On The Brink with Castle Island - Christian Dittmeier on NFT analytics (EP.244)

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

Christian Dittmeier, cofounder and CEO of Evaluate Market joins the show. In this episode we discuss: How Christian and his cofounders Alex and Cody came to find themselves spending their free time analyzing NFTs The insight that led them to start Evaluate Market, a platform for discovering, search for, and evaluating NFTs Christian's perspective on the emerging taxonomy of NFTs and how Evaluate prioritizes the assets that it lists The projects and categories of NFTs that Christian is most excited about To learn more about Evaluate visit evaluate.market  

Today on the podcast, I sat down with Christian Dittmire, the co-founder and CEO of Evaluate Market, one of our portfolio companies. Evaluate is a data and analytics company that is focused on NFTs. They got their start building tools and functionality for NBA top shots, and they've since expanded to cover dozens of NFT projects. Christian is one of the most thoughtful people in the industry on the topic of NFTs, and the conversation with him was a lot of fun. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Christian Dittmire.

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Christian, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Just an awesome time to talk NFTs, given everything that's happening in the landscape today. Yeah, thank you, Matt. Thanks for having me on the show. Let's give people a little bit of background on you. And how did you come up with the idea for Evaluate market with your co-founders? Yeah, so I'm Christian Dittmire. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts before working on a evaluate.

I work to a cybersecurity company and a healthcare startup. Before that, mainly in business intelligence. So doing data analysis and data visualization. I started Evaluate in February with Alex Ramirez and Cody Boucher. Both of them are software developers. Alex worked at Lockheed Martin, us and theia National Labs, and then some startups. And Cody sort of led an API and transaction system at a major company before this.

We started to evaluate after noticing NBA Top Shot. So we were collectors ourselves in January. We checked back in after making an initial purchase and buying some packs and noticed that our investments had skyrocketed, but there wasn't really detailed analytics around that or an advanced way to kind of value what you hold. So we began working on evaluate, we released a proof of concept and had thousands of people using that in the first week. So Alex built a full fledged React app. And then I think a couple weeks later, mid-February, we had like eight million clicks in a single day. So at that point, we were comfortable leaving our jobs. We raised a seed

round in March and then since then have been building for more NFTs and more collections. It's amazing how many people got into NFTs through Topshots. I remember when CryptoKitties initially came out and a lot of people got excited, were you guys interested in NFTs before Top Shots or was that really the click? For me, I had heard of CryptoKitties, I think a year or two before then, didn't quite understand it. I was actually extremely skeptical of Top Shot upon stumbling upon it. It's funny. I think the key driver behind Alex and I buying in is that I had a friend out here who worked with me at my past company and the one before that, who had told me about a YouTuber named Roaring Kitty. and showed me him and I thought, oh, this guy is ridiculous, completely unfamiliar. So I was

completely skeptical. But I told Alex about it and we researched it. We just thought it was ridiculous. And then after like watching what happened with GameStop and watching him go from like 50 subscribers to being on the news and whatnot, we decided, okay, let's let's not be skeptical of things because they feel unfamiliar. So we stumbled across top shot. We're like, you know, it is kind of hard to grasp, but like, why don't we take a shot with it? Alex and I are, you know, big NBA fans. And I think once you own NFTs, you start to understand the experience a little bit more when you can engage with the community. And I think like you said, with TopShod, they did an awesome job of like one, allowing people to onboard using USD and two, attaching to a major IP

that people are already familiar with. So it's harder to describe maybe board API club or wicket craniums or things like that to the average person. But if you're completely unfamiliar, you can at least take a chance on the MBA licensing. And then being able to just easily buy with USD, I think made the onboarding easy. And when you look around the community, a lot of people who are involved in NFTs started off with MBA Top Shot or similar collection. where you could buy with USD. It's amazing to me, having been in the cryptocurrency industry for quite a few years, you usually see people coming at this industry from Bitcoin,

and then you started seeing them coming from Ethereum. Usually those are the gateway drugs, but it seems to me like there's a whole new wave of people that are getting into crypto with NBA Topshots being their very first experience, knowing nothing about some of the other stuff. Yeah, it's nice. It's almost like you get to hijack ideas or concepts or brands that people are already familiar with, and they'll figure out crypto,

just be able to invest in things that they enjoy. Yeah, I think that's right. How did you come to see NFTs as a concept that you could build an analytics business around? Obviously, my background is in data analysis. And I think one thing that people who work in that struggle with is that you go and work at companies that have very limited data sets. And then in terms of public data sets, it really isn't too much that is interesting or that hasn't been analyzed. But I think that that paradigm changes with blockchain because you have easily accessible public data around transactions. So for me, just getting involved with the MBA Topshot, we were able to build a database very quickly. And the interest around it and engagement around it was extremely heavy.

So for us, I think, like it was hard and somewhat, I guess, like esoteric in a way where very few people could access the data and do analysis on it. And we had the background and experience publishing apps to where we could kind of make that more available to people. The engagement and the adoption of it was pretty fast. Within, I guess, a couple of weeks of making it tens of thousands of people were using our app. I think mainly we started believing in the concept because of the usage and because of the excitement around it. My mental model for NFD has been a little bit similar to the early days of Bitcoin where you say, okay, if this is going to be an asset, there's going to be a bunch of stuff that has to exist. So how do you hold the asset? How do you trade it, move it around?

Marketplaces will probably be a thing. And then data and analytics, just how do you get information about this asset? What is the price of it? What's the last time it traded? What are people mostly using a value aid for in that third bucket right now? There's three things that people are looking to discover when they go to our site. The first one is generally, like, how is the market doing? You know, how is MBA Topshot?

What does their market cap or transactions look like today compared to a week ago? The second thing is individual assets. Maybe they're a fan of Steph Curry or Devin Booker or Board API Club. A lot of times I want to look into a single NFT and see how is that performing and how should I value that if I'm going to buy it. And then lastly, people care a lot about their account, maybe more so than the other two areas I discussed. If you go to our site, you can see almost like a Bloomberg stock.

ticker style format, NFT collections, and what it costs to get involved with them. You can look up individual NFTs and see, you know, how their full trading history. One thing I think we do better than other sites is if you're looking at Borde ABI Club or a collection like that, you can filter down to individual traits and see their sales history. So if you want to buy a golden ape, for example, you can see all the sales for that and see a valuation that we tie to that. And then lastly, the account value thing. I think it's still early on. I think there's, there isn't the complete solution yet. And I think us and other companies are trying to to find it to where you can accurately value and predict value, but we do a good job of saying,

what's the liquidation value of this if you were going to price it competitively to be the lowest price for that trade or property for your NFT. So that's kind of what the usage is focused on right now. It does remind me about coin market cap in the early days before there were these institutional grade pricing services for Bitcoin is that you just have a ton of traffic because where else you're going to know what the price of Bitcoin is on certain exchanges. There's a tremendous amount of eyeballs that just want to see what their account value is every single day. Definitely. Yeah. I think it was interesting for us because it started as something that we were doing for ourselves that sort of evolved into a community tool that eventually turned

into a company and got us to where we are now. How do you explain to people in your life that are not into NFTs, just what is going on here and why it matters? Traditionally, people will tell you it's a digital file or asset that's tied to a blockchain transaction that verifies it. But I think oftentimes when I try to give that explanation, it'd be like taking someone from pre-modern society and trying to explain to them that you own a car because of a title, right? I think the real power behind the blockchain transaction or the record is that there's community consensus around it. Not only do you own this asset on a record, but you can also sell it to thousands and thousands of people who believe that you own it and it will pay for it.

And then there's also builders who assign utility to it. So if you own a certain asset, you can use it for certain purposes. Generally, you know, I think it makes a lot more sense to start at the digital collectible, like comparing it to a trading card. But I think once you buy an NFT and you experience the community and ultimately sell it, if you're fortunate enough to sell it out of profit, I think that's when it starts to click. And for me, I think it was fortunate that I started skeptical because I kind of experienced that for myself. It's definitely interesting. Every time you see anyone post anything about NFTs, like maybe, oh, I bought this ape NFT for 10K, you'll always see a million replies of, oh, now I own it and maybe paste the picture in the

applies. There's traditional answers. There's the, like, oh, you know, you could copy and paste a picture of the Mona Lisa. But the real idea, and I think the real power behind it is the community involvement, people accepting that you own it and being willing to pay for it. I guess with crypto assets, there are so many different types of crypto assets. They do different things. There's now sort of an emerging taxonomy of how you'd think about these things. Some of these crypto assets are competing to be money. Some of them are just application-specific coins. Some of them will end up being security tokens. Is there a kind of a framework or taxonomy yet within NFTs that you think about? There's general broad categories, and this includes

a lot of things. Like obviously, digital art is a huge application. There's sports collectibles. There's these avatar, profile picture, NFTs that people will pay and then use them as their brand on social media. You have music NFTs that are starting to emerge. Domain, there's like E&S domains and things like that that are NFTs. But generally, we think more around like the use case for each of them. We care more about on the technical side, like which blockchain are they built on and how decentralized is that blockchain. And also like the overall data structure, like some NFTs like NBA Top Shot, you own a certain serial of an NFT.

And other people own that clip, but a different serial of it. And then some of them are all unique artwork. There's even NFTs now. And I think I've heard you guys discuss in this podcast. It seemed like there was maybe some skepticism around like Lou and Dien project where essentially a collection owner will issue an NFT that is vague as, you know, words describing a sort of Dungeons and Dragon style game or like with the end project, just the series of numbers. And then they allow the community to build that up. So instead of having

to take a bet, because a lot of NFT investing is similar to angel investing where you're looking at a team, you're looking at an idea and you're asking yourself, okay, what's the likelihood that they're going to deliver on this? But with the end project and with loot, the idea is, okay, what are people going to build on top of this and how is the community rallying behind it and assigning value that way. So it is difficult for us as an analytics company because the scope of NFTs and what NFTs can be is very broad. And so building a generic system that can ingest them and do analytics on it is tough because a board ape does not look anything like a top shot moment, does not look anything like the end project, etc. But yeah, I think in terms of how we classify

and we generally start with that broad category, like is this a collectible? Is this something that maybe related to music or whatnot? I think I was the one that I was joking about loot and I should have just bought them at the time. My chill frogs are not doing as well as my loot. I can play that. Yeah, it's definitely difficult. I think one of the things that's interesting is in terms of how this works. And maybe, you know, I wasn't super involved in Defi and sort of the all token error. But it's similar to that where it's like if you follow a couple of people on Twitter who have a lot of influence, you can definitely discover things. But it's hard to predict. I bought Cryptodes recently for point four something and they skyrocketed the two. And a lot of times you just have to borrow

conviction. You have to say, okay, you know, maybe I can't research every NFT project because there's five of them coming out every single day or more. But I know that this person is pretty involved, and I trust their judgment and their conviction. But yeah, it's definitely hard, especially if you're, like, you know, not on Twitter 24-7 to really discover or pick projects that are going to do well. I'm definitely seeing a lot of brands start to get more interested in NFTs. Do you think that NFTs will be a way to engage brands? And I guess similar question is a, I'd be curious your view on just using NFTs to build online communities. Yeah, definitely. So I do think, you know, obviously everybody is excited about major IP and brands to get involved in an NFT space.

It does seem like there is more of a risk on their side in terms of there's brand risk and reputation risk where if they do a drop that doesn't go well, or if the asset doesn't perform well, that hurts their brand. I think a lot of things that maybe Arniz discussed as much instead of the, oh, what if Harry Potter or Pokemon get involved is what NFT collections that are native and born sort of on blockchain, how they can grow. So, you know, I think more when you look at major brands getting involved in NFTs, that's very exciting, but it's also really exciting to see these NFT collections become major brands when you look at a board API club or like Cryptopunks, things like that, where Under Armour, for instance, pays Steph Curry, I think around $20 million

a year to represent them. Board of Abial Club doesn't pay Steph Curry anything. He actually paid $190,000 to have Board API Club represent his personal brand. So I'm definitely excited about the big brands getting involved, but it'll be interesting. I don't know if it's sort of being excited about Sears catalog to become an online store. I think a lot of these natively NFT sort of born in the space brands will do pretty well. Yeah, I agree with that. It sort of reminds me of the private blockchain thing was all the hype for a little while, and it was all about legacy financial institutions taking this technology and co-opting it. And in some ways, some of these brands, just looking at NFTs and wanting to fomo into it feels like that when the real innovative thing appears to be this

groundswell of just community building that's happening through the NFTs and then pushing into the popular domains. Yeah, definitely. And to like address the community side, I'm definitely very optimistic and excited about it. I think especially now we spend so much time online and before that there was very little ownership involved, right? Like we stream content or we essentially hand over content of ours to major companies and they own all of it. And they're taking, rate is 100% on it. It's exciting to see like how community formation goes with NFTs because there's this limited nature of it where there's only so many tokens. But the engagement around is pretty high and it's something to where if you get involved with an idea or brand early on that you can

also benefit from it compared to, you know, if I bought a Rolling Stones t-shirt, you know, maybe I'll make a couple hundred dollars if they blow up. But with this, you know, it's exciting to see people be able to actually engage in these smaller communities, you know, and then also, you know, make money or appreciate and value as the brand takes off. So yeah, definitely very excited. It's cool to see the intersection of NFTs and DAOs as well. So having DAOs that have an NFT associated with them that is almost like a membership card to get in. And you're seeing this not only in the digital domain, but I could imagine a world where this starts to proliferate more and more into just in-person meetups and selective communities being built. Are you seeing a big

intersection there between DAOs and NFTs? Yeah, definitely. The trustless governance of it definitely appeals to people. You even see posts about people saying, you know, encouraging people to work for DAOs. The relationship between working for a DAO versus working for a company is completely different. Some would argue it's much less paternalistic to where, you know, everybody who owns part of the DAO votes on the direction of it and votes on what's being built. So yeah, there's definitely an overlap, maybe because people who are involved in DAOs and NFTs are both maybe involved in crypto. But we have seen a lot of, for instance, like sushi swap, how they're getting involved with an NFT marketplace in the coming weeks or months. So there's definitely an overlap of people

who almost expect, even some of the major NFT collections like GutterCat, they have Gutter Dow, and there's APEDAO related to BORTIB. So there's ideas of basically contributing assets or funds to these DAOs around these token collections in our community. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing to see unfold. I guess when you think about the business models that are working in the context of NFTs, it's obviously super early. But do you think this will look similar to the early days of crypto assets, kind of like I said, around exchanges and analytics providers, these are kind of no-branders?

I guess what else is interesting to you from a business model perspective? Yeah, I think some of these node providers or infrastructure companies like Alchemy and Infura are very interesting. Essentially, you know, it costs a lot of money to maintain a number. node yourself and to have sort of these AWSs of blockchain, I think is a good business model. It's also a good business model to start tokens yourself. I think people who are talented in digital art, who can find people to help them with smart contracts or do it themselves do pretty well. I think it's surprising to look at some of these NFT releases where they essentially generate

10,000 photos of something that people will relate to or be interested in. And immediately some of these issuances making between $2 and $60 million for some of the larger. one. So yeah, I think like infrastructure companies always will do well, but there's definitely probably less preference in terms of just locking in consumers on a good UI. And then, you know, as a data and infrastructure company, the defensibility is definitely going to be much tougher because the whole concept of it is that it's open and accessible to everybody. So yeah, I think like infrastructure will probably continue to be big, but I'm also excited about people who are either very talented digital artists or think of concepts that people will buy into. Yeah, from an artist's

perspective, it's a fascinating piece of technology delivery in the sense that you can make money in perpetuity as long as your art is viable, I guess. It's unlike the analog world where you don't make money on the secondary transaction. Yeah. And also like on the sort of rewarding the community side, I think like Chris Dixon spoke about take rate almost being the new margin where if you can execute on the same idea as somebody else, but reward the community more and take less of the profits yourself, you can be more competitive in this space. So it's nice, sort of like an egalitarian perspective where people who are your biggest users can benefit from your product and also take part of it. And the idea of everybody having a wallet and having these tokens makes it very

easy for these companies that have a lever to basically transfer value to you based on your involvement or your contribution. Yeah, it's a fascinating concept. How do you guys think about prioritizing which NFTs you cover and also just which platforms that you want to be up and running on in terms of the layer one blockchains and the layer two blockchains. Early on, the idea was to add collections that will sort of expand our capabilities. We started with MBA Topshot. We added Eternal.G to add a second collection on flow and sort of demonstrate the ability to have multiple collections analyzed in a similar way. We then added Evolution, which sort of was our first second marketplace outside of NBA Topshot

or a marketplace that's separate from the collection. After that, I think we added Board API Club. That was our journey. into Ethereum. We added gutter cats to support ERC-1155. We added V-Friends. I think they had an auction token that we hadn't seen before. A lot of times this early on, we're adding collections that mark a technical milestone that will allow us to add similar collections in the future. Outside of that, we look at community requests. So what are people asking us? What do people own people who own MBA TopShout? What else are they likely to own? And then we prioritize founders, like VFriends, for instance, the team of V-Friends reached out to us and we're willing to help us

market to their community and tell them about the tool. And then lastly, we, and we'll probably be the standard of sort of governing what projects are added is how many collectors do they have, how much volume is trading. And based on that, I think we can continue to scale up. Do you guys see this pushing to many, many blockchains over time such that you'd be adding 10 new blockchains every month? Like, how do you envision the layer ones? Because obviously there's only so much bandwidth on some of these chains and it's being pushed both up the stack. on Ethereum and then over into other blockchains at the same time. Yeah, I guess my hope, and maybe this is selfishness that it isn't just a clarification of layer one chains because that

makes it harder to aggregate. It's hard to say. And maybe it's just outside of my expertise in terms of where things are going. We are optimistic on the flow blockchain in terms of the on ramp experience and then also just being completely layer one and having no layer two solution needed. But it's hard to say. It seems like polygon has a lot of traction. Mutable X has some good collections built on them and have raised a ton of money. So it's hard to say. We'll continue to add the major chains. But like you said, it'll be interesting to see how they adapt in terms of layer one chain's only having so much capacity to handle transactions. When users are on your platform and they're looking at their individual asset types,

a lot of these engagements, I guess, come from the vein of, look, I've purchased an asset and it's going up in value. I'm trying to figure out how much it's worth. So you can see that there's a financialization of this is what appeals to a lot of people. Do you think that this is going to be a situation where we have NFTs of NFTs, so to speak. So will there be almost an index products and asset management play here at scale that you could see yourself covering as well? Yeah, I think they'll definitely be more institutional investing in this space. I think we've already seen some of that, especially around loot and whatnot. And it's almost interesting. I've heard commentary. And I wish I could remember who said it so that I could credit them.

But they were talking about like VC firms buying up loot saying like, do you realize that you're sort of deflating your own bags because everyone that you own is one that a developer who can build and expand this asset and make it more valuable doesn't own. It's hard to say in terms of derivative products or, you know, will there be indices or funds that own multiple of these? But it does seem like you think of like Moonrock Capital and other ones. There's people who want exposure to NFTs in maybe a manner where there's less risk. And then you also have fractional tokens. So there's sites like fractional.R.R.C.20.com. Where you can create a vault of NFTs and an issue ERC 20 tokens that represent a certain percentage of the ownership. So I'm not completely

tuned into like these derivative products or products that are built on top of it. But I'm sure that especially because of the risk associated with individual ones, they'll probably be more of an appetite for it, especially from institutions going forward. Yeah, that makes sense. What's it like to hire people in this environment? What type of expertise are you seeing in the market? How do you guys screen for talent. It's extremely competitive. I think it's a competitive higher market as it is in general. But for us, we've had a lot of success finding good Web 2 developers or people who are just strong with our tech stack and then introducing them to Web3 concepts. I think a lot of people are surprised when if you know React or if you know JobScript well, how easy it is to pick up

solidity or to pick up cadence, like on flow and things like that. So for us, you know, it's obviously a major plus to have blockchain talent and to have experience developing that. But There's only so many people that have that experience, and there's a lot of companies looking to hire it. So I think a lot of companies that have a lot of success are people who can take people who are good developers outside of the Web3 universe and onboard them to it. And are people that you're hiring, are they generally coming in with a point of view and a passion around a particular type of NFT? Are you seeing that type of vibe with the hiring pool? Yeah, it's interesting. It's funny. It's almost like a, it's a unique experience in terms of

We had one hire, somebody I worked with at a startup that I worked at a couple years ago, come on as our data scientists and he works part time. But he quickly got involved and bought like pudgy penguins and loot and then, you know, just made like, you know, spent a couple hundred dollars or a couple thousand dollars and then made like 200K or, you know, $150,000 within weeks of starting. So it's interesting that, you know, this early on with how the market is rewarding early participants, the financials behind it. But most of the time, I would say most of our hires are familiar. with NFTs and there's a lot of developers out there who want to get involved in crypto and want to get involved in NFTs, but are really learning by starting here and dedicating all their time to it. It's a fun work environment. We work completely on Discord. We live all over the country. So it's very different from working at a, you know, like dressing up every day and commuting to work and then sitting

in a stand-up meeting and then having tons of meetings. We're small or agile and we're able to kind of develop together in terms of like just being on a voice call and hanging out and building. So Yeah, there's tons of interest on the developer side in terms of getting involved in crypto, but most of the time, at least with our hires, they weren't extremely into NFTs beforehand. And I guess you've done this all through a pandemic too. So starting a remote company, meeting all of your investors remotely initially as well. What was that like? I think, you know, obviously the pandemic was tough for everybody.

But I think for us, there was an opportunity around not needing to commute back and worth from our day job, being able to like, as soon as we finish at work, start working on the tool that we were building. So I think in one sense it's strange. There's some of our investors I still haven't met in person, but on the other sense that, you know, it was nice to be able to just meet with people remotely. And I think in terms of work efficiency, it really proved out to us that people can be effective workers without needing a centralized office. And I think we've kind of taken that, I guess, pandemic business model and kind of made it core to what we do or how we operate. I spent two and a half hours in a car yesterday. There was a lot of traffic. And I was like,

this is just completely pointless. Like, why am I doing this? It's like, it's so much wasted time. Yeah, I used to take the red line in from Summerville to Boston and just, you know, just being packed where you can't get a seat and there's just tons and tons of people standing up. And it's almost hard to imagine now being that close or commuting with that many people because now it's like you barely are within six feet of anybody.

Yeah, can't go back to that. Yeah, it's definitely nice just to be able to wake up and just hop on the computer and already be started. So we've mentioned a bunch of projects. that are going on in the NFT space. But just broadly speaking, what gets you the most excited in the space, apart from obviously what you're doing? There's a couple of things.

I think the first one is the blockchain gaming side. I think it's a great opportunity because most people aren't going to take a chance on a game before they're able to play it. So there's game developers now who instead of raising money and developing a game are selling assets of the game before creating the game. So one, we're working with this called Influence, and they sold asteroids that are going to be in their upcoming game. And then from those asteroids, you can make crew members.

And they use those funds to build and they use the community who own those to help the direction. So I think that's exciting from a just from a standpoint of being able to invest in something you care about and see returns from it later. But I think like what we mentioned earlier, being able to have online ownership and form communities around that, I think is extremely powerful. And I think as you look at how we spend our time online, it's very easy to feel like a spectator. If you go on like a Reddit forum about something you're interested in or you feel like

your relationships in there are almost parosocial, where there's these people who are extremely influential and then everybody knows them, but it's a one-sided relationship. And with these NFT communities, it feels very different because it's limited in the size and people are able to actually participate in their interest. When I think about evaluate market right now, it almost feels like a stock market of things you actually care about, right? It isn't these dry securities that you look at quarterly reports for, but don't really know much about the company or not to, you know, throw a shade at crypto because I'm obviously extremely interesting in crypto, but a lot of times, you know, it's still abstract ideas or future promises. Whereas with NFTs, you can, whether it's music, art,

games, anything, you can get involved and you can actually own a part of it and engage around a community who also owns part of it. Yeah, that's such a great point. Before we hit record, we mentioned some of the things that were going on at OpenC this past week around some of the kind of front running, insider trading. I don't know what you want to call it scandal. but for me it highlights the fact that it's such an embryonic industry and we're still kind of trying to figure out the market structure. How do you think of just about the regulatory environment for this going forward? At what point does this start to be like a securities law question with some of these categories of NFTs? Obviously some probably are, many probably aren't.

Regulation definitely needs to catch up in terms of especially on the Dow side, right? There's people who want to contribute to good projects and build things but feel like they can't in the current regulatory environment. But on the other side, with NFTs, I think there's a lot of confusion around what's appropriate. And a lot of it is based off of insider information. If you know people developing NFTs and you know what partnerships they have in the works, maybe you're more likely to buy it. Based on how much money people are making, it seems like they'll eventually be regulatory interest. And obviously with the OpenC thing, as unfortunate it is, it'll probably bring more attention

to that. But there's so much in terms of not just on the regulatory side, but also on the tax side. There's a lot of people who are training good, my cousins, around 20, and, you know, he's traded hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of NFTs. He doesn't know anything about taxes. So, and I think a lot of tax professionals will not know very much. You know, it's going to be interesting seeing people go to their, you know, their accountant say, hey, you know, I made 500K off this monkey photo. It's in Ethereum right now. I haven't converted to USD. What do I own it? Things like that, I think will be difficult. And maybe to touch on our early question,

maybe tax and accounting software bill for NFTs will do well. But, yeah, I think it's so early on. And I think just even as somebody who works in NFTs and is close to some of these collections, it is hard to know what's appropriate and what isn't appropriate. And I think, you know, as the market matures and as these policies are developed, similar to OpenC who's kind of revamped how people are able to trade on their marketplace if they're an employee, I think others will follow suit and market standards will come about from that. But it is so early on to where a lot of people don't know what's appropriate and what isn't

and because there isn't really a regulatory framework, it is somewhat, you know, the Wild West right now in terms of how people buy and sell. Yeah, if you thought you gave your accountant a heart attack when you told them about Bitcoin, just wait until you tell them that you have a pudgy penguin that you're up 5X on, just they're not going to know what to do this year. Yeah, well, the good news is that major news publications are really good at publishing $1.2 million NFT rock sale and, you know, like any type of scandal or people being scammed or fraudulent transactions. Yeah, I think over time as the market matures, it's an intimidating market right now to where

the scams are very elaborate. There's people out there who have set up Discord servers that look identical to like an internal OpenC1 and will invite you and have people posing as individual employees with the same photos. So, you know, it's definitely, it's difficult to navigate it if you're not extremely cautious and don't know very much about it. And hopefully as regulation kind of picks up and then hopefully as companies that sort of operate in the NFT space accidentally, like Discord and Twitter, we'll find ways to protect people better, while still allowing this great new innovation to where

people can come up with ideas that are digitally native and build communities around them and build great products. Yeah, that's super well said. Well, Kersh, this has been a ton of fun. Where can we send people to learn more about Evaluate and follow you online? Yeah, so you can go to Evaluate Market on Twitter. You can also go to Evaluate.com to see the site directly. On the bottom right, we have social links. So check us out there. awesome well thanks so much for coming on the pod thank you matt it's been a pleasure thanks for listening to another episode of on the brink with castle island to find out more about castle island visit castle island dot vc to listen to all of our podcast episodes please go

to on the brink dashpodcast.com or just click on the tab in our website thanks for listening