Bankless - The Worlds Greatest NFT Portfolio | DC Investor

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

DC Investor thought NFTs were cool before you did! Join us on this State of the Nation, as we explore DCs progression through the NFT universe and as he curated the worlds greatest NFT portfolio! ✨PERMISSIONLESS CONFERENCE✨ https://bankless.cc/Permissionless  💯 PREMIUM DISCOUNT 💯 https://bankless.cc/permissionlessdiscount  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini  🔀 BALANCER | EXCHANGE & POOL ASSETS https://bankless.cc/balancer  👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING http://bankless.cc/uniswap  ------ 📣 SoRare | Collect and Play! https://bankless.cc/SoRare  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 9:00 DC Curator 14:28 Before NFT Adoption 21:48 After NFT Adoption 24:05 DC's Portfolio & Punks 38:36 Art Blocks 48:34 One-of-Ones 54:40 Social Tokens & Digital Value 1:00:50 Scarcity & Paying Artists 1:05:20 Changing Culture & the Metaverse 1:09:06 What's Next? 1:12:05 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: DCInvestor on Twitter https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor?s=20  DC's NFT Collection http://gallery.so/dcinvestor  DC's Newsletter https://dcinvestor.substack.com/  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Hey, Bankless Nation, welcome to another episode of State of the Nation. This is a weekly episode where we take you through something big that is happening in crypto. I am really excited about this episode. I have so many questions for our guests. Why don't you tee it up for us, David? Yeah, we got DC Investor who I tweeted out a while ago. He thought NFTs were cool before you did. And then he corrected me and said, well, there were people who thought NFTs that were cool before I did. But there's always someone who's earlier than all of us. But DC was earlier than me, he was earlier than Ryan here, into the world of NFTs and was buying

NFTs because he thought they were cool before the market proved that there was going to be global liquidity and global demand for them. So we really want to pick his brain as someone who has been in the middle of this storm that has happened before the storm even arrived and in the eye of the storm as it came. What it's like to transcend both the pre-market mania side of NFTs and now what it's like to be on the other side of like almost like a global acceptance. of NFTs as like an asset class. And so DC has this very, very just awesome portfolio that's tagged on his Twitter account

and his bio, if you guys want to follow along on that. But we're going to just be asking him some questions about transcending pre-post NFT manias and also what it's like to just be an NFT curator. Yeah, it's super cool. You know, I always thought NFTs in and of themselves were cool, like the primitive, but I had no idea how valuable they'd be, David. That's where I got tripped up. It's like, how do you separate the value of this thing from that thing?

And, like, DC's ability to see these things early has been really key to his NFT game. I think he's got one of the best NFT portfolios in crypto. So this is going to be like a guided tour. Like his personal museum, we get to see this online as curated a selection. So I'm super excited to dig in and ask a whole bunch of questions. Guys, we have some new things going on in the Bankless Nation as always as well. we had an episode with Kathy Wood, Chris Brininski, and you've seen another analyst on the Arc Invest team. These guys managed $75 billion in capital.

Absolutely crazy to have them on bankless. And that was a fantastic episode. Just released that yesterday coming off of that episode. Maybe all-time high downloads. It's going to be. We'll be. We'll see. Might be.

Also, David, we've got a panel on loot tomorrow. You want to give some insight into what that's going to be about? Yeah, we all know the loot phenomenon has. taken the the NFT world by storm. And so we kind of want, and it's moved so incredibly fast. So we're bringing on three loot experts who have been deep into the weeds. Jackson, Dame, Anish from Paradigm, and also Darrell Lau, who will be all be joining us so we can ask questions all about loot and what is going on. Oh, excuse me, not Darrell Lau, Will Palper, the guy who minted the adventure gold contract. So all these guys are contributors towards the loot ecosystem.

them and we want to ask them just like get their insight and perspective as to what that means. That's also another NFT, but like a different type of NFT, like a virtual world. Inside out of NFT, yeah. Yeah, super interesting story there. And the markets have cooled down, but like not that much. And there's so much more to this loot story that I think requires unpacking. So exciting stuff. Also, guys, permissionless conference tickets, bankless is co throwing the world.

I think this is going to be the biggest defy conference ever. We're doing this in 2022. Super excited about the panelists. We're working on the guests. We're working on all of these details. The thing is tickets come available, like 250 tickets come available every 15 days or so, like twice a month. And on the 15th of September, a new tranche is actually going to be opened.

If you are a bankless premium member, you get notice of this first. So you can get your ticket first. They sell out quickly. The last one sold out just a few hours. people realized it was open. I think this will as well. The other thing about it is prices go up every 15 days. It's kind of one of those fun crypto experiments, right? It's like you buy now, where you have FOMO and you buy at a higher price later, right? This is like crypto. So, tickets are now $275. They're still going to 10x over the next few months leading into the conference.

So now is the time to get them. Once again, if you are a bankless premium subscriber, it's $80 in savings right off the bat. So become a bankless premium subscriber. You want in on that conference. It feels like a no-brainer. David, we also are talking a lot about So Rare these days and what they're doing in the NFT space. So what's going on in Fantasy Soccer land. Right. NFTs have the ability to be custom fit for any sort of project or application or a product. And So Rare is doing fantasy football. That's soccer for you Americans out there. using NFTs on Arbitrum on layer two, so we can save on gas fees. And you can pick your squad, you can compete for prizes. And it is just one of those cool, awesome...

Pinkliss is proud to be... One of those cool, awesome, like, legacy applications that is being ported over towards Ethereum Rails and Defi applications to do all the same things that we know in love, but now on crypto terms. You're muted, Ryan. What I love about this, too, is it's all on layer two. So, like, no gas fees, right? And this is like a layer two success story. So they've sold, I don't know, 130 million, something like this in So Rare NFT cards just this year alone. So super exciting to see what they're doing. Bring fantasy sports to Ethereum.

So thanks to So Rare for sponsoring this message. All right, David, I think that's it before I ask you the question. I always ask at the beginning of this, which is what is the state of the nation today, sir? State of the nation is curating. We are curating. The whole promise about NFTs and what all people have realized in the last few, just like, you know, there was the first NFT mania and then now recently the second, is that some of these NFTs have the power to be like some of the deep cultural artifacts of the actual Internet itself. And so I know that's that perspective is one I've gained from D.C. himself. And so while we are perusing D.C.'s gallery alongside with him shoulder to shoulder in just a second, we are all curating. We're all curating part of deep internet culture history. hopefully our picks, our curations are actually the right things to pick.

So we will pick DC's brain about how he thinks about curating NFTs. No longer DC Investor. It's DC Curator, I guess. That was my joke, by the way. I stole it. All right, guys, we will be right back after these sponsors with DC investors. Stay tuned. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure.

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 Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. DAOs 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. 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 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. The AVE protocol is a decentralized liquidity protocol on Ethereum, which allows users to supply and borrow certain crypto assets. AVE version 2 has a ton of cool features that makes using the AVE protocol even more powerful. With AVE, you can leverage the full power of defy money Legos, yield, and composability all in one application. application. On Ave, there are a ton of assets that you can supply to the protocol in order to gain yield, and all of those same assets can also be borrowed from the protocol if you have supplied collateral. Here, you can see me borrowing 200 USDC against my portfolio of a number of different defy tokens in ETH. I'll choose a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option,

but I could choose the stable interest rate option if I wanted to lock in that interest rate in permanently. V2 also features the ability for users to swap collateral without having to withdraw their assets, trade them on uniswap, and then deposit them back into AVE. With AVE, users can do this in one seamless transaction, saving you time and gas costs. Check out the power of AVE at AVE.com. That's AAVE.com. Hey guys, we are back with D.C. investor talking about the best NFT portfolio in the world. DC investor probably needs no introduction to bankless. He's an ETH Bull. He's now an NFT legend. He's an investor, an advisor in the community as well. Previous Bankless guest, DC, great to have you back on Bankless. How are you doing? I'm doing really well. Thanks a lot for having me on, Ryan and David. I'm excited about today's

conversation. Well, usually when we have you on, we talk all about Eith because you have such great thoughts on ETH. But now we're going to switch things up because you have this fantastic curation. in an NFT world as well. We want to pick your brain on NFTs. And maybe to kick things off, as we said in the intros, you saw NFTs back before a lot of people did. Back before, as the kids say, they were cool, right? What about NFTs grabbed you when they did?

And when did you make your first NFT purchase? Was that in 2018? Can you describe that and give us a timeline when you first got interested in this asset class? Sure, sure thing. And I think, you know, the NFT journey for me has been a long one and it's been a progression, I would say, because when I first started off learning about NFTs as a lot of us did in around 2017, 2018 timeframe, the exemplar at that time was CryptoKitties, which those who have been in crypto for a while and in Ethereum for a while will remember CryptoKitties primarily because they quote unquote clogged up the chain at more than one point. And that, what happened in that situation was people were buying these crypto kitties as collectible assets, but they were also assets that were being used like in this breeding game. And so people would be doing these crypto kitties breathing moves on chain, if you will,

to create more kitties to sell. And so it kind of became this thing that, you know, all of these transactions are hitting the Ethereum L1 mainnet. And it was just kind of overwhelming transaction capacity. but people were doing it because they were selling these kitties on the back end of that. And so there was a profit to be made there. And so from my perspective at that time, I kind of viewed NFTs more as a novelty. Although, well, let me say this. I understood the long-term trajectory of the technology even then.

I didn't really think about it from an art perspective, though. I was thinking about it more as like, well, can we tokenize land or house deeds and stuff like that and put it on chain and then use it as part of a program. programmable stack. It didn't really occur to me in a serious way that art would become a primary use case of NFTs at that time. I know that people were creating art, you know, non-game art, but I never really took it that seriously back then because I didn't really understand the vision. Fast forward a little bit from there. And we're seeing even more game items come out. So a lot of people remember Axi Infinity or no Axi Infinity in God's Unchained. So I bought a bunch of

those assets because just because I thought, well, yeah, I can totally see the gaming use case. You know, anyone who's ever played any kind of online RPG or even like a trading card game, like Magic the Gathering, understands the value of like unique assets that you can trade with one another and you can create an economy around. So in my mind, that was just a use case that clicked for me immediately. Still did not really get the art side of that. But that was kind of my early journey in NFTs, really up until I would say the beginning of this year. in 2021 or I would say the tail end of 2020. D.C., would you say there was like a moment where you were like, I want to be an

NFT person or was it more of a slow, slow like, oh, slowly my portfolio becomes more and more and more and more NFT denominated more than it does like ETH or DeFi token denominated? When did you decide that you were really, really going to care about NFTs or was there a moment like that? There was never a moment like that, David. And while I care about NFTs a lot, I still care about Ethereum and just decentralized networks a lot. And that's, to me, it's all one and the same thing. And I think NFTs are a really valuable addition in terms of an asset class to the decentralized

ecosystem. And I know that in previous episodes that I've been on with you guys, I talk a lot about the censorship resistant value of ether as a collateral asset. I think NFTs actually, you know, something that isn't being talked about enough is that when NFTs create this new value on Ethereum, they're expanding actually the economic bandwidth of Ethereum even further. They're expanding the size of the Ethereum-based economy. So I view this as like the first product market fit of like decentralized economy beyond just like mindless like token flipping, you know, which is, which is really probably the first element of it. But now this is

something that's a lot more participative. It's visual. It's interesting. It has this cultural component. But there was never a moment when I set out to say, well, I want to be like this NFT guy. It just kind of like happened. I still don't really view myself as that. I view myself as like a decentralization guy. And I see NFTs as just being a core part of that, to be honest. D.C., let, can we go through your thought process back in 2018, 2019, before NFTs really had proven to the market that there was going to be like global demand, global liquidity for these things. And I want to ask this before and after question, so the same question twice. But back in 2018, 2019, what was your thought process like about, like, how you would vet or analyze or

decide that you wanted to purchase an NFT? Did you think that, like, oh, I'm going to buy this now and sell it later? Or I like the art? Like, how did you, what was your, like, curation thought process back before NFTs were what they are today? So most, I will say that most of my NFT collection was actually purchased in the early part of this year, which still seems like ancient times, by the way. And we can go through that progression a little bit. But when I was buying those game assets in 2018, 2019 timeframe, really during the bear market, one, it was kind of a distraction from the prices of ether and the other tokens that were just like going down. So I was like, you know, I can at least like have some fun playing these games. I was playing gods and chained and stuff like

that. But in my mind, like, the value proposition was clear in that, you know, if these games take off and if these economies take off, then these assets will be worth more. And I can also use them to play the game. And they have like rarer version of cards. Same thing with Axi Infinity. You know, there are some axes that are more powerful than others. And so I was really buying them as bets on like these games taking off, right? And if you look at like, also if you look at games like Magic the Gathering and like the trading card space, so Magic the Gathering actually pioneered basically that entire genre of the trading card game. And early Magic to Gathering cards are now worth a ton of money.

You know, like a Black Lotus can be bought for several hundred thousand dollars or higher depending on the quality of the card. So I saw a value in kind of being early to some of that. Some of those things haven't exactly played out yet. But I will say that earlier this year is really when I got into like the NFT art scene. And it really was a byproduct of the fact that like as I, as you guys know, I was a career management consultant. I spent 15 years doing public sector consulting, and I left that job in February, early February.

And so starting in January, I just started to open my eyes more to other things that are going on within Ethereum. And obviously, we were all very immersed in like the early Ethereum stuff, the early DeFi stuff. But getting into NFTs was something I never really had like the mental space to do. I saw people, though, who are very passionate about their NFTs on Twitter. And I always pay attention to this stuff. I really do try to like sense what people are talking about and why they're talking about it. Is it just blind bag pumping or is there something else there? And with NFTs, I saw these people who are just like rabid collectors.

And I saw it first actually in Cryptopunks. And I saw it like relatively early. So really in like that was probably around January when Cryptopunks were still like a couple of Ether each, you could buy a crypto punk for a couple of ether. But I kind of tried to unpack the psychology behind that. And there's actually a really notable paper by, I don't know if you guys recall this, it was by Foo Basler, Crypto, DiRio, and Alex Gaussman, just talking about the crypto punk like fat thesis,

which was like talking about how crypto punks would absorb all this value. I think the paper is probably like a year old now, well ahead of its time. Okay. I remember reading it when it first came out and I was like, well, maybe, you know, I could maybe see that happening. But then in January or February time, I was like, okay, these are still cheap. It makes sense to place a small bet on this. And I like the collectible aspect of it.

So I went out and I bought my first couple of cryptopunks. And that was really what kind of led me down the rabbit hole, to be honest. I think that's true for a lot of people. It started off in like that collectible aspect, but then progressed on into the art aspect. Can we talk about that? So like this is where I kind of got off the ride. Like in my own kind of like so I totally saw what you saw with like NFTs being a really important primitive with crypto kitties, right? And then I also saw it.

It was very obvious to me as like a former gamer that like the the virtual gaming gods and chain cards axes would be a big deal, right? But then I didn't like I totally missed the crypto punks thing. And then I miss like the broader art thing. And like now I see it. But like now he has a turtle as his profile picture. That's just to make fun of David. That's right. But but I like what was it when you purchased your first crypto punk that like I guess put you

over the edge into uncovering all of these other art pieces? And then why did you like what did you see? these other art pieces at that time. Yeah, I mean, I think, and I think the signal for me was when I saw people were using them more broadly as profile pictures. And there were a few people doing that, like, all along, you know, they weren't, they aren't necessarily like big name profiles that you would recognize. But when I saw people doing that, it kind of clicked for me. People are like identifying with these assets. And I was like, that's like a super powerful driver. And I was like, you know, what's it going to take for someone who's using this as their profile picture to sell one?

And then the gear started turning there, right? So I got, I bought a few Cryptopunks and I was actually really involved with the Cryptopunk Discord for a while. And I was just kind of chatting with people there. I was like, hey, what do you guys think are cool attributes? Why do you guys like them? And they're like, oh, we like hoodies and the big beards and stuff like that. And so I bought, I bought a hood. That's one of the reasons why I bought a hoodie punk. And I thought they look cool. Of course, so I bought one. But from there, I really started to talk to more people within that discord. And they kind of clued me into this on chain generative art space. which is the space that I'm like really like falling down the rabbit hole pretty hard. Because I'll tell you like, and I'm not saying like the one of one art is like not a good market to be in because I own some one of one art myself. But I never really, that value proposition never clicked for me as much because you can have like that JPEG like anywhere. Right. And I get that one person owns it. But that value proposition didn't click for me as much as the on chain generative art. And I think some of your listeners will be familiar with.

with on-chain generative art. And when I talk about on-chain generative art, I'm really talking about these, when you have these minting of pieces on-chain using a generative algorithm. And basically, when the user submits a transaction, the hash of that transaction provides the source of randomness for that art algorithm.

And so that outputs basically a fixed number of pieces depending on what the artist has specified. That was like a light bulb moment for me, because I was like, oh, now you can have this, like, unique, this art form that had existed before, now produces these unique outputs, and now they can be collected and traded. I kind of, like, needed that, I think, to, like, really get it and Cryptopunks. But that's really when I kind of fell down the rabbit hole. And I started looking at all of these art blocks pieces.

And I can talk to you guys about some of the ones that I bought early on and why. But that's kind of how I fell down the rabbit hole. We're about to open up your portfolio and actually take a peek here in a second. But before we do that, I do want to just get your perceptions as to like the before and after, the compare and contrast of like, you know, the pre-adopted state of NFT markets and then the post-adopted state of NFT markets, right? Like, Cryptopunks were dormant for like three years before they really got going. Art blocks saw success really, really quickly, but art blocks are also relatively new.

But as someone who's like straddled the pre-and-post liquid phase of NFTs, has your thought process or curation strategies or just buying process? changed or evolved or adapted at all now that we are kind of in a phase or NFTs have kind of seen more adoption than Defi in some sectors of the world? Yeah, it has a little bit for sure because when I got when I went that period when I was describing to you in January, February timeframe, when I got that generative art concept in my head, I realized kind of this could be like really big and propel the entire NFT space forward. So I kind of went into like a land grab mode. And I think a lot of people thought I was like crazy at the time. And, you know, like I was chatting with some of my

friends, including you guys and you guys weren't the ones who are giving me grief. But some people are like, what the hell are you doing? Why are you spending so much money on this stuff? And you're not just spending money, sir, you're spending Eve. Let me remind you. Well, at the time, and I will say this was like a policy of mine was for every NFT that I bought, like I was actually using defy to help me finance those purchases. So I don't recommend this necessarily. But one of the things that I said was, look, I'm not going to give up my ether to buy these. I'm going, I was borrowing against my ether and other assets. And then I used that, that kind of capital that I was borrowing to then buy the NFTs, right? And I was like,

eventually I'll pay off these loans in some way. But it was actually defy that allowed me to do all of this. And it allowed me to take that kind of controlled risk. And I didn't have to lose my exposure to ether. If I couldn't have done that, I probably would not have bought as many NFTs. T's. And I know the value of some of my collection has swelled a fair amount, but like when I bought some of these, they weren't like nearly as expensive. I'm not saying they were cheap. I didn't get in on some of these when they were like bargain basement. But that was my calculus as I kind of got into this. Pretty cool. Ryan, should we pull up DC investors a portfolio? I think we should. I'm, I'm anxious to dive in here, DC. So I'm pulling up this website, which I think I've seen this before,

maybe, but this appears to be a curated gallery. So this is not necessarily all of the NFTs that you own, but these are NFTs that you have curated to be displayed on this gallery.s. So, is that correct? That's right. Yeah, it's a lot of them. And it's funny because some people will use the term portfolio. I view it. I consider it more of like a collection than a portfolio. Ah, okay. Yeah, which is kind of like a distinction. And I get that people are now viewing them more as like investments. But at the time, I was like, I want to collect these because I view them as pieces of that internet culture, which David, I think your statement at the top of this episode kind of nailed that idea, which is these are pieces of like internet history. So my thought process

has always been like, there are only going to be so many pieces of history to go around. And if I want any of them, I better like get them and I collect them. So I will, I will sell some of them like eventually, but I didn't start off with the mindset of I'm doing this as like a for-profit venture if that makes sense. I think that's such a good distinction. See, my mind is still in kind of like we've got assets and there's like finance and it's defy and these are stores of value. But like thinking about these as cultural collections, I think is the right language to use for this sort of thing. So we're taking a peek. How many items are in this curated list, D.C.? Oh, it's quite a few to be honest.

couldn't give you an exact number, but it's probably like a couple hundred or maybe a few hundred in here. And, you know, not all of them are like super valuable. At the top of this list, you'll see, or at top of this gallery, you'll see my autoglyphs. So these were actually the very first on-chain generative art. So after I bought some of those art blocks pieces that I talked about, I started to like talk to people and learn more about all the stuff that was happening, like during the bear market, basically in NFTs when a lot of us were not paying attention. And they're like, oh, yeah, Autoblifts were actually the first on-chain generative art.

So I tried to buy as many of them as I could. They were already quite expensive. But in my mind, the significance of these first on-chain generative art pieces could not be duplicated, basically. And so I'm wondering, as we scroll through this, D.C., what's the best way to look at this? Should we do it by timeline and find some pieces that you bought kind of early and work our way backwards? Or like, what do you think, David? Where should we start here? I think the first question I want to ask DC is using the frame of reference as deep cultural

artifacts of the internet itself, which of the assets of the NFTs in your portfolio do you think most resonate with that framing? Is it the autoglyphs? I think it's probably the cryptopunks and the autoglyphs for sure, both of which were created by Larva Labs, who have kind of been... I'm going to scroll down to the cryptopunks then. Yeah, go for it. And, you know, I bought a few and wedged in between them are a few avatars. And so that that crypto punk in the middle right there with the iPatch is actually the first one I bought. And by the way, almost all of these are floor punks. And one of the things that I do is I'm kind of like a ruthless floor value hunter. So here's an interesting thing about NFTs, which you guys may appreciate from what you've seen in the

space. A lot of crypto people are like mathy type people. So they get really hung up on like the rarity of different attributes and stuff like that, especially for these randomized pieces. And when I look at them, I was like, okay, I guess I get like the random attribute perspective, but there's nothing that replaces for me, like, aesthetically, how does a piece look when it, like, comes together, right? And to me, this guy with the iPad was just like, it really, and still is like the perfect floor crypto punk. It probably shouldn't have been a floor crypto. He's got an eye patch and a five o'clock shadow, too. I mean, yeah, exactly. It's just like this and like the crazy hair.

It's like this is like perfect. I couldn't believe that it was a floor. And then but then as I uncovered like the collector psychology at the time, everyone's just focused on attribute. Right? Very few people. And I think I think that for a lot of crypto people, that is easier to do and they feel more comfortable doing that

than actually trying to make like an aesthetic assessment. Right. Yeah. You people like essentially people, people like objectivity, right? And so they go and say, oh, well, there's only like X number of this attribute and that number is really so much so much lower than all the other attributes. So therefore it's rare.

Therefore, I feel secure in my investment where DC what you're saying is like, well, this guy looks cool. And I like that. Exactly. So you're saying that maybe perhaps in the long term that people are discounting too much, something that just straight up looks cool. I think so 100%. And so that's why I got that iPatch guy. The second crypto punk I bought was actually the one to the right of that, which is this funny guy. like smoking a pipe.

I was kind of like, this is like my bare market alter ego right here. So I was like, I just thought, I just thought he's hilarious. You smoke a pipe in real life? No,

I don't. But I just think this guy is absolutely hilarious. He's like frowning, he's smoking a pipe. He's got his glasses on. He's watching the charts. You know, and so I was like,

and I thought he was a great compliment to that other one. And so I was like, okay, I'm done now. But then I kept to like buying more. That's kind of my NFT story is I got addicted to buying them.

I bought that guy in the lower right. the guy with the Mohawk, yeah, that guy. And then from there, I actually like, so those were all four punks, right? And I was like, well, you know what? I kind of want one that's like I would like to have as my avatar. It could be that pipe smoking guy. But this is when I, I guess, transitioned into a, quote, NFT identity. And that's when I bought that, the hoodie crypto punk, right?

And at the time, I bought this one for 10 ether, which was probably around 20K at the time. And I just thought it was like, I was like this guy looks kind of bad. He's kind of like chill. I love the big shades. Just everything about him was like, I loved it. So I was just like, and I actually, I had bid 10, but the seller wanted 12. And I remember exchanging messages with him. I was like, would you sell it for less?

And he's like, oh, no, sorry, you can't sell it for less than 12. And I was like, all right, I better just buy it if I want it. And so I bought it and then I set it as my profile picture. And I think the rest is kind of like history after that because that's kind of, I would feel like that was a moment when things. shard to blow up, not because I changed my profile picture, but, you know, it just kind of coincide with that. There's this quip that I hear often from people who are really into, like, tattoos is like after you get your first tattoo, you can't stop thinking about just your next tattoo.

And I feel like that is exactly what just happened to you, D.C., where you got your first, like, crypto punk. And then you just became like a crypto punk maxi. And it's like, well, now I need all of them. It's so funny because, like, when I was buying them, the people in the Cryptopunks Discord, I was just like, okay, this is my last one. And then I come back, like, they see me. They see the sales spot go off on one another. I just kept buying them. And I will say like unlike a lot of people, speaking of Cryptopunk Maxis, there are people who are like, crypto punks are like the only NFTs that are really worth much.

There used to be more people like that a few months ago. And I never subscribed to that because I was just like, look, there's going to be other NFTs that are interesting. So I could have just bought a bunch of Cryptopunks at the beginning. But again, that wasn't really aligned with like what I was trying to do. For me, it was more interesting to pull together like this collection that I'm excited about and it's kind of like a reflection of my taste if that makes sense. D.C., have you ever sold one? Have you ever flipped one or have you only bought? I basically only bought so far.

And so that's why I'm not buying like a ton of new NFTs because I don't have like infinite liquidity. But my mindset was always like, I'm putting money into this that I can afford to lose and I want to hold on to these long term. And then over the past few months, more so, it's been like, well, you know what? This is actually like an asymmetric bet on culture. It's kind of like binary. Either of these things like 50x to 100 X or they like go to zero. And I say zero hyperbolicly because I don't think anything will ever go to zero. So I was like, I don't really, I don't need to like realize the profits from these. So I'm not going to sell them.

The only thing that I have sold was actually some land from Axi Infinity. And you guys might not be aware of this. But within the Axi Infinity game, there's actually land that you can use for the gameplay. I bought several parcels of it during the bear market. And I wasn't really playing the game, but I was just like, I just want to kind of support the creators of this game. And I was like, you know, so I bought it directly when they were being offered. And I ended up selling some of that for like a 200 X profit or something.

And I actually forgot I had the listing up. It just kind of like sold. And I was like, okay, that's cool. But that's the only NFTE that I've sold so far. And it's some of these, like, I mean, could you ever sell this one with the hoodie that's become like your NFT identity? There's somebody in the YouTube chat that says that that Cryptopunk has become iconically tied to DC.

Probably it has. And that's an interesting, that's an interesting thought process because like, can I sell it? I could, right? I mean, I could sell it. And it might even have someone who's like a fan of mine or wants to support me, might even put a premium on it. You know, like they might want to buy that. There might be others who say, oh, that's DC's punk.

I don't want to use it as my own identity. For me, I think putting on DC's face. Right, exactly. I mean, for me, it's kind of like one of the. last NFTs I would ever sell if I had to like sell my NFTs if that makes sense. Can I ask you this because this is interesting and kind of NFT theory is like I would also say because this has become so iconic with you DC, right? And like because you've been, you know, a core part of this movement as well, you've also made this NFT more valuable. Right.

So there's something to like the, the, I guess, second order effect of somebody, purchasing an NFT that has less value. And then because they assume it as their identity, because they use it in all of these places, because they build kind of their reputation in the digital world or the non-digital world, they make that NFT more valuable. I feel like you've definitely made this NFT more valuable. Is this a commonly talked about understood thing in NFT circles? I think it's starting to be more understood. And right now it's just because I think a lot of it is like us crypto nerd types who have been like in on this but now you have like actual like celebrities who have nothing to do with crypto historically coming in and buying crypto punks

like jZ has a crypto punk as his profile picture you've got several athletes that are doing does the fact that they have owned one of those cryptopunks make it more valuable for almost certainly and even like the attributes of the ones that they're selecting right might make them more valuable. And even like I've heard people, and I think hoodie punks are the coolest personally. I wish I had more of them. But like, you know, you see a lot of people using hoodie punks as their avatars, you know, and people associate hoodies now with them. And now they want a hoodie. That has definitely happened. And that's raised the floor prices of hoodies. But I think the phenomenon you're talking about Ryan extends beyond just the avatars into the art pieces as well.

Because now you're starting to see a lot more recognition around who's collecting. these pieces and why. And at the time, so when I put together this gallery page, there were not, surprisingly, there were not many NFT collectors like creating galleries like this. They just kind of had them in their open sea. A lot of them were, they were flipping, you know, to be honest, so they don't necessarily like want to advertise that this is like something they own when they're going to sell it next week. But for me, like, I all, my vision was always to create some kind of like 3D metaverse gallery. And the technology is not, like there yet for me to create an experience that I want to do there. So I was like, well,

let me just start arranging them in 2D. And I found I ran, I tried a bunch of gallery sites. And they just didn't work for me. They were like a little too garish. They're focused on the price too much. They're focused on all this metadata. And I just want I was like, I just want to arrange the NFTs the way I want to on a website. And I came across gallery.com. And I've now become like a huge supporter of theirs. I'm an angel investor in them. And I work with their team as well. And I just started laying them out here. And I was like, oh, my God. I was like, now I can finally, like, experience my NFTs in a way that I'm excited about. And I can go and share with other people. And I actually visit my gallery frequently just to kind

of like tweak things here and there and just to kind of reflect on what I've collected and what I want to collect next. And so the more that people create galleries like this, that will also, I think, confer value on certain types of pieces because your signal. like, hey, I'm holding this. I think this has value in the way that humans are. They naturally look for social cues around what's valuable and what isn't. And I mean, I try not to abuse. I don't consider it like a power. It's just like a consequence of like collecting these things and holding them. But it's something that I don't like abuse. Like I don't, I'll never like take an NFT for money and like put it in my gallery. I will only buy and collect things that like I

actually like. And not all of them are going to be valuable, but I don't, I don't really care. Well, that's why we call you DC curator, right. Yeah, DC curator. Yeah, decentralized curator. We can call it. But yeah, I mean, like, for me, it's just like, I'm just curating my own gallery. I don't have, like, an ambition beyond that. I'm not trying to, like, pump these pieces or anything like that because I'm not going to sell any of them like anytime soon, okay? Like, I'm not going to sell many of them any anytime soon. We put it that way. And so for me, just the value of being able to pull these together has been huge. And it was somewhere along the way, like back when I was doing this in the early days, like no one cared. Like I would be like, hey, guys, check out my NFT gallery. It's like, okay, cool,

what are these? And now people go to it and they're like, holy crap. Like, do you know how much this one's worth and that one's worth? And I was like, look, when I started putting them in here, they were not worth that much. And now, like, some people associate with like a status symbol or whatever. I think the flex, like, I put out of tweet once and I was like, the flex is not like the monetary worth of them, the flex is like your taste, right? And I think like if you're collecting NFTs, like have it be a reflection of your taste, not like your net worth, you know? And I think that's like that's something really like fundamental that I would suggest people think about. I actually wanted to take that transition and go into the art blocks conversation. Because DC, you're talking about

how you bought floor punks based off of their aesthetics, right? And so I wanted to apply that same sort of lends to art blocks and how you think art blocks might be valued based on their aesthetics rather than just like their price, right? Like some art blocks are really highly priced and people are still trying to like figure out how the market is pricing these things. But you have a really awesome set of Fidenzas that you have as a three by three in Ryan, I think it's further down south on the page. And I think it's one of my favorite sets that you have here on this page, on your gallery. And you've curated them so that like there's the green pink ones up atop. We got the multicolored ones with the same backgrounds in the middle and then a similar set of

three down at the bottom. Can you talk about the role of aesthetics when it comes to art blocks and also the again like just double down on the whole like set generation side of things as they pertain to art blocks. Yeah, I think that so for me with all of the arc blocks I've collected, almost without exception, it has been aesthetically driven for me, right? There have been a couple of land grabs that I've made, which I'll talk about in second. But like, I have really focused on, and you can just see this. So I actually bought a lot of these art blocks pieces before I had this gallery. But in my head, I was always buying pieces thinking about how I would physically arrange them like one day.

And it kind of started with like, okay, these two would look good next to each other. And I was like, okay, let's add a third. And I was like, you know what? What if I had like a two-by? three and then what if I had a three by three like visual and so it just kind of like expanded from there but for me with art blocks aesthetics is always like number one I like the the whole attribute rarity like I don't want to say I don't care about it at all but I care like very little about it but for some people that's all they care about and I'm not trying to tell any collector like what

they should care about I'm more just saying like what's important to me is being able to like display these pieces and I think to the other thing that people miss is like everyone's focused on rarity, but fast forward to like 10 years from now, like there's only going to be a thousand ringers. They're only going to be a thousand Fidenzes. Like, is it that important that you have like one of those that's like some super rare attribute? Just having even one of these pieces might be like a big deal at that point.

I mean, it's kind of a big deal now, I guess. But like I feel like people get wrapped up in those dynamics. Instead of just buying pieces they like and they spend a lot more. So by the way, all of these Fidenzos were four Fidensos, 100% of them. And I just, and I bought them when they were cheaper, kind of right before they went completely parabolic, I guess. But like, I was able to like assemble these sets. I just bought them all very quickly in sequence.

I was like, okay, these three would get together, buy them. But I think like, I think the story actually, if you want to go back up towards the ringers, Ryan, because I do want to kind of point out how I thought about some of the stuff in earlier days. And actually you go slightly above the ringers. There you go, right here. If you scroll down just a tad. So you see there, okay, these pieces here, these five around this X copy, this is from a set called Genesis on Art Block.

So this is one of the day one releases at ArtBlocks. And the piece that you're hovering over right now, that Red One, is actually Genesis Zero. So that is the first user-minted ArtBox piece ever created. There were a few created by like Snowfro and Jeff Davis, who were like the guys that were running the site. They minted also some squigglys, which are a day one set, and also construction token, which was a day one set by Jeff Davis. So Snowfro did crummy squiggly. And so this Genesis Zero piece was the first user mint.

And when I saw it for sale, I was like, this was like actually the first art box piece that I bought. It was kind of like a land grab because I was like, okay, everyone's, like, I spent some time in the art block's discord and in the Cryptopunks Discord. Everyone was talking about it. Like people who like, I feel like were the genesis of this community, I was like, I got to buy some of these. And I bought Genesis Euro just on the spot. So it's not my favorite piece like aesthetically, but I felt like it was like a really important piece of history. And that's kind of how I got into it. From there, though, I very quickly kind of discovered ringers, which is below this.

and that's when I really fell down like the rabbit hole because for me I really like kind of the more abstract art style a lot of these have like the way that I talk about is kind of like an anthropomorphic or zoomorphic aspect to it so if you scroll up to that red one there Ryan like that one looks like a moose you know like actually demetri shernic that calls that one the muse the one in the left looks like a raven and you know so each one of the one under the raven looks kind of like an angel you know so I feel like those are like things that kind of of they're kind of evocative of something and these are pieces that make you think but when I realized like mental it took me a second to like make the leap these are all based on like an algorithm they're created at random during mint and there's only like 1,000 and the artist could not curate the outputs I kind of saw the value proposition of the genre immediately and so that's when I really went on my like generative art buying spree and on that note we know that uh uh three hours capital bought a ringer that famously looks like a goose, and it totally looks like a goose.

And there was an insane and premium attached to that. DCR, I want to back up really quick and go back to the whole aesthetic question about art blocks. You said, like, you don't really play the rarity game on art blocks too much. You kind of prefer the aesthetic game. And you also said, like, you know, there's only a thousand, like ringers. There's only a thousand X. Do you think that, like, the reason why different art block sets are priced differently, like Fidenzans are really, really highly priced.

Ringer's really, really highly placed. Do you think that is because of aesthetics, as in like the market's like, oh, yeah, Fidenzas, everyone generally agrees that like Fidensas look really, really cool. And so, like, maybe it's like the sets themselves are priced based off of the aesthetics and then like maybe the rarity inside the sets reprises individual units inside of that set, according to rarity. How do you think about that? So I think that, so the pricing of any NFT set, I think,

is an extremely complex formula. And I can't, it's really hard for me to, like, distill down, like, what makes one set more valuable than another. I think what is interesting about NFTs versus other kinds of art is the ability for them to, like, develop this memetic or viral value, like, on the internet in a way that has not really been seen in traditional art, right? If you go back to, like, early, like hundreds of years ago, right? A lot of artists would die before their work became famous.

and by extension they became famous. Now an artist can put out a set and it can go viral. If the right people start collecting it, then other people want it. And I think that is, like, we've already seen that in the internet generation or in the internet world for a long time, but now you can apply it to discrete, defined ownership of these visual assets. And so to me, I do think aesthetics is an important component of that. Are there aesthetic sets that are not aesthetically like...

Balancer is a powerful platform. valuable. Absolutely. I mean, so it's not enough that it like looks good. There are other like ineffable qualities that I look at. And very often, by the way, guys, I'm not like minting these projects on day one. I'm normally buying after they've been minted. I'm buying on secondary because I want the pieces that I like. I like to see how the market reacts to them. I like to see how the collectors are reacting. Is that like a risk strategy? You like just don't want the level of minting risk? Yeah. I mean, partially, absolutely. I mean, there are sets that I have minted and I do. you like the minting, but I also don't like getting into like gas wars and stuff like that.

So for me, like I would, there's no way I would have been able to randomly mint this set of nine to denses, right? The only way to build something like this is to buy them on secondary the pieces that you want. I might have been able to mint like one or two and then build a collection around that. And I've done that for some sets. But also like there are sets that don't gain that traction. And then I'm kind of like, well, I don't want to put a lot of money into something that I feel like won't necessarily. develop that cultural premium, right? And I think that cultural premium is like, that's the

ineffable part of this that's really hard to understand because you're kind of making a bet on what are people going to find interesting today, what's going to influence artists of tomorrow that's being created today, and how are collectors going to look back on this set? Are they going to look back on it with fondness? They're going to view it as overhyped. And I don't, I don't claim to know the answers to those things. But that is, all of those are factors that go into my own calculus when I'm buying a set. Like, because I think like just as important as like what's in my collection are all the things that are like not in it, right?

There's a lot of things that I could have bought. And that is not to say they're bad. Like I think I do think every collector needs to have a circle of competence. They need to have like something they're interested in. And that's how you build a collection. Otherwise, you're just buying like a little bit of everything and you end up with nothing that you're really excited about. At least that's how I approach it.

DC. Oh, yeah, you muted, Ryan. But, you go for you. Yeah, sorry, I'll go. DC, this has been super cool so far. Honestly, I want to, like, come back after the sponsors and camp out in your museum a little bit more, in your collection a little bit more,

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Check them out at Gemini.com slash go bankless. And we are back with D.C. investor and his famous portfolio. DC, I want to turn the conversation to one. one of ones, which are people that aside of NFTs that are very, very important, that actually are like the most alike towards like the legacy art world, right? Like when a painter paint something, there's only one of that. And so we also have the world of one of ones also in the NFT space. So when it comes to a one of one strategy, how do you change up what you think about or how you invest when it comes to one of ones? So I am definitely not, I'm probably one of the least

sophisticated one-of-one collectors out there. And I generally will prefer sets just because I have more comfort in what I'm buying. There's normally other assets that are like, you know, what we can call comps or comparables. And so when I buy something from a set, I can see, well, this one just traded at that price. So I have a pretty good idea of that. However, there are a bunch of, like, really talented one-of-one artists. And I wish I could, like, own more pieces by them. But, like, I'll point to one of them and this is this like flashing tank one there. So that's an X copy and that's actually, it's actually ironically part of a set of six, but each one of the six was hand created by X copy and is unique. So it is a unique piece. And this was probably the first one of one that I

spent like a serious sum of money on. And this one was definitely quite expensive, but I recognize that X copy is a really important NFT artist. And Xcopy is one of these like true OGs along with Colty and a bunch of other guys who are creating NFTs through the entire bare market. When guys like us were not paying attention to this stuff at all, they were cranking out these drops, they were putting them on super rare, people were buying them. And so I wanted to have at least one of one by X copy. But the calculus, I think for these really has to be on more around the artist.

And you really have to think about who is this artist, what is their place in kind of the milieu or the popular culture and how are they going to be looked back on in decades from now. That's how I think about it. But you can see these other ex-copies I have, which are all of the slightly epilepsy-triggering seizure one. They should have a seizure warning on them really with all the flashing. But I just thought like the art aesthetic was like really cool. And actually the other ones are all like part of a set.

Right. So like this, the one next to that tank one to the left, Overlord, that is number two of 20 of that series. Same with the one to the right of that. So these are all like sets of 20. But if you think about it, that's still like super exclusive. There's not a lot of those. You know, and like there's definitely not enough X copy to go around for all the people who want X copy. So I have no problem buying these like one of N sets. You know, I think like some of my favorite pieces are these one of N sets versus the one of ones. So I don't have. have like a ton of like one of ones that I would really say like I'm super proud of.

I will say like maybe we can talk maybe you can jump to the end of the gallery for a moment, Ryan, because I do want to show you. You have some beepels too. I've heard. Oh yeah, yeah. We can talk about those on the way. Well, before we get there, I'd like to DC right before we started going live here, you tweeted out you don't realize it yet, but many NFTs are actually artist social tokens. Can you elaborate on that tweet?

Yeah. I think that, so there's really two layers to that. The first is when you buy a piece of art from an artist, an NFT, and if you're buying it as something you're holding, you know, I think most people are buying, one, to support the artist, but two, as a collector like myself, I don't buy just to support the artist. I am buying with the expectation that's going to go up in value, or at least a lot of it will, because I'm not going to, I mean, like, if it's something cheap, if it's something relatively inexpensive, I don't have a problem, like spending a little bit of money to support a creator and just being like, okay, I think you're doing cool work. I'm to buy something. If I'm spending like five

figures plus on something, though, I at least want to have an expectation that I'm not like destroying the value that I'm putting into that. I want to, I want to have some confidence that I might be able to sell it again if I want to, even if I never sell it. And also that's just part of the mental stimulation for like a collector. I think people, and I've collected other stuff in the past, like magic to gathering cards and things like that. I didn't do. a lot of physical collecting because you need a lot of space to like take care of that inventory. So NFTs are kind of like a perfect fit for me in that regard. But while we're here and we're talking about these beaples.

So these be peoples were just ones, these were other like notable pieces that I bought like that had already like appreciated a lot. But I feel like Beeple is going to be remembered as a pretty important creator in this movement as well as someone who, because he's like a great story in the sense of he's a creator that has been creating this work for years, right? The guy's been creating like a piece every single year and posting it on Instagram for like a really long time. And he's developed a huge following,

but he never really had a way to monetize that. And now he has a way to monetize that in a way that's very significant. So the one that you've got up here, which is the politics is bullshit one. I eventually picked up one of these. This is people's first ever NFT drop. Okay. And he sold these for $1 each.

okay that was like each one of these were sold for a dollar and god yeah it's kind of crazy he released this october 29 2020 i'm reading here yes and so that was that was like ancient history and nfts time but i remember when it dropped and i was kind of like i heard about it and i was like everyone's like oh people's doing a drop and i was like okay i didn't pay a lot of attention to it but then i tracked the price on these things i was like wow people are really buying into this And these are still trading at pretty high valuations. And so I decided to pick up one of these eventually because I was like, well, it's people's first drop. And I mean, like, and I would love to have some of his one of ones, but they're outside of my price range.

So I didn't do that. Alongside these, if you want to go back, Ryan, to the gallery. So there's two others here. There's Into the Ether and Bull Run. And I think these pieces are also like, these pieces resonated with me for obvious reasons because they're like the crypto theme. And I love it. I mean, I love this into the ether one. This is so cool.

That is a really cool one, yeah. And there's like a print. I don't recall the exact number of this, but I think each one of these has like between 200 and 300 open edition. But that didn't really matter to me. I was like, these are still like for me, for me again, going back to what you said at the top, David, it's all about like the crypto culture that we're creating. And what is like more iconic about the crypto culture than like artwork that's about

Ethereum and about Bitcoin? And so I wanted to like buy some of that. And these pieces actually came with physical additions also. And I don't have them like in front of me, but like Bipel ships this to you with like a digital frame with the art that you can like plug in and it displays the art. He sends you like some weird stuff like a hair sample. You know, like it's just like other stuff. You got like a little certificate.

A sample of his hair? Yes. It's a sample of his hair in a vial. Yeah. I mean, he's kind of an eccentric guy, but I, you know, we love it. And so. So anyway, I just thought those were really cool. And I know one of the points that you guys wanted to hit on was around like physical and digital NFTs.

And maybe we can just talk about that for a second here. Because I think that with, so this is a case of NFTs where when you bought the NFT, you also got a physical with it. Right. The problem is these things can become separated over time. So in general for me, like I don't typically buy stuff like this because I don't want to have like physical and digital inventory and managing. For me, it's almost like a halfway step between going like fully digital.

Like in the example that I used recently that I was talking with Tom Channessi from Delphi Digital about was like, do you guys remember the Cassacius Bitcoins, like those little brass bitcoins that you could buy? Yeah, totally. These are like actual coins. Actual Bitcoin's IRA that you like own, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And what it, all it was was a brass coin with a private key inside of it. And you just hope the creator, like, deleted his copy of the private key, basically. Right. But, like, I remember in 2013 when I was trying to buy my first Bitcoin, I was waiting for Coinbase to, like, approve my deposit. And I was going on eBay, and I was like, maybe I should just buy one of these Cassacius Bitcoins. Because in my head, I was not ready to, like, make that transition to digital. And so I was like, okay, if I buy this coin, then I have something physical in addition to the digital. And it's kind of weird.

And I know that sounds like silly to us now probably. But think about like newer participants coming into the space. Like they might care about that. They might be like, well, I want something physical. I don't just want something digital. I actually think long term, most of the value is going to be on the digital side of these collectibles, to be honest. So that's just my view of like digital NFTs. Now, would I ever have like physical NFTs or physical art based on NFTs?

Absolutely. I mean, I would be, I would love to like get prints of them. I don't have a ton of space in my apartment here in DC area, but eventually as I have more space, I would love to get signed prints by some of my favorite artists of pieces that I own. I'm going to put them up and kind of decorate my home with some of them. Let's scroll down some more, DC. Toward the end, you wanted to get us to the end for some interesting things.

So, yeah, stop me anywhere. I'm just scrolling through some of these pieces here. And you can just keep going. And a lot of these, So there's a few axes there. Yeah. I actually own. Wait, you bought one of the Mark Cuban?

Yeah. I did. So this was one of those NFTs when I bought this. It was kind of like I splashed a fair amount for it. But I bought this one because this was Mark Kiven's first NFT. And I just thought it was cool. I was like he only made 10 of them. I think I think it was 10.

And I was like, you know, Mark's like an early guy, one of the early like prominent people who got into Ethereum and DFi. So I bought one of them. shortly after he released it. He was also very, very bullish on Euler Beets. So I think you've curated a Mark Cuban section in your gallery, right? Kind of, yeah, I just kind of like the juxtaposition of him doing the shoulder roll with these spinning discs. But yeah, these are all of the Euler Beats that I own. These are the prints of them.

I own two of the OGs as well. But yeah, these are prints of all of those, which if you go to the website, you can listen to these generative music samples. Yeah, I was going to say, because it's music too, right? It's not just the NFT art in these. That's right. Yeah. Okay. Now we're getting to the original crypto kitties here that you purchased.

Yeah, we got. Yeah. So that one on the left is like actually, it's not like super rare to be honest, but it's like a, that's a Generation Zero Cryptokitty. Okay. So it's one of the first like, like, general, but it's like first and like the first like 500,000 or something. But I was just like I wanted Gen Zero kitty.

And this is like the most boring, sad looking one I could find. So I bought it. And so. I bought the other one, I think, to like get a drop. Are crypto kitties like still a big deal, D.C.? They seem to have faded a little bit. And like they didn't hold up the way crypto punks did. I'm curious if you know why.

Yeah. I mean, this is really a question of supply and demand. And when you talk about supply and demand, we're talking about they were, I think there were like over a million crypto kitties well over. And there's just not a. Yeah, exactly. Now, I do think some of like the early founder cats might be like worth more. And I know some prominent collectors who own some of those.

I don't have any. And so it's not something that it's not really a rabbit hole. I want to like go back down. But, you know, different people want to collect different things. Now this photograph here in the middle, I think is one that's super interesting. And this is by a prominent photograph photography artist called Justin Aversano. And he's kind of become a pillar of like the photography, NFT community. the NFT community more broadly.

I've spoken with him a few times. And so this is one of, I think there's a hundred twin flames. And each one of these is unique. He went around and photographed a hundred twins. And the whole genesis of the project was when he was born, he had a twin that like passed away. And so he wanted to create this set. And I just thought it was like, this is like the perfect melding of like on chain art.

You know, you've got these defined pieces for like a hundred piece set. is unique and a lot of like prominent collectors have at least like one twin flame. I'd love to have more but I can't have like can't afford to have like an infinite number of some of these because the prices have appreciated a lot. But photography NFTs are another area that are taking off like massively. It's not like an area of like competence for me so I don't collect a ton of it. I would I'd like to get a little bit more into it. But I recognize that this is like anytime I see like something that I feel like it's pretty certain going to be a piece of history, I will I may just try to buy it just because I'm like, this is something that's important as an artifact, even beyond

the art that it represents. So as somebody who funded my life, my life during college via photography, I'm really optimistic that the world of NFTs can come and help add further and further monetization and financialization layers upon more traditional art forms, right? Like, we saw this with Beeple, and that makes a ton of sense because Beal is a digital artist, a 3D digital artist, seeing it also enter the world of photography is fantastic, really, really awesome. And this is how we go from just like weird, esoteric deep corners of the internet where you find crypto punk speculators to actually changing the world, the real world that's

outside of Ethereum, right? Ethereum is now changing the dynamics of photography. DC, as we come to a close here, we still have a few more questions, but I want to ask your question, just a very broad question is, how do you think broadly NFTs are changing culture, not just inside of Ethereum, but outside of it as well. So I think the impact is starting to be incredibly profound, to be honest, to the point where I think crypto culture is going to become a dominant culture in our society. And I think NFTs are going to be a prime like propagator of that in a way that people couldn't have expected.

Why is that? Because now you're giving creators the ability to earn money for digital art creations. And that has been like super difficult before, right? If you're a digital artist, you're basically relying on like, you could have a Patreon. Maybe you're selling prints or some of your work. But now you can sell these NFTs and those NFTs can create value beyond what you created. In addition to that, there's also a royalty payments that you earn. So every time one of these NFTs changes hands on these marketplaces, there's a royalty that the smart contract, if it's enabled, allows you to earn a residual income from that.

And that allows these creators to continue to create. So what does that mean? That means the quality of talent that is flooding into the space right now. These aren't just like pure amateurs. These are like people who are going to be really good. And you're actually going to see people aspire now and to develop these skill sets. So I think, I do think, I know you guys had that like Renaissance episode. Like that resonated with me a lot where it's just like I feel like we are on the cusp of this digital renaissance.

and I think it's going to be realized as we kind of transition more and more into this concept of a metaverse. So DC, I think we should ask this question to almost everyone that tinkers around with the metaverse is because we're all trying to figure out what the metaverse actually is. So what does the metaverse mean to you? So I think the metaverse, I think it's actually fair to compare and contrast it with the internet that we have today. So I think we're in a sense, you could say we're in a metaverse now, which transcends our

physical reality and we interact with one another digitally, often in ways that are like disembodied from who we are personally. Like we're doing a face-to-face interaction here. But a lot of times we're interacting through texts, text-based chat, sometimes through voice chat, right? There's different ways that people are interacting with each other. That has been going on since the internet in like the early 90s when people were in IRC chats and stuff like that. The missing formula to get to metaverse is the ability to economically interact with each other in a frictionless way that I believe needs to be decentralized. And you can't just have it all run on these decentralized rails where I'm PayPaling you money and stuff like that,

right? It's not just about me paying you or tipping you. It's about us transacting with one another in economically important ways. And I think NFTs are like a huge part of that, right? NFTs are arguably one of the first like digitally native economies that we've ever seen, beyond just like token flipping, which we've seen a lot of. Like this is people buying these pieces. They get utility out of them and they're collecting them. And they're using decentralized currencies like ether, actually primarily ether, to buy these pieces.

That is huge. So I think the metaverse is emerging. Actually, in earnest, we're going to look back at 2020 slash 2021 as the birth of the metaverse, in my opinion. And it's not just going to be one like ready player one thing. It's going to be like all of us interact. with each other online in various ways. The VR part isn't even here yet.

And I don't think it has to be like here for us to call what is happening here in Metaverse. That VR component, I think, will start to emerge heavily in like the next few years. What do you think? Just closing with two questions, I guess, here, DC. So one is what's next for NFTs? And the second is, what's next for DC investor? Do you see Curator?

How about NFTs? Yeah, what's happening now? So I think NFT is you're going to continue to go even more mainstream. We're going to look back at them as one of the most powerful, powerful center of gravities in terms of attracting people into crypto overall. They will become the first entry point for a lot of people into crypto. And I think we've seen absolutely nothing yet, both on the art side, which is going to, you're going to see like big institutions and big players come in and museums and things like

that recognize this is a valid art form. you're also going to see a huge takeoff in terms of in-game items and the designing of in-game economies, which are designed to work in a decentralized way where you're swapping assets. So I think that's going to be huge. As far as what's next for me, my goal is just to continue to kind of help to support the decentralized ecosystem. And I'm really focused on Ethereum today. I'll probably continue to be focused on it for the rest of my wife, to be honest,

because I view it as the most kind of decentralized network that we have so far that allows this kind of activity. But that journey is going to take me wherever decentralization goes because I think that undercurrent of decentralization and kind of what it means for our society is so huge that it's, and I think it's going to take decades to play out. So I'm just excited to be a part of the space, both from the Ethereum side, the defy side and the NFT side. So we have a panel tomorrow on the whole loot phenomenon, but the YouTube chat is blowing up one of your specific take on loot and all of that like mania. Do you have an opinion as to the whole loot thing or any thoughts on that? So I think loot is actually a really interesting phenomenon that I can only assess in hindsight. I think right now it's just a very interesting idea.

And I want to see what actually gets built on it. In general, with NFTs, my philosophy is, like, I, like, I, don't want to make the mistakes of like the ICO times when like everyone was betting on things for like future promises and Lute actually itself doesn't make any promises. It's other people kind of implying that things will be built on it. So I respect that. But I think like everyone always needs to be like mindful of the fact that hey, if you're if you're buying something hoping that something else is going to be developed, you just want to be cognizant of like is that going to be developed. Is there an incentive for that development to happen? So I'm very open minded to

I'm interested to see how it plays out. But most of the NFTs that I have don't do anything. And that's kind of by design. But there are some exceptions to that. Like my punk's comic NFTs, which like, oh, I had acclaim like the meta heroes that I have my collection. So, you know, we just need to see how some of this stuff plays out. Well, D.C., it's been an absolute pleasure to have you.

I don't know how many millions of dollars worth of value in NFTs. We just witnessed that's an impressive curation, impressive portfolio. And kudos to you for recognizing this early, getting in on it, and then taking the time to educate everyone else on it. Really appreciate you and your leadership in this space. Yeah, thank you guys. And I always say, by the way, if I get close with this, we don't want, don't ever invest anything or buy NFTs, put more money into it than you can afford to lose because like everything in crypto, there are booms and busts. And so we just want to be mindful of that. Buy to collect and buy what you love.

There you go. Actually, that's a better risk and disclaimer than I had DC. We would just stay on that. I guess I have to get through it. None of this was financial advice, folks. Of course, ETH is risky, defy is risky. NFTs are risky as well. You could lose what you put in.

Make sure you are buying to curate and collect. Buy what you like. Yeah, buy what you like. 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. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your

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