Punk6529 on the Significance of Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks - Ep.331

Transcript

hey y'all a few quick announcements before we begin first this episode is longer than a typical friday show but that's because this is the first ever podcast interview with punk6529 and once he got talking and he's an excellent talker i just wanted to let him run so even though it's longer than a normal friday interview it is well worth your time second i have a number of book events coming up soon so if you want to see me or get your book signed please mark your calendars for these events and i will put all the details in the show notes and very soon we will also be putting a section for upcoming travel and events on my website laura shin.com okay so here is the rundown friday march 26th from 4 to 5 p.m i will

be doing a book signing and reading on the harvard campus at hbs aldrich 11. i will be interviewed about my book by nf castle's michelle choi and will also do a signing and q a the next day saturday march 27th i will be moderating a panel at the harvard blockchain conference from 3 to 3 45 pm with nft artist people pleaser nf castle's will lopkowitz and michelle choi and nifty gateway ceo patrick mclaren on tuesday april 5th from 6 to 8 pm i will be doing a reading and signing hosted by the city of miami miami beach and future perfect ventures at sky yard in miami beach gelachoban putra ceo of futureperfectventures will

be interviewing me and we will also do a signing you need to rsvp by april 1st information in the show notes this is right around the time of bitcoin miami so get there a little bit early and you can come to this reading on saturday april 9th at 11 a.m i will be on a panel at the annapolis book festival on tuesday april 12th at a time tbd i will be at startup grind's global event in redwood city california and this particular conference is focused all on web3 and finally i will also be at the pbs seattle cross cut festival which takes place from may 4th to 7th and i will also be at the oslo freedom forum which takes place from may 23rd to may 25th details on these events tbd

okay now on to the show hi everyone welcome to unchained your no hype resource for all things crypto i'm your host laura shin author of the cryptopians i started covering crypto six years ago and as a senior editor at forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time this is the march 18 2022 episode of unchained if you're frustrated that your bank account isn't crypto friendly it's time to make a change on juno is a powerful new checking account that lets you buy spend and earn in crypto it's free to open an account and even comes with a metal card

download the on juno app today with the crypto.com app you can buy earn and spend crypto in one place download and get 25 with the code laura link in the description point change is the easiest way to earn passive income using crypto you can safely deposit cash or cryptocurrencies to earn up to 20 percent annual yield there is no lending or market risk just simple high return yield farming create an account today at try d5 dot cc slash unc and receive 40 usdc that's tri d5.cc unc [Music]

today's guest is punk6529 welcome 6529 thank you very happy to be here last friday yuka labs the creator of the board api club announced that it had acquired the crypto punks and me bits collections from their creator larva labs why don't you describe what else it was that they announced with that acquisition and how you think this will change things for crypto punks and me bits owners great and i'm happy to do that and i think before we discuss that specifically i think it's probably useful to take a step back to what the punks represented in the space what maybe hugo labs represented in the

space because i think beyond the technical aspects of the transaction i think there were quite a few let's call them narrative aspects or psychological aspects that are embedded in the various reactions that people had to this so if that's okay maybe we do some context setting so the punks are not the first nfts but let's say they're the first nfts that reached popular knowledge popular social construction they have been in the last year at all points in time the most valuable collection by

most metrics of the market capitalization of all the punks cumulatively and they had this let's say counter cultural narrative right there's a lot of og punk holders and particularly the early punk holders are people who saw value in nfts and saw value specifically in the punks early or at least saw narrative saw art saw that this was something worth claiming initially they were free or collecting this led to both a certain community feel among the punk holders

and a certain aesthetic and they are in fact punks then they're low-res punks but they're they are punks so they have a countercultural vibe in what they're representing visually and this abstract aesthetic is 24 by 24 pixelated aesthetic has dramatically influenced the space as has the structure of the collection right whether on purpose or by accident the crypto punks have set the base model for what a pfp profile picture collection looks like that it's

around 10 000 pieces that there are dominant hierarchy traits so in the case of punks humans zombies apes aliens and that there is a generative aspect in how those their various traits are randomly given to in each individual punk and many of the traits in punks you see reflected in many other pfp collections right so whether it's a direct homage or it turns out that those are traits that people find appealing for example hoodies turned out to be a quite appealing trait in punks even though they're not a particularly rare trait

and so many collections proceeded to then have hoodies as a trait because they've seen the market reaction on which traits people like to use to represent themselves in a profile fixture identity so the punks were let's say nine months ago the completely unchallenged leaders of the profile picture category right and some of the largest nft sales that had ever happened were elite punks the alien punks that were between 10 and 20 million dollars and the view being that there's only nine of them and so those nine might become

almost unimaginably valuable over time because of the historical provenance of the collection right that's let's say where we were in may in may is also when the board apes launched and the board apes i think it's fair to say there are three things that distinguish them from a lot of what was happening during that period that was a period where a lot of collections were trying to mint at relatively high prices or to create escalating prices during the mint so bonding curves where the price of each successive mint or group of mints goes up and

it ended up it has turned out as the field has concluded this is a bad idea it actually it's bad for the collection to have people on day one having some people having paid one price and some other people having paid 20 times the price actually leads to unhealthy dynamics in the collection so the one thing that did which other collections also did they had a low minting price 0.08 eth say that's bucket one bucket two is they have a also a distinct aesthetic it's an aesthetic that is more depending on how people discuss it right some people might say it's more fun some

people might say it's more mass market if you follow the discussion among various you know punk holders online some might say it's kich and some might say it's cringe right it's this very it's if the punks are more abstract right the board apes are much less abstract but it was an aesthetic that resonated people liked them right different people on the whole than the people who liked punks but people did like them i was looking at a chart earlier today there is a 9.1 percent overlap um between punk holders and board holders so

nine percent overlap across the collections and one of the things i was thinking about today was if you turn it into absolute numbers it is remarkable how small they are there are another way to put that statistic is there's 910 people in the world who own at least one punk and at least one board ape which in a world of 8 billion people is not a lot right i i famously own some funks i also own some board apes i'm one of those 910 but really that's not a lot of people right so the aesthetic was distinctive i believe and i've always thought it would have it would resonate which it has

and then the third thing that they did that i think was an important part of their success both directly and indirectly is they were a collection that conceded the ip rights in the apes to the token holder and this question of rights and i won't get totally distracted into this right now we can maybe circle back to it is one of the more important collection that the topics in nfts because they're most almost all cultural objects certainly all art

operates under a standard model where the artist retains the copyright right so and there's a lot of confusion including about non by non-nft people in this regard where if you buy then it's easy to think about right if you buy an andy warhol soup can and the the indie warhol has not transferred to you the copyright for the andy warhol soup can right there andy warhol and then the andy warhol estate has retained that coffee if you buy a harry potter book you do not own the harry potter franchise right and so 99 point i don't know how many nines percent of all cultural objects ever created are in this model as are today most nfts you know most

almost basically all generative art all one of one art is still in that traditional model a little bit of photography has experimented with other models and where the real experimentation has happened and really since last may has been in profile picture collections and part of that is because the value of a profile picture collection is reflexively generated between the creators in the community right a profile picture collection in abstract is hard to imagine how it generates value right the the reason it generates value is people use

it i famously use a punk profile picture and for better or for worse whether i'm viewed as being helpful or not helpful to the space it somehow reflects on the punk community or better of course but this is true in general for pfps right so which community adopts a pfp how they use it do they coalesce into some type of group with an identity is what actually drives value in a pfp collection the art might have some role in triggering that but it's not the main outcome i believe right like the

if the crypto punks was a collection launched tomorrow for the first time the crypto punks would have not become what they are right the crypto punks were important yes there was an interesting aesthetic but it was an interesting sonic and a moment in time right and that moment in time was in 2017 that coalesced a certain community around them this concept that the token holder can own the rights for that nft and then also commercialize them was a big idea and it is a big idea that so far it's less about i think the how it's been used in practice and more about the narrative

so in practice we're still very early for people to have built large commercial enterprises using their pfp right you see different i'll call them experimental issues so someone has launched a derivative collection using their board ape as the starting point for that collection someone placed their ape on a micro brew someone pastes their ape on a coffee brand someone djs and puts the ape in the background someone licensed several of their apes to be some type of virtual band none of these are large commercial enterprises yet

but the narrative i think does flow into the value of the board apes the thought that maybe i can do it or maybe someone else in the future can do it if the idea is that someday the board apes become an important global brand that effectively you somehow own part of the franchise is an important part of the board apes narrative and the success of the board apes reset in many ways what is now the market standard for pfp collections right i have a fairly aggressive view of this i believe

now the only two viable choices for a pfp collection are either commercial rights like the board apes model or the whole collection goes into the public domain and it's a very interesting discussion which of those two models are going to win but it's hard for me to imagine that a new pfp collection launches in 2022 says the community that's going to use it is going to have no rights to the value that they co-create with the artist i don't think that's a competitive proposition in 2022.

so what happened over the course of the year the board apes broke away from the thousands of pfp collections were launched in 2021 right there's there's huge survivorship bias in pfp collections right so everyone says oh my gosh i wish i had border party and there's no one in nfts that wishes that they didn't buy like 20 board apes right but there are many collections that looked like they might be somehow what's similar and didn't go anywhere and so some combination of how the collection was structured but also the team execution led to the board apes accelerating away from a lot of other collections

and late last year there was this competition i put this in air quotes between the board apes and the punks which was really primarily on the board ape side all right that the board apes side um said oh maybe we'll catch the punks and you know a lot of board apes holders were people who were priced out of punks in may or in june or july right and then said oh well here's our own community and it's interesting i mean all the pfp collections are still tiny if we are going to have mass adoption of pfps of nfts collections of ten thousand twenty thousand thirty thousand in the world of billions of internet users are tiny right so you end up with this strange

effect that i don't think anyone has solved yet of things that are good for the collectible value of the pfps are bad for building a community because very quickly they run into prices that are unreasonable for normal people to say i i want a profile picture on join a community and the ticketing is 300 thousand dollars right that's a pretty big ticket item and then what happened towards the end of last year the floor price flipped and i don't overstate the importance of it because i don't think it's particularly important but it was viewed as psychologically important for some and for our listeners who are not necessarily nft native the floor price just means what's

the price of the least expensive available piece in the collection uh available for purchase right so the least expensive order at some point was more expensive than the least expensive punk the analysis i've seen and done is the overall value of all punks together is still probably a smidgen higher than all the board apes together because the highest end punk pieces have traded at significantly higher values than the highest than port 8 pieces but they're broadly the same now right i think it's it's fair to think of them as broadly the same market cap

in collections which you know if you rolled back the clock to me and asked people if this might happen by the end of the year the average very sophisticated nft person would have given you a hundred to one odds against this right the punks from a value perspective were viewed as being untouchable now one more turn and then i think we'll get to the psychology so a little bit of the depends on how you want to look at it right and this comes from someone who has significantly more exposure to punks than board apes right so it's not i i'm not harassing the punk community i'm substantially exposed to punk community

but there was a little bit of then i don't know theory or coping i'm like well the punks are historical they're immortal they're immortal they have providence in 20 years we'll see who's still standing the board apes might be a fashion business right they're cool now but three years from now something else is going to be cool and this is going to keep happening like today everyone likes to wear supreme the next day everyone likes to wear a bathing ape these things will come and go but the punk's position at the apex of pfps is something that over the long run will

never change i think that was i believe the view in fact until quite recently so and there was substantial pressure on larva labs to change their policy on rights because you had this weird situation ten days ago where the counter cultural collection the historical provenance collection the rebels of crypto collection had the most restrictive rights policy of any major pfp project and there was this significant mismatch between those two

that the values i think represented by people who wanted to own a punk tend to be crypto values and crypto always tends towards decentralization but if you read the terms of service agreement terms of use agreement of the meebitz which is where larva labs truly laid out their a proper legal agreement well it was very corporate and i read that in may and i said wow that could have just been any type of big company terms of service agreement there's very little punky or counter cultural about this so there was a lot of pressure from some famous punks holder

like 4156 uh who has had a very famous punk ape and spoke to larval labs and said look we'd really like you to consider changing the rights policy and i don't know he claims they then blocked him on or unfollowed him on twitter and so then he sold his ape there was this in the background of this mismatch i think between narrative and and i don't think it's larval labs fault right like what happened is the market changed the environment changed we learned something in 2021 right this hadn't crossed anyone's mind necessarily in 2020 but in 2021 we learned about rights we learned about

public domain and pfp collections and so so this was the this is where we were one minute before the transaction was announced so before you go on i just want to make one clarification which is that i think the punks actually didn't have any policy and so people were also criticizing larva labs for not being transparent and when they finally released a policy for me bids people kind of felt that oh that probably is the same approach they would take to crypto punks but as far as i understand i don't think they ever even released a rights policy for crypto punks so that was kind of another issue was there was like a lack of transparency and clarity about it correct so the

best view of the punks community was that at some point in the punk's discord was there had been a posting by the larval apps teams that you could uh monetize up to a hundred thousand which is something similar that that appeared in the meebitz contract so the meebus contract the meet its terms of use gave a limited commercial license but one that i think in practice was useless it was a commercial license that tapped out at 100 000 a year now that's not to say that most projects will be beyond a hundred thousand a year but it's the type of thing nobody starts a business thinking you're gonna tap out of 100 000 a year right like by definition if that's what you think is going to happen you're not going to do

it and it specifically excluded digital objects which for a world and community whose whole basis of being is digital it was basically sure if you want to make a baseball hat for you and 10 friends do that but honestly i don't think anyone cares about that right like i don't think anyone i don't think the board apes are excited because they're gonna make t-shirts i don't think the punks were excited they're gonna make t-shirts i don't think the the big opportunities in the future metaverse of 10 years from now aren't we going to have t-shirts with our pf fiance and it's totally irrelevant and realistically it doesn't matter what they say no one's going to come and force you because you made a t-shirt with your punk god who cares like

even if they didn't say that no one's going to care so the announcement i believe was very bittersweet for a lot of punk holders and it was bittersweet as follows they got one thing that they liked along with one thing that they didn't like and the thing that they liked was that contemporaneously with the announcement la hugo lab said the punks will go under the same license as uh the board apes which means commercial rights have moved to the punk's holder this is something that a lot of people had asked for over time this is a good thing this is a substantive improvement in the rights of the punk holders and a

substantive improvement in the decentralization of the folks the part that they didn't like there's probably no more annoying person to have had to do that for the punks than you collabs right you know the labs was there they're a competitor in a way sort of not really primarily the board apes were competing with the punks right the punks were in this model of like look that's fine it's cool they should have their fun but the punks are the punks right the punks stand alone the punks aren't commercial guys trying to commercialize these things and suddenly it turns out that

larval sold the rights to in fact that very specific commercial entity and this has caused a lot of discomfort if you see there's there's both man a split liquid is probably too strong even i think there's also just mixed feelings among individuals right in that some people say well i expected more from larval apps right why did they have to do this or why couldn't they have just done this why did they have to combine that with a sale some other people say well the narrative has changed it's one thing to be the counter cultural crypto rebels and it's another thing to be the fourth

collection in a conglomerate backed by venture capitalists that are going to be clearly commercial it's a different narrative uh some people say oh well what happens next if you guys sold to facebook now our car our counter cultural punks are going to somehow be related to facebook that feels strange right feels off some people who worry that maybe hugo will do something cringe worthy with the punks like the punk holders on the whole aren't particularly excited for someone to make them

a punk's game or a punk's metaverse or any of those things right they tend to be fairly deep crypto natives a lot of them i think are fairly wealthy a lot of them aren't going to be grinding out in a game to pick up a you know some special thing in a game right they and so now there's like new risk factors to the punks that they might turn cheesy right like that so this is the negative side of the story i'll give you the positive side i i appreciate and understand the negative side right i'll give you the positive side though

the positive side is these are natural things that may happen when an indie band goes starts mainstreaming and if it wasn't going to happen here it was going to happen at some other point right you can't simultaneously expect that punk's mainstream and punks also are super counter cultural forever right those two are those two are contradictory and the reason i'm more positive about this than i think some of my fellow punk holders is i think this is funny to say i had baked in worse into my assumptions once i read the meebot's terms of use it was clear what larval lab's position

was right it was clear that this wasn't going to be some aggressive experiment on rights or what have you and so there could have been worse the punk's ip could have been sold to disney right and then disney could send a bunch of trademark lawyers to send us all cease and desist every time someone does make a derivative work with a punk or makes a t-shirt or what have you and this would have been a complete disaster right so the fact that it was sold to people who were the ones who moved the discussion forward on decentralization on rights right like and i don't know if they're like strictly the first project of this i think they're not but they're the

first just like the crypto punks were the first to really make a pfp collection work to really make an nft collection work right in a way that and you know now someone in my feed is going to say oh what about the pepe's road happy but the crypto punks practically succeeded the board apes practically succeeded in moving the field forward in terms of rights usage and so would it probably be even better for the punk's narrative if as people were suggesting you know larval abs put the ip in a foundation and gave the rights away and then took the keys the foundation and locked them away forever and threw them to the bottom of the

ocean and then the narrative could never change sure right i think that would have actually been the preferred option for most bunk holders that larval labs doesn't do anything ever again you leave the historical provenance clean there's no chance for something cringe-worthy to happen and we go from there however however as i explained to my friends but that's not our decision to make it's theirs they always had the rights they made it clear they had the rights they could have made whatever decision they want then by definition they did right and so given that they've made conditional on larva labs making a decision like that i believe

it is a better decision than if it had gone to a traditional media lifestyle entertainment company because something substantive has changed the substantive part that has changed is the license now is dramatically better and so for the first time in punk's history and this is going to be a little controversial i'm going to get yelled at later in discord the punks are actually in control of their own destiny because the punks can do whatever they want now either individually or in groups so there is a little bit of i think still

and is left over from the larval labs days where you know a lot of the punk's discord was like i wish lava labs would do extra do y or not do extra not dua today yuga might do something or not do something but you're not bound by it anymore no one is going to let's say yuga makes a punks game i don't think they will but let's say you don't have to play the punk's game let's say the punks want to do something else well one punk or two punks or 500 punks can get together and do whatever they want set up whatever narrative they want engage in whatever activities they want it's in the community sense now this is a maybe more complicated narrative right maybe it's a more complicated narrative than the punks are the holy of holies and they're going to be set in stone forever

and blah blah blah blah but to me i never quite 100 bought that narrative given that even the punks themselves aren't five years old i think one of the things that does happen in this space is we're watching social construction happen in real time right it's an amazing time to be in nfts because many things it's a combination not just of a new crypto art movement which it is but also a new technology for transporting intangibles which is an unbelievably big topic because societal intangibles are a multi-deca trillion dollar asset class

and so we now have rails to move around intangibles and because of a and b you can now make new forms of social organization things we have not seen before and there's a nuance here that i think is underappreciated most forms of how nfts are used are not securities which means you don't end up with the same centralizing influence that tends to happen or forces that tend to happen on tokens that are securities right and that you're very worried that they're securities and that that leads to centralization and good lawyers and having to make sure you don't get in trouble with sec

it'll be very difficult for me to imagine that i don't know the sec has to give x copy permission to release a piece of art right i'm pretty sure that's a violation of the first amendment right it's prior restraint of speech blah blah blah right so the fact in a way because they are one derivative away they're the tokens there but it's representing very clearly forms of speech you have the opportunity to experiment more broadly with social organization yeah well i just actually i just want you to hold that thought because we are going to have a quick word from our sponsors

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with the code laura link in the description back to my conversation with 6529 so go ahead you were talking about how you felt that you know these are not securities right and you see that allows for a lot of experimentation and so what you have is three things wrapped up together a new art movement a technology that allows us to own transport compose intangibles on a on digital rails and the ability to think about what forms of social organization you can do

in this space and so given this we have early hypotheses of what is going to work we have early hypothesis of what social construction will last over the long term right because this is all bitcoin was also social construction right bitcoin i am 2013 era bitcoin the idea that bitcoin should have value is a reflexive idea it's a self-generating idea it's a social construction form of idea and bitcoin has been incredible at forming the social construction whether it's digital gold or um never sell your bitcoins or put them

in cold storage etc etc etc these social construction or intersubjective myths or memes or whatever you want to call them they're all the same thing right that's abandoned social construction it's forming of meaning forming of cultural meaning bitcoin was extraordinarily successful now this is happening in nfts and so the first the social construction that owning a crypto punk is valuable means something and that valuable can be expressed in the value of the token itself is a new idea it's an idea that is a year old year and a half old right i did want to ask you a question about this

because crypto punks don't have royalties built in the way that the board apes do and i wondered if you felt because you know you were talking about how the community kind of maybe wasn't so excited about the fact that it was eagle labs that bought that acquired uh the punks and amiibots but there's sort of like already this difference between the collections and so i just wonder if that will sort of naturally um create a difference in how you collabs stewards the punks sure well i think the biggest difference there is reflected in that uglabs is much more valuable than larval apps right hugo labs is more valuable for a

couple of reasons but the first reason is it has an ongoing 100 gross margin revenue stream from royalties right and the ford apes trade pretty actively as do the mutants and a little bit the puppies but this creates an ongoing revenue stream that larval apps does not have and you see this reflected i mean i don't have a direct view on these numbers but it's clear that if you think through it the yuga labs has a multi-billion dollar valuation those are the numbers thrown around in the press over february and raised some money and had some money on balance she even had enough money

between those two things to buy both the larva labs health punks plus the punks and mieben's ip which means this ended up being valued at a fraction of so even though the collections are the same value right the buying all the punk nfts and buying all the board ape nfts will cost about the same the company yuga is much more valuable than the company larva and it's two things one is the royalty stream which is an ongoing value that moves from holders to the company right because it is in effect yoga is your five percent five percent i

know no more fans and they're five percent of the royalties i think is a five percent co-shareholder in all the in all the board apes forever right and also of course that the yuga team is much more commercial much more active much more likely to convince a set of vcs that they're going to generate a variety of new and exciting business opportunities and therefore their company should be much more highly valued whereas the larval labs team very expressly does not want to do this right they're geniuses right their contribution to nfts is irreplaceable i mean the punks

the autoglyphs which was the first on-chain generative art the amiibits will see over time how important they end up being but they're interesting and they were fairly cutting edge as well and what the team said very clearly is they do not find their best personal satisfaction in running a big commercial business they don't want to scale up a team and be business people but they consider themselves artists and programmers and they have historically been on the absolute cutting edge i mean nfts have basically three main categories

pfps generative art on chain generative art and one of one art twin shimmy in the rest of the world we just call this art the first successful collection in two of those three categories was the same two guys which is an incredible legacy i mean even if they retire tomorrow never did anything else it's an incredible legacy and to me i think the provenance of punks will survive the sale of the ip i think it doesn't really change it was several years ago that it happened that the punks happened they were clearly the ogs of the space

yoga seems to understand this right it was their announcement was very respectful i think they correctly said we're not going to do very much for now we just want to listen to the community right like i i do think the right way that they should be hand the punch should be handled now is fairly light touch for the time being let people settle in process it and see what happens now in the community and if what people want to do with their punks in theory more people can do more things with the punks now within practice a lot of punks holders are pretty crypto rich and don't plan to do anything with their punks i think some people will turn over i think some people will feel like

some piece of the magic is gone and it's interesting because it's all psychological even before the sale the punks were under a much more corporate context than the board apes the board apes legally speaking were much more web 3 than the punks but seeing and even though now the punks are equally web 3 as the board apes the fact that it happened through a business transaction i think feels cold maybe something like that like not what people yes i you knew in your back of the mind that might happen someday but it's different than you the

magma and in fact it did happen but i think the narrative is going to be robust to this and i think the you know if you had told me the punks were sold to some normal corporation and stayed under the old license and now you know disney's the new punks holder i'd be pretty bummed because i think it would have been very hard to imagine where that plays out now you have a substantive improvement in the decentralization of the punks and i do believe we are there's significant failures of imagination um among a good chunk of the nft community because a lot of people and

particularly again the more successful people the richer people they're like well i don't want to commercialize my nfts or then you say well i don't want to make a baseball cap with my nfts and obviously that's just a failure of imagination right where one eight thousandth of the way there from getting the whole planet into nft world and the idea that the most important thing one would do with a piece of interesting art and culture is make a baseball cap is a bizarre failure of imagination right we're going to be in digitally composable spaces and the fact that you can go ahead and try things experiment do different projects

and not have to wait for permission for someone not have to send the letter an email discuss the terms i believe over the course of time will lead to a much better outcome than any collection that we have to do it and so i'm pretty bullish overall even though i i know i think there'll be some short-term heartburn among some folks looking at it yeah and i also wanted to ask about how hugo labs announced it would be selling land in a metaverse and the block reported that the company was projecting it would bring in 455 million dollars in revenue largely off these virtual land sales what do you think of those plans look i can't have a particularly well formed opinion until i see exactly what

it is that they're planning to do what the technology behind this land sale looks like what the terms are of this land sale how it is organized for board apes holders versus the public without knowing any of these things i i can say some generalities i believe it'll do pretty well because you know there's a fairly excited community in and around the board apes world and the idea that oh we're going to have our land or i'll have our metaverse sounds exciting to people historically yuga has succeeded in all of their launches right so uh it would be strange to bet against them here

second and this is a very high concept discussion because it doesn't apply just to yuga it applies to all metaverse land experiments whether it's decentraland or somnium or there'll be many many more i do wonder if the construct of land sales is exactly right for these types of projects and i'll give you an example not from yoga because it hasn't launched yet but if you go through a lot of these metaverses you'll see you'll find yourself at times walking through a bunch of empty fields and looking around to see if there's anyone around and it

is quite frankly boring and it is quite frankly a failure of imagination to go into a computer-mediated environment and have empty fields there the reason you might have empty fields and not well-planned cities is because there's physical constraints on the land right like someone there's a piece of property and until they develop it and put you know millions of dollars of concrete or whatever it's empty in the middle of the city it's a parking lot that doesn't exist in a computer based environment you could vanish the empty fields right you could have portals from one place to another there is

i understand of course why all metaverse platforms so far are doing this they it is both an excellent funding mechanism to sell land right and so most of these land sales have done well and then there's the view of if you give some once you commit people through purchase of the land maybe they'll then expand additional resources both economic and [Music] psychological to develop it out right you know i'll say oh it's a mental model that is familiar to people oh i have a plot of land i can build something on the plot of land i respect that but it is also bringing a mental model that is based on a unmovable 3d grid of the real world

into computers where that's just not true anymore and i suspect i suspect and i can't tell you the answer because i haven't done it i haven't seen it but i suspect this is one of those of this category you know when the first when television first came out a lot of the early tv shows were radio shows with a camera pointed at the presenters because you were still stuck in the prior mental model land sales without necessarily having the solution the alternative solution to me feel like that that we are in the mental model of the real world where you know if there's going to be a 3d space in the real world

and you saw land you build a house and you go in and out of it and then we've transported it to the digital world and i'm not sure then it's going to be the right fit if you want to think of something more recent early internet right we did online magazines online newspapers right the 90s were all about that and were online magazines and online newspapers successful yes and you know does the new york times that haven't is the new york times more successful today online than it will be if it didn't have online of course but it turns out the native informational mediums of online weren't the new york times magazine but online but twitter and facebook

right where they changed fundamental parameters of how you convey information and those became massively larger businesses than the offline business now presented to you in the same format on your computer but this is not a comment specifically about yuga right it's my view generally about these metaverse land sales that and you know they've been successful they've been successful but i suspect there's a turn of the there's an orthogonal shift in the model somewhere where they'll be really successful and what do you also make about the company's announcement that it would

launch a governance token called apecoin as well as a dao so from what i understand reading their website about the coin it is a combination payment token and governance token but primarily a payment token right and so it's one of those you don't get any rights from owning it because if you did it would be a security and then they couldn't issue it to retail participants non-accredited investors they said that they and animoka are going to use it in their virtual world and so my and then there's a treasury that

the dao can vote on to spend for i assume community building type activities right so the treasury governance token part is fine in and of itself i don't think hugely exciting in and of itself that part shouldn't drive a ton of value the interesting question is going to be the payment token and you know again it's one of it's again social construction because the first question one will ask yourself is wait so where did these billions of dollars come from right they didn't exist because people are saying oh well maybe it will be maybe we'll end up settling out in a billion or five billion or ten billion you know where they come from right it makes no sense but there could be a place they come from

as follows if yuga and yuga's partners create various services online or metaverses and quotes or games or what have you and the in-game in metaverse sales require that token that does create a base level of buying pressure for that token particularly you know if they then sold at the next moment i don't know but if they held it right which i imagine they might you could i think accrue value into that token and use it but you'd have to and but i think they will make it the coin of the realm in a way for hugo world right and so

to me my mental framework on this is this is going to be the m1 of hugo world and i don't know is that going to be good bad and different well it's a great question i think it is the token i believe even the nfts i think this is what the crypto punks worry about i think the token of the nfts for the board apes are execution dependent as is the land as is the quote-unquote metaphors as is the game right whereas the punk's pre-purchase we're not you know by larval labs not doing anything which they're very explicitly so they're not gonna do anything great well you're not execution dependent like you also can't do anything bad right again in the and so

yuga's a higher beta play right if yuga hyper executes and becomes a quote unquote disney or marvel or whatever of the digital era well then the whole yuga universe the upside is vastly higher than oh it's historic collectible art right there will of course be over the next few years multi hundred million dollar brands formed in nft world right and did i say million or billion i meant a billion multi hundred billion dollar brands formed in nft world and so

yoga is a leading contender to form one of them but it's hard you have to execute and you have to execute on a variety of dimensions that are complete unknowns right now what is a successful metaverse built on nfts what is you know people say games again i don't think the state of the future world is going to be that everyone pays hundreds of games and hundreds of games universes of their nft collection because you know who has time for that right if you read between the lines and the huge announcement they're saying oh no i'm going to make a game where you can bring your nfts from other collections into my game right they're trying to be the meta platform they're trying to be the one

that okay could be could be if i succeed will be extremely valuable but it is execution dependent and it is a significant step up in complexity in terms of the execution from what they've done now so like looking at it just coldly as a business running a metaverse a gaming platform a token community and continuing to help community moderate the board apes community it's a big step up in complexity now they've executed very well so far they have unlimited capital available to them but nonetheless execution's hard well i guess we will have to see what

happens obviously at this moment it's it's all very new it's just an announcement and i think at the time we're speaking you know people are are getting kind of hyped hyped up about this coin so we will have to see how it all plays out 6529 i have to thank you so much for this incredible interview i just really enjoyed hearing your thoughts on all these things it was almost like listening to like a cultural historian sort of at the moment that all of this is happening and it was just a really fascinating discussion thanks so much for coming on unchained thank you so much for having me [Music]

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