NFT Mania! | Andy8052 & DeeZe (SotN)

The NFT Boom rages on. We bring on Fractional team members and CryptoPunk holders DeeZe and Andy to make sense of all this. Is this just the beginning? Is this a speculative mania? Maybe it's something more. This could be the genesis of a new set of passionate communities, where culture has a quantifiable value. ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 🎖 CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ 📣 TracerDAO | Building DeFi Infrastructure. Join the Discord! https://bankless.cc/TracerDAO ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 10:00 Andy & DeeZe 13:15 jpeg Summer 17:20 NFTs vs. DeFi Tokens 21:14 What Started This? 26:17 The Fundamentals 29:48 Mania or Bubble Territory? 34:03 NFT Evaluation 101 41:43 Getting Things You Like 44:38 Mimetic Desire 50:00 Art Blocks and Generative Art 55:44 Auctions & Pricing 59:47 Fidenza 1:04:01 The Next Picasso 1:11:00 The One-of-One Game 1:17:14 On-Chain NFTs 1:21:07 Vetting Projects 1:26:59 How Long Will This Last? 1:30:53 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: DeeZe on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DeezeFi?s=20 Andy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/andy8052?s=20 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, welcome to another Bankless episode. We've got State of the Nation here for you today. David, we are talking about NFT mania today and what a perfect week to talk about it because it does feel like something's going on, something big is going on with NFTs. I'm amazed at how fast NFTs have taken off and to such heights so quickly, pretty unbelievable. What are we going to be talking about today?

• 0:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we actually had to completely reorg the schedule for the show today. We actually were going to have Hayden from Uniswap, but we actually kicked him out down the line for a future State of the Nation because this week is all about NFTs. It is NFT week. It was NFT week last week. It was NFT week the week before and just the momentum behind NFTs has not stopped. So we are bringing a previous guest of the show, Andy 8052, who is the founder of the fractionalized platform, which fractionalizes NFTs and his community manager at Fractional, which is who's called Adiz.

• 1:22David Hoffman?

  And these guys are, they both have their bios as NFT degens and so they were both DeFi maximalist turned NFT maximalist. And so they have been paying attention to the NFT markets, which is what we need to figure out what the hell is going on in the world of NFTs.

• 1:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  I kind of feel like I need this episode, David, in my life because I feel like somewhat of an NFT boomer. Do you know, like, I've known about NFTs for a long time, hugely bullish on the asset class, but like, haven't really dug deep down the rabbit hole.

• 1:55David Hoffman?

  Still can't wrap your head around it?

• 1:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it's kind of hard, right? And you have to have a passion. So like, I'm looking at all of these markets on OpenSea. I'm trying to figure out, hey, you know, what's the next big project? How do you even evaluate these projects? What does it take? So I'm hoping to ask Andy and Dee's some of these questions, just to get them out of the way. You know, it's super cool here, David, is like, with crypto, there are so many cohorts that have done really well, right? So in the early stages, you had to make kind of bets on base monies like Bitcoin and ETH and do well that way. Then you had to be sort of a finance geek, or maybe a developer and get in on sort of the DeFi boom, DeFi frenzy. And all those booms continue, of course, but now this thing requires a different set of skills. It's a lot about, you know, art curation.

• 2:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do you predict what's going to be the next, the next big meme? It's going to be the next successful art project? Like, I haven't really worked out how to develop skills in that space. I'm really excited to explore this. Before we get into the episode, we should talk about some announcements, some things that are coming to the Bankless Nation. The first is, we've got a new show, man, and it's hot. I just listened to it this morning. Yeah, we do. It's, it's great. And I, you know, I didn't do a pre-listen. I listened to it at the same time everyone else in the Bankless community did it. Cause you've kind of taken this project and developed it on your own. But guys, this is called Layer Zero, and this is a new Bankless show, talking about, we talk about so often, which is the people layer,

• 3:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  the community layer, the culture layer of crypto, that Layer Zero, that's behind every single crypto network in existence. And so you are doing like these targeted interviews with key people in the space, not even key people, you know, just interesting people in the space and hearing their stories. So it's a different format for Bankless. We had like the original, I guess, the, the founder of Vitalik Buterin, just Dimitri Buterin, Vitalik's dad on the episode. And I listened to this all this morning, David, it's absolutely fantastic. Well done on that. What else do you want to say about Layer Zero on that episode?

• 3:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it, it definitely follows a much more free flowing format. With every single Bankless episode or podcast, we have like a massive like agenda that we Go through and this is the exact opposite. There's no agenda. We just have a conversation and because there's so many interesting people in crypto that a free flowing conversation is like always, almost always interesting, right? And so first episode, like you said, is it with Dimitri Boudrin? I have two more episodes that I've already recorded. Eric Connor is coming out next week, followed by Justin Drake, and each episode has gotten better and better already. I particularly loved both of those conversations. Each person has their own kind of like perspective about the world and about crypto.

• 4:40David Hoffman?

  That they, everyone has like ideas and thoughts that are unique to them. But then when it comes to the world of crypto podcasts, like we have to talk about like your project and we have to talk about fundamentals behind assets and we have to talk about, you know, technical details.

• 4:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, stop making fun of our other podcast.

• 4:57David Hoffman?

  I don't want any of that on this show. I want to hear about like what people think about when they close their laptop lid and actually like turn off. Yesterday I recorded with Justin Drake, who actually, there came this moment in this podcast where he was just thinking is like, well, I don't really know when this podcast episode is going to come out. So I don't know if I want to leak any alpha. And I said, well, this doesn't come out for three more weeks, Justin. So like go right ahead. And what he said was absolutely fantastic. It has to do with MEV and ultrasound money. So that's cool. But then we also talked, you know, a fun fact about Justin Drake is like, he's got a kid and like you can see a lot of like Justin Drake in the kid, according to Justin Drake, obviously.

• 5:35David Hoffman?

  But then you can also connect like that to the rebellious nature of Justin Drake, to the rebellious nature of Ethereum at large, which is kind of the whole point of the show.

• 5:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think it's cool. It's not just the free form conversation. I think that's a huge part of it, but it's also the different set of questions that are asked on the show. It's like more about, tell me about your story. Like, how did you meet Vitalik's mom was a question. Yes, that's not a question we would ask on a typical podcast. Or like, do you fear for Vitalik's safety? A pretty crazy question, but like I'm intensely curious about that. Or how often Dimitri Boudrin, do you check the price of ETH? So anyway, this is all really interesting content, new ground, exciting show. Comes out every Tuesday morning. We're gonna have this, I think, every Tuesday morning, hopefully, as long as David has it in him to do this.

• 6:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it'll come out on the podcast and also YouTube. So make sure you are subscribing to both of those channels to check that out. The other thing we should mention before we get into the show is our friends at Tracer Dow. They're doing two cool things that are about to be absolutely huge. One is DeFi perpetuals, which haven't yet taken off in the space yet. But are about to think perpetuals are huge everywhere else. They're about to be big in DeFi. They're building a perpetuals product. For this allow you to go short and long on assets like ether, DeFi tokens really easily, super cool. And they are launching a Dow and they have a Dow. So they are inviting members of the bankless community listeners.

• 7:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  To the podcast to get involved in their Dow as a contributor, as a governor, you guys, you can do that by joining their Discord. Discord is kind of like the, the office for Dows, right? Like that's how you go into the office and you know, put up your hand and say, here I am, I'm a worker, I can do things. So go check that out. There will be a link in Discord for that. All right. Those are announcements. David, I gotta ask you the question. We start every episode of State of the Nation with, which is this, what is the state of the nation today, sir?

• 7:34David Hoffman?

  The state of the nation is manic. We are a little bit manic right now. Like we said, asset, NFT asset prices are all up and to the right. Almost every single one of them that like has the, the, any decent amount of attention. Most art block projects, most like profile picture NFTs, like all of these things have like insane charts. With like whatever few available charts that there are to actually chart these things. People are buying into these things regardless of like whether they're, what they were previously interested in. It seems to be like the entire attention of the crypto industry has focused on NFTs right now. And people are kind of like fervorous right now. So there's a little bit, we're all a little bit manic.

• 8:16David Hoffman?

  The thing is like, you can be a little bit manic, but we can all get a lot more manic. And so that's kind of what we're talking about on the show today is like, how much juice does this thing have? And can we actually turn this like, you know, crypto industry into, or it's like crypto native phenomenon into a global phenomenon? Maybe that's what's coming and that's kind of the conversation I want to have today.

• 8:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  These are very much my questions as well, and also the effect of NFTs on the broader crypto landscape. So, you know, we've talked so much about ETH being money and DC Investor and others have have said, hey, ETH is now culture money. Essentially, that's what you're buying when you're buying NFTs. You're buying a piece of internet culture, piece of crypto culture, and it's all denominated in ETH. So what other effects does the the mania of NFTs have on crypto markets? That remains to be seen as well. Hopefully, we'll explore those topics today. Guys, stick with us. We will be back with Andy and Dee's in just a minute. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

• 9:18David Hoffman?

  Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys. Not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their Ledger hardware wallets, which makes proper private key management a breeze. But the Ledger ecosystem is more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Ledger hardware wallet and the Ledger Live app. And if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite D apps all in one place, Ledger is where you want to be. Not only does Ledger let you buy crypto assets straight from the app, but it also hooks into decentralized exchange aggregators like Paraswap, which makes sure that you are getting the best prices on your trades without your assets ever leaving your control. DeFi never stops growing, and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it.

• 10:02David Hoffman?

  So click the link in the show notes to see all the DeFi apps that Ledger Live has, and stay tuned as more and more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab your Ledger, download Ledger Live, and get all of your D apps all in one place.

• 10:21David Hoffman?

  Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want. Want to buy something brand new in the Uniswap ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants Program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. DAOs have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute

• 11:02David Hoffman?

  to the Uniswap DAO, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap Treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap DAO? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless.

• 11:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey guys, we are back full swing. This is NFT Mania JPEG Mania. We've got two really great guests for you to talk all about NFTs, make sense of the markets, what's going on, hopefully explore some project and see what's good out there in the space. The first is Andy 8052. He's a DeFi degenerate, turned into an NFT maximalist and not lately, he's been an NFT maximalist for quite some time. He's known as the guy with the Crypto Punk with the beanie and he's also the founder of Fractionalize. That's a platform for fractionalizing NFTs into ERC20 tokens so you can gain liquidity on them. We've had Andy on before. Congrats on the raise, by the way, the Paradigm raise, 8 million, I think, or so. Andy, it's great to have you back on Bankless. Thank you, sir.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me. I feel like so much has happened in so little time since I was on last.

• 12:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  It's been crazy.

• 12:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we gotta, we gotta get caught up on what is happening in NFTs. We also have Deez or DeeZe. He's a degenerate shitcoin gambler who got into NFTs, again, coming from the DeFi space, getting into NFTs. He got into them in September 2020, then he went all in in January 2021. Sounds like my story with Bitcoin and ETH, but he's got one for DeFi and NFTs. And then he's currently the community manager at Fractional and he's the host of many Twitter spaces on NFTs. You may have heard, he does like four to six hours, like eight hours a day on Twitter Spaces, just talking about NFTs. I need to catch one of these. Deez, it's great to have you as well. Oh, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

• 13:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm in. Well, everyone's excited about NFTs these days. And I think when David and I started the summer with Bankless, we thought we were going to get some kind of a layer two summer, like a DeFi summer round two. But instead, we got JPEG summer. That's what's happening. And maybe that rolls into an NFT mania, a JPEG mania into the fall. I don't know. This doesn't show any signs of stopping or slowing down, at least right now. I want to start with the big picture question. How did this happen? How did we get to this point? Andy, what's your take?

• 13:43Speaker 02

  I mean, like, a lot of it is really, who the hell knows? But I think, I think a part of it that has become like more clear to me is,

• 13:57Speaker 02

  you know, there, there's so much culture and community, like especially on Ethereum. That's where almost all the NFT trading happens. And there's such like a valuable community of people on Ethereum who are doing things and interacting. And like, it makes sense that they would have their own natural ways to collect things together or signal their success or their status. And like that would start to leak out into the rest of the world as Ethereum starts to leak out into the rest of the world. And so that's kind of how I've been like, how I've been thinking about more of the origin of why now? Why is this happening is I feel like personally, over the last year and a half, as I've been working on Ethereum, things have kind of taken a jump as far as DeFi and just kind of the global status of crypto.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  And so it makes sense that the collecting side of things would also grow. And when those types of things grow, they grow really fast.

• 14:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  DZ, what's your take on why this is happening? You think it was inevitable all along, like we're going to get an NFT mania season? And this is just inevitable? Or is there some specific reason for the, the, the timing of this and the magnitude of it?

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I didn't expect any of this to to happen the way it did, right? Like when I was buying punks and art blocks and pegs and having an investment thesis like my best case scenario was that like the prices they're at right now was going to take like a year or two to get to. So the fact that it happened so quickly has even, you know, blown my own expectations. I think it's a variety of things. Number one, like NFTs are just fun, plain and simple, and it is a very low entry playground for people to come in and get involved. Um, you can with very little money mint a project and potentially change your entire life off of one rare mint. And you can't do that with a shitcoin like you can't a hundred x a shitcoin in a week. Like, there's no way you're gonna get dumped on by whales.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  There's no chance, but you're seeing a lot of people come in with a small stack who just wanna ape stuff. And I think there was a lull. Um, if you look at like the Ethereum and Bitcoin charts, pull it up here, but like in June and July, um, Ethereum, you know, is kind of pretty like from May, actually, um, into June, we had the Sotheby's auction, which gave a lot of credibility to these NFTs. Ethereum wasn't doing much of anything. DeFi and shitcoins are kind of just slowly ranging and people are bored and they wanna do something. So like, I, I know a lot of my DeFi friends didn't get into NFTs until like June and July because they were bored and it was enough for them to just say, hey, let's, you know, look at these punks and art blogs.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  And I think it's almost reflexive where like people make money, they come in and they don't take the money out. They just invest it into the next project. And we're seeing this, you know, massive reflexivity where NFTs are just taking off. And like you said, we are in this manic phase, like is this, this could even be euphoria. Like we might look back in two months and be like, what were we thinking? Fidesz is are selling for three million dollars. Right? So I, I'm always like, you know, telling myself right now, like, do I have enough Ethereum that I'm happy? Like I'm selling NFTs every day just to make sure I have enough Ethereum that I'm happy where if this is like the euphoric top, then I'm good. But I'm still, you know, overly optimistic and I still think people coming in are like early in a way.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  And this might be just like the beginning of the end, or I mean, sorry, the end of the beginning.

• 17:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  How much Ethereum, how much Ethereum do you need to be happy? Cause I'm still working to answer that question.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  That's a tough question. I mean, that's relative to your net worth and your goals. For me, I need enough Ethereum to like.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  I need like 30 to 50% of my portfolio in Ethereum to be happy, we'll just say that.

• 17:38David Hoffman?

  Dees, you said-

• 17:39Speaker 03

  And I'm not there right now.

• 17:41David Hoffman?

  There's never enough Ether, that's for sure. Dees, you said that like, people were perhaps minting these things because in contrast to buying a shitcoin that like can't pump 1000x because you'll get dumped on. And in contrast, you can just mint a token which has by definition, no previous sellers, no like privileged, you know, early minters, no, there's no, you know, NFT pre-mine. And that kind of is reminiscent of some of the DeFi summer activities, which kicked off that whole DeFi mania because of the whole fair launch phenomenon, like the whole like food coin forks. Those are all like very much fair launch phenomenons. Do you think that that is a common denominator between what we saw with DeFi summer in 2020 and what we're seeing in JPEG summer right now?

• 18:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you're pretty spot on there. It's having fair distribution and a low barrier of entry. Even then, like if you were a whale, you could get a lot of the liquidity from liquidity mining where right now, if you're a whale trying to mint a bunch of these projects, like you're gonna get them, but you're gonna pay a ton in gas. And I think it's harder to like really dilute the, like you, you could really dilute a liquidity pool, right? If you have a hundred million dollars and there's 25 million in the pool and you dumped the hundred million and like you just diluted the crap out of everyone who's in there, whereas like with something where there's only 8,888 mints or 10,000 mints, you can't really dilute it to that level.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  So it's even more like upside than DeFi summer.

• 19:15David Hoffman?

  What would you guys say that, Andy, go ahead if you want to say something?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  I know, I would agree. I think that it's like, it's kind of all the best parts of DeFi summer in so much as like there's really high upside. And there's a lot of value in like just scrolling Twitter and Discord and Telegram and finding the next thing to buy. But then you just have like these added benefits that aren't really possible in a DeFi token where like one, you can be emotionally attached to your NFTs. Like I, I love DeFi and that whole space.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  At the end of the day, like if I have to sell my maker for Ave or my comp for ETH, like, okay, you know, it's whatever, but like, I love my CryptoPunk and I don't want to sell it. And it doesn't really matter what the price is. And that's just like, not a thing that really exists with, with DeFi stuff.

• 20:04David Hoffman?

  I definitely resonate with that because there was, there was a time I bought my, my Penguin avatar at like roughly point four ETH and now the floor is at point two ETH. You know, good trade, good appreciation. But like, because it's unique and because I've put it as my profile picture, and also to some degree, because I'm a little bit of a, of a public figure, like, I would feel bad about like letting my Penguin go. Like, I would let the community down. I, my, I don't know who would buy my Penguin. I want my Penguin. And so it does kind of feel like there's a one-way flow of like capital into these NFTs. And then like the emotional attachment like sucks you in and captures you. And it's like, now it's stuck there. And then that actually kind of sets like a floor for some of these things.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. I almost feel like a lot of these NFTs are like almost deflationary in a way. Because you have people who are just totally not price sensitive. I think there was this guy Vincent Bando, who's a really big collector. And he tweeted out something the other day that I thought was really good, where he said, you know, this isn't like a quick flip. This is a land grab. And like to him, he doesn't care what the prices, he doesn't care what the prices now. Like, he's buying stuff because he thinks that it's going to matter in 10 years. And so like, when you have a bunch of people who are doing that, all of a sudden, there just isn't quite enough to go around sometimes.

• 21:14David Hoffman?

  What would you guys say is the like starting pistol for this whole thing? Because like, we, we talked about previously, the NFT bear market. But like, in, in retro, in retrospect, turns out like that is exactly what you said, Andy. It was actually an NFT land grab. Do you think that there was like, like a moment where this like thing actually started? Was there like a starting pistol to anything?

• 21:39Speaker 02

  I think that like the start start of all of it was actually two things that are now like not doing it. I haven't gone nearly as parabolic as everything else, which is NBA Top Shot and Nifty Gateway. And kind of like, and maybe I'm wrong, and you can really dig into the data, and this is incorrect, but based on my naive thesis, you had a bunch of people who were not into crypto, but who got into NFTs in a very easily accessible way. And this was, you know, back in the fall of last year, so almost a year ago at this point. And they were paying with credit cards. They weren't really having to learn too much. But once you do it, and you're actually like experiencing an online all the time liquid marketplace and all this fun stuff, you kind of want to learn more. And I think a lot of people did. I made a lot of friends

• 22:23Speaker 02

  through Top Shot, especially who did want to learn more. And I was teaching them how to install MetaMask and what CryptoPunks were and why they would want to buy one and all this stuff. And then a lot of those people came and they've set up MetaMask and did all that. And then they minted Bored Apes. And then Bored Apes went crazy. And like I've seen a long, a strong correlation on my timeline, at least, of people who used to be NBA Top Shot fanatics, who have Bored Apes as their profile pictures now. And all of a sudden, this was like a massive wealth generation event for an entirely new group of NFT collectors who are generally coming from a less crypto native background.

• 22:59David Hoffman?

  So would you say, Ryan and I, we often critique flow in Top Shots as kind of being like fraudulent NFTs because they're done on a centralized blockchain. So are they really NFTs? And that's a conversation for a different day. But would you agree with the statement that like these non Ethereum based NFT platforms that perhaps were centralized were actually like training wheels for people to come into the world of NFTs and then perhaps graduate to like the real, the real NFT market, which is Ethereum?

• 23:28Speaker 02

  I definitely have seen that. I'd be curious to hear D's perspective because he was on Top Shot as well, pretty early on. But I've noticed that with a lot of people who I've interacted with.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  I I would agree with everything you just said. Um, for me, I feel like the starting, you know, the gunshot was um in mid-January when John Bales sent out that article that said, I just spent thirty-five thousand dollars on a JPG or a, whatever it was, he said about the Ja Morant moment he bought. And like, a week later, an alien crypto pump sold to Flamingo Dow. Um, and that was when I was like, oh, holy shit, here they come. Because I was involved with the daily fantasy scene a little bit. I was a low stakes player who like, could grind and make a little bit of money, but I wasn't great. And seeing guys like John Bales and Peter Jennings and all these other daily fantasy personalities come in, like, I knew that was a really bullish

• 24:21Speaker 03

  sign, because these are people, like Andy said, we didn't see them on Ethereum. We didn't see them using any of our tools until after they got that, like, first. I I probably used the wrong terminology, but I call like an NFT flip. It's almost like a hit of crack. Like, if you buy a Top Shot and it goes up ten X in a week, you're thinking to yourself like, holy shit, like, I need, I need more of this. So then when Top Shot kind of died, like Andy said, they're like, oh, we gotta find this next hit. Like, it's not Top Shot. Like, this is not, like, not dying, but this is going down and people aren't excited about it. Like, what else is out there? People came in the punks who could afford it. We saw a nice little run-up. We see the Christie's auction come out, kind of lends legitimacy to punks. When you have an auction house, it's like,

• 25:02Speaker 03

  hey, we're displaying this with a Basquiat and all these other famous artists, and this is a crypto punk. Um, and then we had the Soffe's set of like art blocks and the COVID alien punk and like twenty other NFTs. And I think that just kind of put a stamp on the whole NFT marketplace. Like, this is legit. This is here to stay. And slowly but surely, we started to see like traditional art collectors come into the space after those auctions. So like, from June up until now, you know, people buying these art blocks and deathbeefs and punks, like, they're not as many crypto-native people as you think. I I think there's a lot of people who are just coming in now, who didn't even touch DeFi summer last year, didn't get involved with Ethereum until seeing these NFT auctions.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  And are now buying it up because to them it's like a couple hundred grand on a piece of arts a deal. Um, they look at things with 10 plus time horizons like Andy said about the land grab. It's just like, what's the total supply of these? Like if you met Picasso when he was 30 and you knew that he was only gonna ever make 10,000 pieces and they were already made and you could grab a slice right now, like, you might think differently than if they're constantly supplying more and more. And I think all of that is just like driving the prices up basically.

• 26:17David Hoffman?

  DeeZe, you're touching on the subject I want to turn to next. And so I want, I kind of want you to expand on that. But when, when Ryan and I were in the intro and at the very beginning, we were talking about like, hey, we're kind of like just confused, like, people are spending money on all these JPGs, like we've never spent money on JPGs before, like what's going on? And so like, we're coming from the DeFi world, right? Where like we have these capital assets with, you know, cash flows, total value locked. There are things that we can measure that make us feel more secure about when we allocate capital to exposure to some sort of DeFi token. Uh, and so like to some degree, NFTs don't have any fundamentals, right? Cause they're just pictures. Is that really true? Or are the fundamentals just something else that we haven't really learned yet?

• 27:01David Hoffman?

  So when you guys are looking at NFT projects, like, are there any fundamentals to talk about? But regardless of like what kind of the project is like, what are the common like things that are always like fundamentally like, bullish or bearish about like an NFT project that you guys pay attention to?

• 27:17Speaker 03

  This is gonna sound like super not quantitative, but like it's mostly vibes. Like I go into the Discord, I talk to the team. I'm a big fan of trying to get the team on a Twitter space. And just like pick their brain and ask about all their plans and you know, wherever they come from and where they think they're going. I think right now we see a lot of success with like punks and art blocks because similar to what you said, there's a bunch of comparables there. If you go to the punks page, you look at 10,000 punks, you look at all the recent sales, you look at trade breakdowns, you look at all these different comparables and you feel somewhat safe. Throwing two hundred and fifty to a million dollars into a pump because you're like, oh, well, these two just sold and they look just like it. And they sold for that amount, so they must be worth this amount.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  Uh, and similar with art blocks, like you have the different comparables, like you're looking at a set of ringers or a set of Fedensas. And you're like, okay, well, other collectors are valuing at this amount, like clearly there's something here. And I think we haven't seen that spill over to the one-on-one art yet. So like, if you look at like X copy, Hackatow, Coldy, some of these OG super rare artists. Their prices haven't moved nearly as much as like art blocks, like art blocks might be up a thousand X and like, you know, X copy might be up five X. Um, so it's a big gap and I think that's because the people coming in, like you said, they just don't know what they're evaluating. So they feel more comfortable buying something with comparables.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. I I've noticed that as well. And I think it it's just like scary, like as someone, I don't really have a ton of one of one art. I have a little bit just because purely I like it and I have absolutely no intention of selling it. If it goes up a ton, awesome. Um, but like, I don't feel super qualified to decide what art is good and what art isn't good. It's never really been something that I've thought about in my life previously. And so looking at different projects that are more community driven or like these are saying have tons of comparables in our collection. It just feels a lot easier. It's kind of like training wheels in in a way of of how to collect art.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Um, and so, yeah, I I think that that like is currently driving a lot of how people are making their purchasing decisions. But then as far as fundamentals outside of that, I I think a lot of it, and it's as silly as vibes is like, it's kind of just all memes. And it's all just, you know, the value is in the cultural relevance of the things that you are buying. And if you think that those things will be more relevant in the future than they are now, then they'll probably be worth more money than they are now. Uh, and it's hard to quantify that, but.

• 29:48David Hoffman?

  Are you guys worried that like the structure of this market is like almost super duper conducive to creating a mania? Because Dees was saying like, well, if like my punk looks like this and their punk looks like that, well, I can probably get this from that. Meanwhile, there's probably someone else who's doing the same thing. It's like, well, their punk is like this and my punk's like this, so I could probably get this for that. And all of a sudden, like, kind of like we were talking about the inherent, like, kind of one-way flow of capital. It feels like people are just going to stair-step their way into insane evaluations. And almost by definition, that has to just be a bubble, right? Like, if it's only one, if it's only up only, then at some point, like, something's gonna pop, right? Are you, do you guys kind of think that this is just a little bit too conducive to be becoming like a massive bubble?

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, so I think yes, but also kind of no, which is a weird answer. But so I think, in general, yes, NFTs are in a bubble right now, like, obviously. When, whether how far up in the bubble we are, I'm not really qualified to say, but I think that everyone would agree they are in a bubble. But really, the question is, the really high end of NFTs, like, the extremely desirable stuff, we don't know what percentage of people who are buying those are buying them purely for speculation or are buying them because they're saying, I don't want to have there be a world where I don't own a punk or I don't own a Fedenza. And those people probably don't care about the mania or what price they're buying it at.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  It's like, I have a Fedenza that I was lucky to get at pretty cheap, and I, unless it got to a price that was really insane, I'm just not gonna sell it. I don't care. I want to have one, I'm ordering the print and I want to have it on my wall, and that's like, an important part of, like, Ethereum history for me and at my time working in Ethereum, and the price isn't really as relevant. And I am by no means the wealthiest art collector around in the, in the NFT space. And so I think that there's, you know, a non-trivial amount of people who are buying this stuff, especially the really high-end stuff, are in positions where the amount of money they're spending isn't totally relevant. And it's just kind of knowing what percentage of people is that. And then, whenever a bubble does pop, what's the floor at that point?

• 31:59Speaker 02

  And really, we have no idea. But, you know, if there's 10,000 punks and 10,000 apes and a couple thousand really, really valuable art blocks, not that many pieces of art to collect. And so whatever that floor is, might be, might be, we're already past it, it might be a lot higher. It's really hard to say.

• 32:17David Hoffman?

  Dee's any color on that?

• 32:20Speaker 03

  Just trying to to pull up Nance and to look at art blocks real quick, but um what what I've seen is similar to what Andy said, like a lot of these collectors, they're buying these NFTs and it's a drop in the bucket to them like if they need to liquidate anything to have money in real life, like the NFTs aren't first, they're last. And if you look at the top holders of art blocks, I was going to Nance about have it up right now, like I can remember from last week when I was looking at it like out of the top 100 holders of art blocks, these people aren't even selling them like you can look at the seven day flow and see like, is it incoming or outgoing and how much? And it's like the most I saw was some guy who sold 25 and most people were around like selling five to 10. And that's like they own 200 plus.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  And it's like kind of wild that like if they minted all these and are sitting on a thousand X plus and they're just thinking to themselves like, ah, let me shave off like my least favorite things and hold on to what's best. And like, I don't think they're going to sell what's best period, especially someone like Snow Fro who has the most art blocks. He has his stuff in a vault. He has to drive a thousand miles to unlock the vault. He just went through a whole big OPSEC thread where he explained like his reasoning behind this, but um these people aren't selling. And like Andy said, there's not that much of a supply. If there's 10,000 punks, there's like 3,000 holders right now. Um, there's 10,000 apes. There's like, what 5,500 maybe holders?

• 33:44Speaker 03

  And then art blocks, there's I think a little over 10,000 holders, but there's a lot more supply there, but there's not that much like that's still not a lot.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  It's still, it feels insane to say that given the price action, but it's still not crazy to me yet.

• 34:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  So uh, what I'm really curious guys is like I I I'm kind of approaching this space as as somewhat of a a noob at this stage and like trying to figure out how to evaluate. Um, what a good NFT looks like or what a good NFT like class looks like. And I think um similar to what she said, Dee's like, what's interesting about this, maybe it's early stage mania, we don't know. But the wealthiest people in the world um aren't in crypto, at least not yet. And like, what's really interesting is, is seeing people come from outside of the crypto community and start to enter into NFTs, right? Like, look at this. This is Visa News.

• 34:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Visa just bought this punk, a crypto punk. Visa-

• 34:49David Hoffman?

  Visa has a crypto punk profile picture.

• 34:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right? I mean, not on my, you know, list, my bingo card for 2021. I got Odell Beckham. He's got a crypto punk, right, from the Lakers. So like, people are starting to recognize and legitimize the culture that crypto is really building. And that's a, that's kind of a unique phenomenon. But what I, what I want to get my head wrapped around is, if I'm new to the NFT world, and I'm trying to evaluate, like, what I should buy, I'm curious about this space, what I should buy, what do I look at, right? So here I am on OpenSea, for instance, and maybe we should talk about,

• 35:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  like, two classes of NFTs. The first is sort of the, the avatar style of NFTs that have been, like, it seems to me, anyway, super hot, you know, the crypto punks, the bored apes of the world, the pudgy penguins, the me-bits, these types of things.

• 35:52David Hoffman?

  They have a ton of surface area, by definition.

• 35:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  So let's talk about these first. So, I mean, if I'm, like, just on OpenSea, looking at a project, how do I evaluate, like, which crypto punk I should buy, or even like, which category of project I should buy in the, in the avatar class? I mean, let's say I'm somebody who, I mean, crypto punks are already established, you know, they're high-end, not in the market. I, I want to get in on maybe the next, like, pudgy penguin, or, or something cool like that. How do I go to OpenSea or various websites and tools and evaluate what I should buy? Like, take me through the 101. What are your thoughts here, Andy?

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Well, I think this isn't something that I do a ton, but I know other people do it. His that they will just go to whales wallets and look at what they own, look at what's been newly added to the site. And you have to be careful and look at what they've actually purchased and not what people have just like sent them. Um, but that is something that I've heard people do relatively consistently. Outside of that, I think that being just like really active on Twitter is probably the best place and having a group of people who you really trust. Uh, where if they say, hey, I saw this thing, it comes out tomorrow. I think it has a good shot. Uh, just, you know, mint a couple of them if you, if you have the ability to is probably your best course of action and you're not going to hit on everyone. I have a bunch of like random garbage in my, in my open sea that

• 37:25Speaker 02

  uh, didn't, didn't pan out, but then I have ones that that did pan out that I've done, I've done well. Um, and so I think that

• 37:33Speaker 02

  that if, if you're purely just doing it because you want to like have your best chance at hitting something good. That's probably your best course of action, but honestly, what I think is most important and generally what I do is just buy stuff that I like and just there's really something at like every price point. And there's so many of these little, you know, sub communities that have grown around these different profile picture projects.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  And there isn't quite as much address overlap as you would guess. There's definitely a lot, but there isn't quite as much like address ownership overlap as you would kind of expect in these, all these different projects. And I kind of think of it like different, like Twitch subscribers or subreddits or something where there's probably enough people in the world to support a bunch of different profile picture projects, not all at the same price point. And you're going to have punks and bored apes that are kind of the, the upper echelon of these things. But if you have a thousand people who all really love your random profile picture project, it probably will still be fine as long as everyone who's, who is in it, like actually is in it because they love the artwork and they love the community and you're doing something fun. And so I think that's really more important than almost anything because.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  Then can say you're happy that you have it because you like it and not just because you think that there's a good chance that it goes up 100x.

• 38:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, so definitely buy something you like, but like I'm on this list here and this is, you know, we're, we're down a little bit on trading volume of OpenSea. There's something called the Cyber Kongs. And then there's like Cool Cats, you know, like, so what's the difference between a Cyber Kong and a, and a Cool Cat? Andy, are you telling me I should just click through? And look at the, the Cyber Kongs and be like, uh, you know, I like, I select one, I, the ones I like. Or is there, is there more to it? Because some of these avatar projects have not picked up and others have. Um, is it as simple as just let your, let your taste kind of dictate and get in early?

• 39:25Speaker 03

  I don't know if it's that simple. Uh, I would backtrack a second here and say like, if you're trying to make the most money possible, I think it's plus EV to most things. And I think what Andy said about finding a group is very important. Twitter is great. Um, but there's a lot of noise and sometimes if you don't have like specifically curated lists, it's hard to separate a lot of, uh, signal from that noise. If you can just make a discord of like 10 to 50 people who are interested in doing this and working together. You guys can move mountains. Like it reminds me of Uniswap summer where I was in a telegram with 50 dudes watching the Uniswap new listing bot. And it's a very similar thing with these NFTs where it's like, oh, this is coming out today. Like, what are we minting, guys?

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Like, what do you see? And they might share a few things. And if I like the art on any of them, I'll mint, you know, between one and 20. Um, but I think what Andy said too is like, you kind of have to like the art at the end of the day, because if you get stuck with this and you see it in your wallet and it looks horrible, you're gonna ask yourself like, why did I blow, you know, five grand or 10 grand on this? Um, something like Kongs, they're a little more in depth, right? Like there's Genesis Kongs, you could get a Genesis Kong and it yields banana and then you use banana to breed baby Kongs and they all show up under the Cyber Kongs thing. So when you're looking at it, you're wondering like, why are some of these Kongs 50 Ethereum and selling? And the baby Kong at two Ethereum isn't.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  Selling. So like you do have to know the different mechanics of how these projects work. Um, Cool Cats was one where like I talked to the guy. He said he's been making the cat for on and off ten years. Like you can go look at his Instagram and go back and he's literally drawing different types of the blue cat. And when I heard that, it's like, you know, this guy had a history with the cat. It's not like he just came in and was like, how do I make uh an avatar project for people to buy? But he was more concerned about like, oh, this is perfect for me to build a community around this cat that I love. And that's the type of thing like I have two cats I love and I probably won't ever sell them because I just want to see what they do with them. Um, whereas like, you know, I might

• 41:33Speaker 03

  want to sell other things quicker because I'm like, oh, here's a hype event that's going to drive volume. And this is a good time for me to get out. So like I look at my different bags with different mindsets like that.

• 41:44David Hoffman?

  I really want to drive the point home about only buying something that you really like. Uh, because that's uh, we were earlier talking about how this like market is just a one-way flow of of money. The way that this thing stays rational and doesn't get over as ski tips is if every participant is only buying stuff that they like, right? If you only buy, so like, it's more about like items that you trinkets that you find in a store that you're willing to part with your dollars with, and then you take it home and it lives on your shelf for the rest of your life. If you are buying, if you're going into the store and you're like saying, hey, I want every single trinket that you have, give them all to me. It's because you're trying to resell them later and you're you're playing the the greater fool's theory.

• 42:26David Hoffman?

  And so like there's a a a greater fool's like valuation thesis. And so there's some sort of like level of having like responsible exposure and responsible risk management by only buying the things that you like. Uh, because like Andy said earlier, if it goes to zero, like no, like if it goes to zero, you still have it on your shelf. And you still like it. Like, I'm sure you would have liked it a little bit more if it if it wasn't at zero, but at least you still have the thing. And so. Maybe some of the best advice that we can give is like if you are thinking about getting exposure to NFTs, because you have this FOMO about this like market that's going on, you don't have to FOMO in, you just have to find something that looks cute. And to some degree, that's kind of why I personally really like penguins. Like, the penguins are just cute. They're just cute little buddies. And that's kind of the fundamentals.

• 43:11David Hoffman?

  And so if you're playing the game of NFTs, you want to buy something that you like, that you also kind of think other people will like too, if you want to actually have adequate exposure. Any thoughts on that, Andy?

• 43:23Speaker 02

  I totally agree. And I think, you know, like, I have, like I said, I have NFTs that I bought that I probably can never sell for more than I bought them for. But I like them. And one day, when I have a nice digital display, I'll display them in my house. And I think they look sick and that's awesome. And then I have other stuff where it's like, oh, you know, I've been very picky with avatar projects that I've minted and bought over the last couple of months. That like whole space is really heated up. And there's some that I think don't look great and I don't really care about them. And I don't really want to have them after I've had some experiences in the past where I have others sitting in my wallet that I now have hidden on my OpenSea profile. And so I'd rather just stick with the stuff where I'm like, oh, that looks, that looks really cool.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  And it's funny, or I can make a meme out of it, or I can send it to my girlfriend and she can think it's funny. And like that, to me, is very important when I'm trying to decide this stuff at this point. Because at the end of the day, if all I cared about was like a safe plus bet, I probably wouldn't just be like aping into random avatar projects.

• 44:22David Hoffman?

  I think using the perspective of getting a digital display to illustrate your NFTs, do you want that NFT up on your wall? Like, should be a good litmus test for whether or not like people should like press the button on their ledger to buy that NFT.

• 44:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's something, though, there's something, it appears to me, very memetic here, right? And by that, I'm talking about...

• 44:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Our Luke Burgess episode about Mimetic desire, which is like, it's not just, to me, anyway, again, you guys are deeper into NFTs than I am, but it's not just like, I want this NFT, excuse me, because I like it. It's also, am I the type of person to buy a CryptoPunk, right? Which is, which is not just an individual, do I like the pixels that form this CryptoPunk image? It's also about embracing the group collective culture, right? And so like, you have to almost answer that question. Do I want to be part of

• 45:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  the MeBits Club, or the Board Apes Club, or the people who are into CryptoPunks? Or am I a different sort of individual? It's like, it's like a social self-actualization type of decision. And there's something like deep and cultural hidden about how we mimic other human beings and associate in, in social groups. I wonder if you could talk about the social dynamics of this. Dee's, any thoughts on that?

• 45:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I actually had like two things I wanted to touch on from the, the last point too. And that is, uh, going back to what Andy said, buying what he wants to display. I think like virtual galleries are going to take off a lot more. I have a lot of fun building and on Cyber and gallery dot SO. And I think like, I don't even think I'll have a lot of this stuff in my house. It'll just be in virtual galleries I build and other people business. And the other advice I would give is like, buy things in pairs. Don't just buy one of a pudgy penguin or one cool cat, because it makes the decision of parting with one of them. When it's your only one, way harder. It's a lot easier if you buy in pairs and you sell your lesser of the two after a price movement to feel like, good, I locked in profit. It's all good. And not like, oh, I just sold my only punk and I might not ever be able to get it back.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  But yeah, going on the Mimetic desire and like culture in these communities, I think you're right. I thought a lot about punks. I don't know if anyone here played like RuneScape growing up. But if you did, you're well aware of the party hat items. They came out 2002, limited supply. They're given out for free. And over time, those party hats are still the most valuable items in the game. And I looked at punks, thinking like the same line of reasoning, like, holy shit, these are gonna be like the new party hats. But instead of just mattering in RuneScape, it's gonna matter for the entire crypto ecosystem because of the culture of the ecosystem wants to show off wealth in a crypto native way. They don't want to go buy a Baskyard or Picasso and put it behind them so that when they're on a live stream, you can see

• 47:24Speaker 03

  it. They want to show off with a crypto native flex. And I bought my first punk for like a thousand or 1,250 bucks. And I didn't like, at the time, know much about the punk community at all. I just had known like, wow, these are really limited. And I think these are gonna have, like, these are gonna behave like the party hat market behave. So that was like, kind of my take on the Mimetic desire. Like, people don't know they want these yet because they don't see other people displaying them. And they don't know, like, like, Mimetic desire to me is like, you don't know what you want until you see what other people want, and then you copy their taste. So if you can have a little bit of foresight and be the taste maker, rather than the taste follower, you can

• 48:08Speaker 03

  maybe have an impact on that Mimetic desire in the future.

• 48:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's really insightful comments. And I definitely appreciate the RuneScape reference. And actually, so did the YouTube chat as well. Guys, we have to talk about, like, one of the biggest star of this show, which is the whole art blocks phenomenon and generative art. And overall, I really think like, if we are on the cusp of some NFT mania, what gets me really, really excited is that if we inject a bunch of capital into digital art, like, at some point, that flows right into like, good innovation. And that's kind of what I am seeing with the art blocks phenomenon. So we're going to get to that conversation next. But first, I'm going to rug pull everyone and send us into our second round of sponsors. So here we go. Thanks for bearing with us. Living a bankless life requires taking

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• 51:26David Hoffman?

  Alright guys, we are back with the state of the nation, the state of NFTs, the state of the NFT mania. And I actually want to turn the conversation to Art Blocks because I'm really excited if this is indeed a big, big bull market that we have ahead of us. It's already a bull market, but if there's more ahead of us, inevitably what bull markets incentivize is innovation. And one of the big things that we've really seen, like almost the star of the NFT show, at least in the last few months, has been Art Blocks. And to me, the innovation behind Art Blocks is the whole phenomenon of generative art. Can you guys kind of just extrapolate and expand on how you, what role you've seen Art Blocks fill in the world of this growing NFT bull market? Like what is Art Blocks? Why is it so cool?

• 52:11David Hoffman?

  Why do people like them? Andy, let's start with you.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I was actually like a bit later to Art Blocks than probably Diesel was and some others. Mostly just because I'm not actually that good at all of this.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  That's really the main thing, I think. But so Art Blocks is, for anyone who's not aware, a generative art platform. They have three different places where you can release your generative art. The most popular being Art Blocks Curated, which is an invite-only drop system. So far, I believe they've had 32 different drops on there so far, so maybe 33, something like that. And yeah, you see 100,000 Ethereum in volume on OpenSea for it. It's highly desirable. And so each Art Blocks project on there, you know, has a very different look and feel. And there's a bunch created by different artists. I think a couple of artists have done multiple, I'm not totally sure though.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  And yeah, so they're all generatively done through a programming language. It's called like PS something, I don't know, I'm not, definitely not an expert in that by any means. And it's loaded up into a smart contract. And then when people mint, it generates the art for them at the time of mint. And so personally, I think that's super cool because it's something that would be hard to replicate in the real world. Because you have like this provable chain of everything that happened and how you got to the point where your art was generated. That definitely is a value add in my opinion, which I think makes it super interesting.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  And yeah, so that's been some of like the biggest sales has been like the Fidenzos and Chromie Squiggles and Ringers. It's it's pretty insane. These can probably add more color.

• 53:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, D's.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. I um, I found Artbox. My friend Trill told me about them in December of 2020 and I'm into a couple of squiggles. And I was pretty addicted because it's kind of a mixture of um marrying the rarity slash like gambling aspect of the profile pictures, but you're buying legit art in the same sense. So like each series, like say the Fidenzos, there's 999 of them. They have different traits and certain traits are very rare and like, you know, people will covet those traits significantly more than like a floor.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  So it still has the same profile picture rarity slash aesthetic premium, but it also is like legit art that to me is more meaningful to own in some sense. Like you could own a ton of cute penguins and a lot of cute cats, but owning art that like you want to hang in your house, or at least I do, that was algorithmically generated at the time that you minted it using your transaction hash to generate what you got, like to me is awesome because the the way Snowfro describes it is like you're an artist yourself as a minter. Like at the time of Mint, the place you are at, the the nanosecond you are at when that transaction confirms

• 55:18Speaker 03

  gives you that unique hash and you're a part of the whole process. And when he said it like that, it made me get really attached to anything I minted versus like what I bought on secondary because I can see in the chain of provenance, like I was the person who got this from the smart contract that minted it. And I'm attached to those more. Um, yeah, Artbox has been a wild ride and I think, yeah, it's P5JS is the language most people use.

• 55:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Dee, I have a bunch of questions about like generative art and how art blocks works. Like, so the first is, are you saying when you mint it, it's kind of like random? What comes out the other side based on some sort of inputs and outputs? But you're sort of like, it's kind of the magic eight ball. You don't know like what is going to pop out?

• 56:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's completely random. So you can look, normally before a drop, they have a test net mint. And you can see, you know, maybe 50 samples of what the algorithm put out. But you don't know what you're going to get until it is minted. Like, it's, it's very wild. Like, you know, when you look at the ringers, like, oh, hey, it's going to be some type of string wrapped around some type of peg. But you don't know what formation is going to come out, what colors those pegs are, if they're going to have bull's eyes, if the background is going to be a different color. And the artists, they weight all of these different things in their code. So they know, but they don't leak it until it's already out that like, oh, hey, if you see that trait, it's really rare.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  Because the shot of that coming up is like 1% or 0.1% or something.

• 56:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, okay. And then obviously there's a cost to mint. Is that a steep cost to mint?

• 57:03Speaker 03

  Um, so recently they changed the way drops came on the platform. Before they were very cheap. It would be like point, uh, squiggles were point zero three, five ETH. Um, and then like another project, maybe like point one ETH. Um, now it's a Dutch auction and it starts high, like maybe five or three ETH. And it goes down every five minutes, like a quarter ETH interval or something like that. So now you really are playing a game of chicken. Like, okay, who is, can we all work together and get the mint price down? Or at what point is everybody going to jump in and mint it?

• 57:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  And that's art blocks specifically has moved to a Dutch auction, right? Others are still kind of, you pay whatever.

• 57:48Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. Uh, it's like pudgy penguins and those type of things aren't Dutch auction. It's just art blocks. Thing is, it's smart. At the end of the day, artists are getting a lot more with this model. Um, with the old model, you might spend point one on the mint that goes to the artist. And you might spend another half an Ethereum in gas because you're using a thousand Gue or fifteen hundred Gue. To get a transaction in because everybody's fighting for these mints. So.

• 58:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ethereum's gotta take its cut.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the option was like, do we want to figure out a way to get more money into the artists? Like, there's clearly a demand for this, right? Like, we're pricing it too low. Um, so they went to the Dutch auction model and I honestly, I haven't minted much at all since they changed it because I'm maybe too uh, cheap and used to the old model, but it's better for the artists and everything is minting out anyway, and it's good to see. And I think it raises the floor on all the old projects too, because you can't get in at the point one entry anymore. Like, it's not gonna happen. Uh, the Dutch auctions, they seem to mint out by like one eighth. I don't think I've seen one go under one eighth.

• 58:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's interesting that all of this is still happening on Ethereum in that you've got like, or the bulk of it's happening on Ethereum in that you have layer twos, which could make the minting process cheaper. But is there like, when it's minted on Ethereum and it costs a bit more, is there something special about that? Does that lend to the legitimacy of the piece?

• 59:16Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I think most collectors, when they're spending a thousands of dollars on a piece, like they want it on L1, like they want it not on a sidechain. Um, that's the mentality I've got from every big collector I've talked to. Like, I haven't seen anyone who is super excited about like minting an art block on Polygon or minting an art block on Flow or like what that looks like.

• 59:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  No one cares if it's on like Joe's sidechain, right? It's got like the most legitimacy as if it's on Ethereum. Um, so I'm curious about this. So there's a recent, I think this just happened, uh, yesterday. Yeah. So an art buyer started with a fourteen hundred dollar art block piece. I don't know if that's, um, the minting price, or maybe he purchased it, he or she, and sold it for three point three.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  Million dollars. This is, you call this a Fidenza, which is a, a style of art block, one of the most, I think, rare, maybe more, more costly pieces, these. I'm looking at it. Looks awesome. Looks super cool. Something you might see in like a modern art museum, like, you know, MoMA or something like that. Three point three million dollars, though. Why is this thing worth that much in comparison to all the other art block pieces?

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  So I can say that this was a second, the first purchase was a secondary sale. They bought it for point five eight Ethereum, I think, a few, like two months back or something.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  But I think that it's helpful when thinking about NFTs in general.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  That, like, think about the most valuable artwork that trades in the real world right now, or the most valuable trading cards and all that stuff. And think about how incredibly inefficient those markets are and how the amount of middlemen that are taking up a ton of time and money and effort. And like, to me, it just makes logical sense that all of the really high-end things that are going to happen in NFTs are just going to like be orders of magnitude larger than what's happening in, like, in like the current real, real world art markets, because it's just, it's 24/7, it's completely global. There's no barrier to entry, unless obviously you have to have the money to do it.

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  And so I think that all those things combined, it's creating this really intense, necessarily like land grab for the really high-end stuff. And so this piece is considered rare for a Fidenza, based on the, the color palette and some of the way that like the line work is done and stuff. I'm definitely not an expert on what exactly makes a Fidenza rare. These could probably say more than I can.

• 1:01:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I'd love to talk about it. This Fidenza in my mind was over, over buy. I, I don't know who bought it. I think they really just fucked with it. Like, I, I don't, there's nothing extraordinarily rare about this. It's, um. You know, you could look it up. There's a good website for anyone who wants more info on rarity on art blocks. It's called rarity dot guide. And on that site, you can, yeah, I'll just, you pull it up, we'll go through it. If you control F Fidenza, it's like, I think the 78th project, but there's a whole list of every art blocks project.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  Well, I got that right. So if you type 313 and search for it by ID, it'll show you this Frenza and it'll show you under the picture of the Frenza, the rarest traits it has and the floor for those traits.

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  I don't know why it's not loading for you. I'm looking at it on my screen right now. The rarest trait for it is the medium scale, which is just like the size of the strips are this medium size. But there's still 35 out of the 99 Frenzas have this. So it's not the most extremely rare thing and the floor for it you can see is what 499. So I think the person who bought it just really, really liked this aesthetic of how it looked. Like I, I was talking to Icebags about it. Like we're, you know, pretty into Frenzas and talking about what we think these, where these are going. And we saw this buy and we're like, what the hell? Like,

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  I, I couldn't really justify like why they spent a thousand ETH on it, being completely honest, outside of just like, they really like the aesthetic of it.

• 1:03:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  But that has to be important too, right? So it's not only sort of the, the rarity of it, but it's how these various rare features kind of pull together and create an aesthetic that an individual human mind values.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. And that's the thing too with art blocks, right? It's a art, not a science. So you can't just be like, oh, it's not that rare. Look at the stats. Somebody likes it and they like the composition of all those traits. They're going to pay whatever premium to get it in their wallet.

• 1:04:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know what's crazy about this is like with these smart contract art pieces, feels to me like the next Picasso could be a robot. Do you know what I mean? It's maybe not even a human being. Maybe it's just an algorithm that's going to produce our art. And that's, uh, that's weird for, you guys are probably already there, but that's weird for me to contemplate.

• 1:04:21David Hoffman?

  Well, this also fundamentally changes the relationship between like the human and the artist, right? So like to produce an art block, if the art block format, even maybe it's not the art block platform, but the generative art format, if that is the future of like digital art and specifically NFT-enabled digital art, like the artist has to be able to code, or there has to be a coder, maybe in tandem with an artist, but there's somebody who can code regardless, because you've got to get somebody who can understand the algorithm in order to like, you know, leverage that code to make a bunch of like, you know, randomly generated art. I think I want to add a little bit of color here with why art blocks, I think, was so successful. And we know in the

• 1:05:02David Hoffman?

  gaming world that like the loot box model is really, really enticing to players. And this kind of feels like that, right? Like you submit a transaction, your unique transaction with a specific transaction hash is what generates the randomness input into the art blocks randomly generated art, and then that produces a piece of art. And so like with, we all, humans love to gamble. We are gamblers who at heart. And like, having this sort of like randomness, like, hey, like you might, you might get, you might strike gold, or you might get nothing. Like, that is really, really enticing to people. And so this, and so like the randomness part of it with your own human input, where you're like, you actually might get something really, really rare back,

• 1:05:43David Hoffman?

  I think is really, really enticing as a kind of like turning this into a game. And humans also love games. And one of the ways I've tried to wrap my head around this is I was talking to a friend in Discord about like trying to wrap my head about why certain chromie squiggles were so incredibly valuable and others weren't, is that like there apparently some chromie squiggles are a perfect spectrum, as in the last color of the end of the spectrum is also the same color as the very first part of the spectrum. Then apparently there's a website based on like finding chromie squiggles that are perfect spectrums. And I'm reminded of like, I have some, some old friends from, from middle school and high school that are big, big baseball fans. But sometimes like,

• 1:06:26David Hoffman?

  when I listen to them talk about baseball, they're not talking about like what's going on in the field. They're talking about numbers and baseball to them is just like this sticky sticky ball hitty game, which is overlaid like this massive like like complex rabbit hole of numbers, right? Like what is this is this one particular baseball players like batting average when the infield is shifted right? Right? And like because there's such a richness in numbers and richness in like, you know, things to pay attention to that sort of like kickstarts this game of like mimetic desire and just like things to contemplate and discuss about. And so like to some degree, it doesn't even matter what the image is. If there's like a lot of cool things to talk about that that goes behind actually producing that image, then all of a sudden like humans really, really want it.

• 1:07:11David Hoffman?

  How do you guys feel about that like perspective?

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  I think I think it makes sense in so much as it's, it's a lot of fun to really get into the weeds and try to figure out what looks good. But I do also think to a certain extent like with our blocks that the aesthetics do matter. I mean, obviously it's but it's like, everyone has a personal preference, but I tend to agree with a lot of the kind of floor based rankings of our block security projects and how much they're worth.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  Like I think that Fidensos are really cool, probably the coolest looking art blocks. And they are, as of right now, the most valuable in like floor market cap. So it's probably like a bit of a combination of both. But I do think that the ability of people to like really dig into numbers and feel like they're they're finding an edge or something is super valuable.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  It was wild too. Like you mentioned the perfect spectrums. And we talked to Von Mises in a Twitter space last week, but he was one of the people who like when squiggles came out very early before perfect spectrum and full spectrum wasn't always a trait in squiggles. That's a fairly new addition to like the OpenSea rarity list. And Vaughn had known like back in December that these perfect spectrums were a thing and he was hunting them. And he was putting like small, but like slightly over the floor bids on perfect spectrums to like not trigger anybody into guessing like, why is he offering so much? And I think he bought like two of them like for like, you know, point one eight.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  And he just sold one recently for like 250 ETH. But it's like, he was out in the weeds with a spreadsheet of all the squiggles, knowing which one was a perfect spectrum way before like the overall community even know. So it's interesting where you can have this edge, like you said, where if you get really in the weeds and you're looking at this from a unique angle, if you can show that unique angle to the group of collectors and kind of make it a common knowledge thing, then the upside in that is insane.

• 1:09:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Eze, I'm curious, do people come to you guys, like you as an expert in this space and like, ask you to go help them? Go figure this out? Because what you've developed is like, uh, you know, a particular set of skills. Right? And, um, a lot of, I mean, it takes training to get to, to your level on this. So it, I mean, are people coming soliciting and be like, these just come, you know, buy the best NFTs, uh, for me and I'll give you a cut, something like that.

• 1:09:44Speaker 03

  Yes, I haven't taken any cuts. I probably should have, um, I, I mostly just give like free, not financial advice. Um, is what I call it. But yeah, I, I do get a lot of questions. I try to point people into buying what they like. Like I'll give them the link to the attribute list of punks. And I'll ask them like, what are your favorite traits? Like some people really like certain traits and some people don't. And it's like, I don't want to tell you what I think the best value is, because what the best value to my personal aesthetic is might not be yours. So it's like trying to get them to answer the question themselves and then helping them from there is kind of the way I look at it.

• 1:10:21David Hoffman?

  That's funny. That's how therapy works.

• 1:10:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. It also feels like-

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  Maybe I'm a therapist with the Twitter spaces-

• 1:10:28David Hoffman?

  NFT therapist, yeah.

• 1:10:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, I think there's an NFT therapist DAO that could be created based on this. Just like, I mean, a bunch of people like you guys who know this space and where others come and like, help us pick the NFT that we want to buy. But anyway, there's so much, so much innovation here.

• 1:10:47David Hoffman?

  Guys, there's a few more points of conversation that I want to get to just as we round out this conversation. And thank you guys so much for your time. Like we said at the beginning, this was a little bit of an impromptu state of the nation because, you know, the crypto markets move and point in different directions. We got to be ready for it. I want to just touch on one of ones because it's definitely a relevant conversation to be had. How is the one of one NFT game different from the other topics that we've been talking about with like the profile picture, NFTs or the generative art NFTs? If people are interested in dabbling in the one of one game, what should they know? And what should they be prepared for? How it's different from the previous conversations we've had?

• 1:11:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can you also explain what a one of one is for some of us?

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so when we say something like one of one art, we mean something an artist minted. It is a one of one. It's not a collection per se. It's just a unique piece from the artist's vision in one NFT. That's kind of how I look at it. But getting started with one of ones is a tough thing. It depends really on your capital and your goals. I think there's two types of one on one collectors I know. There are the people who are trying to do the land grab strategy on the very early stuff, whether that's X copy, Cody, Hackitout. You have me, I'm a, you know, killer acid whale. I love killer acid's work and like when I buy it, I don't even think I'll ever sell it.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  But if it becomes worth something later on, I'm happy to do it. But you have these older OG artists that people try to land grab. And then you have newer artists who might be big outside of NFTs or not. And they come in and they're either on super rare foundation. I don't buy anything on Nifty Gateway myself, but others do. And the newer artists, you're really just betting on like, in my mind, you're betting on the person. Like I buy art from like the people I like after talking to them. One thing about this space is you get a lot of access to all the creators. So in the one of one space in particular, like I really encourage people to reach out and talk to these creators. They're super nice. They're super into the community. Like, I don't think I've ever really had a bad.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  Discussion with like an artist in the space, or if I have, it was like very short-lived and like I forgot about it. But it's like, just bet, for me, when I buy NFTs, I'm buying it because I like it and I'm betting on the person. And that's how I approach all my one on ones. It's like, the piece is great, I'll display it in a virtual gallery or my house, and I love the person who created it.

• 1:13:18David Hoffman?

  Andy, you want to add anything to that?

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, I think that was pretty good. The one thing I was going to mention was that this, what Dee said about there being two different types of kind of one of one collectors, uh, which is very interesting to me, but there's, you know, I, I think probably the most prominent is X copy is kind of like the, the super OG one of one art creator. But yeah, I think what's kind of nice about it is it really can be as accessible as you, as you want it to be as far as price points and the stuff goes. There's tons of really great art that's being sold on Foundation and SuperRare that's less than an Ethereum and you can get in and find something cool. And you have a lot of agency at that point to help spread awareness of these people and try to make them, uh, you know, more famous if that's something you desire to do.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Or there's kind of these more like X copy as a one of one artist is not going anywhere. They're going to be a prominent crypto artist for as long as crypto art is popular, in my opinion. And then the question is really, how, how do those compete against stuff like art blocks and CryptoPunks? And was that, you know, in 10 years, what's more valuable, a rare CryptoPunk or a one of one X copy? And maybe as, you know, as time goes on and NFT art becomes the predominant way to collect art, or one of the predominant ways in more popular culture.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  Will people who feel more comfortable coming in and analyzing these different, uh, one of one pieces will be more comfortable spending eight figures on, on a piece of one of one art or nine figures? But right now it seems like people aren't quite ready for that, um, which kind of, it makes sense to me because it is so much harder to compare to other things. Uh, so, so it, to me, sometimes feels like a little bit riskier because you don't have quite the community around it where you can say with CryptoPunks, look, there's 3,000 people who all own these who are passionate about them. Uh, it's, it's a lot harder to do that with a, with one of one art.

• 1:15:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are Cernit creators who have these like thriving Discord communities too. Xcopy has a big one. Justin Aversano and his Twin Plains collection, that's a massive Discord. And if you can find those communities, like before they really take off, there is a lot of upside there and you can also go in those communities to talk to other collectors about other people's work and they're all like generally really helpful. So I would say like, you know, don't be afraid to get involved too and just jump in like, you don't need to buy something immediately. You can just go in the Discord, talk to the artists, talk to the community and see like, do I see this being here long term? Do I want to build with them?

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  I'm a big fan of giving up my Twitter Spaces platform to artists I like or like artists who are doing something unique that I think needs spotlight. It's on them. So that's kind of like what Andy said about helping build the community and help grow these artists. I take a really small bet on artists after talking to them and I'm like, hey, I want to like, put you on a stage and give up my platform. You can talk to 50 to 350 people, depending on how many people join and just kind of show the world like you're a person, you're a creator, you're just here vibing with the rest of us. And I, I think there's a lot of success behind that. Like I've seen a lot of artists come on a space, share their story for two to five hours and like, sell out everything they have listed because the people in the audience connect so much with them.

• 1:16:45David Hoffman?

  I mean, it would only make so much sense that since we are moving into a digital world and everything is kind of getting digitized, that so does individual artists. So like, you know, we got, we got painters and drawers and graphic designers in the, in the legacy world, putting things that go up on walls. And now that we have NFTs, we can have digital art of the same format of the same style, but now it's an NFT and the, the art actually exists on your computer. So to me, it's like a, a natural progression of the, the nature of art. I also want to ask about, on a completely different note, the, the role of on-chain NFTs because if you dive in down the rabbit hole of NFTs, you realize that like most of these images that these NFTs represent

• 1:17:27David Hoffman?

  aren't on Ethereum. They're on a database somewhere, a centralized database, which is kind of the thing that we're trying to destroy with Ethereum in the first place. And so what do you guys see as the role of on-chain NFTs? Cause there's not that many of them. There's like autoglyphs and then also recently CryptoPunks have had their images actually deployed to the Ethereum blockchain, meaning that CryptoPunks are now on-chain like totally trustless NFTs. And so what do you guys, what's your guys' takes on like on-chain NFTs? And how does this story kind of expand and progress into the future?

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this has been something that's like been a growing discussion point over the last couple of months, I think. Autoglyphs were kind of some of the first to do it. I don't feel confident. I don't think they were exactly the first. I do think there were some projects that had on-chain stuff prior. Actually, Moon Cats might have been one of the first ones, if I remember correctly. What's interesting about it is it's kind of very much so constantly evolving. And so one of the new things people are doing is storing SVG data on-chain so that it can be rendered off-chain, but all the data is on-chain. And, you know, there's some things where it just like really isn't feasible. If you have some crazy 800K, yeah, or yeah,

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  or music, well, there actually is music that's fully on-chain. Oiler Beats has that, and I think some others as well. I think Unigrid's, which is one of the Art Blocks projects, because Art Blocks are all, well, so Art Blocks are interesting because the code to generate them is on-chain. So as long as you know the data that was given to generate it, you can always recreate the piece. So the art itself isn't explicitly on-chain, but it's reproducible based on the on-chain data.

• 1:19:12Speaker 02

  But when you have some crazy artwork or something that might just be too costly or not really make sense to be on-chain, I don't really fault them for using IPFS or whatever else. I've seen a lot of people using Arweave to back that up even more so. I think it's really cool. I know Manifold, who's like a big company working with artists and creators to get their own smart contracts for NFTs. They've made a lot of headway in that space and they've done a really great job and they've been kind of visionaries in some of the SVG stuff that they've been doing. I really liked what they did with like the Sacramento Kings, actually, the basketball team where they... The artwork is all on-chain in an SVG and it updates automatically based on who the owner is and some other information that they can go in and

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  update or change, which is really, really cool. And so I think we'll, we'll continue to see people push the boundaries of what we can do with on-chain artwork where it looks different based on who holds it, or it looks different based on how long you've hold it and all these different types of things, which I think is awesome. And I'll be really excited to see.

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  I would say, piggybacking off what Andy said, um, this is probably my weakest point, or like my biggest knowledge gap in the NFT space is like, I'm not super in the weeds with like IPFS, are we, how things are stored. Um, I know, you know, autoglyphs are significant for their historical being the first. I, I thought they were the first 100% on-chain project, but, um, yeah, I, I am like, I don't really, uh, I, I should think about this more than I do. Let me put it that way.

• 1:20:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's funny. I, I think I just heard Peter from the Geth team, his head has exploded with like the fact that we're storing NFTs. Like a state expansion perspective of Ethereum, but I mean, at the end of the day, this is, um, this is block space that the market pays for. As, as we start to close out, guys, I'm, I'm curious, like getting into, we've covered so much and I feel like I have a, a better perspective on how to dive into the NFT space after this conversation. But, um, give us kind of the, the quick highlights. Say somebody DMs you and is like, yo, gotta check out this new NFT project, right? Uh, it's fresh. You've never heard of it.

• 1:21:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  How would you evaluate it? Like what tools would you use? What are the first things that you check to vet this thing out? Feel free to drop any tools and, and resources to us, uh, as, uh, as you, as you talk through and answer. So Andy, your take first. Yo, I got this NFT project. It's dope. You gotta check it out. How are you checking it out?

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, honestly, I don't really use. I guess it depends if the if the project is already live and like out there and there's just availability bought on OpenSea. I'll go and look there. I'll look at the smart contract code on EtherScan. Is it their own custom smart contract? Is it just the OpenSea storefront contract? I think you can kind of tell a lot based on that. Is it some just other contract that they copy and pasted? How are they storing the data? And then

• 1:22:21David Hoffman?

  Is it is it more interesting to you if it's their own unique contract rather than somebody that they borrowed from?

• 1:22:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, then then it just to me, I think it's really, really hard to know if you if time kind of feels of the essence. You're like, I want to make sure I get this thing because there's a chance it blows up.

• 1:22:38Speaker 02

  It's one of the easiest ways to see how much effort they've put in person, like in my opinion, is did they clearly write their own code? And, you know, do they actively tweet from their Twitter account? And is there Discord? Are there a lot of people having conversations in there? That to me is all really valuable, just to kind of see, are they putting in effort? Was this something that they couldn't have done in one night? They had to have spent a little more time to garner some community and some excitement and the technical chops to do this. And they have their own website. It's not just like some random thing. That that's the kind of stuff I mostly look for more so. And then, like, as I said, I really, at this point, only buy stuff that I think looks interesting. There I've seen stuff where I think, yeah, it's probably going to go up, but I don't really, you know, I'd rather place bets on things I feel more confident about because then in times where

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  things aren't doing so well, I'm not just going to have paper hands and sell it.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  And yeah, so that's that's generally how I go about doing it. It's mostly kind of as you were saying earlier, just more based on like the the vibes and the comedic power of it than anything else.

• 1:23:39David Hoffman?

  These

• 1:23:40Speaker 03

  A couple of things.

• 1:23:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, tell us, how do you evaluate these vibes?

• 1:23:45Speaker 03

  So there's like two scenarios, right? Someone sends you it before it's minted and after it's minted. Um, before it's minted, like Andy said, you don't really have much to go off of. You go into Discord, you look at their Twitter. For me, I follow like 2,400 people and it's kind of a red flag if like only one or two of them are following a new project because in my mind, like even when I see something early before it mints, like for example, I don't know if it's pronounced owny or on one force, but they're these like anime gorillas type vibe uh NFTs that came out. I went and looked at them and I thought to myself like, I don't personally like these, but I see that they're gonna do well.

• 1:24:27Speaker 03

  And I had like over a hundred mutual followers on their account before they launched. And I was like, oh, this is probably like a good project, but I didn't mint them because I didn't like them. And you know, now they're floor 70s. So there's a lesson there where like I could have just followed the herd and saw that, hey, I have all these mutual followers. Like this is probably gonna be a good move. But for me, I don't, I should look at the contract stuff more like Andy's spot on with like, did they take the time to write their own contract? Like they're gonna, most of these projects are pulling in over a million dollars from mint fees. Like if they couldn't take the time to write their own contract for that, that's a pretty big red flag. Um, and then the other scenario is after something comes out, right?

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  I'm a big fan of like going to rarity dot tools, looking at all the attributes in a cleaner list than OpenSea. And then kind of forming like my own ideas around what traits I like. I'm not the guy who comes in and like sweeps the floor, but if I really like the project and I'm looking after, after it minted on rarity tools, I'm looking at like, you know, what are the crowns? What are the 3D glasses? I, I always buy 3D glasses, hoodies and pipes. Like you could make any generative project. And if you have a hoodie 3D pipe, I'm like buying those up because in my mind, it's like, oh, that's on brand and I need this.

• 1:25:45David Hoffman?

  And that's just like sticking power because CryptoPunks like that's, those were kind of the first attributes that ever got some sort of premium to them. And you're just saying like, well, if CryptoPunk premiums had those, well, then other NFT projects will have those too.

• 1:25:58Speaker 03

  Um, I don't even look at it like that more so than like, I just wanna have my same vibe or aesthetic across every project. So like,

• 1:26:06David Hoffman?

  Oh, that's funny. I'm always looking for hats. I'm always looking for baseball caps.

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  I, I went into Wicked Craniums and you know, they didn't have a lot of overlap with um punk attributes, but they did have 3D glasses and they have a skin color that's psychedelic. And like to me, most of my one-on-one collection outside of the photography and most of what I like is this like trippy psychedelic, like killer acid vibe. So I was like, okay, well, I can't get hoodies or pipes here, but like, I'm stocking up on these psychedelic skins because that's my vibe. Or like, I went into Cool Cats and I got a hoodie with like a rainbow unicorn hat, cuz he looked ridiculous. It was like, he's wearing a hoodie and he's trippy with his little rainbow unicorn hat and it fits my vibe. So like, that's kinda how I buy the different projects, even if they don't have overlapping traits.

• 1:26:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is super cool. Guys, um, maybe one last question for you. Um, how, but put on your speculators hat. How much longer do you think this NFT mania that we're in will continue? And like, what happens next? Dee's, your take first.

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  I am, I don't know. I, I thought um back, so my whole thesis with this has been revolving around like, what happened with the Dog memes back in the spring? And how I didn't make a single dollar on any single Dog related shitcoin? And I thought to myself the whole time, like, this is gonna collapse. Like Dog is seven cents. Like, there's no way this goes to 25 cents. Like, this is done. And I learned a valuable lesson. It's like, you know, the market can stay irrational much longer than you think and it's better to just like ride the wave and manage your risk on the way up. I don't know when this will end. Like, my gut tells me it can't go on for another month, but like, that's just probably not true. Like, if it ends a floor, if you tell me it's 500 in a month, like, I'm not even gonna be shocked, even though like,

• 1:28:01Speaker 03

  It was two ETH when I was buying them a month or two ago. Um, and I think the way it looks is like people will not ape into all the new avatar projects. Like you're going to have a bunch of stuff that comes out. People don't mint it. It sits there um, and that risk capital dries out because they can't get liquidity on their old projects that they minted to mint the new stuff. Um, I think that's kind of how it spirals out where like, you know, there's just no liquidity to get out of the shit they have and they can't ape into new shit. And there's not new people coming in with new capital to ape the new shit.

• 1:28:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Andy, what's your take? We got a month? We have more? What do you think?

• 1:28:41Speaker 02

  You know, I, I don't know as far as timelines go. I, I have personally had conversations with a lot of people who have a lot of money, who are still trying to figure out what they do with that about NFTs. Uh, and how they appropriately allocate into those and what that looks like. We've seen a lot of venture capital money flowing into NFTs, a lot of um, hedge fund money flowing into NFTs. And so I, I don't know what their timelines are and what those, what that looks like. But I, like, I just don't think those people are going to be buying the top. Or maybe they'll be buying the top of the cycle, but not the top of the next few cycles. Um, I think they're too smart. And so maybe they're all ready to buy and or they already have.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  Maybe they're buying next week and that's going to be the end of this hype cycle. Um, but I think that if you have like a time horizon that's longer than a year or two, you'll probably be okay.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  Cause I, there's just too many smart people who are buying things right now who that are, that literally have no intention of selling. Like they, that's just not a part of this for them.

• 1:29:47Speaker 02

  And so I think that we'll probably just totally guessing have a few more months of, of real craziness. And like, things will get really, really insane. I wouldn't be shocked if we saw some floors that really made people's jaws drop. Um, but then I, I think where the, the real, where, way that this bears fruit is in a couple of years, when you look back and think about the ridiculous prices that you got, because now every NFL player has a CryptoPunk or wants one and they can't, they can't all get them because there just aren't enough. And like, that's kind of the real end game.

• 1:30:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not a lot of football players out there.

• 1:30:22Speaker 02

  Hedge funds. Yeah.

• 1:30:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  With a lot of money, what's crazy to me is this feels like NFTs feel like a super weapon for propagating crypto culture to the masses. It just has all of the ingredients. It checks all of the boxes from a Mimetic desire perspective. And the unique thing I think about NFTs is all denominated in ETH, right? This is ETH as money, used as a store of value, unit of account and medium of exchange in the NFT economy. Andy Dees, thank you so much for guiding us through NFTs. I've learned so much. We appreciate you coming on.

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. This is fun.

• 1:31:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you. It's a good way to break up the day. And like, I just love talking about NFTs in general. So anytime you guys want to talk NFTs, hit me up.

• 1:31:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Dees, when's your next Twitter Spaces NFT? Do you have the one on the menu at all?

• 1:31:17Speaker 03

  I mean, I'll probably host on it like the pool while I'm drinking with ice bags tonight at some point. Like, we literally had one going. We're on his back porch. I have my phone open. I have one AirPod in, super quiet. And I'm just like giving two people co-host and letting it run for like six hours. And then like, if I hear my name coming through the AirPod, I like jack the volume up. I'm like, yo, guys, what's up? And then like hop in. It's like, it's a really laid back vibe. I'm sure I'll have one open today.

• 1:31:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Could we, could you guys drop your Twitter handle so folks can follow you and get tuned into that? So Dees, what's your Twitter?

• 1:31:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, my Twitter is @DeesFi. It's like a play on DeFi I made last year. The address is D E E Z E F I.

• 1:32:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about you, Andy?

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  I am Andy8052 everywhere. So at Andy8052.

• 1:32:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Follow these guys for more information on NFTs and to get plugged into that scene. I took a few notes here for action items for you, kind of the 101 tips. I hope this might be useful for you. But one thing we talked about was hunting for NFTs in groups using Twitter, Discord. That's tip number one. Don't go alone. Take a friend.

• 1:32:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Don't go alone. Number two. Buy in pairs, one for you, one to sell. I have a feeling these guys buy in more than twos. So maybe scale that up to five or tens, depending on your risk appetite. Look at tastemakers, so view their wallets and check out what they are buying. Maybe become a tastemaker. That's kind of the 401 level, of course. Also, search for legitimacy, history, lineage, credibility. What chain you purchased it on matters. And finally, we talked a lot about buying what you like. You have to be okay if you are stuck with the NFT that you bought for the long run. Those are fantastic tips for you as we close this out in summary. Of course, guys, risks and disclaimers.

• 1:33:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ethos risky, NFTs are risky. We might be in a mania. We have no idea where that is headed or for how long. All of this stuff is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not forever.