Unchained - Are NFT Royalties the Way? How to Build a Sustainable Creator Economy - Ep. 414

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Sterling Crispin, artist and software developer and Holly Herndon, host of the Interdependence podcast, talk about the problems that creators face, some potential solutions, and the debate over creator royalties.  Show highlights: how Holly and Sterling got into crypto how Holly used the Holly Plus Project to pay royalties how NFTs change the economic experience of being a creator how creators make money and why it is so difficult for most of them whether NFT royalties are necessary for artists why creators are the ones that should decide to charge royalties or not how the enforcement of royalties also occurs in the traditional art world whether NFT royalties only benefit big players vs. smaller creators what shifts could make paying royalties a norm, the way paying for music streaming became a norm over piracy other solutions to helping creators earn from their work besides NFT royalties whether NFT creators should use blocklists whether people objecting to blocklists can be hypocritical about decentralization  whether creators can build their own marketplaces how a profit-sharing model among creators could work Thank you to our sponsors! Crypto.com Chainalysis Minima Sterling: Twitter Website Blog post: NFTs and Crypto Art: The Sky Is not Falling Holly: Twitter Podcast Holly's AI Video Episode Links Previous episodes of The Chopping Block debating NFT Royalties: The Chopping Block: Two on Two Debate: NFT Royalty Throwdown! The Chopping Block: Was This Gary Gensler’s Most Liked Tweet? The Chopping Block: Did OFAC Overstep by Sanctioning Tornado Cash? NFT Royalties Magic Eden Magic Eden Moves to Optional Royalties and Heats Up the Debate MetaShield Solana Could Get Enforceable NFT Royalties Via New Metaplex Standard Why NFT royalties are almost impossible to enforce on-chain Galaxy Digital report showing that Nike and Yuga Labs earned the most in NFT royalties. Royalties in NFTs: Yes, no, and why? Royalties Chaos Shows Ethereum NFT Market 'More Serious' Than Solana: Fidenza Artist Tyler Hobbs Artists’ Royalties by BlackBox.art On Royalties by foobar Kyle Samani thread on verticalization Potential solutions Collector Royalties Collector Royalties Eligibility Expansion — Aug ‘21 How do they work Profit Sharing Cardinal Labs Metaplex Standard Exchange Royalties Guarantee NFTs for n00bs: A brief history of tokens and tulips, NFT aesthetics, energy dramas, fan  brigades, social tokens and the metaverse with Daniel Keller Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey all. As you know, there are a lot of changes happening right now in the world of the NFT royalties. I invited Sterling Crispin and Holly Herndon, who are both creators familiar with the NFT world to discuss how creators can earn money using blockchain technology, regardless of whether it's through royalties or some other fashion. We looked at how it is that creators currently make money in the traditional system, what financial problems need to be solved for them, why NFT royalties have been so helpful to creators, and what other ways they can earn regular income, if not from royalties. My main takeaway after our discussion is that this isn't an easy problem to solve,

and a one-size-fits-all solution does not make sense since creators and their offerings are so diverse. After we wrapped, Sterling said he had meant to offer a rebuttal to people who suggest harborder taxes as a substitute for NFT royalties. Harborder taxes require all members of a population to declare a price at which they're willing to sell the property they own, and then to pay a tax on that value. Meanwhile, anyone who offers to buy the property at the price can just buy it.

Sterling wanted to point out that this method benefits rich people who could easily pay whatever amount people set, whereas everyday people might even struggle to pay the tax, even though they are the ones setting it themselves. I also wanted to note that this last week, looks where I went to a zero royalty model, but began setting aside 25% of its platform fees for creators. They made this announcement after we've recorded, which is why we do not discuss this new development during the show. And now, here's my conversation with Sterling and Holly. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're a no-hype resource for all things Crypto.

I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started covering crypto seven years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the November 1st, 2022 episode of Unchained. Minima is a new layer one blockchain designed to run in full on a smartphone. Join over 300,000 Minima node runners on the incentive program today to start earning every month until Mainnet launch. Get your nodes set up at minima.global. Chainalysis demystifies cryptocurrency by providing industry-leading compliance, market intelligence, and investigation support for all crypto assets, for organizations like Gemini,

crypto.com, and blockfi. Maximize your potential with the leading blockchain data platform by visiting chainelysis.com slash unchained. With the crypto.com app, you can buy, earn, and spend crypto in one place. Download and get $25 with the code Laura, link in the description. Today's topic is NFT royalties. Here to discuss are Sterling Crispin, artist and software developer, and Holly Herndon, musician, artist and host of the interdependent

podcast. Welcome, Sterling and Holly. Hey. Hi. So let's start with Holly. Why don't you describe your work as an artist and how it is that you got into crypto? Oh, gosh. Yeah. So I'm a musician and artist, as you mentioned. I think I first got into crypto because my partner and I were working on a project where we were thinking about publishing online in a kind of site-specific manner. And so he was essentially writing smart contracts without really knowing what a smart contract was. And so someone from Ethereum reached out and was like, hey, you should check out Ethereum because I think it could do some of the things

that you're trying to do. Yeah. And so I actually had a song on a 2016 album called Dow, kind of before I actually knew, you know, before the whole Dow explosion. So I've been really interested and kind of like, you know, decentralized tech and governance and essentially moving artists from a kind of web to platform determined creative paradigm to this new paradigm where artists can have more kind of say in the economic ecosystem that they're involved with. That's basically how I got started. And Sterling, do you want to also give a brief description of your work as an artist and how you got into crypto? Sure. Yeah. So I've been writing code since I've been writing code since I was like in high school and, you know, making digital art for a really long time and working in the tech industry in ARVR.

And in like 2015, I was living in L.A. and thinking a lot about, you know, exponentially growing technology and, you know, drones delivering groceries and stuff like this. And at the same time, you know, we were watering all the crops in California with like 10,000-year-old groundwater and no one knew how much was left. And I was like, this is, this is insane. How can all this stuff be happening at the same time? So I made a Bitcoin mining sculpture that was also full of like dehydrated food and kind of bug out materials. And yeah, that was back in 2015. And I really wish that when I sold that sculpture, I bought some Bitcoin with the money. But I couldn't afford that and L.A. rent.

So yeah, I've been thinking about crypto as a subject matter for a while and got into NFTs, I don't know, two years ago or something like that. And yeah, my first NFTs were kind of like conceptual artworks, like talking about NFTs themselves as a medium. And Holly, I wanted you to talk a little bit also about your Holly Plus project, especially the compensation aspect of it. I was curious. So just describe it. But then I was also curious how that has been working for you. Of course. Yeah. I mean, I think we can get into that a little bit around this royalty discussion. But so Holly Plus is essentially kind of a digital twin. And so I've done a lot of work with machine learning voice modeling. So I've created a really realistic model of my own singing voice that people can, you know, create music using. And so we made a Holly Plus Dow and we released a kind of first version of the Holly Plus vocal instrument is less realistic than the new one that we're going to premiere very soon. So stay tuned on that. So the essential model for that, that was that I allowed anyone to be able to use my vocal likeness, my kind of digital vocal identity to create work. And then the Dow would vote on which works to include in a kind of

gallery sale. And then we had a royalty split between me as the voice and then the artist and then the Dow to go on to go back into the Dow's treasury to continue to build more tools. So I think as as machine learning, as the machine learning kind of creative ecosystem expands, which is, you know, it's happening. It's on the horizon. I think, you know, a lot of the ideas around kind of consent and, you know, how people can interact with other people's data and models. It's going to be a really big question. And I think royalties can play a really large role in that. So one of the things that I did is I co-founded an organization with my partner and two other machine learning developers called spawning where we're trying to create a kind of consent layer so that people can

create really high fidelity models based on their own training data that other people can interact with on a consensual basis. And so I think royalties could be a really interesting financial building block in that paradigm. Yeah. And by the way, I heard a clip of one of the AI songs with your voice and it was amazing. Thank you. I was like, I want to build one with my own voice because basically, so the clip I heard was your voice singing Jolene, but of course, you know, I don't know if you're a classically trained singer or not even thought, just trained. You don't have to be. But all I'm trying to say is I was like, oh, this is like if you could just skip all the years of like learning how to sing and then just have your voice be used to sing something like

with perfect pitch and everything. So Sterling, you know, you obviously have this history. as a creator before NFTs and blockchain technology came about. So I was curious to hear your experience with NFTs in terms of, you know, how they changed the economics of being a creator for you versus your experience creating on Webtooth platforms or in the traditional art world. Yeah. So it's it's really been like a mind-blowing world-altering kind of experience. And like I said, I've been, you know, making art with software for a really long time.

and there just wasn't a market for it at all. Like no one was buying digital artworks, right? Like ours Electronica is kind of like the ghetto of, it's the new media ghetto, right, compared to like Art Basel. Like it's just no one's buying. I didn't even know what that was. It's an art fair for digital art. It's like the Oscars or something for digital art,

but it's a particular kind of digital art, right? And it's amazing work, but the market just doesn't care about it. it. So as a creative person that's interested in art and technology, you either have to go work in advertising and use your talents to make like Twix commercials and stuff like that or like fight in the blue chip art market, which is what I was trying to do. So I was like taking all the software I was making and trying to build physical objects and, you know, discrete fine art objects that could be palatable to the art history narratives that people are familiar with in that scene and, you know, try to make it there. But people really look at digital art in the contemporary

art world very skeptically and they don't understand it and they want paintings, right? So that's, that's what sells. You know, I've had a pretty successful run at it. I've still work at art fairs and I had a solo show that was mentioned in the New York Times and stuff like that. But it's really hard to survive economically as an artist in that world. And so when NFTs came out, it was amazing because suddenly, you know, there's no gatekeepers. You don't have to wait for an art fair to come across, you know, every six months or something like that. And there's this huge online community of people that are really technologically interested. They're interested in all the weird backstory and like technical details of an artwork, which most collectors like wouldn't be.

So, yeah, it's been amazing. The audience itself being so different is fantastic. Before we get into all the nitty gritty around royalties and everything, because we're not just going to talk about royalties, but in general, you know, how it is that creators make money or how they don't sometimes or often. But before we get into all that, why don't we just start by helping people understand how it is that creators currently make money and why it is that the method. that are most commonly used don't work for the vast majority of creators. First of all, it's really difficult to define what a creator is. You know, we're talking about filmmakers, authors, musicians. We're talking about independent artists,

and we're also talking about multinational corporations, which are rights holders on behalf of creators. So it's a really, really broad kind of group of people, and they make money in a myriad of different. ways. One of the frustrations with Web 2 and one of the reasons why I was so interested in Web 3 is because often the biggest players with, you know, the most lobbying power or, you know, even the most mainstream appeal would be able to set the economic conditions that everyone else in the field would have to apply to their own practice. And, you know, what works for a top

40 musician might not work for an experimental composer or, you know, same thing could be applied in film or in, you know, many different fields. So one of the things that was so exciting about Web3, it was like, okay, this is a set of like money Legos or building blocks. So you can create whatever kind of economy, creative economy that works for your particular community. And I think when you have that, then you have a broader spectrum of creative output. I think when you have like a very standardization and very centralization of pricing and power in that way, you have things like Spotify, which pushes music into a particular direction and it kind of removes the ability to have so, you know, so many different aesthetics and genres kind of flourish. It's difficult to say this is how creators

make money because they all do it in a different way. It's very unique to each, each kind of field and each level of, yeah, where someone's added in their particular career. Yeah, yeah. And I would say like even just for myself as a writer, I think a lot of, because I'm also a journalist. I don't know if people always would lump me together with, in that category of creator. But, you know, definitely if I, like, look at my book, I'm lucky as a nonfiction writer that I sold the proposal. I didn't have to write the full book. But if you look at the advance, and then you divide it by the amount of time I spend on the book, then that income would squarely put me, like, under the poverty level. So, you know, this is, this is just a reality, I think, for a lot of

people, and it's obviously worse for fiction where you actually have to write the whole entire book and then sell it. Sterling, you know, how would you describe the problems that creators face in monetizing their work? Sure. I think Holly really nailed it, but I would just explicitly say again that, like, there's usually not one revenue stream that makes up for an artist's entire income, right? It's like, oh, I managed to make a little money this way.

And then I released an album and I also released some T-shirts around it. And you're kind of just like, like fucking around and finding out and, you know, just doing lots of stuff and trying to figure out what, you know, what the market is interested in and what your audience is interested in and what you're able to tolerate doing as a human being. Because there's lots of things that maybe would be more profitable than what your core interests are. And you kind of have to balance like the attention economy and what people are willing to buy and kind of what you're willing to make, if that makes. sense. Yeah. And then also in the traditional world, there's so many middlemen, obviously, also that take their cut. So like, for instance, with my book advance, obviously, I got that, but then I have to like earn it back. And there's all the other people along the way that will get paid first. I'll be the last. But one other, you know, thing that I wanted to mention was

a podcast that Holly released. And the guest said something really interesting, which I think really applies to both of your situation in terms of a visual artist. This guest was named Daniel Keller and he said, in the secondary market, the artist receives no upside other than that they're legitimized by their artworks realizing a big price. And then he said any artworks they have in their own storage, those will accumulate in value. But most artists I know do not have much of their own artwork unless they're very business-minded. You sell everything. And then he goes on, you hear these crazy auction results and know what lifestyle those artists are living. It's a cartoon microcosm of how the economy works in general.

Capital accumulates all the gains. Labor, not so much. And then he says, not to mention all the middle manning, your galleries and auction houses take the cut. You have to pay for the costs. It's a bad situation for a visual artist. So I actually think a lot of this applies for musicians and writers as well. Okay, so now let's turn to royalties.

because as you're very well aware, there's a big debate right now about NFT royalties. For a long time, they were kind of built as a way for artists to make regular revenue or passive income and also recoup a bit of that value that the works eventually would go on to have. And a lot of marketplaces in the NFT space were honoring that original promise,

but obviously that has shifted in the bear market and the news kind of, I think, culminated in Magic Eden, which is the most prominent marketplace in Salana, making royalties optional. And there was also an NFT project, D-Gods that stated up front that they would not collect royalties. So I was curious for your opinion on royalties. Are they good? Are they bad?

And what do you think of this trend of them becoming optional or going to zero? Well, I mean, I think they're really huge. hugely necessary for artists. I don't think that all NFTs need to have royalties. Like I think one thing that gets confusing in this topic is that people treat NFTs like a category instead of a technology. So, you know, for artists, yeah, that's definitely a huge draw into the NFT scene as being able to earn royalties from your work.

And like Daniel Keller was saying on that podcast, maybe you withhold some of your work so that it accrues value and you can sell it. But that doesn't really always work. Like you make this one-on-one artwork, how do you withhold, you know, some of the supply? It's one thing, right? So that doesn't always make sense. And yeah, I mean, I think also royalties, like, really help enable experimental work, right? Like, I could even see this in the film industry.

Like, the film industry has such a huge problem with these superhero movies because it costs so much money to make a movie. And investors really risk off and they just want to make films that are guaranteed to make the money. But if independent filmmakers could have, you know, royalties and everyone working on the set, you know, down to the grips and the PAs and stuff could get a cut of that success, you know, if you make this sort of cult classic, you would be able to, you know, make more of them and build off of that. So I think I think they're hugely important. And sometimes in these debates in crypto, it's sort of this like very binary. like this has to be the way things are because, you know, my team is correct. And I don't think the royalty debate has to be like that. I think there can be this broad spectrum of, you know, artists on Tezos collecting 25% royalties to, you know,

projects collecting 0% and everything in between. Yeah, I agree with everything that Sterling said. I think the primary thing here for me is that it should be up to the creator or the project rather than. platform-specific, because that's a paradigm that we're coming out of that we all were really unhappy with. And so I think by a platform making the decision not to honor that, that's taking away that decision from all of the creators who are participating in that. And that just, that knocks an entire kind of like money Lego out of the system that could potentially be really interesting and be,

you know, utilized in a really experimental way. It's almost like, you know, taking like equity off the table of a company or something. You know, you're having equity in this project together. And so for me, it just, you know, there's, I think a lot of people who are really steeped in Web3 don't realize what a steep barrier for entry it is for creators who are not in Web3, both reputational and also technical. And so one of the big draws was, hey, we're going to give you back the power to make these economic decisions for yourself and for your community. And so by taking that away, you're adding friction to onboarding a whole group of people who are kind of then like, okay, well, what's the difference between this platform that's telling me how I can operate

and this platform that's telling me how I can operate? So I think it's very short-sighted to not honor what a kind of creator or a project at large, how they want to build the economy around their project. I think it's short-sighted. And I think it limits who can participate in the field. So before the show, we had a little bit of a chat, and Sterling sent me some links to show that this kind of enforcement of royalties actually exists in the traditional art world, like in, you know, for the sale of physical artworks. France has had some version of this since 1920. The EU in general has had this since 2001.

The UK also adopted it. California tried something like that in 1990s. 77, but it got struck down because it only applied to California. Sorry, well, because it even applied to sales of things that happen outside of California as long as the seller resided in California, but also some other countries that have similar laws are Australia and the Philippines. And I was curious, just if you follow that in the art world, like, how controversial is that concept there?

Like, do we see the same kind of arguments back and forth? Like, you know, artists shouldn't get these royalties or they should, like, kind of And what's the consensus around it in the traditional art world? Yeah, I mean, I'd say that every artist in the traditional art world would love to have royalties on their work. And there's just like no system for that. And like for me, also one of the big draws into Web 3 is that like the contemporary art world really runs on the flow and control of information, right?

Like being able to find a young artist's work and buy 35 paintings for. for $1,200 and then turn around to your collector friends and say, oh, I just found, you know, the next great artists and their paintings are only $10,000. Do you want three of them? You know, like that kind of wild upselling that people associate with crypto happens in the contemporary art world all the time. But there's no ledger to keep track of who paid what for anything. So you don't know if you're getting a great deal or getting totally screwed. And there's there's so many famous examples of that of, you know, dealers squeezing hundreds of of millions of dollars out of Russian oligarchs that don't even know they're getting screwed.

You know, the fact that all that's more transparent and you can know who's doing what. And yeah, I've got a cut of sales is amazing. And again, I'll say like, it's not like artists are these like capitalist fat cats like sitting back on a mountain of gold. Like, yes, our royalties are coming in. Like it's really hard to survive as an artist and, you know, having physical prints of, you know, big one-of-one paintings and selling NFTs and basically doing anything you can to survive is sort of the name of the game. So royalties are just like one other part of that equation. Yeah, but so obviously, you know, you said creators would prefer to get royalties, which is obvious.

But like if that's the case, then why is it that? Only certain countries have adopted this. I think like Holly mentioned, like super rich people have all the leverage. And so like, what do you You just beg the gallery to represent you and they take 50% of sales and like tough shit. You know, that's, you just don't have an option. And is that typically what the gallery takes? Oh, yeah, 50%. And then it's also crazy because you're taking on all the risk, right? You're spending a whole bunch of time producing work.

It might cost you a lot of money to produce each painting. You might be, you know, hiring assistance and paying tens of thousands of dollars in fabrication costs and stuff like this. And then you put your work in a gallery for 30 days or something like that and just pray to God that someone comes in and helps you break even on it. And then maybe eventually the work goes to an art fair. And you know, you meet the right people and make some connection. Like I said, the flow of information. And who knows who is basically how the contemporary art world works. So it's really just an insane game. I think there's a reason. why, like a pretty clear reason why royalties are enforced in music and in film more so than

in the visual art world. And I think that's because a lot of the rights holders are actually powerful corporations that have lobbying voices and are kind of setting standards through governments. So, you know, in the music industry, you absolutely have royalties. And if you don't kind of pay out a royalty, that's illegal and you'll be litigated. So, yeah, with an individual visual artists, they might not have the same kind of lobbying power as, say, like Universal Studios or Columbia Records or something like that. That makes a lot of sense, yeah, which we'll discuss this later, but I think both Sterling and I had these ideas that like artists need a band together. We can talk about that later.

But one other thing that I really wanted to probe here a little bit is just to discuss how helpful royalties are to creators in the NFT space, because I don't know if you saw the report that Galaxy Digital released, but so they estimate that on Ethereum, $1.8 billion in royalties were earned from NFTs. However, the top 10 entities earned 27% of all royalties, and then 482 collections accounted for 80% of all the royalties. So I was just curious, like, with your experience so far, do you feel that NFT royalties are really only helping the bigger players, or are they actually meaningful? for some of these smaller creators as well?

For me, they've been a mixed bag. I mean, I think just back to your quote about capital accumulating, I think that's just like a natural like power law dynamic, right? Like things in the world just tend to organize themselves in that way, which is, you know, a concern and something that programmable money and money Legos, like you were saying, can maybe alleviate. But for me, I think that royalties, again are a great way for funding experimental projects.

Like I made this kind of tongue-in-cheek criticism of Web3 projects called Wides. It's a fully on-chain project that makes the on-chain cryptopunks get wider with every transfer. It's like totally absurd. And there's one for every crypto punk. So there's 10,000 tokens. And like, I'm not going to charge $300 a token at 10,000 tokens for a joke, basically, right? So the economic model on that is give them away for free. Hopefully, people even care to pay the gas feed and mint these things.

And like if it takes off, maybe I get some royalties from it. And, you know, I'm really lucky that it did like 200th in its first day and I managed to make some money. And out of curiosity, what percentage royalty did you charge? I said it at 10% because I just thought it was a crazy project and like, why not, right? but another thing I'll bring up is that I'm also donating 10% of the profits from wides to this domestic violence shelter in San Francisco. And, you know, I think you could argue that withholding royalties is a form of theft, right? But in this case, like, you're stealing for me and you're also like taking money out of the

pockets of these women in a domestic violence shelter. And I didn't make the project to guilt people into paying royalties. Like, this was all before this debate started. But there's all kinds of, like, downstream economic consequences for behaving badly, right? For me, you know, it was a pretty important experimental aspect to the Holly Plus project, to the whole Dow project itself, to have that aspect in place. It hasn't been a huge financial kind of like windfall for me. it's more just kind of like the ethos of knowing that I could, I could experiment with that if I needed to or if I wanted to.

It's more about feeling agency in the space. So as this trend has happened toward either zero royalties or making royalties optional, I was curious, is your sense that creators are really wedded to royalties in particular or just that they want some sort of method of sustainably monetizing their work using blockchain technology? I think it's just so creator and project specific. I think some projects, you know, like a lot of the music universe functions off of royalties. And you kind of go into a project, you spend your time up front and you hope that it'll

pay off kind of in the back end. And it's a fundamentally different kind of creative process when you go into the studio on like a daily rate, or if you go into the studio in a kind of like equity split, like royalty split, you know, how much of yourself and your creativity you want to put in there is kind of in some ways set by those terms.

So just having like a one size fits all for all kind of creativity through NFTs, just makes no sense for me. And Sterling, do you have an opinion on that or what you've seen from other people? I mean, there's so many arguments like, oh, what if you withhold some of the supply or maybe there's like a harbinger tax or something like that? Or we could do this or we could do that. Like royalties are just such an obvious, straightforward, better solution to any of that stuff. And, you know, people argue that

they're not enforceable, but, you know, we wrote software that put robots on Mars. Like, I'm pretty confident that we can write software that enforces royalties. And there's all kinds of like, you know, nuclear options that most projects could do, like, oh, you did a trade that bypassed royalties. And so we're going to replace the picture of your crying panda with like a big pile of dog shit or something like that. And like nobody, nobody wants that. But, you know, it's a, it's like a social agreement that we won't change the artwork, just as much as it's a social agreement that you should pay the royalty. But again, you know, nobody actually wants that. I want to like think about like what it is to be human being and what's going on in the world and focus on my art and not like chase people down for 5% or something like that.

Yeah, I think we sometimes focus on this like obsession with technical protocols. Like what what can we, you know, code is law. What can we hard encode? But we also live by a whole plethora of social protocols, right? Like, you know, the way that the space operates isn't all entirely on chain. A lot of it is social and a lot of it is reputation-based. I mean, we saw the space implode because of a lot of reputation-based errors that were made. So that's maybe not towards my argument.

But these are human systems and it's not all hard-coded. And so there is a certain point where it's just like, don't be an asshole. You know, like that's a human protocol. Yes. And I would agree that 2022 is the year that crypto learned, don't be an asshole. Hopefully. Hopefully, yes. Need to add that last word.

All important. Okay. So in a moment, we're going to talk about some of the potential solutions for creators, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make the show possible. What's the most important thing about crypto? It's not transactions per second. It's not convenience. And it's not even smart contracts.

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Back to my conversation with Sterling and Holly. So one thing that I was curious about was, you know, we've been talking about the music industry for, you know, throughout this episode. And as I'm sure you're well aware, music used to be pretty widely pirated. And we've now seen a big kind of cultural shift where a lot of people largely just pay for these streaming services. So I was wondering what you thought might cause a similar cultural shift that would normalize people either paying for royalties or otherwise. helping creators monetize their work in a way that's kind of more fair to the value of their work. That's a difficult question because I think one of the reasons why people don't pirate maybe is because streaming became so consumer-friendly, which wasn't necessarily great for musicians.

So those two things are a little, there's some tension there. A lot of people, a lot of musicians I know actually earn less in a streaming paradigm than they did in a kind of pirating, avid fan paradigm where people were still buying physicals and still, you know, going to shows and things like that. So I think that the question has some kind of paradox in and of itself. But yeah, I think what streaming did teach us is that people will pay for convenience. So if things are easy and are kind of standardized, people will kind of, you know, go with that option. I mean, it's one reason why kind of like Coinbase is so popular. because it's just like, just like using PayPal or something, it's just so easy to use, even though the fees might be higher.

But how to create a sustainable creator economy, I think fundamentally is to leave the power of whatever kind of economic model works for the creator in their hands and don't try to control that as either a platform or externally. I think that's the primary way that we see really interesting experiments and we see a broad range of different creative output. Certainly, do you have ideas? Yeah, I mean, I think I, you know, I agree with everything Holly said. I think there's a lot of interesting experiments going on on the platform side. Not that they're great solutions, but like Brave browser has this thing where, you know, you put in money in basically your own little tip jar.

And then as you browse the internet, they kind of like allocate it for you to all the people you've been sort of engaging with and looking at, which I think, is sort of an interesting model. And it kind of reminds me, like I mentioned this in our discussion before the podcast, but there's this project Zanadu that Ted Nelson imagined in the 60s. It was like a pre-internet early hypertext idea. And the idea was kind of that similar to crypto and NFTs, like you'd have these unique copies of things and you actually couldn't make copies of them.

So you'd write an article and then someone could reference your article on their website, but it was actually the same object. And then if they were running ads on their website, like the original creator would get a cut of this. So I think there's like interesting ways of building it into the technology itself so that like Holly said, it would just be convenient and, you know, funds would be going out in every direction. But as we've seen, you know, that really only benefits like the top 40 artists or whatever. and I know musicians to get like paychecks from Spotify for like, you know, fractions of a penny every six months or something like that. Just totally ridiculous economic models.

So again, yeah, I think it's important to let people kind of experiment with their own models and figure out what works for them. I'm just going to say, well, so cool about the NFT kind of boom is that all of a sudden people were really valuing digital work. As, you know, Sterling brought this up before that, like, digital work has had such a hard time finding a market fit, but it wasn't something that was kind of cloistered away. It was like the information wants to be free, so it was freely available to everyone, but information also wants to be expensive. That's the other half of the phrase that people often leave off. So all of a sudden, you know, there have been so many experiments, especially in Web 2 around kind of, you know, Patreon models or, you know, these kind of continuous

engagement models where an artist's work itself is never enough. There has to be this kind of continue hustle and grind that really wears people down over time. What was so exciting about NFTs was like, no, I'm going to value the work itself. It's going to have a value. You don't have to, you know, of course people are doing, you know, Twitter spaces and things like this to hype their project, but it wasn't necessarily hard-coded into the value of the piece itself. So that's what was so exciting about the NFT space in general. And I hope that that kind of, yeah, that kind of approach to digital art can remain and can thrive, that we can actually, as a culture, value digital works themselves without having to have this whole hustle economy around it. Yeah. So let's talk about

some of these other suggestions. Oh, by the way, one thing I wanted to say about the project Xanadoo idea was I just feel like we'd have to remake the whole entire internet because so much of it already has been created out of just things that were copies of other things. So I'm not sure. The cat might be out of the back for that one, but, you know, I'm not... But here we are, right? Like, here we are trying to recreate the internet. There's Brave browser and there's Web 3, and, you know, we're, uh, we're like taking it, you know, taking it to the man and trying to fight off Google and their pervasive ad model

and they're sort of like middleman control of everything that's on the web. Yeah, so we'll see. I have a feeling a lot of creators are going to be tuning into this episode. If any of you are also technologists, then reach out to Sterling and Holly. Okay, so let's just run through some of the other suggestions that I've seen online for how creators can either deal with royalties going away or just different variations on how to make this work for both the creators and for the buyers. So one of them was something that we mentioned about artists just keeping some of their early

work to sell later once they become more well-known. You know, we kind of talked about this, but I was curious, you know, to hear if you had anything else to add on whether that was something feasible or not. Yeah. I mean, I mentioned it earlier. I think that it's really only viable in some situations, like how do you do that for one-of-one work? Also, I just think that that's like a bad incentive, right?

Because it turns artists into market participants. And then let's say that, you know, I've got a bunch of my early work and suddenly things are doing really well in the secondary. market, like, do collectors want artists to suddenly dump a bunch of new work on the market that wasn't available and, like, mess up the supply demand curve? Also, you're, like, constantly looking at the floor price and the, you know, price dynamics of the day, like, is this one I should sell my own work? Like, it's just, it's just weird. You don't want your artists doing that. You want the artists you're collecting to, like, focus on making great art and, you know, paying attention

their careers and not like trying to like hustle their own collector base out of more out of more money on like this weird dynamic way it just seems like obviously a bad idea. Yeah, I agree. I think it could work for some projects and again could not work for others. I mean, you know, one aspect to selling work is obviously getting paid, but another aspect is connecting with someone who is valuing your work. And I know for me personally, when I make a collection, I don't know, it's almost like a set of children or something and you want them each to find a home. Like it means a lot actually when somebody handpicks one of these items and then once sat in their collection.

And that's also an exchange that you have with that person. And then so that's also a part of it. It's kind of a social interaction as well. So to kind of keep part of the family separated would be really difficult, I think. Yeah, I relate to that. to artworks. They're kind of in the same series from the same artist. And yes, we like bonded over me picking those specific artworks. So another idea was, and this is actually something Magic Eden's doing, they're changing the royalty structure so that buyers are paying for the royalties

instead of, or buyers are paying the royalties instead of the sellers. What do you think of that idea? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, at the end of the day, I don't think it's that big of a difference and it kind of reminds me of like the hammer price at auctions like you know oh this work sold for 100 million dollars but the hammer price is actually 125 because the auction house is squeezing people out of money and there's all this other extra stuff that they're uh fitting in at the last minute but it does make sense because I think that a lot of times the complaints for royalties come from the selling side like oh I bought this for one eighth and now I've got to sell it for at least X price. Otherwise, like, I'm really not getting ahead. And there's, you know, obviously lots of

flipping and trading going on and people are trying to extract maximum value out of all their trades. So there's some argument there on passing it off to the buyers instead of the sellers. Yeah, I agree. That makes sense. I mean, I think the margins find their ways into the price eventually anyways. But yeah, I think it makes sense for it to be on the buyer side. I can see an argument for that. Okay, so this one is a little more controversial. You're probably aware that some creators have suggested, or even there are companies that are helping them block their NFTs from being sold on platforms that don't honor royalties. So I was curious what you thought of that option. I mean, I think it's inevitable. Like, I think on one side, it was kind of inevitable

that someone was going to say, well, this isn't technically enforceable. So I'm going to not enforce it. And I think it's also inevitable that some projects are going to be like, well, we're going to pull our project from your site. If we as a community want to value decentralization and want to value these kind of like interoperable systems, then we have to come up with these kind of social protocols and these technical protocols that work for everyone. Otherwise, you're going to see really big rights holders either not participating or coming in and then setting the standard for everyone else in ways that we don't like through kind of legislation and, you know, extremely centralized models. So I think it behooves us as a community to figure this kind of thing out

before that happens. Totally great. And I've caused some controversy sort of arguing for block lists on GitHub. So apologies for that. But I do think that, you know, there's there's reason for it in some situations. And even if you look at the, um, the Ethereum improvement protocol that introduced 721 NFTs. There's a little section like, you might want to block list people during transfers, and you might want to collect money from both sides of an exchange of an NFT. So the people that created the NFT standard were definitely thinking about blocklists. So for anyone saying, like, they were never meant to work this way.

Like, it's been a topic for a really long time. And I thought it was really funny. Like X2, Y2 wrote this. big threat about Tyler Hobbs like blocking their exchange with his QQL project. And they're like, you know, code is law and Tyler's inventing new laws. Like, how dare he? But that's just crazy. Like code is law and you guys invented your own laws for like avoiding royalties.

So there's this, there's this funny thing about people like feeling like it's okay if code allows it to basically behave in any way moral or not. But then if you prevent them from doing that, well, you're breaking the rules, that's centralization. That's not allowed, right? So I think there's a lot of like weird double speak and hypocrisy and people who are against centralization storing their stables in USC, which has a block list built into it or ignoring the fact that like, you know, Coinbase and finance are the centers.

of, you know, most economic transactions on Ethereum and stuff like that. So, you know, I think we turn away from centralization when it's, like, convenient for our argument. But I do agree with Holly that, like, in general, we should be fighting for decentralization. And there's probably, like, game theoretical solutions for enforcing royalties where you make it, like, so, like, profitable for the market participants to agree. to pay the royalties that they want to, right? Like, I don't know if that's putting them on some kind of like preferred list for upcoming drops or air dropping them things or what the game theory way of encouraging royalties are.

But I think there's a lot of better solutions than putting block lists in. Yeah, I actually really like that idea. Before we move on to another thing that kind of wouldn't align incentives, I just wanted to say this whole thing where you were like, oh, people are saying code is law. And even you said, yes, code is law. I disagree. Code is not law. Look at all these hacks where the, you know, the developer coded in a way that they did not intend.

Like, I'm sure they're not going to be like, oh, well, you know, okay, code is law. I screwed up. So therefore this person who stole this money can keep it. I highly doubt most of them would say that. But okay, I loved what you said about how royalties could be sort of the, this avenue to getting the buyers more interested in having them because it like gives them perks or something like that. And you probably, oh, yeah, you're the one who mentioned this to me. Like super rare has something sort of similar where they have something called collector royalties.

Can you explain what those are and, you know, just talk a little bit about how effective or popular they've been? Yeah, I think this is a super interesting experiment they did. So basically, if you're a collector on super rare and you buy an artwork, and then later you sell it to, you know, person B, and then person B sells it to person C, you get a percentage of that cut from B to C, and it decays by 50% for each next sale. So you get 1% of the sale and a half percent, and then, you know, 0.25% of the sale. And, you know, I think that's super interesting.

It's like motivating people to buy art on super rare, right? Like it's potentially more profitable than buying it anywhere else. And I also, I really think the sort of decaying royalty is a really interesting idea too. Like I would probably do an exponential decay instead of a 50% decay. But I could imagine a situation where, you know, an artist's royalty starts off at 7%. And, you know, if suddenly it blows up so much that they're making like, you know, 10 grand or 100 grand per transaction on all these royalties that it could just taper off. Like, hey, as a successful artist, you know, my project blew up beyond my wildest dreams. And I've collected like $5 million in royalties off this thing.

Like probably an argument could be made that it could just sort of like taper off. It's funny because when I read that, I was like, oh, I would have thought it would have gone the opposite way where probably the people who collect early on that are paying lower prices have a lower budget. And so you would only charge them like half a percent or whatever. And then as it like went up in price, the people who have a bigger budget, they wouldn't mind paying something more like 5% rather than the 0.5. So you would charge them more. So I remember when I read that being like, oh, I thought it would be like totally the opposite because like they're less price sensitive. So it's just an interesting difference in the way we were thinking about it. Anyway, Holly, I don't know if you have any thoughts on these collector royalties or yeah.

You guys covered it really well. I think you're. your idea, Laura, is really interesting. It would be cool to run kind of like a parallel experiment and have the inverse and just see how that affects sales and the way people are hyping projects. Yeah, it would have to be something where there aren't like thresholds because then people would like try to trade just under the threshold. You know, it'd have to be something where it's like a graduated thing. But that was my thought because, yeah, just in my experience, you know, you can kind to tell when like people don't care as much about things like that and then when they like are paying attention to every to every cent. Okay, so I'm sure you're well aware that Kyle Samani

did a little tweet thread where he kind of had his own opinion on how creators could resolve this. And I don't even know if he was so much saying like, hey, here's an idea for creator so much as like, well, if this is happening, then they're going to be rational economic actors and act in this other way, which is that he was saying. As marketplaces either start to not honor royalties or, you know, the buyers try to skirt around it, that NFT creators would end up creating their own marketplaces. And I was curious for your thoughts on, you know, whether or not you think that that is a viable solution, how popular you think it might be, et cetera. I mean, it's certainly an option. I don't think it's necessarily the best option. It's very project-specific.

And, you know, of course, if platforms continue to not honor royalties, you'll probably see more and more of that. My concern is that you have, like, really big IP holders, like giant record labels or whatever, kind of creating their own versions of this that don't really follow any of the kind of, like, decentralized or interoperability kind of things that we care about in this space. So when things get super siloed in that way, I think that there's kind of a pull towards that. But I kind of like it when it's, yeah, a bit more open. But it's a kind of natural progression if platforms will not be honoring royalties, I think.

Totally. And it kind of reminds me, like, before the ERC 721 NFT standard got written up, there were early projects like ether rocks and crypto punks that just, by their nature had to have the marketplace built into the smart contract, right? So it's like a little array of information keeping track of who owns what, but then also functions for buying and selling the things themselves. And, you know, OpenC is sort of bent over backwards to allow interacting with that contract. So it seems like every other NFT, but it's actually pretty radically different on the back end. I could totally see a new NFT token standard that includes

a marketplace that puts more of that power into the hands of the creators and then sites like OpenC and looks rare or whatever like, you know, visual interfaces for interacting with that tokens marketplace to allow people to, you know, enforce their own market dynamics. Like maybe as an artist you don't want to allow auctions. You want it to all be flat priced or the opposite, whatever. Like putting that into the hands of creators, I think is super interesting. And I think we're going to see more and more experimentation, but I think that eventually, you know, the incentives drive the outcomes, right? So whatever aligns collector incentives and artists incentives is going to be one ends up winning out. Yeah, I would definitely agree.

That sort of seems like a shelling point, as most crypto people would say. So now let's kind of talk about, I mean, this is like, I guess, an example. of what we were just talking about where NFT creators also run their own marketplaces. But Sterling, you brought this blog post about meme creators engaging in a profit sharing model. And I was kind of curious

to hear you. First of what, why don't you just describe it for people, but then talk about how you think it could apply to creators of NFTs? Totally. So, yeah, I noticed there was this whole phenomenon on Tezos last year. This guy, John Carroll, was making this window

series that really blew up. And all these other people started making these tribute windows and then, you know, selling them as sort of little memes onto themselves. But some of the original people that came up with those tribute windows, like their work went totally unsold. And I thought that was kind of ridiculous and also just like a microcosm of meme culture in general where, you know, some core group of friends starts this inside joke. And it blows up. And then, you know, someone who's much more popular online shares this in-joke that other people made. And then they're the ones that popularize and become known for it. And it's just like a weird phenomenon.

So I thought to myself, you know, what if there were more like profit sharing collectives, which is something I'm interested in general. So, you know, you and your friends start making this inside joke and you spin up this profit sharing contract immediately, right? And you're all like minting these funny, like, Bobo the Bears. you know, everything's going to zero memes. And then other other people, you know, start making them and you fold them in as well. And then if some of them start selling, you know, you can figure out any economic model you want, right? Like the person that made the meme gets 50 or 60% of the sale and then the rest of the profit is split among everybody else.

And maybe, you know, if it's like not memes, but it's like landscape photographers, right? Like maybe there's actually like a treasury. And this starts to sound like a Dow, but I think that like, uh, DAOs are largely unnecessary in most cases. You could just do it in Discord anyway, because DAOs are just Discord groups at the end of the day.

But yeah, I think, I think profit sharing in general is like a really interesting model for artists. Yeah, I thought the little charts you had in there showing kind of like how much an individual artists would make, just offering in a normal. model versus how much they would make if they were operating in this profit sharing model was interesting because you could still see that they would still make well more than the other people.

It's just that I guess everybody kind of participates a little bit in the success, but then you can kind of see how they would then benefit when other people have that success. It reminds me of, I forget what they're called, but basically friend groups will get together and they'll do this sort of like shared savings thing where they each pitch in. And then one person is able to use all the savings for some big thing that they need at that time. And then, you know, they pitch it again like a month later, however, you know, whatever it is. And then it kind of goes around and each person can reap the rewards of this savings pool at different times. Yeah.

I mean, I think some of that stuff is related, but definitely it gets into slippery slope terror. you know, depending on who's running it and their hidden motivations on whether it's like a mutually beneficial, amazing community uplifting thing or if it's like a nefarious pyramid scheme that is enriching like very few people. And, you know, that's one thing that's really cool about crypto is that like all that stuff is out in the open and you can just see the contract right there saying, hey, this is an pyramid scheme. It's just like a totally flat thing amongst these friends and you participate or you don't. Yeah, yeah, I could see, though, that apply to NFTs,

like if there was one person who was just way more successful than the others, then there's no incentive for them to do this. So you would have to find people who are like at a similar level of success and talent to you. I think that's partially true, but it's also like there's friends of mine who were like working at FedEx and like the shipping department, like moving boxes. and they're amazing artists, and I'd love to have them in a profit-sharing model.

And, like, maybe I'm selling more work than they are, but, like, I'd be willing to help uplift my friends and, like, help the people that I want to see succeed, succeed. And I think that, you know, in, like, niche aesthetic groups, I think that's also, you know, a situation where you want to see your scene thrive. You want to see people making similar work also get, uplifted and then it makes that little scene stronger and, you know, eventually maybe one of those

people that wasn't doing well ends up outperforming you and then they're kicking back to the, to the group or, you know, maybe their work takes six months. Maybe they're working on a new album or something like that. And if they weren't getting some stream of profit sharing amongst their friends, they wouldn't be able to make that album. And then six months later, they released the album and some of that profit kicks back to the group that have been supporting them the whole time. think like, you know, one of the big critiques of crypto is that it's just hypercapitalism, but it's programmable money and like any economic model can be built on it. And I think it's, it's important that we figure something else out besides like, you know, 5% of market participants

are the winners and everyone else is like getting their necks stepped on by the giants. Actually, when you were describing that, I was like, oh, I can think of the exact friends. I would go in on this with because I have like a gazillion creator friends who, yes, they have not, you know, had success in their creative careers to the same extent that I have. But I completely believe in them. And so, yes, actually, I take it back. I would totally do this. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about some technical solutions to this. I'm just going to quickly go over two of them, but then I want to discuss one of them. So one, we don't have details on this, at least as far as I can tell. Metaplex, however, tweeted that it's working on a new

NFT standard on Solana that can enforce royalties at the protocol level. So that sounds promising. Don't know the details there. I don't think they've, they just said they're working on this. I saw another option. Cardinal Labs has something that wraps the NFT and a token manager that can create what they called permission transfers, which I know will be triggering to certain people, but that would be, you know, what would enable royalties to be split amongst who are, you know, whoever contributed to that NFT or that project. But what I wanted to discuss was I did this interview for my premium offering with Paul Hainsworth of Chia yesterday. And he described NFTs on Chia as each NFT has the smart contract that governs it right in the NFT itself. So each time it gets

sold, then it will dispense the royalties to the people who are owed the, royalties and this is possible at the protocol level, like I said, because the smart contract is in the NFT. However, Chia is super new. In terms of NFT activity on Chia, it's super low. I think he said there's only been like 350,000 NFTs that are even on the platform at all. And so I was just wondering, you know, like all the activity right now is on Ethereum and Solana. But I was curious, like, do you think that of creators move to Chia that NFT collectors would follow or Do you feel that it's sort of like a tragedy of the common situation where some creators would go to Chia and not really make a lot of money, whereas the other ones who stick with Ethereum and Salana, they don't get the royalties, but at least they make more of the initial sale or just curious for your opinion on that. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a bit of a space race right now to see who can create the most interesting kind of standard there.

but I think maybe one example that we could look at is Tezos. I don't really know anyone who used Tezos at all before they started really investing in the kind of traditional art world. And they, you know, they're at like every fair. I saw representatives at Venice, Bianale, they go to Art Basel. They're everywhere and they've really invested a lot in the space. And now a lot of artists meant on Tezos. So I think that you can court a certain community by putting in the time and effort. and if you're developing specific features that work for a specific community, I do think it will

attract people and you can grow an ecosystem that way. But I don't know who's going to win this space race in the end. Yeah, but like the buyers largely are not on TASOS, right? So even though they've courted the creators, I don't know how well that's working. What do you say to that? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know what the actual numbers look like there, but I know a lot of really big name artists are minting and I think selling work on Tazos. I don't know. I would have to check those numbers. Yeah, there's some crossover, especially like in the generative art scene, but it's strange because prices there tend to be much lower and royalties tend to be much higher.

Like, I won't name any names, but there's definitely big successful artists on there that have 25% royalties. And people figure out a way to squeeze their profits out of trades regardless. I'm not advocating that we should have 25% royalties, but like there's definitely places where people are experimenting and trying new things. Yeah, that also wasn't a Tezos endorsement. I was just

just to be clear. I will go out on a limb and say I think Tezos is cool. I was minting on Hick-Eknunk like way back in the day before anybody was really on there. Which, by the way, like worst name for a service ever anyway.

Yeah, well, the creator of the platform was not your typical, you know, entrepreneur. Entrepreneur, let's say, right. But that's awesome. I mean, I'm all about the, like, fuck around and find out ethos of just, like, trying stuff and seeing what happens and being a little more punk rock about it and not so corporate and stuffy.

I like it. I like it. Okay. Last question. I'm sure you're well aware. There are some people who say royalties are a bad idea. they're unenforceable, they call them a tax. I have seen people tweet that speculators are the one who made the NFT market,

which was somewhat hilarious to me, but I guess there are people out there who believe that. So I was curious, like, what do you have to say to people who either believe that creators don't deserve royalties or that they shouldn't, you know, in some other fashion, recoup this value that their works eventually achieve? Yeah, I would say, you know, don't buy them. Go do something else.

Like you can go buy options on corn futures on, you know, the traditional equities market and like do other weird DGen gambling on sports betting. I saw that Gainesie made like 250K on like a sports bet the other day. Like you don't you don't have to buy NFTs. You know, you can you can get your fix elsewhere. Or just buy NFTs that have zero percent royalties. Like this doesn't have to be like a super binary like it has to be this way. has to be that way. Like my team's right and your team's wrong. Just like do whatever you think is right and the market will figure it out. I 100% agree. I think that, you know, speculators are a part

of it. It is definitely a piece of it and no royalties will work for some of that. But that's not going to work if we want NFTs to be kind of like a broader, wider adopted technology. So yeah, I would say, again, not to repeat myself, but it's just not a one-size- fits all. You know, the whole promise of the space is that we can try different experiments and we have these different Legos and we can build these different economies around different practices, around different ethos, around different medium. And so, yeah, if what you want to speculate on, if it doesn't work to have a royalty, then, you know, participate in that aspect of the community. But don't try to enforce that ideology onto something else where royalty is actually really crucial.

All right. So before we go, I'm starting a new tradition on Unchained where I ask people if they have a book they'd recommend to the audience. And in this case, it could be something about, you know, how creators make money or it could be about just art in general or whatever, or it could be completely unrelated. But I just thought I'd ask you and see if there's anything you wanted to share. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the two things that came. came to mind were like finite and infinite games, which is kind of this like weird self-help book, but I think it's interesting because it kind of frames the world in terms of finite games where there's strict winners and losers. And you can kind of have these rules and the game ends and begins or, you know, infinite games where the point is to continue play and things are much more flexible. And I think that art is an infinite game. And people try to put too many rules around it, say like, oh, well, this is an art and this isn't the way things are. And like, this is the box

that I'm drawing around reality and you're breaking the rules. And I think that like, people need to lighten up and realize that like, we're all going to die and that like society is just this like made up arbitrary thing and like don't take yourself so damn seriously. I agree. We're all going to die. Wait, and so who's the author on that? I couldn't tell you. Okay. Okay. I'll look it up. Holly, what about you? There's so many books that I love, but I'm going to choose this Daniel Suarez series. We actually had him on our podcast. He wrote a book called Damon, and then there's a follow-up called Freedom TM. And it's about kind of autonomous systems. And each book, like one book is like the devil on your shoulder. And one book is like the angel on your shoulder. So you can see how systems can be applied in different. in different kind of ways, which I think is somehow relevant to this conversation. Oh, definitely.

Double down on that. Those are some of my favorite books. Shout out to Damon and Freedom. They're amazing. Huh, never heard of them. Okay, I'm curious to look them up. All right. Well, this has been super fun. I'm so glad we managed to pull this together. Where can people learn more about each of you and your work? Twitter. Yeah, Twitter's great. I mean, Twitter's kind of a hellscape, but we're all there. Yeah, just first and last name Sterling Crispin look me up.

That's my username everywhere. Same, Holly Herndon, Twitter. Awesome. Okay, well, it has been a pleasure having you both on Unchained. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks, long-time listener, first-time guest. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about NFT royalties, Sterling and Holly, check out the show notes for this episode.

Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, from Anthony Youne, Matt Pilchard, Ivanovanovich, Pamma Jim Dar, Shashank, and CLK transcription. Thanks for listening.