Nike's first NFT, Optimism Coin and Stripe crypto payouts

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode gm gm welcome to web3 academy what's going on it's the weekly roll up wow what a what another crazy week i keep waiting for the week when we're not going to have any news to share but here we are again jay coming at you from whistler what's up kai what's going on if we ever have a week where we have no news to share that's really bad and we're in the wrong industry i think so let's hope that that never happens i i don't really think that ever is going to happen

because i i said to my mom the other day that i feel like we're on the frontier of like we're like pioneers on the frontier of something new i don't think she fully got it but no definitely not the famous bank bankless quote we're going west that's right we're going west we're going west well welcome welcome to the listeners great to have you here uh always always excited to share the web3 news of the week with you guys before we get started i just want to take a minute to share some gratitude uh amongst all the craziness of life uh important to take a deep breath and remember what you're grateful for uh i'll start us off today uh i am

grateful for my morning oats uh my my morning routine has become simplified because i eat the same thing every day for breakfast uh and uh oats are delicious i've got i've got a down pack i've got the recipe got blueberries banana in there a little applesauce sometimes you know it's just great way to start the day so grateful for oats amazing amazing uh i am grateful for a place called lance's left which uh is this beautiful long left breaking wave uh which is maybe i don't know 20 minutes from where i'm living in papua uh you gotta i mean you can walk there i

guess from the town but it's quite a difficult walk and far so you usually would pay a fisherman to jump on his boat and he'll take you with your boards and then you jump out of his boat and uh and paddle into the waves and um we went on tuesday morning at about 5 a.m and it was just beautiful there was basically nobody there so it's just like three of my friends and myself and we just got to surf this like huge beautiful wave it was like overhead uh overhead and a half kind of size and uh just caught some amazing amazing waves and uh you just you don't get that in many places in the world so super grateful for that opportunity man i'm it's crazy 5am i bet you got a nice

sunrise too oh beautiful beautiful unreal unreal uh all right well before we jump into the news kai what's what's our web 3 word of the week web 3 word of the week is optimism and you're going to see why that's the web 3d one i am very optimistic about web3 but as i teased last week there was potential for an airdrop and uh oh is it ever happening and oh is it ever beautiful not just about the airdrop itself but of just kind of what they're doing so we're gonna explore that later in the episode uh but optimism is the word of the week i love it i love it well on top of exploring optimism today uh we're also gonna run down uh some new

things that are going on in uh defy with uh mortgages and crypto payments around stripe there's some news that's come out there uh elon bought twitter we got to touch on that at some point um we're gonna talk about uh some exciting stuff going on in the nft space uh and we're gonna finish off with our nft of the month which i am personally super pumped about and you guys will see see why later um but to start off uh i think kai and i we always talk about the really the ethos around web3 and the core values of web3 and and the culture of web3 which often does not get the

greatest um image in traditional media uh you know a lot of negativity around crypto and uh we really believe it's you know it's part of our responsibility to push the positivity the optimism uh around web3 uh because we're really here for really the purpose of making the planet a better place um and so we just wanted to sort of take a minute to share a little bit of our thoughts around um that that that that culture and that ethos of web 3.

yeah i think uh as new people come into the space they they come in because numbers go up typically right there's like big brands coming in there's money to be made and i think people forget or don't have never even learned like what is the actual true underlying purpose of web3 and so i tweeted out you know the entire purpose of web3 is to build a censorship resistant permissionless trustless and open internet and so i just said support the protocols and the tech that is focused on that otherwise we'll end up back in the same place we're already in so there's a lot of hype there's a lot of excitement about what web 3 offers but if we don't continue down the path of building it the right way if we don't think long term

then we're going to just end up in the web 2 world of you know and big entities owning it all anyway controlling what we do controlling what we say and it's like what's the point in all of this um and so i feel like it's important to keep reminding everyone or keep teaching everyone like look this is what we're doing at web3 it's not just number go up it's actually we're trying to build a better internet that allows freedom of everything um and so i think it's just important important to to remember that and thankfully when i tweeted that it got a lot of engagement a lot of likes uh it just shows that like i guess other people do care about this thankfully i just let's just touch on a couple of these words because there's a lot of the language here that is really particular

to web3 new language that hasn't really been used in the past um permissionless trustless immutable that words not in this tweet but um you can just give us a definition of of those words right so so permissionless means that you know you can interact with a protocol or a blockchain without asking for permission you don't need to sign up and let them know that you're above the age of 18 or that you're from the united states of america or that you are whatever you know you've made this amount of money it doesn't matter right it's permissionless which just means that anyone at any time can just go and interact with it and that we've never really had in the internet before it's

always been gated by some sort of company and so that is huge permissionless trustless means that i don't need to trust someone else or another entity to hold my value right right now everything on the internet is trusted right we don't actually own any of the money that we have in our bank accounts we trust a bank to um to hold that money for us to custody it for us when we pay for anything on the internet we trust a third party like stripe or paypal or whatever to to make that payment for us right we have to trust them but at any point they could block us right um and so that's censorship resistant right so um in web 2 we don't have that right we see it all

time with facebook twitter etc people getting banned people getting some of their stuff shadow band where it just doesn't show up anymore because of what you're talking about so we don't have freedom of speech right on the internet technically um we don't have freedom to own on the internet technically what you do in the u.s particularly um and so uh those are kind of like this is the idea of web3 is if you think of what in the physical world i can give someone money and that is like with cash and that is freedom to transact right freedom to um to trade with someone and no one can stop that right um and so on the internet we don't have that yet and that's really what web3 is trying to to build also i can speak to someone i can say whatever i want to summon in the

physical world no one can just stop that and again i can't do that in the digital world but that's kind of the promise of web3 but in order to do that we need the protocols and the blockchains that we're using to be censorship resistant to be permissionless to be trustless and to be fully open if we start to build blockchains that aren't those which those do exist in this space already um then we lose this and and everything we think we're building is is all for nothing anyway yeah the other word uh that we hear a lot is immutable can you can you explain that quickly yeah immutable is is basically it can't be changed so you can't go back and alter whatever it was right you can't go back and alter what you said or alter what

you um you know maybe you maybe you gave someone money you invested in something or you transacted something you just someone can't go back and just alter that for you right um which which can happen in the web 2 world of course and so that's kind of the the idea of immutability great and so the the the product that comes from blockchains that are all of these things is block space and we talked about this i think a couple weeks ago in the roll-up um and and to me i think block space is the most important product of the 2020s because block space is basically freedom of speech on the internet right block space is freedom to transact on the internet block space is freedom to own on the internet block space is

freedom to interact permissionlessly on the internet without block space we have none of that we don't get that so block space ends up becoming this very valuable and important product which we're already seeing i mean yes to interact and to transact on ethereum is quite expensive but it's because it's the most permissionless the most decentralized the most immutable the most whatever it's all those things and it is it is the most of all the other blockchains which means there is a lot of demand to use that right and so of course it costs a lot to use that because there's a lot of demand and a little supply now they're working on that with layer twos and things and other blockchains but you can already see there's so much demand to have freedom to do all of these things on the internet because

it's never existed and now it does it's just not a lot of it yet we need more block space and um i'm optimistic if that gives it away that this is gonna happen yeah and i think what this what this means to me and what i think this should mean to our listeners is to participate right like i think that you know there's so much happening in this space there's so much growth and you can often feel left behind you can often feel confused or lost and that's okay and the only way to learn and to be involved is just to participate right um get a digital wallet uh

transact with that digital wallet um buy some crypto or buy an nft uh and just see don't don't go spend your life savings this is not financial advice um but just engage and participate and take a look at ether scan if you have a if you if you have a crypto wallet and you've bought crypto or you've bought nfts go look at your easter scan look up your address on easter scan and see oh my gosh look at how readily available this data is how permissionless how trustless it is like it is it's something that once you engage with more you learn more etherscan is like a ledger basically where you can go and see all the

transactions that have ever happened on a on a public blockchain uh it's very interesting and something we should share and talk about more actually in the future yeah totally yeah uh all right shifting gears one of one of kyle's favorite uh memes what this is a picture of i don't know who this is do we know who this guy is it's not like a celebrity or anything no okay so it's just a dude with a solid mullet and a sweet mustache and uh looks like he's from i don't know the 80s or the 90s kind of thing because he's also got like a doll shirt with a purple collar on it and stripes so uh but it just says fintech in the front defy in the back and this is something we talked about we we often talk about is like you know the

the d5 um applications and protocols that are trustless and permissionless etc we're probably not going to use those like most people are not going to use those you can right because it's permissionless so anyone can use it but what's really going to happen is the the good ux applications will be built on top of that right so you'll have fintech which is like your paypals etc which are very user friendly and that's what we'll interact with and use that's fintech in the front defy is in the back which is they're going to build on top of these protocols because again they're permissionlessly decentralized no one can stop it um and and they'll they'll use those foundation layers and we'll just use the fintech on the front and so that's the the the mullet right you got fintech in the front d5 in the

back party in the front i don't know what is it um something in the front party in the back uh it's uh oh my gosh what is it yeah i can't remember whatever it is anyway we'll come later stripe is is basically starting this off uh with the the d5 mullet here um and they're introducing crypto payments and so what's really cool here is i mean everyone uses stripe like most websites are using stripe to um to pay and um to process payments and now what you can do and it's it's still just a a pilot project but one of the features they have now is you can actually just click over and pay with crypto and what you do is you connect with your web3 wallet so your metamask wallet etc you

just connect in you choose what you're going to pay with so i think it's just usdc right now and it automatically makes the payment for you and so to the user this is amazing because they're used to paying with stripe but with a credit card and now it's just click crypto wallet and it just connects into your wallet and away you go um and so it's it's actually easier than using a credit card because you don't have to put in any details you literally just connect the wallet that's in your browser and boom the payment's made um so they're testing this right now with twitter for i think um creators and things that are on twitter um they're now going to be able to get i don't know if it's tips or payouts um but uh they'll start there with twitter and then they'll they'll expand out further

um they wrote an article about this so here's what's really cool it's not just that now you can pay with crypto um one of the things that um that is difficult for some countries around the world is they can't actually use the payment rails that stripe uses so stripe has to use u.s payment rails i don't think it's swift but i forget what the with the rails that they use um but anyway they have to use that and any countries that are sanctioned or don't have access into those they can't use stripe and so there's a lot of countries um in the world i'm not sure if they put it in here of how many um 70.

today business around the world use connect to program programmatically send payouts to over 70 countries and local currencies but while we are continuously expanding our geographic coverage many countries remain out of reach in part to the intrinsic complexity involved in supporting these local payment systems unfortunately this makes participation the online economy harder for many of those who stand to benefit the most so imagine living in a country where you can't buy things on amazon or buy things on like i don't know most websites right like this sucks this really sucks for development of that country for growth of that country because they can't buy all the things that everyone else's can buy around the world and so um so only 70 countries i don't know how many countries in the world but there's a lot

and over 200 countries in the world so right so strike can only manage and work with 70 right now that's all it has what it says here though is using this um using a crypto wallet it can now reach everybody in the world so anyone who has internet access who can um get a web through wallet which is anyone because it's permissionless they now well once this goes live to the world they can now use stripe and so because of web 3 and this permissionless um functionality all of a sudden stripe can now open to billions of people instead of whatever it is with just the 70 countries so a huge huge huge unlock to the world for for online payments um kudos to web3 and uh and it's ethos and

and the two use cases that pop out to me for this when we talk about the 130 plus countries in the world that don't currently have the ability to to transact online um is education and and work right so you know you think about education in the developing country uh well the amazing thing about the internet is the access to incredible online education online courses well imagine that you couldn't buy that right and now you can right uh once this once this rolls out or another one is work right you know you're you're an online worker you're trying to get a freelance

job um outside of your country and you want your employer to send you money and uh that that can be difficult right and so uh really two big unlocks for the developing world and for opportunity for these people to grow and to be able to uh you know to to accelerate their life and improve their life 100 percent super cool unlock exciting all right twitter speaking of twitter instagram twitter uh take it away jay take it away what happened elon did it he did it um i'm sure you heard the news by now

elon musk officially is the new owner of twitter uh for 44 billion dollars he has purchased twitter and twitter is now a privately held company um i don't know how much we want to get into the reaction of this twitter is not a privately held company yet he's just now the now the owner of it he can take it private which he has not yet done that'll take some time right sorry sorry sorry well likely will be it's headed in that direction right um so yeah line from the twitter board the twitter board said we conducted a thoughtful and comprehensive process to assess elon's proposal with a deliberate focus on values certainty and financing the

proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium and we believe it is the best path forward for twitter's stockholders what a negotiation this was i mean i'm sure you you saw the amount of memes that i saw about the negotiation at the fastest negotiation there's ever been and all public for us all to watch um just straight to the point uh you know what's gonna happen next what does this mean um i don't know i don't know there's there's a lot of speculation you know is this a good thing is this a bad thing to be seen to be seen um but very very big news for for twitter and it hopefully will be a good thing

because it will open up freedom of speech and will allow um assuming elon takes us in the right direction will allow more of the web 3 ethos that we talked about at the beginning well that's the thing here and this goes back to again the ethos this will help everyone kind of understand it's like yes elon is pro freedom of speech he's pro a lot of the things i think that we want and that web 3 wants whether he integrates web 3 or not i don't know um but here's the thing it's it's still owned by one person and so we still have to trust one person so this is not trustless and that's again the promise and kind of what web three is why it's important because what if elon has a bad day he wakes up someone pissed him off and he's like you know

what screw freedom of speech you know like he just wants us which he can and because he's the majority not the majority he's the sole owner of this company and so whatever he wants he can do and that's that's the problem with web 2 is it is in control of certain people and we don't want that we want it to be in control of the community or the users the people that actually use these protocols or these products um so super cool i'm i believe in and i'm optimistic that elon's gonna do well with twitter but uh but it still sucks that we have to trust and that's that's the whole thing all right next up uh another sort of defy mullet uh application is there's a lot happening

uh around mortgages and real estate within the crypto space in the d5 space uh mainly targeted at the amount of uh crypto rich that are out there that have tons of crypto assets and but if you want to go get a mortgage and in traditional finance what they're going to use as collateral for your mortgage is your bank account and your current employment right so um they want to see your salary and they want they want an employer to be the one that's showing you that you need permission is what he said exactly you need permission right you need

permission and so a lot of not only do a lot of crypto people struggle to get mortgages freelancers struggle to get mortgages because they don't have that salary in that employment letter so the permission the bank is not in favor so this is an example of one and there is many that i can keep seeing pop up a lot happening in this space of um a a bank that is allowing people to purchase homes while continuing to hold their crypto because one thing you don't want to do with a lot with a lot of crypto people don't want to give up their crypto because if you sell your crypto you don't have to pay tax on it

because it's capital gain and you possibly lose out on the upside which a lot of people are holding for the long term diamond hands right so what's interesting is that there's so many ways that this is being done in this case the way it's being done i'm just trying to find find it in the article is that um okay so this twist here um instead of simply paying for property with tokens borrowers pledge their digital assets as collateral no down payments necessary that enables the holders to keep their coins avoiding taxes on capital gains and theoretically benefiting from rising

values for both tokens and the real estate it also heightens risk by using a volatile asset to purchase to finance purchases at a time the heated us property market faces a slow downturn from the fastest jump in borrowing costs in decades so basically they're getting a loan by putting up their crypto as collateral um and and this loan is specific to to houses and it's a bank that's doing this so yes which is cool i mean i think this we're going to see tons of this like why would you not right um it's harder to do this with traditional assets because like what are you going to do with gold you're going to lug a bunch of gold over the bank like here keep this as collateral and then give me you know 500 000 so i can buy this house or whatever it's like didn't really work and you

can't really do it with like stocks and stuff because well you don't really own those stocks you just have a paper you know what i mean like a piece of paper that is like an iou to that stock so like banks wouldn't want to accept that what's interesting though is when you own crypto you actually own it it is an asset that you you actually own not customed by someone else and so you can give that to them to hold as collateral and uh and it makes sense um and as crypto becomes less volatile it becomes more popular and and distributed across more people i think it's going to be a great tool and yeah you don't have to sell and take taxes it's it's incredible now again this is the the way to do it with traditional um you can also go to something like maker dao and you can do

it permissionlessly right you can do it um through smart contracts where you have to trust someone um and you can put your bitcoin up for clutter or your ether for collateral right now and you can get a loan and die which is like a stable coin and you can go buy whatever you want with that um and this way you i mean the interest is also way cheaper um typically uh but uh but you don't have to trust the bank or get permission right because like jay said if you're a freelancer and you don't have um you know whatever a steady income you might not get that loan so um really cool what it's unlocking here i think yeah yeah and sticking with the real estate um i've got pulled up here a company called lofty marketplace uh which is a tokenized real estate uh investment

opportunity so you can buy fifty dollars of real estate using tokens right so it's like fractionalized i wonder i would assume what's happening here is um the house or the land could be either is an nft and then you can fractionalize the nft and so you you end up creating a fungible token um let's say you have 100 or a thousand or whatever of these tokens that represent that nft and now you can distribute those tokens to a bunch of owners instead of just one person on nft now you have it sort of fractionalized and a bunch of people can own that i actually did this with um uh i think it's called fractionalize nft is the protocol but you can go and let's

say you have a very expensive high value nft like um like a crypto punk or a board at yacht club you can toss it in there it spits out tokens for you and then you can distribute it on uniswap and people can buy it and own part of it so i owned a guy has like 108 crypto punks or something like that it's insane and the value is like 30 million or something and so i bought i think like 500 of it or something um just to own like get some upside towards crypto punks um which is cool because most people can't afford a crypto punk but you could still get the upside to it if you if you bought the fractionalized token and this is the same with real estate now which is cool yeah yeah yeah and really cool to see that unlock of

fractionalized ownership is it's going to make investing in things much easier for anybody right the other thing that's cool is like you could buy a massive piece of land and then you could what people usually do is they buy a big piece of land and then you split it up right into lots and then you sell those lots you could buy a massive piece of land you could split those lots up via nft and now you can sell them to people and then if that land continues to sell because maybe it's like way before development is in that city um as the original owner of that land you could put royalties on it and so every time that land sells via nft you actually create a little bit of income on it um that's kind of cool as well yeah yeah yeah

yeah it's an interesting use case all right let's let's get optimistic optimistic okay so we talked about this last week optimism which is a layer two of ethereum uh and this is uh so um i don't know i guess i don't need to explain what a layer two is i think we've already talked about it or do you think that we should we should cover that jayla i think you should explain it i think you should explain it okay so um layer twos okay so blockchains have this sort of like trilemma for scaling so um basically the more decentralized a blockchain is um the the less scale it typically has right this is why ethereum is so expensive there's only a certain amount of block space that it has and once there's more people that want to

transact on that um the gas like the costs go up really really high because the more decentralized means the more people that have to like verify what's happening essentially so there's sort of a trilemma between decentralization between speed and um and then costs and so some blockchains uh just say screw decentralization and we're just going to allow this thing to be extremely extremely fast and we're going to allow there to be as much block space as possible so that it's super cheap but there's only a couple people validating the blockchain which is a very big like centralization component and that's a big issue right so like finance smartchain for example it's fast fees are pretty low it's basically a copy of ethereum except there's like 18 validators all

owned by binance and that's it so they can it can be fast there can be lots of block space and they can sell it for very cheap but at any point binance could just be like that shut it down right it's only 18. whereas ethereum has like i don't know 300 000 validators right so a big difference so there's always been this like um this sort of trade-off and that's kind of how layer ones blockchains have always worked is like you're either very decentralized it's expensive or the opposite or you're somewhere in between um but what always happens is the moment that a blockchain starts to get busy and a lot of people start to use it because it's cheap well that that the demand goes up but the supply doesn't change and so what ends up happening is the gas fees

go up so even finance smart chain for example has started to get somewhat expensive even though it was built to be super super cheap but because a bunch of people just started going there and so if you want to onboard a billion people to a blockchain that's never gonna work it's just gonna get clogged the same thing so what ethereum has done and what their scalability solution is is well why don't we build blockchains on top of blockchains and so the way that that's what optimism is is a layer two right and so basically this is a blockchain that um doesn't need to worry about decentralization because it gets it all from ethereum so you you do all the transactions on these layer twos but it's not actually securing it what it's doing is it's taking all the transactions that

happened and then it's bundling all up into one and then it's activating or sort of like running all those transactions all at once through ethereum so it takes let's say a million transactions bundles it into one and then does one transaction on ethereum so it's still using ethereum's decentralization security um but it's super cheap because you know a million people are splitting that one transaction now right so what's interesting about this is the more that people use these layer twos the cheaper it gets so it actually has flipped the like this scalability trilemma on its on its head is that the is that the term and so the more that people use these blockchains the cheaper it gets in that

in the faster it gets um which is completely different than every other layer one blockchain it's not possible on layer one blockchains so anyway this is sort of the future in most researchers and like people that have been in this space for a long time this is the future of where we go we're all gonna use the layer twos and no humans will use the layer one so anyway optimism arbor trim is another one they launched back in september they've just been kind of working out the kinks it's very new technology and um they have all the big apps are now on there and users can use it i think it gained traction to about i don't know 300 000 or so people or 400 000 or so have been using it um and they got to the point where um they were able to take off the

training wheels one where now basically it's been it's it's no longer a centralized um block uh protocol it's it's basically like a public good just like ethereum is and it looks and feels and and works the exact same as ethereum at this point um and so it was ready to go okay let's let this thing free and let's get mega growth because it's working and and um it's kind of set up so what they launched um and announced on i i think it was monday or tuesday um is that they are launching a token a token called op um and so this token is to um do a few things retroactively sort of like reward the community for helping use it even though it wasn't like this fully decentralized protocol yet so it helps

reward the like early testers and members of the community whether you're a builder you're just a user um or you're a core contributor kind of thing and then also the way that this uh works and the reason you drop these is now you have governance so the future of optimism is now being determined by the community rather than just the let's say investors or the core contributors so that's their big announcement um this airdrop is very different than um many of the other ones uh and it's very exciting actually to what they're gonna do so let's let's go let's dive through some of this so we can kind of share what's happening here um so the airdrop is going to 250 000 wallet addresses so that's not people because some people use multiple addresses in fact i'm getting an airdrop to two different

wallets um which is exciting um but anyway it's a lot of it's a lot of addresses a lot of people that are that are getting this and this is just the first airdrop they actually announced they're going to do multiple because they want to continue to reward the community and the people that stay involved and stay using it so can you actually open up that picture there it's very interesting uh yeah just click on that picture so it's very interesting the way they did this airdrop usually people just airdrop the same amount to everyone it's just like if you've used this protocol in the past you get a token which is cool but not really because a lot of people farm these airdrops right they know that a token is probably coming because they know that protocol wants to decentralize so people just go and do like you know

wash trades or whatever so here's what optimism did that i think a lot of others are going to start doing because this is very interesting is so one anyone who made a transaction on optimism prior to june 23 2021 they will get a certain amount of tokens okay so there's 85 000 people that did this um then there's repeat optimistic optimism users so those who are like the power users let's say but then what optimism did is this is more of a growth strategy um and a strategy to like onboard people who care about um ethereum ecosystem care about scaling um and just care about public goods so what they did and this is um we'll show you the results of this soon because it's

pretty incredible is what they did is they rewarded anyone who's ever voted in a dow on the ethereum ecosystem ever doesn't matter if you've ever even touched optimism if you've ever voted in a dow you you are eligible to get some optimism tokens so what a great marketing tool and growth tool to bring people into your ecosystem if all of a sudden you look in your wallet and you've got these tokens from op you're like well what's this right and you also the way you claim them is by doing it on optimism so now you have to use their protocol so what a sweet idea then you have multi-sig owners so these are all anyone who has a multitake is typically a business owner or someone who's contributing to a project um and so they get the optimistic

optimism token so now you're getting the right people right you're getting entrepreneurs and like um people who are controlling protocols and companies onto optimism as well so that's really cool they have git coin donors so anyone who's ever donated on chain through git coin is also going to get rewarded here amazing because one of the things optimism wants to do is the the um the value that comes or the liquidity that comes from this optimism token it's going to be in the hundreds of millions probably billions i would i would guess pretty early on and what they want to do is and also optimism generates a lot of revenue what they want to do is take that money and invest it slash donate it to public goods so um

public goods could be something like um poap for example is a public good right uh which is a proof of attendance protocol that allows you to just make an nft out of nowhere um no they don't make any money from that it's essentially public good they want more things like that because that's sort of the ethos of web 3. the final one and this is really interesting um because this is sort of the war between l2s and then all the new alt l1s like solana and avalanche etc is people were priced out of eth right out of ethereum so they had to go elsewhere and so what optimism has done here is anyone who is priced out of eth which they define as they're still active on ethereum so they they were on ethereum at some point but they bridged over to polygon to arbitram to solana to

gnosis chain anyone who's done that is also going to get rewarded uh with these op tokens which is cool because a lot of times people say well ethereum is a there's a whale chain and you know i don't get these airdrops and things because we just can't afford it well now everyone all those people they do um and so really really cool marketing tool growth tool and just overall i think this is gonna make the the ecosystem grow like crazy and i think more protocols will do uh something similar to this we'll see yeah a couple of things that i find very interesting about this one is um this tactic of airdrops as you mentioned as a growth and marketing tool is just in

such a phase of evolution right like what an airdrop looked like a year ago is not what it looks like today and optimism is clearly leading the way by involving more people in their airdrop but i think the other thing that is really important for us all to understand here is just a little bit about the back end of what what enables this and when we compare it to web 2 it's a great comparison so in webm2 if you wanted to reward your customers or even like your your potential customers your potential users um the only way you really have to do that is to hope that you have all their email

addresses or their mailing address you know before web 2 you could have sent them something in the mail and then with web with web 2 you could email them right or their pixel you could also pixel but or you could pay then you have to pay that centralized company in order to use that pixel and put your right whatever it is you want to reward them and and then you would you would only be accessing them you wouldn't be directly accessing them you would just be you would be getting in front of them somewhere where they are online right um but now with blockchain and digital wallets you can do what optimism is doing which was not possible before

so it's a really big unlock for the potential of reaching customers really right and exactly what they're doing because you look at this this list here so there's about 250 000 people on this list that they're air dropping to and i'm just going to try to do quick math but i would say so to i i would say that about half of those over half of those might not have even used optimism before they might you know and so that's what it what a reach to reach those customers and be able to bring them into your your world and your ecosystem absolutely not to mention they i mean they said

this is one air drop so uh they said there's going to be more air drops and so what happens we can actually skip this one because we just went through that but what happens when you tell people that an airdrop is coming actually skip to the next one because we'll just we'll show this growth stat first whatever you tell people that there might be an airdrop people start using your product because they want that free money look at this chart here so for those that are that are listening and can't see this is a chart of of unique addresses on uh on optimism and before this announcement there was 300 and i don't know it looks like something like 350 000 addresses um on optimism and in one day that bumped to 806

and 500 so an increase in one day of 456 000 addresses that is insane growth absolutely insane growth and again i bet you that this chart continues to go up i bet you that's not just a one-time thing insane now okay so it's not all about growth um what they're really doing here they're also kind of pioneering and experimenting with governance that's really the idea of this and optimism has been one of the like leaders of really trying to make um governance fair and equal trying to make things and continue to stick with the decentralized route um and so um what they did is they actually launched two tokens so they launched op

which is what we just talked about everyone's gonna get that and then they launched something called it's called the citizen house i think um yeah the citizens house and this is where people will get to vote and you can't buy this this is actually an nft and there's only i don't know a certain amount of them um and basically the way that you get this token to to vote is um you have to earn it and so it might be by contributing it might be by using there are many different reasons or ways of which you could earn these um these tokens but this is really cool because a lot of people farm this stuff right like a lot of users so either farm it and just like game it

so because they know the air drops coming or they don't really know anything like i probably wouldn't be good to vote on optimism and where the protocol goes because i'm not a tech person per se i'm not a developer by any means um and like i don't know i understand this stuff a little bit but not enough that like my vote should really matter but there are many people who are really heavily involved in care and like they should probably be the ones who are voting or at least have more voting rights than i do right because if i wanted i could just buy a hundred thousand dollars worth of these tokens right now and have a big vote in this and that doesn't make any sense and that's often what's happening right now in our dows um and so optimism's trying to change that and instead they're doing

an nft voting system um whereby you have to earn these tokens and so vitalik um is actually uh tweeted this out and he says possibly the biggest attempt at non-token holder centric dow governance so far excited to see where this goes um so if vitalik is is eyeing this then you know it's something that's that's out there and it has some potential italic's been a big proponent of i hate or he hates the whole like one token is one vote doesn't make any sense because people can just buy their votes um this is gonna change the game hopefully we'll see how it plays out this is an experiment yeah yeah i think that the the governance side of tokens is not a side that we talk a lot

about because it's just not as exciting and sexy as the the speculation and price goes upside and that's where everyone's focused but the potential for tokenomics to change governance is enormous across across all of our institutions and organizations in such a positive way but nobody's really figured it out yet right it's still in this evolution so very exciting to see how these guys here are doing it because oh my gosh my phone is ringing apologies sorry party foul um tardival yeah uh yeah so really exciting to see

different usages of governance and one thing to know is like so optimism is a protocol it's a public good that is holding already close to a billion or has like a billion dollars of value locked into it and it will be multiple multiple billions hundreds of billions in the future so like this needs to be fully decentralized and so a decentralized fair governance really matters here you don't need to take this much thought and effort into governance if you're something smaller like a small little dow doesn't need this like crazy amount of decentralization like there's a spectrum that's required here and if you're a small little business or something like it doesn't

you don't need this so don't think that oh optimus is doing this like now everyone has to do this and if they don't then it's a product because it's not fully decentralized wasn't this fair governance like no you don't like this is going to be because of this it's probably going to be slow to make decisions but that makes sense when it impacts you know millions of users and billions of dollars but a smaller business like guys sometimes an entrepreneur one person making decisions is actually really good that's how you get done and that's how you build innovations and products right like vitalik was on his own when he first started the idea of ethereum and it probably would have never happened if it was a hundred thousand people all voting like this thing would have never got built so like

don't it's there's spectrums and it's okay you don't oh there's trade-offs and it's fine right you need different things different products different businesses so just keep that in mind yeah well it makes me think of uh the the chat we had with uh we did an interview with um jeff kaufman from jump dow on on tuesday earlier this week and we talked about um the the hype of decentralization but the the good and the bad of it and it's exactly what kai just said is that in the beginning decentralization is slow and difficult you've got to start with centralization you got to start with small team and

not scale fast because and i think a lot of people in the web 3 space are making that mistake by just aiming at oh how can i get the most people involved build the biggest community as fast as possible get as many people involved in my dao and that just makes it sluggish and slow and you lose engagement you you know you need if you have if you're giving out decentralization you're giving out voting to a whole bunch of people then you have to worry about getting them to vote and getting them engaged and that's difficult right think about even just getting getting citizens to vote in our in our in our government elections is difficult right so when when your decision when the decision of whatever it is that you do or your your app does your protocol does whatever when it

impacts a lot of people that's when it needs to be decentralized when it doesn't impact a lot of people it should not be decentralized because that makes no sense right and even if your idea is to like like fake twitter for example that should be decentralized because a lot of people rely on this to communicate with others around the world and if twitter shut down that would impact a lot of people same with facebook right so the idea is start centralized build and when it becomes something important or holds a lot of value then you decentralize because decentralization removes the risk of getting shut down right and so that's when you want to decentralized is like as things become bigger and more important and even if your idea is to build something that's

big and important it's not when you first start it so just start centralized and then decentralize as you go which is exactly what optimism did right like they've been centralized they still are actually um but they started decentralizing their protocol and now they're decentralizing governance but it took time like they've been in business for years right they've been building for like five years now well and and and we we could probably keep going down this but i just want to pull on one more quick thread here that i think is really interesting is the old model would have been to go public right so uh a a web 2 business what what did they all do twitter facebook amazon they all went public and what happens

when you go public now your core objective is to shareholder profits and shareholder gains right and so you become fully focused on what makes the most profit which is what leads to you know increase price decrease expenses focus on margin and you're you're run by a board that has that singular objective right but now in the web three space you have this potential to grow to raise capital without having to go public and you can actually achieve that same level of growth

but you can do so in a way that is decentralized and that is i mean a huge shift in in the way that we're building companies and building some of the biggest companies in the world absolutely okay that was that was exciting i'm optimistic exactly uh and so speaking of growth this is a chart uh for those of you that can't see that are listening of um web three monthly active developers since 2009 and uh it's basically just going i mean basically what it's doing is when price goes up it goes up it goes exponentially up when price kind of evens out well this was during the bear market of 2018 2020 you can see it just

kind of stayed around the same it still grew but it was like not a lot of growth and then 2020 when prices started to take off the developers basically doubled getting close to double by the end of 2021 um and then so this chart only goes to december 2021 i'm really interested to see what's happened over the last few months because um we price has not been going up it's gone down right or slashed sideways for the last little while uh but investment has gone up like crazy into vc so i wonder if there's if there's more like if they're continuing to grow or not we need an updated uh chart on this at some point and and we can share that i know um some friends were at um dev

connect in amsterdam this weekend and every single protocol there was hiring and basically what they said is look we've basically hired like there's just no devs left in web 3 is what they were saying it's like they've hired them all and there's just there's no more to go around so it's like we we need to figure out a way to onboard the web 2 devs uh over to web3 um because there's just basically none left so i don't know i'd be interested to see what the chart for 2022. so if you're looking for a new career go learn solidity and be on the website yeah and if you have the updated chart please send tag me on twitter and post it and send me or put it in the discord channel whatever um this is another chart which is kind of interesting uh i don't know what we

can take away from it exactly but it's looking at the number of eth and btc addresses with a balance of less than .01 uh native units of btc or eth and so basically .01 would be sort of um it's not whales right it's not institutions it's basically anyone at this point could potentially hold that the only difference here is like point zero one of a bitcoin is a lot more than point zero one of each so it's kind of weird to compare this um you almost need to compare us dollar rather than um than uh the native unit um but basically you see from uh what is it 2017 on ethereum has just been exponential rise like non-stop just

going through the roof bitcoins as well is growing it's just growing much slower and i think what i take away from this and again we'd have to compare on usd numbers rather than native units but what i think you see is there's so much more utility in a smart contract platform than it there is on a um store of value blockchain which is what we can call bitcoin um and so they're you're just going to onboard so many more users into smart contract platforms like ethereum and salon etc then you are bitcoin um again it's not to take away from what bitcoin is but bitcoin is doing something very important in the world hopefully if it continues to grow as it does but like it i think over the last few years you can see that the the market has spoken

and they care more about gaming and nfts and you know all the different things like the the social aspects of tokens and all the different things that you can do with the smart contracts people care about that more than they do just like buying and holding yeah bitcoin's not as fun you know it's not fun to just buy and hold like i want to do stuff i don't want to participate there's no moon birds on on bitcoin no no i think the other the other point this chart makes is uh the the points around the the timeline here so this chart goes up to january 2022 uh and it starts in january 10 although

ethereum doesn't even come on this chart until january 16 2016 january 2017 and bitcoin is basically you know at like a hundred thousand people even less up until like january 2013 but when when it really starts to go it's like january 2016 january 2017 and we're at at that point we're at about 2.5 million addresses and now here we are five six what was that six years later and we're at 10 million addresses for bitcoin and 20 22 and a half million for ethereum so really this is just it's hyperbolic growth right there is

it's network effects so for anyone who's ever uh looked into like if you invest in tech you're looking for network effects that's why facebook grew so much right network effect or metcalfe's law is basically one more person comes on that's exponentially better for the network because one more person tells all their friends and when one more person comes on that means more people want to come on because now one of their friends are on and then when another friend comes on you want to be on even more right and it continues to grow grow and grow and that just like spreads and spreads exponentially that's kind of metcalfe's law and if you think like bitcoin has that absolutely and that's why it's had this amazing growth but if you think of ethereum's network effects or smart contract platforms network effects it's not just the network effects of money right or the

network effects of developers coming on it's the network effects of artists and it's the network effects of like um these like defy some people are into d5 there's a network effect there there's a network effect of those who care about art it's network effects for those who care about music there's a network effect for those who care about dows and it's like a bunch of network effects compiling on top of other network effects and that's just like it's insane you know it's absolutely insane brain goes right yeah yeah all right let's move along all right let's keep moving uh some some exciting news uh out of the nft space to share some quick hits for you guys um nike launched their first nft uh so as you

guys might remember nike purchased artifact studios uh i believe like end of last year maybe like december november december of last year and they have now launched their first nft which is these digital sneakers uh and since launch and launch was what like a week ago uh not not long ago since launch these nfts are now trading i was taking a look at them there's i think there's four three or four collections um of sneakers and the they're trading at about two to three eth now uh on secondary market there was even one pair that sold for

east which is the equivalent of about 450 000 us dollars so there's a lot of a lot of activity a lot of action happening here i think the reason that we bring this up and and adidas also has been making their play into the metaverse when they launched um their nft uh about six months ago um as well and so but the reason we bring this up is whether or not you believe in the metaverse and what's happening there there's a lot of big brands that are making their plays into that space and some people wondered when nike launched their shoot would it come with a physical shoe as well like would you be

getting a digital shoe and a physical shoe and as of right now no you're not you're just getting the digital shoe and we've also seen dolce gabbana other fashion companies are leaning into the metaverse space because there's this belief that as we spend more time in the metaverse and our avatars are there fashion matters and we care about the type of shoes that we're wearing and the shirts that we're wearing and i'll be the first to say this sounds crazy to me as well right what are these shoes can i can i put them on like my avatar like if i own a mee bit can i put the shoe on my bit is that how it works i i don't know if you can do that yet but i think that's the general that's probably where

it's gonna go that's where it's going yeah the the terminology can you scroll up the terminology they're using in this article is absolutely amazing so first of all these are called crypto kicks which i think that's hilarious and then they say since the virtual sneakers launch crypto punters have been buying them for between whatever price what is a crypto punter is that like a like a trader or like uh yeah i don't know i don't know a flipper it's so funny um they look cool though i mean they look sweet we'll see what they do i'm sure nike i mean look adidas did the same thing they launched their nfts people like what are these four and then they started doing a bunch of cool things and if you owned those original nfts you got a bunch of sweet stuff whether it was experiences yeah or um i

think they did uh real physical stuff um and so i'm sure nike's going to do something similar um but uh yeah so and it also sort of it it connects to the a couple of things of the power of nfts one is um that you can you can build on top of that project so somebody who buys in early you can you can gift them something later the other thing that that nike has done here or artifact studios has done is they've developed um skins and so you can i think right now you can just purchase these skins and basically upgrade your shoe right um and make it more valuable and more rare but what other people are doing is they're saying

you can play a game or you can interact and as a result of playing that game then you get a skin and you can upgrade your shoe and that gets into the play to earn space uh so yeah lots of really interesting applications um anything else to add there kai so let's let's wrap up here with our nft of the month uh our nft of the month is this one's an obvious one i think moon birds uh obvious is it obvious because i am a super stoked and proud moon birds holder hoot hoot i i think that and because it's basically all the rage of nfts at the moment so it's a bit of both but

truly truly wild what's happened and so i'm not i'm not gonna dive into the moon bird story because i feel like it's been told a million times um and you've probably read about it or heard about it what i actually want to focus on is um why moon birds is such an interesting project and one of the reasons why it's such an interesting project is um it's it's really a utility project right the entire purposes project is utility and one of the areas of utility is called nesting the the more common term in crypto and web3 space is staking and a lot of these projects are using this idea of you can

stake your asset uh and put it into a locked space and as a result you gain rewards for that now because these are birds they called it nesting which is quite clever um and and it's great it's tons of fun i nested uh my moon bird and what this allows is um in 30 days i've been told or we've all been told that we will get our first reward so when you make it to 30 days my nest will generate some sort of reward for me i have no idea what that reward is i don't expect it to be considerable in terms of its monetary value you know i could see it being they actually took our addresses in the

reward system so possibly they're gonna mail like maybe they're gonna mail us stickers or like a t-shirt or something like that with your moon bird on it i can see that being it um or it could be a digital reward because obviously it's easy to airdrop something to our wallet um but what's interesting is just some stats around this so um actually i'm going to pull up dune uh dune is a great site if you haven't used it before for looking up stats on the blockchain it's like an analytics site uh currently there are um about nine thousand there's ten thousand moon birds total total and about nine thousand are nested so that's ninety percent that are nested right very high number and

what what the moon birds team has talked a lot about is that what what you want to be able to do if you're starting a business is you want to be able to reward your most loyal customers right the early people deserve the lion's share of your rewards and we talked earlier about optimism and their airdrop and what board ape yacht club did when they did their airdrop was there was no you got when you when you when they air dropped a coin you got a point whether you had owned your board from the beginning or whether you just bought it the day before there was no difference right and so uh there's this idea of how do you reward loyalty and um which is i think

really exciting in in what moon birds is doing and another example of um a reward that they've talked about is so in the nf in nfts it's very common i'm sure you've heard of you know there's ten thousand or there's seven thousand or eight thousand uh and what a lot of the what they do is with these these number of the collection they have rarity within that collection and so within the moon birds collection kevin rose who's the founder of proof which owns moon birds has sort of given the alpha that there is a few very few i do not have one of these moon birds a very few of them are um inspired by x-copy which is one of

the original artists nft artists and they are going to air drop they're going to do a raffle and somebody who owns those few rare nfts moonbird nfts is going to get an x-copy um nft so you can see how they can they can reward but they can also gamify uh and it's just i think it's super exciting to see these incredible applications of nfts absolutely i think the only uh other thing i would add is like these are all cool and if you look at what board a yacht club has done it's token after token after token just dropping until you create a product and generate revenue all this doesn't matter because

it eventually goes to zero so we'll see what moon birds does um they have big plans to build and they've done it before in the in the web 2 world so um can you build i mean they build a brand from all this can you now build a business around that that's exactly yeah yeah exactly all right well that's a wrap thanks thanks for joining in thank you everybody couple couple things to note uh we are hiring right now we'd love you to join our team uh if you are interested in uh joining our team we're looking for marketers copywriters people who are interested in growing businesses in the web 2 and web3 space particularly around crypto and uh

and web3 um shoot us a message uh also um if you're not in our discord join our discord and uh yeah can't wait to see you guys next week thanks for listening thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on

account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one