The Pomp Podcast - #242 Cock Foster Twins - Nifty Gateway: the Future of Digital Collectibles

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster are the founders of Nifty Gateway which was recently acquired by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss' Gemini crypto exchange. In this conversation, Anthony and the Cock Foster twins discuss what it was like growing up together, why they pursued startups, how NFTs work, why Nifties are likely to be so valuable in the future, how the Gemini acquisition came together, and what artists are launching collections on their new US dollar centralized NFT exchange. =============================== Nifty Gateway is a popular platform where you can buy and manage non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Nifty Gateway provides a simple and easy way to buy nifties with your credit or debit card. If you are an artist or brand who has a following and wants to work with Nifty Gateway to make rare digital items that your audience can easily buy, sell and trade, check out Nifty Gateway 2.0 by visiting niftygateway.com. ~If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay updated on everything Bitcoin, blockchain, and crypto. Check out Off the Chain newsletter by visiting offthechain.substack.com and join 35,000+ other investors currently subscribed to my daily investor letter.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Duncan and Griffin Cockfoster are the founders of Nifty Gateway, which was recently acquired by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss' Gemini Crypto Exchange. The financial details of the deal were not announced. In this conversation, the Cockfoster twins explained what it was like growing up together, why they pursued startups, how NFTs work, why NFTs, or better known as Nifty's, are likely to be so valuable in the future, how the Gemini acquisition came together, and what artists and brands are launching collections on their new US dollar

centralized Nifty exchange. This episode was a ton of fun, and I actually learned a lot from it. I really enjoyed talking to the Cockfoster twins, and I hope you enjoy this one as well. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion.

This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. i've got duncan and griffin here uh i'm super pumped about this you guys are building a whole world that people don't know about yet so thanks for coming to do this thanks so much for having us great to be here yeah there's two of you both have to answer we sound the same all right let's just tackle the uh the important part right out of the gate you guys are identical twins yep yeah people get this confused a lot we definitely don't look as similar as cameron and tyler but

we are identical my parents promised yeah i'm duncan i always wear glasses easy way to tell us apart yeah is that a twin rule that you have to each have a thing so that people can tell you apart no it helps a lot i don't know it makes a big difference are the glasses real yeah yeah they're real all right do you have contacts i don't have contacts now no so just one of you can't see and one can well basically what happened like when we were young i would always stay up late into the night reading books yeah by that tiny little nightlight yeah and griffin just like I don't think you knew how to read. Yeah, it's part of you.

I didn't know you knew how to read. So I had a brother who, the middle brother, which we used to always give a hard time to, he would, at night, we have this like running joke in our family that my dad one time came to check on us, but like check to make sure we were all still in the house, except for my one brother,

he found reading Harry Potter under his covers with a flashlight. He was like, I'm not worried about him ever leaving, but the rest of you idiots. Yeah, see, that was Duncan. He had the flashlight. the smart brother um all right and then uh you guys must get the question all the time your last name is cock foster no hyphen no hyphen it's it's a very confusing last name yeah like what

happened in school where do people think you're like joking yeah we got that a lot a lot of confusion applying for jobs was tough um a lot of people do think we're joking or even they think that cock is our middle name and that we just love to say our middle name they're like wow these guys really love to talk about the fact that their middle name is cock what happened is our dad's last name is cock our mom's last name is foster and they just pushed them together but they didn't use a hyphen just give us two last names we still don't know why dude like is it like they had a sense of humor type thing because like you know when you're in high school and you're like sitting around with your friends and you're like man i'm gonna name my kid like jack ass right and then

after you hit like 13 you're like ah that's probably not a good idea right yeah yeah i don't know i think uh let's hope not i like it yeah you know it's good it's great for seo that's the thing yeah that is true not a lot of other cockfosters out there so almost none all right so you guys grew up in seattle yes yeah and lived there till what age 18 lived there for 18 we both went to we went to separate colleges um i went to washington university in st louis okay i went to emory oh nice yeah and then uh after college i worked at jet.com out of hoboken oh yeah Yeah. Yeah. I could talk a lot about jet.com. Mark Lohr. Yeah. People don't know about Mark Lohr and diapers.com.

Yeah. Yeah. I know it totally falls under the radar, but hell, great business, great place to work, but $3 billion exit. Yeah. Yeah. Three and a half, three and a half, the half, like if it's three and a half million, then people are like, yeah, it's only half a million bucks, but when it's billions and it's like, you know, a little bit bigger. And it's done well for Walmart stock price more than made up for that. Is he still running Walmart? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

He's still the CEO of walmart.com. um he's an animal man yeah i know i know just what did you do there i was a category specialist all right what is that so there it's a job they're hiring for a bunch of people for like right out of college they put you in charge of a line of products okay concept is you know you're responsible for the profit and loss i i liked it you know because it was like they pitched as running your own business inside a bigger company so it's not bad yeah yeah it's cool but basically after seven months you don't sound super excited about it he hated it called me and complained every day why didn't you like it i don't know like not the company but like what about the role itself was

like that was fun the role itself i just realized i was looking for a lot more autonomy you know at the end of the day that's fair yeah and i thought there was much more green grass than starting your own company i got i got into like reading paul graham essays listening to how i built this just like started consuming a lot of startup literature and i was like this doesn't actually sound that hard like you kind of become what you what you consume right yeah yeah it's true yeah it's true of food and information yeah yeah right all right so we have to address one thing if you're watching the video and not listening at home you guys you guys make me feel like uh you guys are giants right now but actually we just had to get new seats because

normally i only do one person so they're sitting on these seats that make them look like they're literally 6 12 which for those of you sitting at home is seven feet um but uh all right so you're at jet.com which becomes walmart.com yeah what are you doing so did you graduate i graduated okay congratulations thank you yeah barely made it uh i worked at accenture as a software engineer which uh that sounds fun in the bay area yeah it's okay uh i also similarly was like wow i want much more autonomy and like want to do much more interesting work and uh and i got really into crypto basically right after college okay it why i mean honestly like always been interested in frontier technologies like that was the main reason i was learning a lot about ai at the time

i was learning a lot about crypto and uh once i finally understood you know i had like a software engineering background so once i i started implementing some stuff on ethereum that's when i really got hooked and i was like wow this is amazing technology uh i think honestly i think experience was similar to a lot of people which is like from a distance it's tough to understand you're like why is this so significant but the closer you get the like the more you can't stop thinking about it yeah and uh that was really my experience with ethereum and then with nifty specifically which like got it really became my area you're at accenture at the time you're like personally interested in crypto you start playing around are you at that time interested in this

stuff or is it more of like you talk to him a couple of times and he's like hey do you check this out yeah it was much more like that he talked to me a couple times he was like you should really be paying attention to this nifty specifically and i was pretty skeptical at first you know what product were you overseeing at jet i i was in the sports fan shop at jet so that's like sports memorabilia like seahawks jerseys that kind of thing got it which was good but i actually quit my job first i was only a jet for about seven months okay and i thought i could you know i thought like startups a lot of green grass i should quit my job and pursue this and i started an e-commerce company originally with a friend of mine from high school out here in new york city

okay and it didn't work but i managed to pick up coding along the way i didn't have any coding background how long ago was this how long ago it must have been 2017 right yeah it was about two years ago oh so okay pretty recent yeah yeah yeah so so you taught yourself how to code while trying to build this exactly yeah because i had to like code an app i'm like having something i had to like sit down and figure out i had the designs i was like i need to figure out how to code this that really made a big difference for me yeah i mean i should have we have been coding from a a pretty young age though like a lot of people in seattle you know we were doing it like i can't imagine why anyone in seattle would be a technology you basically have to learn to code that yeah well

i think bezos said that's why he moved to seattle right was he was like i basically could just pick off all the engineers and people from microsoft and build a business yeah that was a big part of it i also read that there was a lot you only had to pay sales tax if you're buying something in the same state you're in so he didn't go to he didn't go to california he went to seattle because like washington was a lot a lot less people buying yeah exactly so i don't know got it it's boon for seattle okay and so uh you've got an e-commerce company that ultimately doesn't work out but you learn much along the way you're at accenture you after he quits are you like damn should i quit or yeah that's exactly what happened my idea originally yeah a little bit well so at

this point i was already i was already working on nifty stuff okay i was working on a company prior to nifty gateway which was more just like an experimentation and then after that what did that one do so that company was called gallery okay and uh honestly like to really demonstrate how like unfamiliar i was with the space the whole point of gallery was like okay we're gonna make nifties that only let you view a nifty's image if you own the nifty which was like in retrospect such a misguided approach to take why um because like the more you get into nifties you realize like people just really don't care about that people only care about owning a nifty they don't care about like having the exclusive right to view an image and they actually think it's kind of cool

that if i own a nifty i can post that image and like everyone can see it and then they can go check out hey duncan's the one who owns it you know it actually helps generate a lot of like nifty envy it's kind of like if you're rich you don't want anyone else to know you're rich there's very few of those people but people who are rich that want everyone to know they're rich there's a lot of those people right exactly yeah or like sports cars it's like why do you have the car well yeah if they're fun to drive but really it's because you want to drive by people in the car same thing exactly so this was like i think that this was like a a lot of people like seem to have this opinion and like it took me getting involved in nifties and like talking to other collectors

before like i learned that that was just the complete wrong approach to take and uh so like that company didn't work out for obvious reasons because like our approach was fundamentally flawed but you know through that i talked to a lot of people in the nifty space like a lot of collectors and a lot of people making games. And really, I realized the user experience of accessing Nifty's was just so overwhelming. The example I like to give at the time was a friend of mine was working on this project,

Crypto Strikers, now defunct. Really nice looking project though. He made beautiful collectibles. He was trying to target World Cup fans because he was trying to replace Crypto Strikers as soccer player cards. But basically, anytime he would go pitch to any sort of World Cup fan base,

it was impossible to get them started just because the onboarding was so onerous. and you know they're used to like if they want to collect benigni cards they just like hand over their credit card and buy a pack of cards yep and so i was like wow this is you know this this is pretty amazing what's happening like the collector base of people who love nifties is like so so passionate but you we really can't bring it to a larger audience because the user experience is like prohibitive it's it's truly holding us back and would it be fair to say that it's almost like if you think of a marketplace standpoint there's a bunch of people who want this stuff there's

actually a lot of people who um are building them designing them building them etc but the connectivity like the technology platforms that allow those buyers and sellers to come together that's where everything was falling apart before you guys yeah yeah i mean accessibility more than anything there's just like so much friction if you if i want to buy something like the amount of friction that is in place will like lead to reduced sales right and we're basically just seeing an extreme version of that where if the friction is so great that it's basically inaccessible. The anecdote we always give, Adam Draper, our investor, he told us about when he tried to buy a CryptoKitty, he says he spent four hours doing it and then he gave up because he was

like, I literally, I just cannot figure this out at all. This is so confusing. So if that's the level of friction, you're never really going to be able to get a mainstream use case and a mainstream product. Adam has questionable fashion choices with his orange pants, but we do know that he understands technology so it's hard for him yeah it's hard for him yeah it's gonna be hard for anyone yeah yeah when he told us that we were blown away but like wow yeah really valid so so that was really the genesis of of nifty gateway okay so you're you're working on gallery at the time realize hey this model might not be the exact right model but nifty's in general are still interesting you're working on the e-commerce company kind of hey this isn't going to work

but at least i know how to code yeah and then at what point are you guys like well i guess like this person i pretty much spent my entire life with maybe i should go build a company with them okay yeah that's actually a really good question because there's a good story here uh so i moved to san francisco did he kidnap you that'd be the best story that would be the best story yeah maybe cause some tension no so i'd moved to san francisco and we were living together because i thought the bay area is a great place to be okay we're still working on the e-commerce startup we're actually living in bunk beds to save money because like we're living in bunk beds like you guys slept on the same bed or one above the other bunk beds one above the other yeah we actually

tried the same bed well in san francisco you never know like people could have bunk beds and four people sleep in two and two yeah yeah could have shared bunk beds with two other people we weren't quite at the like rotational bed shift where like one person sleeps and then someone else but we were close we were pretty close but anyway yeah so i was in san francisco we were still working on different companies but um we were just having a lot of strategy meetings we noticed like we were working pretty well together and then we went and saw a talk by patrick collison that he gave at y combinator and he was talking about the early days of him and john working together and their approach was just like to compartmentalize responsibility basically like

patrick could be in charge of one thing and john would be in charge of something separate because like you know with co-founders in general but especially with brothers if you're both in charge of the same thing it's probably going to lead to a lot of conflict yeah and we're like you know i think this could actually work like if we tried to take that approach for nifty gateway and really segmented it actually that's when you decided you guys were going to start a company or you had already started Duncan had already he was already working on nifty gateway as a side project yeah and I joined on board with him because I was like I think there's a lot more green grass and crypto and I started to come around to the idea of nifties it took a little

while but were you not convinced at first I was definitely not convinced at first why well I think I think most people are not convinced so like what like what did you not believe in at first and what changed your mind I thought the whole idea of a digital collectible like sounded insane it's definitely i mean it is insane yeah it is insane yeah it's a good idea but it's an insane idea yeah it's insane i still when i tell a lot of people like it's one of those good ideas that sounds bad at first so all right here's the big question your uh your parents when you tell them like hey we're working on not internet magic money but like internet collectible like magic what do they say yeah that's a good question i think our parents kind of gave up trying to

control us a while ago they're just like duncan and griffin are gonna do what they want like you can't really stop them so i have one of my friends like uh he said he was like you know duncan like in college you were like into politics like you wrote for the school newspaper you did all this like stuff like so i thought you had a bright future and now all you talk about is like these digital collectibles like what happened man and i was like well i'm gonna show you yeah yeah now do you like message that person like look at me now yeah yeah all the time rub it in the space what uh what do we call read receipts like you got to keep the read receipts right you're like hey listen i know three years ago you think i already forgot this but just so

you know i screenshotted this i put it on my hard drive at home and like fuck you oh we didn't forget yeah yeah all right so uh your parents are basically like just like stay alive basically don't screw this up yeah uh you start building this what convinced you that the collectibles went from like my brother's insane i don't know what he's doing to like oh wait maybe we should go do this together okay yeah the big light bulb that went on well yeah first of all the big light that went on my head for like seeing nifty's was when i saw like the community around it i noticed like there actually were some like pretty passionate people and then i got into like seeing some of the projects and i was like this is actually kind of cool and i think my

mindset just took some time to shift because like the idea of a digital collectible makes perfect sense once you once you understand blockchain technology and everything we really see it as a lot like bitcoin in 2012 something we try to talk about a lot which is like from a distance it's like well how is this different from paypal you know like it doesn't seem that significant But then when you get up close and you start to really examine the foundations of a lot of, you know, what exists out there already, you're kind of like, oh, well, this is actually like really impactful technology. And this does like matter a lot. So, yeah, I think I just needed some time to be exposed. And we've really seen that with a lot of our friends and other people, too, is like at first they're just confused.

The advantages are counterintuitive, but the closer they get, they really seem to like have a positive. What's the pitch? Like when you guys meet somebody now and they're like, what are you guys talking about? Like, what do you say to like, hey, here's what this is? So I'm glad you asked because after two years, we finally have a coherent pitch that seems to break through with people. Two years, you guys are quick.

Yeah. And by the way, for anyone listening, if you ever are trying to explain Nifty to your friends, this is the pitch that we found makes the most sense. So it's what we recommend using if you want a cheat code. But basically the pitch is a Nifty is a fundamentally better form of digital good. We've had digital goods for a while now,

for like 15, 20 years. And the most prominent example is probably a Fortnite skin. However, a Fortnite skin has some real limitations where it really only exists inside of Fortnite. If your account shuts down or Fortnite the game goes away, then your skin disappears forever.

That's actually a pretty weird psychological experience for us. Because if I buy a pair of shoes and then Nike shuts down, it would be really strange for me to have those shoes disappear. A nifty is the first type of digital good that exists eternally,

can never be taken away from you and uh you actually you feel the same sense of ownership over that digital good as you would a pair of nike shoes and i think if i'm not mistaken and take the video game example skins if i'm playing the i don't know 2019 version of fortnite and the 2020 version comes out i can't bring the skins from one game to the next even though it's the same game is that right right or in some games i think that's true yeah so it's almost like And the reason I bring it up is it's not like Fortnite's got to go away. It's also just like, hey, if you want to play the updated version, sometimes

you can't even bring the skins with you. Yeah, exactly. You have no ownership. A digital good right now, it's like, if I were going paintballing and I get to the paintball arena and I rent a pair of pants, I can wear them during the paintball game, but then I have to leave them there after I go home. A nifty is like

a pair of pants that I could buy in the store. I could wear them paintballing. I could wear them hanging out with friends. I could hang them up on my wall. it's like the first type of digital good that exists eternally and exists outside of any one setting uh which i think really the larger picture is like that's letting us do things with digital goods that we haven't been able to do before yeah the whole idea of digital goods before it was like complete it's a completely different conception you know yeah exactly platform specific you buy them like maybe it's like an upgrade in a video game or something and

that's like how people think of digital goods it's just like being cheap and like not really relevant but like the way i've always thought about this is like the previous digital goods were just representations of physical goods in the digital world so like hey do you want to buy this poster like here it is in the digital world but like that's not actually a poster it's just like a picture of a poster basically yeah now what you guys are saying is like no you can actually own the poster itself and take it wherever you want exactly yeah and it can exist another like bull case for nifties is like the whole idea of like decentralized digital item infrastructure like items you can buy that could exist in dozens or you know hundreds of different virtual worlds

yeah and will grow organically on its own you know in the physical world i mean like i have my nifty's hanging up on my wall yeah i can also show them off in crypto voxels like you know like i can show them off on niftygateway.com there's like a ton of different places where i can like manifest that digital item i just think the whole concept at least for me at first definitely the whole concept of a digital item like being valuable and being like platform like separate from platforms counterintuitive that's something we see a lot of people where did the name nifty come from is it from nft yeah it is it's like a lot of people started calling nfts nifties just to make them sound like more approachable this was totally dropped jumped on that this is right when

we started nifty gateway this was a debate because the whole community was like nft sounds weird we should start calling them nifties and uh that was the time we started nifty gateway so we're like okay perfect this seems like the future term people are going to use so we call it nifty gateway and i think we're now the we're one of the best known companies with nifty in our name there's now nifties.com which is like a media site uh but yeah that's that's where the term why did you put gateway there because you want to be like the gateway to the nifty world it's like you're a regular person it's almost like you have like a pretty self-explanatory name yeah yeah i love self-explanatory like this is yeah me too it's totally my jam but like most

of the time when people hear it they're just like nifty gateway what if they don't know what nifties are right exactly because i think we're nifty kind of sounds like uh your the word your grandfather they're used to try to sound cool sometimes right it's like ah that's nifty like ah it's true and there's a lot of different names for like erc721 tokens like different platforms try to call them different thing you know like if you called it erc721 gateway people would be like what are these nerves talking about it wouldn't market itself quite as well okay so how exactly does this work right so one of the things you guys are talking about is like the ability for me to own so let's just um use a an example of a piece of artwork right um a paint like a digital painting i can

own it and also i can prove it's one of one one of five in the world whatever it is walk me through kind of technologically how this actually works without losing everybody right yeah um i mean basically the way it works is like you'll what you'll own is the nifty itself like you'll actually own like a blockchain token an erc721 then that private key is the whole nine yards private keys the whole nine yards that nifty has like information stored in it there's a variety of ways to store that information on chain off chain um but it has information in it called metadata that's like you know it's there's a name connected there's an image connected and then to check the supply i mean that's that's smart contract dependent but like on nifty gateway smart

contracts that are going live today you'll be able to check if you buy like a nifty you'll able to ask the smart contract how many nifties of this type exist so you'll be able to verify that there's only one of one so basically what the process is the artist will take a work of digital art that they have they'll connect it to that nifty and then they'll sell the nifty itself and whoever buys the nifty can you know prove with 100 certainty like okay this nifty was created by this artist this image is attached to this nifty this name is attached to this nifty this like scarcity is attached to this nifty and then like that's how you that's essentially what you're showing off so would it be fair to say that this also not only gets into like digital ownership

and your ability to uh i guess it'd be the mobility like to take it with you wherever you go etc but i'm assuming that this also solves all the problem with like fake art and knockoffs inauthentic art etc that's the that's the amazing part i mean like nifties cannot be inauthentic i i mean i like you could potentially make like a fake nifty but it'd be exceptionally easy to prove that it's a fake nifty you know like you'd have to be really really unsophisticated to get fooled by a fake nifty and like you would never be able to fake the supply you know be able to check the smart contract at all times so like and a nifty like as opposed to a physical work of art it can never be destroyed it can never fade away like uh you know you can't even look at the sistine chapel

now i sistine chapel no i think it's uh last supper because you know so much sunlight has damaged the painting to the point where they cover it right exactly uh nifty like you know it'll be rendered perfectly for the rest of eternity it'll always be able to like be viewed in its like form what was um was it banksy who like at the christy auction house uh destroyed his own painting like somehow i have like a time sensor or something on it yeah yeah what was that story that was banksy i read about that yeah i think he just had a time in the middle of an auction just like all of a sudden it just like broke and he activated remotely and it shredded the original image but only oh it was remotely activated so they think that he was like there

at the or like maybe it wasn't there maybe i was like watching the live stream or i gave somebody something just like pressed a button but it didn't work it only shredded half of the image and so now the artwork is like way more valuable yeah right notorious like but is that what he tried to do was only half i think no it's not clear right no i think they looked at it and they said it look like you tried to do all of it but i don't know you don't have any competent engineers yeah i just love the idea that something like that where they try to destroy it then it becomes even more valuable right yeah yeah because there's two there's like almost like a barbell right it's like hey if it's not messed up at all it's super valuable which is what you guys are talking about

um and then on the other end is things like banksy or even like the last supper the fact that it is worn down almost makes it more valuable etc right yeah but there's no thing in the middle like no one's like oh man that art was really cool until you like smudged it everyone's like no that's just a screwed up piece of art that's not just smudged yeah yeah that's not cool at all yeah well i think yeah i love that banksy thing the art world loves stunts they love like yeah doing stuff like that we talk about the banana yeah the banana freaking banana great example yeah ridiculous like i was at art basel this year okay so those that don't know what was it somebody took a banana they took a piece of duct tape they duct taped it to the wall and then they sold it for like a hundred

thousand dollars 120 i think yeah i guess it wasn't just like somebody it was a very famous italian artist i'm blanking on his name but he has like he has an exceptional reputation he's been making like you know great legit art for 30 years and then one day just had a break mental breakdown and said i'm gonna go i have no more ideas like let me just go put a banana on the wall i mean we're talking about it now yeah we're talking about it now i think it's genius yeah but then that leads us to like didn't a guy go and eat it yeah yeah yeah someone ate it but then they replaced it with another banana and duct tape because as they said the banana was just the idea you know yeah okay so that guy was not part of the whole scheme no he was separate yeah he was

a performance artist doing a performance art piece of eating the banana but yeah the banana i mean like can we just say that that's ridiculous yeah like it would be like me just being like you know i'm gonna start doing like uh socially unacceptable things it's called performance art like let's go to the met and where they say don't touch things i'm just gonna start like touching them and just big up performance art i feel like you could get away with a lot of that you can make a name for yourself yeah that's not the name i want i think it kind of worked actually like i i bet that the bin is probably trading higher on the secondary market because like we're sitting here talking about it right now of course like the art world traffic's in this

kind of thing and it was also through like gallery paratune which is like a very very reputable gallery they show like daniel arsham that did show cause for a while they're like one of the so they're super legit too they're super legit so that's the whole that's like a big part of this is like this artist and this gallery have been doing this for like 30 years we couldn't just like walk in and like hang up a banana because they'd be like well who are you guys like this is a big thing a part of art that like didn't make sense to me at first but now makes sense where like your whole like life and your whole history of as an artist like feeds into every new work you create so it's like very much like it's not an overnight thing it's like the banana in some

ways has been in the making for like 30 plus years so let me ask this that sounds ridiculous but yeah let me ask this you guys strike me much more as the entrepreneur like technical side of this where is the interest in like the art side have you guys always been into art like dart did you just say hey look like what are the applications for this how did that intersection happen yeah that's a great question i mean we were into uh i like do great questions yeah yeah yeah come on we were pretty into collectibles in high school i was like an amateur sneaker collector i think that really like what was the best pair you had the best pair i had was uh jordan sevens i can i can send you a pic afterwards it wasn't a great collection i mean i was a high schooler with not

very much money um i think my nifty collection is better but but uh yeah and then jordan's were like at least they felt like they were a way bigger deal when i was younger yeah like it feels like they've kind of they dropped off i don't know maybe so i don't pay as much attention anymore yeah i think it's like new fashion brands like you know off-white like this whole like easy thing there's a lot more competition like those to me feel like they have much more uh attention maybe i'm just getting old and like the thing the things that i read about they're covering that stuff rather than covering like the kind of underculture of it's like jordan etc jordan's are like picasso warhol they're like old art and like supreme and stuff that's like like street art yeah yeah and

then um because uh i remember in middle school and high school our big like contrarian thing which really just meant that nobody could convince their parents to buy jordans was uh we all became alan iverson uh sneaker fanatics and so every pair he came out with we'd make them our team shoe which only just meant like the kids all came together like hey we should have a team shoe and the parents would be like what do you mean there's a team shoe it was like well we all selected this shoe and they're like so i have to go buy that like yeah it's a team shoe i can't be the only one without it and we'd all get a new pair of shoes every year oh that's awesome yeah that's brilliant yeah that's brilliant we should make team nifties yeah you should yeah um and

now like uh do you guys know about a hundred thieves yeah yeah like they do super cool they do kind of like uh drops as well right yeah yeah uh for um all kinds of like merchandise and stuff totally yeah yeah no i mean i think the esports market is like super interesting because you have all these teams that are kind of like you know they're like commerce companies at the end of the day but 100 thieves has built like an incredible brand yeah and it's built off the backs of of being like you know one of the best esports teams in the world i kind of feel like that's the canary in the coal mine like that's something that's like small now and it's going to get like much much bigger like it's definitely something to watch i feel like they've totally

distinguished themselves in terms of like branding and i don't know yeah they're really they're They're a really cool project. I just saw that they have this new place in LA and it's like, Jesus Christ. The cash app compound. It's so sick. Well, all this,

yeah, all this Gen Z, like there's so much e-sports culture and stuff that like, I see it on a daily basis and I'm like, wow, I feel old. You know, like how old are you guys?

25. Oh Jesus. I'm 31. And people tell me I'm young. I'm like, if I could go back to 25 and you guys live in New York. Yeah. Oh,

real hard life. all right 25 and so i'm sure that there's nothing fun to do for you guys um all right so you guys are building uh nifty gateway um the tech obviously works how far do you get before you meet cameron and tyler uh winklevoss yeah that's a great question actually um so we got that we got nifty gateway launched and like you went through boost right we went through boost yeah so we're holding yeah we should give context about like what happened after we moved in together decided to join forces this is this is still bunk beds though yeah yeah for a while the first thing that we looked at we noticed like at that point you couldn't even buy nifties with a credit card

and we were like okay this is an extremely basic aspect so we're like all right well what if we made a platform where you could buy nifties with a credit card which sounds like incredibly simple there are actually some uh tricky tech things we had to figure out on the back end a lot of nifty contracts at the time were like hard-coded to only accept ethereum which means we basically had to run a system that would purchase a nifty for ethereum and then send it to a user like after we had purchased it but it all happened automatically so it was like a very smooth use so let me get this straight is before nifty gateway most people would have to take dollars convert that to ether then use that ether to buy the nifty and then they would receive the nifty in their

wallet right exactly obviously that requires the friction of you have to understand ether crypto you have to know where to get it etc you guys basically just said look rather than ask the users to do this just give us your credit card and then we'll like auto magically give you the nifty but really what you were doing is that same process but just you guys were just on the back end correct exactly yeah so that was super smart that was the first thing we did and we posted it with gods unchained the way that the gods unchained was built it basically allowed us like gods on chain gods unchained oh unchained which is a one of the better known nifty games i would say they're a really cool company they're out of australia okay yeah it's like magic the gathering

but all the cards are got it yeah okay it's like a secondary marketplace or it's like hearthstone you know yep yeah so that so that basically the way that their game was set up um we were able to build a credit card purchasing product totally without their permission so like we basically like put up a front end nifty gateway.com we put up a website and we're like it basically just said like you can buy gods on chain packs with a credit card and then we posted it on the discord and everyone was like wait hold on a second what is this like who are these guys like scamming us and trying to take our money the first one we did looked like really really jank and everyone's like why is this website stay the fuck away i think someone was like well wait a second guys like

all the ico scam websites like actually looked super professional so like maybe it's a good sign that's such a bad sign in in the long term but in the short term makes so much sense people like oh it's a shitty website yeah that's probably the legit one yeah yeah it works for craigslist right yeah yeah it does yeah i love like ugly websites that's like get stuff done i don't know so one person on the discord was like all right fuck it i'll try it like what's the worst that can happen and so like they they purchase it works and they get the pack they post in the discord and then from then on everyone in the gods on chain community is like well now there's this new tool where you can buy nifty's with a credit card like and that solved a big problem for a lot of

people it was especially important when they're bringing a lot of new people into the game like Like, that's when we saw our highest activity on that. Like, I don't know if you remember this whole, like, China Hearthstone issue that happened last year. There was basically, like, a flood of new interest in Hearthstone or in Gods Unchained. And at that point, we were getting, like, a ton of activity on the Gods Unchained purchasing portal

because, like, so many new people were entering the space. Got it. And this was the easiest way to go buy. Right, exactly. To get started buying Gods Unchained packs. And for power users, people who, like, spent, like, tens of thousands of dollars on packs. Like, it was much easier for them to do this

did you guys play the game or you just i have a lot of cards uh that's a no okay but but it's it's interesting because i mean this is the same way the paypal group right paypal realized hey a bunch of people on ebay are using this like why don't we go find all the ebay sellers right and have them accept paypal and make it easier and like use that community and that enthusiasm make something easier and then our business grows as well yeah it makes complete sense no totally exactly but that's how we saw it but basically we did that and then we were like this got us like some minor traction and we were trying to raise money it was like very difficult because everyone was like well you guys are just two 23 year olds who like don't know anything

about anything like and sleep in a bunk bed together yeah eventually we got introduced to brayton the day before the boost boost tribe 12 was starting and we we told him like about the traction we'd gotten and he was like yeah like there's really not much in your guys background but like the fact that you've gotten traction is like impressive so like yeah we'll give you a spot in boost and like that was one day's notice on one day's notice that was basically closed for months and we're like wow all right but it was just like you guys are in and uh that was pretty was it worth it boost hey adam close your ears was it worth it definitely yeah 100 yeah all right what's the number one thing you got out of it i mean like any accelerator i think it's like the

community of other people you're around yeah um we still know a lot of the other like boosties a lot of the other is that they call themselves boosties yeah or cockroaches like and it's so it's such a crypto focused accelerator they're like uh i think if you're a crypto team like i would definitely like do boost as like the best accelerator yeah no definitely adam and brayden you guys owe us all um some sort of commission when uh when all the applications come in no no they're super legit they actually they know what they're talking about and i think what you guys are really kind of describing here is i think of it as an overlap between They understand how early stage startups and the challenges and kind of how to maneuver that stuff and test and try to find traction, product market fit, et cetera.

But they're also obviously super bullish on a lot of this frontier tech stuff, crypto included. And so they're a really nice fit in between those two things. Yeah, totally. And for crypto especially, a lot of mainstream VCs aren't paying as much attention or they're really mercurial. They were paying a lot of attention in 2017. A lot of companies got crazy funding, but Boost has been in Bitcoin and blockchain from the beginning. yeah they're very like they're not tourists they're not one of those vcs that was like oh easy money like yeah yeah all right so you go through the program then what happens so we go through

the program and uh at this point are like we're still we've expanded the the purchasing product to like a lot of other nifty projects because uh i mean they all need it and they don't really have a way to add credit card payments themselves so it's like an easy fit but the thing that we quickly realize is like it's really just not a very big market like there's not that many games out there it wasn't growing super quickly and we like you know we also sort of realize like if you're doing a startup you don't want to be in a position where you're dependent on other companies growing for you to grow that's like a really difficult way like very few startups have pulled that off i think stripe did it well um maybe but they're like definitely the exception and like everyone

needs payment processing there you know that's kind of like our view is like i don't know if you know elad gill's framework the like multiple miracle issue like you shouldn't require multiple miracles right company to work is how we saw it like we just need like it should be like there needs to be one miracle for it to work like there should be one thing we have to de-risk and for us we realized we can make that one thing like will people value digital art and digital collectibles will they value them the same way they value like real digital art or you know physical art and physical collectibles and to us like that's a no-brainer that they will eventually you know we'll see what happens yeah but so basically we decided we realized we had to pivot

to a place where instead of like before we were working with other nifty projects that already existed and now we're like what we need to do is find people who should be making nfts who should be making digital art and digital collectibles and we need to build a platform that lets them do that and then lets their audience buy it like really really easily and access all of them like still focused on that accessibility but also a focus on people you know who already have audiences who are artists that sell stuff for large amounts at christie's or you know lebron james supreme like and and they should be making nifties and that the nifties had to be like great you know they had to be like very compelling nifties because like i think like any other

i mean like we we love to compare this new technology to like the movies and like the video camera where like this is a new creative medium like you can do things in this medium that you can't do other places but like movies wouldn't be a business if everyone only made terrible movies they were like unwatchable like people only like care about the movie technology because like like the movies themselves are cool enough for people to like show up and pay money. The same thing is true of nifty. It's like people only care about nifty is if the nifty is you're making are cool enough for someone to like, yeah. If,

if the collectible is compelling enough for someone to like show up and hit by and like, if they're like, or if it's a work of art that really speaks to them or like by an artist that really speaks to them, like it has to be good enough basically. Like you can't, you can't defy the laws of gravity. So basically, yeah. And like I said, basically before with the credit card purchasing product, was like we needed two miracles we needed first of all for a bunch of nft projects to like take off like a rocket in order to have enough volume to build a like solid business and then second we

needed them to all use our product which would be a second miracle so we kind of realized like there's too much uncertainty here which is like how we pivoted and landed on you know nifty gateway in its current iteration which we kind of see is like the fulfillment of what we were trying to do initially which is make nfts accessible right does that make sense and such an important part of this Because we always thought, looking at the crypto space, a lot of the applications that have the most traction are like Coinbase and Gemini, they are centralized ways. People are really intimidated by custodying their own private keys and they're really intimidated by owning cryptocurrency. We always wanted to go with a custodial solution that would allow our mom to

go buy a Nifty, trade a Nifty. But we knew, we were very well aware of how difficult that is to execute and how hard it is like build a secure custodial application so like when we met the winklevoss twins and we started exploring a um acquisition we were like okay this is a this is a piece of technology that we could not get on our own we would spend like two three years building it we would have to hire like you know people who are like so incredible at this and like we might not be able to convince them or we could go use gemini's technology to build our vision and like we immediately have the best custody technology in the world like backing our app and uh yeah so how'd you guys meet them yeah we met them through adam yeah this is another great traver because we

were joking with adam we're like oh right identical twins working in crypto you know just like the winkle bosses like let's play that up and he's like well i actually know the winkle bosses like let me like intro you and then so we got intro to them through adam and then what did he put like twins meet the twins yeah i don't know what he put i don't think yeah something like that don't know if you saw the email but they'd already had their eye on nfts basically okay and they were already bullish on the technology you know they kind of saw it as like a large frontier and i think they were looking to partner up with someone in the space to like build out their nft efforts so they were hunting and you guys were like hey we're uh we're out here yeah yeah all right and

so first time you talk to them is on the phone or uh in person right so they didn't actually when we first met them over email they were like okay cool they just passed us off to their like corp dev team we don't even like so they like they handed us off to like a gemini big dog they handed us off to one gemini employee we talked to it was sarah yes yeah we talked to her first no no names we're getting the i no names no names go ahead we talked to just everyone knows everyone knows that i do this there is a communications person in the room who is babysitting me not them but me go ahead a little bit of us also yeah no it's always me so you guys are good we met we talked to mystery person x about what we were doing and uh and like

we uh we're getting the whole head shake now now we're in trouble all right go ahead we talked to mystery person x about what we were doing and i guess we we impressed her enough to like move on to the next person who is like the our current manager at gemini and like you know a brilliant technologist he understood a lot about like what the the technical like pieces of what we're doing like why are so innovative and he was like okay like these guys really understand the nifty market like very well um they like have the technological chops and they can build products that are very easy to use like we should escalate this to the wake of us twins and then then they emailed us and like hey you should come like meet us in new york yeah i'm like all right well what could this

be about but we're not going to like pass up on that opportunity yeah so then we flew out to new new york the first time did you fly private or public well we lived in bunk beds yeah we lived in bunk beds yeah private thanks to cameron and tyler like hey man come on you guys want me to come out there let's go yeah yeah yeah but then uh we met them in person and they they also loved the product they're like this is amazingly easy to use they're like these guys like have understand our like our perspective on like we share a lot of things and like the crypto custody is like it makes this like a such an a great opportunity because like that together like we would be able to accomplish things that we wouldn't be able to accomplish individually all right before we get

to the business side like what happens when twins meet twins are you guys just like ah what's up there's a lot of like secret stuff i can't talk about secret twins i'm really not at liberty to disclose because i figure it's like when i meet somebody who has a bunch of brothers i got four brothers right so there's five boys all grew up in the same house and if i meet somebody who had a similar life experience i just know a whole bunch about their life because i just had a similar experience i'm assuming having an identical twin is pretty similar right yeah i would say so yeah it's probably similar like do you think cameron and tyler ever slept on bunk beds probably maybe yeah probably maybe as kids as kids they probably not as 23 year olds

we did as kids too yeah we definitely bonded over being twins we were talking about how like working together as brothers was like really advantageous and like yeah yeah we hear you on that um you guys ever get in fights like if i worked with my brother we would be like best friends and then like i'd slap him upside the head sometimes and he'd probably do the same to me no no we never argue never no he's joking yeah yeah no i think uh well you can be honest with each other like i think that's the advantage right is you don't have to worry about like speak your mind and is it true like when i'm with my brothers we could literally be one second perfectly fine the next second like people are like oh my god are they gonna fight and then a minute later people

are just like wait they're back to like normal again and it's just you know like that's my brother we love each other like totally we can always be honest with each other figure it out and move on that's like exactly like our dynamic honestly yeah i think the twin relationship or at least ours is like very similar to like being brothers except like your brother is like very similar to you like looks very similar to you like yeah like you have similar personality traits we sort of like yeah it's it's kind of like i actually think it's great like it makes my life easier it's probably fun yeah like when i moved to san francisco i didn't know anyone but like griffin's friends from college were out there like that there's like a house is basically like

so do you guys have a group text chat with cameron and tyler that's like twins chat it's just the four of you in there yeah we actually do yeah we actually do and it's called twins chat that's called nifty twins nifty twins yeah it's a slack channel yeah we do a lot of nifty related stuff but no and twin communication it is interesting you said all the twin secret communication yeah that's where we talk about like the council of twins and like the secret to take over the world yeah yeah you know now there's gonna be twins that are listening to this like hey we gotta get into there yeah no it is it is interesting listening to this i suggest you start collecting nifties support your fellow twins yeah support your fellow twins

but like one time we we did go to stripe um and we talked to some of the employees there and he was saying that like he thought it was really helpful that the founders of striper brothers too because like like he said they can like push back on each other a lot more the normal co-founders would and that's definitely a dynamic that dunk and i have seen like you were talking about with your brothers it's the exact same like you can really really be completely honest which is super helpful in a business setting that's kind of like what you want you know but you don't want lose each other's trust. So yeah, I think there are a lot of advantages to it. And honestly, a lot of successful companies have been founded by brothers or siblings, siblings, husband, white,

like, yeah, it's always one of these things from the investor seat where you're like, okay, this goes one or two ways. Either this goes really, really well, or this goes horribly wrong. Right. And it's such a binary outcome because all of the advantages that you're talking about are also things that could like blow it up too. Right. Cause you're like, man, I know that they're to be honest with each other yeah right it can both of them handle like actually you know having somebody be honest with them in a in a work setting so when it works it's awesome and then other times yeah yeah i think for us it was so helpful like we were so much on the same page like as to what we wanted to do with our lives like right after college like we were both like

all right we want to do startups it was kind of hard to find like a lot of our other friends were like like look i'm not that crazy like i have a you know good job career prospects like why would would i give that all up to like risk it all and nothing whereas griffin and i were like it was like fuck it yeah we'd rather risk it all right now yeah yeah you probably slept with your 25 you probably still have friends they're like dude what am i gonna do with my life you're like hey man we're in soho what's up want a nifty all right so that brings me to uh what was the moment like when cameron told like hey uh do you want to come here to gemini did they just like was it like a uh job offer on steroids or was it like uh we want to buy your company yeah so it was i so we

they dm you like there's like a slide slide in your dms like sup we did the meeting with them okay we we felt like the meeting went very well after and we were like okay like this seems like there's a lot of synergies here like we're clearly on the same page about a lot of stuff and the other thing we were considering was like obviously raising a seed round at this point yeah and we we also thought that they would be great investors for that and we were talking to some other like vcs we're basically like that was our plan but then we we got on the plane no wi-fi on the plane we landed back in san francisco and we had an email that was like all right guys we want to start seriously exploring the acquisition path and we were like we're honestly a little uh

blown away because like i mean at that experience we've been doing nifty gateway for like six seven months we're still like in the very early stages like it was like getting off the ground and like i literally just quit my job like seven months ago like we were broke sleeping in a bunk bed it was kind of a life comes life comes real fast yeah it's totally true yeah yeah i mean like it was really like a right place but you had also built something that obviously people wanted right it worked yeah right they had done a lot of work before it's not like they just met you at a bar right they had already had a bunch of people on their team talk to you etc yeah and that was it was almost like you guys meeting them was kind of like the hey yes we bless this we like these

people right we think they're smart etc yeah okay so go ahead yeah so then uh then we were like we talked it over with like adam and the boost vc team and basically decided that like that that was the path that we wanted to pursue and then we went down like the the m&a process was it fun it is it's very stressful it's a lot of work it's a lot it's a lot of work and it's like it's just like complex and uh yeah it's like it's all the stuff that's not fun but it's necessary yeah right every acquisition is very similar um our parents are lawyers which was like were very helpful because our dad was sort of like the the point man and he like was your dad your lawyer he was or he was very helpful he was very helpful yeah he wasn't the he wasn't the m&a

lawyer we had to hire like an m&a lawyer he helped us like find the m&a lawyer got it and he would help us he would basically like be there on all the calls to like make sure we understood what was going on yep like give us advice about stuff sort of like a mix between a dad and a lawyer yeah it's one of these things um i tell a lot of young founders uh your parents can be your greatest advisor or your worst enemy depending on like if your dad who's a lawyer gives you help with legal stuff like yeah pretty good fit right like that's what he does for a living you should probably listen if your dad starts giving you advice on like uh hey look at this piece of art i found and like i think this is a good one you're like yeah appreciate the advice

dad but like yeah you've got on uh puma shoes and don't exactly get it yeah like doesn't even use facebook like he has an account but he uses it like once every four months so he's like one of the least like technological people i know but understands law right so yeah you use use what you have in your disposal when you need it yeah um all right makes sense uh so i'm not gonna ask how much money jim and i bought because uh we're not allowed to do that but if you want to just accidentally say that's fine um you also in a public article uh part of the acquisition was in bitcoin uh are you allowed to say whether you guys asked for that or that was part of the twins offer we chose they said they suggested we're like hell yeah they asked cash super

yeah yeah we're major bitcoin bulls the only reason why i like that detail is because uh i've tweeted this so i can say it no one can get mad at me um i actually think that cameron and tyler are going to go down as the greatest investors of our generation totally simply because they made a single bet that at the time was literally the dumbest thing in the world right like let's go take millions of dollars by one percent of the bitcoin network in 2013 yeah like i thought you gave it well that too they have two notches in their belt but just like the the conviction to see something early right and it's like one thing to be like oh yeah like this is cool uh hey i've got

a couple million bucks like let me put a hundred thousand dollars and see what happens it's a whole different thing to be like no i'm gonna put like a lot of my net worth into something and then also through all the volatility to hold on to it yeah there is a again i'll say this not you guys uh maybe a comparison of like if nifty's become what you guys think they will become like they are one of the first to see that right and make a uh a bet in that space yeah we can't say substantial all because we don't know that's certainly how we see yeah and going through the m&a process with them like we dealt with like so many people in different contexts at that point like people were trying to sell the product to like investors and like a defining feature of doing a startup is

like basically everyone you talk to is like just very wishy-washy and will say one thing and then like you text them an hour later and it's like it never even got like we had people be like yes we'll like we'll sell the product and then like three months later we'd be like so what what what happened not in twins chat twins chat nifty twins your word is your bond yeah well kevin and tyler just like they're so high integrity like they said like yet from the minute that they said like we want to pursue this like there was absolutely zero wavering and they're also just high conviction right exactly the bitcoin bet really demonstrates it i don't really know where they got that from maybe you're just born like that but like those two really do have like very

strong conviction yeah exactly so which is a very impressive because like it's rare like you really don't see that a lot of vcs aren't like that a lot of vcs are just like oh what's the hot company like i'm just going to hop in there you know a lot of vcs except for the best ones obviously but are very low conviction but cameron and tyler are totally opposite so it's cool i love it i love it um all right now you guys live in soho how's that that's good it's good that's it just it's good you're 25 living in soho the reason why i bring up soho is you guys have an apartment together no bunk beds no separate rooms separate wow moving up in the world all right but in your apartment you have basically like a nifty gallery tell me about that we have about we have like

eight or eight or nine screens right now okay all is that what it's called is that the the lingo would be screens well they're just like tv screens tv screens the lingo is like still it's still new i don't think we have a great like let's just make it up we'll just say that we made it up right here all right screens everyone listening it's screens go ahead and really i mean really like like so much of what we do like that's kind of like a a test case for us to like develop like nifties and like we we find a lot of like a lot of pitches we've been doing have been to more mainstream art people like people with track records and like the fine art world like galleries museums etc like those kind of people for them like being able to visually see a nifty displayed

is so so important i think for a lot of like a lot of the early people who are into nifties um you know it's fine that they exist virtually and like you know they also exist in virtual worlds for a lot of more we we find like the more someone is like into the art world the more that the visual display is like necessary to like get them to understand what a nifty is and why it's so significant so if i was in your apartment basically the experience is i'm looking at these different screens and i can see a digital good right and this could be like give me the range of what that could entail today so we set up the gallery it's a it's a full-on show i can send you the brief actually but basically it's it's a walk through the history of nifties so we also treat it

as an educational experience the first nifty that we have displayed is a crypto punk um you know rare pepes did precede crypto punks and there were some like bitcoin nifties but i think crypto punks were the first project that like really captured people's imagination and that's the project that like defined a lot of the the elements that would like become popular in the nifty culture so that's why we have crypto punks up there first and also i i love the aesthetic of crypto punks like the the fact that they're just like these pixelated i mean it's literally a 24 by 24 pixel image which is uh i think very cool because it really makes it reminds me of like early internet culture and like sega you know like oh sega genesis sonic the hedgehog yeah then

then it progresses through and we have some other nifties on display and then we have some of the nifties that we're going to start selling when nifty gateway 2.0 launches and our illustration with that is like you know nifty started off as like experiments like people didn't even they they had no idea if this was going to work or not it was a counterintuitive idea and now we're at the point where fine artists with track records are starting to recognize like the importance of this new medium and are really starting to take notice and it's still only at the very beginning of that happening but like we think it's a you know it's a new milestone for this technology and for this medium so you guys are launching today what you made a big announcement

this morning yeah so what we're launching today is we call it nifty gateway 2.0 and there's two separate elements to it the first is a centralized u.s dollar based nifty exchange which there's nothing out there that exists like that right now what does that mean so what that means is it's an exchange for nfts that operates solely in u.s dollars and it's all centralized so it works the same way as gemini does or coinbase does where we custody all the nfts using gemini's technology and then users can buy and sell them with each other so i can go on i have no crypto yeah i can simply go on with dollars and i can say you know what i like that third nifty on this screen i want to buy that one i pay in dollars the dollars actually purchase it i receive the nft and the

dollars go to the artist as well exactly and then like when you're when you want to sell it you know like that artist becomes way more popular their work becomes recognized like the value goes up 10x uh you put it up for sale on the nifty gateway marketplace uh you receive credit like after someone purchases it you receive like money into your nifty gateway balance and then you cash it directly to your us bank account right now it's only us only it's us only cash outs but like international expansion is like coming soon and just to sign up you only need an email address and like a username you know there's no kyc or anything like that the larger point of this is like uh basically it's the first nifty experience that doesn't require cryptocurrency onboarding

and it's really the culmination of what we've been trying to accomplish for years which is making nifties as accessible as they should be um and like really that'll open up nifties to a whole new group of people who like haven't been collecting nifties before and like for example you know the fine artists we've signed up their collector bases would have had a really tough time going through crypto onboarding to like get the full nifty experience now they don't have to they can just go through our very straightforward onboarding and so it's really if i go to nifty gateway.com i can go sign up and see all this yeah you can see the collection yeah okay and then That's the other thing that we're launching.

That was the first thing was the U.S. Centralized Exchange. Yeah. And then the other thing, like I said, another big focus for us has been taking people who already have audiences and have followings in the worlds of physical art or celebrities or athletes or brands who we think should be making Nifty's, should be making digital memorabilia. And we're partnering with them and we're doing drops every three weeks where they release Nifty's.

So we're also launching our first drop with three different people that we're really excited about. Who are the people? So the first one is Lila Wierko. He's a photographer. He originally rose to fame as the guy who took the photo of one of the Twin Towers on 9-11. And that was featured on the cover of Time magazine. So that's how he first became famous.

In 2005, he started working on something called the Boombox Project. And his art is all about freedom. It's about youth. It's about expression. And he picked boomboxes because they're sort of this iconic technology that defined hip-hop culture, defined youth culture in the 80s. And this is the gold boombox part of the collection? Yeah, the gold boomboxes. So he started in 2005 just photographing a bunch of different boomboxes.

And the collection became quite popular. Beyonce and Jay-Z own works from the boombox collection. Kanye West owns a work from the boombox collection. Of course he does. Of course he does, yeah. Started off with just photographs. Then he went to sculptures. And when we pitched him on the concept of nifties, he was like, okay, cool.

I want to bring this boombox collection to a third medium, nifties. so we're really excited about that because this is a guy who has you know a great collector base like does shows in like some top galleries in like new york and la and he's now like for the first time like he's extremely enthusiastic he loved the concept he loved the concept he's like wow this is the future like i love this new medium and he made the point that photography is the primary medium where he works like it started off as a a joke of a medium in like the physical art world and then people's like started recognizing it more and more he was like every new medium starts small and like he's he loves nifties yeah he's bringing this collection that's had like such

an impact on the world to a new medium and like we we couldn't be more excited frankly so that's one artist the second artist is uh named michael kagan he's an artist who his work is all about the future and innovation to me like when i look at michael kagan's work it's sort of like i'm watching the movie interstellar because i get reminded of this like this america that was bold enough to like go to the moon was bold enough to like explore space and like allegedly but go yeah it was so he so he he paints like depictions of rockets depictions of astronauts but like in a very serious very kind of space innovation futuristic yeah exactly and so he's he's releasing five works so we're calling them select works by michael kagan three of them are depictions

of apollo 11 taking off one of them is called uh aldrin and it's a painting of buzz aldrin on the moon that's my favorite and then the other one is called in memory that's also a depiction of an astronaut on the moon i don't know if it's buzz aldrin or not but he i mean he um another guy with an amazing reputation like he he just sold a work at christie's for forty thousand dollars a few weeks ago that that topped the high estimate christie's will provide estimates for all their art auction his estimate was 25 to 35 he sold it for 40 and we like to talk about from christie's to nifty's you know like yeah that's like yeah we're getting these are like five tagline yeah yeah all right yeah well these are yeah these are fine artists who like have impeccable

reputations in the fine art world and are collected by like you know some of the top collectors in the world and they're starting to recognize this new medium for the first time which is like an awesome feeling for us yeah all right that's two who's the third the third is uh well do you want to yeah sure yeah the third is chris cyborg so this is not she's not an artist she's an mma fighter this is a which is a form of art yeah yeah so true and she's basically releasing a nifty collection um the point of that is to provide a new form of like digital collectible merchandise like memorabilia for her fan base so she's releasing two different nifties we worked with her to like connect her with a professional artist to illustrate them the nifties look awesome

one of them is called cyborg ready and that's her like in black and white like standing ready to like fight the second one is called cyborg victorious it's much more colorful it's her with her arms raised and so these nifties serve for her fan base this is a like you know memorabilia that they can collect that they can engage with i think if you're a fan of chris cyborg or if you're a fan of like crypto and nifties this is like something that you can use to like further engage with her work this is basically like you know action figures and that kind of thing like moving on to the yeah into the digital world yeah for the first time so yeah we're really excited about those three and then we're doing them every three weeks right we have a lot of great people lined up

following you know it's really just like the beginning who's the craziest person that you've talked to about this whether they actually agreed or not i don't know if we can yeah i don't know if we should say but i can say you can do whatever you want yeah right oh we got more eyes i will only say that um it's remarkable like the level of interest that we got from artists who were like who have like absolutely enormous reputation like there are artists where we brought them in to have meetings and uh gemini employees like came up and asked for us they're like yo is that this artist like can i can i please be like art uh meaning like the actual visual like painting or photography etc not like musicians not celebrities yeah these are like

these are artists that are so like so well known and so like influential um well a lot of people don't know but uh so i'm not as up to speed on like the art world uh but if you take athletes musicians celebrities etc there's a ton of them that love digital assets in general whether it's bitcoin or something else etc um so it would only make sense that if you can find a way for people at that level of their craft uh in the art world and it can help their business yeah right yeah yeah no like i said we've gotten a lot of interest and then the cool part is how accessible it is for their fan base right now if they're doing something blockchain related my first thought is like how tough is that going to be sign up for do i have to send in my like

id but nifty gateway is like really really easy to sign up for because we're only selling collectibles do you think that you guys will get brands as well i think so yeah i definitely think so like could there be like supreme and those types i'm assuming this is like right up their alley right yeah absolutely no we've started conversations with a few brands and we're like really building it out um we're gonna make this an adventure like every every two or three weeks i hope i can love you guys we're gonna make this an adventure no dude we gotta make a business buckle up yeah yeah i mean for us it's all about like uh you have one with the north korean

government that's an adventure it's a nifty we're really pumped for i really think the the stuff that excites us the most though is like pushing creative boundaries with nifties the comparison that i love to make is like what uh what if the video camera had never been invented Did we talk about this already? I can't remember. Yeah, like if the video camera had never been invented, Steven Spielberg never would have been able to make E.T. And like we would have been robbed of like such an important part of our culture.

You know, like think about the impact that movies have had on so many of our lives. Like we view nifties as a very like a technology that will enable people to do creative things that they haven't been able to do before and to like impact our lives and society in ways that are like are really difficult to predict right now. so the things that we're most excited about are the people who want to use this technology to do things that haven't been done before to like really make an impact and to really make people think like whoa that that's cool like that's so creative like i can't believe someone like had that idea like how much do these go for so like how much do you do you guys choose the

prices do the artist has we work with them we work with them so they basically are like hey here's the cool thing i want to do like help me price this given where the industry is plus where like other art sells yeah yeah the price is very i mean lyle's collection he's he's launching six six different boom boxes six different boom box nifties and he's varying the edition number as well as the price so like his gold boom boxes there's only one of them to one of a kind and that's 2500 which actually for his work is like it's quite a reasonable price cheap yeah yeah i think he uh i think he was like super enthusiastic about this new medium and he was like i want to like the market to figure this out like i'm not going to be true to aggressive artists like they

um they price themselves very differently like yeah yeah a lot of the yeah like it could be kind of except for the banana guy the banana guy is he's got life figured out no but but it i mean it makes sense right it's like hey look i want this to be successful it's almost like the success of it's more important than the price today because if it becomes a new medium you could see a lot of these artists moving you know i don't know 25 of their work into this medium right i mean maybe more well they're the pioneers like they're the first ones to like step up and recognize this this medium the first ones from the traditional art world i should say because there is a like a vibrant community of crypto artists who like make awesome work you know um

they wouldn't be able to exist without like the nifty medium but we review this more of like people who have like deep collector bases like more of a track record in the traditional art world like are taking notice of nifties for the first time got it yeah what what scares you guys about this world like what what's like the big goal where you're like man if we could accomplish x that would be awesome well our mission is to get one billion people collecting nifties so yeah you can do that oh come on is that possible well maybe yeah i mean maybe it's certainly possible i'm not gonna rest until it happens you're supposed to say hell yeah it is i think people are actually like people like are surprised about the the like penetration

of collectibles into like our lives especially like when you think about like the term collectibles like it's kind of a really broad term yeah i call them knickknacks yeah i'm gonna give plain a hard time she literally uh when we moved recently there's a whole box i was like what the hell's in this box it's like a bunch of things i don't even know they're all like going little cabinets and i was like what is all that she's like they're uh you know this elephant came from this place this came from wherever i was like what is this nonsense no knickknacks is the new rule and then somebody uh was like no those aren't knickknacks they're collectibles and i was like oh my god but to your guys point literally those things fit into that category just as much as

jordan sneakers or a piece of artwork right exactly yeah the only difference is like you know how how cool they are like how well made and actually this elephants are not cool at all so i was trying to get these out of here yeah this is what i like i've been doing a lot of research on like a lot of different physical collectibles it's like actually it's quite hard to make like a very sharp spiffy looking physical collectibles like the types of mediums that you can work with they're kind of annoying like plastic it's like you got to paint everything like precisely so many action figures are like not very done very well i i honestly think like with the digital medium i mean you'll see like some of the projects that we have lined up you

know we like hire professional illustrators but they honestly look like great yeah like you look at them and it's like totally true it's like wow like you you have an experience of like wow this is really really cool whereas like a lot of physical items like the manufacturing quality really varies i think it's basically what i'm trying to say is like i think it actually might be easier to make a digital item that gives that like wow factor than a physical item of course i mean we see this sort of thing is inevitable i think most people would agree with that like just the question is when yeah the tough part for a lot of people is kind of like from a distance they don't really get it when they get up closer they start to think it's really cool which is like

what makes us so bullish on the concept because like those are kind of things you want to look for like the secrets yeah the stuff that the people who know about it are really passionate about like right now there's a small group of nifty collectors who are really passionate about it and i also want to say if you want an adventure sign up for our mailing list new content every three weeks we're gonna blow you guys away you're gonna open your inbox and you're gonna be like oh my god this is like i can't believe the creativity that these guys have see look they think they're experts but at 25 they don't yet know saying sign up for the mailing list doesn't count unless you give the url so you have to say niftygateway.com it's all right we just got a thumbs up from the

from the babysitting so we're good to go now see how we buy ourselves some credibility at the end um all right so where can people find you two on the internet uh super active on twitter twitter's my main jam yeah twitter again same rule you have to give your twitter account or people can't find my name is dc cock foster g cock foster just google griffin cock foster or duncan cock foster there's not a lot of other cock fosters out there can we say that you guys are one of one one of one cock foster follow nifty gateway on instagram nifty underscore gateway that's like you know like that's where you post a lot of the visual stuff it's a visual nifty gateway on twitter instagram is more visual than twitter just by like by nature so like yeah that's why i post

a lot of stuff you can't answer with the same answers to these questions what is the most important book either one of you've read do i go first griffin yeah i mean for me it's zero to one by peter teal which i know is cliche for someone who works in tech but whatever i i love that book i read it once a year i don't know it totally changed the world yeah yeah the book that he uh was a blake blake masters and then he has the notes online too from the original class which are also really good that like the book is made to be accessible but the notes like he goes into even more depth and yeah i don't know i i completely love that book like i said i read once a year so i i like for me i'm really into reading like history and biographies um i think

like robert carrow the lbj series was maybe like one of the most did you read that underneath your covers as a teenager i was out partying i wish i wish all right so the lbj series right so robert carrow um he wrote this like he spent decade maybe 45 years now writing this like wow yeah it's insane writing this multi-volume biography of lbj and the crazy part is caro is he's in his 80s he's uh you know like he's not finished with the series lbj isn't even president in his biography series so he's written these books like 2700 pages in it hasn't got to lbj yeah it just hasn't got to but the thing i like about it is he gonna be around to write about let's hope so yeah but by the way uh if you're writing a book being that obsessed with somebody's

cool if you're pretty much doing anything else you're that obsessed with somebody like that's a crime yeah yeah yeah yeah good thing lbj was dead when he started all right so are we believers in aliens or not oh no no no what well i don't know like i haven't seen you don't think there's aliens out there i think it's possible i mean i would be most convinced by like the the math there's just like so many planets out there right like there's got to be like like how many planets there are you you want a crazy stat hit me there's 10 000 planets for every one grain of sand on earth yeah that's my that's my like yeah fuck all of us right and then on top of that uh there is now um scientifically they are confirming whatever that means uh that a black hole

burped which basically to get the black hole ingest so much energy by swallowing stars and all this kind of stuff that it quote-unquote burped and it was the largest energy like transfer or event ever recorded or ever uh measured in uh all of whatever and it happened like 360 million light years away or something and like i basically it's like i have no clue what that actually means but then like dude the world outside of earth is massive yeah so crazy it's just like incomprehensible but i don't know like maybe humans are just really special but i'm bullish that humans are going to become multi-planetary yeah i think like eventually we're just in your lifetime i mean i think a moon colony could happen in my life i don't know about

full interplanetary i think we're just going to get bored like what else are we going to do like You know, I love Elon, but I saw today he tweeted, uh, occupy Mars, but it wasn't Mars. Uh, cause there's a planet, but it was actually the moon and people were giving him a heart. I hate you. That's the moon. Like you buy Mars and then post a picture of the moon. So we got some work to do. You got to know where we're pointing the rocket.

All right. You guys could ask me one question and then we're done. You guys can go back to, uh, actually doing important things. who's the most interesting person you interviewed and why the most interesting person i'll give you two answers uh the most interesting person is actually talking about aliens uh this guy bruce fenton came on he is a ancient alien researcher uh long story short 780 000 years ago i think there was uh a massive impact uh on earth and uh there's a whole bunch of like quote-unquote legitimate science that shows that this impact happened there was like changes in

atmosphere whatever uh most people think that it was a meteor that smashed into earth um uh some people even think that it might have led to uh the extinction of dinosaurs because it changed the pressure in the air whatever um but bruce walked me through all of that and so i was bought in until he said but it wasn't a meteor it was a artificially uh artificial intelligence empowered uh extraterrestrial vehicle that you know got close to earth and broke up and smashed into earth and he claims that then uh it got overlaid with a change in uh the human dna around 780 000 years ago so i said bruce we're about 80 percent alive the last 20 percent you kind of lost which is fascinating to like you know even if it's like pseudo fiction overlaid with like

scientific facts uh it's just cool to talk to people like that yeah and then uh the the most fun one um you want to know who actually uh was fascinating to talk to given the time right now is uh kyle bass um so kyle was uh one of the people who shorted the housing crisis and uh hearing him talk about like he was calling investors screaming at them to put money into the fund because he needed more capital to short it more because he was so convinced it was going to happen and he was like people were like oh i'll get to it next week and he was like no like go right now and put your like sign the fucking document and so when you hear that you just like that was a pretty chaotic period of the financial system and yeah like damn there's probably people

doing that right now yeah yeah yeah right it's so funny to think about kind of interesting crazy time yeah that is super interesting all right well niftygateway.com go buy stuff maybe i'll even like tweet out a couple that i like but then that means you guys all have to buy it so that everyone still thinks that uh that i'm cool it's gonna be some really cool nifties so thanks for doing this guys hey thanks for having us appreciate it hey everyone pop here if you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those

stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.