, hey, if you're a long-term focused diamond-hander, you are probably part of the proof, proof collective, and that is particularly attractive to people that are minting new NFT projects. And so it's really playing that long game and that optimizations for quality that has allowed so much value to be discovered in the proof collective. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, for us, it is about how can we play this for the next,

this long game for the next decade? Like, I built a handful of businesses, And I know that for me, I'm not aiming to do another like a little single or double. Like we're really swinging for the fences here. We want to be a top five PFP project with moonbirds. And so, yeah, we're going for it. This is not about a little short term exit or rug and run. Like this is something much bigger.

So you have the membership NFT, the thousand membership NFTs. Now you have the moonbirds for the profile pictures because, you know, you got to look good in the metaverse. but I'm cognizant that you are missing an ERC20 token. Is there an ERC 20 token on the menu? Oh, man, I didn't know you were going to ask me this question. You know, I think that, well, I can tell you what we won't do. And let's start with those talking about what we're seeing out there in the market.

If that's okay with you all. So, you know, when you think about it. these coin kind of airdrops that are happening, I think a lot of it is broken in that there's two problems. One, there's, why would you need to use that new token versus, say, just using Heath? Like, like, take Ape, for example, like, they're going to build that into their metaverse. But why do I need to have that versus ETH? Why the COVID and I just pay with ETH or with die or USC or whatever it may be. That is one I have yet to kind of, I'm still kind of grappling with and trying to wrap my

head around. The other is what is the value of that token peg to? And this I don't think is solved by anyone. It's just like saying it's inventing a token and say, hey, we have our token, hooray. And like, I'm just launching it. But there's nothing, there's no backbone other than a story of where there may be value. I do appreciate what Dye has done and that they have baskets of underlying other assets that kind of back them up. And I think something can be done here on the NFT side as well.

So I'll hint it that, you know, I like to think about what an underlying basket of NFTs could do to power some type of new token. And then the other thing and the real thing that I think is tragic is the reward structure is completely broken. And so one of the reasons why we have nesting with moonbirds, and nesting is a non-custodial way of locking up. It's like staking your moonbird, but we don't actually take it out of your wallet. And you actually get these little upgraded nests. You start with straw and then eventually becomes a bronze nest and a silver nest and upgrades over time. But what that means is you're saying, I have conviction in this project. I'm not going to flip this.

Now, again, we could make more money if people are flipping them, but that's not the point. We want loyalty. We want community. And so if people are locking in their birds and, and saying, I'm willing to lock up my moonbird, then they should receive the outsized rewards if there ever is a future token that comes out. So it was so odd to me that Ape token launches, and I could have bought an Ape token, or a Bort Ape the day before and received the exact same amount of tokens as someone that had held since day one. And I think

that that's the wrong reward structure. It should be based on your, commitment to a project. And so we're, we're changed in that. And I will say with this all with one caveat, nothing that board apes have innovated in so many different ways. It's mind blowing. Nothing but respect for that community. I'm just thinking about in the token sense, we're just going to do a slightly different take than if we go there. When we do, it will be a different take than what has already been done out there. Building and copying some other project, you know, I think at a minimum, like a PFP is kind of table stakes for anyone that is in this world, but we wanted to make sure with the nesting mechanic and some of these other things that we added

that were built into the smart contract, it wasn't just a Me Too project and that we are thinking about this with a set of fresh eyes and going back to first principles versus just doing another clone. Because clones are a dime a dozen, and the board apes were not clones. They did many quite a few different innovations with their SERMs and a bunch of the ways that they looked at how to do derivative type process. projects on top of their existing user base, which I think were brilliant and spot on, especially at the time. No one was doing that.

But, you know, ours is just a different take on this when we eventually get around to that, that world. I love that. These NFT projects are kind of leveling each other up because, like, you know, one project will just take the best ideas from another and then, like, iterate on them, make improvements in various ways. And then we get to kind of the next level. We unlock it and we see what sort of works.

Oh, I love it. And I don't consider this. I think this is a fantastic thing for the industry. So I'll give you an example. This just happened today. This is fresh news. Quantum art, Justin Arvassano, fantastic, one of the best known photography NFT creators that's out there. So those artwork at Christie's, all this stuff. They created quantum, which was initially just for photography-based NFTs. They announced this morning they had their quantum key, which is like their version of kind of Grails. I don't necessarily not grales, but their version of what would do the proof collective. And they announced this morning that they're going to do a Grails type

launch where you don't know who the artists are and then they'll do the reveal after. But they're putting the emphasis back on the art, getting people to consider and look at each piece and decide which one they want to collect and then doing the storytelling around the artist. This is the entire thing that we built for Grails that we launched a few months ago. I love that they are now using this as part of their mechanic. It's like if we find useful pieces to your to your all's entire thesis around Lego blocks, let's reuse them. Take the best ones, modify them, make them better.

and take them forward. And that's how we all win. So I like to see more of that. That's super cool. All right. Well, let's let's back up and just complete the story around Moonbirds. So we talked about this foundation, which is the proof collective. And now can you tell us a bit more about this moonbirds launch? So it sounds like if you had a, if you were a proof holder, then you got some moonbirds minted to you. You got two. And you could go and claim two. That's right. You could claim to you. Okay, so tell us about like the moonbirds concept. How is it distributed? You know, where is it now?

I think we can look on like open sea stats as we said in the intro is absolutely crushing it. Volume of 36,000 Eth over the last seven days. 76,000. So excuse me, 76,000. Who's counting now? Yeah, exactly. What's a few hundred, you know, dozen, uh, Eth anyway, thousand Eth anyway. So tell us about the launch of this thing.

the attributes, the features, you sort of explain the concept of nesting. I wonder if you could tell us about that again. Just give us the lowdown on what moonbirds are. Yeah, absolutely. So in classic tip of the hat to Cryptopunks, there are 10,000 edition PFP. And essentially, what they are,

they're these cute, if you can't see the video, there's these cute little characters that look like, you know, owls, they are owls. and they have different attributes in terms of rarity around the different things that they hold. So that one that you're looking at there has a little crown on top of its head. The one next to it has a baseball cap.

Those have different rarities associated with them. And then their eyes are different, and their tones of their different fur is different. There's one with some fire hair that you just had up there. And when we set up to create this project, there was a couple of things we wanted to do. We'll get into nesting in a minute, but let's just talk about the design.

Justin Mazzle, who's my co-founder and head of design, created them all, except for the one with a little grimplin toad on the head, another great artist called Grimplin designed a little toad, which is a smoking Elon Musk on top of the head of the moonbirds. But one of the things that we want to do is we wanted to make sure that it wasn't lost on us that as Justin and myself, the one kind of putting together the designs for this project,

that we were two white guys doing it. So if you pause there and look at that one there, that one has like a little Tupac kind of bandana tied up and a gold chain around its neck. And so what we wanted to do is go out and get a diverse group of people that were our advisory panel on the attribute side. So we included a bunch of women and a bunch of people of color to make sure that they were being represented in the things that they would like to see on these different birds. So, you know, we have some eyes there that you're looking at right there that are the rainbow eyes. you know, it depends on how you look at a rainbow, but oftentimes it can be associated with gay pride as well, which you thought was great. It was recommended by one of our members.

We have a little do-rag attribute that is amazing by, it was built. We literally did a design session with John Gray, who you got to watch John Gray's TED Talk. He's actually wearing a du rag in his TED Talk. He's amazing. Really helped us walk through all the stitching nuance and like what color it should be and all of this different stuff. And so it was, it was our goal to set up and create different attributes that would speak to different people. And then some of these attributes would have further kind of utility over time, meaning we could do fun things with them. So, for example, once you nest your moonbird and you lock it up at the three month mark, we're going to drop you like the most insane hoodie for all the hoodie moonbirds. Like these

it's really thick, like high quality, $200 hoodies that are just done by this really great brand that we haven't announced yet. But they'll be coming drop ship to you. as for free as a moonbirds holder. And we have ones that have crummy squiggles on their head, which is a very famous art block project. So you can imagine what will eventually be coming to those moonbird holders. I have an X copy that's going to be airdrop

to one lucky winner of our glitch attributes. There's only five glitch attributes. You can pull under, if you go to body type there on the left and choose glitch at the very bottom, you'll see if you scroll down that center section there, yeah, I just hit glitch there. Sorry, there's six of them. So if you have one of the glitch there, you'll be eligible for that particular air drop.

So we want to have fun both in terms of blanket benefits that will come to every moonbird holder. So it won't just be about the ultra rare ones. Like if you nest your moonbird, you will get things. Like one, one that we're going to do is, we should mention this as well, is when you hold an own a moonbird, you own the IP for 100% of the IP for that image. So you can do anything you want with it. You can build a company around it. You can sell merch with it on it.

Like we're not holding the IP of that. Is this like the board apes license? Absolutely. It was a fantastic innovation by board apes to do this. It was brilliant. And so what we're doing at the three-month nest, the nesting mark, we're actually going to send you 250 stickers of just your,

specific moonbird with your number at the bottom of it that are these super high quality process that we're having done on these stickers that's just one example of like a fun way to show off who your moonbird is and kind of distribute those around to friends or wherever you want to put them of course only in legal places but we'll have like a moonbird's sighting channel on our discord as well does a does a moonbird holder get any of the same benefits that a proof collective holder would they get access to a private discord so there's a private moonbirds only discord they're going to get um a front row seat to our metaverse so they will have they won't probably get as much land as the proof collective members but they will have

access to land in that metaverse as well um there'll be other projects that are dropped on top of this it's just going to be a whole like internal roadmap that we have of things that will come to these holders so absolutely there's going to be a lot of there will be overlap there they won't get it's not really moonbirds are are more for the community and fun and IRL and the meetups and the culture side. And then the collective is more of the hardcore NFT collectors. So the collective receives the research reports, things like that. So that doesn't extend to the movement.

It's crazy because I really see the network effect. What you're building essentially, Kevin, is like if you are a hardcore NFT collector, like you want to be part of the proof network, right? Because that's where everyone is, essentially. So you're almost making it such that it's just so attractive. to opt into the proof network if you're an NFT collector. And it almost strikes me that the community almost self-cureates for you once you've established that, hey, this is our stake in the ground.

This is the type of community we're going to become. Then they just come to the community as a result of that, which is, which is fascinating. David, I think you wanted to say something. Yeah, it seems to be what you're doing with the perks, like the hoodie birds, the hoodie movebirds get an actual hoodie, a nice quality hoodie. and everyone gets a sticker of their moonbird. And it just makes, as a moonbird holder, I would feel very just like warm and appreciated and fuzzy and thankful

that like the operators of this project are allowing me to have all these perks related to the moonbird. But it's also just a great marketing tool for moonbirds itself, right? You're giving marketing assets to the individual holders, right? You're allowing the moonbird holders to express the moonbird brand to the best of their ability. because they have the hoodies or the stickers or like whatever merch comes with their particular moonbird. So like you're you're making sure that the community feels answered and appreciated by but also equipping them with like marketing ammo to promote the moonbirds brand. So I think the end of borrowing a little bit from like the Gary V model because very Gary V had those like redeemable NFTs, right?

But like it wasn't about the art and this is much more about the art. And so it's really doing the whole like you actually get perks with this NFT. but it's also nice to see in your open sea as well. Yeah, I mean, that's, Gary V was a big inspiration. Gary's been a buddy of mine for over a decade now. And when he first announced that he was doing V friends, and he told me how he was tying utility to these NFTs that were very much tied to Gary. If you look at the first, you know, drops, like you get to go to a basketball game with Gary.

And I love that. I was like, whoa, okay, that was a big aha moment for me in connecting like real world life type functionality. to NFTs. And so let me get you really excited. This is where we're going. So what hasn't been built, and this is very early days, is the rails to talk to real world locations.

So there's no way right now that you can walk in to any location, any restaurant, any place, and say, I hold this NFT, let me prove it to you. You can open your mask on your phone, which is dangerous if it's a hot wallet or whatever, right? There's ways to, like, show people a screenshot of something that you say you own, but there's no way to really prove it. So how can we build a product?

And this is, we're product people. So this is what we're thinking about that allows you to verify that you hold an NFT on your phone without it being at risk for being stolen from you if someone holds you up at gunpoint, right? And what, so now what is that unlock? So that unlocks very basic stuff. Like you can go to an event and someone could scan your little thing or tap your phone and let you in and say, okay, oh, you are a member holder. Come on in, right?

But it unlocks. even crazier things when you start talking about the rails that talk to the point of sale connectivity. So if there's Square or there's Shopify, I'm actually talking to the Shopify CEO in a few days about this, we want to be able to say, okay, MoMA, who uses Shopify to power all the entrance, and I'm just making this up, but I got enough of MoMA uses it. But like, let's say it's a museum modern art. We're going to do Proof Moonbirds Day, where it's free and open to all Moonbirds holder to walk into the MoMA and go walk around. And we can then power and tell and send MoMA the money to

comp and benefit them to be able to go in and have that experience. And we can do that at bars. We can do that at meetups. We can do that anywhere. So we can power all of these, this, this connectivity to physical businesses to unlock experiences. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, that's super powerful. So you're, you're manifesting the digital community into, into reality and into the physical, creating like a bridge there. We don't even have to be there. We can say, hey, this bar and random bar in Norway, we've seen that there's 25 moonbird holders of their Friday nights meetup and guess what, here's a thousand dollar bar tab to have fun and we just power it instantly and they can walk in and comp all of their drinks or food or whatever it may be.

And so it's just figuring out creative ways to tie the online and offline worlds together that is going to be a big piece of what we're focused on as well. That is awesome, Kevin. All right. Well, I think we want to get to the next section where we start talking about, like, actually people, you know, creators, communities, thinking about launching an NFT and your advice for them. But just to tie off this first section and what you've accomplished with Proof and Moonbirds, what would you say the big lessons for you have been through this experience? Like the things you'd advise or pass on to a creator thinking about doing something like this for their community, both in Proof and for Moonbirds, what were the takeaways, the key insights for you?

Yeah, I guess a couple things. Like, well, there's a few. One is always hold some back for your own, like, local. Always hold a few back. So when I first launched proof, I basically told all my friends that didn't get it. I'm like, oh, I held some back. And I was like, hey, you can just have them at whatever the floor was. So I sold them off at one eath.

And then I actually overpromise. So I had to go buy some off the secondary myself. And so I was, I actually had buy a couple at two eath. And I was like, why did I? we'll promise too many of these. But I would say don't focus on the price. Like when you're going on to launch something like this, if it sells at Point 1Eath, that's fine.

Because it's not about that initial sale. Yes, you'll get that nice little chunk of change to go out and build. But it's going to be the word of mouth, the momentum of what you create to back up what you've just done in launching that sale that is going to drive more and more people to seek that out and want to purchase and hold that utility PFP. or NFT. So that is kind of like it's on you as a creator then to go out and and deliver. So for us, it's never been about, okay, we just need to, you know, we saw how much, how oversubscribed we were

in terms of the sale. So we had 70 or, I'm sorry, 8,000 available spots because 2000 went to proof collective members of the moonbirds. And we had about 55,000 applicants that applied to be in the drawing at 2.5eath. And so we could have easily gone out and said, hey, guess what? It's 5th now. And we still would have sold out. But we didn't.

We kept it at 2.5th because that was what we promised. And so we sold out of that. And that's okay because that was the right thing to do. And you just have to always listen to the community and play back and do the right thing. Like I'll give you another example. We screwed up. And there was a,

when we were doing the last tranche of the drop, so it was like unlocking these different tiers. these different people that could then mint, there was a 10 second delay between when the mint button went live and when the actual contract allowed those people to mint. And so we had 100 plus ETH that was lost in gas when that happened. And it was difficult because we knew that there were a bunch of scripts that went in there and tried to jump the gun that didn't actually see the mint button appear.

And they went in and rushed in a bunch of gas really fast. And so we had some valid people that, actually clicked the button. And then we had a bunch of invalid people that didn't click the button and use bots. And we said, you know what? This is the long game here. So we just went and refunded $380,000 worth of Eath yesterday. Wow.

But it's like that that's the kind of stuff that, yes, we could have gotten away with it and said, like, hey, we're not going to do this because you tried to do this or X, Y, or Z, or we don't believe it was right. And when MetaMask was even throwing errors to people saying, don't meant this, even though they went and clicked to go ahead anyway. And so we just said, hey, listen, MetaMask threw you in air, but you click. through it. But we know we've all been there. You get excited about a minute and you click any button that comes up, right? So a lot of people actually get like they're in a t-stool and they're not

paying attention to what they're clicking. So they're just clicking as fast as possible. And so, you know, it's like you just got to go back to that. Who am I building for and what time horizon is that going to be? And for us, it's decades. And that means it's not worth the short-term eth versus the long-term vision we're trying to build here. So it's, I guess it just comes back to always delivery, always be shipping and, and, and, and, and don't set, even though the, the, the excitement can be to go out and build 10 or 15 things, but really hone in on the two or three things that you can actually deliver versus trying to boil the ocean. I think that's, that's another big mistake. A lot of entrepreneurs make in general, not just people in Web 3.

This is incredible. I'm, you know, just recalling the, the famous Naval quote of long-term games with the long-term people. And I think you really differentiate yourself by playing the long-term game for community, Kevin. And I, you know, I, you know, you know, Maybe the alpha is just like, be wholesome. This is like refunding all of that gas. It's just like, wow, that is the right thing to do. And it's so wholesome. And it's a shame that it's rare.

But that's what differentiates the community and signals that you are playing a long-term game here. Guys, we're going to talk more about this with Kevin because I want to ask some more specific questions around launching an NFT. Like creators out there who are wondering, is the time now for me to launch an NFT? Kevin, we're hoping you can get into the specifics of what that might look like. And then maybe if bankless decided to launch an NFT, what would that actually look like? Just curious. You know, yeah, just curious. As a model.

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already used to doing, like swapping tokens and staking. So if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, go to Ledger.com, grab a ledger, and take control over your crypto. All right, so Kevin, where we left things was you were giving us the story of all of the success proof has had and Moonbirds have had. For creators out there, say they want to launch an NFT, can you guide us through the prerequisite? So I'm thinking things like, okay, what kind of a team do you need at this point to pull this off. Maybe we'll start there. And then we'll also talk about community, but let's start with team. What kind of a team is required to pull this off? Yeah, it really depends on how technical you are. I would say that for me, I studied computer science in school, but dropped out

year two. And so I can look at code and read it more or less, depending on the language. But I'm not, I shouldn't be writing. That would just be bad. We'd all be hacked and I'd have no money. So essentially what I did is there are, I would say, several really well-known smart contract developers in the space. If you're going to do a utility NFT, I would say probably just don't go to one of the big marketplaces and mint on there. Like you want to have your own, you know, your contract, you know, your keys, if it's your keys, your crypto, it's your contract and your community. So definitely have your own contract built. The good news is a lot of the on-chain Dutch auction mechanics have been built before. We use divergence for all of our smart contracts.

They're absolutely fantastic. The main protagonist there, Aaron is a dual MD PhD, ex-Google 10-year Google engineer, like just as rock solid as they come. Aaron and Harry are fantastic, so I highly recommend them. And we outsource that entire thing to them. So they just went and handled it all. So we didn't have to worry about that component. We could focus on what we're good at,

which is more web building and app building and community and all the things that we love to do. So smart contract engineers are very hard to come by. And oftentimes it's easier just to partner with someone for this initial launch. I also like Manifold. I think Manifold does a great job on the smart contract side. They're really well known for building great contracts for artists as well. So that would be two recommendations there.

And then you need a front-end engineer that's going to talk to the contracts. So who is that person that's going to write that code, that JavaScript and, you know, work with Infura or some of the other alchemies that are bridging Web 2 to Web 3 so that people can connect wallets. They can use wallet connect. They can mint on mobile and all of this. And then, of course, you know, all of the hardware keys and everything you need to keep your crypto safe. And then, you know, a proper Discord crew that knows how to set permissions and do moderation, do token gating, things of that nature where it requires you to have the NFT to get in.

I would not recommend doing a public open Discord because there is just so much spam and scammers that are out there. So I'm very much about the token gated communities. I think that's the way to go. And yeah, that's kind of how you get off to the races. Then you work with an artist. You can find a freelance artist to kind of create your initial artwork if it's just going to be some type of pass that you have access to. And that should be it. How about other prerequisites in terms of a community, right? So, you know, it strikes me that Proof very much had a community already that you'd ceded through the Proof podcast. Do you recommend people have a community before they do this? Because I think there's a lot of NFT mince out there that think, oh, we can mint the

and then build the community on the other side of that. What do you think the order of operations should be? Is it sort of community first, or do you think you can mint and then build the community on the back of that. It's a great question. I think if you are an artist that you're looking to build something in the space, whether it be a PFP or put out your own art, then you just start without the community. Like you just get out there. But if you're on the creator side that is looking to build something on the utility side of NFTs, then you have to have that community first, right? You just won't sell out otherwise. No one would want to collect what you're creating. So, you know, if you're a podcast, then you have to get your audience up to a certain size, especially if they're

non-technical, because if they're non-technical, you're going to have a very low conversion of people that actually even care or can figure out how to collect these things. Gary Vee, if you look at how he did the V Friends launch, he had a massive community, but hardly anyone understood NFTs back in those days and, you know, still don't. And his community was largely people that weren't in the NFT space. And so he spent a lot of time and effort on the education side, you know, how to use Metamask, how to, you know, clobesk. I get purchased ETH for the first time and really walk people through that process, which I think most people wouldn't do.

Kevin, what do you think, what's the role that utility NFTs just have for creators, right? Let's what, what's the, the opportunity for, you know, not just crypto creators, but, I mean, you talked about how like some, many, many audience members for just the average content producer probably aren't ready to get into crypto, but we all think here that crypto's coming to take over the world, right? So eventually everyone's going to be ready to be a crypto consumer. Right. So for the creators out there, do you think that this is going to be a primitive that is going to be true for all creators?

And how do you know when you should start to look to crypto and look to utility NFTs to start to bolster your community? And like you said, get off of that ad drip. So who is you tenant? Who are utility NFTs really for? And how should content creators identify themselves as this is good for me? Yeah. it's it's a great question because it's not applicable to everyone right if you have a resource that you are producing that has people consider to give them some type of

information advantage or some type of knowledge that is valuable to them or they want a more intimate connection with the creator of that content being able to ask questions or do things in a more tight community versus a big community then I think this makes a lot of sense for those types of creators to have utility-based NFTs. I think if you're just trying to reach, if you're a YouTuber that just creates funny, you know, dancing videos, I can't imagine this really applies to you at this point in time. It also works where there are businesses that have high demand, but not enough volume that they can produce. So I'll give you an example. I'm on the board of a winery called Harlan Estate and very small producer of a Napa Cabernet.

And, you know, the discussions that are kind of being had at that level is you have a three-year waitlist to get into a wine allocation, right? So you can imagine what was a traditional like sit on an email wait list could be a more fluid membership that in the form of an NFT to actually gain access to something like that. but to take it one step further, and this is just crazy, the, when wine gets traded, and I know this is a completely different genre, but it just shows you how broadly applicable NFTs are to so many different industries. When wine gets traded at the high end, it can be, change hands like six, seven, eight times before it's actually the cork has popped and it's consumed. And so one of the issues is, how was it stored at the right temperature? Did the actual wine touch the cork so it didn't go dry? so it's not like a, you know, no air got in there, and it becomes a corked bottle of wine.

There's all of these issues, right? So traditionally, it's that is meant someone buys it, they take it, they sell it to another person, sells it to another person that is being shipped all around the country, all around the world, all over the place. You can imagine the issuance of an NFT to represent that physical bottle of wine. And now you can hold on to it. You're going to deem it at any time. So it actually burns the NFT and it's sent to you in the mail and then you consume it.

or you can trade it a decade later, you know, and it's guaranteed provenance in storage at the actual winery, no fraud, because there's a lot of fraud that takes place in that industry as well, and every time it's resold, the original producer makes a cut of that royalty as well. It's just like a beautiful new model for businesses that have a scarce resource that is in high demand. And so you can imagine this happening to tennis shoes. There's no reason why people need to be waiting around the block. for supreme shoes or supreme gear, right? Like they could have an NFT that represents that piece of gear that can be claimed at any point in time comes directly from the proven manufacturer and the manufacturer gets a cut of the royalties going forward.

This could be so broadly applicable to so many businesses out there. And the beautiful thing that I really love about that is it just cuts down on so much waste. Like we don't need to physically move. We don't need to burn gas to move these bottles of wine across the country. And so like it's just instead we just move the token around in the Metaverse. and that is just an Ethereum transaction, which many people think burns a lot of energy, but it actually doesn't. And it actually will do a lot less in the future.

Meanwhile, the wine bottles or just the product stays put and just lets the token float around in the cloud. Oh, so get this. You probably have heard this before. But in the luxury world of goods, a lot of what happens behind the scenes, and it's a horrible thing, is they overproduce. And when they overproduce, they don't want their goods to go back on the secondary market because it cheapens the brand. They're sold at wholesale or slash prices. So they actually physically destroy the clothes and bags and everything else. And it just gets put in a dumpster somewhere and out.

You know, it's like basically like shredding documents in some sense. Now, imagine you have a world where you don't know the demand for the sneaker you're about to create. And you put it out there. And you were thinking, uh, maybe a thousand. And if you would have produced 1,000, you, maybe there was 1,500. Or if you produced 2,000, then you're 500 over. of their actual demand and so you lose money. Now you know it's 1,527 and you can go and do just in time manufacturing and produce the exact amount without any of the waste. It's a beautiful thing. That's

interesting. That's actually a model that we have experimented with out of manufacturing and bankless doubt, which we take in the orders and then we get like 284 orders. So we make 284 shirts. Yes, exactly. Yet to tokenize that. So maybe that's on the frontier. And again, speaking of the frontier. Utility NFTs, I think just offers like this blank slate of opportunity for creators. And you've already illustrated so many different ways that you can use NFTs. And you talked about how Gary V injected utility. And that was an inspiration. And you also illustrated just how aside from content, it actually works for stuff like supply chains in a way I had never, never heard described before. Just like for creators and for other companies out there,

just can you talk about just how there's just this empty space that's yet to be filled in of opportunity for ways to do to use these utility NFTs. And I think this also goes back to your time at Dig, where Dig was really just put the power onto the individual, put the power on the margins of society. So like the average individual was allowed to have empowerment with dig, right? That was the utility website. But now we have utility NFTs and allows you the expression of the individual to come out. Do you have any thoughts about like what could be unlocked once we allow individuals to really be able to express themselves with how they inject utility into their utility NFTs? Oh, it's so cool. Because in some sense, we're actually taking a very old model

of kind of top-down media and flipping it on its head. Like, you know, the Disney franchises that we all know and love. It's they're created by Disney. The characters are owned by Disney. The royalties are owned by Disney. The commercialization and rights of all toys and products and gear. owned by Disney and Disney is a very powerful company. In this model with board apes offering the IP back to the users, with Moonbirds with the IP back to the users, you're saying, guess what? The users can participate in the value accrual, right?

As something becomes more and more popular and you hold on to these, you participate in that upside. So it's the bottoms up. And then now you actually own a piece of the character set as well that you can go off and do very unique things with. So it's just a, it's, there's so many different things that can be done in this new model. Like the next Disney will be built and owned by the people, not by a big fortune 500 company. You know, so it, that's, that's very exciting to me.

That's cool. All right, Kevin. So put these pieces together for us. All right. So bankless has a community right now. We do. We have a podcast. Many of the community are very crypto educated.

What do you think we should do? Like, what would a bankless NFT look like? Do you think, like, because we're sort of in this hybrid of, we're spreading crypto knowledge, we're building a crypto community, but we're doing it mostly so far using Web2 tools, right? Like, you know, substack, podcast, RSS feed. We do have the bankless doubt piece of things, and that's kind of building off in another direction.

But we've not unlocked, like, what crypto-native membership features could be. So, like, what would your thoughts, be for us? What would your advice be for us if we were thinking about doing something like this? Yeah, it's a great question. Well, how many people are in your Dow right now? Thousands. Yeah, I think there's probably like 5,000 or so token holders in the Dow. And what do they have to have to be a part of that Dow? How many of the token? They have to have 35,000 bank tokens to be in the Discord. And what does that come out to in USD right now? Oh, I don't even know. 35 times 0.03. So about $1,000?

Yeah. Right. A little bit over $1,000. So I would allow every single one of those members to be a part of this community for free. So they get one of these NFTs. So you reward them for being your early supporters. Okay.

And then I would figure out what your number is going to be. Your total number of how many people you think you would like in this community, whether it be a thousand, well, you said there's thousands of people in the DAO. There's thousands in the Dow. There's also on the bankless newsletter, there's like 200,000, and free subscribers. You just get this distributed to them. And then we have also premium members.

So we get like this, all of these different, I guess, tiers of membership. You have to figure out gracefully roll them up, right? Because you want them all up.

You roll them all up. Now you have one NFT membership NFT that represents everything that you do. And you have to have one of these to have early access to the newsletter, early access to the podcast, weekly Q&As with all of you. Like all of the things that you would be providing

to across all these different channels is now just done via this. NFT, right? And I think that you have to put a hard cap on it. So it's not this ever expanding base where all of a sudden the people that hold it had 5,000. They're like, okay, great, we're one of 5,000. And then like, tomorrow you're the one of 10,000. I just got half. You know, so yeah, you got to figure out what that number is for you all. But yeah, then I would, I would roll it all up and then have this one utility NFT that people can point to rather than this being this like floating token number. It's like, I have my pass. This will get me in to see the.

guys when they throw an event or a live podcast or hold a meetup at this conference or whatever it may be, this is my thing. And I think that'll be your path forward. And then you get recurring revenue on all of that. As new bankless fans come in and join, then, you know, you get a piece of that, which I think will help fund your business. And you can decide whether you're, you know, I would definitely do adless versions of your podcast for those users, you know, save them the time. Do you think this should be like, um, like, do you like the 1,000 super fans type model? Or do you think it should be, it should be larger, right? So we kind of struggle with this a little bit where part of Bankless's mission is to get out to everyone, right? Like on board billions of people

into crypto. And you'll do that with the podcast, right? Like so that that that, yeah, so that's going to be great. But the deep dive information advantage that you all provide on DFI, the reason I pay for your newsletter is because I'm always reading about stuff that I don't have time to go out a research on my own. And you gave me that killer TLDR that I know I can trust. And it's not about somebody that's just like saying, hey, you invest in this and then that disappears the next day. Like you do your due diligence. And so you have that trust as a community. And I would lean into that. And so those are the hardcore people that say, I believe enough in this to hold this NFT that gives me access to all of this additional resources. But still, you're still doing, you know,

the good work and putting out the podcast to the masses. So you're not cutting that off at all. And, you know, it's like maybe every fifth deep dive article is completely free and you tell them they can have all of them if they hold you know the nfts so it's it's a lot to think through do you think um so another part of this kevin is that's been intimidating for david and i because like you know i i do have one year computer sigh and then i then i switched by the way in my undergrad so neither david and i or are super technical is our question is the tooling there for for kind of creators like how difficult is this? I think when you were talking about it, look, you need probably someone to develop the smart contracts. You need front engineer, that sort of thing. How are the tools

in this space coming along? I know it's not substack level, just like click a few buttons and auto mint, but is it easy enough at this point? Are the tools in place to be able to deploy this fairly easily? Yeah, it's a great question. In its early days, and a lot of people are creating the tooling around this. What we use right now is a site called nftoportal.xyz. And that will power all of your kind of dashboard for your users. So it collects their information. If you want to ship them things, you can token gate all of, you can token gate articles there.

You can token gate a calendar. You can do a private podcast feed there that gets released early. So it's a lot of, a lot of what you're looking for can be done with this tool. That's super cool. All right, Kevin, man. this has been awesome we invited you on to talk about moonbirds but it was actually because we needed you to consult with us yeah we just need for nice consult the free consultancy rugpole there love it yeah this is awesome uh really fun so i i guess like what's um what's kind of next for the

moonbirds community and like what's uh what are the immediate next steps for everyone in in moonbird are you guys like just catching your breath right now and and uh we're we're we're running you know we've We've got five people right now. We just got together on Monday and we put together a list of our immediate hires. We have another 12 people that we're looking to hire for. So that'll be posted up at the Moonbird's website or at the proof website. And, you know, it's all about consistent month over month delivering of the things that we promised on. So we've got a new director of engineering that just started.

We've got a couple other engineering candidates that are starting. So, you know, it's folding all this back-in. getting this to be a well-oiled machine and just ensuring that we can ship product, which is my favorite part. Now that the sale is done, I can actually rest a little bit, not in terms of my workload, but just in terms of like, that was the scariest part. Like, I know how to build products. Like, we can build products in the problem. Like, we'll deliver on everything we want to do. That's, that, that I'm confident in. It was the initial sale on the smart contracts and all the risk around, you know, proceeds and all that, that, that was scary. But now, now we just go build,

build, so can't wait. How much, how much time out of the week are you focused on this, on proof? Is this like a 40 plus hours a week thing? Or how do you have your time with it? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm still a partner of True Ventures. And, you know, we, we, I take a lot of my deal flow and handed off to other partners. We have a fantastic network there. And True is one of our investors as well in Proof, which is great. And so that's, that's easy for me. We have a, you know, 50 plus person company there, true, that helps take in all the different deal flow and things like that. But yeah, my focus right now is just really on this community. Kevin, this has been awesome. Congrats to the Proof Team and to the Moonbirds community and the Proof Collective community

on the successful launch. You guys are absolutely crushing it and really excited to hear your story here about this long-term, multi-decade game that you're playing here in NFTs, and we're excited to see what you guys do next. Well, I'm excited for your June launch of the bankless NFT. We'll launch at the same time the ETH merge happens. How about that? Oh, God. So what, two years? Yeah, something like that. It could be three. It could be one. Developers are meeting in Amsterdam as we speak right now. Are they right now? The devs are working on. That's where I am right now. Yeah. Wendy, like, give me, give me the five second version. When is this launching? Yeah. Oh, okay. So I'm not going to,

Are you going to get us in trouble by saying a date? So we were joking about the same question. I was sitting with like Anthony Zazano and Justin Drake was with us. And we were all we were all getting a beer. And so we were joking about, all right, let's take all of our empty beers, put them in front of Justin Drake, get him one more full beer. Put it in his hand. And we'll take a picture of him and be like, Justin Drake says we're merging tomorrow. We did not do that.

Yeah. But seriously, if I had to guess, if I had to guess, August to October. August, September, October. Mm-hmm. Always four to six months out. Yeah. Always. Always.

Just keeps pushing out a little bit, little bit. It better happen this year. It's got to happen this year. I think Heath is going to go nuts. If this goes well and the merge is like, it's nothing breaks, you know, like in a bad, bad way, I think Eats going to really benefit from this being a success. So I'm excited. Yeah. I think we're all in alignment on that one.

We're excited to timer. NFT for that date. So stay tuned. Kevin, this has been a pleasure, man. Thanks for coming on again. Thanks, guys. Always great to be on.

All right, take care. Bankless, guys, of course, none of this has been financial advised risk and disclaimers, of course, eat this risky. NFTs are risky, all of crypto, certainly is 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.