Web3 weekly rollup: Trump NFT sellout, Visa recurring crypto payments and Magic Eden rewards

Transcript

GM GM welcome back to another episode of web3 Academy it is the holiday special weekly roll up this year is not over and crypto web 3 never sleeps so we're coming at you this week with all the news to keep you up to date I'm jay bird and as always I'm joined by my co-host Kyle reidhead what's up Kai what's up friends if you're watching right now on YouTube you see Jay's got his Santa hat on I did not get mine unfortunately I completely forgot it's actually packed as I'm moving today so today is a is a wonderful day but we're actually recording this a day early so let's hope that no big news comes out tomorrow because we're gonna miss it in the roll-off but we still have tons nonetheless we're going to be talking about Trump's nft collection that's all

I'm going to say there we're going to talk about Visa is all in on the build Market they are going all in the space and I love it moonbirds experimenting with in-chain tech we've talked a little bit about it but now we're gonna to discuss like what they're actually doing I've got the Insight on Magic Eden's Rewards program which we we mentioned the other day Twitter and Elon always drama going on there and then we're going to walk through the story of web3 Academy and share our thoughts and advice for anyone building a business in web3 so we're not going to do it of the month this time around instead we are going to dive into a little bit of the story of web3 Academy and what's up there and give a little feedback and advice to the entrepreneurs of this world and then of course we'll finish off with some quick

hits as per usual gonna be a great session Jay what are you grateful for today though it's our last episode of the year it's our last episode of the year yeah I am grateful for you our listeners we we couldn't do this without you I'm so grateful for every member of our community for our podcast listeners for our newsletter subscribers for our partners and sponsors on the show there's just been so much support for us in creating this show and it's just such a joy I can't tell you how grateful I am that I get to create this show every week and make make content that that helps web3 and helps the space move forward it's just I gotta pinch myself I can't

believe how lucky we are Kai it's yeah it's just it's so awesome and we wouldn't be able to do without you so to each and every one of you listening thank you I love you I love that Jay I have to second that and I'm gonna be grateful for the web 3 Academy team again we're going to talk a little bit about this further later on in the show but we've got five of us now on the team a sixth coming soon and you know just it's been an amazing experience to build this team we've only we launched right through academy by the way on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine which is February 27th I believe so it's still only you know still very new 10 months or so and we've come a long way and I'm excited to share that story and talk about that but just so grateful for the

team to allow us to do this you know week in week out like you said it's just it's an amazing experience it's so much fun to be able to share this information with all of you listeners and we couldn't do it without our team so great for the team grateful for all of you listeners it's a wonderful thing all right let's let's jump into the news starting with the Trump collection I mean what the f is all I got to say about this but before we do we just got to take a minute to hear from our sponsor the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2

platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content to their profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well just like how crypto is freeing us from Banks web 3 is freeing us from these centralized platforms on lens protocol creators own their content own their profile and even their social graphing followers in the form of nfts this allows you to move freely from one social application to another with your content profile and followers moving along with you lens protocol enables self-savertine for your social graph and interoperability across the internet at Webster Academy we believe this is the

future of Social and that's why we've partnered with lens to ensure that the path of social media is heading in the right direction visit lens.xyz to learn more today all right welcome back we got to start off the news this week with Trump's nft collection and what a way to end a roller coaster of a year with the former president who previously said that crypto is a scam and he would never support it what else is new Trump is changing directions and he came out with a nft collection let me just give you the lowdown on what happened here for those of you who haven't heard so this was a collection of 45 000 nfts that were your trading cards is what they're calling them and it sold out at 99 a piece sold out the full collection 40

4.5 million dollars in Revenue coming in as a result of the sale and then since then I believe it's done another 4 million in post in secondary sales so and the royalties on this is 10 so Trump's Trump's made a cool five to six million dollars at this point off of this I mean there's so many directions we could take this conversation Kai a couple quick things on my part I mean Trump trumping a little bit of a sketch bag was no surprise on this one because he he minted 1 000 of these nfts into his own wallet and from those mints he actually took 20 of the most rare nfts now it's not uncommon for projects to

hold back nfts crypto punks did this when they first launched but crypto functions had zero royalties so Trump is he's got royalties plus he held back a thousand nfts plus he didn't just randomly hold back these nfts which is usually what these creators do he picked the most rare ones and held back the rare ones so I it's just I don't even it's shocking a hilarious fun I mean it's made crypto Twitter pretty fun over the past week that's for sure I was gonna say I don't mind that they held back cement of teas I think that's actually a great strategy that's the way you should go you definitely should not hold back 26 percent of the rare one of ones and 28 of the autographed ones and but I think they said that they minted them and so

it was random that's the weird thing that doesn't really make sense but maybe it was who knows but I don't mind the idea of having royalties and holding back some it's I mean that's how you're gonna that's how you're gonna make your money in the long term But ultimately I don't know what do you think about this drop Jay what's your opinions okay first we we got to talk about the art because the art so this was billed as the art based upon the life and work of Donald Trump and I don't know who who out there thinks that Donald Trump has been to the moon or that he was a cowboy or that he's jacked like Superman or that he has laser eyes like it makes no sense that this was built upon his career and his life this art is just awful it's horrendous it is so bad and

that's that's one of the main things that you're buying here is you're buying they said these are trading cards you're buying these limited edition pieces of art now there is some utility and we can talk about what that utility is in a sec but like the art was just so atrocious and to top it off a bunch of people looked into the art and realized that it was it was stolen art so there's one where he's a cowboy and the cowboy jacket was taken from Shutterstock and some of the art still has word has has the The Watermark Shutterstock watermark on it like it's just this is crazy yeah I the art is terrible I'm not gonna lie and I don't understand why anyone would ever want to hold a trading card or an nft of of Donald Trump let alone like anyone really unless I get it for Athens

but anyway is there utility with this or what's going on here like what's the purpose of what he's doing here and I guess the other thing to say is not necessarily Trump doing this it's a company that's doing it all for him it gives me the Vibes of the company that did it for like Tai Lopez and that was the other one there was one recently that didn't really I don't even think it launched Sylvester Stallone I was told at the same company so it's a company that's doing this and I feel like they just have kind of a Playbook that they do but anyway is there is he building Community or what is he really doing here do you know so I nothing on the community side that I I mean he could build a community with this but I haven't seen there's no Discord there's no access to community

but there is there is utility so you get entered into a Sweepstake if you own one of these and he says I mean this website is just hilarious thousands of prizes for this Sweepstake and so let me tell you what you can win you can win dinner with Donald Trump you can win a one-on-one meeting with him which I believe is on Zoom you can win golf at one of his golf courses which he he claims is you know the most beautiful golf course in the world you can win hand signed memorabilia apparently there's a Gala in Florida that you can attend so there is some it's access it is access and look a lot of people probably value access to the 45th president

I guess so what's interesting though is you can actually look on chains there's a lot of people that immediately like okay what's going on here they looked Unchained and they could see who were the people that were actually minting this stuff which is interesting and I I think the coolest stat from all this so there was about 12.7 or something thousand like unique people that actually minted these because obviously some people mentioned more than one and of that 12 000 9.7 of them held nomadic or no eth in their wallet this was minted on polygons so asmatic and then rap teeth actually which that sort of tells you that it was probably their first time and actually I think many of them purchased with their credit card so it tells you it's a lot of actually new users which makes sense I think Trump's following is probably

not the most Innovative crowd and probably not the web 3 native crowd 76 of people who minted this were what we're assuming are crypto newbies first time with a wallet first time with an nft so that's that's interesting and I guess a net positive for the industry but I mean overall I don't know do you think that this is the the playbook for creators and people who have big followings is this what we do we we mint collections we bring them in we gamified a little bit where they can win some stuff and I don't know maybe he builds Community around this what do you think it's it's a great future of web3 I certainly hope this is in the future well okay we talk a ton about tokenize

your your community and the value in that now in this case this was billed as a trading card a digital collectible Trading Card product which I have no idea it feels like the marketing of this was done by somebody who was not even involved in web3 or not even involved in the project and they were just they made a website that was like okay use every buzzword possible to get people by this right so the art sucks so you didn't buy this for the art now you bring up a good point though are we going to see more celebrities and large influencers launch nft collections in order to give access to themselves you know people value access they want one-on-one calls we know zenica for example launched 333

club which is a token gated community where if you hold that nft you get to have access to his calendar and you can book meetings with him and the floor on that is 10 eth right now so yeah you know what I'm at first I was like I don't really get it but you know what's interesting he had his Twitter band and so all of his access to his Twitter followers were gone it's back now he lost access to all them well he now has four well I don't know how many wallet addresses interact with this thing we said 12 000 something those can't go anywhere so I guess there's a benefit and now look doesn't matter what you think of trump or whatever obviously this is super cringe for the industry but I I guess maybe that's I don't know if that's his intention or not I don't

know if he actually understands it that well but I I just see that as a benefit for someone who's had their accounts taken down across multiple platforms small amount 12 000 but still anyway what net positive or net negative for the industry overall what do you think I got to go net negative I gotta go get Negative it's just I don't want I don't want this to be a Playbook that others try to repeat and that's all we're going to see now is a bunch of copycats that try and do this and it's not a good thing to me it just feels like a cringe launch like we had so many in 2021 of just like random people just launching things just because they had a big following and they could make some money from it now I don't think he cares about the money like five million is not a lot

for Trump so I just don't really get why this is happening it's such a surprise to me but I don't know why I continue to be surprised in the space because just the weirdest things always happen if he wins presidency in 2024 it's a net positive collection oh my gosh did you just manifest Trump being president again I'm not saying I want him to win I'm just saying if he wins it could be a debt positive for the industry like it gives like you said it gives it 2021 it gives me like Pixelmon Vibes yes right yeah yeah for sure Tai Lopez Vibes what it gives me yeah and saw that stuff like yeah I don't know this isn't the reason why we're building web three no no but that's for sure gosh you know what net positive for the good

laughs and for the way it puts a cap on a wild ear like yeah could anybody have predicted that you know the FTX and Luna and Trump launching an nft would be the big highlights of 2012. let's wrap up this year put a bow on it throw it in the garbage and let's move on yeah at least this wasn't in 2023 that would have been brutal okay I'd never talk about this again see I can't talk about Trump anymore on this podcast so we're moving on a Visa all right okay what's going on over at visakai all right here's some real good news and this stuff we don't have to throw out the Grabbers this is really cool so Visa announced yesterday that they are experimenting with reoccurring payments

in self custodial Wallets on ZK Roll-Ups that's a lot of big words and that means Visa is doing some smart things Visa's been involved in crypto for a while now they're really big on this space and you know they're but they're not just using it integrating into it like let's say Instagram is or Twitter is they're actually trying to innovate and move this space forward and that's really to me the big news here and what's really cool so what visa recognizes one of Visa's biggest business models and biggest use cases is obviously exchanging value from one party to another and the way they do this is through subscriptions this is one of the biggest things that they enable is reoccurring payments everyone right now in the world that has any reoccurring payment pretty much is done via credit card and I don't know what percent that

is but a large percentage visa and so this is a big part of their business business model and what they've realized is that this is not easy to do if not it's not even possible right now in crypto using blockchain right when you have blockchain there's a lot of different kind of layers that go into this to allow recurring payments now probably the one farthest along and this is unlock protocol one of our sponsors so kudos to unlock they have been doing this via an nft so if you want to use recurring payments you basically have to sell your product as an nft and that nft can issue reoccurring payments it's not native to the blockchain itself or to like your custodial wallet you can move that around now what visa is trying to do is actually make this a functionality that exists in the wall itself and the way they're doing this is through what's

called account abstraction and so basically the difference here is account abstraction is using a smart contract as your wallet so if you've ever used Nosa safe or Argent these are like they call them vaults but these are just a smart contract which holds your assets rather than the non-custodial wallet plugging into the blockchain and so the reason this is cool is because smart contracts are programmable so you can do more things with them you have more freedom and um in some instances there's also some limitations to this but so this allows them to do recurring payments which they have done and what's really cool is Visa is not just doing this on some random blockchain they're actually doing this on ZK Roll-Ups and ZK Roll-Ups are kind of like the the far end of the spectrum of tech the farthest of the future of where the tech is going the newest but most Innovative Tech and that's where

they're actually building this kind of doing this with which is pretty amazing to see and so Visa is playing around with the greatest Tech probably to come out of of blockchain and they're actually trying to innovate and build off of it and create standards in it and that to me is just absolutely amazing so kudos to Visa let's hope they can make it happen but we need this because honestly just to wrap up subscription payments recurring payments is one of the biggest things that we do for Commerce on the internet right now every big company does this and until we get this in crypto a lot of companies cannot move their products over here Netflix does not move to crypto and using crypto until they can have recurring payments because their whole business model relies on Amazon Prime same thing right you think of I mean how many businesses I think it

was we had a stat when we were in our Discord today with the community was 80 of Americans use subscriptions and I mean even us like we have moved over to sub stack with our newsletter and our Pro product that's coming out soon requires a subscription all the companies that are on sub stack right now they require subscriptions and a lot of web3 and crypto is on sub stack and they can't use crypto because you need a reoccurring payment it's such a pain in the ass to not have that and so we need this to bring a lot of the world's business over to web3 and crypto so it's it's a big move and we need visa to build this out yeah I think that this is deep nerd stuff this is the infrastructure layer of the new monetary system that we're building with crypto

but you nailed it we need to be able to do certain things that we can do right now in terms of business models and one of the most important ones is recurring payments and until we can do that we won't get more people on and Visa is really leading the way what I loved about this was that this came out of a internal Visa hackathon so Visa had a hackathon with all their team members to talk about how do we advance crypto and this was one of the winning projects out of that and as you said they're participating in the composability of blockchain and they're doing this this actually account abstraction was a EIP proposal an ethereum improvement proposal from I think like a year ago years ago and and nobody really did

anything with it it's just kind of sat dormant and now here we are in Visa of all people is jumping in and saying hey we want to we want to use account abstraction as a way to build out the tech for recurring payments that's I mean that's amazing and we need we need more businesses like visa and I mean let's be honest the reason Visa is doing it is they see that if recurring payments happens and they are not part of that they lose big time yeah I wonder how they if they figure this out how they monetize it though I mean I guess maybe there's a way that they can integrate their credit card payments and things into it I'm not sure like they can integrate their existing business model into this I don't know how they'll do it we'll find out but speaking of

composability this is not composable whatsoever Twitter and Elon and I don't I don't know if they've actually continued to go through this or not but basically what Elon has announced and Twitter has announced is that you could no longer share links to Facebook posts Instagram posts link tree all these different things to other platforms essentially some of them are excluded but most of them are part of this this is causing a stir in crypto Twitter of course this is causing Sturgis on Twitter in general people getting pissed about it and I just it makes you think about lens protocol which is just the complete opposite right in Twitter's instance they want to make a worse user experience for us right if you're a Creator if you're a user sometimes you want to see content somewhere else if I want to see video maybe I don't want to

watch video on Twitter or maybe just they don't even have that capability and now they're making it harder for us to share our content on different platforms which already sucks the fact that we have to use all these different platforms and post content on different platforms this makes it even harder and so it's just a it's an obvious move I think for Corporate America right these kind of companies to one push more profits to their business in doing so making it a worse experience for us and that's really how the internet was built that's web 2 in a nutshell and it's just funny to to think about what lens is doing which is let's create this fully open interoperable standard where you can post anywhere and it's open anywhere and it's not about you know keeping people on one app and so it's just the difference is hilarious but I I I kind

of understand why Twitter's doing it I mean ultimately Twitter is a business that is not making money and so for everyone out here that uses Twitter and likes Twitter elon's got to make these moves to to make this business profitable and so like he's got to do what you got to do because of the walls and the way that we've built web 2. these are the things you have to do but it's just funny to see the difference between web 2 and web3 from the lens of web 3 this this sucks this makes no sense this isn't what we want but from the lens of a private business that was just purchased for 44 billion dollars and is much profitable this makes total sense right you know you're sitting there you're Elon and the team you're like well we we've built this amazing platform that we're not making revenue from We're

allowing everybody to move off our platform well you guys can't link off our platform anymore and boom now you gotta stay within our platform it also fits with other things that Twitter's talking about launching they're talking about launching video they're talking about doing more within their own platform so yeah I I get it from their perspective it's and also just very confusing because it appear like they put this policy up and then they took it down and I don't need I can't even keep track of I have no idea well they also said that if you want to post off platform and share links then you need to be on Twitter blue so you need to pay the eight dollars whatever it is a month I get that you know what I mean if you it's a bit you want to advertise your stuff on a different platform you probably should pay for that and the

only people that care like this for the average user They Don't Really Care people that care are creators and businesses the ones that are using Twitter which is free to make a bunch of money so I don't mind it I think look I think lens is going to solve this anyway or something like lens but for now it's a smart business move you know and I want Twitter to stay around so do what you got to do Elon [Laughter] okay let's go on to Moon Birds Moon Birds is experimenting with in-chain art so as you might remember we talked about this a few weeks ago on the show at the end of November proof the which is the business that owns mood Birds announced that Moon Birds art was moving in chain now in chain was their word to differentiate between truly in chain ART versus currently we we say

that most nft projects are on chain but the truth is the majority of nft projects only the token is on chain but the art is stored off chain in a centralized server somewhere where only the creator has the key and it basically enables the Creator to be able to change your art as they please if they wanted to do anything to your art they could so now what we're seeing is moonbirds is experimenting and playing with this Tech which I think is super exciting to see because we're really talking about the blend of culture and Tech here and that's what moon Birds ecosystem is all about you know obviously I'm a holder so I'm a big supporter of their project but let me just tell you what this allows you to do what they've done here so

they've done two things if you have a moon bird and you have moved your moon word to be in chain you can log in to your collector platform which exists within proof and you can do one of two things one if your moon bird is nested you can prove that your moon bird is nested by changing the background of your moonberg and this is all done in chain so because I've done something with my nft my nft now is dynamically changed or because Moon versus a big fan of x copy if you own a x Copy Max Payne nft and you have that nft in the same world as your moon bird well then you can

change the background of your moon bird to a custom x copy background so what you moved your moon bird on change eh I have but I can't change my background because I am I moved it in chain Kai come on man language is so just got it's got so much backlash for this in chain on chain thing but I get it they're trying to differentiate good for you right but my my cold wallet is is at home and I'm not at home right now so I can't do this switch but what is to me what's really exciting about this we talk a lot about Dynamic nfts right we had Michael Robinson on the podcast a few months ago from chain link Labs we talked about the impact of dynamic nfts we've talked about during the World Cup Budweiser did a

campaign where you could buy an nft and it would change based upon the score in the game right so there's so much around Dynamic nfts but here's the problem right now only the creator has the access to make your nft Dynamic so in the Budweiser case their centralized team is changing the nft as the score changes right it's not in chain so I'd see what moon Birds is doing here and I really see big use cases for this if we think about more of our activity moving in chain and we want to flex and show off that I don't know let's say I want to flex that I went to nft NYC well because I went to nft NYC maybe one of

my other communities decides that my nft is going to change and I now have a new background or I now have something different that I can show off so I think that we're going to see a lot of very interesting use cases come out of this and the fact that it's in chain is just it makes it so much it's simpler it's easier well it's yeah it depends on what the use of the nft is sometimes you might want the Creator to change it sometimes you might need a like in the dynamic nft with Budweiser for example probably neither the Creator or the owner needs to change it but it should be a you know they're probably using graph protocol to figure out the live score the feed of the game and so it auto does it so in this case a robot makes changes for you in some use cases

the owner of it should be able to change it so yeah it just depends and there's going to be so many different reasons why we use nfts that we're not even thinking of today and so definitely the technology is needed there's no doubt in my mind it's cool yeah super exciting to see okay let's talk about magic Eden we talked about this a couple weeks ago actually sorry last week magic Eden teased a new reward reward loyalty program and then actually the day that we recorded last week right after we recorded they launched the program so let's give you guys the details we want to make sure you guys are up to date on what's going on here and then I think we got some interesting takes on this program so this program basically has five tiers of rewards so you will based upon how much

you buy or sell on Magic Eden you get points that move you up these tiers and so the rewards for this and this is what's I think most interesting about this program is that the rewards are different than most rewards programs and Kai I know you got to take on this you want to share with us so the rewards in this case is loot boxes is basically what magic Union has called them so you could get nfts from a specific project you could get a discount on a future nft you could get whitelist access on a future nft so by you getting points for purchasing or buying or selling on Magic Eden then you will have access to other projects in their ecosystem Advanced

access free access and whatnot so it's a way for them to both promote their creators and highlight them and support them but then also give reward back to their users the reason that I love this is you know giving incentives and giving things away whether we think of those as airdrops or we think of the step to earn like we had with step in or we think of play to earn like we've had with games this is these are all amazing marketing tactics to bring someone in to use an application or to do whatever right and the problem with it though over the last few years what crypto has done is that they're giving away too much of the same thing so they're inflating the VA like that currency let's call it like everything in crypto right is some sort of asset and the way that assets are

valued on open markets is by the amount of buyers and the amount of Sellers and the problem that we've seen in the history of crypto so far is that you airdrop all your ens tokens or you airdrop you know or you give away a bunch of axi or you give away whatever right this is what we've seen as the Playbook so far and every time these airdrops happen these giveaways happen the tokens just plummet in price why because people don't care to hold these tokens they're just trying to take the value from it they're trying to extract value and so there is no reason for people to hold on to them so there's not enough buyers and so looks rare token when they did the same thing token Tanked right every single token that has ever done an airdrop has tanked afterwards and that's why because you're giving away the equity the whatever of

this thing and people are going to sell it what's amazing about this is instead of giving away all the nfts or all of the whatever magic Eden tokens they're taking a little bit from every project I don't know if it's every project but a bunch of different projects and so they're not inflating or over inflating anything instead they're just like giving one or two or a few from each project which is great marketing it's not enough of a giveaway from each project that is going to impact the price and so you're kind of finding that balance which is really really great and so it's this beautiful like idea of incentivizing and giving value but not giving too much of the same type of value that that thing becomes no longer valuable right so it's it's actually really smart I wasn't expecting this and I'm excited to see how it plays out we

showed a chart last week and it'll be coming out in Webster Academy Pro in the coming weeks in January of you know when looks rare started giving up looks tokens they're just it went insane blur when they started airdropping their tokens it went insane right and so let's see how this happens this one's different it's not a token um but it's well it is a token it's nft so let's see what happens I'm excited to see this one play out but like you said it's not a fungible token right as most rewards programs have done which is you pointed out that's not really sustainable right you know because the thing I don't get is how many times can you do that so blur for example is doing their third airdrop I believe in q1 of 2023 so what are you gonna do you're just gonna do another airdrop every quarter what are we the Central Bank of

the United States yeah you're just gonna inflate your token like crazy and push it down to zero the values so this is this seems to be this is the first example of a Rewards program where it feels sustainable and I was just going to say on sustainability they can keep doing this one because the price token's not going to go on but it also just continues to Market new projects so long as they have new people minting on their platform they this is it just continues and continues and everyone is happy there's never a point where this becomes okay it's no longer good so long as they have new people if at any point they don't have enough new projects coming on then eventually they'll have to give away too much of one project and that's the problem but I mean we assume we have many many years of growth in the nft

space so and and what what else does that show that so if you're a Marketplace you have you have two customers basically you have the creators the sellers and then you have the buyers and in the case of most of these programs they're rewarding the buyers by saying if you buy on our platform then we'll airdrop you tokens right but in this case they're actually supporting both sides of their ecosystem right because they're allowing their nft creators to have a marketing tool as you said to reach the buyers let me just tell you about one more thing about this program quickly because I do think this is very interesting and this is something that's coming out in 20 in 2023 so as part of this Rewards program magic Union has also been experimenting

with their fee so when the whole royalty debate started happening and Magic Eden was losing a ton of market share to zero fee markets they made fees optional on Magic Eden so you could choose whether you wanted to pay the royalty or not and that's basically what they've done and they've removed their two percent fee so they said we're not we're no longer going to take a fee for a time and then now have said that that two percent fee they won't take it until January is when they'll start taking it again but when they start taking it again they're going to share it with people involved in this in this loyalty program so if you have high levels of rewards if you go to like let's say their fifth tier of the

rewards program because you're a very active buyer or seller then you will get a percentage of the fee that they take on secondary sales and they've said you can get up to 45 of this fee so they're encouraging you as a user to continue to use the platform because if you continue to use the platform it's almost like this is their way of doing the airdrop right instead of putting money in your pocket by doing an airdrop they're putting money in your pocket by sharing the fee with you a REV share it's like cash rewards for your credit card you know there's cat credit cards where you just get money back that's exactly if you use it that's that's basically what they're doing a lot they're doing that plus kind of like an air miles where like you

earn points and then you can get things from their vendors right now it's different because in this instance it's actually way better because the nfts are actually on Magic Eden whereas air miles is just like third party go use Airlines but it's nothing to do with it kind of thing but yeah interesting Dynamics they're really bringing a lot of the web 2 models into one here which is super cool bullish on YouTube yeah really really stoked about it too okay we just got to take a minute to hear from our sponsor but stick around because after this we're going to talk about a little review on web3 Academy what we learned this past year and where we're going for the next year and we got some quick hits coming at you a lot of onboarding happening in the space so rare onboarding a lot we're gonna talk about decentral land doing land rentals

it's a very interesting stuff coming up so stick around and we'll see in a minute unlock protocol is the nft membership protocol for web3 Content subscriptions Community Access event tickets are all forms of memberships one of the most common business models for creators and entrepreneurs today building an nft membership opens many new possibilities for your members everything from tailored multi-platform experiences to the ability to sell an unfinished subscription on secondary markets these are things just not possible in web 2. however in order for this business model to work creators need nfts which are time-bound or have built-in recurring payments unlock

protocol does this for your nfts that are yet with a few simple steps you can create your own nft contract without code what WordPress has done for websites unlock protocol is doing for membership nfts if you're an nft Creator you can't rely on royalties as they are likely going to zero you need recurring Revenue you need unlocked at web3 Academy We Believe nft membership ships are the future of business and community and that's why we decided to build an unlock learn more at unlock dashprotocol.com all right guys welcome back we are going to dive into the story of web3 Academy

and the growth here and just give some of our advice and the things that we've learned through our experiences here to other entrepreneurs in the web through space so if you're new to web3 we launched on February 27th terrible day to launch a new business because it was also the day that Russia decided to invade Ukraine and so I wouldn't recommend it but we we've pushed along and we actually only launched a podcast at that point about a month later we decided that we needed a newsletter and that would be useful so we launched newsletter as well and then three months after that we were like who the heck are all these people listening to our podcast from your newsletter we don't get to talk to them we have no idea who's listening to this stuff it was very weird and we're like we need to talk to these people and so we decided

hey you know what does web3 do we try to build community so let's launch a Discord see what happens that was probably one of the coolest things we did because we got to understand who the people were that were you know listening and consuming this for the last few months and so we got to meet many of you that are listening today so up until this point today we now have 25 000 downloads a month a little over that on a monthly basis and that's been growing every month which has been cool to see we were one of the top five percent podcasts on Spotify which is really really cool we've hit over 6 000 newsletter subscribers and our Twitter went from zero didn't exist I don't even remember when we started it to almost 10K I think we're about 900 followers away from getting to 10K so that was

really cool so the growth has been great we've been able to meet so many people and learn so much ourselves from this but I think what's great when we think of Webster Academy which is a business we need to hire a team in order to do this content we need revenues well we happen to have our first sponsor come in with lens protocol in September so about what is that six months into the business I believe Jay or so and then we made our second come along with unlock in November so we're super grateful for them they've been amazing to help us learn the space understand the space and and obviously allow us to hire our team which our team now consists of five we have a writer miles we have a social media poster Raul we have a media production guy or what do we call them

in that one production boy which is tigal we call him or Tyler and then Jay and I as as the host and we actually are looking to hire one more probably starting in January which we are excited for as well for our new product Webster Academy Pro it's been a hell of a year Jay anything you want to add on that side of things before I just want to ask a couple questions but anything to add there yeah I think it's not a lot to add you you hit all the main numbers it's just it's remarkable it's remarkable just to step back and it's a reminder of the importance of reflection and looking back and we've come so far and I'm so excited about the future and I think the one thing to note is this growth has happened in a time where this industry is shrinking in terms of

new people coming into the space right obviously it's much smaller than it that it was back in 2021 and 2021 so let's ask this question Jay when we reflect on this last you know 10 months or so that we've been doing this what do you think are the key things the key reasons why webview Academy has succeeded as it has and maybe what are the things that you know as an entrepreneur as a founder of this company that we could have done better in this in this early stages yeah great questions so to the first question I mean the second question there's many things we could do better but start with the first question I think that a couple of things that are great lessons for entrepreneurs first is start before you're ready Kyle had done a podcast before so Kai you had experience with podcasting I'd never done a podcast before and I was

nervous as in the beginning you know butterflies in my stomach before every show pits were sweating man the the swas going on in my chair it's like sitting in a pond before every show I don't know if that's appropriate to say on the show but hey so I think it's a good reminder to Just Produce just put out content and start going because you will never be ready you will never have perfect answers you'll never have the perfect site the perfect intro it was about just producing content so it was the first thing you know even things like our logo and our brand like very

simple in the beginning right you know pick a color pick a typeface boom logo let's roll so keep it simple and just start to create a product and get it in front of people as fast as you can because that's how you eat back so that was the first thing the second thing I would say is be consistent so we have now produced three podcasts a week for 10 months that is a big part of our success is we have just committed to consistency don't get me wrong sometimes you're exhausted you're tired you're not necessarily you know you're coming in you're trying to prepare you're trying to do your best but it's tough it's tough to create that to have that level

of consistency but that is the biggest thing that learns at least your success because you get to learn through experience right you learn if you're producing that much and you're just you keep going at it you learn pretty quickly what works and what doesn't work before you answer the what can we do better I'd love those answers by the way and I actually just want to I want to jump on one for a second it's not just about being ready in terms of understanding what's going to be the product in the business and blah blah blah like you said we didn't even like our logo has everything has changed right when we originally first launched we just knew that web3 was a spot that we wanted to be a part of the other thing I would say is like we launched before we were even knowledgeable in this space but I think what was cool

about that is we said let's just launch not try to be the experts but let's try to become an expert and while we're doing that we will teach along the way let's just be curious and so I think that's another big lesson is that you don't have to be an expert yet you can start creating content even if you're just figuring it out and actually that's the best time to do it is use the creation of your content to learn right like especially if you're younger and you're in school right now every day you go to school and you learn something new post about that in whatever industry or whatever like topic you want to do like that is the best time to start creating content not once you've figured it all out it's actually as you're learning because it's just more efficient that way but yeah consistency and just start is 100 best advice well done Jay

anything you would do better yeah I don't I don't have anything off the top of my head that I would do better like other than like a bunch of little things but I'm trying to think of do you have anything that is sort of like a I don't think I could have done it better because I've just had to learn as we've gone but the thing I wish I was better at was building Community I think it's the thing it's it's probably the other thing I would say that helped us succeed is that we did focus on community it was more accidental we had no idea why or whatever because it was months ago we were just like I don't know everyone keeps talking about Community let's just get everyone to Discord and that has been Monumental for what we've done because we've learned so

much about who our listener is who are the people in the space what kind of content do they want you know we've had a dow that spun out of our community which has been amazing so just like that that has been awesome I just wish I was better at it or our team was better at it because it I just see so much value from it but it's just something that is so difficult and I mean when we first launched it no idea what I was doing you know what I mean like now I'm starting to understand that learn it more done some masterminds with the community which has been amazing so I don't think I could have done it any better but I do wish we started it sooner and like we were better at it from the beginning but that's just a hopeful wish and and just to build on that the

the the ways in which I think we could have done Community better would have been to to build slowly so not to we got a thousand people in our community very quickly and as a result we had a thousand different opinions a thousand people looking for different things and it became chaotic whereas had we had we built one person at a time you know had we had it be a closed community where you had to attend a meeting in order to get access where we got to meet you and you got to meet us and we got to ask you questions and learn about you and why you were joining that would have probably been the biggest thing that I think could have

helped us right yeah because we had to like transition to start doing that way later and at that point we had there was already so many people that came in yeah I agree completely if you're looking to build community it is not about scale that's for sure or actually that's how you do scale okay last question then as we as we finish up this section is we're excited for for the next year so we're 10 months in you know we got a week left in 2022. what are you excited about for 2023 with web3 Academy man I'm excited about so much I'm excited about where the space is at because I think that we are standing on a foundation that has taken years to build and although it might from the media's perspective seem like a really shaky Foundation that's only because of a few black swans that unfortunately all happened in the same year which is crazy

but on the whole we are at a point where I believe next year there's going to be tens of millions many tens of millions hundreds of millions onboarder we've got some major things happening in the space Major Brands Starbucks Reddit really growing Nike all these things are happening so I think and the real utility is coming and now that everyone's been washed out on the trading side we can focus on the business so that's what I'm excited about from the space in terms of us I'm most excited about we are now positioned to bring on the biggest guests in the space and help you as our listener understand more of the how to's and the step-by-steps of what these biggest

companies are doing and how you can model your business or your yourself as a Creator or the way in which you use web3 will be able to give you better models to use that are real practical guides and that's that's what I'm most excited for what about you Kai yeah I think for me the the cool thing about this year is a lot of our content was around just trying to understand Concepts and theories and like where this is going you know we're always trying like is this a good idea is it not blah blah blah and we're just sort of like thinking about it and the more I dove into this space and understand and now the more things like you said have launched with Reddit and Starbucks and all this stuff we can actually go and look and see what has worked it's no longer what will work although we're

still definitely doing that but now there is enough and there's becoming enough information that we can go and say what did work you know what I mean in 2022 and we can do that without asking the companies although we do that for the podcast we can also just go and look at it on chain and that to me is why I keep talking about this Pro thing that's coming out I've been diving deep into it for the last two months and I'm just like holy I didn't realize how cool this is how much data there's and how much you can actually understand about Community about business models about these Concepts that we're thinking about at music nft's content to nfts you know all the stuff we can just look on chain and see what are users actually doing and that is mind-blowing to me and

so I'm really excited to launch web Academy Pro which is coming out the very beginning of January and I think this is going to be I hope to make it the best resource in web3 to understand which businesses business models and Concepts in web 3 are winning and it's no longer about theorizing or just speculating on the stuff it is now let's actually look and see what's working and what's not and I know there's some that do this mainly in the D5 space I'm excited to bring this to web3 to social to all these kind of things and really get to the nitty-gritty so I learned so much 2022 now with this on chain stuff I think we're just going to learn so so much more so I'm I'm just excited to see where this goes yeah and as you said it's no longer speculation on our part yeah right or or trust in these companies saying that

certain things are happening now it's proved it's proven it's proof it's here is the real data and here's what's actually happening yeah so man I'm just so excited bro this is this is so much fun this is just I feel like you know pinch me I'm Living in a Dream okay Jay should we wrap up with a few quick hits what do you think yeah let's do it we're gonna go real quick on these you got only 30 seconds okay first up Sports continues to be a big driver for onboarding into web 3. yeah this was cool so so rare they saw 585 000 new signups to their platform during the 2022 World Cup so rare is like a fantasy sports platform that is that is web3 enabled so they use like nfts and they incorporate them in there 585 000

new people came because they had a World Cup fantasy league I think if you scroll down Jay in that League there was 27 000 different leagues 608 000 people played so a pretty big deal to be honest and just to me the big takeaway is every time a big event happens in this world someone does something with web3 for that event and it always onboards new people so we're just every every day we're onboarding new communities into the space and really it's getting new people wallets and it's going to happen from so many different angles and that's the coolest coolest thing for me okay next up decentraland publish the guide on land rentals in its Marketplace yeah this is super interesting because we've talked a lot about the metaverse and all these land sales that happened in the metaverse we haven't talked about few

months but back in the summer there was all these massive land sales of metaverse land and it was this question of like why are you selling land in the metaverse and is that a good thing well here's decentraland coming out with their Tech to support land rentals now I'm not going to get into the conversation of whether land rentals in the metaverse is a good thing or a bad thing but in order for land sales to work you have to be able to rent your land the only reason that we buy land in the real world is because it's an asset that can accrue value to the investor and one of the biggest ways that you crew value with land is by renting out your land because land is limited and a lot of people don't have enough Capital to purchase land but they still want to

have a retail store or live on that land and use that for their own purposes well now you can do that in decentraland by renting out land into Central land and then turning it into whatever you want to do and the exact mechanics of this this essentially are all on chain so you rent it for a specific amount of time it's one day to 365 days currently you pick the amount of days you want to rent it you do it on chain you pay up front for the land rental the owner of the land sets the price you pay up front for it and then you have access to that land and what the central land is doing is they are also at the same time putting you in touch with developers that can help you build a experience on that land build an activation on that land so it's really interesting

I hope it's permissionless because I just bought land an apartment in Toronto and in order for me to rent my land out I gotta go to the the city government and get approval and they have to give me some numbers that I can go and plug that into Airbnb and so I don't even know if I'm allowed to do it or not it's my land so pisses me right off so let's hope that the way they're doing it is permissionless because this sucks all right what's next all right next up web3 Ed Tech platform Medical School grows to 120 000 developers in just 11 months yeah that's pretty crazy so basically what this is is that is 120 000 developers that are learning about both web 3 and kind of metaverse stuff but what's interesting is the most popular of them all which is the ethereum learning track has seen over 30 000 developers enrolled

in its courses in that time pretty amazing to see of course we need devs we've been saying this for a while and what's really cool is in this bear Market the dev numbers are still going up and this is why we need people more people learning this stuff because we got a lot a lot lot to build so thankful for Medi school for bringing in these people and teaching them the ways we need more of it all right next up timepieces partners with Deepak Chopra for new nft collection yeah it's super exciting I mean time has really just been a leader in the space from the beginning and one of the ways that they've been such a great leader is by using their media platform to partner with other creators and co-launch nft Collections and we've seen them do this many times with different creators and even with cities they did they did a

launch with Miami where they launched some nfts around Miami's art scene so really cool things Deepak Chopra famous author and the spiritual space a real leader in helping the I think he's probably got if you wanted the personal help section of a of a bookstore he's probably got the most books in that section and basically this is a nft collection that will celebrate his best-selling book to 25th anniversary of his best-selling book The Seven spiritual laws of success and so there will be 73 nft artists who create unique book cover art for that book and they'll sell these off as an nft collection so this is an art collection this isn't a utility-based collection although we'll

see in the future I think we all know there is always potential for utility with this whereas if you sold art the web two-way you can't add utility in later because you can't reach those those owners but this way you can so yeah very simple and exciting to see more large large names come into the space and obviously I think Deepak Chopra is somebody this is going to onboard a lot of new people because his audience is certainly not the web 3 native audience okay uniswap to allow users to buy crypto using dividend credit cards yeah so this is an integration with moonpay and goes off of we've talked the last few weeks now it seems they're all happening at one time this is how the space works you had metamask which integrated with PayPal we

had the stripe widgets which are now allowed on kind of any website now we have moonpay integrating into uniswap and what this means is again you get to skip centralized exchanges and you can just move money directly from your bank account your credit card and put it right into crypto and immediately start using web3 applications this is exactly what we need obviously it's a show in the centralized exchange world so we need more of this and I mean unit swap is by far the most used Dex decentralized Exchange in the space and so now you can immediately get money in there it's amazing okay last up new you lab CEO who is it Jay yeah so Daniel oliger algar I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce his last name has moved over the The Great Migration continues to happen of human capital from web 2 to web3 So Daniel was the CEO and president

of Activision Blizzard Activision is one of the largest gaming companies in the world and he is moving over from there to become this CEO of Yuga Labs which owns board API club and crypto punks and me bits and is really the largest player in the space this is a prediction that we actually made for 2023 is that we would see more human capital moving and here we are we haven't even finished the year and we're seeing one of I mean a huge name in the space that's moving over and also a big name in gaming with his experience in gaming it's an interesting signal to the focus of yoga Labs the current CEO of yoga Labs Nicole Muniz is stepping down a CEO but is going to stay on as a partner Institute

strategic advisor so she's not leaving I mean yoga Labs just keeps on making big moves despite the fact that most of the news about them is them being sued by you know a class action lawsuit against them the s cc is looking into their ape coin so despite all that you got some massive name moving over and putting his chips in the web 3 world and last week's Big Move Over was Keith Grossman going from time over to moonpay and moon phase the other one getting suits so it's crazy that we're in this you know this wild Market this bear Market where everything is falling apart and still the smartest people in the world and these big names are still coming into this space so it makes me bullish on a on 2023 and on web3 in general what an episode Jay that's our final one of the

year I mean not the final one you all will listen to but the final one that Jay and I are gonna record what what a year what a year way to go Kai Pat in the back happy New Year everybody happy Hanukkah merry Christmas happy Kwanzaa enjoy some time with your family celebrate hug your loved ones it's been a wonderful year and let's look forward to next year can't wait to see you in 2023. thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 Journey 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 the next one