Weekly Web3 news: Blur airdrop, Shopify goes Web3 and the SEC crackdown

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your trusted source for useful and legitimate information to remain on the Forefront of the internet Revolution I'm Jaybird as always joined by my co-host Kyle reedhead and we believe that web3 is going to change the world that's why we're here to guide the world's top talent into this space to contribute get ahead of the curve and capitalize on the opportunity Kyle what's going on in the roll up this week we've got a big week as per usual we're going to start things off with the chart of the week which is going to uncover an on-chain Bull Run in an off-chain bear Market some pretty cool stuff Happening Here

thank you I like that we're gonna talk about the long-awaited blur airdrop which dropped yesterday a bunch of people are making some money so of course we're gonna talk about that the friends just launched burn Island a deflationary technology which proves that Gary vaynerchuk is in fact a web 3 Pro subscriber because he gets tokenomics so you're welcome guarity for the heads up Shopify goes web three big big news and there was in fact an nft Super Bowl commercial like we predicted last week and it sucked I'm not gonna lie it was terrible they might have another opinion on that but that's my opinion we'll talk more about that and finally the SEC is coming after us crypto Twitter's losing their minds let's all calm down we're going to walk you through what's going on here don't worry everything's all

good web3's thriving and this is gonna be a great episode love it all right let's start with some gratitude before we jump in Kai what are you grateful for this week I am grateful for my parents who came to visit me last weekend in Toronto I actually gave them tickets to the Toronto Maple Leafs game for Christmas and so that game was this weekend so we went out we watched the Leafs game then we went for some drinks we played some shuffleboard at a dive bar all the fun things that I do with my parents and it was a great weekend so it was happy to have him here that's awesome I am grateful that Sam my wife is finally showing her pregnant belly at that time yeah in the first trimester you couldn't really tell she was pregnant and now

we're about halfway through the pregnancy and you can really see her belly and it's so exciting I don't know how else to put it it's just I see that thing and I'm like oh yeah that's my little guy in there so Sam thanks for wearing crop tops around the house and showing off your belly go get it Sam you get it girl all right before we get into things let's start with a quick announcement for those that are watching which you can see up on the screen right now is a conference that I'm actually going to be speaking at called The Creator economy Expo their abbreviation is sex CeX which is awesome for the crypto world because that just makes sense but anyway this is an in-person event in Cleveland on May 1st to 3rd for Content creators and I know many of you that listen to this podcast are content

creators there are some amazing amazing discussions going on at this conference highly recommend you check it out if you can or are in Cleveland on May 1st to 3rd and of course Pro members will receive a hundred dollars off their conference tickets so if you sign up to Pro or if you're already a pro member you just go check out your pro reports or head to the Discord where there's a perks Channel specific for you you get 100 bucks after ticket but I'm going to be speaking on the third day I believe May 3rd gonna be talking about the Great Migration from online to on chain as well as sustainable web 3 business models for creators so if you're a listener you want to come check it out please do and let me know if you're going to come that would be amazing I'd love to meet you over there sweet great

hookup for pro members I like that a little discount at a conference that's great check that out everybody well we're gonna try and do that every week all right before we get into the episode and start off another chart of the week let's take a quick second to hear from our sponsors 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 web3 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 file and followers moving along with you lens protocol enables self-sovereignty 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 are you building a community around your brand well listen

to this at web3 Academy our motto is Community First profit second why because engaged communities tell you exactly how to improve your product and ultimately Drive growth they act as team members recruiting new customers and providing crucial feedback and they become brand super fans sticking by you through thick and thin but to engage your community you must first understand them that's where Chasm comes in Chasm is our go-to web3 tool for managing and understanding our community members it combines both on-chain and web 2 metrics all in one user-friendly dashboard with Chasm you'll know things things like which other communities your members are part of and which of your campaigns are

truly driving results that's why at web3 Academy we use Chasm to launch campaigns optimize growth engage our community members and automate workflows with this all-in-one tool if your community is already on chain get to know them better with Chasm head to chasm.xyz using the link in the description and discover why top brands like a mutable Nifty labs and collab land are using Chasm all right welcome back let's start off with the chart of the week we're looking at chart of ethereum to see is ethereum scaling okay what's going on here yeah so this was a fun one for me I've been wanting to get the data of ethereum plus its layer 2 ecosystem altogether a lot of

people that are looking at what's going on in ethereum are looking at just ethereum and we know that ethereum is now a what's called a modular blockchain so it's got a bunch of layer twos that plug into it and so a lot of the activity is no longer happening on ethereum it's happening on its layer twos and so what we need to do when we look at transactions and things which is what we have on this chart here we need to combine them all if we want to see what's happening with ethereum it's no longer just ethereum it's actually the whole ecosystem and so when it looks like ethereum is actually decreasing in transactions over this bear Market when we add its layer twos on top of it in terms of weekly transactions which we can see on this picture here we can see that it's actually reaching all-time

highs every single day right now when we add this is arbitrary and optimism added on to it it's actually pretty much double its transactions and what's really cool is if we look down on the yellow line which is the gas price of ethereum we can see that even though we are at Double all-time highs ever for ethereum transactions the transactions at ethereum is actually settling the gas prices still not as low as it's been but it's still remaining very very low considering the amount of activity now this is just arbitrary and autism there's 30 layer twos that are all plugged into ethereum and there's one that's even bigger and if you scroll over to the right J on the the chart here we have another chart this one is ethereum arbitrum optimism and polygon when we look at that we are 5x more than

5x actually the total transactions that are being settled now polygon is not settling transaction on ethereum per se but is part of the ethereum ecosystem and so we go from I don't know what was it around 5 million transactions per week on ethereum to almost 40 million per week when we include polygon it's pretty amazing to see that the ethereum ecosystem throughout this entire bear Market if we look at layer twos if we look at polygon is actually going pretty much parabolic and this is true of basically all of the metrics in terms of new nfts being launched new tokens being launched new users like all the things so these charts are pretty amazing we just did a report that came out actually today this morning called as ethereum scaling on the pro side of things and it

walks you through all of this and kind of guides you through what's actually happening in ethereum ecosystem and telling the story through charts it's really really cool fascinating to see was super exciting very well done on that report I gave it a read yesterday and it was so well done everyone's going to want to check that out and there's so much to learn from the ethereum ecosystem it's such a great case study that everybody can learn from so you're going to want to check that out bullish on ethereum as always we love it Kai let's jump into the first story of the week books on web 3 as always all right just bullish on the whole space in general ethereum just happens to be the thing that enables much of it to happen but anyway all right so big news blur which is an nft Marketplace has had

their long awaited airdrop which finally happened yesterday so blur is a low fee optional royalty nft Marketplace we've talked a lot about blur over the last few weeks here it's mainly designed for like Pro Traders but we'll see they've got a lot of new features a lot of new things coming out but it's getting a lot of traction in the last few months and though we're not sure how real that traction is per se just yet and the reason is whenever there's a token coming out from an empty Marketplace we saw this with looks rare in 2020 well early 2022 we saw this with x2y2 whenever they're launching a token Trader's gonna trade and they come in and they start just farming and wash trading and doing all the stuff wash trading is where you own two wallets and you just keep sending and buying and

selling the same nft back and forth and as a result you can earn a bunch of these tokens so the volume of blur has been massive it's actually beaten openc I think yesterday it had more sales volume for nfts than openc itself and open C's been the dominant player since 2017. now a lot of that is likely due to just people trying to farm this airdrop which was gave quite a bit of money to some people so the biggest earner of this airdrop earned 3.2 million dollars in blur tokens so that's pretty cool I guess but most people were earning in the thousands so it's pretty impressive however if you're an American you can thank the SEC which we're going to talk about later for protecting you because they didn't allow you to claim your airdrop unfortunately so if you were American you were not allowed to

participate in this Pro tip though if you use a VPN you can claim your tokens so there it is there's your your Alpha for today but anyway a lot of big things coming out of blur it's exciting to see the big thing that blur did here is they sort of copied looks rare and what they did in terms of you know launching with a token Etc and that gets a bunch of people interested the way that they launched a token is they did it in some ways where it tried to prevent the wash trading and the farming so we're hoping that a lot of this volume is actually real volume and the way that they did it is they just didn't give tokens to those who were buying it was only if you were to list an nft and so this would hopefully prevent a lot of the wash

trading we'll see what happened but anyway big thing for the industry we need a little bit of excitement tokens always do that so we like to see it and this nft Marketplace War just continues and it's been really fun to watch I'm actually in the middle of doing a pro report for them right now next week it will come out called the Great nft Marketplace war and I sort of walk through the ins and outs of what's happened with all these marketplaces it's been one of the most interesting I think market share battles in crypto for sure but you know really in all Technologies so it's very interesting to watch and blur is one of the big competitors now in the space a couple things that I want to touch on first is you mentioned that they had some mechanics to try to make sure that this

airdrop did not go to wash Traders now when I did some research into this the top three wallets that made the most amount of blur tokens which as you said the number one wallet had 3.2 million blur tokens and blur token is trading at about 60 cents right now so that's about 1.4 million dollars in US dollars that that wallet got a serious money it's pretty clear that that top wallet was a wash Trader and it's pretty clear that while it's two and three we're also wash Traders so I don't know did their mechanisms not work was there just wash trailers that were smart enough to get around it I think what Advanced wash Traders would do is they would just have coordinated group efforts right you'd

make a group of you know 10 to 20 people and you'd get real smart about how to make sure that blur couldn't see that it was wash trading by just everybody lists and then everyone else knows to grab and buy at that same time and so it's coordinated effort I don't know I mean I hope that they eliminated watch trading because if they didn't then this is not doing what they wanted to do then after doing this report which is almost done now just looking at the volumes in the nft marketplaces over the last couple years a large percent of the volumes that we see or we think that we're having in this industry are just watch trading it's crazy it's an interesting story to be honest and it's wild to uncover but I think our numbers are so

so so so so inflated now I do think a token can be a great idea to like vampire attack a protocol that's you know kind of dominant but they just need to do it in a different way because these are just not working so then here's the next question so this was blur is calling this season one and this was the season one air drop that just happened this week and now we're in season two is this a sustainable strategy to continually do seasons and continue to do air drops I mean all that's going to do is deflate your token because you're just putting out more and more Supply with each season can you do this forever Kai what do you think I mean you definitely can't you could I mean I guess like ethereum is going to

inflate for forever but it's actually going to deflate because they have a burn mechanism right right so if blur finds a way to introduce a burn mechanism I think if they introduce that then it's fine the way that blur is doing this right now or that many of these Marketplace have done it is for those who trade the fees that are earned they just pay out some of those fees to the users or to those staking the tokens that's what x2y2 did if they had a way where you need to stake your blur tokens in order to receive anything and instead of inflating the currency they just 50 or whatever percent of the fees that blur is actually earning okay maybe that's a way to make it more sustainable and then also maybe they find a way to burn some of it as well like there's

definitely a way to make this work just not in the beginning because in the beginning they need to make a bang and it needs to be a lot of money it needs to get people really excited and that's where they have to airdrop these tokens airdropping is never really it's a good idea if you want to get governance out you want to decentralize which is part of blur's idea here but like it's gonna tank your token it always does even and I mean I think the price of blur when it first dropped was five dollars it's now at 60 cents it's been 24 hours you know what I mean I guarantee it goes well I don't want to guarantee anything but probably goes lower as more people claim the tokens and start selling them right so definitely this strategy is not sustainable but I think that we can find

a sustainable strategy for marketplaces and I think it's a smart idea because those who are using it should probably earn some tokens or should earn some revenues from it and thus have some say on governance right that's kind of the idea of this whole thing so I like it I just don't know that anyone's nailed it yet so we'll figure that one out though yeah well it's interesting you bring up burn mechanisms because that's our next story but I just want to bring up one more point on blur is they also have updated their royalty policy just this week again and in their new royalty policy there's three options for how they will honor royalties or won't honor royalties on their platform because they're optional and their recommended option is

recommended is Block open C says our preference is that creators should be able to earn royalties on all marketplaces that they whitelist rather than being forced to choose to encourage this blur enforces full royalties on collections that block trading on open C like I said it's the great NFC Marketplace War it is literally war and I'm telling you the story is when I talk about looks rare and pseudo Swap and x2y2 and the things that they have done over the last year and a half has been it's amazing for this one this one might Trump at all like literally just straight up saying block them and we'll give you the royalties wow I'd love to see it all right what we got next Kai okay so Avery tweets out well retweet it

here and Avery was actually on the podcast this week and she's the president of vayner3 she did an amazing job explaining what's going on with Brands and web3 and kind of what that market is so if you haven't listened to that one go do it but she is sharing here that the friends has just announced a new technology called burn Island which they say is our future of nft burning and rewards and they call it a deflationary technology well let me explain what this first and then I'll talk about the technology so basically it's a way for the friends holders to burn nfts and when you burn your nft you can receive rewards right so you can either get another nft you can get physical merch you can get access to events different things like that you don't know what you're gonna get and so

there's different events around it so it's kind of like a fun gamified thing where you can sacrifice nfts and it can be your V friends which remember these things are worth a lot of money like what's the floor of a v friends it's got to be a couple of years I'm going to be friends holder but I would guess it's probably somewhere between three to six eats right and so a decent amount of money to just go burn it and go hopefully I don't know I don't know that you can burn your V friend though I don't think you can I think you can only burn a v-friend two maybe they said anything with the smart contracts with you friends so it was the book one anyway there's a bunch but you can even burn non-vee friends tokens so you can burn FTS that have nothing to do with

this really it's not built just for V friends it's built for the whole ecosystem as a way to like this cool game where you can come in burn your [ __ ] and hope you get something so really cool it's funny that if you watch the video garyvee's explaining it and he says this amazing new deflationary technology and what's hilarious is all it is is there's just a wallet that no one has the a seed phrase for and all you do is you send your nft to that wallet and now it's burned that's how a burning mechanism works now I know they have some other stuff where you get some rewards and things for whatever you burn but like ultimately that's what you're doing but anyway love to see it I don't know what it's going to bring We'll see I think the first launch is the 21st of

February that's what they said but it's a great way to add tokenomics to your nft collection I don't know what VP friends is let's say it's ten thousand I have no idea how many there are in there but if all of a sudden you can start burning things to get other things that makes the friends or whatever other nfts participate in this technology here in the burn Island it makes your nft become more and more rare as more people participate in play which will ultimately Drive value and increase value most likely as long as there's demand for your collection it will increase the floor price or the value of those nfts which I think is fantastic it's creating a great experience which we always talk about this is the one thing you want to do right it's giving ownership to those who are part of the

community or part of whatever this nft represents and now it creates this Burning mechanism where you're lowering Supply and making it more scarce which as long as again you are creating demand for these nfts it can only make the price go up if there is more demand so again we talk about this a lot with eth and what they're doing and and so garyvee is doing the same thing now with nfts which is just really cool I haven't seen anyone really do this yet in this form and so I'm excited to see where they take this and how many the other collections end up participating here is this classic garyvee being just a master of grabbing attention here he is grabbing attention back to his ecosystem the full v-friends ecosystem with a fun game I think one thing that a lot of us

forget is crypto is currently the best use case of blockchain it's the most widely used it is having the largest impact however most people aren't that interested in finance as a topic which is what I would put crypto into it's too complex I don't care whereas games trading buying selling that's why nfts brought in so many new people so here's garyvee just making something really fun that people can participate in it's going to grab attention and it also gives people something to do they're not investing in nfts sure Kyle you're right there's the whole wash Traders and there's a lot of that as part of the current trade but there's also a lot of

people that are just here to do cool stuff and have fun and they love the idea of oh if I burn this in some lava volcano cool what does that mean oh something pops out the other side and I get a piece of merch or I get to attend some event or you know I don't even think they necessarily care they just it's that dopamine hit of playing and doing something and here's the plot twist that if this happens then I'm out of the space I'm done because I just can't take it anymore but imagine everyone starts to burn and I'm doing that in quotations they're nft they all send it into this wallet and garyvee just walks away with like a thousands profile entities and just makes millions I know listen I don't think everybody

will do that I don't even know how you verify that the wallet is actually a burnable one but anyway that would be like the ultimate rug why did they set it up like that like they could have set it up where it's actually a burn that is the way that you burn it I think really yeah yeah I think even that's how youth does it yeah people can correct me if they know but I'm pretty sure that's the way that it's done this is what I looked up anyway and learned very interesting all right well let's get on the next story web3 Commerce this is a topic that has not quite hit mainstream yet but third web has partnered with Shopify to really be the leader in web3 Commerce what do I mean when I see web3 Commerce well right now Shopify is one of the biggest Commerce Platforms in the

world that allows anybody to set up a shop to sell literally any physical item and what third web does is it brings in to any Shopify shop the connect wallet feature so now rather than buying with your credit card you can connect your wallet and buy with your wallet obviously this changes the way that you purchase there might be some more self-sovereignty involved here because you might not have to give as much personal information but at the same time obviously you're buying a physical good you have to give your name and your address in order to receive that physical good but you could send it to a PO box or something like that but also this also allows for token gated

experiences weather Academy could launch a shop right now and we could have a hat that is only available to web3 Academy Pro members we could have a t-shirt that's only available to Moon bird holders because Moon birds are on chain and we could connect to that smart contract and say oh this merch is only available for this community so you really can get into this incredible token gating of merch and token getting of different communities it's a really big unlock super super excited to see it I think so early days in web through Commerce yeah I think there's a couple things so like token gating I mean they've already had token gating for a little bit I think the big unlock here with connect wall is you don't have to

create an account right so whatever store I'm buying from usually you have to create some sort of account typically to actually do this you could give your email and all that kind of stuff now you don't have to do that your account is your wallet as we always say and now you can just connect it your account is now made your data doesn't go into their server they don't need to store your stuff because it sucks when they store your name and your credit card information and your address and you don't know what store this could be some janky little store I guess it's all done in Shopify Shopify yeah yeah it's all Shopify which is not a janky little store but anyway still an attack Vector not good for the internet not what we want and so this removes all that now like you said you still got to put your

address whatever that's fine or you could do a PO Box whatever the key thing is it's a lot less data that Shopify has to store which is great for them we don't have to go through the process of creating accounts and you don't even have to put your credit card information because it's just you connect your wallet your money's already in your wallet so it's a little bit it's your account and your bank account like your profile and your bank account all in one you just connect in buy your thing and then leave and then they can create more experiences as you said based off of the things that are in that wallet so it's super cool and again it's just kind of the next phase of e-commerce I had a great conversation with Tim Boss who's the CEO of sharing I'd say podcast is

going to be coming out in two weeks all about digital identity and self-custody of digital identity but he brought up that they are talking to a lot of large institutions government institutions large companies and they don't want to store the data some of these companies want the data because they profit off the data right a lot of web Facebook but a lot of other companies did don't want to store all this data because if they do store it then they have to secure it a they have to pay for the storage which is very expensive to have all the servers and they have to pay a ton of money to make sure it's secure because if some hacker can get in single point entry you can access everything or a lot

of things so there's this big wave I think coming of people saying hey I don't want to store my data oh wow decentralized storage offers me another way to store data that now I don't have to pay all these costs for it I think it's going to be something we're going to see a lot more companies going that direction once they understand that I think right now a lot of companies don't quite get that yet but we're doing our part too to educate well next Monday just a few days from when this comes out we have a deep dive all on decentralized storage so make sure you check that out I wasn't even trying to tee that up Jesus we're so in line look at that great great plug Jay okay next up the worst Super Bowl commercial I've ever

seen right now I'm just getting you started off Jay how could we not talk about this we talked about the Super Bowl last week and the fact that there weren't going to be any crypto ads we knew that limit break which is a web 3 gaming company started by Gabe Layton Gabe Leighton is a leader in web 2 or more so Mobile gaming he was the founder of mobile strike which is the one that had the Arnold Schwarzenegger ads that people might remember so they did a Super Bowl commercial cost them 6.5 million dollars for 30 seconds if you didn't see the Super Bowl commercial I can explain it to you in less than 30 seconds it was a QR code on screen that said scan here and it was some

characters from the digidiku universe or ecosystem jumping around it did not look super full quality let me put it that way when you've got Uber doing a commercial with P Diddy next to these shitty cartoons and a QR no one knew who these cartoons were either no anyone has heard of them you want to put Mario up there okay we all know who Mario is that makes sense no I don't know zero context zero story so you had no idea what it was but the one thing that this ad did do was very clearly tell you to scan this QR code so what happens if you scan the QR code well you were supposed to be able to Mint a free nft however the collection that limit

break offered a digital offered was only ten thousand nfts and they actually held 6 000 of them back so they only were minting four thousand so you got 110 million people watching this we don't know how many people scan but I'm guessing that millions of people scan this nft from what we heard from doing research Raul our social media guy shout out was talking to a bunch of people who are all over this trying to Mint this nft because if you did mint it I heard that some people were able to flip it and sell it for five six seven hundred dollars so some people were trying to be on top of this and if you did scan to Mint right when the commercial played apparently they had already minted out

the 4 000 ahead of time so you couldn't even visit it he tweeted it a couple minutes before the commercial actually went out and so everyone who was on Twitter already saw it he rugged the Super Bowl fans which is insane and then what they did is they just redirected it you didn't even go to the mint you just went to his Twitter and so he literally did a Super Bowl ad said scan me and it went to his Twitter account so he's now got a million followers it's Gabriel Laden guy I think he has a hundred thousand two hundred thousand something like that he had several hundred thousand I don't think he got a million I think he got less than 500k do you have the tweet that he put so he sent them all this tweet a pin tweet on the thing and it's here was my problem with

this whole thing so first of all the commercial was terrible right but whatever that's fine a lot of people do terrible commercials what does it say like the world's biggest free mint or something like that which is like no knows what that even means bro like who are you even talking to you know what I mean it just doesn't even make sense to say that it's like he lives in his own little bubble on crypto Twitter with the 30 people that are here all buying each other's jpegs and like forgets that 99.9 of the world has no idea what the hell a free mint even means and then you get to his Twitter and he had all capitals on his tweets you know meant this thing retweet this it was like all the things that I hate about nft drops where you have to do these stupid white lists and

you gotta follow this thing and share this thing like the most scammy ridiculous things where it's all capital letters and like the big red alarms and it says free and Urgent blah blah it was all that all these things and so you have millions of people who won don't even know what the hell he's talking about but are scanning this thing because like you said that's just what you do when you ask them to scan something and which that's web 2 habits right there right don't do that in web3 you just click buttons You're Gonna Lose Your [ __ ] which is exactly what happened here he sends all these people to get a metamask wallet and to start doing all the stuff right sign transactions and follow this thing and do this and so all these new people people come on what do the scammers do they start running ads

pretending to be him which is so easy to do and putting all these phishing ads out there and so a bunch of people now are starting to get their wallets drained because this idiot decided to go and send the most ridiculous QR code ad thing to 120 million people who don't know what they're doing terrible job on his part it makes web3 look like [ __ ] for anyone that actually even realized that this was web3 I don't even know it was so bad you might not even realize that and then those who like kind of already knew what Webster wasn't luckily had a metamask probably got scammed and got the wallet strained so terrible for people that are already in the space or like dipping their toes in the space and just like basically what this guy did was paid 6.5 million dollars to get

about 800 000 Twitter followers which people are like oh yeah that's great he got attention and he got these followers and that's great dude this guy paid almost 10 bucks a follower on Twitter that's terrible I run a marketing agency I can go into it right now and get anyone follow us on Twitter for 50 cents a piece that's it 50 cents this guy spent 10 bucks it's a terrible job all the way through was terrible absolutely hated it I wish it never existed Gabriel Layton I hope your reputation in web 3 is now completely squashed because that sucked embarrassment hello what are your thoughts Jay I love the way you get fired up there well Jay's like what do you mean I minted three of them I certainly did not I agree with everything you're saying shitty ad puts a lot of people at risk it opens up to a

lot of phishing attacks all of that what I find interesting about this is unfortunately gimmicks Work For Better or For Worse they do work we've seen it I mean gimmicks are nothing new there's been gimmick advertising since the beginning of you know Mad Men and advertising became a thing people want free stuff it's easy to get people with big red flashing lights and win here sweepstakes I mean that's Vegas to a t right and what I'm curious to see is right now it's several different nft collections the main collection which has a floor of 7 or 80th actually equate a high floor but all of these collections have been free collections to start you get it for free either

because you're airdropped it because you're a current holder or you take an action to get and so Gabe Leighton is trying to create this free to own model and he's experimenting with it and with the Super Bowl he was experimenting with it using a QR code it's kind of QR code and then go to get something for free and now obviously I don't know why they didn't do the scale you know read it in the same week minted a million nfts to NFL fans right so why Gabe Layton didn't go and mint a million free nfts right that would have been great I'm not sure do you know what I mean that would have been great get a million people 10 million I don't know how many people clicked and they all get to experience nft for the first time great but instead

you don't let them get it and you redirect them to Twitter like it just doesn't even make any sense let me give a little piece of advice for anyone who's going to run a marketing campaign whether you're the biggest company in the world or a small company in the world yes game it's work gimmicks work short term they don't work long term I'm not saying don't use gimmicks I use gimmicks all the time but the key is this build a reputable brand that gives a lot of value first okay continue to give lots of value and then throughout that journey of giving value and building up your reputation you use gimmicks throughout to make people take actions humans are lazy so they don't take action and so if you want people to take action you've got to use urgency you've got to use these kind of gimmicks

sure that's fine but do it as a like part of a broader strategy where you focus on value and reputation and then you use gimmicks every month or every couple months to like make people take the next step in your like sales Journey or whatever it is that you're selling it's not like these were people that were in his ecosystem before it was 100 120 million people that have never heard of digidaiku and probably never want to hear about it again for the rest of their lives like myself but you don't start it off with gimmicks you start off with value you teach them something you give them something and then you do gimmicks later on right so yeah terrible job in my opinion what do you think anything else on that should we move let's let's connect into the next story just because we're just gonna yell

speaking about gimmicks coffee Zilla has investigated and uncovered one of the biggest gimmickers in the nft space Kai you want to tell us what happened here yeah this is a great story so I hate that we have to keep talking about all these scams that happen to web3 one day I hope it just stops it kind of boils my blood but anyway this is actually really awesome so Dylan danis I believe his name he's an MMA fighter he's been known to be Shilling like different nfts and tokens for the last little while and so coffee's yellow who's like an investigative reporter I don't know if that's what we call them investigative reporter for like crypto YouTube investigator basically yeah yeah and so he contacts Dylan danis and says hey I have this new nft and I would like you

to promote it for me and we'll pay you I think it was five thousand dollars and so Dylan Dana says okay the name of the nft by the way was sours nft candies are moon bound is that what it's called yeah so the abbreviation of that is scam but this guy didn't notice that at the time and so basically what they did is they said they paid five thousand dollars they paid him a thousand dollars to start and he just had to tweet out a picture of the other T collection and a link and so they made him sign a contract to make it look legit in the contract in the fine print they literally put this is a scam what you're supposed to be putting out is not actually the link that we're going to send you like they told the whole thing that he was going to do the whole time

this guy didn't even read the contract just signed it took the money thousand bucks and he tweets out the promotion for this nft and he says to check out this nft when you click on the link what this guy did was the coffee Zilla rugged it and basically redirected this link to a web page that said have you been scammed by Dylan Dennis and it listed off all of the nft projects and tokens that he has basically been promoting that were scams over the last whatever it was a year or two and so this guy left it up for I'm not sure how long it ended being up for but quite a while on his Twitter and didn't realize that he was sending all of his followers to a web page that was exposing all of the scams that he's done absolutely incredible execution this is how you

execute right here okay coffeezilla well done I mean I hate that people are getting scammed this is how you do it right here that was well well done I got nothing wrong with people using their influence to promote other projects right but two things one don't be a [ __ ] [ __ ] and promote a project that you don't even look into you don't even read and do due diligence on and two when you do promote a project make sure that you disclose that you promoted to that project now obviously Dylan Dennis is like a horrible human probably deserves to go jump off a cliff with Gabe late and that might be a bit extreme but they can go right off into the

sunset together how about that at least gave Leighton is like trying to do things in the technology world of web3 I want to say that I know you talked about it a couple weeks ago I think on the roll up into like he's at least trying to like innovate in the space but just terrible at marketing execution I wish we could move to some good news this isn't necessarily bad news but tell us about what's going on with the SEC lots of talk on the SEC this week all of our crypto Twitter bring us up to speed guy I was debating if we were going to talk about this but I think it's getting quite Big A lot of people are hearing about if you're on crypto Twitter then you've definitely heard about it it's getting some coverage in the media and that's the SEC has taken some action

over the last two weeks in a couple different areas of the blockchain web3 crypto world one is unstable coins the other is on staking as a service I'm gonna break down kind of what they've done and what those are and then give some takes on it so the first thing that the SEC did which is the Securities and Exchange Commission run by Gary Gensler is they forced Kraken who is a very reputable one of the longest standing exchanges in the U.S is basically coinbase and there's Kraken that's all that's left at this point but they were doing what's called staking as a service so as we know most of the blockchains of the Bitcoin are now proof of stake including ethereum since its merged and you can stake your native token so you can stake your eth let's say and you've got to run a validator and you help us

secure the blockchain and you can earn some apy some percentage back if you do that I mean it's pretty easy but it's not everyone knows how to run a validator so what companies have done some protocols like rockable and lotto and some exchanges like coinbase and Kraken it said hey we'll do it for you you give us your money we'll run the validator and we'll take it for you that's what staking as a services this has become a billion dollar industry in the last couple years if they go to a trillion dollar industry in the future so it's very big now the unfortunate thing is that the SEC came and told Kraken that they need to shut down their staking as a service program and they give them a Wells notice that they were going to take them to court all this stuff basically what happened was Kraken

had to pay 30 million dollars to basically get rid of the lawsuit and is now shutting down their staking as a service program so very unfortunate and this worried a lot of people and said okay the SEC Gary Gensler they're coming after staking as a service they're coming after the U.S and basically going to move this entire new industry out of the US and now Americans aren't going to be able to stake and all this stuff Brian Armstrong the CEO and founder of coinbase actually tweeted out and said coinbase is staking services are not Securities we will happily defend this in court if needed so this is coinbase saying like hey come after us we're going to deal with this in court now the one thing I want to say is this first of all I hate Gary Gensler just like everyone else in crypto space I think

he's a piece of [ __ ] maybe he can go jump off a clip too or whatever you said we're being Savages yeah this is an aggressive day we're in a good mood I'm not gonna lie I don't know why we're so anyway the thing to understand about this I actually don't know that the SEC is doing the wrong thing here we'll see what happens if they go after coinbase then okay then they have ill intentions right now I'm not sure that they do they haven't done anything to stop like the protocols like rock and Pull and Lido which is decentralized you just pull your eth with another group and it's all done through a protocol and it validates for you okay coinbase same thing you give the money to coinbase but they then stake all of it there's no hidden details of what's happening with your

money you know exactly what's happening it goes they stake it and then you actually get a liquid token that shows how much you've staked right whereas crack on the other hand doesn't have that liquid token and also when you look through the details of their staking service they're not even staking all of your eats and I don't know why that is nothing against Kraken I think they're very reputable I think Jesse Powell is the founder there has been amazing in the space but they're holding back some of your Ethan doing something with it and so you're getting an apy which is what FTX and Genesis and all the problems that we've had over the last little while have done is they said hey we'll take your crypto we're going to do something with it and you're going to give you you know some sort of return

that makes sense if you're staking it all because the blockchain's giving you that money we know where it's coming from but with Kraken not all of it was getting staked and so I actually think what Gary Gensler has done here in the SEC might actually be good now I'm not saying kraken's doing anything wrong I was going to do anything bad with your money maybe they had a reason for that but it wasn't listed in their details and we didn't actually know and so that's it's opaque right because it's hidden it's not transparent and we don't want that in this industry we know what that does 2022 was you know the highlight of all this I think it sucks but maybe they're doing the right thing and they're forcing crack into the right way now could they have just said Kraken change your policy and make sure you

stake it all and like it's all good it didn't do that he decided to be a dick about it they could pay 30 million and blah blah blah but you know what I wouldn't take the [ __ ] of anyone in the centralized crypto space right now based off of what happened last year so like I think people need to hold on and maybe this is actually for the better so let's just chill on that now the reason people are getting really pumped about this is because then a couple days later the SEC comes out and puts a Wells notice here on paxos paxos is a highly regulated American company again and they are the ones that facilitate all the crypto for PayPal and for a lot of big institutions in the US they also are the one that does the minting for binance USD which

is a stable coin which is bye-bye dance but it's all backed one from one and is regulated in legit but again the SEC came in said you need to shut this down you can no longer mint for vosd because they're claiming that this stablecoin is a security which is a little bit insane because the security is like an investment to make something this is just pegged to the dollar how could it be a security so anyway paxos has had to do this as a result PayPal was about to launch a stable coin they backed out because they're like well we don't know what to do here with regulation and everyone says oh my God America's now trying to go after stable coins and they're going to crack down on all stable coins and we're all screwed circles next you know the usdc tether blah blah blah again

people need to chill the hell out none of that has happened yet okay I'm not saying it won't but none of this happened yet why are they doing this well it's specific to binance not stable coins look stable coins are massive and if the SEC goes after stable coins this is a big problem for our industry because stablecoins are the number one app for blockchains right now 20 of the total crypto market in terms of value isn't stable coins right it's taking as a service is also a big point of that so these are two really big applications on blockchain so this matters I get it but the SEC is concerned about binance because again it is a centralized company that is not audited at all and millions and millions and millions of users use it there are American users that hold on to busd and we don't know

what assets binance has now we hope to the Lord that binance has these assets because if it goes down it's the biggest Exchange in the world bigger than coinbase we're all [ __ ] but again I think and I'm giving Gary the benefit out I don't know why that he's just saying look we don't know what's going on there let's just again protect investors and so that's what they're doing now if all of a sudden they go after Circle which we already know is audited and has done a great job okay we have some bigger issues but until then guys let's relax I think we're okay the market like tanked after all these things happened everyone started tripping balls and said it's the new checkpoint 2.0 which is like they're trying to shut down the whole crypto industry just relax that's not the case and you know what these regulation

things always happen in crypto they've happened for 10 years now and they always happen a bunch together and yes it sucks and it's scary but like we always continue on we either build something new or the regulation does and actually go through you know it's all just talk it's all politics it takes a long time for any of this to actually happen so like all I'm saying is relax it's probably not as bad as we all think it is and it seems like they have a little bit of reason for this you know and after last year [ __ ] they should have the benefit of the doubt to be completely Fair everybody take a deep breath geez we're fired up so you guys can relax how about that and I would say some advice to anyone who's American that's listening

to this Jake travinsky who's like one of the top lawyers in the crypto space he was the one that kind of was like look guys it's not that bad just yet anyway it could be bad but it's not but he's like look we can write letters to our I don't know what you call it like your mayor's or your like jurisdiction or whatever and let them know that you support crypto you support web3 and you know you use this technology in your business he uses technology for whatever reason and the more that we do that the more that representatives in the US are going to fight for this so let's not cry about let's not whine about it like a lot of this might not be as bad as you think but like go write letters talk to the people in your jurisdiction and like

let's fight for this because ultimately this is our freedom to transact and to do things but overall I think it's fine Ryan sulcus summed it up quite well he's the founder of massari he's really heavy into the politics stuff and he made a bunch of calls to a bunch of people in the policy world and basically said these are just enforcement actions are facts which are based around one time targeting Finance which we know is probably a good thing and it was just about the mechanics of crack and staking it's not staking as a service in general so overall I think we're all good it looks like the markets have figured that out because of the last 24 hours we pumped like crazy so I think people are starting to relax there there's a bit of a scare but it's all good anything to add to that Jay no I think you did a

great job Kai thanks for wrapping that for everybody all right well everybody take a deep breath I did a lot of reading on that so none of you guys had to you know because yeah that's what we're here for so we're gonna wrap up here with our quick hits and the first quick hit is Aid drop launches open source donations and raises over 11 eth for turkey earthquake relief what's up Jay yeah so Aid drop which is actually a project of a couple friends of the show so shout out to the team behind this they've created a Cool Tech here so we've all heard a poapp which is proof of attendance protocol well Aid drop has created proof of donation so any charity can use a drop to bring their charitable campaign on chain so now when you make a

donation through an A Drop campaign you get a little badge actually funny enough looks very much like a PO app and then it's a circle and you get that badge in your wallet that says proof that you made this donation now what that does is it can lead to the organization that is receiving those funds it can lead to them now their donations are also on chain so the way that they then go and spend and allocate those resources is now now more transparent so we actually heard was it last week or two weeks ago Russell Wilson who's the NFL quarterback news came out that his foundation only

allocates 25 cents for every dollar to the actual Charities that they are supporting which is just an awful rate right like usually you're targeting for more of like 80 cents on every dollar sure you have 20 cents that you need to spend on your own admin and your own business keeping the lights on blah blah but you try to push most towards giving to the people in need and so in the case of Russell Wilson we don't know what the actual number is was this media speculating and it's just them get it grabbing attention is this real and we're not sure but if this was on chain then we would know and so a drop shout out for bringing donations on chain and for creating this proof of donation

platform and as Kai said their first campaign that they ran was for relief for the turkey earthquake and they raised over 11 East for it look it's not massive numbers this isn't changing the world but these are how things start nice and small so good news good news good news what's also really cool about this is if in fact Jay and I did launch a hat for web3 Academy Pro subscribers through Shopify and token gated it we could also say oh if you also donated to the turkey earthquake relief then you can get access as well and we don't need to know who they are we don't need to call up a drop and ask we can just use their token and so that and maybe we give it for free to them because we believe that's our way of donating to Turkey right there's so much you can do here I just

want a quick chill we have an upcoming episode I just met with Nate Gosling who's the product lead at git coin and get coins really the leader in charitable funding and bringing all of that on chain using quadratic funding as a mechanism and that it's just going to be one of the best episodes one of my favorite episodes it comes out next week so make sure you check that out if you want to Deep dive if you care about that space okay next up order notes nfts on bitcoin over 120 000 nfts minted like we said it was going pretty well exponential last week so it's still continuing to grow and get traction it's pretty cool 120 000 is great on bitcoin it pales in comparison

to anything that's going on on let's say polygon for example or Solana or ethereum I think last I checked polygon was minting you know like 20 000 nft collections so smart contracts in I think it was a day or a week I can't remember bitcoin's counting you know every nft and polygons doing 20 000 collections which let's say they're all ten thousands is what everyone does even Gabe these numbers are just they're actually tiny but I mean cool for Bitcoin will keep you posted if anything else cool happens but other than that it's growing somewhat sort of fast but yeah I mean the other funny thing about this is just like actually buying and selling these things is a freaking joke we talked about this last week but there's no Marketplace set up for this it's all over the camera like trades you've gotta be in discords and like

finding the person that has it and then making a deal with them like if this was 2016 this would be really cool to be fast adoption it would be fun whatever but it's like there's no Tech around these nfts if any other blockchain minted 120 000 nfts no one would bat an eye nobody gives a shot you know what I mean so it's actually not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things for nfts okay next up major Paris and LA museums featuring crypto punks yeah we've talked about this in the past look art is obviously one of the biggest use cases for nfts to date because when you think about what an nft could be in the beginning everybody said okay let's make them digital art let's make them jpegs

and what's really cool about this story is for the first time now we are seeing some of the leading generative art make it into major museums I'm talking about the LACMA which is the Los Angeles County Museum of art one of the largest museums in the U.S and I'm talking about the leading Museum in Paris which I my gosh if I try to pronounce it my French is brutal it is called Center pompadou I hope I said that right forgive me if I didn't and they're now displaying crypto punks Auto glyphs ringers some of the leading nft collections in their museums which is alongside Andy Warhols and picassos now these were donations to

these museums so this is a bit of a marketing play from some of these collections large collectors who care about their assets are saying Hey I want my assets to be in a museum and it'll pump the rest of my bag so there's a bit of marketing behind this but on the whole really positive news for the space because this shows that you know museums which are sort of slow-moving organizations are supporting generative art and believe that these pieces of art should be hung alongside some of the most famous artists of all time pretty cool next up goes ultrasound yeah if we look at the chart here so this is a little bit crazy what's happening right now and it's interesting all the things

we just talked about that are happening in web3 as a result of all of that remember what happens here for those that are pro subscribers and have seen my report on each tokenomics the more activity that happens on ethereum the more we burn eth the more deflationary it comes which is a wonderful thing in an inflationary environment which we're in right now and right now eth is just burning and burning so much damage it's insane a few thousand each per day at the moment and so it took a while after the merge to get fully deflationary but if you can see the chart here up on the screen it's just straight line up in the amount of heat being burned but in the amount of supply of eth in total it's just a straight line down a lot of this is happening over the last 24 hours as a

result of blur so as an nft Marketplace launches its token and wants to reward its users for player authentic tees what happens well it burns a bunch of these which is great for the ethereum network in ethereum holders it makes it more secure it makes the price go up which makes everyone hold teeth happy so a lot of good things come from the East burn and it's exciting to watch this play out as we all predicted many many years ago once the merge would occur as more transactions are happening because of more activity in the ethereum ecosystem which we project will continue to happen East Coast deflationary incredible you got it all right last up 6529 that's Punk six five two nine if you guys don't follow him on Twitter you probably should he announces meme land what's that yeah so she's actually shortened his name just to 6529 apparently he's no

longer I know he's punk6529 on Twitter but his brand now is just 6529 nfts gave us numbers as Brands anyways I want to get into that but what happened was on Valentine's Day this week 6529 announced meme lab so 6529 believes very strongly in the power of three things nfts to capture culture and memes to capture culture and then the opportunity for memes to capture value by minting them as nfts and selling them on chain and so meme lab is a project where every day a there is a featured artist will have a meme available for limited Supply and you will be able to Mint it so let's

take a look at what today's is today is memes in the sky it's called it's the sale opened actually when we just started recording so there's 982 of these available at .032 East this is by no means investment advice but a very cool project to feature artists and to feature culture and bring it on chain because one of the biggest issues with memes right now is that it is so hard to prove ownership or history of the meme right right you know we all create these memes and it's like who created that first right well shouldn't the Creator get some credit for that well if you're a Meme creator now what you can do is you can go to meme lab and you can use

meme lab to create Your Meme and then Your Meme is on chain it'll show that you were the original of this and you get validity and very verification of the sort of the history of that Meme it's a cool project love to see it 6529 doing big things all right well that's a show Kai we got a little aggressive there you get fired up in this space we care so much about it we're just so passionate well thanks for listening everybody I hope you all have a great weekend make sure you check out next week's show if you're a pro member make sure you look for the pro report that just came out yesterday on eath if you're not a pro member go subscribe to Pro and learn more about what's going on on chain eyes on chain as we like to say have a great weekend everybody catch you

next time 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 implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one