NFT lending markets and the case for NFTfi

Transcript

in 2020 defi summer was the biggest narrative and it led a lot of people to make a lot of money could 2024 be the year of nfty Summer I think so first we've got billions of dollars in real world assets coming on chain in the form of nfts from tokenized watches to real estate to Pokemon cards and so much more and second we finally got permission list protocols which are coming to the market with lending products they're able to offer better liquidity for your nfts in today's episode I'm joined by one of these nft 5 protocols meta Street its co-founder Conor Moore we talk about the nft liquidity problem and how metast Street has developed a unique new

primitive to turn loans into liquid tokens we talk about the launch of meta Street's points program Ascend where you can Farm their upcoming airdrop and learn how to access 10 to 18% yield we also talk about why the new ERC 404 token standard is such a big deal and how meta street is thinking about using it as a governance token standard for their upcoming airdrop if you care about nfts yield blast ERC 404s and or points farming then this is the episode for you gmgm welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet we make sense

of an onchain World in constant trans information I'm jbird and I believe that nftf is going to change the world GM Conor welcome to web3 Academy yeah thanks so much for having me stok to have you man nftf is not something we've talked a ton about to be honest on our podcast we talk Lots about yield and how you can gain more yield in web 3 we talk a little bit about defi we've talked about blast we've talked about points farming and meta street is is really at the intersection of so many of these things ERC of 404s too we're going to talk about how you guys are doing that later in the show but before we jump into all of that just take us back to

maybe the beginning why did you initially start meta Street and what is the vision and the reason for you guys building this product I started uh my career in Investment Banking and so did David who's one of the two other co-founders we actually worked at deuts Bank together um I subl his apartment when I was interning this is a while ago and then after we had that experience David went into crypto fulltime I went on and worked in traditional Finance worked in private Equity did a bunch of stuff around real estate so we were securitizing big pools of asset back Securities which is relevant for this story and in 2021 nfts are going parabolic everyone's talking about them

and primarily thinking about them as like art and collector which is a valid Market in it in its own right and like also deserves a financing arm but the bigger opportunity here obviously is like looking Beyond art and collectibles and thinking about the nft the erc721 contract as just the real asset equivalent for crypto that the erc20 is the financial asset and so what I mean by that is ec2s are like stocks currencies Commodities right ERC 721s are real assets they the the the traditional Finance equipment would be like real estate equipment Capital things like that and that market

requires its own debt Market behind it and that debt market for real assets does not look like the debt market for financial assets so like Financial assets have margin accounts you know you trade with leverage your crypto equivalent is a compound well real assets don't they don't operate like that and it's primarily because they don't trade frequently so you have different mechanisms and so we had this experience in our previous lives working with those debt markets and to us the opportunity to create that on chain do it permissionless take it advantage of all the composability aspects of Defi and ultimately just like enter this blue ocean it was a huge opportunity right and it helped that also you had this

huge art and collectibles market so you didn't have to just start from you know total you know black box but you you had existing collateral that you could create lending markets for so that was why we started the project this was in 2021 at the time when we started ministry there was $10 million of cumulative lending volume ever in the history of nfts so it was pretty early and there really the only design was like a very simple peer-to-peer contract and so we basically have spent the last two years iterating on that design you know obviously many new players have come into this space many new ideas and the whole concept of financial markets that support nfts has started to really

mature over the last couple years and now we personally medist stre has done about $150 million of of lending volume the industry as a whole is like north of I think4 billion dollars of lending volume and this is even still before we've gotten to the more mature you know versions of collateral which I think are also starting to come with like especially with this real world asset push and and other things like that that was kind of like our our journey leading up to starting metast Street and then we can get into like what we've been up to for the last two years and all that but that's kind of the background so far nfts have really as you said only been used for digital art and collectibles maybe membership passes to a little bit

but uh they haven't yet reached their full potential I think not even close to their full potential and so there's this coming wave of capital that's going to come in and as you said they need the ability to have more lending more financialization of those nfts and that doesn't exist who who just so we know who are the you mentioned that there's about four billion in lending who are the major players in that space right now there's a couple of funds it's primarily individuals though early adopters yeah people who already you know View the value of crypto punks for example as like being pretty stable and

so therefore they're they're comfortable participating in this market there are a few funds um in indigo is one dialectic these these guys have done pretty sizable positions in the space um but but beyond them it's primarily individuals yeah okay okay let's jump forward now that's the sort of back story from a few years ago when you guys F first built that bring us up to today on on what you guys have been focused on and where you're at with metast street now yeah so the protocol design looks a lot like the securitization Market debt securitization market and so what we basically have done is created a pooled lending protocol that uses tranches to

try to make the the protocol more efficient and going back to what we were talking about a second ago with a being for financial assets and metast Street being for crypto's version of real assets generally there that that has like various permutations of implications in terms of what the right design is for that lending market and so with something like r20s you have a lot of liquid spot market and so you can liquidate these tokens fairly easily and so most lending designs for ER c20s revolve around a liquidation mechanism but if you again go back to like our real estate comparison you don't have a liquidation mechanism

in your mortgage right that's not how that and the reason is because that would be kind of predatory the reason is because you don't have a liquid Spa Market houses aren't selling every second of every day right okay so if you don't have that then how do you create an efficient lending Market well the way you do it is you allow people to represent their risk tolerance via the these tranches within a pool of capital and so if I can say I'm willing to lend up to you know 10 eth and you say okay well I'm willing to lend up to 20 eth now we have two people who are participating in the same loan but have different risk tolerances and are

working cooperatively you're able to benefit from your position in a higher risk because you're going to get more interest income and I'm going to benefit because I get to participate in that loan still but at a much lower risk threshold that's like obviously should be create more efficient market so we basically used that concept and applied it to the entire protocol so the way the protocol works is you have pools in capital that have these tranches in them and then those pools are paired with nft collateral and the protocol is entirely permissionless so I can create a pool of capital for any nft contract that exists and pair that with any erc20 and that's

very important because like if you have the wh listing mechanisms or you have voting by a dow fundamentally that really limits like what where you can go in the future how you can grow that's basically how the protocol works and we've iterated on this a bunch over the last couple of years and have gotten to a place now where it's fully permissionless it doesn't rely on oracles and it has a dynamic interest rate that ultimately makes the capital like should make the capital as efficient as possible right yeah I love the focus I mean look we have a natural problem that I think everybody can see here which is is that there's a liquidity issue with nfts I mean maybe you could argue that there wasn't a liquidity issue during the nft poll run of

2021 at that point blur going crazy you know okay sure that's much more liquid but we definitely have this liquidity issue and you guys are coming in saying hey we need to unlock more Capital efficiency and we built the protocol in order to do that and you've done it quite smartly I think where the lender can choose their risk appetite which really allows them to have choice in the way that you know how much yield do you want what are you seeing in terms of the yield that people are getting from participating and using the protocol right now yeah and so and this is maybe one of the most interesting things like for your listeners is this Market has the highest

yields in crypto and it has for the last two years and the reason is because it's really laborous like most previous to metast Street existing the only way for you to really participate in this market was to go and originate loans one by one against like maybe sometimes assets that were as you know worth as little as $5,000 so most people don't have time for that right so it's pretty laborous and it is fundamentally more risk than creating uh money market lending like a the way that the a market works you are never ever supposed to have a default right like if there were to be bad debt on the protocol people view that as a failure of the protocol but that's not how most

debt markets work typically it A lender is taking on the understanding that they are taking on possible risk and the way that they make their money is by being a good underwriter and then making more interest income than they lose from defaults right so this product is really just supporting that kind of lending which is the most in the traditional sense it's the much larger side of the house and crypto is just unfamiliar with it because to date mainly it's been a margin account for leverage trading right so it's just like a different product But ultimately what that means is the yields here are much much higher than what you could get you know depositing into a money market because you're ultimately taking more risk and

so across our platforming we typically see yields in the kind of the teens ethon eth yields or stable coins as well e or stable coins at the teens but across the Market as a whole like it can be much higher than that depending on the collateral type you'll see north of 20 or even 40% Ys wow wow that's incredible and now as you said not only is there some risk to this there is a a financial knowledge that someone needs to have we're not going to all of a sudden see the average dgen who maybe is just farming tokens but maybe doesn't have like a financial background or trafi background all of a sudden start to take on lending and participate in

this type of nftf or do you think that's coming like where do you who are your users now and do you think that it will go more mainstream in the future or is it going to continue to be more the Trad five people that are moving into crypto we're seeing this new way to access Capital big picture like long term I think definitely the latter but right now we're seeing a lot of the typical crypto users onboarded to the platform and the I think there's two main innovations that we've developed with this protocol the first is just the the way the pools work with these like tranches borrowers get one offer but the lenders are split into many tranches the second is that then the lenders can

tokenize or are instantly tokenizing their positions when they deposit so I deposit eth and I mint my eth Crypt Punk LP position we call them liquid credit tokens so with the liquid credit token now you've introduced the concept of secondary Market liquidity for these lenders and so it starts to look more like what a typical def user is comfortable with because there's this presence of a secondary Market where I can trade out of my position so we'll get into Ascend but we just launched Ascend it's our points campaign and in the last 24 hours we've gotten rtvs now over 25 million and we have about $3

million of curve LP behind those positions and so what that means is even though the these depositors are depositing into a pool that will then possibly be locked into longer duration loans the lender never bears that duration risk because they can trade out of it on on secondary market and so the more the deeper that liquidity is for the secondary Market the more you like can think of this as just a normal crypto asset normal defi token and actually like for people who are Crypt native the comparison I'd make here is Li's stake E before you could redeem so if you remember Lio was creating all

this stake eth where people were staking but this was before you could redeem your stake eth before the beacon chain merge happened and how did that work I mean th those positions were fully a liquid and yet staked eth had a secondary LP position that was paired with eth and state deth and you could trade it in and out of that now in times of higher concern about the longevity of Lio or whatever you saw some volatility around that pricing But ultimately there was a market and as soon as you had that market what happened staking rates went parabolic because now you have secondary Market liquidity I don't have to take on this duration risk and be locked into this underlying position and so that's something that we're really excited

about because I'm hopeful that it will bring a lot of capit capit into the space and ultimately it's just a much if we can bring Capital into the space through our protocol you will see that people have a much easier way to participate in this market and not be originating $5,000 loans every day and managing all this stuff and having an operational nightmare for that yeah these liquid credit tokens that you guys have launched is it's a huge Innovation I think and this idea of making these loans tradable and making them liquid is you're not stuck in your position and I think the main thing that stands out to me is you're making them composable with other defi apps and other tokens and

that is going to just lead to way more efficiencies I think these are the type of innovations that gradual and then all of a sudden type thing right it feels like this is one of those moments tell us a little bit more about I know you raised 25 $5 million recently created these liquid credit tokens you launched this and now we have Ascend this points program that you guys have launched lead us into maybe a send and how people can participate in that points program yeah so the 25 mil is like our total fund raise I saw some people reporting that we just raised 25 but it's our total like cumulative funding okay so yeah I

think first I want to touch on the composability part that you were talking about and I think the reason this is so important is because fundamentally this is the advantage that defi has over trapi and anytime you see something novel come into the space but then have the team say we're going to use a permission side chain or you know everyone has to kyc the login or what it's like you're missing the point I mean the the real benefit here is that this is all permissionless and composable we should all strive to build things that are permissionless and composable because that's our advantage over traditional finance and so with this product creating the lcts gives us the ability like we were just talking about we have an amm on curve with $3

million in it I didn't call Mr curve I didn't call mes to get approval for that right there's another platform called AA that does permissionless borrowing and lending we actually created uh a borrowing lending pool so you can post your lcts as collateral and borrow raps de against them you know so and all this stuff you don't have to get approvals or sign off because it's composable that composability for us also goes the other direction so on the actual origination side so primarily what we've been talking about is the depositor side you know how the deposits work and tokenizing the deposits into lcts but on the origination side we also have composability so all of the peer-to-peer

lending platforms arcade Nifty X2 Y2 these are all peer-to-peer platforms where you have someone posts a singular nft as collateral borrow from a singular lender they actually create promisory not nfts those promisory note nfts are like the key to unlock that loan that the lender holds and we can ingest those as well so on the borrower side we actually can also aggregate across all these peer-to-peer lending platforms and we can only do that because the peer-to-peer platforms are also composable that's very special right and that's that's kind of a beautiful thing that happens in in crypto and defi that doesn't happen elsewhere I don't have to

have a good relationship with any of these platforms for this to work it just works so okay so where are we going now we have spent the better part of two years iterating on this product design and now we're kind of getting into the point where the protocol is fully permissionless and we want to get as many users to the platform and really start to proliferate meta Street as just a piece of infrastructure for all of the future tokenized assets that come on chain and we should definitely cover this at some point too with like these watch platforms that are tokenizing watches or domain names yeah let's let's talk about this now actually this is I think this is a good a great point is pointing out all these use cases for

what are all the tokenized assets that are coming on chain yeah so again like because of the platform's permissionless we've built this thing to be sort of functional with whatever comes next you know as long as it's a 721 and or 44 so with these this watch platform we've been working with they're tokenizing watches and I want to be able to create a borrowing and lending market for those watches and this has already seen some some level of product Market fit just within nft Finance generally what one of the most fascinating things to me though is these guys that are tokenizing the watches a big part of their value proposition to watch dealers is the fact that they can access a Global Lending

Market in silly and borrow against them and that didn't exist two years ago so two years ago if you'd said why are you tokenizing watches you'd have been you wouldn't had a good answer there would be no answer it didn't make sense I mean it's like oh you can maybe have some marginal benefit in how fast you can trade these things but it wasn't as big of an advantage and we've seen this with domain names intellectual property land there's a platform called Fabrica land that's trying to tokenize actual plots of land so there's a lot of these projects in the pipeline you know this isn't hypothetical these are companies that have raised funding to build build this stuff out and all of those platforms are going to hopefully be tapping into this Global liquidity layer

and my hope is that we can have metast stre supporting pools for people borrowing against their crypto punks their 404s their watches their plots of land and all of those participants don't know that there are any of these other pools that exists they're just using it for their own specific use cases so I'm very excited about that you know and I think this represents the evolution of the 721 contract in general you see a lot less talk about like the next wave of pfps and a lot more talk about rwas about gaming assets and and the like which feels like the natural progression of us exiting sort of the prehistoric version of this timeline and until like some more interesting use

cases from here yeah yeah I'm I'm glad to hear you say that I don't think think uh everybody who listens to this show knows that our thoughts on pfps as long-term assets like sure there is value in art and that is one thing but pfps were a I don't know maybe an unfortunate first use case for nfts look it brought a lot of hype and it was a lot of fun but as you said there is way more real world assets that have tremendous value to be brought on chain and have access to these markets watches just being one of many examples we're not yet seeing the forest through the trees yet and this is why I think a lot

of people get caught up on nfts they try to describe them they try to describe what is an erc721 and there's just so few use cases right now that they haven't we haven't yet been able to really see the tremendous potential of this which I think goes so far beyond what any of us even realize in this current moment like I think the future is we we can't even imagine it yeah and you know the way we think about it is r20s are uniform things and year 721s are unique things so wherever you can take the word thing to mean something else like what specific thing we are talking about that's how broad this is sometimes we talk to people who

say oh you know you guys are tokenize or you're lending to nfts but you also want to lend to real world assets or other other things things that aren't nfts the answer is they're thinking of pfps when they say that but they're talking about the same thing it's going to be an erc721 contract regardless so as long as you are supporting are you creating a lending Market that supports unique assets versus uniform assets which are two fundamentally different designs then kind of like the world is your oyster I mean you can take that in any direction you want and again it's not up to me even it's up to whatever that tokenized asset platform is that wants to do that okay so you're building this I go I'm getting so bullish on medist stre as we

go through this episode you're building this you know underlying layer for nft 5 for nft Lending it goes so far beyond it's so interesting yeah most people just think about NTS it's pfps it goes so far beyond that into the future let's talk about you just launched a send your points program prior to the release of your token MST tell us about Ascend how can users get involved how can they Farm it tell us maybe about the Integrations you have some unique partners that you're working with this on lots to unravel here so I'll let you sort of jump in yeah so Ascend is a thre monthlong points campaign that was important to us to not drive things on into perpetuity

which I think people get frustrated by so there's no that you know that concept of like delution um because points are running for forever and all that doesn't apply here and basically it's just uh it's everything we've talked about I mean it's the same core architecture but it's just in a very very kind of gamified simplified experience and users are earning points by depositing into lending Towers those lending Towers have obviously you know steps to them and that's kind of Representative of of the tranches within the pool the users can earn kind of this base interest of 10 to 17% yield and then they get their points on top of that they mint these liquid credit tokens and they can supply those

onto curve and LP them and earn additional yield from the curve LP they can borrow against them on AA which is the permissionless rc20 lending platform and continue to to Loop that position and then like you said over the next three months we also have a number of Partnerships that will be rolling out and because the LCT itself is tradable and composable our users will be able to basically double dip and re hypothecate their funds and deploy them elsewhere throughout crypto so we're going to have these available on blast as well as one of the amm on blast which is Thruster and then there's another platform called juice which is a like a yield

amplification platform to basically try to farm more points so it's you know we've called it a point centipede it's a lot of it but you know the goal here right is like to give users as many bytes at the Apple as possible and be able to use their their money elsewhere as much as possible one thing that I think is fairly novel with this concept of using lcts is it gives the ability to move the value of an nft to a layer two without moving the nft interesting the way to think about that right is if you have a loan against an nft maybe it's not 100% of the value but it could be up to maybe

70% of the value and now I can take that token move it up to an L2 most nft holders do not like the idea of moving their nft to an L2 because they just worry about hack and you know provenance risk and all this stuff but that's a lot of money it's about $ 14 billion doar on L1 and none of the l2s have done a great job of creating kind of their own native nft communities and so this is kind of an opportunity it's like you buy a house in Ohio and you get a you know a mortgage from a bank but then ultimately who ends up up dealing with that mortgage you know it gets securitized and it's traded every day on the New York Stock Exchange or the it's traded in New York as a bond right so so like

same concept applies here you've got this nft that is locked into a loan on L1 but now I can mint this LCT token I can take it over to blast and do some farming there I could take it to another L2 and so on so I think that's something that will unlock a lot of value and drive a lot of tvl up to these l2s they obviously want yeah that's very interesting we will make sure to put a link in our show notes to you guys put out a great thread today we're recording this about just short of a week before this episode comes out so if you're listening to this a s would have been out for a few days but we'll put a link where you guys can learn more about a send and all the details and how you can participate I got to give you a shout

out on the uh three month timeline and really focusing on not this like endless ution there's been so many projects that have just had no timeline on their points program no timeline and you just end up you end up with so many users getting so confused and so lost and so well well done to put the timeline on it and to make it simple that'll hopefully lead more people to participate yeah I mean we're users ourselves right so we're familiar with the um the Market's opinion on those things we don't want things to be drawn out you know I know people are trying to get a token and we want to just run the points

campaign in a tight and timely fashion yeah I love it okay you mentioned ERC 404s earlier that's a narrative that has really taken off recently I mean it's an unofficial token standard which was launched by Pandora I think like two weeks ago roughly so quite new and you guys are already jumping on board and using ERC 404s how are you using them maybe actually before we talk about how you using them what are your thoughts on ERC 404s why do you think this is an important token standard and why do you think uh it's going to be used by others so I think it took off because for as long as nfts have existed people have tried to fractionalize them and they

want that erc20 trading volume that that you don't get on nfts it's never taken off and the reason has always been because the approaches have been taking existing 721s and then tokenizing them and that requires like even though it might seem like a small step the incremental friction in ux to do that is really high you have to get all these people that bought these nfgs to go and do this I mean they might just not do it right and there's nothing you can do to stop them so we've seen that like nfx was one to Sarah was another nfx you know you would go on nfx as crypto Punk pool it just wasn't good execution it wasn't liquid enough and so it never really took off

and then you have 404 come out and the reason that 404 is taken off while these others haven't is very simple the only reason is because from day one the second you create the nft you have this liquid token pair and that that difference in ux is it may seem small but it's huge and so as a result all these people got so excited and you saw a bunch of these projects launch over the last couple weeks and it remains to be seen like what kind of staying power they they obviously have now I will say that the one thing that the 404 does not do is it does not maintain uniqueness of token ID so if I earn a 404 nft I don't get the same the same nft back that

takes away a lot of what the nft contract standard does best so for example at first I thought maybe you know you could do a lot of interesting things with rwas here I'm starting to think you probably can't because I need to be able to redeem that one nft for that one rwa connection if I can't do that it really kind of diminishes the value there but I think so far the way that people have thought about it generally and it's and logically is I'm taking nfts and I'm turning them into ec2s and I'm creating liquidity for ec2s what we found most interesting about this just selfishly is the other direction so taking your 20s and turning them into nfts and obviously the reason that we like that is because we support

nft lending not air C20 Ling so if you can take ec2s and turn them into nfts and have uniform asset sizing for that then that starts to open up a lot of potential for just the Tam of our Market as it exists today so that's great I'm happy about that and we want to support these 404 projects and we are actively trying to support these 4 or4 projects give them leverage on our on our platform the thing that we have been experimenting even more with within the context of our own governance and I'm not sure this is something we'll implement or not but it's it's something that you could do is the idea of applying different governance power to different nft IDs I'll explain more you

may be familiar with the concept of dual class shares which is having like Class A and Class B shares within like public traded companies so Facebook did this this was something that Facebook is very well known for because Zuckerberg owns 90% of the Class B shares those Class B shares have 10 to one voting power over Class A shares and that basically just means that Zuckerberg has total control over the path of the company it does not mean that his shares have a different economic value they don't get like more dividends you know nothing like that I mean for all intensive purposes the economic value is the same it's just the Gan Val it's different I think this is really interesting in the context of

404s because every time you burn an nft and mint a new one you create a new token ID that's one it increments by one each time and so what you could do with the 404 standard in the context of a governance token is you could actually create the concept of dual class shares so you could have class A Class B shares where nft IDs one through 100 are the class B shares and nfts 100 through 1,000 are the class A shares the class B shares have 10 to1 voting rights and so if who gets those 100 it would be the team that started the project and the reason I think this is kind of

interesting is the the reason that the class B shares are popular is they're primarily popular amongst founder-led tech companies and why is that is because the founder needs to maintain some level of control over the vision in order to get that company to a stabilized State no crypto Protocols are in a stabilized State they all decentralized too early yeah and they decentralize too early and then what happens is that protocol fails to achieve its Vision I think maker Dow has accomplished a lot of stuff but they're a good example of this they have a lot of bloat overpaid employees things move very slowly and ultimately had you given maker Dow the autonomy to really operate that as a as a business

I think they could have gotten much further and I actually would say to even maybe give a spicier take salana and it's fairly centralized decision making has made Leaps and Bounds on the technical front relative to ethereum's decentralized approach there's a whole other side of that equation obviously but I think that that's kind of interesting and so could you create a scenario where you have a new standard where governance tokens give that team governance power without giving them economic value like outsized economic value so they can continue to drive that Vision forward without worrying about like losing control and having this bloated vehicle that you know is just basically getting robbed by all these

individuals coming and making governance proposals and so on and the key is that that power is only governance power because if I ultimately want to sell my shares the only way that I'm going to be able to do it is an erc20 it's very unlikely that you're going to find some OT buyer for the nft side and a second I sell those shares I burn that low token ID and I get a regular token IP a regular just Class A share basically so I think that's pretty cool you could basically maintain control the team launch a token realize the vision get something to true escape velocity beyond the way people think about crypto projects but actual escape velocity to the degree of like a large tech company

equivalence and then you can give up relinquish control once that Vision has actually been realized right so this was something you were thinking about and it's not like we're definitely going to do this but that concept like as you start to iterate on those ideas there's a lot of interesting things you can do with the 44 that you couldn't do with just like a standard erc20 in the context of a governance token yeah that's fascinating I not considered that use case and it's made possible because an ERC 404 can either be an ERC 721 or an ERC 20 but it can't be both at the same time as you said you when you switch you basically have to burn and

then mint the other one and so that ability now would there be a risk of and also I just actually have to say first I completely agree with this I believe in decentralization all of our listeners do I think everybody in crypto believes in decentral ization but I also know as a multiple time founder that you do not achieve quick decision making and growth and productivity when you start with decentralization it is actually heavy and slow and very challenging especially when you're dealing with internet strangers who are all around the world and work in different time zones and now I got to

coordinate all you and figure out how to get you all to make decisions together like no thanking right so yeah by the way most of those people don't want to vote any any way and if really are unhappy they can vote with their feet and sell their shares you know sell their token and then that that's enough I mean that drives enough of a decision any yeah totally so you said you're not sure if you're going to do this why wouldn't you do it what are the risks uh legal risks I think probably one of the biggest challenges with this concept is it inherently is a centralizing force and so are you then going to run it you know have problems with SEC or something

because you can't make the argument that this is a sufficiently decentralized now I think that I think there is still an argument to be made and and the point is that the economic value is not different and so from an economic standpoint you do not own 51% of the network or whatever I think that's the key I think that's why you could could possibly do this but that would be the probably the gating factor I mean when we all timately do launch a token it won't be through a US entity or anything like that so we're trying to do all the best practices you can possibly do but still like that's probably the main reason why you wouldn't yeah yeah thanks SEC and American regulation for making things

way more difficult than it needs to be we're just trying to innovate here come on like jump on board help us out and you got Gary going on what was he on the other day yesterday was on cnvc said that Bitcoin isn't decentralized I mean I just can't take the L Gary just go home man like go pick another battle with somebody else please it's hard to be a crypto founder because it's like come on man you think that we don't have enough of a high bar to cross like if we get hacked then it's just game over all the money's gone we'll never be in business every kpi of our business is entirely public some guy can make a dune dashboard show the whole world whether

or not we're doing a good job and just be totally accurate or not like we already operate under the highest standard possible of expectations and it's not from Regulators it's from the people that are in this space and the fact that it's all permissionless and then you add on top of that you know all this regulatory hate and like all these people in Congress just saying you guys are all scammers and criminals and it's like man it's a tough industry so tough It's so tough I really empathize with Founders like yourself not to mention when you do launch a token now you also have a whole bunch of shareholders and I'll put that in air quotes who are

yelling at you constantly on Discord and on Twitter for not making their price go up when they don't understand really what you're trying to do and what you're trying to build you know it's being a crypto founder it's like being a a founder of a public company and a found under of a startup at the same time well everything is also onchain and can be accessed by anybody I mean it's just yeah it takes it takes big balls so kudos to you David and your other F like the protocol at least it's fully permissionless and that's something that not everyone can say you know everyone will claim but I can actually like academically defend that this protocol does not need me or anyone to work

properly and neither will the government token right I mean for all intents and purposes we'll have some admin fee that you can turn on if we wish but or if if the token holders wish but like there's nothing centralizing in any aspect of that I mean even on frontend stuff like you don't need us to host a front end and in fact the goal here will be to proliferate this set of SM contract so much that you're just going to interact with these pools on all these other platforms like the watches platform and all of that and so like that's a good feeling for sure from the Leal side of things to know that this actually functions as as it should as a truly permissionless protocol does yeah yeah

kudos to you and the team it's super impressive what you guys have built and you've done it in so many of the right ways before we we wrap up here I just want to give you a chance to uh tell people where they can follow you on Twitter tell people where they can learn more about meta Street we'll obviously put links in the show notes but the floor is yours to give any shill that you would like yeah Twitter at Conor more or metre is med. XYZ I would just encourage people to like follow us hop in the Discord we are insanely responsive so you know people just want to come in and have no clue how anything works and ask questions and get tailored responses like we like doing that so we just want people to like explore this

space get excited about it the way we are excited about it and excited about kind of the potential here and ultimately become users and like earn a lot of yields ideally you know we want to create products that make people money so we're totally open book awesome okay we always like to finish with a a speed around just some fun personal questions sometimes I let our guest prep for this but you didn't get a chance to prep so this is really off the cuff hey first one since since you're an an nft 5 platform I got to ask the obvious is is there any nfts that you have that you would never sell I have a uh a soulbound kyc token that I cannot which is a plug for a platform

called quadrada which I think very highly of they're doing kyc offchain and then creating a soulbound token which ultimately means you can do stuff like unsecured credit which is something that we are also exploring and want to do but no I I have like some coaps and buff Buffy corns from E Denver and that kind of thing like all very aventur ofm Collectibles David and and Ian both the my co-founders have multiple crypto punks but I don't have a crypto Punk or anything like that but yeah probably just the random event driven Collectibles cool okay one prediction for 2024 definitely Bitcoin alltime highs I think in this in 2024 you think yeah for sure I'm pretty bullish on foraster I think foraster will end up

doing super well and I think that between meta Street Arcade Nifty 5 these nft platforms a big part of narrative and conversation within crypto is whether or not there's something to speculate on to date there has not really been I think with all these platforms kind of reaching that Dow stage that decentralization stage and hopefully launching governance tokens you're going to see a lot more conversation about this stuff and a lot of people also will make that same leap that we've made of it's not just crypto bonds it's not just these you know are nfts but there's fill in the blank other things and getting excited about that so is this going to be nftf summer we've had defi summer yes is that what's

coming it will be nft five summer I love that I love that I'll start pushing that narrative as well okay last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it I think it would be something around just being like self- Sovereign and owning your own you know your own future owning your own assets I really feel like in today's day and age this is becoming extremely topical crypto's become extremely bipartisan there's all sorts of implications of Freedom associated with it it's impossible to be in this space and not feel strongly about that and actually fascinating to see such a strong ethos within an industry like previously in my life I've not experienced that so I

think that's really fascinating so I think it' be something to that effect like the importance of self- sovereignty the importance of freedom of control of your own money and just like recognizing that this is for the best this is decentralized approach to life is a better version of life for you and for your family it's a long billboard but I'm with you we we'll we'll go run it through the marketing team and get them to you know tighten it up a bit but yeah it's so true like self- custody is really the underlying connection across all of blockchain and crypto and doesn't matter what Revolution you're talking about that we are creating within this space whether you call it web 3 or crypto or blockchain whatever term you use to bucket it all together you know

self- custody is that base layer all of this and whether it's money or it's data there is so much advantage to self- custody that I think we've gotten so used to not having self- custody it's almost like we're blind to this fact that hey we don't control our we don't own our own stuff and like that's a big problem we're only starting to see those problems take more place in the past decade but yeah I think I I completely agree like I don't know maybe it says you know take custody of your or something like that yeah that was just my chat gbt prompt for my four-letter billboard post amazing Conor just an absolute

pleasure to have you on the show shout out to you and the team at medist stre for everything you guys are building really excited to follow along hope our listeners participate in Ascend and take advantage of that points program I think we'll have to have you back on in a year or something like that when as you said more of these real world assets come on that might lead to the big explosion that we're talking about yeah thanks so much for having me I you know it's like these projects raise money it still takes them two years to launch but so many of them are here now and and they're right at the cost of launching so very exciting next couple years Rocko man thanks so much for listening in everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web3 Academy your one

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