Danny Jones Podcast - #125 - I'm A Teenage Metaverse Millionaire | The Blockchain Boy

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Lucas Dimos is a crypto content creator, co-founder of CryptoKnight.io, and Business Development Officer for InfinityPad. Lucas combines fundamentals-based investing and an industry insider's perspective on cryptocurrency, the markets, and the future of technology to craft a holistic approach to blockchain & crypto in my content. https://twitter.com/blockchainboyy help us make more money: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon sponsors  https://liquiddeath.com -  Use code KONCRETE at checkout to get a free koozie 2-pack with a 12-pack purchase. danny  https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny  https://twitter.com/jonesdanny Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right, welcome blockchain boys. Thanks for having us, man. Yeah, dude, for sure. Tell people who aren't familiar with you, tell us what you do. We do a lot, but if you ever heard of crypto, you know, we delve in that industry a bit. We have a media company called Cryptonite, which is more than a media company, but that's what most people know it as. And this is our CEO, Michael Sessa. We're business partners and co-founders.

Michael Sessa. You introduced yourself to me earlier as what, just Sessa? Just Sessa. You go by Sessa. All right, cool. Team calls me Sessa. Sessa. Friends call me Sessa. Probably because where I grew up in New York was like a, like, just basically an Italian

neighborhood. Everybody's name was either Michael or Anthony. And that's, Anthony's my middle name. So you just, everybody went by the last name and it kind of just stuck. Cool. Yeah. So I like your TikTok. I like your, uh, you got some funny stuff on there. What, what do you guys do, you guys just like teach people about crypto and NFTs and stuff?

You know, there's multiple creators under our. you know, company. And for me personally, my focus is more no BS crypto, because the crypto industry is fundamentally built on bullshit. A lot of it is. And so I think that trying to bring people down back to reality showing them what is real and what's not is important. And I hope that my content fills a role, which is not only educational, but fun as well. So I think, you know, trying to connect with the people who are into crypto, which is also young people who are on TikTok. I was never a TikToker until I was sitting at a Cajun seafood restaurant and my buddy

Michael Wang was like, hey man you got to get this app. I'm like, weren't they going to ban that? I thought that was a good thing. I saw all those dancing garbage like that. But no, there's actually a vibrant crypto scene on TikTok. Really? Yeah. It's seen amazing growth over the last 12 months. Ever since the GameStop stuff, I mean, sure, we've had our moments of, you know, okay,

why are we pumping this garbage? Memecoin. Does nothing. But it's gotten so many people into crypto. I think it's been genuine asset to the space. How did you get into crypto? The year was 2017, and I, you know, my mom told me about crypto. I was

16 years old. I'm 20 now, so I've been in here for about almost five years, give or take. And my mom was like, hey, there's this thing called Bitcoin. And I was always a tech guy, built my first computer, freshman year, programming, that kind of stuff. Not so much now, but it was just I dabbled, and I liked investing.

I've always been sort of an entrepreneur. And so, you know, I looked at Bitcoin was like $1,000 a little bit under. The next week, it was like two grand. And I said to myself, holy shit, I got to get on this. I had no idea what any of it was, you know, digital gold. Okay, what does that mean? So I hopped right in the space. And that led to a passion both on a professional level and a personal level that has persisted to this day. Hmm. How did you guys meet? So circa around 2017, 2016, 2016. I was working on this startup.

I just left the financial industry. I was with Merrill Lynch for a few years. And I met one of my former business partners, and we were working on this project. Essentially, it was a Dow. It was a lot like a Dow in the Metaverse, but it was in 2017. Nobody even knew what Metaverse was back then.

So raising funds in traditional capital was hard enough to get it off the ground. and I remember we're out at this convention, actually in Tampa, and we bumped into each other. What was it? It was like right outside. It was right outside. They had like the Lamborghinis outside.

Yeah, this was at the Amnale Arena. What was it called Synapse Summit? Synapse, yeah. It was at Synapse in 2018. 2018. 2018 Sinapse Summit, Tampa, Florida. And he was working for a guy. He was like 16 years old.

I think I might have been 17 at that time. He was 17 and he was like suited up. up. A poorly fitting suit I might have. It suited up. And I remember you came up to, you were pitching me the company that you were working with. It was this company.

I mean, look, there's so many, like, scam artists even locally. Yeah. And I'm not going to say that the company was a scam, but the guy he was working for was an asshole. And so. It was unfortunate. But he came up to me. He had this amazing sales pitch.

was like the best sales pitches I've ever heard. And I could tell he was young. I didn't know how young. And that like blew my mind when I found out. So I'm like, you know what? Come by. We were working out of Cretto Condoid at the time. I was like, come by Cretto Condo is like co-working space. And let's chat some more. And he came through. And I mean, the rest was history. I basically was like, all right, leave who you're working with now because they don't even have a contract in place for you and they're working you like a dog i was like so i don't i don't know why you're why you're working for free for them and we took him in as a as an intern and gave him papers and then like you know eventually cut equity out of the deal and um unfortunately that never kicked off but then you know wrap up

2020 and and i'm pitching him on crypto night i'm like hey you got some interest in and going back into the crypto industry he's like yeah yeah i do i was like i got this idea and then Cryptonite was born. It actually originally started out as a trading bot company. And and then it just spiraled into a media company fast enough. So Cryptonite is a media company? Yeah. So we started out literally I wrote a business plan for this thing. And I sent it to one of my now business partners on June 6th of 2020. And it was outlining this whole thing. I was like, we're going to build a trading bot and we're going to market it on TikTok. And there wasn't a single crypto TikTok.

influencer at the time, like none. So I'm scouring this album. I'm like, this is like popping off so fast. I'm like music artists getting the songs out on it. I was like, this is great. So I was, I took like an interim role as a COO at a nonprofit in downtown Orlando. And then I was like, once I came up with this idea, I was like, all right, we need to, we need to kick this off because the crypto markets turn around. I saw the writing on the walls. So two months later, you know, me and and my business partner

we were conceptually. I called up Lucas said, I got something I think I need you to be a part of because I slowly realized this is way too much work for me to become an influencer on TikTok and build an entire company. So I called them up and I said,

we had grants at the time too. I had these two grants from my other company that I was using to fund Cryptonite just to try to get it off the ground. Like it was so shit. Because like the one grant would lapse and then people weren't going to get get paid for two weeks and I can add that other hard conversation where I was like guys looking listen

if you want to be a part of this cool if not I can't afford to pay for the next two weeks the grant doesn't kick in so you're going to miss paycheck I'm going to miss paycheck I'm not getting paid anything either and but I called this was early 2021 the grant stuff but we had we had kind of gotten into it at the very end of 2020 yeah because I called him I remember the phone calls like listen how would you like to make crypto content on TikTok I'll pay you something $625 a week. To be fair. I said all you have to do is make content on crypto.

I wasn't supposed to be the influencer or the creator or whatever. No, not at all. I was, I've only been biz dev, right? So more professional settings. And I wasn't supposed to be on the handling the TikTok. We had a small team built. You know, I picked it up just to see what the platform was like. And I did this is sort of a side thing, you know, while we were trying to grow the bot,

while we were trying to get the brand down. And long story short, we had picked a few people. A few of my friends, a few people he knew. And we had gotten to the point where we had done photo shoots with the people that we thought were the final candidates to be like, we were going to put on a show and produced by us. And I just started making videos. And slowly, like, it became more so that I was taking way more precedent than anyone else.

And it was completely by accident, which is kind of funny, because I never really thought I would be the person in front of. of a camera or making content because mind you I'm doing this all from my bedroom with no production um like I had an android phone okay you know it was camera quality was not great let me just let me just say that is rough beginnings um humble beginnings and we're now officially out of the bedroom as of Monday Wednesday when my new furniture comes in you know so yeah there you go yeah so it's a bar So you guys are kind of like crypto financial advisors or I don't know.

Whoa. Whoa. What's next ex-Nay on the financial advisor? Definitely not financial advisor. So what do you got? I still don't understand. I understand you're a media company, but like. So when it started out, we had a few different partners involved.

One of them was a trading guru. And the trading guru, it didn't turn out well the first iteration. We wound up wasting a good six months. And that was rough because as I mentioned before, we had grants. They were lapsing. And so time was of the essence. It was a ton of time wasted. And I was like, shit, we got, you know, I think at the time was like four, four solid employees that we knew we needed to make paychecks for.

And so luckily, Lucas's following was growing at the time. One of our graphics designers that we had on payroll, he came through Clutch, made him an awesome, the logo that he has today. Shout out to Nick. Shout out to Nick. So he actually, he designed the current iteration, but my initial logo to show you how, like, little I gave any effort into that. It was $15 on Fiverr. And I was like, hey, make me something. Because there was a guy I used to watch did great content, but he stopped posting.

So I thought, hey, maybe I'll take up where he left off and just fuck around a little bit. But it turned into so much more than that. You could really think of us like a media company and a bot company that two are quite separated, but we are under the same name. Media company focused on educational content. community, and educating people like how not to get yourself boned. Because we're not financial advisors. I'll never sit here and tell you, hey, man, go invest in this now. Not only is that blatantly illegal because it's financial advice,

but it's also not the thing that I encourage people to do. I like to say, hey, guys, this is interesting. Go do your research about it. Okay, look at the ecosystem behind it. Look at the partners. This is what I'm doing, and you shouldn't do this. and this is where I think it could go, right? So it's like, it's not necessarily me telling people that, you know,

something is about to pop off. It's more about helping them get the tools to do it themselves, so they don't need me. You know, I want to be on a beach in, you know, when I'm retired in 20, 30 years, whatever it is. And I want them, I want the next person to see my channel and get inspired and do the same thing and help, you know, everyone grow in the space. That's really what I'd like to do personally is just elevate the crypto space

to be taken more seriously because like in TikTok we get made fun of a lot we get made fun of a lot. There's a lot of creators who are only there for personal gain and to make dog shit content and it's frustrating because that's the videos that people see when they see

crypto TikTok but there's a vibrant community of people who we're not even affiliated with but we do shows with or have on live streams who are really smart in the industry and have helped educate essentially millions if not tens of millions of people people in the last 12 months. It's beautiful. And I wish people would give it a chance, you know.

Hell you. It's all about community, man. How do you guys explain this crypto dip going on right now? It's an emerging market, right? So you have the cycles of adoption. Cryptos in the... Well, it's like halved in the last week, right? Yeah. Let's just say my pockets are hurting. But it's okay. Yeah. Because if you can't handle it at its negative 50%, then you don't deserve the two, three, 100 X's that come with it, right? Nice. It's very similar to the early internet, right? So we're seeing this technology come out and there's blatant rip-offs and scams.

This is just, it just comes with the territory. It's opportunists taking advantage. But there's also a really cool shit that's being built that will be affecting the financial industry in 10 to 15 years when this technology is done. Ethereum is still in beta. People don't realize that. Vitalik himself is like, hey, guys, this was adopted too quickly. it's not supposed to be adopted for mainstream use yet.

Like this technology is very early. I mean, Ethereum gas fees, I paid tens of thousands of dollars last year just to move my money. It's definitely not ready. But we are seeing it get to that point. We're seeing major companies adopt this technology slowly but surely.

And just like a forest fire that burns down everything in sight, what comes back will be stronger and it will be, you know, the newest, greatest thing that we can use in our everyday lives. Essentially. You got some gym quotes in there, man. It's crazy because, like, you know, when they say, like, we welcome regulation, like, we're just waiting for it, you know, I mean, because until that time,

you're going to have this crazy volatility. But, you know, that's crypto. I mean, it's, I've had days where I'm up 300%. I've had days where I want to cry in a corner, you know, because my bank account is just, my crypto account, excuse me. But you got to stay well diversified. You got to stay well diversified. I put everything I had into cryptocurrency when I was 16.

I mean, bro, there's a picture that I have that I keep in 2020. Of me, I borrowed a dollar from my girlfriend, who's moving in with me now. And I needed to deposit it into the bank, so I didn't overdraft. All my money was in crypto. Everything, not saying I bought crypto with money I received from a grant. But I was buying crypto basically at the... But you kind of are. At every opportunity, and I bet literally everything I had.

I dropped out of college to pursue a career in tech startups and crypto, and I knew college was not for me. I find it very frustrating because it's very arbitrary, and I couldn't see myself doing that 9-to-5 stuff personally, and I think that we're going to see a lot more of that in the coming years. And crypto and Web 3 is a great space to build in. You don't need a college degree. You can, as long as you have a reputation, a foundation, useful skills, you can join a Dow, you can build cool things with cool people.

And you can be really successful at it. I've met more millionaires who are younger than me than I have who are older than me on crypto Twitter. Really? Assuming that they're not famous, just people I see in comments sections who are like 18 or 19 who have like... These are people who have bought it when like it was super cheap and they just, that they've held on to it ever since. Specifically, NFT Twitter. NFTs. People become millionaires in the last 10 months with NFTs.

It's crazy. Yeah. Okay, I'm not going to lie. I fumbled the bag. I looked at the board apes. Art was fucking ugly. I was like, they are literally so ugly. I don't want them.

They're dumb. And I was going to buy 10 of them because someone I told me to. And I was like, ah, these things look really gross. I still don't do this. I don't buy NFTs that I don't like the art of. I don't care who they are. I don't care who's doing them. If it's not at least watchable, I'm not putting a board.

board ape on my screen or on a chain. I'm sorry. I love that Cube one that you post on your Twitter. The cube, the 3D cube with like the ghouls and goblins inside of it. Yeah, I just retweeted that actually. They were in my comments. No idea what that project is, but they seem cool. They interact with my posts, so I showed him some love. There's a lot of underrated NFT artists. A guy named Sergey out of Miami, really fantastic artist. I first saw his art in 2018. He does crypto art and he does this, he's a do what you love kind of thing going on. And so I purchased a bunch of his NFTs.

No resale value. I spent tens of thousands probably on his NFTs. But I bought him because I liked him. And that's what I do with NFTs personally. Or they have to have really good utility. I buy them to flip them. Buy them and flip them. Yep, buy them and flip them.

What were those called? No attachment. How long is it? There's people. I have one that I'm attached to. Sorry. Yeah. One, just one.

What were those ones? The Apollins? How are your Apollins doing? Oh, God. This is the problem with the NFT space, 90%. $8,000. $8,000. Puggy Penguins was the best flip I ever had.

Which was? Pudgy Penguins. Pudgy Penguins. I bought one, I bought a few, but I bought one for $6,000. It was like two Ethereum at the time. And I knew it was rare. He was looking at it as like, ooh, this is a rare one. You should definitely get this.

I was like, I was like, I'm going to do it. I had to convince him, too. He had to convince me. I was like, I'm going to spend six grand on a, fucking penguin. I was like, are you kidding me? And he's like, bro, do it. This is, this is probably a great move.

I said, all right. Fine. Fuck it. And, yeah, it sold two weeks later for $80,000. Wow. Cha-ching. Yeah. Damn.

That's fucking incredible. I'm calling him screaming. I'm like, I love you so much. I'll invest in anything you ever tell you ever. Yeah. Forever. Forever. This is great.

Wow. Fuck. Yeah. That's awesome. Congratulations. Yeah, congratulations. Are the pudgy penguins still valuable? Yeah.

Funny story with that. You know, I'd like to make it known as an example of what happens in this space. The founders, which, you know, we never did any sponsored word. People always think that because, like, we really just love the penguins. We talked about them. They were cute. They were already blowing up. Like, we got them views, yeah.

But they were already, they were up 10x when I bought them. They were up, you know, they were up 2x when he bought them. Nice. And so they were still going. But the founders basically, I don't want to say rugged, but they basically did another mint of miniature penguins, took the Ethereum, and it basically said, all right, guys, see you later.

Thanks for the bag. Talk to you later. Yeah, I sold mine way below floor for half an eighth. This was my NFT profile picture on Twitter, and I've always rocked with the penguins. Community's great. Founders left them dead and hanging. That's the problem.

Like, there's no, where's the accountability for these Web3 projects, for these NFT projects specific. And that's like, you know, if crypto is in the early adoption phase, right, where the early adopters or the early majority is getting in, NFTs are before the early adopter phase. I mean, if you look at who owns an NFT, right? You can see the accounts on OpenC. I think it's $3 million.

And a lot of those are probably people selling to themselves. I'm going to keep it real with you. But we will see NFTs integrated in a major way, just like we saw crypto kind of blow up in, 2021. It's sort of like 2017 for NFTs right now. So I'm probably going to buy more probably as much NFTs

as I do crypto during the bear market. Yeah, absolutely. Anyone who doesn't is a fool, in my opinion. No financial advice. And some of FTs aren't just art. Some NFTs are like, would people understand, like NFTs are like passes for things. Yeah, like the yacht club, the ape yacht club.

Like you're a member of a club and you can go to the discord, you go to the parties, all that stuff. But even more. so, they can make you more money past that. So like, um, we just, uh, well, so me and my, my friend Joshua, Jake, who's a business partner of ours as well, uh, we just joined as advisors to this NFT project called the blockchain miners club. And, you know, they minted these NFTs, right?

They're really cool artwork, but they entitle you to a community reward, right? And so they basically took this mint money that they had from raising from these NFTs and they bought a bunch of Bitcoin miners. So they've got all these Bitcoin miners, hundreds of them, mining Bitcoin. And I think there's some Ethereum miners going on too. They've got all this passive income coming in that they're reinvesting. And holders of these NFTs are entitled to the community rewards. It's not a direct investment thing, but you know, you get your community rewards for owning

these miners. And so things like that really excite me for NFTs. This is what I'm more than anything excited for. is the ability for people to actually show the utility that they have, you know. And you can actually burn two of these together to create an ultraminer, which has a token attached to it, which they're trying to integrate into a couple different ecosystems. But it's really pushing the boundaries of what is an NFTs.

Is it just art? Well, no, an NFT, all an NFT really is is just, you know, saying that you own a specific thing, and it's like a right. So I have the rights to this NFT is my NFT. but it can represent anything. I mean, this table could be an NFT. You have a, it's like a deed saying, hey, this is my table. Right, it's like a deed.

Exactly. Like a patent maybe. To that, like, ticket sales are going to be the biggest thing in NFTs. I always said, if we weren't doing this, I'd be trying to solve for ticket sales for sporting events or concerts or whatever else. Because as soon as they square that circle, like, all ticket sales will be NFTs. It just makes so much sense. It solves scalping issues. It solves royalty issues.

I mean, we can do that now, right? You just get to your little Apple wallet, and they send you like the little QR code in your wallet, and it's kind of like that. So the difference would be is say you sold like, you know, you're Jay-Z and you sell, you know, a concert out, right?

There's going to be tons of people who like buy up your tickets, especially like we sealed us. And then they're going to try to resell them for, you know, 5X the price right before the show. So if you're a Jay-Z, you can go in, and if you sell by NFTs and each ticket's an NFT, you go in and say, well, all right, that's fine. But every time that ticket's sold when it gets transferred,

like 10, 20, 30, whatever percent of the value is going to go back to the artist. And now poor people are really good at Jay-Z concerts. So, you know, people... You can't go to them now. Yeah, if you're poor. Well, how much is a Jay-Z ticket? A couple hundred bucks, probably at least. Yeah, but if he was doing it with NFTs and people are scalping them on the black market,

they're going to end up being thousands of dollars. NFTs don't solve traditional issues. They oftentimes present new ones, right? We see this a lot with projects that get exploited. And this is actually a really... So I don't know if you've heard, this is a great example. The blockchain is like, you know, bringing a bunch of meat in front of hungry lions.

And these hungry lions are biting at their cage, trying to get in and get the juicy meat. Because even though, yeah, okay, it's immutable, great. This Ethereum is my Ethereum. there's no bank. Everything else is still a risk. These board apes were getting sold for, you know, 1.7.Eth, 0.7Eth recently, just last week, because of an API issue with OpenC.

Essentially, what was happening is that people had them listed, you know, six months ago for that price, but they didn't want to pay the delisting fee, which is Ethereum gas fees are prohibitively expensive. So they would send it to another wallet and then back again violating that smart contract. But someone found an exploit where even though it wasn't publicly available on the blockchain, that smart contract was still active. So they would immediately buy it, flip it for maybe 20 or 30 times what they bought, and make off with, you know, 100 grand or less than that sometimes, 80 grand. And so there's a lot of exploits in the space right now.

And it's just, like I said, part of the emerging technology that's coming here. We're going to see these kinks. But still, there's more wins than there are losses. I mean... Have they fixed that yet? It's OpenC. The Board Ape, I thought like last week, the floor on those things was 90 Ethereum. Now it's like 118 Ethereum.

It's insane. Yep. Justin Bieber just bought a Board Ape for 500 Ethereum, I believe. See, that seems like the whole value in it. It's just because celebrities buy it and people think it's cool. Like Jimmy Fallon, Justin Bieber, whoever else, Post Malone, whoever else bought those things. And it's like more and more celebrities or famous people with big Twitter followings will buy them. and then it makes more people want to jump in.

But it also does have like all those cool intangible value to it, like the discord and the parties and the merch and all that stuff too. And keep in mind, a lot of these celebrities didn't actually buy them. They used something called Moon Pay Concierge. And, you know, we can debate about whether or not they're actually paying for these. But I think I have a sneaking suspicion. Some of these celebrities, they were gifted at.

Really? Oh. I think this is very likely. What is Moon Pay concierge? Moon pay, you know, they're kind of a company in a space that puts together, from what I understand, I'm not a huge expert. I haven't really looked into them that much. They put together like, you know, if you want to invest in NFTs, but you don't want to do it yourself.

So they have a concierge service. And they've got some other stuff going on. But I think it's no coincidence. Let's just say that, that all these board apes started to appear. Yeah, you want exposure, but you don't want to take the time to learn about it. Yeah. So you want to be in the crowd. but you don't want to do anything for it.

And I'm not like a huge, I don't know much about moon pay. I just know that they have the service. Those types of services are going to be around for a long time. I mean, that's why financial advising services are around because people don't want to learn what to invest in in stocks. They just want to build their wealth and then toss it over to a financial advisor. It's the same thing. Really?

You know what I mean? Interesting. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in this industry, man. I mean, more than I could explain in a podcast episode. What's the chances of the board ape is just one big scam? These guys are just going to, like, hit the, hit the freaking highway. The craziest thing is that there's a lot of, you know, rhymes with Yatsi imagery behind these board apes. People don't talk about that much.

There's a guy on Twitter who I, you know, people debate this. I did notice that. I did notice that. So I had this guy, I had this guy Brett on the, Brett Phillips baseball player on the podcast last week. And he taught me about the board apes, literally last week. And so me and a friend of mine went and bought one. and it has a, we has this crazy helmet on it. Here I'll show it to you.

And it's, we just looked it up today, and it's some fucking, it's like a German Nazi helmet. I was going to say, the only thing I could think that rhymes with Yahtze is Nazi. I didn't know if I was missing a word or if I'm like. Yeah. So there's a lot of historical references behind the board API Club, and I'll send you guys this afterwards. I was very doubtful.

I thought maybe it's a coincidence. There's a lot of stuff that, And I'm not saying that they are definitely, definitely intentfully doing this, but there just seems to be a lot of coincidences here. They're definitely too big to fail. The board apes, I would be very surprised if they did not last, probably, you know, for conceivably as long as NFTs are a thing, unless something drastic happened because they've got, they've hit critical mass.

You can't go back from Justin Bieber aping into the board apes. They could get canceled. I doubt it. for wearing German World War II helmets. But the powers that be behind crypto don't want that to happen. Who are the powers that be? Well, there's Twitter and then there's crypto-twinter. And crypto-twitter has a, what would you say, like a different set of rules?

Crypto Twitter is an interesting set of Twitter. It's very different from anything else. But like, you know, when I say the powers that be, it's very general topic because it's hard to track down who those are. But crypto's run, you know, there's a lot, like I said, a lot of smoke and mirrors in this industry that I'm trying to cut through. And a lot of people have been made enemies of other people because they try and do the same thing, you know. But it is what it is. I think that ultimately we will see this space grow and evolve to where people can recognize that.

You know what I'm saying? Like one of the things that I see a lot. So I also have a side thing I'm doing. I partnered with Dowmaker, which is like the number one, like, legit crypto launch pad in the space. shout out to the Dowmaker team. I'll send him this video. And we're running something called InfinityPad. So I've learned how to kind of do IDOs initial offerings.

And not available in America. Shout out to my non-American friends. But there's a lot of VCs in the space that are just out here to just get their bag. There's a lot of VCs and LPs that are just down here to use DFI and Web 3 to do the same thing they did in Web 2. And it's very frustrating to see that. So I think that we can build a system that makes them obsolete.

And that's kind of what I want to focus on doing so that they don't have control beyond the space. Because a lot of these projects have that. So are all NFTs reliant upon Bitcoin mining or Ethereum mining? Because Ethereum, the only way Ethereum transaction, like those gas fees, right? Those gas fees are because you've got to pay for the people that have the miners, right? You've got to pay the miners to do those transactions. So Ethereum Is Ethereum reliant on mining?

Yeah, for now. For now, until it goes proof of stake or whatever. People think Ethereum's the only network you can have that if T's on. That's not true. Oh, it's not true. Yeah, no, there's a ton of different networks. There's Serrao, there's Solana, there's... Environmentally friendly networks, might I add.

That don't have the impact that Ethereum has. Hmm. Like my newest thing is Avax, Avalanche NFTs. I love that whole ecosystem. It's so fast, so clean. And it's just got so many more use cases than I think even Ethereum NFTs do. Really? Yeah, I'm here for it.

I'm definitely making the transition over. To give you guys some history in the space, like 2017 was about the cryptocurrencies, right? Emphasis on the currency. No one cares about that right now. Bitcoin's one. Okay. No one's replacing Bitcoin. It used to be Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin had a thing going.

No, Bitcoin Cash is gone. Nowadays, it's about the layer one. and layer zeros. To give you an example, that's essentially networks like Ethereum that projects can be built on top of. And it's been a mad dash for which layer one,

layer zero, et cetera, whatever you want to call it, which blockchain platform is going to win the race. You know, I made a bunch of money. Shout out to this man here

off of a layer two called Polygon-Matic. That was my biggest W last year. That's the other one that you can buy shit with on OpenC is Polygon. Yes. which is great.

I put a grand in at a penny. I bailed out at 90 cents. And then it shot up to $2.80. That was funny. Look, I'm not mad about it. It was still a 9,000 X return. 9,000 X return. Wow.

On what investment. Like, it was, yeah. That's insane, man. Yeah, it was great. So you guys are just watching this shit all day long. All day. Well, for me, it goes back to why, why I couldn't be a creator at the time

was because building a business is just insane. Especially one that has the amount of like, I think we're at 18 employees now. Something like 18 employees and we have like three different business models all under one house

and all thriving. We're really trying to be a holistic company in the space that's doing a lot. We want to do cool stuff. We've worked with some really cool brands. We've worked with really cool creators. And so we're just trying to, you know, scale up here as far as we're going. I mean, I'm pretty happy with our team right now.

Yeah, trading bots launching in two weeks. We got the media company. We've done over, I think our best month was something like three quarters of a million in deals. And then we have our Discord community, which we just, we broke 100,000 last month. It took a small dip. I think we went down about six, seven thousand when the crypto market took a nosedive. People don't want to see their portfolios. They don't want to think about it.

They don't want to think about it. Seems like the people that get the richest off that stuff are the people that just forget about the crypto they have. It's the best way to be. It's the best way to be. I'm completely emotionless. Like, even though, you know, my portfolio goes up and down, I think really what separates the people who are going to make it

in early technology, like crypto, is the conviction that they have behind their investments. It was not easy to get here. Everyone's like, oh, my God, you're so lucky. You invested in Ethereum when it was early. You invested in Bitcoin when it was early. Yeah, okay, we saw our portfolios. I hit six figures when I was 17.

I saw that portfolio decimated over the next year and a half, two years. You don't understand, like, people think it's easy. It's not easy to hold an asset down 90% and then back up again. It's not. I watch my account go from $68,000 to $3,000 in 2018, the entire way down. Yeah. You stayed on the train, though, right? Oh, yeah, I didn't sell a thing.

Nice. The only ones that get hurt are the ones that jump off. Yeah, man. I tell people not to, I tell people to take their profits because you don't want to be stuck holding the garbage networks. A lot of stuff from 2017 ain't here now. And it's going to be the same way next time. It's just how it goes.

You know, you've got to consolidate into what I call the blue chips. Ethereum's a great example of that. Yeah. Ethereum's a blue chip? No, it's not going anywhere. It's the bluest of blue, in my opinion. What do you mean by that? It means, like, Ethereum is not about to die tomorrow.

Okay. There's a lot of vaporware projects, like stuff that is clearly experimental and for whatever reason could fail. You know, even the biggest projects in the space in 2017 are shadows of their former selves. You just never know what's going to last. So Ethereum and Bitcoin are like the two biggest ones, right? Those aren't going anywhere. Yeah. And look, everything that I invested in back in 2018 is still, or 2017, 2017, is still around today.

And then there's some new ones that have added on that just their blue chip quality. You know, the networks are too large. There's too many people using them. And the real thing is just like find use cases. It's one of the hardest things for like real new use cases to come about is so many different projects come out and they just want to, they want to build a coin. And they come up with a problem to solve, but there's really no problem there. it's in you know this gets compared to like internet in the late 90s where everybody had a website for everything and it's like that's great you can have it up but is it really worth anything it's bringing

value to people how many people are actually going to know about it see about it or if you have 50 websites doing the same thing which one's going to come out on top and you know it's it's it makes it really hard in this space for the the new projects that are true blue and like really solving a problem to be found or heard of, you know, because you just have thousands of shit projects. There's 10,000, 20,000 coins, you know, it's a trial by fire. It's, the crypto market is throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks for some of it. And the projects that get really big will make those investors a lot of money, you know. You, you're early investor in Polygon, like we were. Great. As soon as they said it speeds up Ethereum, and I was like,

oh, I've been on Ethereum. It's, slow as shit. I was like, yeah, this is something that'll pop off. Like, if I can trade on this or I can do something on this and it makes my transactions faster. This is, it was at one cent. I was like, this will be a dollar easily. But there's other projects that are, that do the same thing, or that's an example,

but there's projects that compete with each other and some of them die and some of them do really well. That's, like I said, having conviction, you're picking the right one, you've got to know what you're doing. It's the, it's the BS, like, have you seen that house out in, I just watch this. it's some it's like the most expensive house in america oh yeah in los angeles in los angeles 500 million dollars yeah i saw that jesus and i'm watching this thing and they're like doing the walkthrough is ridiculous like 150,000 square feet or 100 thousand square feet or something like that

and they're talking about like it's in bankruptcy court yeah they said i was going to sell for like half price like quarter million dollar or uh 250 million right and the guy goes they're looking into tokenizing it like why Why? And it's, they have to throw blockchain in there. It's like, that's the type of shit that, that is repressing good projects. And, like, stuff in this industry.

Well, you guys hear a constitution down? tokenizing it. What the fuck? You can fractionalize things. You can fractionalize ownership. They did this with the original do. So you're saying, like, make the house, break up the house and the individual, like, people can own parts of the house. Imagine, imagine.

The logistical nightmare. turning the house into like the fucking SMP 500 or something. Imagine the deed but cut up into thousands of little pieces. Right, gotcha. Okay, I see. And Constitution Dow was a great example of that, but it almost worked and then it didn't. They were trying to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution. They raised like, oh, God, I can't remember tens of millions.

Yeah, but you don't need a blockchain to do that. That's called a reggae plus offering. But who, okay. And break up an asset in the pieces. Rally does that with Pokemon cars. My friend's not going to do that. My friend's not going to go to a reggae offering, you know? That's fair.

That's fair. What they do have is Ethereum, and they can commit that Ethereum to buy the U.S. Constitution. Ultimately, it didn't work. They were outbid on Sotheby's, but it's a really cool idea. And, you know, what's crazy? They ended up making a token out of it, a Dow token that ended up doing like a 50 X or something crazy. Crazy shit, yeah. What the fuck is a Dow token?

It's a governance token. So a Dow, right, a decentralized, autonomous organization. There's three main things that came out of this bull run. DAO, not DOW. Yeah, DAO. And, you know, there are governance tokens that you can vote essentially to choose to determine the future of the project. So it's kind of democratizing, you know, projects and things that people want to do.

And, you know, there are dows for all kinds of stuff. You know, the governance token is what makes it that, which is kind of cool, right? So you can do a lot of really interesting, nifty stuff, which, Constitution Dow is just a fun example of that. Think of it as like a company without a C-suite. And just everybody's kind of, you say like governance token, like the people decide. Like, truest form of democracy. Is that similar to like what they say with the board ape, you'll be able to stake it and earn,

I heard some, I was telling me something about you. If you own the board ape NFT, you can stake it. And then they're going to create a token called like ape. coin. And then once that comes out, you'll be able to earn this ape coin without doing anything. You just staking it means like you

you sign off that you're not going to sell the NFT for X amount of time. It's a smart contract. You pick a time and put it in there. And staking, look Tim's going to kill me for saying this. Staking smart in my book. Like you can stake tokens that are already out there. Like if you ever heard of like crypto.com

it's a great app. I have a lot of crypto assets on there. And I take everything through there because if you are like a certain tier, you get extra rewards. So it's kind of like locking your money up at a CD in the bank. Only instead of getting some shit percentage, you're getting 6, 10,

some 15% PA on your crypto. You can get 30% and it's still considered relatively safe. Just for holding it. So yeah, it's like a certificate of deposit but for your crypto funds. And now yeah, it's pouring over into the NFT space. Right.

I can see how it makes the NFTs more valuable if you claim you're not going to sell it for a certain amount of time. Sure. I still don't understand how if they make a coin, how you get paid from that. I mean, it all comes down to what they're going to use it for. I'm not a board aid member. I couldn't give a shit really about what they're doing. But

you know, I'm sure they're going to, it'll be something cool. Maybe you can buy exclusive merch with it. Maybe you can gain exclusive VIP access into a club on the yacht in Miami or something crazy, you know. So there's a lot of cool utility you can do. I don't know necessarily if it's a governance token.

But, you know, the use case is whatever they decide. I mean, I'm not going to buy any myself, I don't think, personally. Yeah. But I'm sure it will be tradable like any other decentralized, you know, exchange. They can just list it on there and, you know, get it going. Mm-hmm. Uniswap. Hmm.

Interesting. Do people still mine cryptocurrency to make money? Yeah. Really? It's just the issue is that with every consensus mechanism, consensus algorithm, form of consensus, essentially how a blockchain works, right? You have proof of work, you have proof of stake, you have dedicated proof of stake, you have all these kind of, you know, you have a DAG directed acyclic graph technology like Hedera

Hashgraph and Constellation Network. And so there's a bunch of different like algorithms and ways to do it. Bitcoin mining and Ethereum mining, for most people, is not going to be an endeavor that's worthwhile because Bitcoin specifically you need a lot of money. Yeah, you got to buy those crazy specialized, what the fuck are they called? Ant miners. Ant miners. From Bitmain out of China.

And unless you have like a handshake agreement where you can get a bunch of miners, it's going to be difficult. You're going to be waiting months to year. If you don't get scammed. If you don't get scammed. I mean, it's very tough to secure these legitimately. And you need, I assume, another handshake agreement with the local government because I don't know what the rate of power is at this place.

But, you know, unless you got some cheap energy, you're not going to make much. You're really... Yeah, it's fucking ridiculous. I'd, like, dip my toe into it a little bit, and I bought, like, six of the 30-90s, and it makes me, like, $20 a day. So that's Ethereum. You're mining Ethereum, right? Yeah, yeah.

You know, this is my biggest gripe is that Ethereum 2.0 is not here. Ethereum is switching from proof of work. Right, to prove a mistake. Right. Then Ethereum mining is going to be dead, and GPU mining is going to be worthless. Until I find another coin to mine, right, which will be a while. I mean, you can actually mine a couple different things. You can go into nodes.

Yeah, nodes are... What's a node? Nodes are my new favorite thing, man. I make like a few hundred bucks a day just by running notes. What the hell is a node? It's basically you're... Sometimes you're purchasing a node on a network, right? Or you're...

Normally with nodes, you're not like staking. So, like, with staking, you get your coin back, right? But with purchasing a node, you're actually purchasing it. So, like, Strong Block, for instance. Oh. He hates strong. I don't know what about Thor. What about Thor Network?

Sure. Like Thor Network, Thor Finance. There's dubious, for anybody who's new to this, nodes are very dubious. There are some that are good, some that are questionable. You need a good strategy and you need to get exit plan. But essentially, you're helping the network, whatever protocol that is, like approve transactions, right?

You're validating transactions on a network. And there are Bitcoin nodes too, but you're not getting paid. It's not a piece of hardware. No, you can actually run it right on your computer. And some of them are, this is my rule of thumb with them. The easier they are to set up, the more risky they are. Like that is, that is.

That's with anything, right? Right. The easier. Like hex. You ever heard of hex? Some of it does make sense. I have heard of hex. That guy's been trying to get on this podcast.

Richard Hart. Yes. So Richard Hart is a very interesting, and I know this is. He hasn't been trying to get on here. Somebody's been trying to try to get on here. Somebody's been trying to set it up to get him on here. Richard Hart, and they're going to, I know I'm going to get tagged on Twitter, in my opinion, is running what I would consider to be a project with questionable fundamentals.

We'll just say that. What's he doing? Hex is essentially a clone of Ethereum. You have to stake your Hex for a long time. They're also running something called Pulse Chain. You have to sacrifice together. on the pulse chain. I don't really mess with it. Sacrifice what?

I'm pretty sure you have to sacrifice your HEC to get on to get pulse. I'm not, I'm not an hex expert. I've only been on the website a few times. I've, you know, looked at their community. I've been through their stuff. I've looked at what they're doing. On their website, if you want to scroll down and look at the very bottom, there's a piece of text. Abusive text. A piece of text. It's a small little paragraph. It's essentially like saying, you know, this is a political statement. You're, you want your boss. freedom of speech. You know, this is not investment.

Also, you know, you have to do this if you're about free speech and this and that. And I'm like, what is this, man? The network is really nothing new, in my opinion. It's like, and people will, I know they're going to come with me. In my opinion, Hacks is just like the new BitConnect. Who's going to come at you? They have a very dedicated community. Crypto Twitter.

I have, yeah, they have gone through all my videos and made hate clips. I'm actually in a music video. I'm in a music video They call us Fooroos Foo Roos Yeah and there's a Hex rap video Where it's like You know

They actually have a few of my buddies And they have them They have them in caskets They have their picture And a casket And it's like they're burying the Furoos It's like weird Why because you guys talk to

About X? Yeah because like if you're not with us You're against us I have nothing against Hex investors I just don't think the network is good It doesn't do much I think it's just like

There's a reason it's not on coin market cap, you know, like where they say it should be. There's a lot of networks that do the same thing. I think it's so hilarious that it's so much competition in all these crypto networks and crypto coins and people who are invested in certain ones. It's like, it's like such a like a tribal competitive world in crypto, especially when you combine it with social media. It's just like pouring gas on fire.

You can do anything you want. You can fork, like you can for UniSwap, right? This is what, what's his name, Ty Lopez is doing? He has the Radio Shack brand. Oh my God, I forgot about that guy. He has the Radio Shack brand. And essentially, I looked into this a little bit. He's like forking Uniswomp and then calling it Radio Shack or something like that.

Like a Radio Shack decentralized exchange. He bought Radio Shack? He has the rights to it. So he's actually got the rights to a bunch of like old companies that no one gives a shit about. And he's trying to like modernize the brand. Nostalgic. I mean, I don't know anyone who's going to use that. Maybe like my dad.

That's what Gary V always talks about. Gary Vee's a big crypto guy too Gary V's more of an NFT guy Gary V is a visionary in a lot of ways I think he really You know if anyone if there's anyone to credit With like showing that NFTs are not just monkey pictures It's Gary Vee I gotta give him props man

Yeah Yeah yeah he's Very knowledgeable of this stuff Pretty much everything I know I learned from watching his videos Nice Yeah so Ty Lopez is big into this stuff huh Is he selling NFTs too I couldn't get

I don't know. I just saw that. Someone making fun of it. The problem, like I said, with crypto is it attracts the grifters, because it's easy to grift, you know? And I've had very public beef with people on YouTube and other places.

We're just, you know, we're not going to elaborate on that, but let's just say we have different... Why not? We should elaborate on it. Well, there are just people that I disagree, I disagree with that I think that are leading the space in a direction that I don't agree with, And so we have our, we have our moments, you know.

He's no BS crypto. If I think it's BS, I'm going to tell them to be yes. We can pull them up on the TV and shame them right now. Call him out. Richard Hart, where are you at, bitch? It's not Richard Hart. Richard Hart, you know, he's not actually, there's worse people than Richard Hart. Yeah.

Well, he looks very entertaining. Oh, yeah. He's very, like, charismatic. He's got a really cool background on his videos. He has a way of, like, you know, He's like they got the Charles Manson vibe. Yeah, I dig that. Where's he live?

Maybe I should get him on here. That would be an interesting episode. I would love to see you guys. Do you know where he lives? Oh, God, no. But I'm sure he would do it. He has a thing where he, like, you know, has people on his, he wants to go on people's shows to debate. He's a very good debater.

But he doesn't do it in person, though. Everything he does is remote. Well, because it's a security risk. He is quite, you know, he has a lot of, you know, value in crypto. And there's a lot of people who just, you know, don't like him. so I don't blame him, you know. You know, people in crypto are kind of weird like that. You know, I was just seeing the other day,

it was just kind of funny, kind of off topic, someone's tracking Elon Musk's private debt. That is so sick. That was so funny. I was actually, I was watching that on, that was on TV this morning. They were interviewing him on like fucking MSNBC or something like that. Like the kid's gone full-blown mainstream.

Blown up. Make a career out of anything, man. That is crazy. his jet goes everywhere bro okay pull up that Twitter account Elon Musk's jet he goes from like Austin Texas to Sacramento

California like three times a day in his jet I didn't know people travel that much like what do you what are these people doing yeah there it is find his actual go to his feed so you can see all of his posts

that looks like Florida he just installed a private he had like 50,000 followers two days ago now he's got a quarter million followers Did they do the rocket launch day? Oh, bro, I was standing outside my office and we saw some crazy shit in the air. That's probably it. That's what, we were like, what the fuck is that?

It got to live yesterday. Yeah, right before I talked to you on the phone. Me and Mike were standing outside, we're like, what the fuck is that? It was some alien-looking shit. Yeah. I've never seen that before. They were going to do it yesterday. Is his jet in Cape Canapel right now?

I'm so glad you brought that up because we were tripping for a minute. Oh, yeah. It's the, it's like a lot of it. Yesterday, they were like literally aborted three seconds before launch because the cruise ship just plowed through the like no, no ship. Apparently. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, it was supposed to launch yesterday at 4 o'clock. Oh, my God.

That's sick. There's a cruise ship in the area. Go up to the 31st. See if it was in Florida. No. Elon Musk's jet. He flew public to get here. That's funny.

Yeah. And he offered the guy five grand to take. it down. He said, no. Didn't he say 50K? And the kid responded, he's like, I'll do it. He's like, I can't do it for less than 50K. He undersold.

Oh, yeah. Say 5 million. He's a $5,000. Dude's a billionaire. Yeah, that's like me. I said, see me for 50Ms, bud. That's the equivalent of like three pennies that you find in your spare change in the pocket of your locker.

Yeah. Five grand. But I understand it's about, you know, like, I have, I've had people who squat on my domains, my like my Ethereum name service domain. Somebody was squatting on it for the longest time. We actually got into a bit of a feud. But he ended up giving it to me.

I didn't want to pay him for it because it's just like I don't negotiate with terrorists like that. But he gave it to me after like I did some charity where I did a charity NFT drop. So like we raised some money for St. Jude's. It was cool. People got to hop on the phone with me. Some people got like artwork. You know, it was like a nice little thing I partnered with Ada to do.

So, you know. I'd have gotten here today. His name was Rick Ross and he owned he owned rickross.com and uh i think rick rock the rapper alfred him like less than a thousand bucks for it wow he eventually sold it for i think around 10 000 but i feel bad i actually just curved ross uh he was trying to go live with me but i was moving and i was like dude i'm sorry he was trying to do what he has a new nftc collection come oh does he really he wanted me to do a live with him on ticot i was like i'm moving too busy you're gonna be propped up on my on my hooka like to I don't have a stand. It's on a box.

I hope he does all pictures of Rick Ross's NFTs. Is this the real Rick Ross or is this Rick Ross? No, it's... Pull up, I want to see it looks like. Which Rick Ross? What? La Cota did a live stream. Free Ricky. Freeway Ricky.

Oh, the original. Oh, not the rapper. Oh, no, we're thinking of a different Rick Ross. Oh, the OG. Yeah, the OG. Yeah, yeah. The original O.G. Oh, wow.

Yeah, there's a little bit of name, name difference there, but not really. Well, we, well, we do. you say Rick Ross, everyone thinks of the fucking hip hop artist. Right. I guess he must be, like, pissed off that he keeps getting mistaken for that. You know, like, I would be kind of pissed.

Who does? The original. Right? Yeah, I think he tried to sue him for that. I think he changed his name, actually, because of that. He changed it to Freeway after Rick Ross? No, I think Rick Ross changed it. The rapper changed his name.

I'm not a... Because that guy got out of prison. I think he sued him. For stealing his name. I heard that Rick Ross, the rapper, owns the biggest swimming pool in the United States. Really? At his house. He has like a house in Atlanta.

He got some big house. Remember when Forge Otto Blow? He does a lot of swimming? Remember when Forge Yotto went to his big house party in Miami? They showed the big house in, not Miami, but Atlanta. Apparently that's the biggest swimming pool in the world. Not the world, the U.S. Huh. We'll check that out someday.

I think he does a lot of float, and I don't think he does a lot of floating. Float. So, So, all right. One thing I'm trying to understand is this proof of stake with Ethereum. That's going to shut down all the Ethereum miners. And now there won't be any gas fees on Ethereum when you try to make transactions. No.

So gas fees, depending on, you are going to pay a gas fee, right? Unless you're... But you don't pay it with Bitcoin, right? You do. You do pay it with Bitcoin? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, there's going to be a cost always to send something. Unless you're using a technology like Nano, which uses block lattice to no fee.

Or Polygon. Polygon has fees too. They're just very nominal. You're paying a quarter of a cent. And that's what's exciting is like that you're paying a quarter of a cent instead of a $200 fee. You know, frustrating. But you just have to bite the bullet because everything is on Ethereum. It's just the biggest one there is.

It's the strongest network. But no, yeah. Even when Ethereum switches to proof of state, The gas fees theoretically should increase. They just had an update last year, which was supposed to help the gas fees, but all it did was stabilize them to be high consistently instead of bringing them down to a consistent price.

So my hope is that Ethereum comes to a point where combined with the layer twos that it has, like Polygon, that it's affordable for the average person, but it's not. So I used to tell people, I used to tell people go get some Ethereum and hop into DeFi, go, you know, experiment with new technology, But it's just not feasible because you're going to need $500, $600, $600 to do anything

on Ethereum. So I tell people, go to the Binance Smart Chain, go to Avalanche, go to Pocod. What is it? What are you talking about? What I know, I don't know what Avalanche, Pocodot, any of that is. Different networks. Different networks.

Like Ethereum. Like Ethereum. For the, for the, sort of, but not really. Yes, in this scenario, yes, they are. You can just imagine that, you know, you log in and you can use the blockchain through a wallet, you know. Just, you know, there are some,

EVM-compatible networks, the Ethereum Virtual Machine. A lot of the tech is just Ethereum forked and changed slightly. Okay, yeah, I see what you're saying, yeah. But, like, Solana is non-EVM-compatible. It's a good example. Salana has been like this big up-and-comer. I think it's overrated, but...

Really? Yeah, centralized. They sacrifice... They're compatible with the same layout as the Ethereum... Like, your Metamask, when you log in a Metamask, it's EVM-compatible, so all you have to do is add the network and it's the seamless integration.

you know but like salana you need the phantom phantom wallet which they just raised 106 million I think Solana did phantom a wallet on Solana Solana has a lot of See that it gets so much more confusing

then you have all these fucking wallets you got coin base wallet Metamask wallet so that's why I was saying like EVM compatible why it's so important is because if you if you play in like defy land or that's not a real place but you know what I mean

like if you it is a project I think Is it a... If you... The names, the names kill me. If you play in the space and you're connecting, like, and you're doing

blockchain gaming or something like that, right? Or you're running nodes, or you're trading your crypto or... NFTs, right? You know, like, for most people, they use Metamask. Right. So, you know, I have downloaded MetaMask

on, as an extension. And you say, like, oh, it's compatible on that network. That network is compatible with that. wallet and it allows me to just connect the same address to that site. Okay. So in the future a wallet's probably going to be as common as like a social media account.

Like if you don't have one like you're probably not going to be able to walk around Web 3 that easily and Web 3 is already here. What the fuck does Web 3 even mean? It's a bullshit term. It's a bullshit term. Like when people ask me, hey man what are the best Web 3 coins? I'm like motherfucker this is Web 3. Like we're in Web 3.

Okay, so we're in Web. So it's like version 3 of the web? Well, yeah. So like we're removing sort of the big tech giants from the equation, or at least that's what we're trying to do. Not only the financial middlemen, but the social middlemen, we want to essentially eliminate a lot of these corporations with so much power over us through Web3, and that suck the profits. So like your data, your, you know. Like Facebook and Twitter. It's ownership. That's probably the best way to provide.

How is that going to happen? Do you know how much money I've made from just using DFI protocols? I don't even know what a DFI protocol. protocol is. From DFI projects. So like the Ethereum name service, right? Dot E, you know,

EINS domains, dot ETH. You ever heard those? No. So it's like, so the blockchain boy. dot Eth. The blockchain boy. dot Eth exists. Okay. And instead of having...

Oh, okay, okay, dot Eth. That's why those Twitter people have their Twitter name. Dot Eath. Exactly. So instead of a bullshit wallet, like no one wants to use that, you just type in the blockchain boy.eath, and you can send me whatever you want.

For better for worse. That's just a public... In the browser. In any browser? In a, like, Metamask or, like, if you want to send me crypto, it's an address. But you could also use it as a domain name. You know, if you want to really build decentralized websites,

you know, ICP is probably my favorite, like, decentralized way to build stuff because they do it more on the blockchain instead of compromising on central. An easy use case example would be like pre-search. Have you heard of pre-search? No. Pre-search is like Google that doesn't scroll. screw you. Like, so every time I search on pre-search, instead of Google getting paid by

XYZ advertiser. Right. Right. I get paid. So I hook my wallet up to pre-search. And now every time I search for something, it's a search engine. It actually searches Google, Yahoo, duck, dot, go, YouTube, like all these other sites. And now when I search for something, yeah, I see my account go by like 15 cents every time I search. It's like Bray Browser. You heard of Bray Browse? I have heard of that, yeah. Basic attention token. You're rewarded for the ads that you see essentially and stuff like that.

So you get paid to use it. We're taking away the tools that made the, you know, the Elon Musk's, the tech giants of the world and giving it to the people that use the networks in the first place. I got an airdrop for having an Ethereum name. and that airdrop was worth $3,000 to $4,000 They did a business insider article about it AirDrop? It was cool

AirDrops are fucking sweet, dude What the fuck is an air drop, dude? If you're in early enough Blown, bro. Hey, he works construction full time. I just fucking do these podcasts, but this is like the second or third crypto podcast I've ever done.

We can get really, we can get deep with it, man. Yeah, they're still on web one. It would take weeks. And weeks and weeks. Think of it like this. Like, you're being rewarded for using a network and providing value to that network. Who pays you? The same people that would pay the company.

So, like, just routed through you. It is, no, not necessarily. Air drops are a little different. Oh, not for Air drops. I was talking to, like, with pre-search and the advertisers and things like that's owning your own data. Like, like, you're you, you have value to, like, you ever hear the term, like, if the product's free, or the product.

Yes. Yeah. So that's like on websites. When you go and use a free product, they're collecting data about you and then selling it to another company. Right. And then that person is profiting off of it. And it's like leaving you in the dust with no show for anything that you just provided to that company.

See what I mean? So Web 3 is essentially a way to. Sort of. It's complicated to explain without being too detailed about it. The ENSirdrop, it was a governance airdrop, so a governance token was airdrop to you. Depending on how long you'd had your name, how many you had, how long you basically reserved it for. Some people made 60 grand, man. I mean, it was crazy, you know.

People really make a lot of money from these. You know, we had one called Looks Rare. It's an NFT marketplace. And I think myirdrop from that was like five grand, maybe six. And now look, like, like, like, like, it's not like here's just $5,000. congratulations for holding your stuff. You got to qualify for him. Also, like, why you would get airdrop.

Like you said, air dropped a government's token, right? So, like, if I own something and I'm on that network, right? And they know that I'm a holder of whatever that is. Right. They can then program it to go, okay, we're going to do a massive air drop, right? Hook up your wallet. Those parameters. We'll validate that you are an owner of XYZ coin, right?

And then we're now giving all the owners of, this an airdrop of tokens, right? In that case was a governance token. So now they're air dropping these governance tokens and now when he says like, oh, I made $5,000 off of that, he then took the governance tokens that he got and was like, I'm going to sell

these right away because they're valuable. Yeah, I'll take the fucking money around. And he'll go and sell it. Right? And then boom, you got an air drop of $5,000 worth of governance tokens that you just sold immediately. So on these search engines,

or browsers or whatever. Are there people paying to be seen on there? I mean, it's just like any other browser. It just, it's rewarding you for using it. I mean, I'm not a huge brave guy. I've never really used. You know, Josh is a big brave browser guy. But, you know, best example of this that people, that is topical, that people will know, is this looks rare marketplace that just dropped? Because OpenC is terrible. They blew up real quick. They didn't have the staff to support billions of dollars flowing in. And they made some mistakes. And that's, you know, it's okay. OpenC, they've done a lot for the space, but there's another NFT marketplace called Looks Rare that airdropped a bunch of tokens to anyone who would like traded NFTs on OpenC, I believe.

And all you had to do was like list an NFT on their marketplace. And people got a lot of money from that. And so now they're a real competitor. They're sometimes outdoing the volume on OpenC. So how do you think that these types of browsers or search engines or whatever are going to take over websites like Twitter and Facebook and decentralize? the powers that be on the internet. The monopolies. It's going to be niche for a while,

but I think we'll see if we continue to see the crypto market grow and expand, I think we'll see better alternatives form because people, there's a financial incentive for people to be on these platforms. So they are rewarded for using these platforms.

And, you know, it's hard to turn that down, especially when you know you're getting a comparable experience. But it's not going to be easy by any means. And a lot of what, like, these big, what two companies are doing is they're kind of trying to co-op the movement. Back in 2017, it was really core defy people. I mean, look at who sits on the Hedera Hashgraf, the council, right? Haderas not a very good network, in my opinion.

Well, you can have your opinions. They're doing good steps. They're trying to decentralize. That's the point of a blockchain. But the council members on Hedera are huge corporations. Is that really the spirit of what that is? Is that the network we want to use? I don't think so personally.

It's a fine line too. Because, you know, like you were saying, like with opency being too big or not being big enough to handle everything, like with a lot of this stuff, DOSS that come up and these different protocols that come up, like there's a lot of unforeseen consequences that can occur and stuff that we can, or they're trying to hold, you know, big tech accountable for.

Like you see the hearings and this and that, and they drag like Jack Dorsey or, you know, whoever out in front of the committees. And, you know, it's like to the mass public, it's kind of a wake up call to realize like, oh, wow, our politicians don't know shit about the internet. You know, and they're trying to regulate it. Yeah, it's rough.

But then to that same fact, it's like those types of hearings and pressures on those guys are what stop, you know, like trafficking from going on on Twitter or sites. It's those type of pressures that stop that. So when you have a decentralized network, you really need to, and why we say like, oh, community is so important. Like, you need to foster a good community.

Like, you need to build a good community. Otherwise, the project could go south real fast. You know, because who knows who comes onto that network or what the governance is on that? Yeah. One of the projects I'm working. working with a little bit is called BBS network. Essentially, think of it like a Reddit on the blockchain, every post is an NFT,

you can buy it, you can host your own BBS. They're really trying to stop the shit posting. And it's funny because that's when you remove the barriers, when people are anonymous, shit posting is what happens. And it's what happens a lot in Defi. That's why there's so many good memes.

You know, that's why you see people want to buy the Constitution. Why do they want to buy the Constitution? For the meme. I think it's interesting to see it's really a social experiment as much as we want to say the computers are the ones that are doing this

and that but it's really goes back to the community and the social aspect of it we're really just doing a huge experiment that has a lot of implication on the future of this tech and to a lot of people they just don't

they're not there yet and that's okay but it will come a time when this stuff is integrated it's interesting it is a community but a lot of the people in the community, they're also anonymous, right? It's like essentially like something similar to Reddit or 4chan. Yeah, I mean, there are some projects that are run by semi-anonymous or anonymous people. Being

doxed is very important. I don't invest in projects. Right, when you're the head of the project, you want to be like everyone has to know who you are in real life. Yeah. But you say community, nobody knows who these people really are. Like, but most of the people are just anonymous. Reputation is everything, you know. And crypto is a very small space, professionally speaking. Everybody knows, or at least has heard of somebody else. It's probably also that. It's weird, though, because, like, there's so many people on, like, crypto Twitter.

I was just talking to a guy there a day, and he's got, like, his name is, like, some weird, I think it was, like, Hitton.et.h. And he's got, like, 300,000 followers. I don't know who the hell he was. His profile image was an NFT. And he says he's, like, a CEO of 12 different companies. And it's, like, how do you know who the hell this guy is in real life? You know what I mean?

They have so many followers, so many people. obviously trust him and follow him. I saw like he was followed by Obama. But like he was like some made up name with a made up profile picture. Smoke and mirrors, bro. I told you, man. This industry is, there are a lot of smoke and mirrors. Maybe it's like an omerta though, too.

To the, like if you said who's the Jesus of cryptocurrency, Satoshi Nakamoto. Right, right. And who is Satoshi Nakamoto. How thinny. I think it was multiple people. If you're, if you're, you know, in the space and you want to, idolize somebody you're idolizing somebody who is endorsed you know like so there's something to it when

there's something to that though like people that are anonymous they're more mysterious when you don't know like what they're where they are what they look like it also makes them like it almost makes them like more of an idol or like a god like figure you know what i mean people can assign who they want like you can assign what they look like in your own head but They stopped with nothing else. And this is actually very funny. One of the guys who got exposed, this guy named Beanie, Maxi, on Twitter,

he's had some involvements with other projects that people, you know, I don't really have a side. I just think it's funny. People gotten pissed off at him, and they found out who he was. And now it's just memes of him. And he's like not taking it seriously. You know, because he's like some like white dude

who just looks like your average guy. And it's like, oh, that's who you are. He found it in the master's stuff. Some normal guy. Now no one cares. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's cool. You know, like... It is cool.

It's just exciting. Every day is exciting in this space. Yeah, well, it's like the beginning of the regular internet. Everything was anonymous. People there were message boards, people posted shit anonymously, no one had to worry about it. And, you know, when everyone had to become, you had to enter your social security number to have an account on Twitter, then, you know, they start selling your data and it just becomes more corrupt. But it's a fun time, man. And also, I think this is the best space for anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur.

to build in. You can build in a lot of, I'm very bullish on the creator economy. I'm very bullish on crypto. I'm very bullish on tech. And I think Web3 is a nice merger of a lot of these. And I think it's the best space for anyone to build in who wants to do something great, in my opinion. Yeah, a lot of people, especially when it comes to like the creator stuff and like the social media stuff, everybody in the creator side of things complains about how the tech companies like to censor everything you're talking about. It happened to me. Oh, really? Yeah. I was almost banned. They had to

did a whole CNBC article on this. Really? Yeah, I was almost banned. It wasn't just me.

Everyone was getting heat. And you know why? It was because the assholes were pumping garbage coins

like Safe Moon. Garbage project. You know the guy originally was a Barstool guy promote that? I think so. Yeah.

Yeah. Dude, the original guy was like off the back of a cereal box on their website before they changed it. Safe Moon was a scam

that got too big to fail almost and they had to take it legit. In my opinion, allegedly. So what happened to you? What did you do post a video?

You just, TikTok was banning us. Oh, TikTok bans everybody. No, yeah, but it was specific to crypto. All the crypto. It was a huge article. Like 12 different people were in there. It was, but I think, you know, I think they figured out, like, who's legit now. Because one of the marketing heads at TikTok follows me now, and so they don't ban my post anymore.

Oh, yeah? You know? Yeah. It was sweet. One day I woke up. I had gotten permanently banned, like, for like, 24 hours. And I wake up and never, again, was there a video down. So I don't know who the TikTok gods are.

But thank you for not. You got blessed. I remember being in my office and him calling me going, hey, bro, I think I just got banned. And I was like, and this was at a point where he was the only creator that we had under the Cryptonite brand. And we were launching a new product in our Discord. Like we had just launched the price. And I was like, oh, my God, it's all crumbling at this moment. He goes, yeah, man, I don't know what we're going to do.

Yeah, man, it's not comforting having the future of your business reliant on these social media networks. No. Especially when they ban you for everything. But social media is the single most powerful tool for businesses now. For sure. You know, like hands down. TikTok's still very underrated. You guys should be posting clips to TikTok.

Can you pull up this guy's TikTok? What's your TikTok name? The blockchain boy on TikTok. Blockchain boy. Oh, wow. That was quick. Oh, Austin's fucking on it. Damn, 500,000 followers on TikTok.

Doesn't mean anything. Six million likes. Damn. Do followers, dude, followers don't mean shit on TikTok. Really? No. The only thing it matters on TikTok is, is your content good? It'll be seen.

You don't make, you know how much money I make from the creator fund? I think maybe $1,000 a month. On TikTok? And I rack in tens of millions of views on TikTok. And I rack in that very low number. What makes a video good on TikTok? you have to learn how to engage people. You have to learn how to grab attention.

There's a certain way to make TikTok content. Have you ever made a video to the chicken and macaroni dance? No, I can't say I have. I'll make one for you if you want it. Will you? Do you know what song I'm talking about? I have no idea. I won't sing it for the sake of not getting clipped, but yeah, I do.

But yeah, I've been taking a break from posting because I'm moving. So you just find the popular songs on, or the popular trending songs on TikTok, and you make a video to that song, right? Sort of I mean you have to hop on trends But you know that's not going to build a community You have to offer value to people You have to create that engaging content

That's going to bring people back What are you offering them? It's not like oh what are you selling them Are you providing value Are you educating? Are you being funny? Are you like you know Causing an emotion in people Whether that's positive or negative

Interesting You have to learn how to communicate effectively And do it in 60 seconds And that's the hardest part But I've gotten pretty good at it You know like I think So like it Thanks man

Appreciate that The craft has been slowly evolving So when the fuck is Bitcoin and Ethereum and all these cryptos gonna come back To what they were Two weeks ago a month ago That is a very open-ended question Because they're tied to the stock market right now

They are tied to the stock market Why is that? Because think of it like this Like where's the liquidity for the stock market coming from From the money printing And that liquidity in the stock market's going crazy and that provides other funds to invest in crypto. And crypto is seen as a speculative risky asset.

So it's like the stock market like did a line of crack. And yeah. So crypto will mirror almost sort of the movements of what the stock market does. But there'll be a time when it's decoupled from the stock market. You think? Yeah. Even with all the regulation and they're talking about with the Biden trying to regulate it and all that shit in the news about it.

Dude, Biden couldn't regulate, you know, two. two damp socks. I don't think they understand it enough to regulate it, and that's what scares me, honestly. Probably, and you're probably right, I disagree a little bit. I think that we'll see a good comeback this year in crypto. I do think we'll start seeing those higher highs this year before we go into an entire bare market, if you will. But I think that crypto, you know, the reason it tracks it is because so many of the big boys are now here. you know like so much big money is now in crypto it's like it's it's it's no longer a question people

like when's the institution when the institutional money is in crypto now and it's still growing but for the most part like I think that I think crypto single-handedly this time around saved our economy from going into complete despair back in 2020 like I really do believe believe that that's why we start seeing that run up in crypto and where people are like, how are we going to start trading things when you had like something like 2020 happen? You know, I mean, having a new asset class, and it's happened before. Like, it happened in the 1970s. It happened when before like mortgages and real estate were like collateralized and being sold around everywhere, we were going into an economic collapse. And they were like, well, let's just.

create a new financial industry. And they were like, so we'll take mortgages and we'll start trading them like stocks. And then a whole housing market of products came out and people started training. This is obviously a much grander scale. But I think that there was a lot of behind the scenes going,

hey, cryptocurrency could save the economy. We could run this out a little bit more. And also, back in 2017, the retailers controlled the market. Now retail market is only 30% of the volume, if that, it's the institutions. It's the bots. It's the whales. And they're manipulating it. I mean, they will manipulate it as much as they can.

It's very easy to do. And they will continue to do so until, I guess, the regulations come in. And then, you know, the, you know, the J.P. Morgan's, the official boys step in. Although some of them are, I think, they're already stepping in. I mean, even with the reports, even when I was leaving, like, they weren't really talking about it. I mean, there was whispers around it. But now they're like full on in their, like, in their company reports. They have whole crypto sections, like for financial advisors, for all that.

Like they brief on how to talk to your clients about cryptocurrencies. How would the government regulating it affect it? What would it change? Fiat gateways. That means exchanges. No more anonymous exchanges. Well, no. That's basically dead.

Coinbase reports to the IRS. Okay. And anonymous exchanges, I mean, they're already going after. the uniswap. This is already looking into that. Honestly, I think as much shit as I give Ripple and XRP you know, I think that they're doing us a favor

by keeping the SACC occupied because I think they're going to come to Binance. Binance is next up, man. Binance is next up. They did, you know, Binance did a lot for the space, man. I remember trading B&B at $5. They did a lot for the space. They hopped in and went. They didn't really care about the regulations.

They just did what they were going to do, made a bunch money and now they're the king of the space. The government don't like that. You know what I'm saying? Derivatives markets have been closing ever since the first of this year across multiple countries from Binance. There's a little suss activity going on. Derivatives markets really power the crypto prices. A lot of these fluctuations up and down. People getting liquidated, longs and shorts. And, you know, we're seeing this kind of happen. Another thing is I'm worried about is tether a little bit. Tether fud's been around for a while. I don't trust them. I don't hold.

a lot of tether if I can help it. We'll see. But I think 2021 is going to, or 2022 is going to be quite rocky, in my opinion. I'm a little more not bearish, but I'm more like, okay, let's see what they're going to do with the regulations. Let's see, you know, what projects they're going to come after. And I'm sure it's going to have a cascading

effect on the rest of us before we can actually see the industry start to grow in a more professional manner. Yeah, I don't like, I don't like guessing. And I'm not always right, which is which is why I decided to create a bot company in the beginning. Because it's like, I'm going to let smarter people build something to handle this off a set set of protocols. And it kicks ass.

It does. We've been testing it now for, I think, three months. And we did an alpha test with like small group of people. And it got a 90% hit rate, which means 90% of the time was accurate, which is way more than I am. So I was super happy about that. Wow. Yeah. That's wild.

Yeah. Good times. It tells you, basically what it does is it'll break down a ton of different coins. And it'll tell you when to get in and out of them and for the most profit, you know. Huh. How did a guy make 300% in one trade, some crazy shit? Because he was just like, we told people like, hey, you don't have to trade. This is just for you to reference, like, to see if you like it or not.

Guy was doing 100x leverage. They wouldn't let me in the chat. I wanted to come say, hi, you know, but no. We wouldn't let him in. I'm a bit of a... We don't want you in there TikTok and all them. Yeah, that was a hard decision. No, it wasn't.

You in Jackson, Mahomes. Yeah, to be clear, we're not the brains behind the bot. Oh, God, no. Absolutely not. Smart guy, actually, we met on TikTok. All the people that I've met on TikTok are people that work with me now. You know, somewhere we found them. You know, Cryptoendio was one of the first people ever met.

She's massive, done massive things. One of the best female voices in the space. an example, I think, for women who want to get into crypto Web 3, I think they should really check her content out because she's been through a lot. She's the best. The misogyny in the space, man, like, it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. Misogyny?

Dude, you think, like, being a girl on the internet is tough? Imagine people who are chronically online who are oftentimes, like, deprived of social interaction and who have a bunch of money harassing women. Like, it's a problem. I'm not going to lie. After, like, talking to Wendy, she's done a lot. She's been through a lot. So I respect her a lot.

And she came on the team. We're very close with her. Shout out to Crypto Wendyo. And we've also got Crypto Weatherman who built the bot. We had a discussion about TA. I was like, man, T.A.'s horseshit. It's astrology for men. He's like, no.

Technical analysis. I'm like, these people draw in lines on charts. Words I don't understand. No, no. He sat me down. He's like, let me teach you TA. So we hopped in a Zoom call. Five minutes into the Zoom call,

I knew I was going to ask him to come work for us. His brain is amazing, and so is his personality. And you put that together, you get a really kick-ass guy who can do some cool shit. And so he built the algorithm for this bot, literally scrapes news sites and social media to see if it's bullish or bearish. No one else is doing that.

Yeah, the bot has some really cool functionality. And I knew the second I met Crypto Weatherman, I was like, this is great. I need to introduce you to my partner. My partner is a data scientist. This guy's like level 10 genius. Amazing. And we put them in a room together.

And it was just like magic. And then, you know, three months later and a ton of dev work and now we have some working signals that we can actually put out there and help people trade and hopefully not lose a lot of money. I got to talk about Josh. Our last creator is Joshua Jake who's out here helping us run up this media company. He designed our studio. One of the smartest guys I've ever met when it comes to researching stuff.

So that's our dream team. Hands down. He's got two first names. Josh. I like him. I like him already. Sounds like a sick team. I met him in Miami.

We went out one night. We shared a hookah. And I showed him that business letter that I wrote to one of my now business partners. And I showed him that and he was like, yep, I'm in. He's like, he's like, you don't want to know how this is going to work. He's like, nope. He's like, I'm down. and then a month later he moved from San Diego to Orlando.

I remember. And we're building out the studio. We were in my hotel room in Miami at 4 a.m. I was writing a disc track to somebody that I was feuding with at the time. Crypto disc track? Crypto disc track. It's on SoundCloud. You want to look it up.

Pull it up. Pull it up. Pull it up. It might be copyrighted. Pull up the SoundCloud. I'll dispute it. So this was at 4 a. 4 a.m. in Miami and Josh was there hyping me up.

He was drunk as hell. End up getting food poisoning. We had to, like, drag him into the car. We got Cuban food in the morning. Dude was, like, vomiting on the side of the road. Um, from, like, this horrible bug. Yeah. Where, where, where'd you get it?

Oh, God. They went to some fucking food truck. I stayed at the hotel. I was pooped. I was... In Miami? Yeah. This was for Bitcoin 2021.

Oh, okay. Yeah. We hit a lot of spots in Miami. It was a good time. Miami is, like, the, the crypto capital of the world. I was there in 2019 when they unveiled the Bitcoin Center in Miami. the mayor cut. I was right next to the mayor. I was a video of him cut in the rope. And I knew from that point...

You were right next to it? Mm-hmm. Like, like, from me and the guy back there with the cameras, that's how far it was. It was like, that moment I knew Miami was going to be on the spot. There was no going back. Crazy. Yeah. Crazy shit. Dude, I just saw a video the other day of this dude in Miami.

He looks like a young guy and he owns, he was just like walking through his house. He owned some house on the water, and it's just full of NFTs everywhere. Makes sense. You know what I'm talking about it. His name's like Pierre. He's like a French guy. Is he on Twitter? I think I might have seen a clip from his house on Twitter.

It was on, uh, it was on Vice's YouTube channel. It was a, it was a clip from Vice on Twitter. Someone had retweeted. Okay. I saw the, dude, Miami is like the golden, like, crypto kingdom. I don't know. It's crazy. Yeah.

My favorite artist is down there, you know. Who? His name is Sergey. You know, he's got a lot of, like, Bitcoin artwork. I saw him in 2018. First crypto conference. went to nobody was there 2018 same conference hall

in 2021 were you at the one in Miami down there in 2018 blockchain shift no it was North American Bitcoin conference that was a different one yeah there's too many conferences have you ever bought anything on Silk Road no but I did meet Ross Ulbrick's mom yeah I had her on here too

and she was a very nice woman and I'd love to reconnect with her because we were on Skype and I was like trying to you know help her out and but I was I was like 17 so I didn't have shit but now I don't have a platform, you know, and she's, she just wants her son home and... Isn't it crazy the sentence that kid got? They made an example.

Quadruple the sentence of El Chapo. Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Or double, double El Chapo sentence. Something insane. It's just, it's a little sad, man, you know? But this is what happens when you have, when you have people who are kind of figureheads, and they want to crack down on it, you know?

The kingpin charge. Yeah. For some kid that just created some eBay for crazy. crypto crypto eBay. It goes back to that whole like unintended consequences of what you're building. Yeah. And then people start using it for nefarious acts. And you're like, but it's with everything.

You know, it's like people like, oh, cryptocurrency. Like isn't that, you know, what people use to buy drugs? I remember somebody told me that at a bar one time. It was a buddy of mine. I was like, bro, you smoke pot, right? He's like, yeah. It's like, what did you pay your dealer in? It's like cash.

Like, yeah. The cash is used for nefarious things. any medium of exchanges, you know, so it's ridiculous. The same thing happened with, you know, who burner is? Yes. Yeah, he's the guy. Like the drug dealer to the... Burner.

He's guy? The cookies guy. Cookies. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So luckily he was rich enough at the time and probably connected enough. But he had like an absolute fiasco of a launch of some social network that he launched. and it was like the social network without censorship

and the whole thing like immediately blew up and he was probably facing the same sort of charges because now he had this like free social network with no moderation and immediately was like drugs, sex trafficking just like the worst of the worst. Nazi memes.

Not yeah, all that. And it was like he got out of it but like he probably would have been facing a lot of the stuff. That's so crazy. though. That's the craziest thing that you make these people responsible for the users of the platform. Right.

Well, like, you know, they walked so that we could run. They did the hard things, you know, even like Charlie Shrem. You know, this is another example of that. Shout out Charlie Shrem. Like, these are the innovators that, you know, have paid the price for innovating in my opinion.

What happened to Charlie Shrem? He lives in Sarasota. Yeah, awesome guy. Yeah, he's cool guy. He was like one of the first crypto exchanges in the world. And they ended up doing like crazy volume. And because of like, I think it was because of the Silk Road stuff, this was years ago. I was before my time. I was like 12.

They got him on a money transfer license. It was something like that. And it was over something, something ridiculous that he, you know, when it was brought to his attention, he took action too. Like there was no reason for him to get pinched like that. It was completely messed up. And it was, it was. And then obviously, like, I mean, you're at the, at the, that was at a time where it was like the equivalent of trading like tokens on on a video game you know what I mean like and they're like well you don't have money transfer license so jail like how long did he spend in jail do you know I'm not I'm not sure I'm not wasn't that long I think it got out like pretty quickly okay but it was still like it made a whole documentary about it I think yeah yeah it's been years since I like researched his case but we've had a few interactions briefly but he's definitely I would I would consider it's

absolutely a crypto-o-G. Yeah. You know, like, when you talk about, like, Crypto G's, like, Charlie Schram, Eric Voorhees, like, a lot of those guys. Michael Boss twins, man. Yeah, you know. You know, Mark Zuckerberg made off with his bag,

but they got theirs, too, man. Yeah, like, these are, these are, yeah, their story is crazy, right? They were, like, they were in, like, my yorka or a Bisa or something when they learned about Bitcoin or something, and they had just got paid their first billion dollars,

and they put all of it into crypto. Yeah. Absolutely wild. Imagine if it went the other way, you know? They'd probably be serving us fries at the drive. I'm right through. But hey, man. That's the crazy thing about it, though.

I mean, like, you don't know where it's going to go. And you sell, like, it's, like, you buy an NFT today for $100,000. It can be worth $150,000 tomorrow. And then you sell it, make $50 grand, but then two weeks later, it's worth $1 million. And you'd be like, God damn it. But are you mad? Yeah, kind of. Still made money?

Yeah, but you're still mad. But, like, you just got to find the next one. Yeah. It comes down to conviction. So many opportunities. It's just like betting Yeah Just like sports betting

There's a lot to it There's a lot to that Somebody asked me in my comment section You know Do you gamble? We have a story about that But And I'm like no

You don't gamble I gamble for a living You just have to have the conviction And belief in this technology And the projects that you choose And that's really what it is Like you have to believe You gotta stick to it

You can't just dip your toe in And expect to win I mean you can I mean you can Dollar Cost average into Bitcoin And have your you know two three X gains over time however you want to do that in my opinion no financial advice i was got to say that um no you don't i'd like to say it i'd like to say it i've told you this too

like everybody's hung up on like financial advice and like i don't want to sound like a dick someone's yeah everybody creators go this is not financial advice and like give a whole disclaimer what are they worried about so so it's it's one you only have to worry about that if you are an actual financial advisor and you're registered and two if you're blanketing it on media to people, it doesn't matter. You can literally tell people, buy Bitcoin. That's it. But if you're telling it to a blanket at audiences

and it's not personalized to a single person, it's not financial advice. I think it's just one of those things where they saw somebody do it and then everyone just copy them. Everybody does it. They don't know why they do it. It's my biggest pet peeve.

Well, also, it's like you don't want to be that guy, you know, that's like this cryptocurrency is going to this price and it's going to happen. And I'm certain of this. I have my insight sources. This and that. and it doesn't happen and you look like a jackass in front of everybody. Is that what Richard Hart does?

No. Okay. But, you know, this is just like some of the stuff in the crypto scene, like, you know, like everyone's always talking about going to the moon and this and that. I like to, like I said before, bringing it back. I like to do realistic outcomes and expectations because it's not all sunshine and roses. You know, it's not a rose garden for y'all. It's really, it's trial by far, dude. You're going to come in here.

You're going to get your ass handed to you, probably. But it's the only way you're going to learn. It's the price your education. Too many people try to jump in and just want to get rich overnight. And it's like, you know, I have buddies who like come to me and they're like, I want to trade NFTs. And I'm like, you should not be trading NFTs. No.

Like start with like small investments. Dude, you can make, but if you have the money to buy one of those apes, you can make so much money flipping them. So the way. Pretty much every single ape that's for sale, you can look at it was, it was bought 20 days earlier for like 50 grand less. Well, you don't even need that much money. You can put NFTs for a couple hundred bucks, man.

You know, like, pull up the invisible friends. Like, the invisible friends right now, huge. I think it's going to be a blue chip right off the bat. Really? I was looking today to get white lists. On OpenC? Just look up Invisible Friends' NFT. It's not out yet.

Okay. Oh, it's not out yet. You can tell when these NFTs are coming and when they're going to do well. Just by, just by, like, being in the space. You'll know. The Invisible Friends, I think, yeah, 7 to 9 Ethereum floor price when they drop. Really? Seven to nine.

Those are kind of cool looking. Yeah. Oh, that's great. Seven to nine Eth is my prediction. That's super dope. Are they animated like this? Yeah. Are you white listed?

Oh, no. So you can actually get white listed if you buy. Those are sick. You have to have four NFTs from the previous collections of this artist. And it costs, and it's like $28,000. So I'm sitting here. I'm looking right now and I'm like, do I want to spend $28,000 to get white listed? But like, do the rare ones of these?

Holy shit. So if you get whitelisted, you buy four of his previous NFTs, you get one of these for free? No, you get the opportunity to pay for one. And they're going to start at what? Oh, I don't know what the price is for these. I was looking at it this morning. They're not, like, overly expensive. They're dope.

If all of them are animated, like these rotating, like these looping gifts, that would be super sick. Oh, really? Uh-huh. And, like, dude, it's impossible to get one. The public sale will be over in a quarter of a second, and it's going to go to the people who pay 30 grand in gas fees. It's like the hate beast. 30 grand in gaspies? It's front-running each other.

Whoever's got the most money to burn wins. Wow. You basically have front-run competition. These things, I want you to go back and look at them. Seven to nine-eath is my thoughts. It's like hate beasts. Yeah. Hate beast dropped seven to nine-eighth floor instantly.

Everybody knew it, and everybody was trying to get in on that white list, and they couldn't. What are those worth? Seven to nine. I think, yeah. Still? Well, they started at six. They got to seven pretty quick. and that was uncommon for an NFT project like that.

Usually after reveal, the four prices tank, but they still go up. Their discord, I think, had 400,000. It was like 400,000 people in their discord. That's four times the size of ours. Yeah. For one project, right? That's not even out, by the way.

And only 8,000 items? Yeah. So you had 400,000 people competing for 8,000. items. My friend bought a couple of those the serums, you know, like the beaker with the... Oh, shit.

Like four days ago. On Friday, I think it was. He bought one of them for 16th, the other one for 25th. Now the one he bought for 16th, four days later, is for selling for like 31 Eth. Oh, I thought you were talking about the M3 serum. No, no, no, the M1. He bought two M1s and two M2s. And they're both double what he paid for four days ago.

Yeah. It's because the mutin apes. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah, the mutin apes. I had an opportunity to buy a mutinepe for three, Eith. Yeah. I was with Alex in New York City. We were in the car.

We were in you and Alex in that Jamaican guy who was like talking about God. And Alex was just not shutting up. We had one friend who's like definitely a bleeding atheist. And then our cab driver. We're in Little Haiti, by the way. Yeah, we're in those little Haiti. Cab driver who was like full on about Jesus. Jesus. Yeah. And they just...

And they were having a podcast. Yeah, they were chomping it up, man. Yeah, and he's like, you know, as he's speeding away, he's like, he's talking to me because I was the last one. My buddy's never been to New York before. I'm like, bro. I was like, I'm not trying to get killed on the way to dinner. Like, shut the fucking... Dude. Oh, it's so fucking funny. Yeah, he was like... Dude, New York's a wild place like that.

Yeah, man. It is. We've had some fun times up there. Give him the gift of Jesus. Because the last time I saw him gone. You know, wow. We've had some good times, man. Like, you know, we do a lot of traveling. We're going to Vegas soon for anything we're doing. And then we got NFTLA.

We have Coin Desk and Consensus. Yeah, we're partnered with Coin Desk. Do you spend any time in the VR Metaverse? Yeah. So, you know, I just bought an Oculus. And so did you. Yeah. We both have Oculus now.

It makes me sick. Makes me sick. Really? Oh, my tummy hurts one in there. Do you have a bitaber on there? Yeah. Oh, it's the best game. That's the only game I can play with that.

The Star Wars game is badass, too. Star Wars is really good. I almost threw up from that. The fucking lightsaber is so, it's like, it's incredible, dude. Yeah, you feel it in your hand, you're like fucking killing the robots and shit. What about Creed? Have you downloaded Creed? No.

It's boxing. It's with, like, you got like Sylvester Stallone in, in there is like your coach, yeah, and you just. That's great. I got to get that one. Yeah, that's good. You know, I have an interesting. interesting story about kind of the Metaverse stuff. So there's this guy on TikTok I follow.

A lot of people spend a lot of time in, like, every single day hanging out in there. You're already online chronically, like most people. Like you're scrolling Twitter, when you're taking a deuce, whatever, you're doing this and that. But like our lives are almost, I spend more time online than I do in person. And the Metaverse is a natural extension of that. What we, the Fortnite, you know, Fortnite, the big concert,

We play all the time. Marshmallow and the Travis Scott. Fortnite is a glimpse into what, will be the norm in a couple decades, if not sooner than that. Probably sooner. Those emotes that you buy in the outfits that are like NFTs kind of, except everybody can buy them. Exactly.

Right. Exactly. But like, you know, the, the Fortnite concept is more than a game. It's like this live event service. Like, you can have these things in there and everything is, there's some paywalls to it, but it's still pretty cool. And I think that's kind of like what we're going into.

I'm, you know, I'm very, It's interesting companies are looking into this. The guy following TikTok, he has a school in the Metaverse in Sandbox. And you can get into his school, his NFT school, by purchasing a virtual jacket that you can wear in the Metaverse. I forget his name. Damn it. But he had a Pepsi executive in his school who bought one of his jackets.

A Pepsi executive at Pepsi. Oh, God, he's probably a fucking pedophile. You hear the story about the guy from PlayStation? What? Do you hear the story about the guy who works at PlayStation? Holy fuck, bro. He was on Grindr, trying to get like a 15-year-old boy to come to his house.

Kid went to his house, freaking videotape the whole thing. The guy went down hard. Find that article. Holy shit. That got dark fucking quick. Pedophile, the pedophile executive at PlayStation. Dude, some of those people are fucked.

That's why I'm an Xbox guy. I just bought a PS5. I've never had any, you know, PS5. I just gave him my 360, you know? Like, I literally like... All right, wait. Why did you give me the 360? So you can play guitar hero.

Most flame game ever made. Yeah, you should see this man shred. Oh, God. Got guitar O three, five. That's what we do in the office when, yeah, when there's some doubt time. Rips some guitar hero. Hell yeah.

Nothing better. Mm-hmm. You know, it's a good time in there. So what is the sandbox? What is that sandbox? Can you explain what sandbox is? There's a few metaverses. Sandbox.

Think of sandbox. like Minecraft Metaverse, right? Like that's the easiest way to think about it. Minecraft Metaverse. Yeah. So like everything's blocky and you can have like plots of land and you can build shit in there too. I was an early investor into Victoria VR. Have you heard of that one?

Mm-mm. It's a Metaverse company. They're doing some pretty cool stuff. They just had their land cell going on. And Victoria VR, like that was the last big Metaverse project to blow up. That was insane. That was some good returns on that one. But yeah, so that was like my biggest Metaverse bag.

There's also, of course, like DeCentraland and a few other places like other Metaverses. And a lot of them are sort of, we actually interviewed Netverk, which, you know, is another Metaverse company. Before any of this happened, it was like our first, one of our first interviews. Network. Yeah. I had the opportunity to buy $30,000 of Metaverse land. And I was like, this is weird. I don't know if I want to commit 30K to this.

I, you know, I should have done it because it ended up selling for like 10x. It was a painful one. $300,000 for some property in the Metaverse. Yeah, something like that. Man, you know, it's just... Do you own any digital, any Metaverse real estate now? I do. Really?

I bought some plot. I bought a plot of land in Nebraska, two plots of land in Nebraska, in this thing called Eartha. And Earth is like, you know, think of it like an alternate reality where Earth has been through this terrible disaster. And it's a game, and you can have resources on your title, I got Jack's shit because what the fuck is in Nebraska

Like get the fuck out of here I bought the premium shit And you gave me Nebraska How much you pay for it? Oh, I think I paid like a grand For the two Wow I'm not sure how much I could flip it for right now

I should check Because I also invested into the coin And they did really well too That was like another big project But I made some money from the coin And I think I could sell my land For at least what I paid for it Maybe more

That's insane This is the article about the PlayStation guy, former Sony PlayStation Execant under investigation after appearing in a peto sting video. Yeah, so the kid was trying to staring at the logo. And he was weird. That's so fucked up. If you watch the video, he literally opens the door, the front door of his house,

he's wearing that. He's like in his boxers and a PS5 shirt. Oh yeah, here's the video. Turn the volume down. He looks, he sort of looks like the type. I'm not going to be too much of a dick. Just fast forward through all this bullshit. This is probably going to be like... There you go. There you go. Keep going.

Oh my God. Keep going. Holy shit. This isn't it. This isn't it. I don't know what the fuck all this is. A lot of B-Role. This is a bunch of bullshit.

This is not even it. I thought they had the fucking cops like a Chris Hansen type shit. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways. That's crazy, man. Well, Patrick Baitman type. Yeah.

Well, thanks for doing this, guys. Thanks for having us. Yeah. It was a pleasure. We got deep. We went deep. Yeah, we did. There's a lot to cover.

Tell everyone listening. and watching where they can find your guys websites, your guys social media, all that, all that jazz. Cryptonite.io. Yeah, check us out, kryptonite.io, you know, on TikTok at the blockchain boy, all of our kryptonite creators can be found through our website. Come join our Discord community, hang out with us.

We're about to relaunch some of the stuff, working on some free educational resources. I got my man Diego working on that. But, yeah, this was great. I've been a fan of the podcast for a while. Like I said. Yeah. Since you were working with Ben and the original stuff.

That's how you originally found it? Yeah, because I was like in high school. I was like most people. A big, a big like real estate. I love real estate too. I want to get into that. A lot of people love real estate. A lot of people are attracted to rich people online.

Yeah. Well, I would say it's not about that. It's just about. It is about that though. It is. A lot of people, a lot of people that are attracted to, uh, wealthy type people who show it and they make social media accounts. And then it's people just, you're attracted to it because that's what

want. He was a character. Dan Zerian. Oh, yeah, he was. Yeah. Right. Yep. Absolutely. Everybody wanted to be Dan B. Yep. Yeah. He did it. He did it right. That's for sure. Then he mic dropped him. He just wasn't a seat. Stop posting.

Yeah, but I fall into the school like 20 minutes from here. He went to, uh, Admiral Farragut. The high school he went to. Yeah. He got kicked out for bringing a gun to school. Yeah, I could see that. That makes total sense. Wow. Yeah, he like pulled up in his car and like pulled his AK out of his trunk and he was like showing it off to somebody. I guess he didn't know it was illegal. He didn't tend on

doing anything bad. I think he was just showing it off. Yeah. And then he got kicked out. Wild. Wild. Good times. Well, thanks for having us, man. This has been cool. It's our first real podcast appearance. Is it really? Popper cherry with you guys. I'm honored. I'm honored to pop the cherry. No problem. Yeah, you got to come back. Anytime.

You guys want to talk crypto. Hell yeah. We can do dedicated stuff too. This was a general overview. I could talk for hours until your face is blue. Fuck yeah. We'll do it. All right. Well, cool.

Thanks, boys. I appreciate it. Thanks, guys.