Friend.tech: pump and dump or here to stay?

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm Jaybird and I believe that friendtech is not going to change the world that's why I'm carving a path for doers to confidently build and not invest in some areas of web 3. welcome back it's another episode today we are talking about Fred Tech we've got Kyle on the show and we've got Herbie who is a leading nft Trader just bid in the space since 2021 really gets it he's worked for some top projects

he's worked at blur he's worked at DSO where he worked on social tokens so he really has seen what what friend Tech is is what diesel initially was back in the day and so we talk about that we really dive into the quest question of like whether friendtech is is it pump and dump or is it legit is this something that's here to stay and the conversation revolves not really so much around whether friendtech is here to stay it's more of a question of like what are they doing right now that is going to lead to long-term sustainability because right now they've absolutely exploded and we

get into the numbers and how successful they've been and the millions of dollars that they've you know that they've generated in fees and then the millions of dollars they have locked in their contract because all of the money that's been invested in shares of friends and we also talk about if you don't even know what front Tech is this episode's going to break that down for you too so you understand really what is friend Tech and at the end we're going to talk about should you get involved is this an opportunity that you should be capitalizing on or is this a hype cycle Sirens going off watch out avoid this we're gonna let you know so stick around to the end really great episode

before we jump in let's just take a minute to hear from our sponsors modern newsletters are built on paragraph that's right paragraph is a brand new newsletter platform that combines the best parts of web 2 and web3 to supercharge newsletters for both writers and readers build a community not just an audience paragraph uses blockchain Tech to allow readers to collect and own the words that matter to them this takes reading a newsletter to the next level where paragraph readers can mint collect and show off quotes from their favorite newsletter this opens new possibilities like creators sharing Revenue with fans I also love their new feature paragraph AI this integrates gpt4 natively in

paragraphs create edit and improve your writing effortlessly with one click and guess what we at web3 Academy are on board and have already moved our content over to paragraph We believe this is the future of newsletter because of profound engagement it creates between creators and fans so whether you're a Creator writer or an Avid Reader it's time to check out paragraph and capitalize on the opportunity of being early Herbie what's going on my man welcome to weather3 Academy so excited to have you on the show today hey guys thank you for having me excited to be here another fellow Canadian on the show we've been on a been bullish on

Canadians in crypto these days this is like three or four weeks not in a row but almost that we've had Canadians so excited to have you today we're talking all about friend Tech is it uh pumped and dump or is it legit is this thing going to the Moon are we all going to be buying friends stocks or friend shares whatever we're calling them before we jump into opinion Herbie you're quite active in the space and active in front Tech you explain it for people who don't know what it is for people who haven't used it although I feel like you'd probably have to live under a rock to not be aware of what fronttech is right now we did put out a newsletter last week about it as well but in your own words what is front Tech yeah so the simplest way that I at least

try to think about it is way that anybody can effectively or just access to a private group of a specific Creator and then with that access you effectively on a share which can then be speculated on there is a utility of having access to this group such as person like Kobe who's a prominent Twitter figure then there's also the aspect of trading it and potentially trying to speculate and monetize and the value of this Creator or the value of you know that they will provide to the holders in that private shot for the group itself I like that you focused on the actual utility of it rather than say I think most people would describe it as like speculating on your friends basically and buying shares in your friends but you the way you describe is great it's true you are buying access to

them I have access to Kyle because I bought his shares I asked him to send me nudes he didn't so then I sold his shares and now I'm not smart he didn't I didn't get what I wanted for my ACCESS yeah I did make a profit yeah I didn't first time I profited it off of the off of the token in a while a spotting one side of this is definitely propagating his front SEC like they're making they're made me killing it so that they made like four or five million dollars and just on trading fees but saying you know portion of every of every transaction and it's funny to me like the bigger question is you just mentioned like where is this going it's just a pump and dump or just that real value and the reason why I try to have that like products like you know

value proposition to the user-focused approach is that that's what people will eventually do because eventually token incentives run out and what is left and that is what people you know will stay for and that is what will give something longevity or not want to give some contacts so there's been 1573 eth that's been generated from protocol fees so that's straight to friendtech and then in terms of numbers this weekend just things went crazy on friend Tech so it launched on I think August was a 10th or something like that and then up until like Friday it hit but 30 000 users and then in the last two days it's gone from 30 000 up to 79 000.

so like it's just like the curve on this thing is just when it went crazy and then like even transactions was at about less than a thousand a day it reached a total of 398 000 as of Friday and then in the last two days all of a sudden the cumulative amount is 1.35 million so like this thing is now doing like let's see twenty thousand thirty thousand transactions a day out of nowhere yeah we're actually not even the day this is by hour this is hourly that's hourly 30 000 transactions hourly I was like those that math doesn't add up so like this thing's going crazy at the moment it reminds me a lot of bitcoat I mean it's very very similar it's the same like bonding curve structure of how the tokens are emitted

effectively bringing in people's price a lot of similarities to Twitter there are some differences this might be a spicy take but I actually think that big cloud did it better at least in some ways they did things better and had more like overall not as like directive a private utility but as far as for speculating on true social tokens and people's value and what that means I think that Bitcoin was a very interesting very interesting approach that and friendtech is a little bit more yeah definitely still has like very strong incentives for sharing as we're seeing because now this speculative airdrop people want to share their token they don't know like if I need to get money by people trading my shares by buying people shares by inviting people so there's this huge surge now of this you know machine that is running for people to share this app

share this product then frankly is like pretty clunky like nobody really really knows that much about the utility or if people are going to use it ongoing but it's the same as like you know farming the next like meme coin to me right now it's like just value is there attention is there and uh people are trying to capture it get their share of it and then I guess in the background we'll see we'll see what sticks can you um just walk us through big cloud for a second a lot of our listeners are newer they came in the last cycle and so probably missed some of what bitcloud was which to me seems very I was around for that too and it it's very similar big difference to me well I'll let you explain that we can talk about it afterwards yeah a big Cloud's effectively diesel

effectively a decentralized Twitter and so what that means is every time that you make a post on Twitter it goes into Twitter's database every time you get followers your social graph is owned by Twitter diesel was an approach where you own your own follower graph you own your own posts that you make and you can do things like you know creating nfts having a tipping system that's involved for every single thing you post so it's a much more like monetized social experience somewhat that's like broadly accessible in the same way as Twitter and then people can buy uh shares like very very similar to friendtech of each Creator on the big cloud platform so now it's called DSO it's rebranded to D cell and they're still kicking I think it's

been tough for them to to gain adoption obviously as like building a social network from scratch is incredibly incredibly difficult but um that's kind of the similar to lens protocol except for the fact that you can speculate on the creators so it's kind of like a friend Tech Plus lens protocol in one but when bigcloud first came out it wasn't it was basically just front Tech like you could only speculate on creators I don't think you could really like I don't think it was a full web 3 Network at the time when it first launched as far as I remember maybe wrong with that do you know I worked with them a while after they launched and they were and they became diesel but okay actually I'm trying to remember if when they initially launched if they had a feed that was similar to Twitter or if

it was just like Creator token crisis basically just Creator telegraphy but the difference from bitcloud to diesel was sorry big cloud to friendtech is front Tech you don't get the liquidity as the Creator whereas on big clout you could and so what happened was and the reason they've rebranded is because a lot of the creators would just go on there they tell which Twitter people like their followers to go and buy it and then a bunch of them go buy it and then the Creator could just rug it all and take all that liquidity and it just it kept happening and happening happening and so I was like you make lots of scam and so it kind of lost credibility and then I think they switched their name and they've actually built something that's pretty decent as a result of it which is cool and so like

maybe friends I think that's why we're having this conversation today is a lot of people are pumped about friend Tech a lot of people are like okay this thing's a scam and it's a piece of but I mean big cloud was kind of that in the beginning and now it's building something legit and so the question is like does friend Tech does friend deck do something similar I don't know it's got the traction well it's starting to get the traction anyway big cloud also was like there is 200 million dollars from Andreessen like or around I think they're raised in Bitcoins with 200 million dollar number maybe a little bit inflated from what they actually raised but like they have the who's who of BC you know in the route and raised a ton of money they're very very hyped project and I feel like people want to have some

aspect of like decentralized social to work and I'm really rooting for it I have a story that I can tell you guys after of why I like I'm not a huge fan of what to social or at least the way that you know things are set up in the way that it's unfavorable to users one difference between big load and friendtech is um you can't really build the same network effects on an individual basis on Friends hack is you can on big cloud it would be more of like a page Tree on site model but then that also brings a question of like ongoing incentives for the Creator and for the users which we can talk about so we're looking only fans model whereas bitcloud like anybody can access it if I follow just like I can follow Elon Musk on Twitter I can access it so you can

get a million followers on on Twitter on big cloud Etc but the way that the share structure is priced you can probably only reasonably get like a few hundred maybe a thousand people in a friend Tech group before it's like six seven figures for something to join then it's completely inaccessible which there is a market for but it's not like it's not going to onboard a billion people at least I don't think so that's what I tuned out this morning is the problem is so there's a there's a bonding curve to listeners that aren't on friendtech yet there's a bonding curve where basically each person that buys a share the price of the shares then go up each time and so like the leaders right now have 150 holders and to buy a share it's like 2.5 each right so it's like five thousand dollars almost to buy a share just one

share of a Creator which is like that's not a scalable thing and it's only 150 holders right it's like you can only get 154 and you're done basically like obviously some can go more but you're getting real dangerous buying some random you know share in some random app where you don't even control the funds like like I would not ever be spending too much I've eaten anything of this app at least nine times soon so it definitely limits the scalability which is one thing that I think is a red flag I think of this this app right now at least the setup of it yeah it reminds me of like Alpha paid Alpha groups right like you like a lot of people especially in Ft space create a paid Alpha groups where they auctioned off or they sold 100 300 500 passes a lot of them were

scams a lot of them you know were like worthless but some people had like legitimate Alpha and people paid for it and it's a similar Vibe as this like you get a private feed to somebody who can share their mean coin picks or share their nft picks or you know their macro analysis whatever it is before they send it on Twitter and I think that does have value like I don't want to discredit the platform I believe that there can be a future sure where at least some people build valuable private shots and people are willing to pay 5 10 20 even 100K I wouldn't be shocked to see it as like the next massive consumer web 3 app that takes the world I struggle seeing that future but I can see like a good business model for friends Hack That does unfold at least for a small amount

of creators who are that same group that's willing to create like a paid Alpha group and invest time in it Etc but why would you do that on friendtech when you can just go do that on Discord or in black or in telegram like those already exist right and if you do it in one of those platforms you can set the price you know you lose the the share model but the the speculation of the bond curve is almost a bad thing because you now can't control your product you're at the mercy of the market which like we've seen so many nft projects struggle so much because they're so I don't want to get go down the gods path but like Liam or her you've talked Hans about the gods and how how much of a

riot they'd been on because of their floor price and it's just screwing their ability to build a business so well I struggle with that yeah agreed because it's like you don't get to control the price which sucks and so they get limits the amount of users that can come in you also don't get to control the features like right now the chat is kind of like like it's like I can speak to every one of my shareholders but if they speak only I can see the response but the others don't see their response which is not a great tool for building Community by any means for example we have a paywall like Community Jay and I right with Webster Academy for pro members now they pay like a monthly subscription they get other things like a newsletter they get events like video calls with us

but they have a private chat and Discord and that's token gated so it's like somewhat of a similar idea except we get to control the price and so we can be unlimited we have more than 150 people in there and it's still only 18 a month you know now if we did it this way with friendtech it would cost you five thousand dollars to get in here which is just which is just kind of crazy easy now I guess you own the share so you can always sell at any point and get out but I don't know to me it's not a it's not a scalable thing for sure it then it becomes about speculation and not about actual value delivered I believe that that was one of the fundamental problems with nft's last cycle is all the rewards and incentives were front loaded for

creators and if like if we just use basically any project it mints out crater is a million dollars then they get you know a tiny little drop of royalties on an ongoing basis that are now disappearing on transaction volume that's pretty much it and they can't raise money anymore unless they sell more at ft's dilute their brand and risk the entire thing collapsing so I think that that model is kind of played out and the future really has to be in my mind like ongoing revenue and whether it's through a typical you know web to you know subscribe model that is like only fans or that is like patreon or like what you guys are doing or if it's something that's more Innovative like a harburger tax which I'm not sure if you guys are familiar

with which is basically like you can what's his name on forgetting anyways I'll try to explain it it's a little bit complex but basically you have to set a price that anybody can buy your asset on at a specific time so if you were to buy let's say Kobe's like say Kobe wants 100 people in his like you know friend Tech group and sells off 100 nfts people buy it once those people buy it they have to set a sale price that they're willing to sell that asset for and then based on that sale price they play a percentage in tax to the Creator on a yearly basis so an example could be Kobe sells out 100 things for one eat each right then people can set their share price let's

say 5e 10e 100e whatever but whatever you set it as you have to pay like a 20 or 50 tax per se on a yearly basis to the Creator so if I set my price at five Eve I have to pay Kobe one Heats per year and anybody can buy it at five youth at that time and if somebody buys it I lose my asset so it's meant to create like a more efficient market that has some benefit for financial upside but also gets creators paid obviously it's more like confusing the tools don't really exist for today but it could be a model that I see working and I believe like Eric wall and um one other person started forgetting their name have like are trying this now and it's frankly a model that I think could work but

obviously it's like confusing it's like a membership fee at golf course since they do this right like really see to just to get anything and a lot of like exclusive clubs and things do this so it's similar to that yeah except you can't sell those right like you leave that golf course you leave that membership yeah you get nothing right you don't get anything back even though you probably Paid Dues of like forty thousand dollars up front yeah yeah getting back to friend Tech here is their gross really just because of speculation like do you do we really believe that 80 000 people who have signed up for frontec have done this so that they can get access to a private group with whatever influencer I mean no definitely not like I was just using the

shot like it's again like I commend the founders for for building this and again it's option I wasn't that is incredibly difficult and should be applauded is it so hard to build anything anything in web 3 especially today is the market isn't isn't quite as hot and there's not quite as much attention so what they've done is incredible I will say like I don't feel like many people are using it today for the sustainable value-driven approach that has real longevity which is these chats definitely some people are and definitely there are some like Hot Shots that people like and enjoy but for the most part like everybody's token has value everything is being traded speculated on I'd say a very high majority of activity isn't like authentic interest in in the products but more people like gambling no shares

trying to farm the airdrop Etc and that's not again that's not to say that friends hack won't work or friends hack is going to like Crash and Burn I think it's mostly just to say like for people who are playing that game to temper expectations and don't conflate people who are speculators with like real valuable users because eventually the speculators will disappear and play a new game what do we know about the airdrop are you following that at all do you have any insight on what the airdrop might be when it might come why you might get tokens yeah if anybody has like the ultra top secret Insider scoop my DMs are open I've always always down to receive those kind of those kind of messages but um I don't have a ton of information I

believe it's six months they're releasing token and every week people earn points we don't know officially what um you know how those points will convert to airdrop or how those points are allocated from what I understand I believe it's some combination of like share price trading activity on European like I think invite codes too and invites and potentially like message activity I'm not sure but those seem to be like the key factors that people could uh could earn from right in your mind how do you feel about you know you were to blur and you saw what using an airdrop as incentives to build a product how what that does do you think that this is a good approach for friend Tech what are the positives

and the negatives of this the way that I think about startups is like you have to get to the next step and you have to survive at every layer and it's a very dangerous game in crypto when you use Financial incentives to like bootstrap activity on a product because you know it's not real you know it's going to disappear at some point and you know that people are going to leave people who are invested are going to have a bad experience and lose money and we're seeing a little bit of that with with we're right now where some people are like happy with or unhappy with the token incentives people willing to take nft losses to earn this token and the token drops and then everybody's mad and we're in that like pretty unhealthy cycle now with with nfts and how much of that has to do with

blur or non is tough to you know objectively Define but I would say it definitely helps startups get to the next step but it's very important if you lose the like trust and you lose the Goodwill effectively with your users because it just creates such a pump and dump and everybody who actually cares about the product and everybody who actually loses uses it those the people end up getting hurt the most typically especially when you can invest in something like the people who really believe in blur and bought it at one dollar and now it's trading you know down 75 that hurts you know that's hard for that person the person who is authentically trying to like Market make on blur to earn points and support the network who has lost you know 100K and in trading and then it's

gonna get an airdrop that's worth 10 grand that's hard so I think it's a helpful game to get projects to The Next Step but a very beginning extremely dangerous stage that can sacrifice Longevity if the rewards are too heavily front loaded which frankly in my opinion like 99 of crypto projects go too far yeah I think it's a uh dangerous because it it leads to so much speculation so okay come back to the initial question of the show do you think that friendtech is pump and dump then or do you feel like it's here to stay my honest answer is I think that the level of activity and interest that we're seeing around it isn't isn't going to sustain but I do think that we will see people who

continue to use frantac and build like communities on friendsac and it to be like a healthy like Niche you know secondary I guess like way for creators to interact with their their followers and an audience do I think it's going to be the web3 app that you know brings cryptos to mass is definitely not but do I think that they could have a really good business and could create good opportunities for some creators yeah Kai what do you think I don't think that it's a pump and dub in the sense that I'm I'm hope I mean the team is ain't on so you never know so I don't take my word on this but I don't think they're going to rug everyone the one thing that worries me is they have the ability to because as I said the creators don't have the liquidity but friendtech does

have all of the liquidity now I haven't read their code so like I don't know if they have the back door or not but like likely there is a risk there that they could take just all the liquidity and square one over and it's a lot of liquidity there's 13 250 Ethan there right now which is something like 30 million dollars so I don't know for sure but I'm pretty sure they could just walk away with all that which is insane to go back to like do I think this thing is here to stay I think the app itself sucks I think the ux and onboarding which everyone is going I don't understand but on Twitter everyone's so pumped about this like this this app might not be the future but they're showing that like we can have good ux and good onboarding in web 3 and I'm

like first of all this thing's barely web3 and the onboarding is still terrible you have to bridge you have to randomly like send eth from base if you even have Ethan bases most people don't because it's been around for a week like and then you just have to know to send it to some random wallet like it's not a good ux at all and I think that the this industry really needs to like improve their I don't know their expectations like like it seems crazy to me that everyone's literally bowing to friendtech right now saying that this is great ux it might be it's still terrible but then I think just think the longevity this thing makes no sense like as we said with the numbers the price point of the the bond curve like it's not going to scale to a lot of people

I think 2.5 ethos is what the highest is right now for share I don't know how high that goes I'm sure it will surprise us and something will go there'll be a share for like 20th in a few weeks from now and we'll be like what's happening but I just think most this activity is airdrop Farmers I mean you can even when you open up the app the biggest button on the bottom right of this app says airdrop which is just such a red flag like they're doing all the things that like I'm actually not even that impressed in their activity I know people are getting excited even who you said like you know they've done a good job of getting activity but it's like look they've done exclusive invites right which you do and you the way you start it is with high profile Twitter

people so Clubhouse did this before right you can make it exclusive people want in and then you airdrop from so people want in and then plus you can make money if you're in so of course you're gonna get a lot of activity it's not that hard to do to be completely Fair especially in crypto I mean we one time we launched our profile account on lens and we said that if you follow us you might get something and we had 60 000 accounts follow us in a matter of like a weekend they're all Bots and like they want real people but like in terms of just getting activity it's not that hard at crypto if you promise that people are going to make money so like I'm not yet super like impressed by that I think the one thing is if this team is smart and they don't rug they've found a

way to make money on chain which is not an easy thing to do that's the thing I'm most impressed with is like they're making good coin here and so they've already got investment from Paradigm and then let's see how long they can get this speculative Mania to continue for because the longer this goes the more money they make and just like what happened with bitcloud is you might have a product in the beginning but if you happen to find a way to make a bunch of money and your team is good you can turn it into making something it's actually real right whether it's through getting a big investment like you said bitcloud did or just you make a bunch of money kind of like boarded Yacht Club has done right I don't know if the team is good like there's potential here because they have eyeballs and they have

money well they're making money and I'm once you make a bit of money it's pretty easy to make more so like what friend Tech is today I don't think is the app that makes it it's not a sustainable thing I think it's terrible ux I think most of it sucks it's got red flags written all over it but they found a way to make money so will friend Tech version two or version three or something they make from it that could be something but honestly most of the time that anyone does anything somewhat successful in web3 they end up rugging anyway so honestly my odds are that they rug that's my guess I don't think they're gonna rug like that's extreme like the team raised from Paradigm like I'm guessing that they're a legit team and they had to dox themselves to Paradigm

like so I think that they there is a trend in web 3 of docs t or non-docs teams like Anon teams yeah that's true that and there's red flakes all over this app so it's like it's pretty sketching that I don't know if they'll rug but they're this thing's gonna have a bad fall I can almost guarantee it but cheaper to lose money that's my prediction for sure Herbie and they agree I think the unanimous consensus a lot of people will lose money at some point we could leave it at that good for the team kudos to them but I think at some point it's highly probable a lot of people will will lose a lot of money and even if they succeed like to a much greater degree than what they what they do today just because the speculative

engine is so strong and there's not much to latch onto today like crypto is pretty flat other than obviously the you know 1050 tip last week nfts are just like incredibly depressing so there's meme coins but even meme coins it's kind of like you have to be a complete degenerate to really like you know be hardcore in that scene and make money and it's ruthless so something like friends like it was a great time to launch and yeah you know they have attention they're generating money they're doing things that are really hard to do in the space and again a plot them for that but it's easy to overshoot enthusiasm in in the web 3 space from we do it all the time what I would advise anybody to do is I always believe in participating in new tech right so go ahead jump into friend Tech if you

don't like my experience just send myself Kyle or Herbie a message we get points if you use our codes so we'll gladly give you guys a code but get in and you can throw in twenty dollars and you can play around but any money you spend beyond that twenty dollars spend it because you actually are getting this to that Creator and you think it's worth their share price to get that access or spend it knowing you're gambling that's if you want to gamble that's fine instead of going to Vegas just download friendtech and toss five grand on Kobe see what happens if you really want but just understand that might go away pretty quickly one like sneaky huge W that I think people aren't

focusing enough this is a massive win for bass also like this is the biggest social app that's been hosted on on an L2 at least that I can recall off the top of my head and bass is like like not even two weeks old and they're hosting this and I'm very bullish on bass from consider obstampling the five that they're getting is adoption what people don't think a coin is coming or think it's like improbable this is real like what's happening with the DK mins and all these Brands and you know friends hack and whatever else is in the pipeline to me I see them as like the big winner out of all this because they're just you know boosting the activity on their chain showing to other you know startups like you should launch on base instead of Paulie or ARB or whatever it is and then for big brands

also it's showing like hey we can handle like scale at least to some degree maybe not like you know Disney scale that's not necessarily or whatever proven yet but this is a decent amount of scale and activity and I think that bass has been like great seamless as far as like the on-chain aspect of this has been really good we've pulled charts on bases like revenues from from Trading fees and then you can you can check out their expenses on how much they pay in gas to ethereum in the profit of Base since launching which they've been around for what two weeks now maybe two and a half is they're already over two million dollars in profit in two weeks and for context to that optimism which launched in 2021 they're cumulative in total they've made nine million dollars in profit basis

just on that in two and a half weeks so like it's and they're just getting started it's been 12 days it doesn't mean they launched on August 9th I remember right yeah that's it so people are excited and I guess like the first week you know it's probably boosted a little bit but if people keep trying to build apps like friendtech where you they're generating hundreds of thousands of transactions that's it's a huge amount of money that's gonna go to base and be gonna become like a very profitable Revenue stream for coinbase where they want to continue you know capturing this hardcore crazy crypto native D5 audience and um appeal to them so out of all the things that I've seen in the last like year year and a half come out of crypto to me base is

legitimately probably if not the most promising on this one of the most promising things for bringing this crazy you know crypto web 3 scene to the masses and Friends hack is kind of I think maybe the first uh the first pitch or first inning of that so of that Journey that we're seeing yeah so I completely agree with that I got a question for you guys so we always talk about the show that speculation is not sustainable right like we were warning everyone with the nft thing like get out like this thing's gonna blow up like a lot of things in crypto artist these like speculative bubbles I'm starting to think that there is a I don't know what size of people that just like speculation is utility for people and it's like we're never gonna get away

from this like it always bothers me but then I'm like you know what maybe just people really like to speculate on things and that number of people might be bigger than I imagined and so it's like maybe there are just going to be apps that exist like social and user-friendly type apps that are just based on speculation trading and that's just it like that's just the utility I don't know what you guys thought of that but I've just been mauling that over the last few days and it seems to me that's probably going to be the case I'm with you on that full-time or fully excuse me I believe that the like financialization of opinions is going to be the next big step for for social networks and we've seen like everything is becoming effectively like more dopamine inducing where you went from like you know

written text to images to Now videos and we're seeing gambling explode as it becomes more accessible and we're seeing like more relevant forms of gambling explode to the average person like sports betting and such so I believe like um an application like what poly Market is doing where you effectively create this like Financial speculative layer on top of like real world trending Viral Events where you can bet on anything for those who aren't familiar you can effectively create like a betting market for anything it could be the election upcoming US election it could be when like the submarine you know story was happening or the superconductor story you created a bat of like is this real or not is a person going to be alive or not I just saw it before we got on here where you could bet is on chain and you

could bet if someone's plane was going to be delayed or not and there was like a problem like a probability of it you could bet on I was like come on this is hilarious yeah I mean it's kind of funny you could like hedge your own like potential plane delay he's gonna be like a one thousand dollar cost being late for the meeting you can hedge and ready I don't know like people probably won't be loud but it opens up an infinite world of possibilities a fun like instantly accessible things and poly Market isn't that in my opinion isn't that like non-web three user friendly but I do believe that like speculation and these effective like you know timed options that have an expiry date is going to be the future of speculation for the normal

person's gonna be massive the problem with crypto markets is they're Perpetual they never end like even if everybody stops you know using whatever like polygon or you know like Dogecoin whatever it is that market is still going to exist forever and people are going to get hurt forever and it's going to leave a really bad taste in their mouth if you place a bet on whether the you know submarine person is going to be discovered by X8 it expires in two weeks and it's like a progressive rise in dopamine as that happens and then the event ends and it's like okay I know it's done now not thinking in the back of my head like should I sell my Dogecoin should I not should I buy next cycle whatever it's these like very easy you know easily accessible easily understandable for

like normal people and like you know the game that you're applying in you know the rules that you're applying in and you know what you're going to lose you know you can win so I'm very very excited about that future you know if speculation is a utility if that makes sense imagine that's the one thing that blockchain brought and that's it it's just the ability to it removes friction to bet on anything in the world one of the things that I was thinking about over the weekend as well I don't know if you guys have heard of telegram Bots yet so these like yudabot and others basically what this is is although it seems like it's this djenny thing it's actually a massive breakthrough I think for the space so a telegram bot is basically you set up this bot where you basically say like a

couple words and you can invest in a token so I could be like I don't exactly know how it fully works but it's it's easy enough that you basically just say like uni five bucks whatever then just like goes in good bot just like goes and buys it for you basically it removes all that friction of like connect your wallet open up uniswot Trade sign three times like it gets rid of all that and it's just a message inside of telegram and it just like buys a token for you so that's a pretty big deal for djends people trading okay so that's cool the other thing I think of like when I go back to friendtech is and you mentioned it Herbies that like I think the ability to speculate or buy equity in people is going to be a really big thing whether it's opinions or that's access or that's

just like you know a musician's career or whatever like I think social tokens is going to be a really big thing we've been saying that for years I don't know when that comes but like friendtech is kind of that but just not not fully but I think when you have the ability to like invest in anything whether that's social tokens or like you said your flight or whatever and then you have these Bots where in telegram you can do it with one text basically like you're it's gonna be just so easy to buy anything you know you just talk to someone and someone's like this person said this cool thing you're like sick I'm gonna buy two shares right and you just you do it all in your in your telegram app that's going to be just nuts when that happens and I think trendtec is a kind of like

an introductory to that I don't think that's the app that we all use but it's that plus these telegram Bots are going to be a wild a wild thing in the future and I think the younger kids are going to just love that it's gonna be native to them in normal we'll still think it's probably weird or people older than us but like I mean Herbert you're probably pretty young I think you just got out of school at slango so this is probably like very native to you and normal whereas like if I talk to my parents they're like what the heck are you talking about right so I can see it being a big thing me too with the thing you mentioned like friends hack I really do believe that like isolated instances are much easier for people to understand than like holistic Investments and

companies coins and people if that makes sense because the amount of like compute power it takes to factor in all the variables for you to consider all the variables you need to factor in on like whether I should invest in Kobe share is a lot harder than saying like do I think that Dylan danis is like tweet or do I think he's going to Tweet photos of like Logan Paul's you know fiance like five or more photos of Logan Paul's Beyonce today you know what I mean it's just so much easier and if you're like bullish on Dylan Dennis being like the best you're in a troll you could be like yeah I think he's going to I think he's going to keep to our heart right so it's like fun infinite stream of experiences whereas like the Dylan Dennis coin is maybe like

a little bit less exciting a little bit more complex I'm basically like very long like Smooth brain left curve Simplicity on crypto apps and I think that that's our future to be honest like every single evolution of crypto has been simpler than the loss more degenerate than the loss like a lot of D5 people missed nfts because they're like these are stupid monkey photos and a lot of nft people are going to miss whatever the next big thing is because they're like this is so dumb like at least by nfts you know mean something or have a team behind them or whatever yes they'll have like the you know the general thought process not just like oh this is fun look I want to I want to do this I think you're right and I'm so not excited for that world that something

dumber than nfts than monkey nfts is gonna be bigger it's gonna be the next thing you're probably right on that it's so scary to me because gambling it's like the worst addiction possible right because if you win you get the ultimate dopamine Rush right and you must come back and do it again if you lose you still get the dopamine because there's so much energy and excitement but you also get the down which you can only fill by gambling again right by jumping back in so it's scary to me that that is where we're going because I think you're right that is where we're

headed I get excited about social tokens not from the financial side of them but more from the membership and access side because it's really exciting to think about whether it's a influencer or a sports team or a musician we all have had those people where musicians probably the one that everyone can relate to where you're like oh have you have you heard this band and they're like you're like yeah I saw call them first you know I was early we want to celebrate that and want to be able to show that off and we should get maybe we get access to something because of that I don't necessarily know that we should get financial gain from that but if we get extra access we get to buy their tickets to their concert first next time we don't have to compete with all the Bots like that gets me there or get into

a community where we can meet other fans like that stuff gets me super excited more than the financial side of it see that's how you can tell where the older ones Jay and we're like yeah real utility he's like nah that monkey jpegs and whatever's dumber than monkey JP it's not it's not as dumb as muggy jpegs I mean you're not really no I actually agree with you but I believe that it'll be a different mechanism that I'll be realized through the way that I like the ultimate utility for nfts that I see is just basically a better way to store data of like different experiences that you have a digitally native experiences and at their core it's just like immutable digital receipt of X and that

X can be anything it proves that you own this thing proves that you have this thing and review nfts if like you know 100K monkey photos and it seems kind of like crazy that that's just what it is but it just proves that you you own that thing it's just really a receipt of ownership you know certificate so I think that the future of nfts is much more likely that that you know favorite band that you went to early you have that ticket in your wallet and if you go see them like five of their first concerts they could do something to say everybody who holds these you know everybody holds five or more tickets from our first like you know from our first tour everybody has a ticket from our first tour gets 20 off our most recent one and I see that as a

potentially like easier to understand mechanism of rewarding people in a social token-esque type way without having a liquid token and directly associated with it well and this is also why I don't love what friendtech is building out because I love the ability like you said it's a receipt right and you could receipt could be as an nft could also be as a fungible token you can do either way with it but then you can take that receipt and go to any other application on the internet that allows you to connect your wallet and give access create an experience whatever and I'm friendtech these aren't real tokens right they're like points or whatever but you can't go and then take the nut in your wall and then you can't go and take them and get an experience elsewhere which that would have been really cool now there are

people I don't know if you've seen Fubar and someone else so Fubar made this contract where you could take your shares and tokenize them through an easy like ux kind of thing you just put your address in and then boom it mince all the tokens and now people can buy and trade them on uniswap instead of in friendtech and he took like a percent fee and then someone forked his thing and removed his fee and now you can so like they're actually so webbed three of them right right now friend text Shares are being tokenized which is is actually better in my opinion because now you can do things with it right so like now you have the real open permissionless concept where you can take those shares that are tokenized and give access to anything that I'm actually kind of bullish on but points

in frontec I just don't I don't see that as the future I hear you I mean one important point you guys brought up earlier is um I do believe the utility model will be based on people paying money for things and then receiving things in backside not like I bought your token or I bought your friends like share and I expect like utility and perpetuity the model doesn't scale like there's just no incentive for creators to continue doing it so I do believe like the rewards that you know followers fans audience whatever you want to categorize it as will get in the future will be based on financial investment viewed as an expense in the past yes I can see that yeah there's a reason why everybody knows patreon and only fans in

the web 2 world because those business models work and sub stack like all these subscription based business models they work and we are starting to have that in web 3 but initially in web3 all we had was 10 000 collection nft go ahead buy it and now I have to figure out how to turn that into a business which is why most of those businesses have failed okay I want to wrap you here because we're almost at time but Herbie I gotta ask you're just an absolute a savant with uh your threads on Twitter showing off how nft it's actually really refreshing how out of two Traders have actually made money and made a lot of money when so many of us have not are you buying right now what are you buying

or what's your current view on the nft market and any advice you would share to our listeners I'm very slowly connecting things that I love which I don't care much about the price price that I can afford I'm probably putting like maybe two percent of my net worth in nfts that I'm just like I like I wanted a crypto dick but I saw one that I liked like I'm buying this I wanted to you know I don't care I don't care if it knows now 50 it has a flamethrower it has a Canon deck I'm like this thing is awesome it's maybe going to go up my wall one day depending on what my future spouse will say but yeah so that's the type of like that's the type of collection I'm doing today and we talked a little bit about like the left curves out of things

moving left to the left group to me I think that the nfts today that actually give people like emotional enjoyment and that don't have future expectation of returns those are the Best Bets you can make because attention is going to keep flowing to those like you know memes narratives whatever you want to call it and they don't have the same like debt as typical projects every utility project like d Gods what happened is they had so much like anticipation debt in effect like loaded up in their users that nothing they could do could ever reach like the amount that they owed and they defaulted and that I think every utility project is still kind of going through that same stage so I like you know dick buds I like punks I like art

that's the kind of stuff that I'm looking to collect now I'm absolutely not looking to invest more in in utility-based projects because frankly I just don't even know if these are ever going to be a thing again and um there will be games that won't have the same gag holders won't have the same like you know traumatic experiences that these holders have had being down 90 95 and just play that and you know get your you have a much better chance of getting 100x and won't have the same persisting cell pressure so my idea now is like I want to buy things that have no don't have to do anything and I believe will still be very relevant in the decade two decades and then play whatever the next new Ponzi is to be completed I love that what a great strategy I want to buy the dumbest things that's my

strategy and it's gonna work too I mean in every cycle it's worked right Sheba and Dogecoin like these are it this is you if you get in those memes they were it's weird yeah I mean I'll buy the things that'll survive I believe across Cycles closer to the bottom and I don't need to pick the bottom I think we're getting closer now but there will be stupid new fun games that everybody plays and nfts look like the dumbest thing in the world back in you know early 2021 and then you know by early 2022 everybody was hypothesizing about how they're going to take over the world so I want to view my crypto experience like I have fun hopefully can you know make some money trading hopefully people don't get too wrecked and you know just um view it from that let's that makes

sense and select things I like along the way I mean it's great advice I think like you collect things that you like don't collect things that you expect to make money off of right now because it's just who knows what happened it's way way too unpredictable last question Herbie is a question we ask all of our guests if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it okay so this is have a generic answer and then like that I've been working through in my own life and then uh probably a little bit more original answer the generic answer that's been the most impactful thing for me is like head towards things that like are scary to me that I'm afraid of and I find that when you talk with things you're afraid

of it's like your life gets incredibly so much better um and when you're hiding on your computer for 12 hours a day being nft DJ and it's easy to like you know in between Twitter and Discord to just go to easy things so I think that's a good a good message and the other one I would say which is on that same vein is um whatever like persisting thoughts you have that you think will be like judged externally or you think that it won't be socially accepted to like explore those thoughts instead of dismissing them that's one of the things that led me to nfts early that's one of the things that has helped me create like healthy you know health habits and such that are very like unconventional against the brain that make my life much better so oftentimes like those things are hiding

behind that fear of you know like social being socially unaccepted or whatever it may be if you're persisting thoughts for something to to explore them especially if they are like not very socially accepted yeah I think that's like listen to your instincts or trust your gut like we all have those consistent thoughts that we we push down and we suppress them because we're afraid of judgment so great message Herbie great to have you on the show my man it's been an absolute pleasure appreciate your time whenever you launch your next project which I know you're working on we didn't we didn't talk about it today because it's top secret but whenever you do would love to have you back on Matt I would love to jam with you guys

when you guys are in Toronto we gotta we gotta hang out whenever you're next you guys are cool all right Kai we're cool man look at that thanks so much for listening and everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web through insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3. make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we

say is financial advice crypto and Webster are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one