Bankless - The Polygon NFT Ecosystem with Frank (DeGods), Zhuoxun Yin (Magic Eden), & Stani Kulechov (Lens)

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

In today’s episode, we’re talking to Frank DeGods, from the DeGods project, an NFT project that’s recently migrated to Polygon. We also brought on Zhuoxun Yin, Co-Founder and COO of Magic Eden, an NFT marketplace also migrating to Polygon. And last, but certainly not least, we’re also joined by Stani Kulechov, Founder and CEO of the Aave companies, which is bootstrapping Lens, a social media ecosystem on top of Polygon.   ------ 📣 MetaMask Learn | Learn Web3 with the Leading Web3 Wallet https://bankless.cc/  ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM:  https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken  🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  👻 PHANTOM | #1 SOLANA WALLET https://bankless.cc/phantom-waitlist  ------ Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 7:02 Why Polygon? 13:45 Solana vs. Polygon 25:30 NFT Trajectories  35:00 Lens on Other Chains? 41:09 Supernets 43:20 The Lens & Polygon Focal Point 48:10 Ecosystem Metrics  1:00:00 Polygon #3 Community?  1:05:30 Lens, Content, & Metrics 1:12:25 Closing & Disclaimers  ------ Resources: Frank https://twitter.com/frankdegods  Zhuoxun Yin  https://twitter.com/ZhuoxunYin  Stani https://twitter.com/StaniKulechov   ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Welcome to State of the Nation, guys. We've got a special episode for you talking about the Polygon NFT ecosystem. Our panelists today tell us that this is the third largest ecosystem for NFTs in crypto and one worth paying attention to. David, who do we have on? What are we going to cover today? First and foremost, we got Frank Degods from the Degods project, which is an NFT project spawned on Solana, currently migrating to Polygon. So we will talk about some of those decisions and why They decided to move over to Polygon in this and age. And then second, we got Z, the co-founder and C.O.O. of Magic Eden, which is an NFT marketplace also on Solana, recently migrated to Polygon.

So we'll, and we have two perspectives like this. Last up, we got Stani Kulikov, who is the founder and CEO of the AVE companies, which is bootstrapping lens, a social media ecosystem on top of Polygon, where your profile is an NFT, your content is an NFT, loss of surface area for NFTs. And so just to recap the project, we got D-Gods, which is a PFP project that is in process of migrating to Polygon. We have Magic Eden, which is an NFT marketplace

that is also recently migrated to Polygon. And then we got Lens, which is a social media platform where your profile is an NFT, all the content that you make is an NFT, your interactions or transactions on Polygon. And so we're going to ask all of these participants on the Polygon ecosystem, why Polygon? What about Polygon brought them there?

What about Polygon is unique and different? Is Polygon really the third largest NFT ecosystem after Solana? So these are some of my questions. What do you want to know in this interview, Ryan? Yeah, I think I have those same questions. And particularly for these two projects, let's remember Magic Eden and DeGods, both migrated. They're massive projects in Salana, huge successes, and they are migrating and moving to Polygon.

And I shouldn't say full migration because they're continuing to support Solana, but at least the DeGods used. Project is doing a full migration over to Polygon. So the question is why? Is there something, are there greener pastures over in the Polygon side? What are the cultural differences between these projects? That's a big topic today as well. One disclosure before we get in.

I am an advisor on the Polygon project. I have material exposure to the Matic token. David is not an advisor, but he also owns Somatic. And Polygon has also been a sponsor of the Bankless podcast in the past. We take disclosure seriously at Bankless. we think everyone in crypto should. And so that's why we are mentioning these at the top of the show. You can always find our disclosures at bankless.com slash disclosures for more info on that. We update that monthly. All right. We're going to get right into the episode. But before we do, we want to thank

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No ads, just straight to the content. But that's just one of many things that a premium subscription gets you. There's also the token report, a monthly, bullish, bearish, neutral report on the hottest tokens of the month. And the regular updates from the token report go into the token Bible. Your first stop shop for every token worth investigating in crypto. Bankless premium also gets you a 30% discount to the permissionless conference, which means it basically just pays for itself. for itself. There's also the Airdrop guide to make sure you don't miss a drop in 2023, but really

the best part about Bankless Premium is hanging out with me, Ryan, and the rest of the Bankless team in the Inner Circle Discord only for Premium members. Want the Alpha? Check out Ben the analyst's Dgen Pit, where you can ask him questions about the token report. Got a question? I've got my own Q&A room for any questions that you might have. At Bankless, we have huge things planned for 2023, including a new website with login with your Ethereum address capabilities, and we're super excited to ship what we are calling Bankless 2.0 soon TM. So if you want extra help exploring the frontier, subscribe to Bankless Premium. It's under 50 cents a day and provides a wealth of knowledge and support on your journey west. I'll see you in the Discord. Welcome back, Bankless Nation,

to our NFT ecosystem on Polygon show. In the top left corner, we got Frank D-Gods from the D-Gods project, which is an NFT project recently migrated to Polygon. Well, it seems like D-Gods might be his last name. It's not, but it might as well be Frank. Welcome to the show. Yo, yo, super excited. And then in the bottom left corner, we got Z, the co-founder and C-OO of Magic Eden, an NFT marketplace, also on Polygon. Z, welcome to the show. Yo, what's up, fellas? Thanks for having me. And last, but definitely not least, in the top right corner, we got Stani Kulikov, founder and CEO of the AVE companies, which is bootstrapping lens, a social media ecosystem on top of Polygon.

Stani, welcome back to Bankless for like the fifth or six time, however number of times has been. It's good to see you again, Sonny. GM, GM, happy to be back again. So we really want to take this opportunity to really explore why your guys' projects chose Polygon. How has that experience been? What is the NFT ecosystem like on Polygon? And really just get a snapshot of flavor of the Polygon NFT ecosystem.

So we'll start with that very basic question. Why Polygon? And we'll go in the order that I introduce you guys in. So Frank, we'll start with you. Why did the DGODs project choose Polygon of all chains to pick? I think that there's like a clear traction with consumers on Polygon. And so it's something that we're just excited about being an NFD project. I always, and I might be more controversial in this take, but I just look at all the blockchains

as different databases with, you know, different tradeoffs. And so for an NFT project, right, like being associated. with a lot of really cool brands, a lot of really smart builders. That just excited us. And I'm sure I'll get more into details there, but at a high level, like, keep it simple, stupid. Like, it's kind of a no-brainer in 2023 to be launching on Polygon. And we're going to take a moment to dive into each of your guys' respective projects

and the details behind each one of these. But Frank and Z from D-Gods and Magic Eden, previously we're both projects on Solana. And so we have some diverse perspectives to bring to this conversation. Frank, when did D-Gods come to Polygon? Yeah, so to clarify, D-Gods are going to Main Net-Eath. We have two projects. Utes is our second project, and that's the one that's going to Polygon. So we have announced that we're migrating in Q1,

so we're looking at around end of Q1 for the actual migration and working on some pretty cool tech to do it in a unique way that hasn't been done before. So, yeah, and around end of Q1 is what we're looking at. Beautiful, beautiful. Actual migration, yeah. And Z, a question to you. and Magic Eden, when was it decided that Magic Eden would onboard the Polygon Network and

and Y Polygon of all chains? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Frank, I was expecting some spicier takes from you to kick off, man. Come on. Oh, I'll get into it. I'm learning. You know, you keep it simple, lure them in, and then we started giving the hard-hitting controversial takes. Yeah, we'll warm up. So Magic Eden, yeah, as everyone knows, we started on Solana. We actually launched a Polygon in December. And the thesis for us is really around two things. One is that we want to serve the gaming ecosystem really, really well. And clearly, which we can get into as well,

it's not like a one chain rules them all from a gaming standpoint. It's clearly there's some fragmentation across the ecosystems. And there's some good traction in terms of Web3 native games, but also like traditional game studios that have been, been working with Polygon. Then the second thing is, obviously, you know, an NFC community needs a lot of different things. One is you need some really crypto-native,

where three-native creators, like amazing ones like Frank. You also need experimentation from brands, you know, influences, whoever else that's in that ecosystem. And that there's clearly some movement and traction that Polygon is making around trying to sign up a lot of those guys. And I think that us being a very, very community, centric and grassroots NFT platform. We saw a pretty cool opportunity to work with like many,

many sides of the market. And that's what got us excited to go to Polygon in December. So we launched then. We've been doing a lot, a lot of like, a lot of that focus has been on launchpad and obviously our marketplace, which is sort of tied in together. It's like we help launch projects. And then they obviously are available for trading on Magic Eden.

And we have like a massive March coming up in the theme of general March madness for those of you that are in the US. We have, I think, like, 17 launches lined up in March. So it's going to be a huge, a huge one. So we're working with guys like Frank and the Degod team. And there's many others in the ecosystem that I think are feeling pretty bullish. And yeah, we're pumped. It's a fun place. Honestly, it's a very different vibe, which we can get into as well, some of the differences that we've noticed between some of the different NFT ecosystems. Yeah, that's definitely a line of questioning that I have is what is the specific culture that has arisen on Polygon. But before we get there, we got to, of course, talk to Stani.

Sonny, I'm sure you're connected to all of the layer two's in the space. And so I'm sure every single layer two would have loved to have hosted Lens. What about the architecture or design choices or relationships with the Polygon team made the Polygon network specifically the right network for Lens? Can you talk about that for a little bit? Yeah, definitely. I mean, we started to build originally on the Ethereum community, and we feel that we're kind of like a heavily part of that community,

and that's also where Polygon has its roots as well. So very early upon, Polygon was the network where a lot of the bandwidth from Ethereum was actually happening. Specifically, Polygon had the gaming community very early, so that was happening before the... So there is a lot of NFT activity before we saw the NFT summer. And obviously something that is very valuable for a social layer like lenses that, you're able to do a lot of transactioning.

And one is that the way Polygon is constructed today, it allows that capacity to transact on a lower transactioning cost. But more importantly, what is valuable is that the team and the ecosystem has this kind of like a bigger vision of how actually the scalability will happen and you can go beyond what is the limits of today that Polygon has. And also, I like the blue color as well. So my first car was blue colored. So that's something that tries to try to try, try, attention as well for me. Right.

Isn't Polygon purple? Purple. I'm a bit color round, though, so I think it's, for me it's kind of like a, like, a very dark blue. Hmm. Hmm. It's definitely purple. It's definitely purple. Maybe, maybe your first car was purple too, though.

So that's like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's a difference? Flip back. Clip back. Purple is just a cooler version of blue anyway. Yeah.

Well, guys, guys. I have kind of a follow-up question, and Z, yours is enticing. It's just like, let the spice flow a little bit here. So maybe we'll unleash the spice flow gates here. So both you, Frank, and UZ migrated from, or not fully migrated, you're still on Solana, but also chose to expand into Polygon as kind of the next chain. Could you guys do a quick compare and contrast for us? You know, crypto is so tribal about things.

And so people are mad no matter what chain you choose, right? So if you stand in Salon, you're going to piss off people. If you move to something else, you're going to piss off. You're always going to make people mad. That's what happens in crypto. But you guys have both been in the belly of the beast now in both of these ecosystems and both these communities. I'm sure you have identified strengths and weaknesses, differences across the two.

Let's start with you, Frank. So what's the difference between Solana and Polygon, from a culture perspective? Like, what are some of the things that you've noticed? Yeah, definitely getting into the spicier stuff now. So, I mean, for me, I'm still, like, a huge fan of Solana. And I think that, I think in the long term, Solana's going to find its core killer daps.

And, like, obviously, Magic Eden was the biggest killer dap, you know, thus far, so far on Solana. But there's going to be more defy, et cetera. I think that when I think about it at a very high level, is just the difference between like EVM and non-EVM chains. And I think like what you see, there's a lot of entourage effects with being on an EVM chain that, you know, growing up and building our project on Solana, we just never got that benefit. So I think that that's the core difference. I'll say this, like where the Polygon ecosystem feels today is just a lot less built out, honestly, than where Solana's at.

Because Solana's been forced to just like rebuild everything that existed on Heath in terms of a lot. of infrastructure from the early days. And there was a lot of opportunity in the early days to launch something like, you know, Magic Eden obviously came out of nowhere and has become one of the biggest marketplaces in the world. Even with Degods, when we first launched, you know, there wasn't like a lot of Solana NFT activity. And now it's a vibrant ecosystem. So I think the biggest tradeoffs at a high level are just Polygon feels a lot earlier today in terms of the community and culture side of the PFP ecosystem where Solana is. definitely gotten its own brand and I think on Solana projects focused more around utility,

more around like builders has definitely been been the main narrative where I think on Eith it's more brand and culture and I think that's just where we honestly fit in more towards and I think yeah it's just that's where I would start off with. So Frank, before you before you go. So why did you guys decide to move again? So I remember at the at the time there were stories like this kind of breaking the Polygon paid Ute Ute's collection $3 million to leave Solana. I don't know if that's true. Is it kind of like a money type play? Is that part of it?

I didn't really follow this when it came out, but can you give us some context for that? Yeah, let's do it. So the best way to put it is, I think at the time when we made the announcement of migrating Gygods and Utes combined, we're doing, which is our two collections, we're doing about 40 to 50% of all the trading volume on Solana, like for NFT. generally. And right now, the market cap of like D-Gyods and Yutes is almost bigger than the rest of the Solana NFT ecosystem like combined. And so we were just hitting a little bit and this has been hotly debated on Twitter. But I think a lot of people, including myself, believe we were

hitting a little bit of a ceiling on Solana in terms of growth where I mean, even right now on Solana D-DGods is by market cap. I think the number four biggest PFP project in the world. That's either on ETH or Seoul. And so we just thought we felt a little bit like we were capped. And we were big experimenters. And we're like, one of our core models with the community is it's FIWB, which stands for fuck it, we ball. And so, you know, it was one of these things where we were getting offers, honestly, from a lot of chains post-FTX to migrate. There wasn't like a single blockchain that didn't send us something or wasn't interested in like UTS and our potential. migration. Polygon was definitely not the largest number that we were offered, but again,

like, that's not the core reasoning behind the decision. There's a lot of entourage effects and a lot of, you know, brand equity that Polygon has spent a lot of time working hard to build. And that's what the ultimate decision maker was. But I'm all about transparency. And so I think we're like the first team to actually like announce like, yeah, this is how much we got in our grant. I didn't really care at the time. I still don't care. People know the behind the scenes or the financials behind it. but the honest answer was every blockchain was offering us something. And we went with the Polygon. So give us that inside baseball.

So is that you guys have a super popular NFD collection. Yeah. That's really what happens. These other chains want to go compete for, for you to deploy their platform, their ecosystem. This is pretty common, it sounds like. Yeah. And I'm like obviously biased where I think it's a,

the deal of a lifetime, honestly, for Polygon. And I think it would have been a great deal for anyone because I think it's really hard to get a, like an initial spark of a strong community. be like really strong IP that's crypto native to launch on your chain like I think every chain is pretty good with getting like big web two brands to a certain degree obviously polygons crushing son has had some big deals avax bm bmd they've all bmd head christiano rinaldo so i think the harder thing is to actually get crypto native projects that are much more in line with what the community is looking for today as opposed to future you know two future looking and so yeah i think that that's definitely the inside

baseball there is that there was a lot of those conversations that happen constantly. And I think the thing that people be surprised on is I do believe we are one of the biggest, if not the biggest official like Polygon grant. And people have this perception that Polygon's out here and strictly pay to play. The reality is, and whether people like it or not, Polygon has gotten so many brands under their umbrella now, their pitch is actually really easy. And they're not shelling out a lot of money because if you're like a big Webtoe brand, do you want to go on another chain or do you want to go on the chain that meta, Nike, you know, all these other massive brands are already on, it makes their pitch a lot easier. And so, yeah, like that's...

This is one thing that everyone, even competitors kind of, you know, say about Polygon, is their business development just absolutely crushes it. And so I guess this can be thought of as a marketing business development expense. But what's your take on the same question, Z? So give us a contrast between Solana and Polygon. Yeah. So the first thing I'll say, I'll make two, like more macro points. One macro point number one, I think is that this this kind of thing, like what Frank is talking about and what Degods did, this will become much more normalized over a period of time. And it sort of takes obviously some some guts and some balls to do it as transparently as they did. So I think they, you know, credit where credit is due there.

So you're talking about grants to attract projects is common. Or just maybe even just like, whether it's grants or some other incentive or even no incentives just to move and do things on different chains, that's hard. That's like objectively just like a hard thing to do. So it's not the easy path actually. I think it's easier to actually stay on Solana and just be the king, right? That's the easy path. So that's like the first point. I think this will become more normalized over time. And I think it's cool to see. And it's funny because I was sort of laughing earlier about us being in the belly of the belly of the beast. Like I feel like Frank and us, there's no one else that has been in that more than us over the last six to six to nine months.

the second macro point I was going to make was that a lot of the really interesting things to point out about the Sala ecosystem today is that it reminds me a lot actually of of 2018 on ETH. So as you guys know, I was a DYDX at the time. I was second employee at DYDX massively into the DFI ecosystem. And at the time it was like it really, that year for me created a, there was a tribalism that created that was really, really good for the ETH ecosystem. It was actually amazing for it.

And long term, that was one of the best things that happened. I really feel like that's happening and has happened in the last three, four months after all of the really negative events that happened on Solana. So the statements around like being long term really bullish on Seoul, but also wanting to do things on different chains in the short term, those two things can definitely coexist. And we absolutely feel that way. Like, you know, we've done over $3 billion in trading volume on Magic Eden on Solana, right?

And we still have a big stable of creators that are wanting to launch things all the time on Solana. So that's like not going to go away. But kind of to France's point, it's like there's a separate set of opportunities that Polygon is trying to make themselves known for. And whether that's brands, whether that's whatever, whatever, they invest a lot of time and effort being a BD engine to sign those deals. and ultimately the bet that they're trying to make,

it's almost like a different go to market as a chain. The bet they're trying to make is that they want all these brands to coexist and then eventually that ecosystem becomes rich enough, that rich not in the monetary sense, but rich from a cultural sense that everyone wants to do some shit together. And that's a bet. Whether that actually plays out, we don't know yet. But that's the bet that I think, you know, Frank is making,

the bet that we make in terms of we want to have a play there too. And as a marketplace, the role that we have is more, being the connector of all those dots. Right? So if there is a brand that wants to do something, they should do it with Magic Eden because we can help them get connected with someone that's Web3 Native

that knows how to be successful in this space or vice versa, right? If a Web3 Native brand wants to do something with a big traditional brand, that can also happen through a lot of the connections that we have and the dots that we can connect. So I feel like culturally, that's just to set the scene a little bit for everyone.

in terms of like day-to-day sort of things that are interesting that we've noticed because a lot of obviously has more of a trading culture I would say like it really I mean the roots of it more like a Dgen culture would you say Dgen trading culture really sure oh hardcore hardcore hardcore because the fees are so low right and so what happens is there's the spread of like a few dollars it's like a meme right people undercut by 10 cents 15 cents because you can and so it just makes it a much more or yeah, like people are just down to speculate and talk about these projects all the time. I think the other thing is really great about Solana is it's a very and you guys will appreciate

this because I'm definitely more on the content creation. I'm really passionate about content creation. I believe a lot of the value in crypto, especially NFTs, literally just come from Twitter and like Discord. And like if you think about it, what would these collections be valued today if there was no Twitter, if there was no Discord, probably closer to zero than anything. And so Solana has had a very strong content creator ecosystem that is actually like really hard to bootstrap. And one of the biggest challenges Polygon has, you know, going forward where we have this thing called DGen News or this guy is just like live tweeting like reality show style tweets about stuff that's beef between random Solana and FTA influencers.

And, you know, people can follow a few accounts and be constantly spewed 24-7 content around specifically what's happening on Solana. and I think obviously ETH NFTs have this certain parts of BFi have this but it's pretty rare to see across crypto where it's a self-sustaining Is it a lot of like the TikTok

of like you know of crypto? Is it like just moves faster attracts this kind of gen Zeta Hey I will say I definitely I definitely move faster. I definitely

like all the stuff that we're seeing now with like open scene blur yeah man that played out three months ago on Salaa yeah we've seen this movie

yeah interesting we've seen almost five five months real yeah how did it play out in Solana? I see So the attention span on TikTok is 15 seconds

And Solana is seven seconds And Salana is seven seconds, right? And honestly, it's a feature. No, it's 100% of feature. It's a feature for sure. I'm obviously like, so I'm 23 right now. I'm like definitely a zoomer. And that's what also attracted us to Solana early days.

It's just it's just that the bar is so high for no fucking reason. like everyone's spending like $5, $10 on a minth or whatever, but their bar is as if this thing is like, you know, the next coming of Jesus. And so that just makes it a very cutthroat like intense environment where if you're not delivering something on a day to day basis, if you're not showing up every day, you are just like getting lost in this overall content like whirlwind, which is why honestly like we locked in on doing like Twitter spaces. because if there's what, like 10,000, 15,000 daily active traders on Solana or just in NFTs broadly and we're doing Twitter spaces that are pulling 500 people, 1,000 people, you know, that's almost like 3% of the entire ecosystem. And so when you extrapolate that out to just all the different types of content that's being made, it kind of like is nice.

The whole meme of Solana early days especially is that you go to Solana for engagement because because it's so fast and everything is happening so quickly, You have people that are way more engaged on a day-to-day basis, way more engaged on every random GM post or every random thing that's happening. And I honestly think that even Main NetEath doesn't have this as much where, you know, you kind of wait for the big official announcements, but you're not following a lot of these creators on the day-to-day, which is where I think the puck is going, by the way. And this is why I think what Z said about Solana being early is very accurate. Because you look at the projects and NFTs today that are popping off even on Mainnet Eat. you have Jack Butcher, obviously. And you also have like this other project, Kid Call Beast.

And a lot of these projects that are new that are actually outperforming the rest of the market are very clearly high engagement. Constantly things are happening. Community is constantly engaged. So this is where the puck is going because in a bear market when everything is consolidating, I think everyone has a hard time figuring out what's going to be relevant in the next year, in the next two years. A lot of the narratives that we saw in the bull market are just like collapsing in front of our eyes. And so day-to-day engagement is becoming, I think, a lot more important of a metric with NFTs. Because otherwise, if you don't have that, you're not going to be relevant.

And not being relevant means no bids. No bids means the floor keeps going down. And floor keeps going down and people get more angry. And that is the debt cycle now in 2023 for a lot of projects. This is a really interesting perspective. And actually not the conversation I thought we'd be having so far into this show. Franken Z, since both of your projects now span both chains. I want to get a little bit more, dive into that perspective a little bit more.

The way that you guys are describing this, and maybe this is my Ethereum bias, but it's like, Solana is your bootstrapping ground, as in you get tested on Solana. You find user acquisition on Solana, but as soon as you have meaningful adoption and sticking power, you graduate to Ethereum, or at least an Ethereum layer two, perhaps like Polygon. And that seems to be what both Magic Eden and D-Gods have done is that they bootstrapped on Solana. and then once they had sufficient network effects and a sufficient brand of the in of its own right, it found that it could actually also latch on to the Ethereum ecosystem as well because it had grown to that size on Polygon. Is that a fair description of like the trajectory? Yeah, I can I can start. I think that's probably a little too much of utilitarian kind of view.

For us, we kind of think about it more like we want to serve. It's like we're a product driven company. So we want to serve different use cases. And the use case that we obviously served on Solana and got became very successful as a result was really focused on like, yes, this sort of PFP use case, a little bit of gaming, but it's like high velocity content like economy. Like I don't know how to really articulate it super, super well, but that's really what it feels like. And I think just to tie a bow on the previous point, I really do think that this is anecdotal,

but I really feel that actually the users on Solana are also younger than what we see on EVM. And that maybe also marries well with why some of those points that we are making around like attention, speed, all this kind of stuff rings true. Anyway, that's just to tie a bow on the previous point. But the way we think about is use cases. So when we think about going to Polygon, for example, that was a very intentional. thing. Like we knew that the NFT ecosystem there was small. Like everyone knows that. If you look at the data, it's obvious, right? It's objectively much smaller than Salana. And it's objectively not, it doesn't

have an organic NFT creator sort of ecosystem yet. But you go there because you believe that the way that they are putting the pieces together, that there's something probably will end up happening there. And that use case there is going to look a little bit different, whether it's gaming, just like, you know, for example, of the 17 mints that we're doing in March, a bunch of those are actually free mints. And that's like a, you know, the free mint meta for gaming and even for NFTs in general is starting to take forth a little bit more. And then the second thing I would say is that because of different technological gaps or reasons, because of different needs that creators have or goals that they have, they will decide.

where they will have a view or they should have a view. They will form a view on whether it makes sense to launch on which chain. Over time, that will again become more normalized where it's like maybe I'll just do some shit on every chain or I will, you know, maybe marry to one. I don't know if we'll really at that point yet. But because of that decision, then as a marketplace, we obviously want to work and serve as many creators as possible, right? So if creators are basically making those choices, then we want to absolutely be there to serve

them and the products will will will look different the vanilla like you know icon marketplace that kind of thing that is not that's not the end state here I think a lot of these creators will need different things and we should build the things that serve them so that's sort of how we see it rather than like a graduation thing yeah that's what I was thinking in what you guys were describing there david is like what they're describing is not so much a graduation but just like different sort of medium and culture it It's sort of the way if we're thinking about it in the content world, the way we think of like a, try doing a long-form two-hour podcast on TikTok with Vitalik Buterin, right?

Like, that shit's not going to work. No one cares. What you have to do is like, I don't know, 30 seconds, some sort of highly memetic, you know, Vitalik dancing back and forth, like TikTok style content. And so you have to sort of adapt your project and what you're doing for kind of the culture and the network and what it rewards. And you could probably repurpose, like we can repurpose bankless content into like a TikTok form or a Twitter form. It's the same message throughout it, but the medium and the expression is it's much different from network to network. That's kind of an unlock from what I'm hearing from Frank and Z about these different chains and where they shine.

And it sounds like Polygon is really shining in this ability to kind of bring together all of these like Web2 brands. You know, you have like Nike, you have meta, you have like, you know, Instagram there and it's just sort of this meeting place. And that's what you guys are saying. It's like, oh, these are the early blocks forming. You can kind of see how this ecosystem will differentiate itself. Something that I've noticed when I look at the NFT ecosystem and also the activity that is happening on across the lens applications, because you see a lot of NFTs being met in the protocol itself, but it's, it's basically a distribution channel to share an FD projects that the users are interested in,

is that like you kind of see that all these brands that are on Polygon, they somehow create this symbiosis of brand value to that, to the new brands as well. So it's actually quite interesting to see it. It's kind of like looking into, you know, a, if you go to a street where you have a lot of brands and your designer brand is next to some of these brands. It basically elevates. So, and not just like elevates, but it really ties the value together. So for me, it makes quite a lot of senses that if you want to capture that value, getting all these different brands that are excited about Web3 and also the projects that are the pre-native and getting them into the same place, that really is something that creates some sort of new traction.

Sonny, since we're talking about multi-chain conversations, was there ever any sort of analysis about Lens on something like Arbitrum Nova? I don't think Arbitrumb Nova was out by the time Lens had come around, but was really for Lens specifically, Polygon the only game in town at the time of deployment? Yeah, yeah. So at that time, even layer two, even arbitrium optimism weren't there at that point. And when we're deploying on the test net already, it was like layer twos were very early. And the infrastructure is quite, you know, quite novel. You know, many of the layer two, they're still. They're pretty centralized. You know, there's one sequencer. The interesting part about something like the three social, is that you might need less of the security that you will need in decentralized finance, for example. But at the same time, like, we had to choose something where you have a bit more of the scalability that you would have, for example, using Ethereum. And the way the protocol works is that it has this exciting infrastructure that is on chain and then an infrastructure that is off-chain. And based on whatever you're building,

in the Web 3 social, you're picking different kinds of pieces. And the more heavily you're relying on the own change transactions, you're kind of like you're bound by whatever is the security and block space of a particular network. So quality in that sense made a lot of sense, but also kind of like the vision that we're now in the situation where there is this proof of stake network and you have everyone pretty much minting

the same place. I mean, we have a lot of issues at the moment because there's a lot of traction on lens and at the same time, they might be something else happening on Polygon. Sometimes that can be like rated NFDM anything happening. But the bigger vision is that from there, you actually go and scale into super nets and you kind of have more dedicated bandwidth for your project. So that is something that's going to be interesting to see it down the line. And actually, the lower transaction fee is, it's really affects into the audiences and how the actual audiences are built, because, you know, if you mint NFTs on main net, and that's where, you know, a lot of the activity happened during the NFT summer. And before that, being able to mint and even transact,

you know, that has a cost. So being able to do that on a lower, level and having also this compensability. So Pologan effectively, it's not only about an feast, there's also gaming and you know, Avegochi is a big part of the Polygon community and being able to benefit with the whole infrastructure is very fascinating. So I think it's just like so progressed and the branding kind of like a play is like the latest ad that's been happening over the past year. So so that's, that's, That's definitely something that is value at as well. Stani, you just mentioned supernets.

I just want to get a quick definition from you on that. What is a super net? I'm looking at the page here. Is this on Polygon? Yeah. So supernet is, I could say it's a layer three in some way. So if you think about it that way. So Polygon is a proof of stake network with certain amount of validators.

And that validator amount reflects the cause that will be to operate on that network. And supernet is another network on top of the polygon network that you can have for your project, for example. And you can use validators from the actual proof of stake network and have your own validators as well. So that's the kind of interesting part. And when you have a supernet, you can also decide that you can use a ZK Prover, for example,

to prove actually your state of the supernet. periodically on top of, onto Ethereum. So like, sometimes we're kind of like segregating quite a lot, you know, what's happening, polygon, Ethereum, but actually you can use a lot of this infrastructure together. And supernet is one of the examples where you can have more transactioning on a supernet. You can use the proof of stake validators, so the actual polygon network, but then you can take your super net state and deposited to the Ethereum periodically to have additional security. So everything can be actually combined on some levels, depending on the use case you have.

Yeah, this is pretty similar to a lot of the other narratives out of the layer two space. Like ZKSync has their fractal scaling, optimism has their super chain. I didn't actually know that Polygon was playing in this ecosystem, but it kind of seems inevitable that all layer two is move into this design design case. That's what Avax is doing too, right, with their subnet with the subnet. Yeah, the subnets aren't it's not shared security. The security parameters aren't the same. No, it's different.

But yes. No, everybody. Sonia, I got a, I got a question for you about just the community that's arrived inside of Lens specifically. Lens I kind of, in my mind,

I picture as like its own kind of contained environment inside of Polygon as in when you go to Polygon to do lens stuff, there's like a boundary around like the lens community versus the rest of Polygon just in the nature of lens is this big social organization and then and then you have like the rest of Polygon. But I'm wondering if that's even the rest, the right like perspective to even take here. Like what is the lens community and how much does it overlap with the Polygon community? So for example, like are there people talking about Magic Eden or D-Gods on lens? And just like overall how, how? what is the conversation like and how much polygon focal, how much of a polygon focal point is there?

Yeah. So short answer is, there is definitely a lot of talking discussions. So what the data shows is that and how Lens protocol was actually initiated on Mainnet is that we started to list a lot of the NFT communities and DOWs and DOW members that could actually get early access to meet their land. plans profiles and also developers and periodically whoever asked for a planes profile. And they had that eagerness to test protocol. We basically mean that them profiles. So you have based on the data and that's the beautiful thing about Web3 is that all this data that is computable is public, right?

So you have a lot of people from the Ethereum community or they're in the Polygon community and they're participating in different kinds of activity, defactivity, and also Dow voting as well. But there's also a lot of new addresses that just are excited about with your building, and, you know, they want to use Web3 social deadline, especially what is happening now in the traditional social media space. The particular thing is that the users in Lens, they're pretty much talking about everything, but most of the conversations are actually around Web3. So that might be different kinds of NFT projects. They might be sharing Magic Eden links or their NFTs and people are talking about them or if they find something.

So it's kind of a way to discover things. You can, obviously, you can, whenever you post on Lens, you can make that content actually as collectible as well, and it will actually show in Magic Eden. And the profiles are token as NFTs as well. Magicita has actually done a lot of great work of showing your latest profile picture in that inside of the NFT, which is very cool.

But I think the way we see it is that with Lens, you basically own your online profile and the connections you make. And then that's basically your distribution channel to your audience. So if I find something interesting, I can basically share it on lens and amplify my engagement, for example,

if I have an FDMint happening somewhere or I want to share the NFTs that I might have to my audience and across the whole lens protocol. So it's kind of like an early community of Web3 native, users and we're quite happy about it. So we weren't actually targeting that, you know, Lens is going to be something where everyone's going to migrate from Twitter and

Instagram and it's going to be like the wholly great solution of everything for like future of online presence. In fact, our goal is to basically just focus on how we get all the VEbtree projects and audiences into Lens and use it as a base, the three social layer. And then as the infrastructure scales, we can actually open up for larger audiences. So as we move into the second half of the show, I've asked each of you from each of the respective projects

to bring some numbers and some metrics to really flex about how awesome each respective project is. Because after that, we want to talk about the future. Stani hinted at some early stages of composability between Lens and Magic Eden. and I'm sure there's a bunch of other projects that have more stitching together to do it as this Polygon ecosystem expands. But really, I want to pick your guys' brains as to the future state of Polygon and what you guys see on the horizon there, along with all these hot numbers that we're going to talk about right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

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And we're going to start off the second half of this conversation talking about some metrics and some numbers. And so right before, I kind of blindsided our guests here, right before we were recording the show, I asked each of our guests to do some research as to their own project, the numbers and metrics to flex about the current health of their own ecosystem. So, Frank, I'm going to start with you, D-Gods. Show us some of the numbers.

What are the best numbers that you can give us in terms of the vitality of your community? I don't have screen share stuff, but I could share because I'm following this stuff all day. So I think right now, D-Gods, in terms of 10K, NFT projects is number four in the world, right behind Azuki and then Cryptopunks and then Bored Apes. And so, yeah, that's been pretty sick to see the growth there and doing that. Is that in terms of like volume or market cap? Market cap, like floor price kind of. Yeah, floor price.

You know, the basic market cap, I think, is like two. it's either average sale times total number and or floor price. I think on both those metrics right now we're top five for sure. And then is that? Like 130 mil market cap. Wow. For JPEGs. Yeah, for JPEX.

Yeah. That's exactly. I'll be used to this by now, Ryan. Yeah. No, it's super proud. And I think I've been very open from day one. It's kind of one of the things that's rallied our community. So for context for people that are new to DGONS and,

and Utes. I remember when we first minted D-Gods, we were one of the more hyped projects on Solana, but that followed a five-month period of everyone kind of shitting on us and labeling the gods a dead project. And we were kind of like, there was no trading volume, super low, like floor, all this stuff. And the whole time I was rallying the community and saying, hey, like we're figuring things out right now. We're fucking around. We're finding out. And we're going to try to become the number one project on Solana. And at this time, we were like number or 100 or something like that. And within the next two months,

D-Gods grew so quickly. And we ended up becoming number one and have kind of held that spot for the last year plus now. And so it's been like a big rallying cry for our community. Like we just want to shoot for the top. It's what we want to be the biggest NFD projects in the world. And everyone that's in D-Gyods and Yutes today knows that that's the goal. And yeah,

it's been pretty incredible to watch that growth happen with D-Gods. Yutes on the other hand, I believe right now is in the top 10 for anything over 10K supply. So there's 15,000 UTS. And yeah, I think the thought process here, and this is coming back to the whole numbers and the decision behind Polygon specifically is, hey, like when we launched UTS, we were already really big on Solana. And it's now the number two project on Solana right behind D-Gods.

And both of the market caps of those projects make up almost the rest of the Salon market combined. And so we wanted to give Uts a chance to shine on its own and become like the, quote-unquote, you know, top dog of their. its own ecosystem. And so that's kind of the goal with Polygon. And we just want to help other builders launch on Polygon outside of just Utes itself so that there can be a more vibrant ecosystem. And that's how I think about the Polygon. If I'm being the most D-Gen person on this panel right now and just being very real, I just think that Polygon is extremely early. And everyone loves being

really early in crypto because that means that there's a lot of opportunity. And so when I think about the Polygon ecosystem, I think that there's a lot that they can learn, steal and borrow from. from all the good stuff that's happened over the last year and start to grow out that infrastructure really quickly. And we just hope to be one of the main catalysts towards that happening. And so, yeah, that's kind of where our projects are at right now. You guys are, you know, if you're going to be listening to this in 2024 or end of 2023, maybe our predictions have come through and the guys is a number one project in the world. And Yutes is also very high up there. So just I like to manifest it in the reality. People in the audience that are listening, you heard,

here first. So if you just peaked a listener, if that was the case, what is the roadmap that they should be excited about with the DGos project? And if that also peaks them, where would they go to learn more? Yeah, I think a lot of this stuff, this is like a strategic thing. And I'm pretty open about how we think strategically. I think it just makes more sense to release a lot of information post-migration because like right now, everyone is kind of just waiting for the migration, which is happening around Q1 and a Q1. So why like blow our load metaphorically early here? And you kind of like talk about it whenever there's going to be a lot more attention on it around the migration and then use that to kind of catapult more of the excitement hype and momentum.

That's just metaphorical. Yeah, definitely just metaphorical. And that could mean a variety of things. You know, could mean a gun in a chamber. Obviously like that's what I was referring to. So, no, I'm very also open about how important to me it is to build hype and excitement around projects. Because I think that that often gets a bad rap. And I've been on the front lines saying like, hey, look, people are mad that DGyads is doing so well.

People are mad that you too doing so well. They're like, oh, what have you guys built? And I think you guys are just looking at the game of NFTs wrong. And one of my more famous tweets was I said, you know, NFTMFers always talking about utility. And then it was like a picture of a infomercial purse that has like a. a touchscreen on it and it's like got all these kind of utilities to them, but it just looks super cheap compared to like a simple Louis Vuitton bag. It's just like, oh, it's just a white background. It's just a Louis Vuitton bag. And it's like NFT MFers who probably pick the purse with the

touchscreen on it because they're not understanding that so much of this space is driven driven by, you know, what people value it for themselves. And so our job is NFT projects is to make people proud to be a part of the community. And so when I think about the gods and I think about Utes, I think every holder is proud to be a DGOT holder, proud to be a Ute's holder. And that actually scales so much more than any nascent utility could possibly scale. And you've seen this at the top layer with obviously the biggest projects in the space, Sport Apes, you know, Cryptopunks, Azuki. And so yeah, that's kind of our thesis as well.

And we just have a much more degenerate, like viral content tilt where we always talk about breaking the internet. And so for me, when I think about the Polygon move to wrap it all up in a boat. I just think it gives us more vectors where we can go extremely viral and have everybody in the ecosystem talking about us constantly. And that's the game plan is just build a lot of content and do things that make our holders proud of being in the community and watch the results of that. Turning the conversation to Z and Magic Eden. What are the numbers or metrics that you look at in order to understand the vitality and health

of the Magic Eden ecosystem? And what are those numbers? yeah for sure i just want to say though on the man it brought me back a lot of memories when you pop out that video on on the de gods website just like paper hands bitch tax tax feels like a long time ago unbelievable it's actually crazy crazy it's crazy it's crazy bro it's crazy uh okay so magic there's a few stats that i think are pretty interesting one is um we recently did a bunch of analysis around our creator business so as everyone knows like we spent a lot of our time thinking about how to make products and services and experiences that help creators either get started with NFTs or make them more successful once they decide to launch something.

That's sort of grounded all of that decision making around how we do discovery on Magic Eden. So you'll see like the carousels. You'll see like announcements. Those are announcements that creators can make directly on Magic Eden. So you can see that that's why I'm like really bullish on some of the stuff that Stani was talking about around like different ways that social can play out. This is one of those ways where a creator can immediately make an announcement around something that is very, very specific, knowing that the audience on Magic Eden is very, very engaged, right? They are already on Magic Eden on the collection page thinking about some stuff.

But one of the things that we were looking into was, hey, like, how did creators do on Magic Eden in the last 12 months? And a couple of really amazing stats. One is they made around 250 million on Magic Eden last year. And the second thing is that $250 million flowed into the hands of creators. Exactly. To do the art that they created on. Exactly. Yep.

That's a lot. That's huge. That's a not small. It's huge. So like I think people, some people don't really realize how big the Solana NFT ecosystem actually is. It's by far the second biggest by far. And obviously there's still a step change to get to ETH, but it's it's it stands on its own feet. The second really interesting stat, and this is one that's been more topical for us recently, as we've been, you know, as part of us going to Polygon, we've been talking to more and more like Web 2 platforms who are thinking about, hey, how do we use Magic Eden or NFTs as a, as another channel or another, another way to engage our community, whether that's, whether you're a brand or if you're a different kind of creator.

whether you're an artist, whether you're an influencer. And I'll keep it unnamed. One of the really big Web2 social media platforms has a goal that's like, hey, we need our creators to make like a thousand bucks a month. Right. That's an aspirational goal. The average creator in Magic Eden last year who launched our launch pad. And our launch pad is basically like more of a premium sort of,

we partner with creators and help them launch on Magic Eden. we did about 400 of them last year and the average creator made over $300,000. Damn. Damn. Pretty insane. That's average. It's insane. Average.

And that to me basically tells me, it gets me really fired up because this is a, creator should think about this as it should not be like a black and white, like let me replace the things that I'm already doing. But it should be another way to augment and amplify their existing content, their existing ways of engaging in their community and working and, and keeping their community happy, all this kind of stuff. And I think NFTs is a as a fundamental concept, is a really good way to do that. So that's like one of the really cool things that we're trying to push on. The last stat I'll tell you, I mentioned the $3 billion stat before. The last time I'll tell it's more of a product thing because, as I said, we're like a very, very product-driven company.

But the average session time on Magic Eden is 15 minutes. So our users come and spend a lot of time just discovering new content. And that, I think, is a really big testament to, number one, the sheer amount of content that's being created currently on Solano and hopefully what we see on Polygon and on ETH on Magic Heaton in the future. But secondly, it says a lot about like what people are fundamentally trying to do. They're trying to discover new communities and they're doing their diligence. And they're trying to learn about what Frank is doing and what others are doing. And that's a, that kind of browsing and discovery is going to become even more important over time.

And whether that's through like specific features, but also through, you know, if we go to places like Polygon and have to tell like different stories, different narratives, work with different creators. Like these are all just different and new things that we will have to build and have to be built into a marketplace, right? And that's why I think in the over the long term, there will be some sort of verticalization of some marketplaces. But in general, I think people will want places where you can discover a lot of things. And that, you know, if we are successful, it's sort of like we want to be the home,

we want to be the home of NFTs in that sense. That's the aspiration that we have. So anyway, I'll stop shilling. That's basically some high-level stats. Z, before we get to Stania on Lens, just real quick, I want to ask both you guys. So for you, Frank, and UZ, Ethereum clear number one as far as NFTs,

Solana, you're saying, is actually a clear number two as far as NFD community. Do you think Polygon is the number three? And is your presence there, like sort of kingmen making Polygon as maybe the number three community? Or do you think that number three title is kind of up for grabs this year? Yeah, I think for me, I definitely think it's a pretty clear number three. I mean,

I think whatever people might feel about it. I remember when the Trump FDFTs came out and I watched them do. I think it was like six or seven million dollars trading volume on the first day. And I was on like Polygon. And I think they're almost at like all time highs even today. Can I find those on Magic Eden here? Yeah. Are they on Magic Eden?

Sir. this is it no no no it's not it's not different one if you go to the go to that toggle that all chains toggle yeah hit polly and then you should you should you should see the trump one yeah there you go yeah no it's a yeah yeah yeah yeah some quality stuff though yeah so i think when i saw them mint out at the time it was like a hundred dollars which at that time would have been i think eight eight sole which is a pretty high mint price typically for i think i at a really high mint price, you know, on Solana, and they did a 45,000 supply. And then they minted that thing out in like a few hours. And then it proceeded to do like top trading volume of that

week. And it still gets traction today. So I think similar with the Reddit FTE stuff where, again, they've like unlocked a part of a market that, frankly, nobody else not even made that ETH has unlocked to a certain degree. And so that's where we think the advantages are. And if I'm being totally honest here, I just think that ETHs MFers are going to, love Polygon once there are more projects on there for them to trade because, you know, I'm friends with a lot of people at this point in the NFT space and especially on the DGN side, like people are doing DGNs even to this day on ETH. And it's just a little too cost prohibitive to a point where, you know, a lot of them have a

much more likelihood of training to zero have less of a crazy run up where I think in a low fee environment, you could see that change. So yeah, I just think it's going to be a no brainer for it's going to be a no brainer. Yeah. With Ethereum, though, with EVM chains, there's so many right now. And there's so many up-and-coming layer 2s now. So unlike kind of Solana with the Solana virtual machine, it's kind of just Salana is the only game in town. But with EVM, it's fairly simple to go from chain to change to chain.

Do you think there's enough of a moat with all this competition coming after Polygon? Yeah, I mean, I don't think that the moat is actually, like to me, the moat is just good IP on the chain. I look at it actually closer to HBO versus Netflix where, you know, someone might sign up for HBO because they're a big fan of Game of Thrones or they might sign up for Apple TV because they want to watch Ted Lasso. And I think that at least, I mean, we are like the prime case study of this where you'll hear the story very often of de gods or Utes being the only Solana NFT that like certain people that trade very often on ETH. It's the only one that they hold. It's like the reason that they bridged over like Capitol. And I think we've seen this firsthand. A lot of people in our

community, we talk to them a lot about that. And so, like, the reason that you try out a new chain is not because of the technology of the chain, but it's actually because of the projects that are on that on that chain. Content is still king. It's always king. I mean, like, I'm, I'm so deep on this thesis where like all that really matters to me at the end of the day is like, are we putting out more content and is that content getting more reach than anybody else? And I think everyone has the wrong approach. A lot of people have the wrong approach to it today where they're trying to like branch out and go for this mythical like mainstream audience where to me I think that the highest value audience is the people that care about crypto NFTs today. And if you give them an incredible

experience and you give them content that they can follow 24-7 and constantly be entertained with, it'll continue to grow concentrically. And the best example of this is most people that buy NFTs, if you talk to them and you ask them especially higher ticket NFTs, what made you buy it? They'll say something along lines of a trusted influencer talked about it, a friend told me about it. You know, we were talking about this at work. Like, it's usually actually more interpersonal connections than it is like at the Super Bowl or from a massive drip email campaign. It's actually personal connections that drive people to make real purchase decisions

when it comes to NFTs. So if you really want to grow smart when it comes to NFTs, our approach has been referral-based like word of mouth type of marketing because that drives real metrics and real numbers. And I think that's the same approach that we're taking with Polygon, where how do we get more high quality? You can't take shortcuts. How do we just get more high quality price? projects on Polygon, if there are more that have constantly new things that are coming out that

are exciting for people to follow, more of the attention will get shifted and diverted over to Polygon. And there's nothing of blockchain with their technology can do to change the fact that people just want to be a part of cool communities. And that's what has product market fit with NFTs right now. I don't even think I need to ask my next question because this dovetails so nicely into Stani and what Lenz is doing with when it comes to just content and conversation in a web three fashion. So like Stani, the high level question is tell us about the vitality of lens. But really, I want to hear about like the conversation, like what Frank was saying when it comes

like content is king and how it's routing a bunch of value using conversations, using community members talking about stuff. How is this activity arriving on lens? And what are the metrics that you can show us to tell us about how much vitality that community has? Yeah, no, I definitely agree that. that it's quite a lot about the the actual content and distribution so yeah content i'll say like um the content is is is the king but also the like the curation is the layer that is

is very very much that actually make some of the nfti projects um more valuable what we heard recently as well so for example that where where you can actually hear about different projects you know one one way is to you know being different digital groups or hooked Twitter or telegram groups but something that is very interesting about lens is that you can actually incentivize also the sharing of the content so lens as a social layer it also has a monetization layer so for example how people are sharing content for example and incentivize like other people to share and amplify that content to your audience. I mean, in general, the lens protocol, it's still a beta.

So we don't have it as completely open and permissionless minting yet, but we're going towards that direction as we're now building the lens version two. But out of 110,000 profiles that has been given and granted and minted roughly we have average users of 35,000 per day, which is quite a high number of users coming back to Lens and just talk about different things, different projects, NFTE communities, and just sharing content.

And also, like, when we look at into the different numbers, currently on average profile is earning roughly 70, five dollars per profile in terms of revenue for just sharing that content. And I think that's very exciting in the sense that if you compare it to traditional social media, you really don't get anything. Like you might have like five minute views and you earn five dollars at maximum. So the curation, I think, is going to be very valuable parts. So like who are those influencers, how they're curated, but also seeing the transparency, like how people are getting actually paid when their share content and distribute to their audiences. And if you see all that activity also on

chain, it's very valuable for the users because it brings sort of transparency and accountability. So if someone shares a project to you and you see effectively that, you know, there's, that's content of verification that might be paid, but you might be seeing it because it's, valuable for you and you value that particular influencer, for example. So I'm personally super bullish on seeing a lot of NFTA stuff happening on lens. And also like down the roadmap, what we're trying to also figure out is that, you know, if you create content on directly on lens, how you could actually mint it directly in Magic Eden or whatever protocol you want to actually use outside of lens and have that kind of like a composability there as well.

So definitely like it's very early, but at the same time, I feel that that's, that lens protocol has created this kind of a layer of sharing and curating content to a web three native audience. And the discussions are very good three native as well. So kind of going back to the point, what Frank said that it's like, it really does. doesn't make sense now to reach to the whole world at this point, but actually focusing like how you can, how you can master the audience of Web3 native users and give them the best experience that they could have. Stanii, if somebody wants to go down the lens rabbit hole, where do they find that rabbit hole?

Where should they get started? So currently, if you want to mint a lens propot, just hit me a DM on Twitter or through Discord and I can help you out and you can mint your first lens profile. Because Lens has like a terrible bot problem, right? Like everyone's trying to get their bots onto Lens because they're trying to farm an air drop, right? Is that kind of the idea? Well, basically in terms of the BOT,

so the Lens protocol itself is pure raw data, but actually how you see that activity on your front end, it depends on the front ends and the algorithms in between. So for example, you have the ability as a frontend to minimize what you actually see. And that can be actually reduced. But at the day, like, we want to focus on the idea that lens should be permissionless in the future. And it's available to anyone. So you can mint a profile.

But once you minted your profile, you can actually attach any of those identity pieces that you might have. that might be your lens handle, that might be your ENS name, that might be some other piece of identity that actually creates a social reputation. It can be also your own chain balance sheet at the same time. And based on that and your activity and reputation score, we can actually create a reach for you as a user. So effectively, what's going to be different compared to Lens and the traditional social media is that it's basically accessible to anyone.

You can create a profile and have ownership of your online presence, follow other profiles and users. But at the end of the day, it's your activities that actually reflects how your content reaches out all the contents out there. Guys, this has been really cool. What a great panel. And I appreciated your insights today. I guess my takeaway is we're still kind of finding that content is king.

The cool set of tools around Web 3 and Crypto is that means creators can be king rather than the aggregators, the Web2 aggregators. So we've got content as king, creators being king. It seems like Polygon is this new platform for the creator economy. Super bullish. It's this place where it seems like social media is meeting crypto cultures, meeting Web2, and that's why it sounds like all of you are there. So thank you panelists for giving us some inside baseball into the NFT community on Polygon. The third largest community, maybe there's a flippinging in store.

Maybe they come after Ethereum's thrown at some point. Who knows the future is up to all of us in the community. Thank you panelists for joining this discussion today. Everyone just gave the thumbs up. Bankless Nation, as always. I've got to tell you, risks and disclaimers, NFTs are freaking risky. They're just JPEGs, aren't they, Frank? But it becomes kind of valuable sometimes too.

Of course, all of crypto is risky. So is defy. You could definitely lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. And we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video.

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