Bankless - NFT Mania! | Andy8052 & DeeZe (SotN)

Starting point is 00:00:01 Hey guys, welcome to another bankless episode. We've got State of the Nation here for you today. David, we are talking about NFT mania today. And what a perfect week to talk about it because it does feel like something's going on. Something big is going on with NFTs. I'm amazed at how fast NFTs have taken off. And to such heights so quickly, pretty unbelievable. What are we going to be talking about today? Yeah, we actually had to completely reorg the schedule for the show. We actually were going to have Hayden from Uniswop, but we actually kicked him out down the line for a future state of the nation because this week is all about NFTs. It is NFT week. It was NFT week last week. It was NFT week the week before. And just the momentum behind NFTs has not stopped. So we are bringing a previous guest of the show, Andy 8052, who is the founder of the fractionalized platform, which fractionalizes NFTs. And his community man, at Fractional, which is who's called D's. And these guys are, they both have their bios as NFT DGens. And so they were both a D-5 maximalist turned NFT maximumists. And so they

Starting point is 00:01:26 have been paying attention to the NFT markets, which is what we need to figure out what the hell is going on in the world of NFTs. I kind of feel like I need this episode, David, in my life, because I feel like somewhat of an NFT boomer. Do you know, like, like I've known about NFT. T's for a long time, hugely bullish on the asset class, but like, haven't really dug deep down the rabbit hole. Still can't wrap your head around it? Well, it's kind of hard, right? And you have to have a passion. So like, I'm looking at all of these markets on Opency. I'm trying to figure out, hey, you know, what's the next big project? How do you even evaluate these projects? What does it take? So I'm hoping to ask Andy and Dee's some of these questions just to get them out of the way.

Starting point is 00:02:06 You know, it's super cool here, David, is like with crypto, there are so many cohorts that have done really well, right? So in the early stages, you had to make kind of bets on base monies like Bitcoin and Eith and do well that way. Then you had to be sort of a finance geek or maybe a developer and get in on sort of the DFI boom, DFI, and all those booms continue, of course. But now this thing requires a different set of skills. It's a lot about, you know, art curation. How do you predict what's going to be the next big meme? It's going to be the next successful art project. Like, I haven't really worked out how to develop skills in that space. I'm really excited to explore this. Before we get into the episode, we should talk about some announcements and things

Starting point is 00:02:50 that are coming to the Bankless Nation. The first is we've got a new show, man. And it's hot. I just listened to it. We do? Yeah, we do. It's great. And I, you know, I didn't do a pre-listen. I listened to it at the same time, everyone else in the Bankless community did it because you've kind of taking this project and developed it on your own. But guys, this is called layer zero. And this is a new bankless show talking about what we talk about so often, which is the people layer, the community layer, the culture layer of crypto, that layer zero that's behind every single crypto network in existence. And so you are doing like these targeted interviews with key people in the space, not even key people, you know, just interesting people in the space and hearing

Starting point is 00:03:34 their story. So it's a different format for bankless. We had like the original, I guess the founder of Vitalik Buterin, which is Dimitri Buterin, Vitalik's dad on the episode. And I listened to this all this morning, David, is absolutely fantastic. Well done on that. What else do you want to say about layer zero in that episode? Yeah, it definitely follows a much more free flowing format. With every single bankless episode or podcast, we have like a massive like agenda that we go through. And this is the exact opposite. There's no agenda. We just have a conversation. And because there's so many interesting people in crypto,

Starting point is 00:04:08 that a free-flowing conversation is like always, almost always interesting, right? And so first episode, like you said, is it with Dimitri Boudrin. I have two more episodes that I've already recorded. Eric Connor is coming out next week, followed by Justin Drake. And each episode has gotten better and better already. I particularly loved both of those conversations. Each person has their own kind of, like, perspective about, the world and about crypto, that they, everyone has like ideas and thoughts that are unique to

Starting point is 00:04:37 them. But then when it comes to the world of crypto podcasts, like, we have to talk about like your project and we have to talk about fundamentals behind assets and we have to talk about, you know, technical details. David, stop making fun of our other podcasts. I don't want any of that on this show. I want to, to hear about like what people think about when they close their laptop lid and actually like turn off. Yesterday I recorded with Justin Drake, who actually, uh, there came this moment in this podcast where he was just thinking as like, well, I don't really know when this podcast episode's going to come out. So I don't know if I want to leak any alpha. And I said, well, this doesn't come out for three more weeks, Justin. So like go right ahead. And what he said was absolutely fantastic. It has to do with MEV and ultrasound money. So that's cool. But then we also talked to, you know, a fun fact about Justin Drake is like he's got a kid. And like you can see a lot of like Justin Drake in the kid according to Justin Drake, obviously. But then you can also connect like that to the, rebellious nature of Justin Drake to the rebellious nature of Ethereum at large, which is kind of the whole point of the show. Yeah, I think it's cool. It's not just the free form conversation. I think

Starting point is 00:05:42 that's a huge part of it, but it's also the different set of questions that are asked on the show. It's like, tell me about your story. Like, how did you meet Vitalik's mom was a question. That's not a question we would ask on a typical podcast. Or like, do you fear for Vitalik safety, a pretty crazy question? But like, I'm intensely curious about that. Or how often? Often, Dimitri Boutrin, do you check the price of Eith? So anyway, this is all really interesting content, new ground, exciting show. It comes out every Tuesday morning. We're going to have this, I think every Tuesday morning, hopefully, as long as David has it in him to do this.

Starting point is 00:06:17 And it'll come out on the podcast and also YouTube. So make sure you are subscribing to both of those channels to check that out. The other thing we should mention before we get into the show is our friends at Tracer Dow, they're doing two cool things that are about to be absolutely huge. One is Defy Perpetuals, which haven't yet taken off in the space yet, but are about to think perpetuals are huge everywhere else. They're about to be big in DeFi. They're building a Perpetuals product for this, allow you to go short and long on assets

Starting point is 00:06:47 like Ether, DFI tokens really easily, super cool. And they are launching a Dow, and they have a Dow. So they are inviting members of the bankless community listeners to the podcast to get involved in their Dow as a contributor as a governor. You guys, you can do that by joining their Discord. Discord is kind of like the office for DAOs, right? Like that's how you go into the office and, you know, put up your hand and say, here I am.

Starting point is 00:07:12 I'm a worker. I can do things. So go check that out. There will be a link in Discord for that. All right. Those are announcements. David, I got to ask you the question.

Starting point is 00:07:21 We start every episode of State of the Nation with, which is this. What is the state of the nation today, sir? The state of the nation is manic. We are a little bit manic right now. Like we said, NFT asset prices are all up into the right. Almost every single one of them that like has the any decent amount of attention. Most art block projects, most like profile picture NFTs, like all of these things have like insane charts with like whatever few available charts that there are to actually chart these things. People are buying into these things regardless of like whether, they're what they were previously interested in.

Starting point is 00:08:00 It seems to be like the entire attention of the crypto industry has focused on NFTs right now. And people are kind of like fervorous right now. So there's a little bit, we're all a little bit manic. The thing is like you can be a little bit manic, but we can all get a lot more manic. And so that's kind of what we're talking about on the show today is like how much

Starting point is 00:08:18 juice does this thing have? And can we actually turn this like, you know, crypto industry into or this like crypto native phenomenon into a global phenomenon? on maybe that's what's coming. And that's kind of the conversation I want to have today. These are very much my questions as well. And also the effect of NFTs on the broader crypto landscape. So we've talked so much about ETH being money. And D.C. investor and others have said, hey, ETH is now culture money, essentially. That's what you're buying when you're buying

Starting point is 00:08:47 NFTs. You're buying a piece of internet culture, a piece of crypto culture. And it's all denominated in ETH. So what other effects does the mania of NFTs have on crypto markets that remains to be seen as well? Hopefully we'll explore those topics today. Guys, stick with us. We will be back with Andy and Dees in just a minute. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use DFI. If you've been using Ethereum for the past 12 months, you've probably noticed the high gas fees and the slow confirmation times that have been plaguing defy. Too many people want to use Ethereum and it doesn't have enough capacity for all of us. That's where Arbitrum comes in. Arbitrum is a layer

Starting point is 00:09:32 two to Ethereum, which means Arbitrum can increase Ethereum's throughput by orders of magnitude at a fraction of the cost of what you are used to paying. When interacting with Arbitrum, you can get the performance of a centralized exchange while tapping into Ethereum's level of security and decentralization. This is why people are calling this Ethereum's broadband moment, where we get to add performance. performance onto decentralization and security. If you're a developer and you want to save on gas costs and overall make a better experience for your users, go to developer.offchainlabs.com to get started building on Arbitrum. If you're a user, keep an eye out for your favorite defy-apps building on Arbitrum.

Starting point is 00:10:08 Arbitrum has been working with over 300 teams, including Ethereum's top infrastructure projects, and we'll be opening up to all users shortly. There are so many apps coming online to Arbitrum, so you may want to pack your bags in preparation for the great migration to Arbitrum Layer 2. To get up to speed with Arbitrum, follow them on Twitter at Arbitrum and join their Discord. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure.

Starting point is 00:10:35 Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants.

Starting point is 00:11:01 We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dow's have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap Treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a Unigrant at Unigrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that

Starting point is 00:11:31 you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap for sponsoring Bankless. Hey guys, we are back full swing. This is NFT Mania, JPEG Mania. We've got two really great guests for you to talk all about NFTs, make sense of the markets, what's going on, hopefully explore some project and see what's good out there in the space. The first is Andy 805-2. He's a D-5D-Gen, turned it to an NFT maximalist, and not lately. He's been an NFT maximalist for quite some time. He's known as the guy with the Cryptopunk with the Beanie, and he's also the founder of Fractionalize. That's a platform for fractionalizing NFTs into ERC 20 tokens, so you can gain liquidity on them.

Starting point is 00:12:17 we've had Andy on before. Congrats on the raise, by the way, the paradigm raise, 8 million, I think or so. Andy, it's great to have you back on bankless. Thank you, sir. Yeah, thanks for having me. I feel like so much has happened in so little time since I was on last. Right. It's been crazy.

Starting point is 00:12:33 Yeah, we got to get caught up on what is happening in NFTs. We also have D's or DZE. He's a degenerate shit coin gambler who got into NFTs. Again, coming from the D5 space, getting into NFTs, he got into them in September. 2020. Then he went all in in January 2021. Sounds like my story with Bitcoin and Eith, but he's got one for Defi and NFTs. And then he's currently the community manager at Fractional and he's the host of many Twitter spaces on NFTs. You may have heard he does like four to six hours, like eight hours a day on Twitter spaces, just talking about NFTs. I need to catch one of these. Dees, it's great to have you as well.

Starting point is 00:13:14 Oh, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. in. Well, everyone's excited about NFTs these days. And I think when David and I started the summer with bankless, we thought we were going to get some kind of a layer two summer, like a DFI summer round two. But instead, we got JPEG summer. That's what's happening. And maybe that rolls into an NFT mania, a JPEG mania into the fall. I don't know. This doesn't show any signs of stopping or slowing down at least right now. I want to start with the big picture question. How did this happen? How did we get to this point? Andy, what's your take? I mean, like, a lot of it is really, who the hell knows?

Starting point is 00:13:53 But I think a part of it that has become like more clear to me is, you know, there's so much culture and community, like, especially on Ethereum. That's where almost all the NFT trading happens. And there's such like a valuable community of people on Ethereum who are doing things and interacting. and like it makes sense that they would have their own natural ways to collect things together or signal their success or their status. And like that would start to leak out into the rest of the world as Ethereum starts to leak out into the rest of the world. And so that's kind of how I've been like how I've been thinking about more of the origin

Starting point is 00:14:33 of why now, why is this happening is I feel like personally over the last year and half as I've been working on Ethereum, things have kind of taken a jump as far as Defi and just kind of the global status. of crypto. And so it makes sense that the collecting side of things would also grow. And when those types of things grow, they grow really fast. Deasy, what's your take on why this is happening? You think it was inevitable all along? Like, we're going to get an NFT mania season and this is just inevitable? Or is there some specific reason for the timing of this and the magnitude of it? Yeah. So I didn't expect any of this to happen the way it did, right? Like when I was

Starting point is 00:15:13 buying punks and art blocks and pegs and having an investment thesis. Like my best case scenario was that like the prices they're at right now was going to take like a year or two to get to. So the fact that it happened so quickly has even, you know, blown my own expectations. I think it's a variety of things. Number one, like NFTs are just fun, plain and simple. And it is a very low entry playground for people to come in and get involved. you can with very little money,

Starting point is 00:15:43 mint a project and potentially change your entire life off of one rare mint. And you can't do that with a shit coin. Like you can't 100 X a shit coin in a week. Like there's no way. You're going to get dumped on by whales. There's no chance. But you're seeing a lot of people come in with a small stack who just want to ape stuff. And I think there was a lull.

Starting point is 00:16:01 If you look at like the Ethereum and Bitcoin charts, pull it up here. But like in June and July, Ethereum, you know, is kind of pretty, like from May, actually, into June, we had the Sothabee's auction, which gave a lot of credibility to these NFTs. Ethereum wasn't doing much of anything. Define and shit coins were kind of just slowly ranging, and people are bored, and they want to do something.

Starting point is 00:16:26 So, like, I know a lot of my DFI friends didn't get in NFTs until, like, June and July, because they were bored, and it was enough for them to just say, hey, let's, you know, look at these pumps and art blogs. And I think it's almost reflexive where, like, people, make money, they come in and they don't take the money out. They just invested into the next project. And we're seeing this, you know, massive reflexivity where NFTs are just taking off. And like you said, we are in this manic phase. Like this could even be euphoria. Like we might look back in two months. We'd be like, what were we thinking? Fidenzas are selling for three million dollars.

Starting point is 00:17:01 Right. So I'm always like, you know, telling myself right now, like, do I have enough Ethereum that I'm happy? Like I'm selling NFTs every day, just to make sure I have enough Ethereum that I'm happy, where if this is like the euphoric top, then I'm good. But I'm still, you know, overly optimistic. And I still think people coming in are like early in a way. And this might be just like the beginning of the end. I mean, sorry, the end of the beginning. How much Ethereum do you need to be happy?

Starting point is 00:17:28 Because I'm still looking at the answer. That's a tough question. I mean, that's relative to your net worth and your goals. For me, I need enough Ethereum to like, I need like 30 to 50% my portfolio in Ethereum to be happy. We'll just say that. And I'm not there right now. There's never enough either.

Starting point is 00:17:47 That's for sure. Dees, you said that like people were perhaps minting these things because in contrast to buying a shit coin that like can't pump a thousand X because you'll get dumped on. And in contrast, you can just mint a token, which has by definition no previous sellers, There's no, like, privileged, you know, early minters, no, there's no, you know, NFT pre-mine.

Starting point is 00:18:11 And that kind of is reminiscent of some of the DeFi summer activities, which kicked off that whole defy mania because of the whole fair launch phenomenon. Like the whole, like, food coin forks, those are all, like, very much fair launch phenomenons. Do you think that that is a common denominator between what we saw with DeFi Summer in 2020 and what we're seeing in JPEG summer right now? Yeah, I think you're pretty spot on there. it's having fair distribution and a low barrier of entry. Even then, like, if you were a whale, you could get a lot of the liquidity from liquidity

Starting point is 00:18:45 mining where right now if you're a whale trying to mint a bunch of these projects, like, you're going to get them, but you're going to pay a ton in gas. And I think it's harder to, like, really dilute the, like, you could really dilute a liquidity pool, right? If you have $100 million and there's $25 million in the budget, pull and you dumped the 100 million in, like, you just diluted the crap out of everyone who's in there. Whereas like with something where there's only 8,88 minutes or 10,000 mints, you can't really dilute it to that level.

Starting point is 00:19:16 So it's even more like upside than DFI summer. What would you guys say that, Andy, go ahead if you want to say something? No, I would agree. I think that it's like, it's kind of all the best parts of DeFi summer and so much as like there's really high upside and there's a lot of value and like just scrolling to a little and Discord and Telegram and finding the next thing to buy. But then you just have these added benefits that aren't really possible in a DeFi token where like one, you can be emotionally attached to your NFTs.

Starting point is 00:19:49 Like I love Defi and that whole space. At the end of the day, like if I have to sell my maker for Ave or my comp for ETH, like, okay, you know, it's whatever. But like, I love my crypto punk and I don't want to sell it. And it doesn't really matter what the price is. And that's just like not a thing that really exists with with defy stuff. I definitely resonate with that because there was there's a time. I bought my,

Starting point is 00:20:13 my penguin avatar at like roughly 0.4th. And now the floor is at 0.2th. You know, good trade, good appreciation. But like, because it's unique and because I've put it as my profile picture and also to some degree because I'm a little bit of a public figure, like I would feel bad about like letting my penguin go. Like I would let the community down. I don't know who would buy my penguin.

Starting point is 00:20:35 I want my penguin. And so it does kind of feel like there's a one-way flow of like capital into these NFTs. And then like the emotional attachment like sucks you in and captures you. And it's like now it's stuck there. And then that actually kind of sets like a floor for some of these things. Yeah, definitely. I almost feel like a lot of these NFTs are like almost deflationary in a way. Because you have people who are just totally not price sensitive.

Starting point is 00:20:58 I think that was this guy Vincent Van Doe, who's a really big collector. and he tweeted out something the other day that I thought was really good where he said, you know, this isn't like a quick flip, this is a land grab. And like to him, he doesn't care what the prices. He doesn't care what the prices now. Like he's buying stuff because he thinks it's going to matter in 10 years. And so like when you have a bunch of people who are doing that, all of a sudden there just isn't quite enough to go around sometimes.

Starting point is 00:21:20 What would you guys say is the like starting pistol for this whole thing? Because like we talked about previously the NFT bear market, it, but like in retro in retrospect, turns out like that is exactly what you said, Andy, it was actually an NFT land grab. Do you think that there was like a, like a moment where this like thing actually started? Was there like a starting pistol to anything?

Starting point is 00:21:44 I think that like the start, start of all of it was actually two things that are now like not doing it. I haven't gone nearly as parabolic as everything else, which is NBA top shot at Nifty Gateway. And kind of like, and maybe I'm wrong. you could really dig into the data and this is incorrect. But based on my naive thesis, you had a bunch of people who were not into crypto,

Starting point is 00:22:06 but who got into NFTs in a very easily accessible way. And this was, you know, back in the fall of last year, so almost a year ago at this point. And they were paying with credit cards. They weren't really having to learn too much. But once you do it and you're actually like experiencing an online all the time liquid marketplace and all this fun stuff, you kind of want to learn more. I think a lot of people did. I made a lot of friends through TopShot, especially who did want to.

Starting point is 00:22:31 want to learn more. And I was teaching them how to install MetaMask and what Cryptopunks were and why they would want to buy one and all this stuff. And then a lot of those people came and they set up Metamask and did all that. And then they minted Bored Apes. And then Bored Apes went crazy. And like I've seen a strong correlation on my timeline, at least, of people who used to be MBA Top Shot fanatics who have Bored Apes as their profile pictures now. And all of a sudden, this was like a massive wealth generation event for an entirely new group of NFT collectors who are generally coming from a less crypto-native background. So would you say, Ryan and I, we often critique flow and top shots as kind of being

Starting point is 00:23:09 like fraudulent NFTs because they're done on a centralized blockchain. So are they really NFTs? And that's a conversation for a different day. But would you agree with the statement that like these non-Etherian-based NFT platforms that perhaps more centralized were actually like training wheels for people to come into the world of NFTs and then perhaps graduate to like the real, the real. the real NFT market, which is Ethereum? I definitely have seen that.

Starting point is 00:23:35 I'd be curious to hear Deez's perspective because he was on Top Shot as well pretty early on, but I've noticed that with a lot of people who I've interacted with. I would agree with everything you just said. For me, I feel like the starting, you know, the gunshot was in mid-January when John Bales sent out that article

Starting point is 00:23:55 that said, I just spent $35,000 on a JPEG or whatever it was. He's talking about the Jaw Morant moment he bought. And like a week later, an alien crypto pump sold to Flamingo Dow. And that was when I was like, oh, holy shit, here they come. Because I was involved with the Daily Fantasy scene a little bit. I was a low stakes player who like could grind and make a little bit of money, but I wasn't great.

Starting point is 00:24:19 And seeing guys like John Bales and Peter Jennings and all these other daily fantasy personalities come in, like I knew that was a really bullish sign because these are people like Andy said, we didn't see them on Ethereum. We didn't see them using any of our tools until after they got that, like, first. I probably used wrong terminology, but I call like an NFT flip. It's almost like a hit of crack. Like, if you buy a Top Shot and it goes up 10X in a week, you're thinking to yourself, like, holy shit, like I need more of this.

Starting point is 00:24:48 So then when Top Shot kind of died, like Andy said, they're like, oh, we got to find this next hit. Like, it's not Top Shot. Like this is not dying, but this is going down and people aren't excited about it. Like, what else is out there? people came into punks who could afford it. We saw a nice little run-up. We see the Christie's auction come out, kind of lends legitimacy to punks.

Starting point is 00:25:06 When you have an auction house, it's like, hey, we're displaying this with a Baskin on it and all these other famous artists, and this is a crypto punk. And then we had the Socrates set of, like, art blocks and the COVID alien punk and, like, 20 other NFTs. And I think that just kind of put a stamp on the whole NFT marketplace. Like, this is legit.

Starting point is 00:25:26 This is here to stay. and slowly but surely we started to see like traditional art collectors come into the space after those auctions. So like from June up until now, you know, people buying these art blocks and deaf thieves and punks, like they're not as many crypto native people as you think. I think there's a lot of people who are just coming in now who didn't even touch defy summer last year, didn't get involved with Ethereum until seeing these NFT auctions and are now buying it up because to them it's like a couple hundred grand on a piece of arts. deal. They look at things with 10 plus time horizons, like Andy said, about the land grab. It's just like, what's the total supply of these? Like, if you meant Picasso when he was 30 and you knew that he was only going to ever make 10,000 pieces and they were already made and you could grab a slice right now, like you might think differently than if they're constantly supplying more and more.

Starting point is 00:26:18 And I think all of that is just like driving the prices up, basically. Dees, you're touching on the subject I want to turn to next. And so I kind of want you to expand on that. But when Ryan and I were in the intro and at the very beginning, we were talking about, like, hey, we're kind of like just confused. Like, people are spending money on all these JPEGs. Like, we've never spent money on JPEGs before. Like, what's going on? And so, like, we're coming from the defy world, right? Where, like, we have these capital assets with, you know, cash flows, total value locked.

Starting point is 00:26:46 There are things that we can measure that make us feel more secure about when we allocate capital to exposure to some sort of defy token. And so, like, to some degree, NFTs don't have. any fundamentals, right? Because they're just pictures. Is that really true or are the fundamentals just something else that we haven't really learned yet? So when you guys are looking at NFT projects, like, are there any fundamentals to talk about regardless of like what kind of the project is? Like what are the common like things that are always like fundamentally like bullish or bearish about like an NFT project that you guys pay attention to? This is going to sound like super not quantitative, but like it's most.

Starting point is 00:27:28 vibes. Like, I go into the Discord. I talk to the team. I'm a big fan of trying to get the team on a Twitter space and just like pick their brain and ask about all their plans and, you know, wherever they come from and where they think they're going. I think right now we see a lot of success with like punks and art blocks because similar to what you said, there's a bunch of comparables there. If you go to the punks page, you look at 10,000 punks, you look at all the recent sales, you look at trait breakdowns, you look at all these different comparables and you feel somewhat safe throwing $250 to a million into a pump because you're like, oh, well, these two just sold and they look just like it and they sold for that amount. So they must be worth this amount.

Starting point is 00:28:08 And similar with art blocks, like you have the different comparables. Like you're looking at a set of ringers or a set of Fedenzas and you're like, okay, well, other collectors are valuing with this amount. Like, clearly there's something here. And I think we haven't seen that spill over to the 101 art yet. So like if you look at like ex-coppy, Hacketal, coldy, some of these OGs super rare artists, their prices haven't moved nearly as much as like art blocks. Like art blocks might be up 1,000 X and like, you know, X copy might be up five bets. So it's a big gap. And I think that's because the people coming in, like you said, they just don't know what they're evaluating.

Starting point is 00:28:40 So they feel more comfortable buying something with comparables. Yeah, definitely. I've noticed that as well. And I think it's just like scary. Like as someone, I don't really have a ton of one of one art. I have a little bit just because purely I like it. And I have absolutely no intention of selling it. if it goes up a ton, awesome.

Starting point is 00:28:57 But like, I don't feel super qualified to decide what art is good and what art isn't good. It's never really been something that I've thought about in my life previously. And so looking at different projects that are more community driven or like Deves is saying, have tons of comparables and art collection. It just feels a lot easier. It's kind of like training wheels in a way of how to collect art. And so, yeah, I think that that like is currently. driving a lot of how people are making their purchasing decisions. But then as far as fundamentals

Starting point is 00:29:31 outside of that, I think a lot of it, and it's as silly as vibes is like it's kind of just all memes. And it's all just, you know, the value is in the cultural relevance of the things that you are buying. And if you think that those things will be more relevant in the future than they are now, then they'll probably be worth more money than they are now. And it's hard to quantify that. Are you guys worried that like the structure of this market is like almost super duper conducive to creating a mania? Because Dees was saying like, well, if like my punk looks like this and their punk looks like that, well, I can probably get this from that. Meanwhile, there's probably someone else who's doing the same thing. It's like, well, their punk is like this and my punk's like this.

Starting point is 00:30:13 So I could probably get this for that. And all of a sudden like kind of like we were talking about the inherent like kind of one way flow of capital. It feels like people are just going to stare, step their way into a. insane evaluations and almost by definition that has to just be a bubble right like if it's only one if it's only up only then at some point like something's going to pop right are you do you guys kind of think that this is just a little bit too conducive to be becoming like a massive bubble yeah well so I think yes but also kind of no uh which is a weird answer but so I think in general yes NFTs are in a bubble right now, like obviously.

Starting point is 00:30:50 When, how far up in the bubble we are, I'm not really qualified to say, but I think that everyone would agree they are in a bubble. But really the question is the really high end of NFTs, like the extremely desirable stuff, we don't know what percentage of people who are buying those are buying them purely for speculation or are buying them because they're saying, I don't want to have there be a world where I don't own a punk or I don't own a Fidenza. And those people probably don't care about. about the mania or what price they're buying it at.

Starting point is 00:31:20 So like, I have a Fidenza that I was lucky to get at pretty cheap. And I, unless it got to a price that was really insane, I'm just not gonna sell it. I don't care. I wanna have one. I'm ordering the print and I wanna have it on my wall. And that's like an important part of like Ethereum history for me and my time working in Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:31:38 And the price isn't really as relevant. And I am by no means the wealthiest art collector around in the NFT space. And so I think that there's, you know, know, a non-trivial amount of people who are buying this stuff, especially the really high-end stuff, are in positions where the amount of money they're spending isn't totally relevant. And it's just kind of knowing what percentage of people is that. And then whenever a bubble does pop, what's the floor at that point?

Starting point is 00:32:04 And really, we have no idea. But, you know, if there's 10,000 punks and 10,000 apes and a couple thousand really, really valuable art blocks, not that many pieces of art to collect. And so whatever that floor is, might be, we're already past it. It might be a lot higher. It's really hard to say. Is any color on that? I was trying to pull up Nance and to look at ArtBlocks real quick.

Starting point is 00:32:29 But what I've seen is similar to what Annie said. Like a lot of these collectors, they're buying these NFTs and it's a drop in the bucket to them. Like if they need to liquidate anything to have money in real life, like the NFTs aren't first, they're last. and if you look at the top holders of art blocks, I was going to Nancy, but I don't have it up right now. I can remember from last week when I was looking at it, like out of the top 100 holders of art blocks, these people aren't even selling them. You can look at the seven day flow and see, like, is it incoming or outgoing and how much? And it's like the most I saw with some guy who sold 25 and most people were around like selling five to 10.

Starting point is 00:33:08 And that's like they own 200 plus. And it's like kind of wild that like if they minted, had all these and are sitting on a thousand X plus and they're just thinking to themselves like, oh, let me shave off like my least favorite things and hold on to what's best. And like, I don't think they're going to sell what's best, period, especially someone like Snowfro, who has the most art blocks. He has his stuff in a vault. He has to drive a thousand miles to unlock the vault. He just went through a whole big op-sec thread where he explained like his reasoning behind this. But these people aren't selling. And like Andy said, there's not that

Starting point is 00:33:41 much of a supply. If there's 10,000 punks, there's like 3,000 holders right now. There's 10,000 apes. There's like, what, 5,500 maybe holders. And then art blocks, there's, I think, a little over 10,000 holders. But there's a lot more supply there. But there's not that much. Like, that's still not a lot. It feels insane to say that, given the price action, but it's still not crazy to me it. So what I'm really curious, guys, is like I'm kind of approaching this space as somewhat of a new at this stage and like trying to figure out how to evaluate what a good NFT looks like or what a good NFT like class looks like. And I think similar to what she said, Dee is like, what's interesting about this, maybe it's early stage mania, we don't know. But the wealthiest people in the world

Starting point is 00:34:37 aren't in crypto, at least not yet. And what's really interesting is seeing people come from outside of the crypto community and start to enter into NFTs, right? Like, look at this. This is Visa News. Visa just bought this punk, a crypto punk. Visa has a crypto punk profile picture. Right?

Starting point is 00:35:00 I mean, not on my list, my bingo card for 2021. I got Odell Beckham. He's got a crypto punk, right, from the Lakers. So like people are starting to recognize and legitimize the culture that crypto is really building. And that's a, that's kind of a unique phenomenon. But what I want to get my head wrapped around is, if I'm new to the NFT world, I'm trying to evaluate like what I should buy. I'm curious about the space, what I should buy. What do I look at? Right. here I am on OpenC, for instance. And maybe we should talk about like two classes of NFTs.

Starting point is 00:35:43 The first is sort of the, the avatar style of NFTs that have been like, it seems to me anyway, super hot, you know, the crypto punks, the bored apes of the world, the pudgy penguins, the me bits, these types of things. They have a ton of surface area by definition. So let's talk about these first. So, I mean, if I'm like just on OpenC, looking at a project, how do I evaluate, like, which crypto punk I should buy or even like which category of project I should buy in the, in the avatar class?

Starting point is 00:36:21 I mean, let's say I'm somebody who, I mean, crypto punks are already established, you know, their high end. I'm not in the market. I want to get in on maybe the next like pudgy penguin or something cool like that. how do I go to OpenC or various websites and tools and evaluate what I should buy? Like take me through the 101. What are your thoughts here, Andy? Well, I think this isn't something that I do a ton, but I know other people do it,

Starting point is 00:36:50 is that they will just go to Wales wallets and look at what they own, look at what's been newly added to the site. And you have to be careful and look at what they've actually purchased and not what people have just sent them. But that is something that I've heard people do relatively concerned. consistently. Outside of that, I think that being just like really active on Twitter is probably the best place and having a group of people who you really trust where if they say, hey, I saw this thing, it comes out tomorrow. I think it has a good shot. Just, you know, mint a couple of

Starting point is 00:37:21 them if you have the ability to. It's probably your best course of action. And you're not going to hit in everyone. I have a bunch of like random garbage in my open sea that didn't pan out. But then I have ones that did pan out that I've done well. And so I think that if you're purely just doing it because you want to like have your best chance at hitting something good, that's probably your best course of action. But honestly, what I think is most important. And generally what I do is just buy stuff that I like. And there's really something at like every price point. And there's so many of these little sub-communities that have grown around these different profile picture projects. And there isn't quite as much address overlap as you would guess. There's definitely a

Starting point is 00:38:06 lot, but there isn't quite as much address ownership overlap as you would kind of expect in all these different projects. And I kind of think of it like different, like Twitch subscribers or subredits or something where there's probably enough people in the world to support a bunch of different profile picture projects, not all at the same price point. You're going to have punks and board apes that are kind of the upper echelon of these things. but if you have a thousand people who all really love your random profile picture project, it probably will still be fine as long as everyone who's who is in it, like actually is in it because they love the artwork and they love the community and you're doing something

Starting point is 00:38:42 fun. And so I think that's really more important than almost anything because then at the end of the day, you're happy that you have it because you like it and not just because you think that there's a good chance that it goes up 100x. So definitely buy something you like. But like, I'm on this list here, and this is, you know, we're down a little bit on training volume of open C. There's something called the Cybercongs, and then there's like Coolcats. So what's a difference between a Cybercong and a Cool Cat? Andy, are you telling me I should just click through and look at the Cybercongs and be like, you know, I like, select one I, the ones I like, or is there more to it? Because some of these Avatar projects have not picked up and others

Starting point is 00:39:24 have, is it as simple as just let your taste kind of dictate and get in early? I don't know if it's that simple. I would backtrack a second here and say, like, if you're trying to make the most money possible, I think it's plus EV to mint most things. And I think what Andy said about finding a group is very important. Twitter is great, but there's a lot of noise. And sometimes if you don't have like specifically curated lists, it's hard to separate a lot of signal from that noise. If you can just make a discord of like 10 to 50 people who are interested in doing this and working together, you guys can move mountains. Like it reminds me of Uniswap summer where I was in a telegram with 50 dudes watching the Uniswap new listing bot. And it's a very

Starting point is 00:40:10 similar thing with these NFTs where it's like, oh, this is coming out today. Like what are we minting guys? Like what do you see? And they might share a few things. And if I like the art on any of them, I'll mint, you know, between one and 20. But I think what Andy said, too, is like, you kind of have to like the art at the end of the day, because if you get stuck with this and you see it in your wallet, it looks horrible, you're going to ask yourself, like, why did I blow, you know, 5 grand or 10 grand on this? Something like Kongs, they're a little more in depth, right? Like there's Genesis Kong.

Starting point is 00:40:41 You could get a Genesis Kong and it yields banana. And then you use banana to breed baby Kongs. And they all show up under the Cyber Kong thing. So when you're looking at it, you're wondering, like, why are some of these Kongs 50 Ethereum and selling? And the baby calling it, too, Ethereum isn't selling. So, like, you do have to know the different mechanics of how these projects work. Cool Cats was one where, like, I talked to the guy. He said he's been making the cat for on and off 10 years.

Starting point is 00:41:09 Like, you can go look at his Instagram and go back. And he's literally drawing different types of the blue cat. And when I heard that, it's like, you know, this guy has a history with the cat. It's not like he just came in and was like, how do I make an avatar project for people to buy? But he was more concerned about like, oh, this is perfect for me to build a community around this cat that I love. And that's the type of thing. Like I have two cats I love and I probably won't ever sell them because I just want to see what they do with them. Whereas like, you know, I might want to sell other things quicker because I'm like, oh, here's a hype event that's going to drive volume.

Starting point is 00:41:45 And this is a good time for me to get out. So, like, I look at my different bags with different mindsets like that. I really want to drive the point home about only buying something that you really like. Because that's, when we were earlier talking about how this, like, market is just a one-way flow of money. The way that this thing stays rational and doesn't get over as ski tips is if every participant is only buying stuff that they like, right? If you only buy, so, like, it's more about, like, items that you trinkets that you find in a store that you're willing to part with your dog. with and then you take it home and it lives on your shelf for the rest of your life. If you are buying, if you're going into the store and you're like saying, hey, I want every

Starting point is 00:42:24 single trinket that you have, give them all to me, it's because you're trying to resell them later and you're playing the greater fools theory. And so like there's a greater fools like valuation thesis. And so there's some sort of like level of having like responsible exposure and responsible risk management by only buying the things that you like. because like Andy said earlier, if it goes to zero, like, no, like, if it goes to zero, you still have it on your shelf and you still like it. Like, I'm sure you were to like it a little bit more if it wasn't at zero, but at least

Starting point is 00:42:54 you still have the thing. And so maybe some of the best advice that we can give is like if you are thinking about getting exposure to NFTs because you have this fomo about this like market that's going on, you don't have to fomo in. You just have to find something that looks cute. And to some degree, that's kind of why I personally really like penguins. Like the penguins are just cute. They're just cute little buddies.

Starting point is 00:43:15 And that's kind of the fundamentals. And so if you're playing the game of NFTs, you want to buy something that you like that you also kind of think other people will like, too, if you want to actually have adequate exposure. Any thoughts on that, Andy? I totally agree. And I think, you know, like I said,

Starting point is 00:43:33 I have NFTs that I bought that. I probably can never sell for more than I bought them for, but I like them. And one day, when I have a nice digital display, I'll display them in my house, and I think they look sick. And that's awesome. And then I have other stuff where it's like, oh, you know, I've been very picky with avatar projects that I've, that I've minted and bought over the last couple of months.

Starting point is 00:43:51 So that, like, whole space has really heated up. And there's some that I think don't look great and I don't really care about them. And I don't really want to have them after I've had some experiences in the past where I have others sitting in my wallet that I now have hidden on my OpenC profile. And so I'd rather just stick with the stuff where I'm like, oh, that looks, that looks really cool. And it's funny or I can make a meme out of it or I can send it to my girlfriend. and she can think it's funny. And like that to me is very important when I'm trying to decide this stuff at this point.

Starting point is 00:44:18 Because at the end of the day, if all I cared about was like a safe plus bet, I probably wouldn't just be like aping into random avatar projects. I think using the perspective of getting a digital display to illustrate your NFTs, do you want that NFT up on your wall? Like should be a good like litmus test for whether or not like people should like press the button on a ledger to buy that NFTs.

Starting point is 00:44:43 There's something, though, there's something, it appears to me very memetic here, right? And by that, I'm talking about our Luke Burgess episode about memetic desire, which is like, it's not just, to me anyway, again, you guys are deeper into NFTs than I am, but it's not just like I want this NFT, excuse me, because I like it. It's also am I the type of person to buy a crypto punk, right? Which is not just an individual, do I like the pixels that form this cryptopunk image? It's also about embracing the group collective culture, right? And so like, you have to almost answer that question.

Starting point is 00:45:29 Do I want to be part of the me bits club or the board Apes Club? the people who are into crypto punks or am I a different sort of individual? It's like it's like a social self-actualization type of decision and there's something like deep and cultural hidden about how we mimic other human beings and associate in in social groups. I wonder if you could talk about the social dynamics of this. Dee's any thoughts on that? Yeah, I actually had like two things I wanted to touch on from the last point too. And that is going back to what Andy said, buying what he wants to display. I think like virtual galleries are going to take off a lot more. I have a lot of fun building and on cyber and gallery.com. And I think like I don't even think I'll have a lot of this stuff in my

Starting point is 00:46:18 house. It'll just be in virtual galleries I build and other people visit. And the other advice I would give is like buy things in pairs. Don't just buy one of a pudgy penguin or one cool cat because it makes the decision of parting with one of them when it's your only one way harder. It's a lot easier if you buy in pairs and you sell your lesser of the two after a price movement to feel like, good, I locked in profit. It's all good. I'm not like, oh, I just sold my only punk and I might not ever be able to get it back. But yeah, going on the memetic desire and like culture in these communities, I think you're right. I thought a lot about punks. I don't know if anyone here played like Rainscape growing up, but if you did, you're well aware of the party hat items.

Starting point is 00:46:58 They came out 2002, limited supply. They're given out for free. And over time, those party hats are still the most valuable items in the game. And I looked at punks thinking like the same line of reasoning, like, holy shit, these are going to be like the new party hats. But instead of just mattering in runescape, it's going to matter for the entire crypto ecosystem because of the culture of the ecosystem wants to show off wealth in a crypto-native way. They don't want to go buy Basquiat or Picasso and put it behind it.

Starting point is 00:47:28 them so that when they're on a live stream you can see it they want to show off with a crypto native flex and i bought my first punk at like a thousand or twelve hundred and fifty bucks and i didn't like at the time know much about the punk community at all i just had known like wow these are really limited and i think these are going to have like these are going to behave like the party hat market behave um so that was like kind of my take on the memetic desire like people don't know they want these yet because they don't see other people displaying them and they don't know like like mimetic desire to me is like you don't know what you want until you see what other people want and then you copy their taste so if you can have a little bit of foresight and be the taste maker rather than the

Starting point is 00:48:11 taste follower you can maybe have an impact on that memetic desire in the future yeah that's really insightful comments and i definitely appreciate the the runescape reference and actually so did the the YouTube chat as well. Guys, we have to talk about, like, one of the, the biggest star of this show, which is the whole art blocks phenomenon and generative art. And overall, I really think, like, if we are on the cusp of some NFT mania, what gets me really, really excited is that if we inject a bunch of capital into digital art, like, at some point, that flows right into, like, good innovation.

Starting point is 00:48:45 And that's kind of what I am seeing with the art blocks phenomenon. So we're going to get to that conversation next, but first I'm going to rugpole everyone and send us into our. second round of sponsors. So here we go. When you shop for plane tickets, you probably use kayak, Expedia, or Google to compare ticket prices. So why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto? When you make your trades, you want to make sure that you're getting the best possible price on your trade and that you aren't paying high gas costs that you could have otherwise avoided. That's why you should be using Macha. Macha routes your orders across all the

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Starting point is 00:51:00 and stay tuned as more and more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to Ledger.com, grab your ledger, download Ledger Live, and get all of your DApps all in one place. All right, guys, we are back with the state of the nation, the state of NFTs, the state of the NFT mania. And I actually want to turn the conversation to art blocks because I'm really excited if this is indeed a big, big,

Starting point is 00:51:28 bull market that we have ahead of us. It's already a bull market, but if there's more ahead of us, inevitably what bull markets incentivize is innovation. And one of the big things that we've really seen, like almost this star of the NFT show, at least in the last few months, has been art blocks. And to me, the innovation behind art blocks is the whole phenomenon of generative art.

Starting point is 00:51:49 Can you guys kind of just extrapolate and expand on how you, what role you've seen art blocks fill in the world of this growing NFT bull market? Like what is art blocks? Why is it so cool? Why do people like them? Andy, let's start with you. Yeah. So I was actually like a bit later to art blocks and probably D's was and some others,

Starting point is 00:52:09 mostly just because I'm not actually that good at all of this. That's really the main thing, I think. But so ArtBlocks is for anyone who's not aware, a generative art platform. They have three different places where you can release your generative art. The most popular being ArtBlock's curated, which is an invite-only drop system. So far, I believe they've had 32 different drops on there so far, so maybe 33, something like that. And yeah, you see 100,000 Ethereum and volume on OpenC4. It's highly desirable.

Starting point is 00:52:45 And so each art blocks project on there, you know, has a very different look and feel. And there's a bunch created by different artists. I think a couple artists have done multiple. I'm not totally sure, though. And yeah, so they're all generatively done through a programming language. It's called like P.S something. I don't know. I'm definitely not an expert in that by any means.

Starting point is 00:53:10 And it's loaded up into a smart contract. And then when people mint, it generates the art for them at the time. of mint. And so like personally, I think that's super cool because it's something that would be hard to replicate in the real world because you have like this provable chain of everything that happened and how you got to the point where your art was generated that definitely is a value add in my opinion, which I think makes it super interesting. And yeah, so that's been some of like the biggest sales has been like the Fidenzas and chromy squiggles and ringers. It's pretty insane. These can probably add more color.

Starting point is 00:53:46 Yeah, D's. Yeah. I found art blocks. My friend Trill told me about them in December of 2020, and I'm into a couple of squiggles, and I was pretty addicted because it's kind of a mixture of marrying the rarity slash gambling aspect of the profile pictures, but you're buying legit art in the same sense.

Starting point is 00:54:09 So, like, each series, like, say the Fedenses, there's 90099 of them, they have different traits and certain traits are very rare and like you know people will covet those traits significantly more than like a floor so it still has the same profile picture rarity slash aesthetic premium but it also is like legit art that to me is more meaningful to own in some sense like you can own a ton of cute penguins and a lot of cute cats but owning art that like you want to hang in your house, or at least I do, it was algorithmically generated at the time that you minted it using your transaction hash to generate what you got, like to me is awesome. Because the way Snowfro describes it is like you're an artist yourself as a minter.

Starting point is 00:54:59 Like at the time of mint, the place you are at, the nanosecond you are at when that transaction confirms gives you that unique hash and you're a part of the whole process. And when he said it like that, it made me get really attached to anything I minted versus what I bought on secondary. Because I can see in the chain of provenance, like, I was the person who got this from the smart contract that minted it. And I'm attached to those more. Yeah, ArtBlocks has been a wild ride. And I think, yeah, it's P5.js is the language most people use. So, D, I have a bunch of questions about, like, generative art and how Art Blocks works.

Starting point is 00:55:38 So the first is, are you saying when you mint it, it's kind of like random what comes out the other side based on some sort of inputs and outputs, but you're sort of like, it's kind of the magic eight ball. You don't know like what is going to pop out? Yeah, it's completely random. So you can look normally before a drop, they have a test net mint, and you can see, you know, maybe 50 samples of what the algorithm put out. but you don't know what you're going to get until it is minted. That's wild. It's very wild.

Starting point is 00:56:17 You know when you look at the ringers, like, oh, hey, it's going to be some type of string wrapped around some type of peg, but you don't know what formation is going to come out, what colors those pegs are, if they're going to have bull's eyes, if the background's going to be a different color. And the artists, they weight all of these different things in their code. So they know, but they don't leak it until it's already out that like, oh hey if you see that trait it's really rare because the shot of that coming up is like 1% or 0.1% or something wow okay and then obviously there's a cost to mint is that a steep cost to mint

Starting point is 00:56:51 um so recently they changed the way drops came on the platform before they were very cheap it would be like squiggles were 0.035 eth um and then like another project may be like 0.1 East. Now it's a Dutch auction and it starts high, like maybe five or three Eth and it goes down every five minutes, like a quarter-eath interval or something like that. So now you really are playing a game of chicken, like, okay, who is, can we all work together and get the mint price down or at what point is everybody going to jump in and mint it? So it's a lot specifically is moved to a Dutch auction, right? Others are still kind of you pay whatever. Yes. Yes. Yes. The pudgy penguins and those type of things aren't Dutch auction.

Starting point is 00:57:41 It's just art blocks. And the thing is, it's smart. At the end of the day, artists are getting a lot more with this model. With the old model, you might spend 0.1 on the mint that goes to the artist. And you might spend another half an Ethereum in gas because you're using a thousand guay or 1,500 guay to get a transaction in because everybody's fighting for these mints. So Ethereum's got to take its cut. Yeah, so the option was like, do we want to figure out a way to get more money into the artist? Like there's clearly a demand for this, right?

Starting point is 00:58:15 Like, we're pricing it too low. So they went to the Dutch auction model. And honestly, I haven't minted much at all since they changed it because I'm maybe too cheap and used to the old model. But it's better for the artists and everything is minting out anyway. And it's good to see. And I think it raises the floor on all the old projects too because you can't get in at the point one entry anymore. Like, it's not going to happen. The Dutch auctions, they seem to mint out by, like, one-eath.

Starting point is 00:58:43 I don't think I've seen one go under one-eath. It's interesting that all of this is still happening on Ethereum in that you've got, like, or the bulk of it's happening on Ethereum, in that you have layer twos, which could make the minting process cheaper. But is there, like, when it's minted on Ethereum and it costs a bit more, is there something special about that? Does that lend to the legitimacy of the piece? Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:59:06 I think most collectors, when they're, spending a thousands of dollars on a piece. Like, they want it on L1. Like, they want it not on a side chain. That's the mentality I've got from every big collector I've talked to. Like, I haven't seen anyone who is super excited about, like, minting an art block on Polygon or minting an art block on flow or like what that looks like. No one cares if it's on like Joe's side chain, right? It's got like the most legitimacy as if it's on Ethereum. So I'm curious about this. So there's a I think this just happened yesterday. Yeah, it was so cool.

Starting point is 00:59:42 Yeah, so an art buyer started with a $1,400 art block piece. I don't know if that's the minting price or maybe he purchased it, he or she, and sold it for $3.3 million. This is, you call this a Fidenza, which is a style of art block, one of the most, I think, rare, maybe more costly pieces, these. I'm looking at it. It looks awesome. It looks super cool.

Starting point is 01:00:07 something you might see in like a modern art museum, like, you know, MoMA or something like that. $3.3 million, though, why is this thing worth that much in comparison to all the other art block pieces? So I can say that this was a second, the first purchase was a secondary sale. They bought it for 0.58 Ethereum, I think, a few, like two months back or something. but I think that it's helpful when thinking about NFTs in general that like think about the most valuable artwork that trades in the real world right now or the most valuable trading cards and all that stuff and think about how incredibly inefficient those markets are and how the amount of middlemen that are taking up a ton of time and money and effort and like it

Starting point is 01:01:02 To me, it just makes logical sense that all of the really high-end things that are going to happen in NFTs are just going to, like, be orders of magnitude larger than what's happening in, like, in the current real world art markets, because it's just, it's 24-7, it's completely global. There's no barrier to entry, unless obviously have to have the money to do it. And so I think that all of those things combined, it's creating this really intense, necessarily like land grab for the really high-end stuff. And so this piece is considered rare for a Fidenza based on the color palette and some of the way that the line work has done and stuff. I'm definitely not an expert on what exactly makes a Fidenza rare. These could probably say more than I can. Yeah, I'd love to talk about it. This Fidenza in my mind was over by.

Starting point is 01:01:46 I don't know who bought it. I think they really just fucked with it. Like I don't, there's nothing extraordinarily rare about this. It's, you know, you can look at up. There's a good website for anyone who wants more. info on rarity on art blocks. It's called rarity. Dot guide. And on that site, you can, yeah, I'll just, you pull it up, we'll go through it. If you control F, Fidenza, it's like, I think the 78th project, but there's a whole list of every art blocks project. Well, I got that right. So if you type

Starting point is 01:02:18 313 and search for mint by ID, it'll show you this fedenza, and it'll show you under the picture of the fedenza, the rarest traits it has. And the floor. for those traits. I don't know why it's not loading for you. Look at it on my screen right now. The rarest trait for it is the medium scale, which is just like the size of the strips are this medium size.

Starting point is 01:02:45 But there's still 35 out of the 99 Fidenzo's have this. So it's not the most extremely rare thing. And the floor for it you can see is what, $4009.90. So I think the person who bought it just really, really, really liked this aesthetic of how it looked. Like I was talking to icebags about it. Like we're pretty into Fedenzas and talking about what we think these,

Starting point is 01:03:07 where these are going. And we saw this by and we're like, what the hell? Like I, I couldn't really justify like why they spent a thousand Eath on it, being completely honest outside of just like they really like the aesthetic of it. But that has to be important too, right? Dias says it's not only sort of the rarity of it, but it's how these various rare features kind of pull together and create an aesthetic that an individual human mind values.

Starting point is 01:03:35 Yeah, definitely. And that's the thing too with art blocks, right? It's a art, not a science. So you can't just be like, oh, it's not that rare. Look at the stats. Somebody likes it and they like the composition of all those traits. They're going to pay whatever premium to get it in their wallet. You know what's crazy about this is like with these smart contract art pieces feels to me

Starting point is 01:03:54 like the next Picasso could be a robot. Do you know what I mean? It's maybe not even a human being. Maybe it's just an algorithm that's going to produce our art. And that's weird for you guys are probably already there, but that's weird for me to contemplate. Well, this also fundamentally changes the relationship between like the human and the artist, right? So like to produce an art block, if the art block format, even maybe it's not the art block platform, but the generative art format, If that is the future of like digital art and specifically NFT enabled digital art, like the artist has to be able to code or there has to be a coder maybe in tandem with an artist, but there's somebody who can code regardless because you've got to get somebody who can understand the algorithm in order to like, you know, leverage that code to make a bunch of like, you know, randomly generated art. I think I want to add a little bit of color here, which with why art blocks I think was so successful. and we know in the gaming world

Starting point is 01:04:52 that like the loopbox model is really, really enticing to players and this kind of feels like that, right? Like you submit a transaction, your unique at a transaction with a specific transaction hash is what generates the randomness input into the art blocks randomly generated art

Starting point is 01:05:08 and then that produces a piece of art. And so like with we all humans love to gamble. We are gamblers who at heart and like having this sort of like randomness like hey like you might, might get, you might strike gold or you might get nothing. Like that is really, really enticing to people. And so this, and, and so like the, the randomness part of it with your own human input where you, like, you actually might get something really, really rare back. I think it's really, really

Starting point is 01:05:33 enticing as a kind of like turning this into a game. And all humans also love games. And one of the ways I've tried to wrap my head around this is I was talking to a friend in Discord about like trying to wrap my head about why certain crony squiggles were so incredibly valuable. And, uh, and others weren't, is that, like, there are apparently some chromy squiggles are a perfect spectrum, as in the last color of the end of the spectrum, is also the same color as the very first part of the spectrum. And apparently there's a website based on, like, finding chromy squiggles that are perfect spectrums. And I'm reminded of, like, I have some old friends from middle school and high school that are big, big baseball fans. But sometimes, like, when I listen to them talk about baseball, they're not talking about, like, what's going on in the field.

Starting point is 01:06:19 they're talking about numbers. And baseball, to them, is just like this sticky, sticky ball, hitty game, which is overlaid, like, this massive, like, complex rabbit hole of numbers, right? Like, what is this one particular baseball players, like, batting average when the infield is shifted right? And, like, because there's such a richness in numbers and richness in, like, you know, things to pay attention to, that sort of, like, kickstarts this game of, like, mimetic desire and just like things to contemplate and discuss about. And so like to some degree,

Starting point is 01:06:51 it doesn't even matter what the image is. If there's like a lot of cool things to talk about that that goes behind actually producing that image, then all of a sudden like humans really, really wanted. How do you guys feel about that like perspective? I think it makes sense in so much as it's, it's a lot of fun to really get into the weeds

Starting point is 01:07:13 and try to figure out what looks good. But I do also think to a certain extent, like with art blocks, that the aesthetics do matter. I mean, obviously it's by, It's like everyone has a personal preference, but I tend to agree with a lot of the kind of floor-based rankings of our blocks curated projects and how much they're worth. Like I think that Fidenzo's are really cool, probably the coolest looking art blocks. And they are, as of right now, the most valuable in like floor market cap. So it's probably like a bit of a combination of both.

Starting point is 01:07:45 But I do think that the ability of people to like really dig into numbers and feel like they're finding an edge or something is super. valuable. It was wild, too. You mentioned the perfect spectrums, and we talked to Von Mises in a Twitter space last week, but he was one of the people who, like, when Squiggles came out very early before, perfect spectrum and full spectrum wasn't always a trait in Squiggles. That's a fairly new addition to, like, the OpenCCherty list. And Vaughn had known, like, back in December that these perfect spectrums were a thing,

Starting point is 01:08:18 and he was hunting them. And he was putting like small but like slightly over the floor bids on perfect spectrums to like not trigger anybody into guessing like why is he offering so much. And I think he bought like two of them like for like you know, point one eighth. And he just sold one recently for like 250th. But it's like he was out in the weeds with a spreadsheet of all the squiggles knowing which one was a perfect spectrum way before like the overall community even known. So it's interesting where you can have this edge, like you said, where if you get really in the weeds and you're looking at this from a unique angle, if you can show that unique angle to the group of collectors and kind of make it a common knowledge thing, then the upside in that is insane. I'm curious, do people come to you guys, like you as an expert in this space and like ask you to go help them, go figure this out? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:09:12 What you've developed is like a particular set of skills, right? And a lot of, I mean, it takes training to get to your level on this. So, I mean, are people coming to soliciting and be like, D's just come, you know, buy the best NFTs for me and I'll give you a cut, something like that. Yes, I haven't taken any cuts. I probably should have. I mostly just give like free, not financial advice is what I call it. But yeah, I do get a lot of questions. I try to point people into buying what they like.

Starting point is 01:09:46 I'll give them the link to the attribute list of punks. And I'll ask them, like, what are your favorite traits? Like, some people really like certain traits and some people don't. And it's like, I don't want to tell you what I think the best value is because what the best value to my personal aesthetic is might not be yours. So it's like trying to get them to answer the question themselves and then helping them from there is kind of the way I look at it. That's funny. That's how therapy works. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:10:13 It also feels like- Maybe I'm a therapist with the Twitter space. NFT therapist, yeah. I mean, I think there's an NFT therapist, Dow, that could be created based on this. It's just like, I mean, a bunch of people like you guys who know this space and where others come to like help us pick the NFT that we want to buy. But anyway, there's so much, so much innovation here. Guys, there's a few more points of conversation that I want to get to just as we round out

Starting point is 01:10:39 this conversation. And thank you guys so much for your time. Like we said at the beginning, this was a little bit of an impromptu state of the nation because, you know, the crypto markets move and point in different directions, we've got to be ready for it. I want to just touch on one of ones because it's definitely a relevant conversation to be had. How is the one of one NFT game different from the other topics that we've been talking about with like the profile picture NFTs or the generative art NFTs? If people are interested in dabbling in the one of one game, what should they know and what should

Starting point is 01:11:10 they be prepared for, how it's different from the previous conversations we've had? Can you also explain what a one of one is for some of us? Yeah, so when we say something like one of one art, we mean something an artist minted. It is a one of one. It's not a collection per se. It's just a unique piece from the artist's vision in one NFT. That's kind of how I look at it. But getting started with one of ones is a tough thing.

Starting point is 01:11:39 It depends really on your capital and your goals. There's two types of 101 collectors I know. There are the people who are trying to do the land grab strategy on the very early stuff, whether that it's Xcopy, Koldy, Hackatow. You have me, I'm a killer acid whale. I love killer acid's work. And when I buy it, I don't even think I'll ever sell it. But if it becomes worth something later on, I'm happy to do it.

Starting point is 01:12:04 But you have these older OG artists that people try to land grab. And then you have newer artists who might be big outside of NFTs or not. and they come in and they're either on super rare foundation. I don't buy anything on Nifty Gateway myself, but others do. And the newer artists, you're really just betting on, like, in my mind, you're betting on the person. Like, I buy art from, like, the people I like after talking to them. One thing about this space is you get a lot of access to all the creators.

Starting point is 01:12:33 So in the one of one space in particular, like, I really encourage people reach out and talk to these creators. They're super nice. They're super into the community. I don't think I've ever really had a bad discussion with like an artist in the space. Or if I have, it was like very short lived and like I forgot about it. But it's like just that for me, when I buy NFTs, I'm buying it because I like it. I'm betting on the person.

Starting point is 01:12:57 And that's how I approach all my one of ones. It's like the piece is great. I'll display it in a virtual gallery or my house. And I love the person who created it. Andy, you want to add anything to that? I mean, yeah, I think that was pretty good. The one thing I was going to mention was that this, what do you said about there being two, different types of kind of one-of-one collectors, which is very interesting to me, but there's,

Starting point is 01:13:19 you know, I think probably the most prominent is Xcopy is kind of like the super OG one-of-one art creator. But yeah, I think what's kind of nice about it is it really can be as accessible as you as you want it to be as far as price points and the stuff goes. There's tons of really great art that's being sold on foundation and super rare that's less than an Ethereum and you can get in and find something cool. And you have a lot of agency at that point to help spread awareness of these people and try to make them more famous if that's something you desire to do. Or there's kind of these more, like X copy as a one of one artist is not going anywhere. They're going to be a prominent crypto artist for as long as crypto art is popular, in my opinion. And then the question is really

Starting point is 01:14:06 how do those compete against stuff like art blocks and cryptopunks? And what is that, you know, in 10 years, what's more valuable, a rare Cryptopunk or a one-of-onex copy? And maybe as, you know, as time goes on and NFT art becomes the predominant way to collect art or one of the predominant ways in more popular culture, people who feel more comfortable coming in and analyzing these different one-of-one pieces will be more comfortable spending eight figures on a piece of one-of-one art or nine figures. But right now it seems like people aren't quite ready for that, which kind of, it makes sense to me because it is so much harder to compare to other things.

Starting point is 01:14:55 So it to me sometimes feels like a little bit riskier because you don't have quite the community around it where you can say with crypto puns look there's 3,000 people who all own these who are passionate about them. It's a lot harder to do that with one of one art. There's certain creators who have these like thriving discord communities too. Xcopi has a big one. Justin Aversano and his twin flames collection, that's a massive discord. And if you can find those communities like before they really take off, there is a lot of upside there. And you can also go in those communities to talk to other collectors about other people's work, and they're all, like, generally really helpful. So I would say, like, you know, don't be afraid to get involved to

Starting point is 01:15:39 and just jump in. Like, you don't need to buy something immediately. You can just go in the Discord, talk to the artists, talk to the community, and see, like, do I see this being here long term? Do I want to build with them? I'm a big fan of giving up my Twitter spaces platform to artists I like, or like artists who are doing something unique that I think needs spotlight on them. So that's kind of like what Andy said about helping build the community and help grow these artists. I take a really small bet on an artist after talking to them. And I'm like, hey, I want to like put you on a stage and give up my platform. You can talk to 50 to 350 people depending on how many people join and just kind of show the world like you're a person, you're a creator, you're just here viving with the rest of us.

Starting point is 01:16:21 And I think there's a lot of success behind that. Like I've seen a lot of artists come on a space, share their story for two to five hours and like sell out everything they have. have listed because the people in the audience connect so much with them. I mean, it would only make so much sense that since we are moving into a digital world and everything is kind of getting digitized that so does individual artists. So like, you know, we got painters and drawers and graphic designers in the legacy world putting things that go up on walls. And now that we have NFTs, we can have digital art of the same format of the same style, but now it's an NFT and the art actually exists on your computer. So to me, it's like a natural progress.

Starting point is 01:17:00 of the nature of art. I also want to ask about, on a completely different note, the role of on-chain NFTs, because if you dive in down the rabbit hole of NFTs, you realize that most of these images that these NFTs represent aren't on Ethereum. They're on a database somewhere, a centralized database,

Starting point is 01:17:19 which is kind of the thing that we're trying to destroy with Ethereum in the first place. And so what do you guys see as the role of on-chain NFTs? Because there's not that many of them. There's like autoglyphs, And then also recently, Cryptopunks have had their images actually deployed to the Ethereum blockchain, meaning that Cryptopunks are now on-chain, like totally trustless NFTs.

Starting point is 01:17:39 And so what do you guys, what you guys does this takes on, like, on-chain NFTs? And how does this story kind of expand and progress into the future? Yeah. So this has been something that's like a growing discussion point over the last couple of months, I think.

Starting point is 01:17:55 Autoglyphs were kind of some of the first to do it. I don't feel confident. I don't think they were exactly the first. I do think there were some projects that had on-chain stuff prior. Actually, Mooncats might have been one of the first ones, if I remember correctly. What's interesting about it is it's kind of very much so constantly evolving. And so one of the new things people are doing is storing SVG data on-chain so that it can be rendered off-chain, but all the data is on-chain. And, you know, there's some things where it just like really isn't feasible.

Starting point is 01:18:28 You have some crazy 800K, yeah, or music. Well, there actually is music that's fully on-chain. Euler Beats has that and I think some others as well. I think Unigrids, which is one of the ArtBlocks projects, because art blocks are all. So art blocks are interesting because the code to generate them is on-chain. So as long as you know the data that was given to generate it, you can always recreate the piece.

Starting point is 01:18:53 So the art itself isn't explicitly on-chain, but it's reproducible based on-chain data. but when you have some crazy artwork or something that might just be too costly or not really make sense to be on chain. I don't really fault them for using IPFS or whatever else. I've seen a lot of people using RWeave to back that up even more so. I think it's really cool. I know Manifold, who is like a big company working with artists and creators to get their own

Starting point is 01:19:22 smart contracts for NFTs. They've made a lot of headway in that space, and they've done a really great job. and they've been kind of visionaries and some of the SVG stuff that they've been doing. I really liked what they did with like the Sacramento Kings, actually, the basketball team, where the artwork is all on-chain and an SVG, and it updates automatically based on who the owner is and some other information that they can go in and update or change,

Starting point is 01:19:47 which is really, really cool. And so I think we'll continue to see people push the boundaries of what we can do with on-chain artwork, where it looks different based on who holds it, or it looks different based on how long you hold it and all these different types of things, which I think is awesome and it'll be really excited to see. I would say piggybacking off what Andy said,

Starting point is 01:20:07 this is probably my weakest point or like my biggest knowledge gap in the NFP space is like I'm not super in the weeds with like IPFS, are we, how things are stored? I know, you know, autoglyphs are significant for their historical being the first. I thought they were the first 100, on chain project. But yeah, I am like, I don't really, I should think about this more than I do.

Starting point is 01:20:36 Let me put it that way. It's funny. I think I just heard Peter from the Geith team, his head has exploded with like the fact that we're storing NFTs on chain, like a state expansion perspective of Ethereum. But I mean, at the end of the day, this is, this is block space that the market pays for. As we start to close out, I'm curious, like getting into, we've covered so much, and I feel like I have a better perspective on how to dive into the NFT space after this conversation. But give us kind of the quick highlights. Say somebody DMs you and is like, yo, got to check out this new NFT project, right?

Starting point is 01:21:16 It's fresh. You've never heard of it. How would you evaluate it? Like, what tools would you use? What are the first things that you check to vet this thing out? feel free to drop any tools and resources to us as you talk through an answer. So, Andy, your take first. Yo, I got this NFT project.

Starting point is 01:21:37 It's dope. You got to check it out. How are you checking it out? Yeah, honestly, I don't really use. I guess it depends. If the project is already live and, like, out there and there's just available to be bought on OpenCy, I'll go and look there. I'll look at the smart contract code on EtherScan.

Starting point is 01:21:56 is it their own custom smart contract? Is it just the OpenC storefront contract? I think you can kind of tell a lot based on that. Is it some just other contract that they copy and pasted? How are they storing the data? And then... Is it more interesting to you if it's their own unique contract rather than somebody that they borrowed from?

Starting point is 01:22:15 Yeah, well, then it just, to me, I think it's really, really hard to know if time kind of feels of the essence. I want to make sure I get this thing because there's a chance it blows up. it's one of the easiest ways to see how much effort they've put in, in my opinion, is did they clearly write their own code? And do they actively tweet from their Twitter account? And is their discord that are there,

Starting point is 01:22:38 are there people having conversations in there? That to me is all really valuable just to kind of see, are they putting an effort? Was this something that they couldn't have done in one night? They had to have spent a little more time to garner some community and some excitement and the technical chops to do this. And they have their own website. it's not just like some random thing.

Starting point is 01:22:57 That's the kind of stuff I mostly look for more so. And then, as I said, I really at this point only buy stuff that I think looks interesting. I've seen stuff where I think, yeah, it's probably going to go up. I don't really, you know, I'd rather place bets on things I feel more confident about because then in times where things aren't doing so well, I'm not just going to have paper hands and sell it. And yeah, so that's generally how I go about doing it. It's mostly kind of, as we were saying earlier, just more based on like the, the,

Starting point is 01:23:23 the vibes and the memetic power of it than anything else these tell us a couple things yeah tell us how do you evaluate these vibes so there's like two scenarios right someone sends you it before it's minted and after it's minted um before it's minted like andy said you don't really have much to go off of you go into discord you look at their twitter for me i follow like 2,400 people and it's kind of a red flag if like only one or two of them are following a new project because in my mind, like, even when I see something early before it mince, like, for example, I don't know if it's pronounced Oni or On One Force, but they're these like anime guerrillas type vibe NFTs that came out. I went and looked at them and I thought to myself, like, I don't personally like these, but I see that they're going to do

Starting point is 01:24:14 well. And I had like over 100 mutual followers on their account before they launched. And I was like, oh, this is probably like a good project. But I didn't mint M because I didn't like them. And, you know, now they're floor 70. So there's a lesson there where, like, I could have just followed the herd and saw that, hey, I have all these mutual followers. Like, this is probably going to be a good move. But for me, I don't, I should look at the contract stuff more.

Starting point is 01:24:37 Like, Andy's spot on with, like, did they take the time to write their own contract? Like, they're going to, most of these projects are pulling in over a million dollars from mint fees. Like, if they couldn't take the time to write their own contract for that, that's a pretty big red flag. And then the other scenario is after something comes out, right? I'm a big fan of like going to rarity dot tools, looking at all the attributes in a cleaner list than open C, and then kind of forming like my own ideas around what traits I like. I'm not the guy who comes in and like sweeps the floor, but if I really like the project and I'm looking after it minted on rarity tools, I'm looking at like, you know, what are the crowns? What are the,

Starting point is 01:25:20 3D glasses. I always buy 3D glasses, hoodies, and pipes. Like, you could make any generative project. And if you have a hoodie 3D pipe, I'm like buying those up because in my mind, it's like, oh, that's on brand and I need those. And that's just like sticking power because Cryptopunks, like, those were kind of the first attributes that ever got some sort of premium to them. And you're just saying like, well, if Cryptopunk premiums had those, well, then other NFT projects will have those too? I don't even look at it like that more so than like, I just want to have my same vibe or aesthetic across every project. Oh, that's funny. I'm always looking for hats. I'm always looking for baseball caps. I went into wicked craniums and, you know, they didn't have a lot of

Starting point is 01:26:03 overlap with punk attributes, but they did have 3D glasses and they have a skin color that's psychedelic. And like, to me, most of my 101 collection outside of the photography and most of what I like is this like trippy psychedelic like killer acid vibe. So I was like, okay, well, I can't get hoodies or pipes here, but like I'm stocking up on these psychedelic skins because that's my vibe. Or like I went into cool cats and I got a hoodie with like a rainbow unicorn hat because he looked ridiculous. It was like he's wearing a hoodie and he's trippy with his little rainbow unicorn hat

Starting point is 01:26:38 and it fits my vibe. So like that's kind of how I buy the different projects, even if they don't have overlapping traits. This is super cool. guys maybe one last question for you how put on your speculators hat how much longer do you think this nfti mania that we're in will continue and like what happens next dees your take first i am i don't know i thought um back so my whole thesis with this has been revolving around like what happened with the dogg memes back in the spring and how I didn't make a single dollar on any

Starting point is 01:27:19 single doge related shit coin and I thought to myself the whole time like this is going to collapse like dog is seven cents like there's no way this goes to 25 cents like this is done and I learned a valuable lesson it's like you know the market can stay irrational much longer than you think and it's better to just like ride the wave and manage your risk on the way up I don't know when this will end my gut tells me it can't go on for another month, but like that's just probably not true. If it ends a floor, if you tell me it's 500 in a month, like I'm not even going to be shocked, even though like it was two weeks when I was buying them a month or two ago. And I think the way it looks is like people will not ape into all the new avatar projects.

Starting point is 01:28:00 Like you're going to have a bunch of stuff that comes out. People don't mint it. It sits there. And that risk capital dries out because they can't get liquidity. on their old projects that they minted to mint the new stuff. I think that's kind of how it spirals out where like, you know, there's just no liquidity to get out of the shit they have and they can't ape in the new shit.

Starting point is 01:28:21 And there's not new people coming in with new capital to eat the new shit. Andy, what's your take? We got a month. We have more. What do you think? You know, I don't know as far as timelines go. I have personally had conversations with a lot of people who have a lot of money. who are still trying to figure out what they do with that about NFTs and how they appropriately

Starting point is 01:28:44 allocate into those and what that looks like. We've seen a lot of venture capital money flowing into NFTs, a lot of hedge fund money flowing into NFTs. And so I don't know what their timelines are and what that looks like, but I just don't think those people are going to be buying the top. Maybe they'll be buying the top of this cycle, but not the top of the next two cycles. I think they're too smart. And so maybe they're all ready to buy, or they already have, maybe they're buying next week. And that's going to be the end of this hype cycle. But I think that if you have like a time horizon that's longer than a year or two, you'll probably be okay. Because there's just too many smart people who are buying things right now that are, that literally have no intention

Starting point is 01:29:31 to sell it. Like that's just not a part of this for them. And so I think that we'll probably just totally guessing, have a few more months of real craziness. And like, things will get really, really insane. I wouldn't be shocked if we saw some floors that really made people's jaws drop. But then I think where the real way that this bears fruit is in a couple of years when you look back and think about the ridiculous prices that you got because now every NFL player has a crypto punk or wants one. And they can't all get them because there just aren't enough. And like, that's kind of the real end game. It's not a lot of football players out there. Yeah. With a lot of money, what's what's crazy to me is this feels like NFTs feel like a super

Starting point is 01:30:18 weapon for propagating crypto culture to the masses. It just has all of the ingredients. It checks all of the boxes from a memetic desire perspective. And the unique thing I think about NFTs is all denominated in ETH, right? This is ETH as money used as a store of value. unit of account and medium of exchange in the NFT economy. Andy, D's, thank you so much for guiding us through NFTs. I've learned so much. We appreciate you coming on. Thanks for having me. This is fun. Yeah, thank you. It's a good way to break up the day. And like, I just love talking about NFTs in general. So anytime you guys want to talk NFTs, hit me up. Dees, when's your next Twitter space is NFT? Do you have the one on the menu at all?

Starting point is 01:31:05 I mean, I'll probably host on it like the pool while I'm drinking with ice bags tonight at some point. Like, we literally had one going. We're on his back porch. I have my phone open. I have one air pod in. Super quiet. And I'm just like giving two people co-host and letting it run for like six hours. And then like if I hear my name coming through the airport, I like jack the volume up.

Starting point is 01:31:28 I'm like, yo, guys, what's up? And then like hop in. It's like it's a really laid back vibe. I'm sure I'll have one open today. could you guys drop your Twitter handle so folks can follow you and get tuned into that. So Dees, what's your Twitter? Yeah, my Twitter is at D's Phi. It's like a play on D-Fi.

Starting point is 01:31:46 I made last year. They adds D's D-E-E-Z-E-F-I. How about you, Andy? I am Andy 8052 everywhere. So at Andy 8052. There you go. Follow these guys for more information on NFTs and to get plugged into. that scene. I took a few notes here for action items for you, kind of the 101 tips. I hope this

Starting point is 01:32:12 might be useful for you, but one thing we talked about was hunting for NFTs in groups using Twitter, Discord. That's tip number one. Don't go alone. Take a friend. Don't go alone. Number two, buy in pairs. One for you, one to sell. I have a feeling these guys buy in more than twos. So maybe you scale that up to five or tens depending on your risk appetite. look at taste makers. So view their wallets and check out what they are buying, maybe become a tastemaker. That's kind of the 401 level, of course. Also search for legitimacy, history, lineage, credibility, what chain you purchase it on matters. And finally, we talked a lot about buying what you like. You have to be okay if you are stuck with the NFT that you bought

Starting point is 01:32:58 for the long run. Those are fantastic tips for you. As we close this out in summary. Of course, guys, risks and disclaimers, eth is risky. NFTs are risky. We might be in a mania. We have no idea where that is headed or for how long. All of this stuff is risky. 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.

Bankless - NFT Mania! | Andy8052 & DeeZe (SotN)

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