How Long Will the NFT Bull Market Last? | Andy8052 & DeeZe (SotN)

Transcript

hey guys welcome to another bankless episode we've got state of the nation here for you today david we are talking about nft mania today and what a perfect week to talk about it because it does feel like something's going on something big is going on with nfts i'm amazed at how fast nfts have taken off and to such heights so quickly pretty unbelievable what are we gonna be talking about today yeah we actually had to completely reorg the schedule for the show today we actually were going to have uh hayden from uniswap but we actually kicked him out uh down the line for a future state of the nation because this week is all about nfts it is nft week it was nft week last week it was

nft week the week before and just the momentum behind nfts has not stopped so we are bringing a previous guest of the show andyof who is the founder of the fractionalized platform which fractionalizes nfts and his uh community manager at fractional uh which is uh who's called ades and these guys are they both have their bios as nft degens and so they were both d5 maximalist turned nft maximalists and so they have been paying attention to the nft markets which is what we need to figure out what the hell is going on in the world of nfts i i kind of feel like i need this episode david in my life because i feel like somewhat of an nft boomer do you know

like i've known about nfts for a long time hugely bullish on the asset class but like um haven't really dug deep down the rabbit hole still can't wrap your head around it well it's kind of hard right and you have to have a passion so like i'm looking at all of these markets on open sea i'm trying to figure out hey you know what's the next big project how do you even evaluate these projects what does it take so i'm hoping to ask andy and dees some of these questions uh just to get them out of the way you know what's super cool here david is like um with crypto there are so many cohorts that have done really well right so uh in the early stages you had to make kind of bets on base monies like bitcoin and eth and do well that way then you

had to be sort of a finance geek or maybe a developer and get in on sort of the d5 boom d5 frenzy and all those booms continue of course but now this thing requires a different set of skills uh it's a lot about you know art curation how do you predict what's going to be the next next big meme it's going to be the next successful art project like i haven't really worked out how to develop skills in that space i'm really excited to explore this uh before we get into the episode we should talk about some announcements some things that are coming to the bankless nation the first is we've got a new show man and it's hot i just listened to yeah we do it's it's great and i you know i didn't

do a pre-listen i listened to it at the same time everyone else in the bankless community did it because you've kind of taken this project and developed it on your own but guys this is called layer zero and this is a new bankless show talking about what we talk about so often which is the people layer the community layer the culture layer of crypto that layer zero that's behind every single crypto network in existence and so you are doing like these uh targeted interviews with key people in the space not even key people you know just interesting people in the space and hearing their stories so it's a different format for bankless we had um like the original i guess the the founder of vitalik buterin which is dimitri buter and vitalik's dad

on the episode uh and i listened to this all this morning david is absolutely fantastic well done on that uh what else do you want to say about player zero in that episode yeah it it definitely follows a much more free-flowing format with every single bankless episode or podcast we have like a massive like agenda that we go through and this is the exact opposite there's no agenda we just have a conversation and because there's so many interesting people in crypto that a free-flowing conversation is like always almost always interesting right and so first episode like you said is it with dimitri budrin i have two more episodes that i've already recorded eric connor is coming out next week followed by justin drake and each episode has gotten better and better already um i i particularly loved both

of those conversations uh each person has their own kind of like perspective about the world and about crypto that they everyone has like ideas and thoughts that are unique to them but then when it comes to the world of crypto podcasts like we have to talk about like your project and we have to talk about fundamentals behind assets and we have to talk about you know technical details david stop making fun of our other podcasts i don't want any of that on this show i want to to hear about like what people think about when they close their laptop lid and actually like turn off um uh yesterday i recorded with justin drake who actually uh there came this moment in this podcast where he uh was just thinking it's like well i don't really know when this podcast episode's going to come out so i

don't know if i want to leak any alpha and i said well this doesn't come out for three more weeks justin so like go right ahead uh and what he said was absolutely fantastic it has to do with mev and ultrasound money so that's cool but then we also talked you know a fun fact about justin drake is like he he's got a kid and like you can see a lot of like justin drake in the kit according to justin drake obviously but then you can also connect like that to the rebellious nature of justin drake to the rebellious nature of ethereum at large which is kind of the whole point of this show yeah i think it's cool it's not just the the free for forum conversation i think that's a huge part of it but it's also the different set of questions that are

asked on the show it's like more about tell me about your story like how did you meet vitalik's mom was a question yes that's not a question we would ask on a typical podcast or like uh do you fear for vitalik safety a pretty crazy question but like i'm intensely curious about that or how often dimitri peter and do you check the price of eth so anyway this is all really interesting content new ground uh exciting show it comes out every tuesday morning we're gonna have this i think every tuesday morning hopefully as long as david has it in him uh to do this and it'll come out on the podcast and also youtube so make sure you are subscribing to both of those channels to check that out the other thing we should mention before we get into the show is our

friends at tracer dao they're doing two cool things that are about to be absolutely huge one is d5 perpetuals which haven't yet taken off in the space yet but are about to think perpetuals are huge everywhere else they're about to be big in d5 they're building a perpetuals product for this allow you to go short and long on assets like ether defy tokens really easily super cool and they are launching a dow and they have a dow so they are inviting members of the bankless community listeners to the podcast to get involved in their dao as a contributor as a governor you guys you can do that by joining their discord discord is kind of like the the office for dows right like that's how you go

into the office and you know put up your hand and say here i am i'm a worker i can do things so go check that out um there will be a link in discord for that all right those are announcements david i gotta ask you the question we start every episode of save the nation with which is this what is the state of the nation today sir the state of the nation is manic we are a little bit manic right now like we said asset nft asset prices are all up and to the right almost every single one of them that like has the the any decent amount of attention most art block projects most like profile picture nfts like all of these things have like insane charts with like whatever few available charts that there are to

actually chart these things um people are buying into these things regardless of like whether they're what they were previously interested in it seems to be like the entire attention of the crypto industry has focused on nfts right now and people are kind of like fervorous right now so there's a little bit we're all a little bit manic the thing is like you can be a little bit manic but we can all get a lot more manic and so that's kind of what we're talking about on the show today is like how much juice does this thing have and can we actually turn this like you know crypto industry into or this like crypto native phenomenon into a global phenomenon uh maybe that's what's coming and that's kind of the conversation i want to have today these are very much my questions as well and and also the effect of nfts on the

broader crypto landscape so um you know we've talked so much about eth being money and uh dc investor and others have have uh said hey eth is now culture money essentially that's what you're buying when you're buying nfts you're buying a piece of internet culture a piece of crypto culture and it's all denominated in each so what other effects does the the mania of nfts have on crypto markets that remains to be seen as well hopefully we'll explore those topics today guys stick with us we will be back with andy and deez in just a minute but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys not your keys not your crypto that's why so

many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallets which makes proper private key management a breeze but the ledger ecosystem is more than just a secure hardware wallet ledger is the combination of the ledger hardware wallet and the ledger live app and if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite d apps all in one place ledger is where you want to be not only does ledger let you buy crypto assets straight from the app but it also hooks into decentralized exchange aggregators like paraswap which makes sure that you are getting the best prices on your trades without your assets ever leaving your control defy never stops growing and the ledger live app grows alongside with it so click the link in the show notes to see all the defy apps that ledger live has and stay

tuned as more and more apps come online and if you don't have a ledger hardware wallet what are you even waiting for go to ledger.com grab your ledger download ledger live and get all of your d apps all in one place bankless is proud to be supported by uniswap uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum which is what ryan and i call a money robot no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy something brand new in the uniswop

ecosystem is the uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants we have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again dows have money and they are in need of labor if you think that you have something to contribute to the uniswap dao apply for a grant to uniswap just look at the size of the uniswap treasury it's almost 3 billion dollars this mountain of capital is looking for labor do you have something of value to contribute to the uniswap dao no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply for a uni grant at unigrants.org and help steer unit swap in the direction that you think it should go that's exactly what we did to get uniswop to be a sponsor for bankless and you can do the same for your project thank you uniswap for sponsoring

bankless [Music] hey guys we are back full swing this is nft mania jpeg mania we've got two really great guests for you to talk all about nfts make sense of the markets what's going on hopefully explore some project and see what's good out there in the space the first is andy 805.2 he's a d5 d-gen turned into an nft maximalist and not lately he's been an nft maximalist for quite some time he's known as the guy with the crypto punk with the beanie and he's also the founder of fractionalize that's a platform for fractionalizing nfts into erc20 tokens so you can gain liquidity on them we've had andy on before congrats on the late the raise by

the way the paradigm rate is 8 million i think or so uh andy it's great to have you back on bank list thank you sir yeah thanks for having me i feel like so much has happened in so little time since i was on last right it's been crazy yeah we gotta we gotta get caught up on what is happening in nfc's we also have uh deez or deezy he's a degenerate [ __ ] [ __ ] coin gambler who got into nfts again coming from the d5 space getting into nfts he got into them in september 2020 then he went all in in january 2021 sounds like my story with bitcoin and eth but he's got one for uh d5 and nfts and then he's currently the community manager at fractional and he's the host of many twitter space uh spaces on nfts you may have heard he does like

four to six hours like eight hours a day on twitter spaces just talking about nfds i need to catch one of these deez it's great to have you as well oh thanks for having me i'm excited to be here oh man well everyone's excited about nfts these days and uh i think when david and i started the summer with bank list we thought we were going to get some kind of a layer two summer like a d5 summer round two but instead we got jpeg summer that's what's happening and maybe that rolls into a an nft mania a jpeg mania into the fall i don't know this doesn't show any signs of stopping or slowing down at least right now i want to start with the the big picture question how did this happen how did we

get to this point andy what's your take i mean like a lot of it is really who the hell knows um but i i think i think a part of it that has become like more clear to me is uh you know there there's so much culture in community like especially on ethereum that's where almost all the nft trading happens and there's such like a valuable community of people on ethereum who are doing things and interacting and like it makes sense that they would have their own natural ways to collect things together or signal their success or their status and like that would start to leak out into the rest of the world as ethereum starts to leak out into the

rest of the world and so that's kind of how i've been like how i've been thinking about more of the origin of why now why is this happening is i feel like personally over the last year and a half as i've been working on ethereum things have kind of taken a jump as far as defy and just kind of the global status of crypto and so it makes sense that the collecting side of things would also grow and when those types of things grow they grow really fast what's your take on why this is happening you think it was inevitable all along like we were going to get an nft mania season and this is just inevitable or is there some specific reason for the the the timing of this and uh the magnitude of it yeah so i didn't expect any of this to

to happen the way it did right like when i was buying punks and our blocks and pegs and having an investment thesis like my best case scenario was that like the prices they're at right now was going to take like a year or two to get to so the fact that it happened so quickly has even you know blown my own expectations i think it's a variety of things number one like nfts are just fun plain and simple and it is a very low entry playground for people to come in and get involved you can with very little money mental project and potentially change your entire life off of one rare mint and you can't do that with a [ __ ] coin like you can't 100x a [ __ ] coin in a week like there's no way you're gonna get dumped on by

whales there's no chance but you're seeing a lot of people come in with a small stack who just to ape stuff and i think there was a lull um if you look at like the ethereum and bitcoin charts pull it up here but like in june and july um ethereum you know it was kind of pretty like from may actually um into june we had the soft abuse auction which gave a lot of credibility to these nfts ethereum wasn't doing much of anything defined [ __ ] coins were kind of just slowly ranging and people are bored and they want to do something so like i i know a lot of my d5 friends didn't get into nfts until like june and july because they were bored and it was enough for them to just say hey let's

you know look at these punks and art blocks and i think it's almost reflexive where like people make money they come in and they don't take the money out they just invested into the next project and we're seeing this you know massive reflexivity where nfts are just taking off and like you said we are in this manic phase like is this this could even be euphoria like we might look back in two months and be like what were we thinking fidenzas are selling for i'm thinking that now right so i i'm always like you know telling myself right now like do i have enough ethereum that i'm happy like i'm selling nfts every day just to make sure i have enough ethereum that i'm happy where if this is like the euphoric top then i'm good but i'm still you know overly optimistic and i still think

people coming in are like early in a way and this might be just like the beginning of the end i mean sorry the end of the beginning how much ethereum do you need to be happy because i'm still um i think that's a tough question i mean it's relative to your net worth and your goals for me i need uh enough aetherium to like i need like 30 to 50 percent of my portfolio and ethereum to be happy we'll just say that you saw it there right now there's never enough ether that's that's for sure um these you said that like uh people were perhaps minting these things because in in contrast to buying a [ __ ] coin that like can't pump a thousand x because you'll get dumped

on and in contrast you can just mint a token which has by definition no previous sellers no like privileged you know early mentors no there's no you know nft pre-mine and that kind of is reminiscent of some of the defy summer activities which kicked off that whole defy mania because of the whole fair launch phenomenon like the whole like food coin forks those are all like very much fair launch phenomenons do you think that that is a common denominator between what we saw uh with d5 summer in 2020 and what we're seeing in jpeg summary right now yeah i think you're pretty spot on there it's having fair distribution and a low barrier of entry um even then like

if you were a well you could get a lot of the liquidity from liquidity mining where right now if you're a whale trying to mint a bunch of these projects like you're going to get them but you're going to pay a ton in gas and i think it's harder to like really dilute the uh like you you could really dilute a liquidity pole right if you have 100 million dollars and there's 25 million in the poll and you dump the 100 million in like you just diluted the crap out of everyone who's in there whereas like with something where there's only 888 mints or 10 000 mints you can't really dilute it to that level so it's even more like upside than d5 summer what would you guys say that andy go ahead if you want to say something

i know i would agree i think that it's like it's kind of all the best parts of defy summer and so much as like there's really high upside and there's a lot of value in like just scrolling twitter and discord and telegram and finding the next thing to to buy but then you just have like these added benefits that aren't really possible in a defy token where like one you can be emotionally attached to your nfts like i i love d5 and that whole space at the end of the day like if i have to sell my maker for ave or by comp for eth like okay you know it's whatever but like i love my crypto punk and i don't want to sell it and it doesn't really matter what the price is and that's just like

not a thing that really exists with with d5 stuff i i definitely resonate with that because there was there was a time i bought my uh my penguin avatar at like roughly 0.4 eth and now the floor is at point 2 heath you know good trade good appreciation but like because it's unique and because i've put it as my profile picture and also to some degree because i'm a little bit of a public figure like i would feel bad about like letting my penguin go like i would let the community down my i don't know who would buy my penguin i want my penguin and so it does kind of feel like there's a one-way flow of like capital into these nfts and then like the emotional attachment like sucks you in and captures you and it's like now it's stuck there and then that actually kind

of sets like a floor for some of these things yeah definitely i almost feel like a lot of these nfts are like almost deflationary in a way because you have people who are just totally not price sensitive those this guy vincent van doe who's a really big collector and he tweeted out something the other day that that was really good where he said you know this isn't like a quick flip this is a land grab and like to him he doesn't care what the price is he doesn't care what the price is now like he's buying stuff because he thinks it's going to matter in 10 years and so like when you have a bunch of people who are doing that all of a sudden there just isn't quite enough to go around sometimes what would you guys say is the like starting pistol for this whole thing

because like we we talked about uh previously the nft bear market but like in in retro in retrospect turns out like that is exactly what you said andy it was actually an nft land grab do you think that there was like a like a moment where this like thing actually started was there like a starting pistol to anything so i think that like the start start of all of it was actually uh two things that are now like not doing it i haven't gone nearly as parabolic as everything else which is nba top shot at nifty gateway and kind of like and maybe i'm wrong and you could really dig into the data and this is incorrect but based on my naive thesis you had a bunch of people who were not into crypto

but who got into nfts in a very easily accessible way and this was you know back in the fall of last year so almost a year ago at this point and they were paying with credit cards they weren't really having to learn too much but once you do it and you're actually like experiencing an online all the time liquid marketplace and all this fun stuff you kind of want to learn more i think a lot of people did i made a lot of friends through topshop especially who did want to learn more and i was teaching them how to install metamask and what crypto punks were and why they would want to buy one and all this stuff and then a lot of those people came and they set up meta masks and all that and then they minted board apes and then board apes went crazy and like

i've seen a long a strong correlation on my timeline at least of people who used to be nba top shot fanatics who have board apes as their profile pictures now and all of a sudden this was like a massive wealth generation event for an entirely new group of nft collectors who are generally coming from a less crypto native background so would you say ryan and i we often critique flow in top shots as kind of being like fraudulent nfts because they're done on a centralized blockchain so are they really nfts and that's a conversation for a different day but uh would you agree with the statement that like these uh non-ethereum based nft platforms that perhaps more uh centralized were actually like training wheels for people to come into the world

of nfts and then perhaps graduate to like the real uh the real nfc market which is ethereum i i definitely have seen that i'd be curious to hear jesus perspective because he was on top shot as well pretty early on but i've noticed that with a lot of people who i've interacted with i i would agree with everything you just said um for me i feel like the starting you know the gunshot was um in mid-january when john bales sent out that article that said i just spent thirty five thousand dollars on a jpeg or a and whatever it was just some of the drama ramp moment he bought and like a week later an alien crypto punk sold to flamingoed out um

and that was when i was like oh holy [ __ ] here they come because i was involved with the daily fantasy scene a little bit i was a low stakes player who like could grind and make a little bit of money but i wasn't great and seeing guys like john bales and peter jennings and all these other daily fantasy personalities come in like i knew that was a really bullish sign because these are people like amy said we didn't see them on ethereum we didn't see them using any of our tools until after they got that like first i i probably use the wrong terminology but i call like an nft flip it's almost like a hit of crack like if you buy a top shot and it goes up 10x in a week you're thinking to yourself like holy [ __ ] like i need more of this so then

when top shot kind of died like andy said they're like oh we gotta find this next hit like it's not top shot like this is not like not dying but this is going down and people aren't excited about it like what else is out there people came into punks who could afford it we saw a nice little run up we see the christie's auction come out kind of lends legitimacy to punks when you have an auction house that's like hey we're displaying this with a basketball and all these other famous artists and this is a crypto punk um and then we have the sophomores set of like art blogs and the covid alien punk and like 20 other nfts and i think that just kind of put a stamp on the whole nft marketplace like this is legit this is here to stay and slowly but surely we started to see

like traditional art collectors come into the space after those auctions so like from june up until now you know people buying these art blocks and death beeps and punks like they're not as many crypto native people as you think i i think there's a lot of people who are just coming in now who didn't even touch d5 summer last year didn't get involved with ethereum until seeing these nft auctions and are now buying it up because to them it's like a couple hundred grand on a piece of arts a deal they look at things with 10 plus time horizons like andy said about the land grab it's just like what's the total supply of these like if you met picasso when he was 30 and you knew that he was only gonna ever make 10 000 pieces and they were already made and you could

grab a slice right now like you might think differently than if they're constantly supplying more and more and i think all of that is just like driving the prices up basically these you're you're touching on the subject i want to turn to next and so i kind of want you to expand on that but when when ryan and i were in the intro and at the very beginning we were talking about like hey we're kind of like just confused like people are spending money on all these jpegs like we've never spent money on jpegs before like what's going on and so like we're coming from the defy world right where like we have these capital assets with you know cash flows total value locked there are things that we can measure that make us feel more secure about when we allocate capital to exposure to some

sort of defy token uh and so like to some degree nfcs don't have any fundamentals right because they're just pictures is that really true or are the fundamentals just something else that we haven't really learned yet so when you guys are looking at nft projects like are there any fundamentals to talk about but regardless of like what kind of the project is like what are the common like things that are always like fundamentally like bullish or bearish about like an nft project that you guys pay attention to this is gonna sound like super not quantitative but like it's mostly vibes like i go into the discord i talk to the team i'm a big fan of trying to get the team on a twitter space and just like

pick their brain and ask about all their plans and you know where have they come from and where they think they're going i think right now we see a lot of success with like punks and our blocks because similar to what you said there's a bunch of comparables there if you go to the punks page you look at ten thousand punks you look at all the recent sales you look at trait breakdowns you look at all these different comparables and you feel somewhat safe throwing 250 to a million dollars into a pump because you're like oh well these two just sold and they looked just like it and they sold for that amount so they must be worth this amount uh and similar with art blocks like you have the different comparables like you're looking at a set of ringers or a set of fidenzas and you're like okay well other

collectors are valuing with this amount like clearly there's something here and i think we haven't seen that spill over to the 101 aren't yet so like if you look at like x copy hackathon coldy some of these og super rare artists their prices haven't moved nearly as much as like art blocks like artbox might be up a thousand x and like you know x copy might be up 5x um so it's a big gap and i think that's because the people coming in like you said they just don't know what they're evaluating so they feel more comfortable buying something with comparables yeah definitely i've noticed that as well and i think it's just like scary like someone i don't really have a ton of one-on-one art i have a little bit just because purely i like it and i have absolutely no intention of selling it if

it goes up a ton awesome um but like i don't feel super qualified to decide what art is good and what art isn't good it's never really been something that i've thought about in my life previously and so looking at different projects that are more community driven or like these are saying have tons of comparables in our collection it just feels a lot easier it's kind of like training wheels in a way of of how to collect art um and so yeah i think that that like is currently driving a lot of how people are making their purchasing decisions but then as far as fundamentals outside of that i i think a lot of it as it's as silly as fives is like it's

kind of just all memes and it's all just you know the value is in the cultural relevance of the things that you are buying and if you think that those things will be more relevant in the future than they are now then they'll probably be worth more money than they are now uh and it's hard to quantify that but are you guys worried that like the structure of this market is like almost super duper conducive to creating a mania because deez was saying like well if like my punk looks like this and their punk looks like that well i can probably get this from that meanwhile there's probably someone else who's doing the same thing it's like well their punk is like this and my punk's like this so i could probably get this for that and all of a sudden like kind of like we were talking about the the

inherent like kind of one-way flow of capital it feels like people are just going to stair step their way into insane evaluations and almost by definition that has to just be a bubble right like if it's only one if it's only up only then at some point like something's gonna pop right are you do you guys kind of think that this is just a little bit too conducive to be becoming like a massive bubble yeah well so i think yes but also kind of no uh which is a weird answer but so i think in general yes nfts are in a bubble right now like obviously when whether how far up in the bubble we are i'm not really qualified to say but i think that everyone would agree they are in a bubble but really the question is

the really high end of nfts like the extremely desirable stuff we don't know what percentage of people who are buying those are buying them purely for speculation or are buying them because they're saying i don't want to have there be a world where i don't own the punk or i don't own a vodenza and those people probably don't care about the mania or what price they're buying it at so like i have a fedenza that i was lucky to get at pretty cheap and i unless it got to a price that was really insane i'm just not going to sell it i don't care i want to have one i'm ordering the print and i want to have it on my wall and that's like an important part of like ethereum history for me and my time working in ethereum and the price isn't really as

relevant and i am by no means the wealthiest art collector around in the uh in the nft space and so i think that there's you know a non-trivial amount of people who are buying this stuff especially the really high-end stuff are in positions where the amount of money they're spending isn't totally relevant and it's just kind of knowing what percentage of people is that and then whenever a bubble does pop what's the floor at that point and really we have no idea but you know if there's ten thousand punks and ten thousand apes and a couple thousand really really valuable art blocks not that many pieces of art to collect and so whatever that floor is might be might be we already passed it it might be a lot higher it's really hard to say

is that any color on that i was trying to to pull up nance and to look at art blocks real quick but um what what i've seen is similar to what annie said like a lot of these collectors they're buying these nfts and it's a drop in the bucket to them like if they need to liquidate anything to have money in their life like the nfts aren't first they're last and if you look at the top holders of our blocks i was going to nancy i don't have it up right now i can remember from last week when i was looking at it like out of the top 100 holders of our blocks these people aren't even selling them like you can look at the seven day flow and see like is it incoming or outgoing and how much and it's like the most i saw was some

guy who sold 25 and most people were around like selling five to ten and that's like they own 200 plus and it's like kind of wild that like if they minted all these and are sitting on a thousand x plus and they're just thinking to themselves like now let me shave off like my least favorite things and hold on to what's best and like i don't think they're gonna sell what's best period especially someone like snow fro who has the most art blocks he has his stuff in a vault he has to drive a thousand miles to unlock the vault he just went through a whole big opsec thread where he explained like his reasoning behind this but um these people aren't selling and like andy said there's not that much of a supply if there's 10 thousand punks there's like three thousand holders right now um

there's ten thousand apes there's like what fifty five hundred maybe holders and then art blocks there's i think a little over ten thousand holders but there's a lot more supply there but there's not that much like that's still not a lot um it's still it feels insane to say that given the price action but it's still not crazy to me yet so uh what i'm really curious guys is like i i i'm kind of approaching this space as as somewhat of a a noob at this stage and like trying to figure out how to evaluate um what a good nft looks like or what a good nft like class looks like and i think um

similar to what she said these like what's interesting about this maybe it's early stage mania we don't know but the wealthiest people in the world um aren't in crypto at least not yet and like what's really interesting is is seeing people come from outside of the crypto community and start to enter into nfts right like look at this this is a visa news visa just bought this punk a cryptic punk visa visa has a crypto punk profile picture right i mean not on my you know list my bingo card for 2021.

we got odell beckham uh he's got a crypto punk right from the lakers so like people are starting to recognize and legitimize the uh culture that crypto is really building and that's a that's kind of a unique phenomenon but what i what i want to get my head wrapped around is um if i'm new to the nft world i'm trying to evaluate like what i should buy i'm curious about this space what i should buy what do i look at right so here i am on openc for instance and maybe we should talk about like two classes of nfts the first is sort of the uh the avatar style of nfts that have been like it seems to me anyway uh super

hot you know the crypto punks the board apes of the world the pudgy penguins uh the me bits these types of things they have a ton of surface area by definition so let's talk about these first so i mean if i'm like just on open c looking at a project um how do i evaluate like which crypto punk i should buy or even like which category of project i should buy in the in the avatar class i mean let's say i'm somebody who i mean crypto punks are already established you know they're high end i'm not in the market i i want to get in on maybe the next like pudgy penguin or or something cool like that um how do i

go to open c or various websites and tools and evaluate what i should buy um like take me through the 101 what are your thoughts here andy well i i think this isn't something that i do a ton but i know other people do it is that they will just go to wales wallets and look at what they own look at what's been newly added to the site and you have to be careful and look at what they've actually purchased and not what people have just like sent them but that is something that i've heard people do relatively consistently um outside of that i think that being just like really active on twitter is probably the best place and having a group of people who you really trust uh where if they say hey i saw this thing it comes out tomorrow i think

it has a good shot just you know mint a couple of them if you have the ability to it's probably your best course of action and you're not going to hit on everyone i have a bunch of like random garbage in my in my open c that didn't didn't pan out but then i have ones that that did pan out that i've done i've done well um and so i think that that if you're purely just doing it because you want to like have your best chance at hitting something good that's probably your best course of action but honestly what i think is most important and generally what i do is just buy stuff that i like and there's really something at like every price point and there's so many of these little you know sub communities that have grown around these different profile picture projects

and there isn't quite as much address overlap as you would guess there's definitely a lot but there isn't quite as much like address ownership overlap as you would kind of expect in these all these different projects and i kind of think of it like different like twitch subscribers or subreddits or something where there's probably enough people in the world to support a bunch of different profile picture projects not all at the same price point you're going to have punks and board apes that are kind of the upper echelon of these things but if you have a thousand people who all really love your random profile picture project it probably will still be fine as long as everyone who is in it like actually in it because they love the artwork and they love the community and you're doing something fun and so i think that's really more

important than almost anything because then again today you're happy that you have it because you like it and not just because you think that there's a good chance that it goes up 100x so so definitely buy something you like but like i'm on this list here and this is you know we're down a little bit on trading volume of open c there's something called uh cyber kongs and then there's like cool cats you know like so what's the difference between a cyber con and a cool cat andy are you telling me i should just click through and look at the the cyber kongs and be like uh you know i like i select one i the ones i like or is there is there more to it because some of these avatar projects have not picked up and others have um is it as simple as just let your let

your tastes kind of dictate and get in early i don't know if it's that simple uh i would backtrack a second here and say like if you're trying to make the most money possible i think it's plus cv to most things and i think what andy said about finding a group is very important twitter is great um but there's a lot of noise and sometimes if you don't have like specifically curated lists it's hard to separate a lot of uh signal from that noise if you can just make a discord of like 10 to 50 people who are interested in doing this and working together you guys can move mountains like it reminds me of unit swap summer where i was in a telegram with 50 dudes watching the unit swap new listing bot and it's a

very similar thing with these nfts where it's like oh this is coming out today like what are we mentioning guys like what do you see and they might share a few things and if i like the art on any of them i'll meant you know between one and twenty um but i think what annie said too is like you kind of have to like the art at the end of the day because if you get stuck with this and you see it in your wallet it looks horrible you're gonna ask yourself like why did i blow you know five grand or ten grand on this um something like kongs they're a little more in depth right like there's genesis kongs you could get a genesis kong and it yields banana and then you use banana to breed baby kongs and they all show up under the

cyber kong's thing so when you're looking at it you're wondering like why are some of these kongs 50 ethereum and selling and the baby calling it too ethereum isn't selling so like you do have to know the different mechanics of how these projects work um cool cats was one where like i talked to the guy he said he's been making the cat for on and off 10 years like you can go look at his instagram and go back and he's literally drawing different types of the blue cat and when i heard that it's like you know this guy has a history with the cat it's not like he just came in and was like how do i make uh an avatar project for people to buy but he was more concerned about like oh this is perfect for me to build a community around this cat that i love and that's

the type of thing like i have two cats i love and i probably won't ever sell them because i just want to see what they do with them um whereas like you know i might want to sell other things quicker because i'm like oh here's a hype event that's going to drive volume and this is a good time for me to get out so like i look at my different bags with different mindsets like that i really want to drive the point home about only buying something that you really like because that's uh when we were earlier talking about how this like market is just a one-way flow of of money the way that this thing stays rational and doesn't get over his ski tips is if every participant is only buying stuff that they like right if you only buy so like it's more about like

items that you trinkets that you find in a store that you're willing to part with your dollars with and then you take it home and it lives on your shelf for the rest of your life if you are buying if you're going into the store and you're like saying hey i want every single trinket that you have give them all to me it's because you're trying to resell them later and you're you're playing the the greater fool's theory and so like there's a a a greater fools like valuation thesis and so there's some sort of like level of having like responsible exposure and responsible risk management by only buying the things that you like because like andy said earlier if it goes to zero like no like if it goes to zero you still have it on your shelf and you still like it like i'm sure you

would have liked it a little bit more if it wasn't at zero but at least you still have the thing and so maybe maybe some of the best advice that we can give is like if you are thinking about getting exposure to nfts because you have this fomo about this like market that's going on uh you don't have to fomo in you just have to find something that looks cute and to some degree that's kind of why i personally really like penguins like the penguins are just cute they're just cute little buddies uh and like and that's kind of the fundamentals and so if you're playing the game of nfts you want to buy something that you like that you also kind of think other people will like too if you want to actually have adequate exposure any any thoughts on that andy i totally agree

and i think you know like i have like i said i have nfts that i bought that i probably can never sell for more than i bought them for but i like them and one day i'll when i have a nice digital display i'll just blame my house and i think they look sick and that's awesome and then i have other stuff where it's like oh i you know i've been very picky with with avatar projects that i've that i've minted and bought over the last couple of months as that like whole space is really heated up and there's some that i think don't look great and i don't really care about them enough and i don't really want to have them after i've had some experiences in the past where i have others sitting in my wallet that i now have hidden on my open c profile

and so i'd rather just stick with the stuff where i'm like oh that looks that looks really cool and it's funny or i can make a meme out of it or i can send it to my girlfriend and she can think it's funny and like that to me is very important when i'm trying to decide the stuff at this point because at the end of the day if if all i cared about was like a safe plus bet i probably wouldn't just be like aping into random avatar projects i think uh using the perspective of um getting a digital display to uh illustrate your nfts do you want that nft up on your wall like should be a good like litmus test for for whether or not like people should like press the button on their ledger to buy that nft there's something though there's

something it appears to me very uh mimetic here right and by that i'm talking about our luke burgess episode about mimetic desire which is like it's it's not just to me anyway again you guys are deeper into nfts than i am but it's not just like i want this mft excuse me because i like it it's also am i the type of person to buy a crypto punk right which is it which is not just an individual do i like the pixels that form this crypto punk image it's also about embracing the group collective culture right and so like

uh you have to almost answer that question do i want to be part of the me bits club or the board apes club or the people who are into crypto punks or am i a different sort of individual it's like it's like a a social self-actualization type of decision and there's something like deep and cultural hidden about how we mimic other human beings and associate in in social groups i wonder if you could talk about the social dynamics of this uh ds any thoughts on that yeah i actually had like two things i wanted to touch on from the last point too and that is uh going back to what andy said buying what he wants to display i think like virtual

galleries are going to take off a lot more i have a lot of fun building in on cyber and gallery.so and i think like i don't even think i'll have a lot of stuff in my house it'll just be in virtual galleries i build and other people visit and the other advice i would give is like buy things in pairs don't just buy one of a pudgy penguin or one cool cat because it makes the decision of parting with one of them when it's your only one way harder it's a lot easier if you buy in pairs and you sell your lesser of the two after a price movement to feel like good i walked in profit it's all good i'm not like oh i just sold my only punk and i might not ever be able to get it back but yeah going on the memetic desire and

like culture in these communities i i think you're right i thought a lot about punks um i don't know if anyone here played like runescape growing up but if you did you're well aware of the party hat items they came out 2002 limited supply they're given out for free and over time those party hats are still the most valuable items in the game and i looked at punks thinking like the same line of reasoning like holy [ __ ] these are going to be like the new party hats but instead of just mattering in runescape it's going to matter for the entire crypto ecosystem because the culture of the ecosystem wants to show off wealth in a crypto native way they don't want to go buy a basket or picasso and put it behind them so that when they're on a

live stream you can see it they want to show off with a crypto native flex and i bought my first punk at like a thousand or 1250 bucks and i didn't like at the time know much about the punk community at all i just had known like wow these are really limited and i think these are going to have like these are going to behave like the party hat market behave um so that was like kind of my take on the memetic desire like people don't know they want these yet because they don't see other people displaying them and they don't know like like memetic desire to me is like you don't know what you want until you see what other people want and then you copy their taste so if you can have a little bit of foresight and be the taste maker rather

than the taste follower you can maybe have an impact on that memetic desire in the future yeah that's really insightful comments and i definitely appreciate the the runescape reference and actually so did the the youtube chat as well uh guys we have to talk about like one of the the biggest star of the show which is the whole art blocks phenomenon and generative art and overall i really think like if we are on the cusp of some nft mania what gets me really really excited is that if we inject a bunch of capital into digital art like at some point that flows right into like good innovation and that's kind of what i am seeing with the art blocks phenomenon so we're going to get to that conversation next but first i'm going to rug pull everyone and send us into our second

round of sponsors so here we go thanks for bearing with us living a bankless life requires taking when you shop for plane tickets you probably use kayak expedia or google to compare ticket prices so why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto when you make your trades you want to make sure that you're getting the best possible price on your trade and that you aren't paying high gas costs that you could have otherwise avoided that's why you should be using matcha matcha routes your orders across all the various defy exchanges on ethereum polygon binance smartchain and gives you the best possible prices without taking any commission matcha has smart order routing that splits your order across multiple liquidity sources if matcha sees that it gets you better pricing trading on matcha is super easy because it pulls the liquidity for me

into a single easy to use platform and that has even saved me multiple times from accidentally picking the wrong decks to trade on and accidentally getting a bad price matcha also allows for you to make limit orders on chain so you can set and forget your defy trades and they will go through automatically while you're away new to matcha is an integrated fiat on-ramp you can purchase crypto directly with your credit or debit card and have that fiat be instantly traded for any token that has liquidity when you're making a trade head over to matcha.xyz bankless and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets arbitrarum is an ethereum scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use defy if you've been using ethereum for the past 12 months

you've probably noticed the high gas fees and the slow confirmation times that have been plaguing defy too many people want to use ethereum and it doesn't have enough capacity for all of us that's where arbitrom comes in arbitrary is a layer two to ethereum which means arbitrarily can increase ethereum's throughput by orders of magnitude at a fraction of the cost of what we are used to paying when interacting with arbitrary you can get the performance of a centralized exchange while tapping into ethereum's level of security and decentralization this is why people are calling this ethereum's broadband moment where we get to add performance onto decentralization and security if you're a developer and you want to save on gas costs and make an overall better experience for your users go to developer.offchainlabs.com to get

started building on arbitrom if you're a user keep an eye out for your favorite defy apps building on arbitrage arbitrary has been working with over 300 teams including ethereum's top infrastructure projects and will be opening up to all users shortly there are so many apps coming online to arbitrarium so you may want to pack your bags in preparation for the great migration to the arbitrometer layer 2. to keep up to speed with arbitrary follow them on twitter at arbitrary and join their discord all right guys we are back with the state of the nation the state of nfts the state of the nft mania and i actually want to turn the conversation to art blocks because i'm really excited if this is indeed a big big bulb market that we have ahead

of us it's already a bull market but if there's more ahead of us inevitably what bull markets incentivize is innovation and one of the big things that we've really seen like almost the star of the nft show at least in the last few months has been art blocks and to me the innovation behind our blocks is the whole phenomenon of generative art um can you guys kind of just extrapolate and expand on how you what what role you've seen art blocks fill in the world of of this growing nft bull market like what is art blocks why is it so cool why do people like them andy let's start with you yeah so i was actually like a bit later to our blocks and probably dies was and some others uh

mostly just because i'm not actually that good at all of this [Music] that's really the main thing i think um but so art blocks is for anyone who's not aware a generative art platform they have three different places where you can release your generative art the most popular being art blocks curated which is an invite-only drop system so far i believe they've had 32 different drops on there so far so maybe a 33 something like that um and yeah you see 100 000 ethereum and volume on on open c4 it's highly desirable and so each art blocks project on there you know has a very different look and

feel and there's a bunch created by different artists i think a couple artists have done multiple i'm not totally sure though and yeah so they're all generatively done through a programming language it's called like ps something i don't know i'm not definitely not an expert in that by any means and it's loaded up into a smart contract and then when people mint it generates the art for them at the time of mint and so like personally i think that's super cool because it's something that would be hard to replicate in the real world because you have like this provable chain of everything that happened and how you got to the point where your art was generated that definitely is a value add in my opinion which i think makes it super interesting

um and yeah so that's been some of like the biggest sales have been like the fidenzas and chromie squiggles and ringers it's pretty insane these can probably add more color yeah yeah i um i found art blocks my friend trill told me about them in december 2020 and i'm into a couple squiggles and i was pretty addicted because it's kind of a mixture of um marrying the rarity slash like gambling aspect of the profile pictures but you're buying legit art in the same sense so like each series like say the fidenzas there's 999 of them they have different traits and

certain traits are very rare and like you know people will covet those traits significantly more than like a floor so it still has the same profile picture rarity slash aesthetic premium but it also is like legit art that to me is more meaningful to own in some sense like you could own a ton of cute penguins and a lot of cute cats but owning art that like you want to hang in your house or at least i do it was algorithmically generated at the time that you minted it using your transaction hash to generate what you got like to me is awesome because the the way snow fro describes it is like you're an artist

yourself as a mentor like at the time of mint the place you are at this the nano second you are at when that transaction confirms gives you that unique hash and you're a part of the whole process and when he said it like that it made me get really attached to anything i minted versus like what i bought on secondary because i can see in the chain of provenance like i was the person who got this from the smart contract that minted it and i'm attached to those more um yeah artbox has been a wild ride and i think yeah it's p5.js is the language most people use so these i i have a bunch of questions about like generative art and how art blocks works like so the first is um are

you saying when you mint it it's kind of like random what comes out the other side based on some sort of inputs and outputs but you're sort of like it's kind of the magic eight ball you don't know like what is going to pop out yeah it's completely random so you can look um normally before a drop they have a test net mint and you can see you know maybe 50 samples of what the algorithm put out but you don't know what you're gonna get until it is minted like it's wild it's very wild like okay you know when you look at the ringers like oh hey it's going to be some type of string wrapped around some type of peg but you don't

know what formation is going to come out what colors those pegs are if they're going to have bull's eyes if the background is going to be a different color and the artists they weight all of these different things in their code so they know but they don't leak it until it's already out that like oh hey if you see that trait it's really rare because the shot of that coming up is like one percent or 0.1 or something wow okay and then obviously there's a cost to mint is that a steep cost to mint um so recently they changed the way drops came on the platform before they were very cheap it would be like point uh squiggles were point zero three five eighth um and then like another project maybe

like point one eighth um now it's a dutch auction and it starts high like maybe five or three eth and it goes down every five minutes like a quarter eighth interval or something like that so now you really are playing a game of chicken like okay who is can we all work together and get the mint price down or at what point is everybody going to jump in and mint it so it's a lot specifically it's moved to a dutch auction right others are still kind of you pay whatever yes yes like pudgy penguins and those type of things aren't dutch auction it's just art blogs and the thing is it's smart at the end of the day artists are getting a lot more with this model

with the old model you might spend 0.1 on the mint that goes to the artist and you might spend another half an ethereum in gas because you're using a thousand way or 1500 way to get a transaction in because everybody's fighting for these mints so ethereum's gotta take its cut yeah so the option was like do we want to figure out a way to get more money into the artist like there's clearly a demand for this right like we're pricing it too low um so they went to the dutch auction model and i honestly i haven't minted much at all since they changed it because um maybe too uh cheap and used to the old model but it's better for the artists and everything is minting out anyway and it's good to see and i think

it raises the floor on all the old projects too because you can't get in at the 0.1 entry anymore like it's not going to happen uh the dutch auctions they seem to mint out by like 1 8 i don't think i've seen one go under one eighth it's interesting that all of this is still happening on ethereum in that you've got like or the bulk of it's happening on ethereum and that you have layer twos which could make the minting process cheaper but is there like when it's minted on ethereum and it costs a bit more is there something special about that does that lend to the legitimacy of the piece absolutely i think most collectors when they're spending a thousands of dollars on a piece like they want it on l1 like they want it not

on a sidechain um that's the mentality i've got from every big collector i've talked to like i haven't seen anyone who is super excited about like minting an art block on polygon or minting an art blog on flow or like what that looks like no one cares if it's on like joe's side chain right it's got like the most legitimacy as if it's on ethereum um so i'm curious about this so there's a recent i think this just happened uh yesterday yeah um yeah so an art buyer started with a 1400 art block piece i don't know if that's the minting price or maybe he purchased it he or she and sold it for 3.3 million dollars this is um you call this a fidenza which is a a

style of art block one of the most i think uh rare maybe more more costly pieces these um i'm looking at it looks awesome looks super cool something you might see in like a modern art museum like you know moma or something like that 3.3 million dollars though why is this thing worth that much in comparison to all the other art block pieces so uh i can say that this was a second the first purchase was a secondary sale they bought it for 0.58 ethereum i think a few like two months back or something um but i think that it's helpful when thinking about nfts in general

um that like think about the most valuable artwork that trades in the real world right now or the most valuable trading cards and all that stuff uh and think about how incredibly inefficient those markets are and how the amount of middlemen that are taking up a ton of time and money and effort and like to me it just makes logical sense that all of the really high-end things that are going to happen in nfts are just going to like be orders of magnitude larger than what's happening in like in like the current real real world art markets because it's just it's 24 7. it's completely global there's no barrier to entry of us obviously you have to have the money to do it

and so i think that all of those things combined it's creating this really intense necessarily like land grab for the really high-end stuff and so this piece is considered rare for a fedenza based on the color palette and some of the way that like the line work is done and stuff i'm definitely not an expert on what exactly makes a fidenza rare jesus probably say more than i yeah i'd love to talk about it um this fedenza in my mind was over over by i don't know who bought it um i think they really just [ __ ] with it like i i don't there's nothing extraordinarily rare about this it's um you know you can look it up there's a good website for anyone who wants more info on rarity on art blocks it's called rarity dot guide and on that site you can

yeah i'll just you pull it up we'll go through it um if you control fedenza it's like i think the 78th project but there's a whole list of every art blocks project um well i got that right so if you type 313 and search for mint by id it'll show you this fedenza and it'll show you under the picture of the fedenza the rarest traits it has and the floor for those traits um i don't know why it's not loading for you i'm looking at it on my screen right now the the rarest trait for it is the medium um scale which is just like the size of the strips or this medium size but they're still

35 out of the 99 for them so those have this so it's not the most extremely rare thing and the floor for it you can see is what 4990 um so i think the person who bought it just really really liked this aesthetic of how it looked like i i was talking ice bags about it like we're you know pretty independences and talking about what we think these where these are going and we saw this by and we're like what the hell like i i couldn't really justify like why they spent a thousand eth on it being completely honest outside of just like they really like the aesthetic of it um but that has to be important too right these so it's not only sort of the the rarity of it but it's how these various rare features kind of pull together and

create an aesthetic that an individual human mind values yeah definitely and that's the thing too with artbox right it's a art not a science so you can't just be like oh it's not that rare look at the stats somebody likes it and they like the composition of all those traits they're gonna pay whatever premium to get it in their wallet you know what's crazy about this is like with these smart contract art pieces it feels to me like the next picasso could be a robot do you know what i mean it's maybe not even a human being maybe it's just an algorithm that's going to produce our art and that's uh that's weird for you guys are probably already there but that's weird for me to contemplate well this also fundamentally changes the

relationship between like the human and the artist right so like to to produce an art block if the art block format even maybe it's not the art block platform but the generative art format if that is the future of like digital art and specifically nft enabled digital art like the artist has to be able to code or there has to be a coder maybe in tandem with an artist but there's somebody who can code regardless because you've got to get somebody who can understand the algorithm in order to like you know leverage that code to make a bunch of like you know randomly generated art um i i think i want to add a little bit of color here with with why art blocks i think was so successful uh and we know in the gaming world that like the loot box model is really really enticing to

players and this kind of feels like that right like you submit a transaction your unique at a transaction with a specific transaction hash is what generates the randomness input into the art blocks randomly generated art and then that produces a piece of art and so like with we all humans love to gamble we are gamblers who at heart and like having this sort of like randomness like hey like you might you might get you might strike gold or you might get nothing like that is really really enticing to people and so this and and so like the the randomness part of it with your own human input where like you actually might get something really really rare back i think is really really enticing as a kind of like turning this into a game and all humans also love games and

uh the one of the ways i've tried to to wrap my head around this is i was talking to a friend in discord about like trying to wrap my head about why certain chromey squiggles were so incredibly valuable and others weren't is that like they're apparently some chromie squiggles are a perfect spectrum as in the last color of the end of the spectrum is also the same color as the very first part of the spectrum and there apparently there's a website based on like finding chromie squiggles that are perfect spectrums and i'm reminded of like i have some some old friends from from middle school in high school that are big big baseball fans but sometimes like when i listen to them talk about baseball they're not talking about like what's going on in the field they're talking about numbers and

baseball to them is just like this sticky sticky ball hidey game which is overlaid like this massive like like complex rabbit hole of numbers right like what is this this one particular baseball players like batting average when the infield is shifted right right and like because there's such a richness in numbers and richness in like you know things to pay attention to that sort of like kickstarts this game of like memetic desire and just like things to contemplate and discuss about and so like to some degree it doesn't even matter what the image is if there's like a lot of cool things to talk about that that goes behind actually producing that image then all of a sudden like humans really really want it how do you guys feel about that like perspective

i think i think it makes sense and so much as it's it's a lot of fun to really get into the weeds and try to figure out what looks good um but i do also think to a certain extent like with our blocks that the aesthetics do matter i mean obviously it's it's like uh everyone has their own personal preference but i tend to agree with a lot of the kind of floor-based rankings of our block security projects and how much they're worth um like i think that fidenzos are really cool probably the coolest looking r blocks and they are as of right now the most valuable in like floor market cap so it's probably like a bit of a combination of both but i do think that the ability of people to like really dig into numbers and feel like

they're they're finding an edge or something is super valuable it was wild too like you mentioned the perfect spectrums and um we talked to von mis he's in a twitter space last week but he was one of the people who like when squiggles came out very early before perfect spectrum and full spectrum wasn't always a trait in squiggles that's a fairly new addition to like the open sea rarity list and vaughn had known like back in december that these perfect spectrums were a thing and he was hunting them and he was putting like small but like slightly over the floor bids on perfect spectrums to like not trigger anybody into guessing like why is he offering so much and i think he bought like two of

them like for like you know point one eight and he just sold one recently for like 250 eth but it's like he was out in the weeds with a spreadsheet of all the squiggles knowing which one was a perfect spectrum way before like the overall community even known so it's interesting where you can have this edge like you said where if you get really in the weeds and you're looking at this from a unique angle if you can show that unique angle to the group of collectors and kind of make it a common knowledge thing then the upside in that is insane jesus i'm i'm curious do people come to you guy like you as an expert in the space and like ask you to go help them go figure this out yes what you've developed is like uh your particular set of skills

right and um a lot of i mean it takes training to get to your level on this so i mean are people coming so listening and be like these just come you know buy the best nfts uh for me and i'll give you a cut something like that yes i haven't taken any cuts i probably should have um i mostly just give like free not financial advice um is what i call it but yeah i do get a lot of questions i try to point people into buying what they like like out give them the link to the attribute list of punks and i'll ask them like what are your favorite traits like some people really like certain traits and some people don't and it's like

i don't want to tell you what i think the best value is because what the best value to my personal aesthetic is might not be yours so it's like trying to get them to answer the question themselves and then helping them from there is kind of the way i look at it that's funny that's how therapy works yeah it also feels like i'm a therapist with the twitter space nft therapist yeah i mean i think there's an nft therapist dow that could be created based on this just like i mean a bunch of people like you guys who know this space and where others come and like help us pick the nft that we want to buy but anyway there's so much so much innovation here guys there's a few more points of conversation that i want to get to just as we round out this conversation and

thank you guys so much for your time like we said at the beginning this was a little bit of an impromptu state of the nation because you know the crypto markets move and point in different directions we've got to be ready for it i want to uh just touch on one of ones uh because it's it's definitely a relevant conversation to be had how is the the one of one nft game different from the other topics that we've been talking about with like the profile picture nfts or the generative art nfts um if people are are interested in dabbling in the one-of-one game what should they know and and what should they be prepared for how it's different from the previous conversations we've had also explain what a one-of-one is for some of us yeah so uh when we say something like one-of-one art we mean something an

artist minted it is a one-of-one it's not a collection per se it's just a unique piece from the artist's vision in one nft that's kind of how i look at it but getting started with one-of-ones is a tough thing it depends really on your capital and your goals i think there's two types of one-on-one collectors i know there are the people who are trying to do the land grab strategy on the very early stuff whether that's x coffee cody hackathon you have me i'm a you know killer acid whale i love killer acids work and like when i buy it i don't even think i'll ever sell it but if it becomes worth something later on i'm happy to do it but uh you have these

older og artists that people try to land grab and then you have newer artists who might be big outside of nfts or not and they come in and they're either on super rare foundation uh i i don't buy anything on nifty gateway myself but others do and the newer artists you're really just betting on like in my mind you're betting on the person like i buy art from like the people i like um after talking to them one thing about this space is you get a lot of access to all the creators so in the one of one space in particular like i really encourage people reach out and talk to these creators they're super nice they're super into the community like i don't think i've ever really had a bad uh discussion with like an artist in the

space or if i have it was like very short-lived and like i forgot about it um but it's like just bet for me when i buy nfts i'm buying it because i like it i'm betting on the person and that's how i approach all my 101s it's like the piece is great i'll display it in a virtual gallery or my house and i love the person who created it and do you want to add anything to that um yeah i think that was pretty good the only thing i was going to mention was that this what you said about there being two different types of kind of one-of-one collectors uh which is very interesting to me but there's you know i think probably the most prominent is x copy is kind of like the the super og one of one art creator um but yeah i think what's kind of nice

about it is it really can be as accessible as you as you want it to be as far as price points and stuff goes there's tons of really great art that's being sold on foundation and super air that's less than an ethereum and you can get in and find something cool and you have a lot of agency at that point to help spread awareness of these people and try to make them uh you know more famous if that's something you desire to do or there's kind of these more it's like ex-copy as a one-of-one artist is not going anywhere they're going to be a prominent crypto artist for as long as crypto art is popular in my opinion and then the question is really how how do those compete against stuff like art blocks and crypto punks and

what is that you know in 10 years what's more valuable a rare crypto punk or a 101x copy and maybe as you know as time goes on and nft art becomes the predominant way to collect art or one of the predominant ways in more popular culture people who feel more comfortable coming in and analyzing these different uh one-of-one pieces will be more comfortable spending eight figures on on a piece of one of an art or nine figures but right now it seems like people aren't quite ready for that um which kind of it makes sense to me because it is so much harder to compare to other

things uh so so it to me sometimes feels like a little bit riskier because you don't have quite the community around it where you can say with crypto puns look there's 3 000 people who all own these who are passionate about them it's a lot harder to do that with a with one of one art yeah there's cernit creators who have these like thriving discord communities too uh x-copy has a big one uh justin aversano and his twin flames collection that's a massive discord and if you can find those communities like before they really take off there is a lot of upside there and you can also go in those communities to talk to other collectors about other people's work and they're all like generally really helpful um so

i would say like you know don't be afraid to get involved too and just jump in like you don't need to buy something immediately you can just go in the discord talk to the artists talk to the community and see like do i see this being here long term do i want to build with them i'm a big fan of giving up my twitter spaces platform to artists i like or like artists who are doing something unique that i think needs spotlight on them um so that's kind of like what andy said about helping build the community and help grow these artists i take a really small bet on an artist after talking to them and i'm like hey i want to like put you on a stage and give up my platform you can talk to 50 to 350 people depending on how many

people join and just kind of show the world like you're a person you're a creator you're just here vibing with the rest of us and i think there's a lot of success behind that like i've seen a lot of artists come on a space share their story for two to five hours and like sell out everything they have listed um because the people in the audience connect so much with them i mean it would only make so much sense that since we are moving into a digital world and everything is kind of getting digitized that so does individual artists so like you know we got painters and drawers and graphic designers in the in the legacy world putting things that go up on walls and now that we have nfts we can have digital art of the same format of the same style but now it's an nft and the

the art actually exists on your computer so to me it's like a natural progression of the nature of art i also want to ask about uh on a completely different note the the role of on-chain nfts because if you dive in down the rabbit hole of nfts you realize that like most of these images that these nfts represent aren't on ethereum they're on a database somewhere a centralized database which is kind of the thing that we're trying to destroy with ethereum in the first place uh and so what do you guys see as the role of on-chain nfts because there's not that many of them there's like auto glyphs and then also recently crypto punks have had their images actually deployed to the ethereum blockchain meaning that cryptopunks are now on chain like totally trustless nfts

and uh so so what do you guys what's your guys takes on like on-chain nfts and and how does this story kind of expand and progress into the future yeah so this has been something that's like been a growing discussion point uh over the last couple of months i think autoglyphs were kind of some of the first to do it i don't feel confident i don't think they were exactly the first i do think there were some projects that had on chain stuff prior actually mooncats might have been one of the first ones if i remember correctly um what's interesting about it is it's kind of very much so constantly evolving and so one of the new things people are doing is storing svg data on chain so that it can be rendered off chain but all the data

is on chain um and you know it there's some things where it just like really isn't feasible if you have some crazy mp 800k yeah or yeah or music well there actually is music that's for the unchained uh euler beats has that and i think some others as well i think unigrid's which is one of the art blocks projects because our blocks are all well starbucks are interesting because the code to generate them is on chain so as long as you know the data that was given to generate it you can always recreate the the piece so the art itself isn't explicitly unchained but it's reproducible based on the on-chain data um but when you have some crazy artwork or something that might just be too costly

or not really make sense to be on chain i don't really fault them for using ipfs or whatever else seeing a lot of people using r weave to uh to back that up even more so i think it's really cool i know uh manifold who's like a big company working with artists and creators to get their own smart contracts for nfts they've made a lot of headway in that space and they've done a really great job and they've been kind of visionaries in some of the svg stuff that they've been doing i really liked what they did with like the sacramento kings actually the basketball team where they the artwork is all on chain and an svg and it updates automatically based on who the owner is and some other

information that they can go in and update or change which is really really cool and so i think we'll continue to see people push the boundaries of what we can do with on-chain artwork where it looks different based on who holds it or it looks different based on how long you've pulled it and all these different types of things which i think is awesome and it'll be really exciting to see cool i would say piggybacking off what andy said um this is probably my weakest point or like my biggest knowledge gap in the nft space is like i'm not super in the weeds with like ipfs or weave how things are stored um i know you know autoglyphs are significant for their historical being the first i i thought they were the first 100

on chain project but um yeah i am like i don't really uh i should think about this more than i do let me put it that way it's funny i i think i just heard peter from the geth team his head has exploded with like the fact that we're storing nft's uh like a state expansion perspective of ethereum but i mean at the end of the day this is um this is block space that the market pays for um as as we start to close out guys i'm curious like getting into we've covered so much and i feel like i have a a better perspective on how to dive into the nft space after this conversation but um give us kind of the quick

highlight say somebody dms you and is like yo gotta check out this new nft project right uh it's fresh you've never heard of it how would you evaluate it like what tools would you use what are the first things that you check to vet this thing out feel free to drop any tools and resources to us uh as uh as you as you talk through an answer so andy your take first yo i got this nft project it's dope you gotta check it out how are you checking it out yeah honestly i don't really use i guess it depends if if the project is already live and like out there and there's just available to be bought on openc i'll go and look

there i'll look at the smart contract code on etherscan is it their own custom smart contract is it just the openc storefront contract i think you can kind of tell a lot based on that is it some just other contract that they copy and pasted how are they storing the data uh and then is it more interesting to you if it's their own unique contract rather than somebody that they borrowed from yeah well then it just to me i think it's really really hard to know if you if time kind of feels of the essence i want to make sure i get this thing because there's a chance it blows up it's one of the easiest ways to see how much effort they've put in person like in my opinion is did they clearly write their own code and you know do they actively tweet from

their twitter account and is there discord are there a lot of people having conversations in there that to me is all really valuable just to kind of see are they putting in effort was this something that they couldn't have done in one night they had to have spent a little more time to garner some community and some excitement and the technical chops to do this and they have their own website it's not just like some random thing uh that that's the kind of stuff i mostly look for more so and then like as i said i really at this point only buy stuff that i think looks interesting i've seen stuff where i think yeah it's probably gonna go up i don't really you know i'd rather place bets on things i feel more confident about because then in times where things aren't doing so well i'm

not just gonna have paper hands and sell it um and yeah that's that's generally how i go about doing it it's mostly kind of as we were saying earlier just more based on like the the vibes and and the medic power of it than anything else these couple things yeah tell us how do you evaluate these vibes so there's like two scenarios right someone sends you it before it's minted and after it's minted um before it's minted like andy said you don't really have much to go off of you go in the discord you look at their twitter for me i follow like 2400 people and it's kind of a red flag if like only one or two of them are following

a new project because in my mind like even when i see something early before it mints like for example uh i don't know if it's pronounced oni or on one force but they're these like anime gorillas type vibe uh nfts that came out i went and looked at them and i thought to myself like i don't personally like these but i see that they're gonna do well and i have like over 100 mutual followers on their account before they launched and i was like oh this is probably like a good project but i didn't mean and because i didn't like them and you know now they're floor 70s so there's a lesson there where like i could have just followed the herd and saw that hey i have all these mutual followers like this is probably gonna be a good move but for me i don't i should look at the

contract stuff more like andy's spot on with like did they take the time to write their own contract like they're gonna most of these projects are pulling in over a million dollars from mint fees like if they couldn't take the time to write their own contract for that that's a pretty big red flag and then the other scenarios after something comes out right i'm a big fan of like going to rarity.tools looking at all the attributes in a cleaner list than openc and then kind of forming like my own ideas around what traits i like i'm not the guy who comes in and like sweeps the floor but if i really like the project and i'm looking after after it minted on rarity tools i'm looking at like you know what are the

crowns what are the 3d glasses i i always buy 3d glasses hoodies and pipes like you could make any generative project and if you have a hoodie 3d pipe i'm like buying those up because in my mind it's like oh that's on brand and i need this and that's just like sticking power because crypto punks like that so those were kind of the first attributes that ever got some sort of premium to them and you're saying like well if crypto punk premiums had those well then other nft projects will have those too um i don't even look at it like that more so than like i just want to have my same vibe or aesthetic across every project so like oh that's funny i'm always looking for hats i'm always looking for basketball caps i i went into wicked craniums and you

know they didn't have a lot of overlap with um punk attributes but they did have 3d glasses and they have a skin color that's psychedelic and like to me most of my 101 collection outside the photography and most of what i like is this like trippy psychedelic like killer acid vibe so i was like okay well i can't get hoodies or pipes here but like i'm stocking up on these psychedelic skins because that's my vibe or like i went into cool cats and i got a hoodie with like a rainbow unicorn hat because he looked ridiculous it was like he's wearing a hoodie and he's trippy with his little rainbow unicorn hat and it fits my vibe so like that's kind of how i buy the different projects even if they don't have overlapping traits this is super cool guys um

maybe one last question for you um how but put on your speculators hat how much longer do you think this nft mania that we're in will continue and like what happens next dees your take first i am i don't know i i thought um back so my whole thesis with this has been revolving around like what happened with the doge memes back in the spring and how i didn't make a single dollar on any single dog related [ __ ] coin and i thought to myself the whole time like this is gonna collapse like dog is seven cents like there's no way this goes to 25 cents like this is done

and i learned a valuable lesson it's like you know the market can stay irrational much longer than you think and it's better to just like ride the wave and manage your risk on the way up i don't know when this will end like my gut tells me it can't go on for another month but like that's just probably not true like if it ends the floor if you tell me it's 500 in a month like i'm not even gonna be shocked even though like it was two weeks when i was buying them a month or two ago um and i think the way it looks is like people will not beep into all the new avatar projects like you're gonna have a bunch of stuff that comes out people don't mint it it sits there um and that risk capital dries out because they can't get liquidity on

their old projects that they minted to min the new stuff um i think that's kind of how it spirals out where like you know there's just no liquidity to get out of the [ __ ] they have and they can't open the new [ __ ] and there's not new people coming in with new capital to eat the new [ __ ] andy what's your take we got a month we have more what do you think you know i don't know as far as timelines go i have personally had conversations with a lot of people who have a lot of money who are still trying to figure out what they do about nfgs and how they appropriately allocate into those and what that looks like we've seen a lot of venture capital money flowing into nfts a lot of um

hedge fund money flowing into nfts and so i i don't know what their timelines are and what those what that looks like but i like i just don't think those people are going to be buying the top but maybe they'll be buying the top of this cycle but not the top of the next two cycles um i think they're too smart and so maybe they're all ready to buy and or they already have maybe they're buying next week and that's going to be the end of this hype cycle um but i think that if you have like a time horizon that's longer than a year or two you'll probably be okay uh because i there's just too many smart people who are buying things right now who that are that literally have no intention of selling like that's just not a part of

this for them um and so i think that we're probably just totally guessing have a few more months of of real craziness and like things will get really really insane i wouldn't be shocked if we saw some floors that really made people's jaws drop but then i think where the the real way that this bears fruit is in a couple of years when you look back and think about the ridiculous prices that you got because now every nfl player has a crypto punk or wants one and they cannot they can't all get them because there aren't enough and like that's kind of the real end game it's not a lot of football players hedge funds yeah with a lot of money what what's what's

crazy to me is this feels like nfts feel like a super weapon for propagating cryptoculture to the masses it just has all of the ingredients it checks all of the boxes from a mimetic desire perspective and the unique thing i think about nfts is all denominated in eve right this is eth as money used as a store of value unit of account and medium of exchange in the nft economy uh andy dees thank you so much for guiding us through nfts i've learned so much we appreciate you coming on for having me this is fun yeah thank you it's a good way to break up the day and like i i just love talking about nfts in general so anytime

you guys want to talk nfts hit me up when's your next twitter spaces nft do you have anyone on the menu at all i mean i'll probably host on it like the pool while i'm drinking with ice bags tonight at some point like oh we literally had one going we're on his back porch i have my phone open i have one airpod in super quiet and i'm just like giving two people co-host and letting it run for like six hours and then like if i hear my name coming through the airpod i like jack the volume up i'm like yo guys what's up and then like hop in um it's like it's a really laid-back vibe i'm sure i'll have one open today could we uh could you guys drop your twitter handle so folks can follow you and get tuned into that so deez what's your

twitter yeah my twitter is at d's phi it's like a play on d5 i made last year um yeah it's ds d-e-e-z-e-f-i how about you andy i am andy8052 everywhere so at andy8052 there you go follow these guys for more information on nfts and to get plugged into that scene i took a few notes here for action items for you kind of the 101 tips i hope this might be useful for you but one thing we talked about was hunting for nfts in groups using twitter discord that's tip number one don't go alone don't go alone uh number two buy in

pairs one for you one to sell i have a feeling these guys buy in more than twos so maybe you scale that up to five or tens depending on your risk appetite look at take taste makers so view their wallets uh and check out what they are buying maybe become a taste maker that's kind of the the 401 level of course also search for legitimacy history lineage uh credibility what chain you purchase it on matters and finally we talked a lot about buying what you like you have to be okay if you are stuck with the nft that you bought for the long run those are fantastic tips for you as we close this out in summary of course guys risks and disclaimers

ethan's risky nfts are risky we might be in a mania we have no idea where that is headed or for how long all of this stuff is risky you could lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not forever