Web3 weekly: the Ethereum Merge, Starbucks NFT rewards and Google in web3

Transcript

g m g m welcome to web3 Academy it is the weekly roll up before we run down all the top news in web 3. everything you need to know from the past week to make sure you look cool sound cool in front of your boss in front of your friends you know you can explain web through to your mom I'm Jaybird and this is Kyle reedhead and our goal here at Webster Academy is to help entrepreneurs businesses and creators explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and build thriving communities on today's show we've got some hot topics coming at you we got the eth merge it's merge day happy marriage day

we got Starbucks is launching their nft loyalty program I'm putting nft in quotes it's not using the word nft it's their loyalty program Google is getting into web3 jumping in on the fun we got a correction from last week on semi-fungible tokens and then we're going to wrap up with our nft of the month you're going to want to stick around for that some exciting stuff coming at you this week Kai what's up my man no not much just living the dream another big big week in web 3 as per usual that's for you guys for years well what's uh what's something you're grateful for this week Kyle oh this week I am grateful for the web 3

Academy Community uh and also the web through Academy Dao which is I mean kind of the same thing the Dow was born out of the community um but just been having a lot of conversations with members from in there that have been with us for a while have been following along the podcast for a while get a lot of good feedback from them Dow's been working hard to kind of get on their feet to figure out their Direction uh it's been really really cool to kind of watch this all play out and just you know get to know all these people um around the world to be honest um so it's really really cool uh also along with that we're trying to treat our community with a lens protocol handle uh due to our partnership with lens and we keep getting rugged uh I mean not rugged we keep getting spammed

um we'll show you guys later in the show um we basically are not going to mention it anywhere else but on here and we're going to show you the last thing you now have to do I'm really sorry um but we we now have 55 000 followers on lens protocol which is the large largest uh largest profile on lens by like more than double um so obviously we can't wait list 55 000 people break everything so we're gonna do one more thing that's going to help and hopefully we can get you guys what you deserve so I'm grateful for all of you and sorry to put you through all this just one more thing stick with us you're gonna get your lens handle sorry that it's taken so long but understand this is a problem that we are all dealing with of web3 right now is

yeah yeah but yeah it's just a lot of there's a lot of spammers there's a lot of people trying to you know a lot of bots out there that are just trying to get whitelisted trying to get on top of all these various platforms and it's not take advantage of opportunities what's your gratitude Jay I am grateful for my fiance Sam's family and they are all here right now uh love love thankfully we all get along and love I love my in-laws and I love I love Sam's uh brother and uh his wife uh and so they're all here right now so we've got a full house and the reason they're all here is they're helping us renovate our

home uh so yesterday I actually had to leave uh the home I felt super guilty because they're all like working on the house and renovating and I left to go to a cafe to do my our work and and I came back and came back there was new flooring installed in the house the outside of the house was painted uh so shout out to gore Jane Nick and Julie thank you so much for uh allowing me to run a business while you guys renovate our home very good grateful very grateful Super Lucky what's the web three word of the week I mean of course it's merge we

merged we did it we're here we did it we finally I mean we didn't do it but someone did it I'm grateful for those people that that did it for us and uh we're finally there there's no more proof of work uh we have moved on to proof of stake uh and here's a tweet from metallic which says the merge will reduce worldwide electricity consumption by 0.2 percent that's pretty significant man that's crazy um I mean I don't know what if Bitcoin went to prove stake I wonder what that would produce by but point two that's a very large amount uh considering it's the entire world's electricity grid so hopefully that gives us some nice um some nice you know PR uh that hey crypto

is actually doing things here trying to reduce uh electricity consumption in the world but yeah we did it we did it this morning uh well morning for me I don't know what time it went for you I'm in Europe so it was at I think 9 a.m ish is when it happened and it happened with basically no issues at all and we're all good and what's funny sailing you wake up and it's kind of like a birthday where it's this big thing you talk about you think about it all year and then you wake up you're like well it's just another normal day I mean nothing really changes in my day today anyway uh I'll tell you what does change though if you're watching on YouTube you can see we have ultrasound.money the website up which has been tracking a lot of um the issuance so we actually did

Twitter spaces yesterday as well where we talked a lot about the tokenomic changes in ethereum and um one of the big things is it reduces its inflation rate by like 90 percent which is pretty insane so you combine that with eip1559 which is the the burn so when there's transactions it burns some of the eat uh and the idea was we were supposed to be deflationary so Bitcoin has 21 million that's it well ethereum is actually you just it doesn't have a set number it's actually just going to go down and down and down making it very um uh uh what's the word they're looking for scarce and so since this morning I mean for me recording it's now five o'clock so it's been less than 12 hours and we have already decreased the supply the total supply of ethereum by 159 eth

and you can watch it live on ultrasound.money um so that is super cool exactly what we uh planned on happening uh is currently happening now at the same time the price is absolutely dumping I don't know if you saw it before we started getting on its record a year so I mean hey slide in demand Dynamics we always talk about and how this matters uh not today it doesn't but that's okay it is what it is thankfully we also live in in a in a current macro environment that is not not the greatest and and as well a media uh a media that controls your narrative and right you know we're we're feeling that but this is this can't be understated is the the supply change

here you can see on this 161 now we burned we've lowered to each since we started talking about this yeah look at this look at this chart before so this is uh yeah it was increasing a lot 5 am so this is in the one hour the one hour before we we switched we we added 1 000 over 1 000 East in Supply in one hour and now we're going down and now we're going down so yeah it's uh can we reduce the world's electricity consumption by 0.10 yeah which can't point zero two point zero two which can't be uh oh no

it's a point two point two 0.2 man 0.2 there's going to be a lot of I think that the big take here is what's going to be the impact over the next few months on the number of enterprise that are going to enter into web 3 because one of the big one of the major things stopping them was the environmental impact and they didn't want you know something somebody like I mean is it is it a the fact that Starbucks is entering right now is that because they saw this coming right like I think that there is there's definitely some Enterprises that will be coming to the space so yeah I wonder how long that takes to like play out it's like you

know we know there's this kind of supply and demand shock with ethereum we know that reducing the uh carbon footprint is gonna allow more more businesses to come in like does that happen immediately were they ready for it or were they like let's not even start thinking about it until they actually successfully do the merge so now it's like okay it works now we start to plan and build which means we're a year out you know or were they already planning I don't know uh I guess we'll we'll have to see I mean it's good guess on Starbucks you know they launched like what two days before this happened speaking of launching um here's ethereum proof of work I have their uh we have their Twitter up um and uh they are now live they went live like literally like an hour ago so

there is a proof of work chain uh it's called eth W Main net um that's about all I know the symbol is good for you wait we'll hold up one sec Kai hold up hold up what is what is ethereum proof of work yeah so this is basically the miners that were originally um validating or or um securing the ethereum network well they have all been shut off and now we just use proof of stakes right so all those miners all around the world they're they're um their equipment is essentially useless so they all banded together and said hey let's just fork ethereum and we'll just keep mining but this one will be called eth W and they just basically duplicate everything that's on that um

on the existing blockchain and then just continue on down this route and they so they just forked it and so they continue to earn eth but it's now eth W and that price will be very different than what normal eth is we'll see maybe it's more maybe it's less it depends on the markets and what they decide uh now I've we've talked about this before like everyone is supporting proof of stake so you can assume that proof of work will just go down proof of stake will continue doing what it's doing um but we'll see so this thing is now live um as for like can you go and dump your tokens uh I don't know how to do that yet it's still too early I saw something I think Kobe tweeted that it's on um it's on binance or no sorry it's on FTX

uh the token so you can actually get your airdrop there I don't know if this is true though but if you do have an FTX account I'd go check that out um and you might be able to get I think it's just at that point but when you click on like mainnet etherscan here or ethw scan it's um the server's down so I think too many people are trying to get onto it so they couldn't even support uh what's going on right now anyway so it's kind of a show for most people honestly I would recommend you just don't touch it because there's also probably gonna be a lot of scams and phishing links and things like that and just like don't get greedy here and try to double your funds like the chances that happening to be very slim um just keep keeping on and probably

just forget about yes I completely agree I think that's the best advice it's just do nothing because the odds are the odds are not in your favor here that it goes well too much risk too much risk I agreed so let's move on let's move on to bigger and better things Starbucks is getting into web 3. it's kind of talks about Starbucks what are they doing do you drink Starbucks Jay Starbucks before we before we talk about what Starbucks is doing in Webster right I don't know if we want to do that no I do not I do not do that Starbucks I used to be a big Starbucks fan but not

anymore uh okay yeah I mean being in Europe I don't think I'll ever go back to like Tim Hortons Starbucks and that kind of stuff I like but I mean I've also lived in South America for a long time and they have amazing coffee there too so I'm a bit of a coffee snob um so yeah I don't typically drink Starbucks either but anyway I appreciate and love everything Starbucks is doing to bring in onboard normies into the world of web3 uh so Starbucks Brewing revolutionary web through experience for its Starbucks reward members um so basically what is happening here is uh it's called Starbucks Odyssey and they are creating a Rewards program for their um for their customers so it's basically right in within the Starbucks app and uh

and you're gonna be able to earn or buy uh nfts now they're not calling it nfts so similar to what Instagram did where they call it digital Collectibles Starbucks is calling them stamps and what Starbucks says here is that people using these rewards they won't even know that they are using the blockchain and I absolutely love that that was one of the first things that I read in this um uh in their sort of report that they put out here so they will earn what's called digital stamps which are actual nfts so what's interesting here is like the users themselves with no idea that they're nfts but you can go and like track and see how well this program's going by looking at etherscan well polygon scan so you can see like on chain what's happening here but the users don't even

realize that they're doing it on chain so that's actually a really cool concept that I'm excited to like dive into and look into basically what's happening though is they have digital quests which gamify the Starbucks in coffee consumer experience to earn these stamps so you can also purchase the stamps via a Starbucks Marketplace they've literally created an nft Marketplace but you can buy them with a credit card and you don't need a wallet so there is no wallet set up here it's just all done in the back end for you uh which is quite interesting now what happens is these nfts basically are worth a certain amount of points and based off the points that you get you can have different experiences and do different things so some of the examples where you

can join a virtual espresso making uh class you can get Starbucks merch um there's even I think uh you can get a trip to I think it was Costa Rica to see how the coffees are grew and grown so there's some pretty cool things here and the whole idea here is that they're just trying to make a very different experience for their community and for their members but it's not about so they have two different programs they have um somewhere in here they should show the breakdown if you can scroll down there's an image and they have a loyalty program and then a Rewards program I think so basically one of their program is just like you know you buy enough coffees you get a free coffee so that's not what this is this is if you do

certain things like I don't know go into a store and do acts like there's just certain like the gamify it if you do those you can collect these nfts they're worth points which allow you to claim certain things uh in Starbucks so pretty cool what they're doing here it's very different uh we haven't really seen this on this scale this is going to be massive and they've done this and launched it on polygon uh and one of the interesting things speaking of the merge uh is that they announced so they they put this in bold somewhere in here and they said we put it on polygon which is a proof of stake chain that is green and has low carbon footprint et cetera et cetera and they talked about how this is important to them and their business and blah blah blah so you can just see from Reading

their announcement here that it is important that they are on a proof of stake chain uh so ethereum obviously making a good move here doing this because we have probably the biggest one of the biggest companies uh that is going to be using nfts now in a very big way I think that's going to bring a lot of I'm assuming a lot of people are going to be collecting a lot of teeth here and they're worried about what one is is the user experience so making sure that people don't have to create a wallet they don't even know it's in a t um they don't even know it's on blockchain for the most part uh and then they care that it's green right they care that it's on um Green Technology so some big takeaways there uh very exciting are you going to be taking and

doing the quest Jay yeah I mean I definitely think I will purely to experience something new I think all of us to be honest all of us should be doing this stuff because if you're a builder in web 3 you've got to be trying out everything and the only way you learn is by participating and playing right uh it's actually only in the United States so we can't do it anyway uh well if you are in the U.S as of uh September 12th uh which was just a few days ago you can sign up for the wait list uh I don't think the program the Starbucks Odyssey launches until later

this year uh yeah later this year it launches but you can get on the wait list we'll put the link for that in the show notes uh yeah I think that the few big takes that I have from this are this is a this is web 3 at scale that we have not seen yet right like this is I don't know how I know that Starbucks loyalty program is one of the biggest in the world uh I don't know exactly how big it is in terms of how many millions of users but millions of users are on it so you're talking about the potential for millions of people to onboard to web3 and as you said they're not this this press release that we're we're looking at uses the word nft uses the word

blockchain but if you go into Starbucks marketing materials for this they're not using the word nft they're not using the word blockchain and they're they're going to onboard millions of people to web3 that don't even necessarily understand the back end and that's fine you don't need to know the back end you just need to know the functionality I think the other great part about this to me is I used to use Starbucks it used to be a quite an avid Starbucks Drinker and I still probably have points somewhere now I can't these my points are not going to transfer over to this but it would be nice if you were a user of something and then you stalked me user

if you could go sell your reward points and in this case if there's a Marketplace there's the potential to trade and to sell them okay I was just gonna ask it's gonna say why so if no one knows it's an nft that's on the blockchain it's not really an open thing like you don't have a wallet so it's all within Starbucks why even why even make an nft then why not just do it but this gets into okay so you build your Starbucks is going to build their own ecosystem right so they're going to have their own Marketplace so you can stay within Starbucks you can go into the marketplace maybe maybe you can't I would assume you could sell and I would

assume you could trade in the marketplace and so or maybe that's like an eventual plan I guess the other thing is this the other big unlock here that I think we don't get is if not using polygon which is an existing way to it's an existing database then they have to go and build their own royalty programs database to store all this data secure all the data and manage all that which means they need data centers and they need you know all these people whereas it already exists on a blockchain in a way that just won't go down it's just it's like 100 uptime blah blah blah um and so they can just go and use this existing one so it actually saves them a ton of money building out this royalty program

um and a ton of risk as well because it's more secure can't get hacked so I guess maybe that's also part why um but yeah maybe they're going to open it up one other thing too I think is let's think longer term once we get into the metaverse think about what this data being on chain does for a metaverse experience so right now you can start to create social experiences within the metaverse for your users who have certain numbers of stamps or who are using their stamps at the same time you know that I think that is also the there's a longer term play there with the ability to connect in the metaverse yeah we'll see I mean I guess same with

like Robin Hood when they introduced allowing you to use crypto you could only do it within Robin Hood but then eventually they allowed you to send it you know out to your own personal wallet and on a non-custodial version uh and so like now they're creating their own actual wallet so like it was a phased approach and maybe Starbucks doing the same kind of thing which makes complete sense um so this is interesting so okay we just talked we have Starbucks one of the biggest loyalty rewards programs in the world is now using nfts we have Instagram and Facebook okay so not empty sorry stamps then you have Instagram and Facebook the two biggest social apps in the world for the most part um which is integrating nfts calling it digital Collectibles so huge huge we had

Ticketmaster right the biggest like ticket uh ticketing program in the world which is starting to integrate nfts uh and now we have Google which is the biggest Monopoly in the world I don't even know just the biggest everything uh but biggest hub for like developers and all that kind of stuff um they create anything and everything and they are now have partnered with the Ronin Network and Sky Mavis so if you remember um we haven't talked with them a lot uh in a while but Rona network is the network that runs and hosts axi Infinity which was the big web 3 game uh based off nfts um and tokens um it was a really big like 2021 uh and even I think 2020 a little bit but it

really took off 2021. so anyway um they built their own blockchain because it was not scalable enough on ethereum and that's called The Rona Network and it has its own validators to secure the network and they have just partnered with Google Cloud uh Google cloud is obviously a massive organization so their team is now running a validator uh for the Runner network so it's securing the blockchain of ronin uh so that is super super cool it's a big partnership and it shows that Google is taking blockchain seriously so much so that they want to be involved in um the Runa Network which is one of the biggest uh nft marketplaces with the most volume I think or sorry not volume um transactions I believe those

translations yeah yeah yeah um so a big play sky Mavis Ronan obviously a big player in the blockchain space and in gaming they have plans to make many games uh and Google Cloud sees that or Google sees that and so they're kind of integrating themselves into that which is uh which is pretty cool so is this this let me ask you a question here is this Google experimenting with validating I think so so whose plan they might validate other blockchains in the future probably so Google's plan is not to create front-facing like user um applications with blockchain they came out a while ago and said that they

want to create tools to enable developers to build on top of the blockchain and so I think like they're not trying to build the nice app and and the thing like what Instagram is doing with digital Collectibles or what Starbucks doing instead they're taking the back end route of like how can we enable the development of this stuff and really like push forward blockchain from the back end kind of things and so I think this is their first sort of play at that which is hey let's go in and run a validator and actually start securing a blockchain here which is a business they make money doing that um and I'm sure it just integrates them more into the system because they probably want to learn more about how this is all working and what's going on

um so yeah I don't know where this technically goes but I don't see why most companies aren't like eventually running a validator for ethereum and other blockchains right right like totally totally makes complete sense well and and as we move from online to on chain you know the amount of you know AWS Google Cloud uh cloudflare like all these large uh server-based companies that provide us all the data storage for the online world you know they're going to want to start to play a neon the block on chain world too so I think it'd be interesting to see we should check out it AWS is doing this yet because I would assume that they're thinking about it too

yeah maybe so Google's actually doing a few things in the in the blockchain and web3 world so they also had um the ethereum merge countdown this got went pretty viral on Twitter over the last couple days uh where you could literally just Google ethereum merge and they had a countdown like a live countdown to when the merge is going to happen showing when the uh when the actual block is that it's going to merge at and they had the black and the white panda coming together as the time went down and then eventually that's like the big theme of eth is is uh is merging this and um so there was actually a someone from Google who tweeted this out and he says oh this was built by my team and so what we're seeing here is sort of Google and I don't know if they're doing

this tactically or if this is just different parts of their organization that just happens to be doing this but it's like they're not doing the big splash thing like Instagram and Facebook but they're like hey we're gonna support here we're gonna put this little fun snip in here so it's like it looks like they are trying to warm up the web 3 Community you know because obviously there's a lot of people like oh we need to get rid of companies like Google and so Google's like Hey we're supporting here we're supporting here and it's like I don't know we'll see where they go with it but I just I get this feeling that they have something they're doing uh and they're just trying to like give us little tidbits you know as we go just to like keep us a little bit happy we'll see speaking about getting rid of

Google we just wrote an article uh which was released yesterday about how web3 should build decentralized search engines uh which would take over Google so I think there is there's there's two sides to this right uh and and I won't go deep into this go read this article because it really talks about the power that Google has and the problems that are a result of that power uh one of the uh guests that we had on the podcast pre previously talked about how his company got completely rugged by Google so we should create decentralized search engines and that's something that everybody should understand particularly if you're in the SEO space go give that

a read well this is the craziest thing that I learned writing this article uh was four there's 4.8 billion people on the internet 4.3 billion people use Google 4.3 billion people I was like what I knew it was a lie but that is crazy and so the power they have is is wild and so in the article we didn't actually say like we got to get rid of Google but we said we can disrupt Google and either Google's gonna have to disrupt itself or maybe web 3 incentives and tools can do it for them uh and it's basically just aligning everyone that uses the search engine via tokens and things like that there's more of a hypothetical discussion

um but there are some uh companies that are actually already doing this or playing around with anyone so watch out Google we're coming for you you win your 4.3 billion users yeah just just just give us a few just give us a few uh Brian Armstrong tweets out this is the CEO of coinbase I absolutely love what they're doing here so this is super cool so he tweets out starting today coinbase will begin integrating our crypto policy efforts right into our app these will help our 103 million verified users get educated on the crypto positions held by political leaders where they live so check this out if you are on coinbase you can now go

into the application and you can search through all of the different senates and house members and it has their picture their name um and what is this their district and then it has a rating on if they are negative or positive towards crypto so this tells you who you should be voting for in your District if you want web3 and crypto to be the future this is absolutely amazing this is awesome so where is where is coinbase getting this data from like they're they're giving a a rating for the crypto sentiment of each one of these senators or host members so coinbase probably has the biggest group of let's call it like U.S policy efforts or lobbyists in of

anything right uh it's massive they have tons of lawyers tons of lobbyists a whole team dedicated specifically to ensuring good policy in the United States and so and this is all across the United States so they have done their research for a while on this and have been acting on it and lobbying and trying to figure out where to put funds Etc and I think what they came to realize was well we have all this information why are we keeping it private let's just share this with anyone and everyone and what better way to do this than to just throw in our app to 103 million people uh which I don't know if that's 103 million that are in the US specifically because if it is that's a third of the population almost that's crazy right so that's super cool so I mean great marketing for them

because a bunch of people are going to want to go and see this and so where do you get that information well you go to the coinbase app so cool and I mean I don't know this could make a big difference right uh I'd be scared if I was a senate that was opposing crypto or web through right now because well we can see it right here and people in crypto are very loud and they take action right we are on the Forefront of Technology um we don't sit around and just let happen we're trying to build a parallel universe here we're trying to shape the future and so you got a Target on your back now if you're uh if you're against crypto web 3 and you're in the senate or the house watch out uh what I love about this too is in in

this tweet from Brian Armstrong he says crypto advocacy is very important for our mission of increasing economic freedom in the world and coinbase will do its part to help but the crypto Community is much bigger than coinbase hopefully we can all rally to engage elected leaders and Drive sensible policies that is it couldn't be more true and I think it brings up the very important point which I think we talk a lot a lot here and probably should discuss more is everybody needs to get involved because regulation is coming there is a lot of research being done and a lot of policies that are being written right now and when that happens there is an

opportunity for you as a voter to get involved for you to put up your hand for you no and not just by where you put your vote there's also going to be a lot of opportunity for you know there's so many committees right now from all levels of government they're trying to learn and most of these committees they're not crypto native they're not web3 native you know these are people who don't know anything about nfts or about crypto and they're trying to learn and so if you have any opportunity to get involved and to give your opinion and to help these people learn because they're the ones that are going to set the legislation that's going to affect us for the next 20 30 100 years you know what's really gives me some hope for all this is so in

the end of the metaverse book by Matthew ball great book by the way um he talks about the reason that the internet is an open protocol is almost exclusively because of the US government they are the ones that fought and created the Committees that made the standards for the Internet Protocol uh so if it wasn't for the US government it might not I mean I don't know who knows how it could have went but he's like there's a good chance that we would have had actually just multiple internets and so like you sometimes might have had to like get on a different network to go and use this certain site kind of like what we have to do now with blockchains um and so uh hopefully I mean but here's the thing the US government also tried to shut

down the internet in the beginning and then we fought forward and like when Napster happened this was a big problem and and even before that and so like it just took some time for them to learn and um yeah I don't know this gives me a little bit of hope we'll see yeah no I totally agree all right Switching gears to nfts or should we say sfts oh God last last week on the show we talked about saying exactly brace yourself for more lingo being rammed down your throat that is very difficult to understand so we'll try to keep you up to date on it all last week we talked about uh FX hash which is one of the leading generative art marketplaces launched FX text FS text is their

publishing uh platform where you can publish an article but you can publish it on the blockchain so somebody can collect that article and eventually possibly somebody could trade or sell that article if you're an author you could put a price on an article uh and what FX hash did was they believed that it was really important that the creator of Articles because articles is different than art that they'd be able to edit it and so they built into the smart contract this ability to edit these articles and they called it a semi-fungible token and so we talked about that last week and I went about my

way and was like oh that's what a semi-fungible token is interesting you can edit tokens okay in the last week I have been re-educated and have learned that a I've learned the there is no Consortium that decides what these labels are and what the true definition is and so semi-fungible token is actually already being used mainly by the gaming industry to define something very different and I think this is more likely when you refer to a semi-fungible token this is what people are referring to and it actually led to a great conversation uh about semi-fungible tokens which with Michael Sanders who's

one of the co-founders of horizon which has created one of the biggest blockchain games skyweaver that is we are publishing that conversation next week so check that out but let me just give you the that will be if you really want to dive deep into this go listen to that show but let me give you this sort of Cole's notes on this okay so we have two types of tokens we have erc20 tokens which are fungible tokens and then we have ERC 721 tokens which are non-fungible tokens okay then what happened was as game developers we're starting to create games they realized that they needed another type of token because when you're in a game

very often in a game you might have let's say you have a shovel in your game okay you don't need if you had a fungible version of that shovel well then there would be there there would be I don't know a hundred thousand a million of that shovel right but often in a game you want to limit supply of something okay so if you had a non-fungible version of that shovel well that's just confusing you don't need you know a thousand one of one versions of a shovel then you get into this like conversation of like what's the difference between each one of those shovels it's one more valuable than the other one it gets really confusing when

you start to want to like trade and have a Marketplace you want to sell those shovels so what the game needs is the game needs a semi-fungible shovel which means they have 1 000 shovels where they're all the exact same so all 1000 shovels have the exact same price they can be traded evenly one for one but there's a cap on it you're creating a collection the same way you do with an nft where you create a collection of a certain item and that's what a semi-fungible token is and that is so they always have the same they always have the same value those thousands

doubles for example always have the same value yeah so but they go up or down to get so like their value doesn't go up or down but it goes wow interesting what yes yes so it allows it and it makes tons of sense for games it allows games to have items within the game which you could have you could have one version of that or you could have ten thousand versions of that and the value of all of those stays the same but how is that any different than a fungible token because my understanding is that a fungible token does not allow you to create it as a collection right the way the smart contract is written you can't have a collection with a fungible token

right gotcha interesting well we will continue to dive further but first Jay thank you for admitting and saying hey you know what I wasn't fully correct about what I said last week and you learned over the last week and came in and preached and taught us some more so we'll continue to do this uh on whatever the heck semi-fundables are that's what we do here at web3 Academy and let me tell you I I this happens all the time we're always learning and and if you ever and on that note our listeners if you ever catch us saying something wrong please yes please tell us let us know uh we're not we're by no means perfect this space is moving and

changing so fast and so if you catch some dude saying something wrong let us know or if you catch us saying something that you're not quite sure about or you want more explanation are on let us know happy to dive deeper into things for you we're we're here for you guys we do this for you hit us up on Twitter okay Ford is also entering the metaverse with virtual Automobiles and nfts uh so Ford made an announcement this is still early uh in their in their plans they've just basically done a press release saying uh that they're going to do something and they filed something like I think it was like 20 different

um 19 trademark applications uh around virtual cars around virtual automobiles all connected to their brand names like F-150 and Explorer and all and Mustang and all of those um and so we'll see what they do but I think here's another example maybe these are semi-fungible tokens right instead of being non-fungible maybe Ford decides that okay you want to drive the 2024 F-150 in the metaverse well there's going to be 100 000 of them right and you want to buy one of those 100 000 you can buy one of those 100 000 in your avatar can roll around the metaverse in

the F-150 it looks like they're going to have featuring non-fungible tokens and digital collectibles I think that's the exact same thing uh but that's what they say here in this article Instagram would say it's the same thing can't be a digital thing it's not an nft that's uh I think that's the truth getting getting into the whole the language discussion is a whole other one we'll have to yeah Raul is making a web 3 dictionary right now or a boy Raul who runs all of our social media he's making a Webster dictionary he's going to make sure you guys understand the language LeBron what's LeBron doing LeBron James the King they say um one of the grace athletes of Our

Generation okay LeBron James has partnered with artifact which is Nike's uh web3 play and through this partnership artifact has updated the traits of one of their clone X so this is very interesting I was very getting into the technical side of this basically so artifact owns clone 7968 and they gave it an LBJ beard and a Chosen One Crown uh to make it look like LeBron himself and these traits are one of one

updated their nft now did the picture itself update or was it just the the like traits here the pictures this is the picture here's here's the before the before it has no beard and the after it has a beard and also its skin color got darker to match LeBron's skin color yeah I don't understand exactly how they do this I mean they own the nft they also own the collection so um I mean we are finding out learning that nfts are not as safe as we all thought they were and the IP rights and all those things are not necessarily the salt as we thought they were um I do know that so that they added the metadata that's the traits here and so basically this is the same as like

royalties and stuff where basically a Marketplace just needs to either accept or not accept the metadata so you can change at any time and when we launched our nft um with unlock protocol the one for our Rabbit Hole course um we could update our metadata multiple times before or after we Minted as well um I don't know about changing the picture but I think that's also just metadata um so I don't know what the rules are and how I mean there's no rule I'm sure but just like can you just change any image you want if you created The Collection like we need to dive into that we need to get someone on that can go into this technical stuff yeah it's explaining because this is this is this is not just the this is separate from IP rights IP right that's the whole other

thing this is yeah this is like the the technical side of can you can you update and I guess it's the metadata it's not the on-chain data so yeah I'm we gotta we'll dive into it deeper for everybody at some point all right let's take a quick break of this episode to update you on what's going on with lens protocol we want you our friends to get your lens handled because we want to chat with you on lens on lenster on lens tube we're posting content on there and we want to in uh engage with you and we know that you guys have been you know waiting and wanting this and we're doing everything we possibly can to make this happen if you can see up on our screen right now we have our Webster Academy profile from

lens friends and we are currently being followed by 55 000 people uh which we know is not 55 000 people um we tried to like quietly do this last week by just saying it on the on the podcast on the YouTube uh and I mean we didn't have 55 000 people listen to the episode so there's no pasta away the 55 000 community members we want this to be our community who gets us on this protocol handle not every person in the world but what's happening here I think is people are just creating hundreds of metamask wallets okay accounts and then following us because they're expecting to get a lens protocol handle well guess what sorry uh but we're not gonna do that and lens isn't either so too bad we absolutely get frustrated and hate when

people try to take advantage of a situation super annoying is what it is for the real people that are listening to this um we have a solution and it means you have to do one more step and again we are sorry for that but uh this time it will get you it and if they spam us again it doesn't matter because here's how this is going to work we have posted something on Leinster lenster.xyz uh under account and it is a cool picture a photo of lens and web through Academy and just kind of showcasing our partnership uh given the next so we love that and what happens is on lens on lens um every post is an nft and so you can like it just like you could on you know Instagram you can retweet it they call

it mirroring or you can collect it which means you actually mint it as an nft and if you don't have a lens protocol as we said you can follow us which everyone has already done 55 000 of you and that mints your follow as nft which is super cool well now what you can do is collect this as an nft and so what you have to do if you want to um get whitelist it is you have to go collect this now here's the catch it costs one Matic for you to collect this now I don't know what Maddox at but I'm pretty sure it's under a dollar or somewhere around there anyway oh my gosh yeah so it's not a lot of money we're not doing this because we want to make money we're doing this because someone who signed up with five thousand

uh accounts or 400 accounts or whatever is probably not going to pay that much and if they do cool because here's what we're going to do is we're going to do one of two things we will let the community decide we are going to either donate any of the Matic that we get here to something to the cause of our community's choice so all of you here that are listening we will put up a poll later on we're not sure where yet we'll figure that out and we will decide together collectively it depends on how much we earn like if only 20 people do this then I don't know but we'll donate or we will convert thematic into I can't remember the name of the token but there's like a carbon credit token where you can buy these and then you just burn it and basically you're burning carbon

credits and so you're you're basically lowering the amount of carbon credits available uh for companies and people to use um so doing something good for the world so we're going to do one of those two things but in order to this you have to go to the um uh uh to this post which the link is in the show notes again and Jay's gonna show us here Jay's logged into an account okay so to collect this all you're going to do is go to the red button on the right underneath the post click collect it's called got it looks like uh a couple boxes red boxes on top of each other yeah now you have to allow yourself to collect first uh and so you basically click the button and it's going to make you do a transaction just saying that you are able to do this by the way lens protocol

is working on removing all of this stuff so it'll be all under the hood eventually they're still in beta so that's why we have to deal with all this um and basically once you've allowed yourself to collect you can just go collect for one Matic or it might be wrappedmatic it depends um you'll see a w front of the ratmatic if you need that if that's the case you have to swap Matic into rapmatic what you just do on uniswap for super cheap okay so I've got my raftmatic I'm ready to collect I click the collect Now button and it will make you sign a transaction um you also have to be following us so use the wallet that you decided to follow us with or you got to just go follow us whatever

um because we're only allowing people to collect this who also follow us again the point here is we're trying to get this to our community only people who are committed to Webster Academy which is Jay Jay is now a collector of this post uh and so that's all you have to do um and I know it sucks we're sorry but um it's the way she goes right yeah and I think it's uh like we said it's let's make sure this goes to the right people not we don't need to get lens lens handles into the hands of a whole bunch of scammers who just want to profit and take advantage of it we want to get into the hands of people who are really using and doing in web free and we know that to you exactly

okay next up LG has launched a new nft Marketplace called LG Art Labs and you this Marketplace allows you to buy and sell nfts from your TV from your LG TV interesting so there's certainly no shortage and I mean I think nft marketplaces are going to be something that we're going to be talking about this probably every week for the next decade because that is the manner in which people the whole world is going to use nfts f to sfts I mean sure we're gonna be talking about sft marketplaces too as if one Marketplace isn't already enough but in this case LG is they're creating their own

Marketplace and they're going to do it in a way that is so simple that you can do it from your TV because they want to allow you to access web3 right from your TV and it's going to utilize their new in-app well lipto wallet what is that I was gonna say have you ever been that's crypto and wallet mixed together have you ever been on like a a an internet browser from your like on your TV it's such a pain to like oh yeah move around and get around to be the worst ux in the world TV browser plus like web3 I was like no way uh but maybe they'll find a way to like put it all under the hood using this

wallet we'll see what they do here but uh you know the other big thing this can this connects to which I think is is really a big a big part of the art side of web3 and of digital Collectibles is okay so you buy a you know a Damien Hurst piece of art as an nft well you want to show that off right you want that up on your wall well all of the biggest producers of screens TV screens computer monitors those things LG being one of the biggest of those are going to want to play in that space and we're going to have computer screens around our house so instead of having an art a piece of

art you know on your wall you're going to have a TV a TV screen and that TV screen is going to show your digital Collectibles and you're going to want to be able to access the marketplace and maybe you want to sell that or you want to buy a new one so it's a good thing you can see how eventually the user experience makes a lot of sense right just gonna have TVs all over your wall and anytime you want you just go on it's touch screen you can just go on trade on openc or whatever you want yeah and then you're going to be able to jump into your TV and jump into the metaverse which will be virtual reality uh yeah it's gonna blow your mind okay Linux is launching a foundation to support the development of Open Source wallets and

I'm sure they won't let anybody call it a wallipto uh this is really exciting because this is called the open Wallet foundation and one thing that we talk a lot about in this space is we need a lot of Builders to create protocols and standards right now uh and there's not a lot of money in that it is difficult to create a business model for developing a standard so what is happening is all the development of these standards and Protocols are being developed on the side by the businesses as well so it's like you've got to start a business but at the same time you also got to go build the infrastructure like the

blockchain digital infrastructure and that's tough right if you're a startup like that is very challenging so the best way to do this is to just do open source to do it through Community you build in the open you have a whole bunch of people who are also trying to create the same business you come together and basically Linux Foundation is going to facilitate that by funding a lot of these open source developments particularly around wallets because we know that wallets is really that's the on-ramp to web3 so we need we need we need more wallets we need wallets with the best better wallets better wallets we need better ux and wallets this brings up an interesting conversation

Kai I know you've are you using Argent like there's all these smart wallets that are being used and I don't know if you can explain the difference between like a regular wallet uh which I believe is an eoa wallet versus a smart wallet uh so a smart contract wallet I mean I don't think I can explain the technical aspect of it but Argent for example everything I do is right in that wallet so like I can use Ave and but I don't know that I'm using Ave I just like I can use the different like I can um stake my eth in Lido but I never have to go to Lido I can just do it right in there and it's right beside like let's say staking in rocket pool or whatever else like they're pulling things from the protocols and all putting it right

in there and so I'm interacting with smart contracts and that without actually going and doing it I'm just doing all my wallet I also don't have a seed phrase there so they get they've completely got rid of the seed phrase thing um which is great and you just have like friends that can verify if you in case you lose your your wallet friends or family members then you get to choose those so it's really cool and it's all on Layer Two so everything is basically free it's great I mean there's only a you can't like use every application with it yet because it's still very very new but just using it you're like oh whoa okay this is a way way better experience uh it feels like a typical web 2 app um versus something like metamask where you're like okay what the heck's going

on here you know the the seed phrase thing alone I mean if you go set up a wallet and at the same time you have to understand and learn about seed phrases and your private keys and then you have to figure out where you're going to store that and go through the stress of what happens if I lose this like that there's a non-starter for the onboarding most people so yeah I think it also removes the layer of all these signatures that you have to do like you just had to do it for when you meant to or when you minted that um uh post on lens those are all gone away and it's just native written in the application as well so you have to do all those kind of things that's where this will go and it's already starting to happen but um cool

I think we need to do a full Deep dive on wallets and the future of wallets and how that improves the ux one day we shall okay third web third web which if you if you haven't used third web if you are launching an nft third web is one of the best platforms to use for your smart contracts of nfts we are working with uh some nft launches right now and we're writing their smart contracts and we're finding third web to be incredibly helpful incredibly useful so highly recommend it um third web has here a tweet Thread about how you can set up a script subscription-based payment model for

your web3 app so if let's say you had a web 3 app and one of the best ways if you have a an app let's say you had a web 2 app one of the best ways to develop your revenue is to have recurring Revenue through subscriptions right that's how that's free business Works Amazon businesses Netflix uh we have 20 subscriptions live right now everyone that's just how we do it and so what this this thread explains and we'll link to we'll link to it in the show notes is it explains how you can have a very simple user Journey where the user signs in with the wallet pays the subscription using stripe so it could use Fiat to pay

the subscription and then the web3 wallet is used to access this restricted product and because you're using stripe you can use Stripes recurring payment setup and that's that connection between stripe and your wallet ensures that if they stop paying the recurring payment then they no longer get access to the content what's great here is you're using the wallet as your identity essentially so you don't have to create an account you just your wallet is not your payment so using the word wall is actually probably not the best idea here but essentially your wallet is your login it's your identity you need to give you that yeah and then you're not even touching crypto you're just using credit card and purchasing something the same way as you normally do you're just

not having to create an account with a password because you already have one with your metamask or whatever wallet you try to do so it's just connecting your identity to the app but again you can always disconnect from any time so that's actually really cool I love that yeah also because subscriptions are coming like reoccurring payments are already a thing using like super fluid and diagonal Finance but it's very new so it's still a bit of a clunky experience so like if you're trying to build a product where you want scale and you want the masses to sign up for it like Netflix for example they're not going to use crypto subscription payments right or nft payments it's just not there yet for the masses but this is where you could use a wallet and still have the ease of the Fiat subscription service that's cool

all right time time for nft of the month okay hit him with it you ready our nft of the month is Digi daiku did she died what is that everybody want to say that say that five times fast times did you daiku yeah did you die too how many more looks like so price 6.5 each wow it's four points so did you die coup launched as let me just give you some context here uh 2020 and 22 unique nfts clearly a shout out to the year 2022 uh

launched on ethereum launched August 9th I believe so about a about a month ago and was a free to Mint and has over the last month become I think it's number seven on most volume traded uh nfts over the last month it's traded uh almost 7 000 eth over the last month which actually in in a bear Market at seven thousand each is a lot yeah in a bow Market that would have been nothing in a month but in a bit in a bear Market that's a lot and current floor price is 6.5 East and this was free to Mint and okay so why are we highlighting digidaiku uh as our

favorite nft well our entity of the month it's your coverage I haven't decided yet if this is my favorite you haven't decided okay okay well you tell me then how you feel about it after after we go through it here so first off we love the founder shout out to the founder we're going to talk about why we love him uh Gabe is his name second we love the way they're innovating in the space they're expanding on the ER 721 token with a new modification a new standard to that token which allows uh more gameplay and third the way they are building community so let me just talk about each one of those so first what got this the reason this nft did so

well and got a lot of attention is it was launched by limit break limit break is founded by uh Gabe Laden or Leighton and Halbert I don't know how to say his last name nakagawa nakagawa now Gabriel Laden is seems to be the more the front-facing founder and uh both these guys are very well known in the web 2 Gaming world uh they've launched some really big games they've they founded machine Zone uh which I'm not a gamer and Kai I know you're not a gamer either machine zone is a big gaming company from web 2. it's created really successful games like mobile strike and fear of God and some

other ones so so they had a really strong track record they're well known so when they came up with this this nft it got a lot of attention um and I think what what first clued me into this nft was uh there was a a tweet going around that it was the first time that Steve Aoki had made money off of an nft uh and there's all these Steve Aoki jokes that Stevo can you buys your nft that your nft is screwed because his if you go look up his Wallets on the blockchain he's like done terribly with his nft Investments it's like Jim Cramer yeah exactly uh at least at least Steve Aoki makes great music unlike Jim Kramer who just

yells at the screen all day uh so um so Gabe is really the founder is just just a fantastic thinker and he's got a um a a podcast that he released that actually just came out uh like I think like yesterday that's really great highly recommend listening to it uh but it's he is an example of how a deep thinker can create the web 3 products in the open and so there's two things that he talks talks about that I find really interesting Kai I want to get your take on both these um first is this concept that everybody is saying that the ux is so bad in web3

right now rather than his take is that that's a good thing that that's where you want to be so he uses the example of you if if he were to create a time machine a time travel machine and it had the worst ux in the world there would still be millions of people lining up to use it right because that product is a product that the market wants there's a massive product Market fit and so he spent his time in in web 2 game and he basically said he got to the point where all you were doing was tinkering with like pixels and buttons and changing ux he's like that's boring

there's no innovation in that the real Innovation is in the space where the ux is terrible and that is if you have a space where you have bad ux and VC money is still flowing there and and so is all the attention yeah so so that's that was that was the first thing you talked about which I thought was just such a great take it's like going to a restaurant that has a long lineup and shitty service but you still go anyway because the product the food is so damn good that's web three exactly that is that is exactly what three or the other example is Craigslist Craigslist has the just like the worst

looking product like there is nothing impressive about Craigslist Craigslist has 10 employees and they did over 600 million in Revenue last year well that's great because it works people love it so that was the first take the other take he had is and Kai you mentioned Matthew Ball's metaverse book and you just finished reading that so this will be the take that I think you will like is he talks about how the ultimate dream of the internet and more so the metaverse is having everybody on the screen at the same time so connecting us on screen so rather than us being disconnected when we're

online right now which we are the only way we are connected online right now is if we either connect through a social media and we chat or we connect on Zoom but we're all online how many you know what several billion people are on the internet right now 4.8 billion remember but we're not connected to them right right unless we take the extra steps well the view of the metaverse is that we will be able to connect because it'll make it more fun and more social right so the example is let's say let's say I'm striking shopping on on nike.com And Kai you're also shopping on nike.com currently we don't know it right there's no there's no way for us to know that

we're both there well the metaverse should connect us right right so that we both know that we're shopping there and now all of a sudden we get to sharing that experience hey what are you looking at it's a different we're at a store right check out these shoes like oh I'm looking at these shoes too what do you think like oh let me put them on my avatar do they look good on me do they look good on you right yeah that's actually so yeah I think that that uh that that is a that is an area and a that gets into a whole conversation and we won't dive into this conversation right now but like how many people are trying to fix that problem right of making sure that we can all connect online okay so love the founder

love the project too let me tell you about the project so uh the project is obviously a gaming product project and what the project did is there's this this tweet that Gabriel released he says in this tweet if for those who did some research through our new adventure ERC 721 token which we released with digidaiku Spirits we thought we would give a more in-depth explanation of what we where we're going with the new Adventure Quest system and then there's a screenshot of a whole bunch of uh of code and basically I'll link to this uh and we'll link to this in the show notes but essentially

what they're doing here is they have created a new standard where you can interact with your you can use your nft to interact with a game and this adventure ERC 721 standard can then enable your token to be up upgraded or changed or manipulated as a result of what you do in the game so you could if you take certain actions in the game your token could be burned if you take certain actions in the game you're totally be staked well you're using the game it could require you to stoke your stoke your toe steak Stoke stake your token while you're using the game so

that then you can't go trade or sell it because like that token is interacting in the game but what's really cool is you don't necessarily have to engage in this so like let's say you just want to be a collector well you can just leave your nft as a collector nft but then once you take certain actions to involve yourself in the gameplay okay now this new standard comes in and says okay this nft is involved in the gameplay okay we're gonna update it and we're gonna update the the token as a result of your actions there so really really interesting for the manner in which gameplay and games are going to interact with with nfts so it's like Dynamic like

it can it can be exactly upgraded or maybe downgraded I guess yeah exactly yeah like essentially once you opt in the smart contract can can can change can I think what's what's interesting here that we're learning and I mean we just talked about semi-fungible tokens and now this adventure ERC 721 which is kind of like a dynamic nft it seems like of some sort but it's it's I think what I'm learning is we're s there's going to be so many new standards that come out right it's not just erc20 ERC 721 that's the unlock of the last couple years there's going to probably be so many of these different standards

um that are all going to come out and all going to enable different things and that's the cool thing about smart contracts is they're programmable we can build in all these cool different things um and uh and so we'll see some of them will work some of them will be great some of them will not be so great uh and that's the idea of building the sandbox and so it's really really cool that this Project's doing that and they're kind of creating a whole new standard I guess yeah yeah completely that's exactly it the other thing I love about this project uh quickly is I love the way they are building in the open so here's a tweet from the founder he says if we were to buy a big TV ad for digital daiku what should we do with the commercial you're just asking he says

obviously I have some ideas I'm just curious what you think and his follow-up tweet was is what's funny is the responses are better than what you'll get from prestigious ad agencies he says he's had world famous adages tell him what they should do and their ideas are garbage whereas the community has great ideas right so love seeing that I highly recommend following Gabe on Twitter highly recommend following this project it's going to be really cool to see what they build they just launched their Discord and I love this in when they launched their Discord they have Digi points that you can get in their Discord and they talked about again he asked on Twitter what should you have to do to

get digital points you wanted feedback well they decided the only way to get Digi points is to make memes that's the only way love it which which is great right branding get everybody making memes that's that's what a project needs that's how you build community meme culture but fun memes are fun let's do it together why not I love it and use user generated content everyone loves generating content means you're easy yeah it's uh so shout out digidaiku shout out Gabriel Laden thanks for being great builders in the space you are the nft of the month you wow what a week what a week that's a wrap on the the weekly roll up thanks so much for everybody for listening in have

yourself a great weekend and we'll be back with you next week with more news never shortage of news in web3 keep on doing keep on building love you guys thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one 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 and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in

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