The Pomp Podcast - #748 Building Ethernity Into A Massive NFT Platform w/ Nick Rose

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

Nick Rose is the Founder & CEO of Ethernity. In this conversation we discuss NFTs, Intellectual Property, Signing superstars like Messi, Culture, and what it would cost to play in an NBA game. ======================= With 10M+ users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell 100+ cryptocurrencies. The Crypto.com Visa Card gives you up to 8% back instantly, and 100% back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, Crypto.com lets you earn up to 8.5% p.a. on BTC, and 14% p.a. on stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App with code "pomp". Download the App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/pomppodcast2021 ======================= My friends at Coin Cloud will give you $50 in FREE Bitcoin when you buy $200 or more at any of their 4,000+ machines. Use promo code POMP to get your free Bitcoin. For details or to find your nearest Coin Cloud machine, visit www.Coin.Cloud/Pomp Coin Cloud has been serving customers since 2014 and has established itself as the world's leading digital currency machine (DCM) operator. More than just a Bitcoin ATM, Coin Cloud machines make it easy to buy and sell Bitcoin and 30+ other digital assets with cash. To find your local ATM and get $50 in free Bitcoin, visit www.Coin.Cloud/Pomp ======================= Ethernity.io: The world’s first authenticated and licensed NFT platform, trusted by over 150,000 members. Digital NFTs and exclusive real-world unlockables, authentic partnerships with athletes and artists. Visit Ethernity.io, where you can buy and sell authenticated NFTs from top notable figures, rights, license, and IP holders you can’t find anywhere else; the start of an entire ecosystem bringing utility to #NFTs. =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Nick Rose is the founder and CEO of Athernity. In this conversation, we talk about intellectual property, NFTs, sports, music, celebrities, and also what it would cost to actually go play in an NBA playoff game. I really enjoyed this conversation with Nick, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, let's hear a word from our sponsors. First up is Crypto.com. They're helping to mainstream the crypto industry, signing major global partnerships with multiple sports, including Serie A, the Italian football league,

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Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy,

but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Nick, what's going on, man? Hey, Pomp. What's up, buddy? How are you? Fantastic. it dude the accent is on point we are ready to go we got to teach people some stuff you ready

perfect yes feel free to use subtitles if if that helps nah listen you uh you get it man all right my brothers already love you they're like oh this guy's a legend all right here we go first thing is you guys are doing a ton of stuff around intellectual property when people think intellectual property there's two types you can create new intellectual property or you can use existing intellectual property give me a list of the heavy hitters that you guys have partnered with on the intellectual property side? Because this is a list that definitely comes from the legacy world. But as soon as you say people like, oh, damn, that's big time stuff.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, the plan with Eternity was always to go after and do IP acquisition. I mean, we own a bunch of licenses and like, you know, the Leo Messi license, Muhammad Ali, Shaquille O'Neal, Tony Hawk, Fernando Tatis, the baseball player, the Bruce Lee estate we just signed a few days ago, the official first Diego Maradona license. So we'll be able to create now Diego Maradona NFTs and collectibles. So, you know, we're doing the official MrBeast NFTs, the Pele NFTs. I don't know if you guys are familiar, more into soccer, but we have over 300 licenses right now.

We're aiming to have about 2000 by the end of 2022. But, you know, that's just one part of what we do. We feel getting legacy IP was the right move for us to move forward. But, you know, I've been seeing a lot of people saying they want to recreate that and Web3 should be, we should restart that and we should build our own IPs. But, you know, most of that stuff is nonsense. It will take 50, 60 years to even get close to a company like Disney and you probably won't be able to. So the smart way for us was to go and do those deals and, you know, keep acquiring IP. so i just asked you to name a couple and you started off with messy muhammad ali right bruce

lee i mean you just went right for the heavy shaquille o'neal just heavy heavy hitters right out of the gate walk us through in traditional ip licensing or an acquisition uh there's a lot of negotiating that goes on and if you want to use somebody's name to put it on you know shaquille o'neal shoots him you want to put his name on a shoe you want to put his name on a basketball you want to put his name on a poster you want to whatever there's all kinds of stuff that goes on How do you guys actually approach these IP holders and what does that negotiation look like? How does a deal come together and what are the terms usually? Yeah. So before we launched the company, you know, there were there was strategic research of who do we want to approach.

Right. And obviously, a bunch of our investors and advisors are licensors who own those licenses. Right. Like ABG, for example, great company, the third biggest licensor in the world. They own Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe. So they're big investors in our company, advisors as well. So we have a deal there, obviously, a long-term deal to be able to monetize the licenses in Web3, NFTs, wearables, because NFTs is the first stage. We're aiming to create wearables for the metaverse, our own metaverse and our partners' metaverse. We just struck the deal with Sandbox, which I love. Great guy, Sebastian and Arthur there. And obviously gaming. Gaming is a huge, huge, huge play for us. our first game is coming out 2023 we already started working on it but the whole point was

get those licenses through partners like abg or or or message management or or another or isos agent that have about 180 players right and and take it from there and monetize it talk to me about mr beast so you said that you guys are going to do some stuff with him how do you think about somebody who i look at athletes are really interesting but mr beast was born on the internet he was bred on the internet he's the internet you know uh kind of lovable person massive audience how do you think about partnering with somebody like that and what would you guys do with nfts and mr beast yeah so uh the creative part is amazing i i saw actually the art few days ago uh so mr beast is a guy that's like you said was born in on the internet and i'm very excited for

this drop because he's giving away all the money to charity. He's one of the few people that actually do that. A lot of people are interested in Web3 and NFTs. All of them are financially incentivized to do that. But MrBeast is different. He doesn't really care about making money out of it. So he's donating all the funds to Team Seas. The campaign has started to remove trash from the ocean. I don't know if you guys have seen that. I'm pretty sure you have. But yeah, we're creating digital characters and wearables for mr b for mr beast you can use those wearables in the metaverse and um buy his nfts as collectibles and yeah all the proceeds will go to the team c's campaign and so when you think about something like that how much of this is just uh you're able to buy

mr beast uh nfts and you kind of just hold them versus it'll actually unlock experiences or have there be some sort of connection with the creative art versus some sort of uh other value so yeah So we categorize our NFTs differently. Some of them are unlocking experiences, like you get to Zoom with Mr. Beast or you get to meet him in real life. We did this with Manny Pacquiao, the kid who won the one-on-one auction.

We flew him to Vegas. He watched the Pacquiao fight with Ugas. He got to meet him. They had a conversation and it was pretty fun for him. Huge boxing fun. But some other customers got to get physical items. The Pacquiao gloves from the fight.

um some some of them got to zoom with money pakia right the same thing um stands for a lot of other um talent that we have on board um but it doesn't end there the wearables and the metaverse stuff are are even more fun for me because you get to unlock the money pakia gloves and now you can use them on your avatar on the metaverse and when i say the metaverse that doesn't mean only the eternity metaverse because in my opinion there's not going to be one metaverse there's going to be thousands of metaverses, right? So, interoperability, I'm sorry, how do you say this word in English? Incompatible. No, interoperability. Yeah, interoperable. Interoperability is very important because let's say you bought those Pacquiao gloves through Eternity, you should

be able to use them on your avatar, on sandbox, on the central land or whatever metaverse you like, right? So, that's what something we're really focusing on. And when you start to think about uh the craziest experience that you guys have worked on so far obviously flying somebody to go to a mandy pacquiao fight and watch in the front row uh or watch the uh fight is pretty cool is there anything else that you guys have done where you're just like dude this is crazy that we did it but it was really special for somebody no i mean we've we've been focusing a lot on the physical the digital stuff that's coming out with eternity 2.0 and first quarter of 2022 are going to be some crazy crazy stuff i'll keep that uh low key for now but you'll be one of the first

ones to know but there's some crazy stuff in there who who is the ip that you want but you haven't been able to secure yet what's like the dream one you get to pick one what's the dream one oh man you're killing me right now come on what is it we we literally have almost everything we really wanted to get. There is one that we have not been able to get, and that's the Lakers and LeBron James. And that's because I'm in LA, so that's, you know, I'm a huge Lakers fan,

so they might not be doing that good this year. But still, I think it's massive, massive license, and that's an IP. What would you do with LeBron's IP for something like this? Like play one-on-one and get dunked on by LeBron? Or like, what would you do? Or play one versus one on a digital match.

I mean, he already did Space Jam. You saw that, right? So there is no limits, right? So maybe your own avatar can play on in one-on-one match with LeBron on the metaverse. So stuff like that are very interesting to us, right? And by owning this specific thing, it unlocks this experience

and you end up playing with him in a digital environment, right? So those are some stuff we're working on, even with soccer or some other fun stuff. Like we're creating the Messi pack, which is literally a jet pack with a number 10 in the back. And you can fly around the metaverse

with Messi's jet pack. it doesn't make any sense because Messi is a soccer player but that's that's the metaverse for us there's no limits right you can with you can let your imagination dude I want a jetpack Joe John what questions you guys got Nick what's going on man thanks for joining us uh so my question would just be around the conversations with these athletes or their managers and whatnot when you go to talk to them about licensing their IP for stuff in the metaverse for NFTs these kind of things do they understand uh exactly what's going on like what are those conversations like? Well, that's a great question. So a year ago, if you'd ask me,

I'd tell you they don't understand a single thing. I've Zoomed with probably every single agent that's out there from film, entertainment, and sports. In the start, they were like, what the hell this crazy guy is talking about? So it was very easy for us to get those IPs. Now, a lot of companies have been actually building divisions with experience in Web3 and nfts and blockchain that and they're kind of getting more sophisticated and there's more competition now out there but now yes a lot of these agents are are starting to understand what's happening and and you know props to them and i think it's a good step forward for the space and uh yeah there's more understanding right now but there's a huge huge difference

if i compare to compare the conversations to a year ago to today john what question you got Nick, thank you for joining us. I have a question. What part of this space has the most opportunity? Is it the athletes? Is it the digital creators that are already on the internet? Like, what is the space that has the most opportunity here? Great question. I think both. I think it's harder to create something, to build something new, right? I think the sports and teams and brands have been around for 100 years. And collectibles have been around for hundreds of years, right? 150 years.

So you're not really reinventing the wheel. You're just taking something that's working and you're just making it digital, right? So a Manchester United or a Manchester City collectible or a Miami Heat collectible or a Lakers collectible, it's always going to be a collectible, right? You see the baseball cards that have been selling for millions of dollars these days, the physical ones, right? I think the same future lays for NFTs, all the collectibles that's been creating today. And 50 years from now, there's going to be a similar value to sports collectibles, right? The physical sports collectibles. But yeah, we don't know yet how a Mr. Beast collectible will

will run for the next 30 or 50 years right because that's something brand new but you know data so that collectibles uh of teams always hold their value and usually go up no financial advice obviously but you know i think sports and teams are are a safer play and then for the experiences with the actual individuals how does that work on a resale basis so if i have the nrt and i get the experience say with lebron or mr beast or any of these athletes or um i would say popular individuals and i sell it to someone else do they get the experience again no they not in everything for example we're building us we're building so eternal labs which is our our studio that we built eternity right we're building another company called funnable that's going to creating so to

create social and fun tokens and our goal is to create fun tokens for the same licenses we own For example, imagine the Messi token, right? The Messi token will trade like a normal ERC-20 token and will give you access to yearly experiences. And how those deals look like are the token holders will get to participate in a couple of experiences, right? So yearly, there's going to be new and new experiences with Messi or other players or other celebrities and creators, and you get to actually participate. but from the nft side not all the nfts unlocking real world experiences some of them are just one-off experiences some of them are yearly experiences for the next for the next 10 years or five years uh but but but it depends okay got it and so when i start to think about uh

this whole idea is there ever a world where like let's say you got let's use the lakers as an example you not only would create uh the individual nfts or kind of collectibles but you also would try to create the true virtual world? Like you would create like Laker Nation or something like that and people could come in and use it? Or is this specifically IP that is only around the collectibles? That's correct. We are aiming to create metaverses and digital museums or digital hanging out rooms for most of our licenses. A lot of them don't want to do that yet. They just want to wait and see how it plays out. But some of them are actually very forward thinking and they think it's a good idea. And we already built something for the heavy metal magazine that goes out the

next, I think, January. And yeah, most of them are interested in digital environments and metaverses. So yes, we're building a couple now. When you think about companies, one of the things I haven't seen, right? So we're talking about IP, we've talked about athletes, musicians, kind of celebrities, right? People who already have some sort of intellectual property. is there a world where like facebook could just sell like a facebook nft or like i don't know maybe tesla tesla's got like a huge community right could like tesla just sell like tesla nfts you think they would do well i mean tesla anything they sell it will sell out as you know they sold they made a tequila and it sold out so whatever elon tweets sells out so i think it's a special

case i don't think if mark zuckerberg would tweet go buy my tequila anyone will buy it But if Elon does it, I think people will. So it depends. Some brands have the ability to have massive communities that support them. Some others don't. So I'm not sure about Facebook. I think Tesla, yes. Yeah, not every brand can do that.

I think a lot of like Ray-Ban, for example, right? That's an IP we're almost there to acquire. Rocco, the CEO of Oliver's People, is a very close friend of mine. So we want to get the Ray-Ban IP and build sunglasses for all the metaverses. Companies like that, I think, have a better chance of actually selling NFTs than Facebook, like a social network. Yeah. And then how do you think about brands like Supreme is probably the one that I would jump to, like a kind of a streetwear brand type thing. If I remember correctly, Supreme has done partnerships with various like video game makers or maybe even Twitch or whatever. How do you think about them playing in this space?

I mean, huge. I mean, Supreme, their category is wearables, right? If everything goes as planned and the metaverses will be a huge part of our life, and they will, we are already in the metaverse anyways. Who doesn't want to wear a Supreme t-shirt on the metaverse, on their metaverse character, right? So Supreme, I think, is going to be one of the big winners on the metaverse. Got it.

And then how do you think about different geographies, right? So like in the United States, it seems like people love this stuff. Are you seeing the same type of interest all across the world or are there certain regions where you're like, oh, we see tons of interest here, but maybe not in other places? You'll be surprised. I mean, our data, at least on Eternity, I mean, 65% of all sales are coming from Europe and Asia and not the United States. Really? United States is 30%, I think, right now. Yeah.

I think the U.S., what can happen in the U.S. is a lot of things are unclear with regulation. I mean, I saw Tommy Bellew was talking about DeFi and DAOs earlier, and I tend to agree with that. You don't know what's going to happen here. And it seems, I mean, it seems that the government will embrace crypto, and I really hope so. But you never know. The SEC wakes up one day and says DAOs are dead. This is that. So you don't know.

We're literally focusing mostly into expanding in Europe and Asia for now. one of the things that i think will be really fascinating is there a world where you could create some sort of collectible or unlockable that would allow someone to play in a game like oh yeah like let's say the new york knicks i mean they're they're so trash at this point and you know i love the knicks but uh john just gave my brother just gave me like hey man chill out with the knicks talk we're like literally you could sub john in if you hold the nft you get like two minutes of game time john could go in and play point guard for him i don't know man depends how much money that can generate. I mean, maybe John will be better on the game. So maybe

everything is doable. Like I had the conversation the other day with a director that he wants to sell an NFT and the NFT will unlock a role in the movie, right? Obviously not a big role, a smaller role, but you know, you never know. People now can buy their way into anything. So I'm pretty sure we'll see some crazy stuff like that. Quavo's definitely dropping a quarter of a million dollars to get two minutes of runtime in an NBA game right like like j cole may be dropping cash to go ahead and buy and buy some time on the floor right if you think if you kind of just go through it and i mean drake how much is drake playing to jump in a game real quick against lebron right john am i wrong you are correct drake drake might

pay two million dollars to get two minutes of uh uh time on the floor in like a playoff game hit a three and so then he could put in his next song that he hit a playoff three what have you done lately i think there's people that would pay a lot more than two million of course yeah a lot a lot like that's what i'm talking about forget collecting these things whatever like show me what i can do in terms of getting go play in a game stuff like that the other thing that i think would be fascinating is i'm shocked that no sports team owner hasn't said we're gonna auction something off and call it like the owner's nft and you get once a year to go sit in the owner's box with the owner and sit next to them and watch a game how much does somebody pay for that true

a lot i guess the owners doesn't really need it but but yeah a lot of people pay a lot of money it don't matter how rich you are those guys always want more money right somebody says i'll give you five million dollars they say okay what do i gotta do i gotta sit here for the game i was already gonna watch and you're gonna sit next to me you're gonna be annoying no okay come into the box right yeah yeah what other ideas you guys got in terms of things people sit with jerry jones at imagine if you were sitting with jerry i would love to buy something sit next to jerry jones for the cowboys giants game and just talk shit the whole time we've been talking to the cowboys a lot because we did the duck prescott and zick elliot drop and they'll they are the most educated

in nfts compared to any other nfl team yeah what makes it what makes you say that because we've been talking to them a lot and we did already two drops with them uh and they're very very into the space and they're looking into the space very very so when you do it with Dak Prescott and Zeke and these guys do you have to you have to work with the team on it also um if you use their logo yes okay but you know they're as you know the NFL has banned NFTs and they're not I mean it started free and we could do whatever we wanted at them at this point right now the NFL hasn't decided with what they want to do yet they did a deal with with Dapper Labs for videos but you know who cares about those videos uh but to create actually collectibles or trading cards they

don't know what they want to do yet gotcha yeah the other question that i have is dac prescott i think you told me this before the nft you guys did with him it changes based on his performance yeah so explain how this works i forgot completely to talk about that yeah see i didn't forget you see you see how good i am at my job yeah i got a good memory right here so you know so eternal labs is a technology company right so we want to we want to do groundbreaking stuff so what we did with irc nfts is um we create an nft and depend and the whole thing is is it's changes depends on performance right so the qbr rating changes the nft will change so we have three types of nfts it starts like from a normal nft and if duck has a great game the nft lit lit up some fire if he

has a bad game, the NFT turns to a completely cold NFT, like fully icy and stuff. You can find all that on our website. So we did the same thing with Luis Suarez of Atletico Madrid, and we're doing the same thing with Messi and hundreds of other soccer players and teams. But I think it's pretty fun because, you know, it's kind of a competition with yourself. If the things you buy are actually performing good and you can see your whole collection on fire or your whole collection or frozen solid, right? So I think it's a cool, cool little feature that get collectors to participate.

Yeah, the whole idea of it changing is pretty crazy, right? Where you literally can go ahead and do it. We're using Chainlink. The Chainlink identifies the data in the blockchain and that's all the performance and it changes automatically.

Yeah, the other piece is that if the giants had one, we'd be in the, we'd be so far down. You wouldn't even know. It'd be like black. It just, the NFT would turn black. We've got to pick it up fellas. Let's go. Yeah. Some, something else, something else I want to talk about that we've been working on a lot is we've built a lot of DeFi applications on, on, on Eternity, NFT staking, NFT lending, NFT renting. You can now rent a CryptoPunk, right?

You can have him for a week on, on a custodial contract. The reason we have not released those things yet is we're waiting to see regulations and what will happen then. Like I said, we don't want to publish any products that will endanger the whole operation. And something that I can say here is we're almost done with a $20 million raise for Atherna Labs from multiple investors. Some very good names that will help us take Eternity to the next level. But like I said, the regulation part on DeFi is something that's kind of worrying, but we'll see. But I'm very, very interested in DeFi myself. So we've built all these instruments that you can go and peer-to-peer rent an NFT or lend money to somebody and he gives

you his NFT as collateral. And that's not only for Eternity NFTs. You can do it with a CryptoPunk or you can do it with an Ape or anything. What kind of yield do you expect people to be seen on these things depends i mean it's from from 30 to 40 depends it's gonna be peer-to-peer so there's going to be a mutually agreed yield between the two parties gotcha that's that's pretty good though the uh the the entire thing is uh um is nuts how quickly this is all moving last question i got for you what's the craziest experience you've had in this entire journey you've met a lot of people you've done a lot of crazy shit what's the craziest thing so far Damn, man.

That story right there, the one you just thought of that you don't want to say, tell me that story. There's things I can't really say, but I can tell you a funny, funny story that's not very, very funny. But when we were in Vegas with Shaquille O'Neal filming his commercial, filming his commercial with Justin Muller, great, great drop. I've never met a funniest person than Shaquille O'Neal. I've met him for the first time in person in Vegas. This guy could be a Hollywood superstar if you wanted it. he's the funniest man alive. Like I could not believe how nice and funny he is.

It's not that crazy of a story, but I was really, really surprised to actually meet somebody who is that freaking funny. I don't know how this guy is not the comedian or, or not an actor yet. Cause he's getting paid what? Like $8 million to go bullshit about basketball. I'm like once a week on Thursdays.

He is incredibly nice. And he also is hilarious. Even on the TV broadcast and stuff. He is very, very funny, right? By the way, one of the artists wanted one of the NFTs strategy was let's create an NFT loop of Suck, of Suck throwing a free throw and endlessly missing it on a constant loop. And I was like, will Suck be offended if we do that?

I told him about it and he said, fuck yeah, this is funny. So I was like, so we'll probably do that on the next drop. Yeah, that is hilarious. You got to be able to make fun of yourself, right? Where can we send people to find you on the internet so that if they want to learn more about what you're doing? Yeah. So I am Nick Rose on Twitter and Instagram, but the company's website, the thirdly.io,

you guys can find all information there about what we do with NFTs and eternal labs.io will be when you'll find about all of our products pretty, pretty soon, probably January. All right. So eternity.io. And then also the, I am Nick Rose on social media. Correct. Awesome. My friend, thank you so much for, for doing this. This is a super fun.

Thank you guys. Thank you for having me. And we'll, we'll talk offline. Have a good one. All right. Sounds good. Bye boys.