Weekly Web3 news: Solana exploit, Nomad bridge hack and Gucci accepting ApeCoin

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode gmgm welcome to web3 academy it is the weekly roll-up i'm jay bird coming at you from portugal this week where i am with my fellow co-hosts a small little surf town just maybe 30 45 minutes north of lisbon i would say it is beautiful i mean it is beautiful but the weather is terrible

it's not it's not european summer on the on the coast of the northern coast coast of portugal that's for sure yeah but we love eddie we got we got a jam-packed episode today kai lots happening uh we're going to be talking about uh a little bit of fun and some hacks that are going on but always important for you guys to be in the loop on that we're going to talk about uh a couple of research reports and basically what's happened in the nfc space in the last uh six months and what's sort of coming in the future uh we're going to talk about um magic eden made a big announcement uh this week uh tiffany and co made a big announcement in the nft space uh we've got a

shopify we're gonna chat about and then we're gonna finish with the uh web3 tool of the month uh which is a tool i'm pretty excited i'm pretty excited to share this one and i think one that not a lot of people know about yet uh did i hit everything there kai anything else uh exciting we should let people know about there's gonna be some more stuff sprinkled throughout the episode but uh oh we'll do a community update uh of the dao as well um but yeah there'll be tons of other small i like sprinkles i like sprinkles sprinkles are nice sprinkles on my ice cream sprinkles on my donuts delicious sprinkles on your donuts what's uh what's up let's let's share some gratitude though what do you feel what are you feeling grateful for today okay

i think that we probably share the same gratitude today um so the reason that jay and i are together even though if you're watching on youtube um we're still we're still on zoom which is kind of funny uh but we just don't have the right setup for that so we have to be in different rooms but we're here because we are having a work retreat with our team at impact digital marketing and at web three academy um and we are all here at eddie saida for a ten was it nine days of of work and fun and uh and getting to know each other um we started our our marketing agency three years ago and uh it's been fully remote and our whole team is fully remote from all around the world uh many in in europe and so none of us have met and uh

finally we all came together and met here in portugal for the first time and it has been an absolute blast for the last couple days uh and we're here until until next wednesday so it's um been a really really cool experience and just so grateful to to have that experience and to be able to make this experience happen and every single person from the team showed up um which was we weren't sure was going to happen so kudos to the team of impact digital marketing went through academy um we're so pumped to have you all here there's actually four of them sitting in front of me as i say this they got their hands up let's go i think it's amazing the power of in person you know it's so

uh we we spend so much time online and so much time and more and more time online and we're all going into the metaverse and we're headed in that direction but you cannot replace uh the just the power of connection that comes from being in the same room and uh sharing the same space and seeing somebody smile uh i really wanted us to record this uh in person but we just don't we just don't have don't have that set up this co-working space what the heck okay uh shout out to surf vita though great great spot that we're staying in uh much appreciate this if you're coming to arizera check it out for sure uh love it kyle what's the web 3 word of the week yeah the web 3 word of the week was actually a a a community driven word uh

from the team here i asked them this morning what they thought it should be and the answer is it's community and the reason for that is because community i mean we say it all the time but community is everything in web 3. and um you know we are building a community right now uh inside of the dow and we have been for a while with the podcast and everything um and i think it's just been one a challenge to grow a community right it is not an easy thing to do but the benefit and the the results you get from building community and making that a priority in any business web 3 or web 2 is just so important and i think the benefits that come from it are so good um and so i think it should be a focus for everyone uh and i think you know as i

said it is difficult but i mean i was on a call yesterday with i think there's about 12 of us who's working on a project inside of the dow and uh and what a blast it was you know a bunch of people i've never met uh in real life and we had a great time on the call we were having fun getting done um and um you know everyone left that call just laughing and it was like everyone's like wow that was really good um and it's just funny because none of us have ever met but we just all have the shared mission and that's really what community is all about now look it does it comes with its challenges i think we're seeing that in the dao right now as well right it's a bunch of random people from all over the world who have never worked together and so um

you know you've got to kind of go through those speed bumps and work through them and i think everyone who's starting a community will have to understand that and expect that um but i think if you go into it with expectations like hey this is probably not going to be super easy you'll get through those rather quickly and easily and uh and come out the other side and um and just see and and all the things that that are good that come from from building a strong strong community yeah it's uh it's amazing the power of having the opportunity to connect with like-minded people what that does for your energy for your enthusiasm and it's not it's not something that happens fast it

takes time and we'll talk about a little bit more about what we're doing in our community updates and if you're building a community and you know by all means reach out if you need help figuring out how to do it because we're trying to figure out how to do it right now too but i think the biggest thing that i just keep seeing is the connections and the relationships that's at the center is when you build a connection with somebody else it doesn't matter whether it's online or in person that can lead to yeah incredible incredible results because you trust each other and because you're excited and you share energy and you share opportunities uh there was a call last night that ended up going like i got off after an hour and a half but it was i checked like i looked in there were

still six people in this call like after probably two and a half hours just hanging out chatting right talking about web3 talk about what they're building really really powerful stuff really cool okay before we get into starting the news uh just one thing i want to mention uh if you didn't know we have a newsletter uh and uh it basically summarizes all the things that we talk about in the podcast it also lets you know that a new episode is out um and so if you prefer to read or maybe you like to do both uh make sure to sign up to our newsletter the link is in the show notes below um so just head there and you can sign up task your email in and we'll send you three emails a week and they will be jam-packed with a ton of great information um so make sure to

check that out love it sign up for the newsletter let's go let's jump into the news what is first up in the news this week kai well there was a uh i mean there's been a few problems in the web free space this last week uh the web 3 word of the week was almost hacks um but so basically what happened um there was one here on the solana blockchain um that was that was um pretty uh i don't want to say bad but there was a thousands of um wallets that had some issues here uh and um it was on the what is the name of it again um slope mobile wallets um and so basically what has happened here well

actually let's give some instructions first if there are ever hacks you hear it on twitter maybe here at your discords whatever um first thing you should always do is go to your wallet go to the settings of the wallet um and revoke permissions so basically when you connect into applications or dapps um you may have signed something that allows them to drain your wallet uh and so there's a lot of people on twitter and in discords that were basically saying go and revoke all the permissions so you basically like are disconnecting because it doesn't do it automatically so that's what we have up here on the screen um but to just explain what happened um this was not a hack of like the solana blockchain or something like that it was the slope um slope mobile wallet and basically what they did which is

not good i'm gonna be completely honest is not good at all but what they did here is they were storing the seed phrases of their clients of their users and they were doing it in a in a plain text way and it got sent to other partners and so it was able to easily be hacked and people could just like go and grab like the seed phrases and just drain wallets um insane that they built i don't know what they did or why they did it this way but this is not good this is not cryptography this is not the way we're supposed to do this stuff um and actually dc dc investor who's a big nft collector um he just tweeted out uh some some pictures of this on slope's website

they're saying that they are a non-custodial wallet and they do not store your mnomics i believe is how you say that word uh which basically means your seed phrase um which was basically a complete lie i mean maybe it was just a mistake in the way that they did it or something um but yeah not not ideal um and we need to be better as an industry in um in our security right like we should never be storing seed phrases i don't know why they were even doing that that's not non-custodial at all um so weird we'll learn more this just happened i think it was yesterday um and so we'll kind of see what comes from this but hopefully we take this as a learning experience that's for sure i feel like we've had a lot of learning experiences lately i hope uh yeah i hope

the learning can be over and we can move past it right and then we have another one um and maybe you want to touch on this one jay but this was uh this was nomad this is not a wallet this is something different yeah yes so so nomad uh which is a a bridge uh i'm actually not sure which uh chain nomad is on i think it's on eth um and all it's the bridge to all evm chains it's all the uvm channels yeah okay so so nomads are bridge and this wasn't really a hack per se in the sense of like usually when we hear a hack there's like one group of hackers or one bad actor that is you know performing a hack and stealing millions

in this case uh about almost 200 million in assets was stolen and the way it happened was that nomad did a smart contract update and with that smart contract update i mean i guess they didn't do the proper audit you were able to after that smart contract to update you were able to do a bridge transaction without any authentication whereas before you had to have authentication so what that enabled was it enabled anybody who knew about this to go in and to redirect

any any bridge from somebody else's wallet to their own wallet so i don't exactly know what the numbers are but apparently this wasn't like one wallet that stole all this this was like thousands of wallets that because basically this was you know spread on the internet a whole bunch of people found out this this was happening uh and unfortunately there's a lot of people that when they see opportunities to take advantage of um you know of uh of the system and to profit off it they do which is you know just so sad and so unfortunate for all of us uh because yeah it makes everybody uncomfortable and makes everybody uneasy uh they're doing a full investigation and you know the full report hasn't come

out yet so we'll we'll see what they say but yeah just always a bummer to start off with uh with some fun news like that so let's jump into some more positive stuff kai well i just wanna i wanna address one thing so the whole idea of what we're building here in crypto is using cryptography okay and cryptography is basically built off math and like basically it's built off mathematics right and the way that you when you build blockchains or certain things with crypt cryptography it's essentially impossible to hack because of the way that it's been um the way that it's developed um the problem is in this space is there are a lot of um

applications or things in web three that are not actually cryptographic like bridges going from one chain to another right so it is impossible right now anyway and maybe this change in the future to write a a bridge or to to develop a bridge that is uses 100 cryptographic language um to go from let's say ethereum to let's say solana or another bridge something written in another language it is impossible which means that there is always some sort of centralized risk where you can't use cryptographic code to make that bridge happen when you can use cryptographic code through the entire protocol then you can ensure that it is going to be extremely risk i don't want to say

risk-free but basically risk-free right like it is very very difficult to hack salon of the blockchain itself right it is much easier to hack applications that are built on top of it right um and that was actually one of the things that solana said um in their uh in their sort of like quick overview of what was going on their investigation was that there was no evidence the solana protocol or its cryptography was compromised and so one of the things is because we are so early we haven't built the cryptographic ways of doing all these things like bridges and whatever else right a lot of these applications and things so there are still a lot of ripe areas to be hacked um but that is coming it just

takes a while to write um these in the in the correct way so we have to in order to do these things we got to start in more centralized ways which are more risky right and so we're seeing that i mean both of these hacks had nothing to do with hacking crypto they just were hacked like normal web two ways right like one was they just restoring your seed phrases which is ridiculous um and then this one as well was just like was kind of just open for anyone it was not season basically yeah yeah open season exactly so it takes time i mean vitalik talks about this and he's not even sure that we're ever going to have cryptographic bridges from one blockchain to another other than going layer one to layer two right um right which is where you stay in the same

ecosystem and they they rely on each other for security and so that can be done cryptographically and that's why we haven't seen any you know hacks along these kind of bridges yet now i mean those are still new but just something to keep in mind is like we need to be thinking about the cryptography in this space because that is the actual secure components of the space and that's really what we're trying to build out just takes some time all right let's go over to openc um so chris dixon we've we've uh we've mentioned chris dixon a few times he is a part of a16z he is now a board of directors at openc which is pretty cool chris dixon is a super bright mind um in tech he's been in this space for a really long time

um one of the smartest i think in this space one of the best thought leaders in the space and now he is um going to be leading or part of the board of directors making decisions for one of the biggest or the biggest nft marketplace uh in this space so really cool to see that i already thought he was on the board of directors i guess because a16z was such a big investor in openc from the beginning so this news to me was sort of like i was like isn't he already on their team he's he's he's part of it already but yeah i'm sure he's making decisions definitely okay we got next up here gucci is now accepting apecoin payments uh at select stores in the u.s and they they expand they plan to expand uh their

acceptance in the future of uh cryptocurrencies up for in-store purchases so now you can buy your gucci loafers for using apecoin or using uh and they're doing it via bitpay which is a uh i think a payment a cryptocurrency payment app uh why why apecoin this is like a product i think this is so interesting yeah like i have so many thoughts on this so why apecoin is a big one right like i think okay a couple things why coin but also let's recognize that apecoin didn't even exist a year ago so we're talking how fast does web3 move right now right in a year you have

a token which is now being accepted at one of the largest retailers luxury retailers in the world like what like it's just incredible to see the speed i think it's amazing i think it's amazing for the the space i think the ape coin part is weird it's also i mean it's a shout out to board api club and the ecosystem that they're building including the power of their ecosystem and i'm guessing there's a belief within gucci that by doing this uh you're gonna attract a lot of apes and ape holders and a builders have a lot of money and that's who you're trying to attract into the gucci store uh you know it sort of goes along with there's some interesting news

we have about tiffany and cohen their nft launch and sort of similar the approach that they have of a lot of these luxury retailers are not trying to target the masses they're trying to target their specific customer it makes sense i mean you know that a board at yacht club holder is someone who is either wealthy or happen to make a lot of money on their boarding bill club yeah uh so um it makes sense for a luxury brand to want a partner i bet you that this is just the first of many things that gucci and apecoin um do together i would bet they do some sort of partnered nft launch in the coming months um we'll see or something to do with the metaverse i bet you gucci wants to go inside their metaverse uh put a store in

there or something i don't know we'll see um this is just my uh my thoughts i think it's just the start all right what's this nearly 75 of retailers plan to accept cryptocurrency payments within the next two years wow 75 percent really yeah i think it's amazing to see so this is a deloitte study uh it's incredible a to just see every week there is a study coming out of a major consulting firm deloitte kpmg mckenzie are constantly producing metaverse crypto nft report because and why are they doing that these businesses are talking to the largest their clients the largest enterprises in the world you know they're the ones working with

coca-cola working with all the fortune 1000 brands and they advise them and so they're trying to build out trend decks to show where we're going and this report was 2 000 senior executives from the retail industry and 75 of them said they plan to accept crypto within the next two years in their retail locations like wow it's and this is happening faster than i think any of us thought it would happen and i think where it probably goes it's probably not going to be accepting apecoin amongst most of these i mean maybe if they really kill it on their marketing but um i think it's stable coins right um like it just it makes so much sense it's so easy it

opens you up to being able to use anyone in the world if you accept stable coins right um if you only accept um us dollar or you accept you know visa or whatever there's only certain countries that those are in if you're using stripe there's only certain countries that can use that whereas if you use um you know blockchain and you accept stable coins you can accept it from anyone in the world it does not matter um it would be i would bet that most these big companies aren't accepting like ethan bitcoin to be honest because it's so volatile so it would just be a bit of a pain um but stablecoin seems like the perfect opportunity and i think what's coming as well i just recorded last week with um two lawyers blockchain lawyers one in the us one in canada and the big thing um i

think this comes out next week but the big thing that they were discussing is that um stable coin regulation is coming soon and probably faster than anything else and that is what's going to enable all of these companies to get into the space because why wouldn't they want to use stable coins so i think once that regulation happens that could be uh that could be really really big for the space yeah you can take this one socios uh invests 100 million in uh barsa studios which is fc barcelona's web 3 [Music] efforts or web 3 company so um yeah this is i mean it's really interesting to see

let's break this down a little bit because i think that's even a lot of people don't even know what socio's is do they even know what barcelona studios is and what they're doing but it's very interesting to see okay we talked about community being the web 3 word of the week right who has some of the biggest communities in the world sports franchises right right we are die hard about probably sports and music are probably two of the biggest communities in the world right we're pretty die-hard by our sports and we're pretty die-hard about our music that we love right and we're actually funny enough we've got another announcement about music later on in this show and so i think it's worth talking about socio's here first um known as chili's i do yeah so far we're

known as chili's chili's is the name of their token right but so the company used to be called chili's and then they changed the socios like i don't know end of 2021 basically what they are is um they're a centralized platform that enables you to mint social tokens specifically in the niche of sports i'm sure they will expand but basically it's a way for you to like um tokenize your fan base and so what you can do is you create a you know barcelona token or whatever it's called um and you can distribute that out to your fans and it gives them tools to like vote on you know what's the song that they're gonna come out to for the next game or what's the color of their jerseys for the season or you know whatever else events

they're gonna do and things like that so it's a really cool way to sort of like bring your fan base together into a community and i don't know if there's any that are like sharing it in the revenues and stuff like that but eventually that's probably where it goes in some sort especially if the community starts to help in terms of marketing and all that kind of stuff which they do i mean they walk around in jerseys they can get much better marketing than that right um so it's a way to sort of monetize your community and chili's has been a leader in this for a few years now and they have many big sporting teams especially in europe uh mainly in football or soccer whether it's like barcelona manchester united juventus um those are the there's like the 10 about a dozen of the biggest football

soccer franchises in europe and so what happened here they're investing in barca studios this is like the marketing arm or the digital uh barcelona club digital arm of barcelona the football franchise the football club right so i don't actually exactly to me i was more interested in this from socio's side than i was from barcelona studios i mean i guess barca studios is you know they're building in the metaverse they're building nfts for barcelona uh which yeah i mean everybody's trying to get in the space here we go jump in i think it comes back

to another point that we've made so many times on this show which is uh play right like participate and play how many of these brands like we just talked about about gucci gucci didn't start their plan in the metaverse by dropping eight coin in their stores that's not the first thing they've done right they've done many other things in web 3 right and most brands are doing that and so you know same with you know this 100 million dollar investment didn't just happen because uh you know they took they took steps right to get there speaking about investment i saw stat in july 1.7 billion dollars uh was invested into um

no this is a different stat 1.7 billion dollars was invested into uh into web three companies so from like a fundraising perspective this year just in july yeah i think that was you know what's crazy about this when you think of barcelona i don't know how many barcelona fans there are um but i'm sure there are many um and it's you named a bunch of other big uh sporting teams that are kind of have tokenized their fan base it's just interesting that web three is is marketing or bringing in people from so many different areas all at once we talked about music right how big communities are there and that's that's becoming a big thing and so there's like you have big people in the music space we actually have a few uh news on this

in a second i think we're gonna talk about muse it's like they're promoting nfts to their fans and then you have barcelona is promoting tokens to their fans and then you have like every single industry is all promoting web 3 to their fan base into their communities so it's like you have everyone just all promoting gucci to their you know what i mean it's like everyone is doing it all at the same time it's like no wonder this is the fastest growing technology ever right i got an army of all the biggest sporting and music musicians and artists and brands in the world all doing this together and it's just picking up pace right i just checked that stat so 1.7 billion dollars invested into web 3 companies in july alone that was 90 companies only so it's an average of 20 million

per company that they're that they raised in july alone only in july like the worst thing to ever happen to the internet was jay what's that the gdpr rules in europe which make you accept cookies every time you go on a damn website i'm sick of it i honestly want to leave europe just because of that i love europe but man do i hate going on the internet in europe it's insane yeah i accept this we should be using vpns probably major bunch of internet rookies uh okay here's another talking about stats and what happened uh has happened recently uh a report came out from uh i believe it's from nascent um

that said crypto users spent 2.7 billion dollars minting nfts in the first half of 2022 and that came from one million unique wallet addresses so two things there you quickly notice only a million wallet addresses are and that's and that's that many people have multiple wallets right so is that a million unique users uh so it's still super small buying nfts but those million people are spending 2.7 billion dollars on nfts hey there's a lot of money flowing around in space but also and this is minting nfts right this isn't uh this isn't like secondary sales but also it just shows like yeah we're in a bear market and some of this

did happen i think the nft bear market happened later than the crypto bear market started it's sort of as a bit of a lagger but wow like still a lot of energy and excitement for nfts 69 nft collections launched on may 22nd alone what the heck that's insane that is wild cool love to see it um yeah this is big uh web3 project so city of miami has partnered with time mastercard and salesforce to launch uh an nft um it's a i think 5 000 nfts and the idea here

um is that it's an initiative for the city of miami designed to drive revenue to local businesses and non-profits through exclusive reward offerings yeah there's 5 000 ft's um i was kind of like well why time mastercard and salesforce um time is this a leader in the space they have done a lot in web3 with nfts in that so i think they're using them as a partner in terms of guidance um they're using salesforce uh which we talked about this a few months ago but salesforce has this like nft cloud this new product they're creating um which is to help um i don't know if it's enterprise only but basically to help with minting and selling nfts and so salesforce is actually kind of handling the whole uh minting and selling of the nfts um which is kind

of cool uh and then mastercard i'm not exactly sure what they're doing they will add turn-key utility of the program by providing nfd holders with access to its priceless miami experiences so mastercard will handle the like use cases of it so some really big names all getting involved and again experimenting playing in the sandbox like many of us are doing and now they're doing it with a city a city like a massive city in the us so that is really cool i mean city of miami has been big in in crypto and up three for a little while now um they have miami token i'm pretty sure they put bitcoin on the balance sheet of miami last year um so yeah this uh the mayor francis uh suarez he's been big in this and trying to really be a leader in that so that's i mean they're trying to be the next

silicon valley but for web three so right right kudos miami the other thing that this says to me is uh collaborate right like if you're if you're a business and you're not sure how to get into web3 you don't even need to be the one to to to to launch the campaign or the project or to build the nft find a business that already is doing that and just collaborate with them partner with them you know put your logo on it put your brand behind it uh i mean if you want to collaborate give us a shout we'll collaborate here at web3 academy with anybody that wants to get into the space uh there's i think that's just a really great way to to build and to learn because then you do it you build you bring your communities

together and you you get to do it as a group and outside of just collaborating if you want to launch an nft you're a business you're a brand you are a creator and you're looking at launching an nft and you need some help reach out to us we have an agency that helps with this kind of stuff we build websites we do marketing et cetera but we also have over the last um six to eight months have been helping projects launch nfts and do it in a safe uh and audited way um where you can ensure that your nft everything works smoothly and you don't get rugged which is really really important um so yeah if you want to launch nft and you need some help i mean you could go to salesforce it

sounds like they have something called an nft cloud but i bet you it's going to cost you a hell of a lot of money so maybe come to us we'll be and it's centralized i don't want to i don't want to work with a centralized company that's not what web3 is all about all right what's this tipping talking okay talking about launching nfts here's a good one for you so tiffany co which is one of the largest jewelry brands and jewelry retailers in the world is launching uh their first nft uh it is called nf tiff or nft if not exactly sure how you would say that uh and it is uh in partnership with crypto punks

so you must hold a crypto punk uh in order if you go to the uh did i if you go to the next one does did i have uh did i send this one to you kai yeah there you go so like here's an example of what it looks like um so it's a basically if you if you purchase this nft at drop and let me be clear this is an expensive af nft not a surprise how much it is 30 what yeah 30 30 and there's only and there's only 250 of them what is that like 50 000 right now 30 is like 50 000 yeah wow yeah so uh for 50 000

if you own a crypto punk you can go i mean this is token gating right this is you know exclusivity this is what we've been talking about this whole time of the power of you know you build a community and then you limit access to only certain things right and this is what punks is really uh you know a big they're really leaning into this because you know punks is trying to make exclusivity a big part of their of their community so yes you get this pendant basically they will if you mint the nft you will get a pennant uh which is uh of your crypto punk and has on the back which punk you have and you know official date of uh of the nft uh you know it's i don't i

don't know if there's any utility or anything involved in this i think it's literally you just get this pennant as far as i can see what's interesting is remember yugolabs purchased crypto punk so uglabs is the creator of board yacht club they purchase crypto punks and me bits and uh so you i mean you wonder who's making these partnerships right you got board at yacht club or apecoin which is partnering with gucci you've got crypto punks with tiffany and co um yugo labs is in there with the big luxury brands and and kind of their whole idea was you know crypto punk sporty yacht clubs are the blue chips these are the luxury nfts these are the big ones and they're partnering with the luxury companies in the in their in brands in the real world right in the physical world so um they i think google apps has

a plan yeah google apps has a plan so when you labs bought crypto punks and did they buy me bits as part of what did me bits come from so it was the same uh artist uh or artists i think there was two um that wasn't like that was a private sale right so nobody knows uh what do you think that they bought it for i i heard a stat which was that somebody guessed that it was 500 million dollars wow um i have no idea actually i don't i don't think i could guess that yeah i heard that from kevin rose that was with kevin rose guessed he guessed 500 million not insane that is pretty crazy i mean the the crazy thing is the um

crypto punks were minted for free they didn't make any money off that and there was no royalties and there's no there's no royalties yet me bits they did make money um but i don't think they have royalties for the meat bits either um so they just they basically just sold the ip maybe b bits does have a royalties i can't remember but i know crypto punks is not um no they make money off of that which is just um is wild because obviously the total value of crypto punks now is i don't know multi multi multi millions um okay this is cool so we talked about sporting and then we talked about luxury brands and all of these are kind of leading the way into uh web3 and now we have music so muse is releasing uh their

next album on polygon uh with an nft so they're using a platform called serenade um which is a an nft minting platform on polygon and excuse me and so basically it's on august 26th um and it'll be released as an nft um what is it will of the people i guess is the name of the album this is an old album or this is a new album new album it's a new album right yeah yeah and it's set to be the first ever release that will enter the charts in the uk and australia um so i mean muse is huge um great music and uh and yeah so they're launching and so on serenade basically what this is it's a centralized um

company where um you can mint your nft and it can be stored just in the wallet that's in serenade so you don't have to like go and create a wallet um so easy kind of ux for new users which is what you get when you have something like this you know muse is very mainstream so it's not like they're trying to do this only to web three people but what serenade allows you to do is actually just move it and kind of create a new wallet that's actually a non-custodial wallet and take your nft there off platform if you want to so it's sort of like an onboarding platform um for nft so again really cool um one thing i just wanted to add here that i thought was very interesting two things actually one was i saw uh this is a um a limited release of 1000

which i always think is is very interesting part of nfts and we haven't really seen this yet in music of like the utility side like we've seen it a little bit like chainsmokers did something and there's the royal platform which is a great platform for artists to use but most artists are just experimenting this seems to be the first where they're really going all in on like releasing an album as an nft where i i don't know if like i actually wonder if if it's possible that this is the only version of the album like i don't know maybe i'm wrong in this that would be insane to like not release the cds or vinyl or anything and this would be the only way you could get the album

obviously they would let you stream it but i'm not sure about that but i remember seeing that and that was very interesting to me oh you get a limited edition format okay so yeah they're still but but the more interesting thing about this and i'm neither you or i ki or like you know music industry people but the way you mentioned this beginning there's this is the first nft release that is being allowed uh onto the charts so there's an organization occ what does that stand for um something of it's the music chart organization basically it's the the organization that allows you to be ranked as an album on charts and to

receive ranking and this is the first project that's being released as an nft that is being allowed onto the chart so basically what we're seeing here is these are standards these are chart standards within the music industry and web3 is still trying to figure out you know how to meet up with standards and how to meet up with our existing web 2 and old world standards and here's an example of okay they're figuring that out which is obviously a big unlock i mean we talk about regulation a lot sort of fits in the same way of this idea of the old standards and us using web3 so it you know fits into that mold and then i think that it's going to allow an album like this to really achieve a lot of success because it could bring a lot

of attention to it and it looks like whoever's helping them with it says that after this release um they'll be working with a number of emerging and iconic artists um to do more things with albums eps and singles um so it looks like there's gonna be lots more to come here uh in the music world which is super super cool i think so much opportunity there cool um v friends so v friends which is the nft collection that gary vee and his team launched back in early 2021 i believe these are like hand-drawn like animals and things that garyvee himself drew there's like 283 different characters um they just had closed a seed uh funding round um which was led by a16z of course

what isn't led by a16c in the space um and they raised 50 million dollars um so i don't know garyvee drew 283 cartoon characters uh and he's now raised 50 million as a result of that web 3 is insane and don't bet against gary vee never never bet against you right never bet against garyvee he's a legend um but yeah we'll see what they do with this i mean i think if there's one you know company or whatever you want to call us that's going to challenge like the crypto punks and yuga labs you know i think garyvee may be one of them i think kevin rose with moon birds may be another of those kind of the heavy hitters here in the space and so they're

just they're really good to follow and follow along and just see what they're doing um because i mean when you get 50 million dollars for nft project plus whatever they made in the minting of it like they they're the ones that are going to be kind of leading the way and trying new things and experimenting and and whatever i would bet the friends comes with a partnership very soon just like what you labs is doing with theirs so we'll see who they decide who he decides to partner with but um yeah big news it's pretty crazy that you know nft has only been a thing for like two years and these companies are like you said maybe 500 million is what they bought crypto punks for yeah friends is raising 50 million um it's pretty crazy okay magic ethan magic eden magic ethan

magic ethan what the heck is magic ethan uh magic eden or now they actually have changed their twitter handle to magic ethan magic eden is the second largest nft platform or marketplace although maybe i'm it's very close with looks rare it's either number two or number three to open c uh and up until this week magic eden has only allowed solana nfts uh to be sold on their platform which really is what allowed them to become so big because solana eco salon has a great community a lot of nft projects have been launching on solana in the past year and you actually couldn't launch solana on openc so everybody was going to magic

eden and what happened was it like a couple weeks or a month ago open c announced that they were allowing solana on open c uh maybe actually was back in april a few months ago and what does magic eden do magic eden responds with they're going to allow ethereum on magic eden so now you can buy and sell your nfts on magic even i would bet polygon comes next because if you're evm compatible then it's very easy to like if you already have ethereum on your platform it's very easy to add polygon and then add you know avalanche et cetera it's very difficult to go

ethereum and then add solana because they're they're very different it's almost like you could think of ethereum and salon kind of like apple and android right just very different um very different code very different uh languages et cetera and so they're kind of like just completely different things so you learn to build this marketplace around solana you basically have to go and relearn everything on the ethereum side of things but if you want to go ethereum and then add polygon it's pretty much the same um and so i would bet that's the way that they go but let's see what happens um but cool i mean competition's heating up this is what we want it just means that we're gonna force both of these open c and magic ethan uh to provide better features right how do

they get their customers and retain their customers better features that's all it is to it right so cool let's keep keep improving it's the care bear countdown five four three two one uh this was a uh actually shared in our discord in the web three news feed by lynn uh lynn thank you so much for sharing this is a fl i saw this this morning i was like this is a flashback i forgot about the care bears to be honest uh but classic when i was when i was a kid i don't know you watched it i i'm assuming considering you just sang the the uh oh yeah yeah do you know any details on what's going on here i know they're launching an nft

soon is that is that the gist of it yeah yeah to be honest i don't know a lot of details about this uh i've just seen it ever i think they did launch it which is super confusing because we're looking at their twitter and it's saying that they haven't launched it but i'm pretty sure that they did launch it because i saw it trending on openc the other day uh so um they should probably update their twitter uh yeah i think this is like sort of like the you know the rugrats that we talked about last week and nickelodeon launching that what you're really seeing here is um tv and

uh and movies are massive brands right like we we talk about this with disney a lot what is what is disney really they're brand creators right and what they do is they create these huge brands and it's not like the movie is just the start right where they really monetize and capitalize on this is through the way that you push that brand further through merch uh through you know toys through t-shirts through um activations and events through partnerships with uh cpg companies like how many times have you seen ironman on an m m um box in the grocery store right so

and we love these brands and what you're seeing is a lot of older brands from the 90s in particular because i think the 90s brands know who are the most active crypto people right now are those who were you know us right those who were born between you know mid 80s to sort of like you know the 80s and 90s right those who were born in that period are the ones who really love crypto and so a lot of brands like care bros are making a comeback by getting into the nft space uh what's what i can't figure out is like where where does this go right it's like great to drop an nft but like is there a utility here or am i just buying a carabao is it just a pfp like do i really want to care bears my pfp i

mean maybe i do i guess if i'm absolutely obsessed with the care bears personally i'm not and like i don't know maybe they build a community maybe there's a massive community to be built here um i don't know yeah i question this i mean i guess if you're a big fan you like for example if there's something i really like if i'm a i'm a toronto police fan and when i was younger i would want a picture of matt sundin on my wall there's no utility it's just like i like i always had it on like above my bed right so maybe kids want a picture of their favorite care bear i don't know it doesn't necessarily need utility i guess but i hope that they do build utility around it although i guess if it's like 40 year olds you're saying or 30 year olds that

are buying this stuff like i mean there's 14 eth to get one of these i saw um anywhere from two up to fourteen depending on on which ones it was yeah so they did uh they are they saw it was yesterday that they minted was it yesterday okay there's only eight of them there's only eight really yeah i guess they weren't so confident that they were going to get a lot of people or what that's a tiny i know it's a title i mean i think that's that's an interesting way to do it though too i see a lot of nft collections trying to do massive mints like that's if that's tough right like there's nothing wrong this is what i keep saying to everybody mint ten right and just start yeah just start right just

guessing you just need to get nft into the hands of your community that's all you need to do yeah agreed um okay so we're going to go on to uh some launches here um and we actually don't have many but this was a really cool launch especially for us in the dow maybe we'll do the community update right after this jay um so this is uh swipe looks like it's what it's called but spelt in a very weird way way s-w-y-p-e swipe um so starting today if you're a dao or part of a dao you'll be able to connect your gnosis safe wallet directly to an fdic insured bank account this is really cool so your gnosis safe is basically a multi-sig wallet that you use and share with uh with the dow members um and it's non-custodial which

is great and you basically sign um that that multisig wallet with your own personal wallets and that's how you do transactions in the crypto world inside of a dow well now you can link it with a bank account um and you can make wires and ach payments um through a bank account you can also get um i don't think it's credit cards but debit cards and um with spend limits and like category restrictions so meaning you know if you have marketing guild maybe they can only buy marketing things or whatever um and you can dish out debit cards to uh to people in your dow and they can buy things in the real world uh with us dollars uh instead of just uh in crypto um so that is really really cool and a big unlock i think for

dows um i think you know it's just obviously dallas are gonna need to buy things other than crypto things um right we need subscriptions and we need all that and right now it's like well how are you gonna do that someone just has to do it personally for the most part um and so this enables uh a new way for the dow to kind of um continue to spend money from the treasury and do it in a multi-sig way instead of like relying on one single person to go and just like throw their credit card on a subscription for you and hope that you'll get paid back and hope that that one person won't rug you kind of thing um so yeah cool swipe never heard of them um but uh great little unlock here um do you want to give some community updates there jay while we're on this

yeah yeah let me give a community update so uh web3 academy community uh shout out to the 36 new members that joined in the last week uh and shout out to those who joined our new members onboarding call uh yesterday uh we've started we now have a new member's onboarding call every wednesday at 4 p.m eastern in the discord and would love to see everybody come out we might also do another time to help out people in different time zones in the future so we'll look into that so if you're not able to attend that look out for another time coming soon but really cool look our goal here is to create the best community to

learn web3 to network and connect with others who are learning web3 because this space is moving so fast and you need help figuring it out you need a community that you can go to you can ask questions somebody last night in the call was talking about wallet security i mean it's a topic that comes up all the time i mean we were talking about some rugs and some not rugs some hacks that happened at the beginning of this podcast uh and wallet security is so important you know disrecord security is so important so somebody came into that call and they were able to ask like hey what does anybody know what i should be doing for wallet securities anybody have any advice and we chatted about that right so this is a safe place where you can come in and ask any questions and

that's what the community that we're building is all about so yeah join that new members call check out our weekly sandbox sessions uh there's one today happening so by the time this podcast release won't be it'll be too late to join but it's all about music and nfts really cool one there's a project that's coming in to present and get some feedback uh and then also if you want to join the dow the web 3 academy dao is just firing on all cylinders so many exciting things happen kyle mentioned earlier uh there was a call earlier this week where they're building a project that's super cool and people are fired up about it and lots of activity so if you want to join the dow two ways to do it one

come into the dao weekly all hands which is every monday at 4 p.m eastern in the discord uh that's a great that's probably one of the best ways to figure out what is going on in the dow and to stay up to date if you just attended that weekly call you'd be pretty in the loop uh and then in discord um the way you get into the dow and get access to that and become a dow member uh is um by clicking on the join the dow uh channel and you got to go through guild xyz you got to connect your wallet and the reason you connect your wallet is because we have launched the doer token uh which is our governance and social token and will give you access to um

opportunities to vote on proposals and to be part of building the dow and governing the dow so lots lots happening there one more quick thing we are looking for a digital artist or a graphic designer in the dow right now so if anybody out there listening if you're a digital artist or a graphic designer and you want to get involved in a dow uh hit us up message myself message kai join the discord we need we need multiple we we have some nft ideas we have poeps we have all these different things and um marketing guild's doing a great job on making that happen right now but we could definitely use some help if you are an artist a creative uh and can do it digitally uh we would love love love love some help so join in um and head down to the marketing guild once you um

let's join um okay what's next this was interesting so um i'm gonna do where we are gonna do more talks on the merge over the coming weeks we said we were going to talk about it this week but i want to wait because um the uh the final test merge for ethereum we're talking here moving from proof of work to proof of stake um is actually next week it is august well i guess it could even be two weeks august 6th to 12th somewhere between there it's on a certain block and we don't know when that block comes um so it'll be sometime next week or potentially the following week um and this is the the gourley merge and once this is done uh then we go to the ethereum mainnet merge and like it's a thing it's happening it looks like

it's gonna be mid-september september 19th somewhere along that week there um this is interesting this is the nasdaq.com that wrote this article about this which is gourley is coming ethereum's last rehearsal before the merge um on nasdaq so that's really cool i just thought that was interesting to see but there are big implications here for the web3 space and uh and we're going to talk about that and share what that means um but gourley is the first the so it's the last test net of we've already done two test nets this one's a bit different than the others it is very similar to ethereum main net so this is the big one if this goes well like we're all set and we're going if this doesn't go well well we'll see what happens but um let's not even it's not even go down that route um but so it's coming next

week the other reason i want to bring that up is i think you're about to start hearing a lot about the ethereum merge and so we will write some articles and do some stuff to help you kind of understand it because there's a lot of bad takes on what's actually happening here in the merge and a lot of just misinformation people just don't really understand it's very complicated um so we will try to get you all up to speed uh on what that means um moving and we'll talk we'll talk not only about i think a lot of people think about the ethereum emerge and they only think about the investment side should i be buying ethereum now when is the time to buy when's the best plan to buy that's not the only reason why this is so important we'll be talking about the

wider implications of this to web 3 and to the ecosystem beyond ethereum to like the whole space yes sir so what's this we're going to have some hot takes yeah so we have fight take uh i'm sure lots of you heard the news or if you haven't heard that michael saylor uh has retired and so uh lily nope it's lily on instagram had this great tweet it's so messed up that if michael saylor retires to pursue his true passion of degenerately buying bitcoin he's a visionary and when i do it my family holds an intervention [Laughter] that is amazing is it retired i don't think he retired he stepped down a ceo and he said yeah

yes so i mean i think what really happened here is um was it microstrategy i believe is the name of uh the firm that he's been ceo of i mean he founded it when he was like 24. uh and basically he's just he hasn't really been running the firm he's just been buying bitcoin like his entire strategy has been focusing on buying bitcoin and how do you think that's gone in the last six months not so great like there i saw that they bought bitcoin at an average price of like 30 thousand and we're not even at that price right now and we've been below yeah but right i i wouldn't say it's not so good i mean their stock is worth 10x what it was before he ever did any of this the amount of press that microstrategy has got it's now like a

household name like everyone knows microstrategy which like we're talking about the podcast two years ago i would not have cared two shits of what who michael sailor was or what microstrategy is so like he has done very very well for microstrategy for their normal business um because of how much press he's got and even just the equity like it's worth so much more um now obviously yes his investment has not done so well i think he's he's done you make a good point and this is why they're moving him he's not retiring they're just moving him from ceo to chairman and this is why because he's a great spokesperson and he's a visionary who should be out pounding drums and driving attention and driving press not running the day-to-day ops of the organization right of minecraft yeah

that's why they made this switch i'm also not like a huge fan of michael cena so i was protecting him there was like yeah why am i doing that have you ever seen you ever seen him at a conference he walks with like a squad of like 10 like massive security guards and like bodyguards it looks ridiculous yeah he's aggressive vitalik walks in and he's like alone and like you know he's got a dog suit or a bear suit or something he's just yeah and he's like standing out he's super easy to see and then michael saylor walks in he looks like he's like the president entering like he's yeah he's predicted he's the perfect king of the bitcoin maxis in my opinion perfect oh god um do you want to do this bitcoin one or should we just wrap up with the no it's

good let's go let's do the two of the month to the two old month okay yeah what is it two a month two of the month is there's two tools of the month whoa whoa uh first doll eve two and second mid journey and the reason there's two tools and months is essentially these are two tools that do the same thing so we're highlighting these two tools but we're also highlighting the space so what do these tools do they are ai systems that create generative art uh sorry not generative art they that generate art they create

graphics and art uh and i don't know if you have seen what these things can do but it is nuts like super impressive like there's one kyle's got one up on screen right now and they do this let me be clear so let me actually back up for a sec a.i ai art has been something that has been worked on and millions of dollars have been spent on it for the last decade but it hasn't been available to the masses or to the public because it's just mainly because it's so expensive to create and the technology wasn't really there where what ai really needed to get to it needed to get to a point where you could say to it um

brown flamingo flying over the moon and it would be able to create an image that actually was that and and generate that image purely based off ai not based off of any it's not like it's doing a google search for that and then re-piecing it together it is creating fresh new art right and in order to do that you need to build these systems where basically the way these these ai platforms get built is you funnel through millions of images into it so it gets to see flamingos from every different direction and every different color and understand that and then it can regenerate that right um and now it's funny that these two

tools basically have caught a ton of attention mainly in the art world in the last few weeks because mid journey has done their big launch this past week they've moved from beta to open beta and dolly 2. also i think dolly 2 is still by invite only but they also have got a lot of attention a lot of press and so look these are amazing tools for any business not even web3 but they're particularly amazing for web 3 because we are trying to create nfts and we're trying to create a lot of graphics all the time like you need to make kyle mention it we are looking for a graphic artist in our discord right now in our community because we're

trying to create pull-ups and we're trying to create art and what's one of the hardest things about launching a business is you have to create a lot of your brand and you need a lot of imagery to create your brand well these two platforms are basically i think this is this is going to be a just a huge unlock for small businesses to be able to create graphics and create artists so we don't need a higher digital artist we can just hire an ai robot and they can make it for us now you're saying you'll rather work with a human [Laughter] why why what's wrong with an ai bot i'm down with an ai bot i just like the idea of having a human who can i can talk to and can do something

beyond with the ai okay so we are either we are looking for either a digital artist to join the dow or an artificial intelligent robot to join the dow whoever can do it faster and can pump out the most content uh will win i'm kidding but we'll we need anyone and everyone but uh robot sounds great to me i mean like check checkmate we'll put the links in the show notes i i really believe that these are tools that are going to be incredibly powerful and this is just the start like we're at this you know i think we've been talking about ai for so long but we haven't really seen any products that have breached the masses yet right like we're not really ai is you know in the back labs and in

ibm and you know that's who's working on ai but these are this is possibly the first tools that could really make a difference to you know to businesses around the world and creators around the world absolutely well jay that is a wrap and i think we might have just finished our first roll uh maybe we didn't get it in under an hour i was like this might be our first one ever that we get cut it let's let's end it right now quick um but uh yeah great episode uh you're right behind me you can't see it but if i could there was oh yeah yeah yeah yeah right there yeah come on over [Laughter] there he is together humans and then we get a robot over here

all right give the final notes from my uh for my all right uh yeah thanks thanks for listening everybody uh appreciate you guys as always uh and uh yeah have a great have a great weekend spread some love spread some joy join our discord if you're not already in there shout out to everybody that shared news with us this week thanks so much really appreciate that keep on sharing and uh yeah keep on spreading the good vibes and let's hope for some sun in edisada you know that'll be nice yakuza you promised us that we'd have some sun all right take care everyone thank you thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web3 journey if it does please share this

episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see in the next one