NFT Marketplace Wars | Panel

With OpenSea hinting at a potential IPO in the future and LooksRare swooping in with a vampire sneak attack, it's clear that the war for top NFT Marketplace is starting to heat up. Who will come out on top? Here to discuss this 4D chess match are some of the space's most influential thought leaders and returning guests: Eric Conner, Co-founder @ethhub_io, DC Investor, advisor and investor, Zeneca_33, investor and content creator, & Carly Reilly, host of Overpriced JPEGs. ------ 📣 ALTO IRA | THE CRYPTO RETIREMENT ACCOUNT https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 👀 POLYGON | LAYER 2 DEFI https://bankless.cc/Polygon ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🦊 METAMASK | THE CRYPTO WALLET https://bankless.cc/metamask 💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics: 0:00 - Intro 8:51 - Why humans trade JPEGs 13:31 - Non-OpenSea marketplace standouts 19:15 - What’s working/needs to be improved 26:26 - Social integration & plug-ins 31:26 - Fraud/spam prevention 38:06 - Socialization/financialization of everything 42:55 - NFTs on L2s & L1’s future 49:49 - Bullish NFT alpha 55:07 - The NFT x ETH correlation? 59:08 - Short-term vs. Long-term pumps…crash? ------ Resources: Eric Conner's Twitter: https://twitter.com/econoar DC Investor's Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor Zeneca_33's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Zeneca_33 Carly Reilly's Twitter: https://twitter.com/carlypreilly ----- 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.

• 0:07David Hoffman?

  Welcome Bankless Nation to this week's panel. This is a special panel because we have our friend, friend of the podcast, Carly Reilly, joining us to replace Ryan Sean Adams. Ryan is, it's past Ryan's bedtime. So we're bringing Carly from the Overpriced JPEGs podcast to help co-host this NFT marketplace panel. And that's what we're talking about today. NFT marketplaces, what's good about them? What's lacking in them? What's, what do we want to see in innovation with NFT marketplaces? Carly, welcome back to the Bankless RSS feed and to the Bankless YouTube. How's it going?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Thank you. It is going well. This is part of my long con to replace Ryan permanently as co-founder and CEO of Bankless. I'm pumped to be here. I, Overpriced JPEGs is having a lot of fun over on RSS feed, but it's always nice to collab with you and hang out with the broader crew.

• 1:01David Hoffman?

  I have thoroughly been enjoying Overpriced JPEGs and all of the content that you guys have been putting out over there. And we also have one of your reoccurring co-hosts, co-moderators, guests.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Host of the Moment of Zeneca segment on Overpriced JPEGs, to give a hint as to who we're talking about.

• 1:19David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. We're going to get into who we have on for this show a little bit later. But first, we have to talk about our friends over at Alto IRA, because Alto IRA is how you get away from the shackles of paying Uncle Sam more than you need to when it comes time to sell your crypto assets, if you ever have to ever sell your crypto assets. If you are like me and you don't like paying taxes or don't even like doing anything related to that, you can just sign up for Alto IRA, which is just the easy mode for your crypto taxes. It's the easy button for crypto. All of the assets that are on Coinbase are available inside of your Alto IRA Tax Advantage Retirement Fund.

• 2:00David Hoffman?

  So you can roll your crypto assets into a tax advantage crypto IRA with Alto IRA. There's only $10 minimums and there's a bunch of. Options and features that you can unlock in there to make your crypto taxes extremely easy. So you can go over to altoira.com slash bankless and get your crypto in a tax optimized fashion. So you don't, you have to sell the minimum amount, which is what we like, we like to do. Carly, let's talk about who is on our panel and also what we are going to talk about. Clocking in to this panel, we have returning guests Eric Conner and DC Investor. I think people will be familiar with these two. We've had Eric Conner on the Bull Case for Ethereum

• 2:43David Hoffman?

  podcast as well as DC Investor. We've had DC Investor on. I think this will be his sixth time on the show. So friends of the podcast. And also, we're bringing somebody over from the overpriced JPEG ecosystem. You want to tease who that is Carly?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  I would love to. Roy Basin, we've talked about this, how we pronounce his last name. Roy Basin, also better known as Zeneca33. I talk about Zeneca all the time. He's a fountain of wisdom in the NFT space, amazing collector, thinker. He has a Substack. He has a podcast called Two Board Apes. And most importantly, he is a recurring guest on overpriced JPEGs to give us all sorts of NFT updates, macro market updates. Really excited to have him here because I love talking to him. And he's also a tremendous person.

• 3:26David Hoffman?

  And Carly, of course, we're talking about NFT marketplaces and overall, the NFT industry in this present moment, which seems to be going through a little bit of a conversation phase shift, I would say, especially with the introduction of the Looks Rare NFT marketplaces. People are starting to open up their horizons as to what an NFT marketplace could do and look like. Carly, what are you excited about to hear on the show this today?

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think we are in a little bit of a transition phase. And Zenica and I have actually talked about this before, that it's great to see other platforms like a Looks Rare putting more pressure on OpenSea. More competition just means better results for us, hopefully as users. But I like, I could hear these three panelists talk about pretty much anything. And I'm really excited to get their thoughts on sort of the current landscape and where we're going from here, right? Like, how will social be incorporated in all this? We're seeing Twitter start to incorporate Web3 and NFTs. But how will these Web3 marketplaces incorporate social elements? Or all these things that I think carry a lot of promise. Excited to get folks' take on where we're going with all that.

• 4:29David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. So let's go ahead and get right into that conversation because I want to talk about that just as much as you do. But first, before we get there, we have to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Polygon is Ethereum’s largest and most vibrant scaling solution to date. With millions of monthly users and all of the biggest DeFi apps, the Polygon ecosystem has turned into a blossoming metropolis of DeFi activity. Transactions on Polygon are quick and cheap, allowing users the freedom to achieve their DeFi goals, all while being economically anchored to Ethereum. But Polygon isn’t just the proof-of-stake sidechain. The Polygon team is building a suite of scaling solutions, including Polygon Hermes, Midan, Nightfall, and Zero, all with different design choices in order to be optimized for all possible crypto use cases.

• 5:11David Hoffman?

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• 5:54David Hoffman?

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• 6:38David Hoffman?

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• 7:02David Hoffman?

  All right, and we are back to kickstart our NFT marketplace panel, which I'm really excited for. I know that the guys from OpenSea, from Foundation, from Zora, from SuperRare, from LooksRare, shout out to all you guys. I hope you guys are listening to this because this one is for you. We want to unpack what does, what do the NFT connoisseurs of the world want to see in their ideal NFT marketplace? And what are they overall looking at in the world of NFTs? Once again, clocking in in the bottom left corner, we got DC Investor. He's been on the show for his sixth time this time, an NFT connoisseur with one of the my favorite NFT portfolios. You can check it out on his Twitter. It's linked there. He's a long-term thinker, which is why we

• 7:45David Hoffman?

  love him as a guest on Bankless. DC, welcome back to the show.

• 7:50David Hoffman?

  You're also muted, by the way.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Sorry, guys. Hey, thanks for having me on, David. Really excited to be here with you and Carly and the rest of the crew here today.

• 7:58David Hoffman?

  Next up, another recurring guest. We got Eric Conner, who is an Ethereum OG. He's participated in just about every single type of market that Ethereum has ever produced, and NFTs is no exception. Eric, welcome back to the show.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks, David. It's true. I do like to trade illegal JPEGs, so pumped to talk about NFTs.

• 8:17David Hoffman?

  And then Carly, do you want to introduce guest number three?

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I said it earlier. I will say it again. One of my favorite thinkers in the NFT space. He has an awesome podcast, an awesome Substack. He also launched his own collection recently, Zen Academy. Going to plug that for you, Zenica. Also a proud Zen Academy holder here, and a recurring co-host, segment host on Overpriced JPEGs, our other Bankless podcast that I host, and just a great thinker in the space overall.

• 8:44David Hoffman?

  Well, guys.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  Excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 8:46David Hoffman?

  Sorry. Trigger happy. Let's go ahead and get right into it with our very first question, which is going to be the million-dollar question, just to get us oriented. I want to throw this one at Eric first. Eric, why do humans trade JPEGs in the first place? And what should NFT platforms be optimized for in order to really just facilitate that behavior?

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I first would say, I know, David, you and I have had this conversation offline many times, but humans, given the ability to speculate on anything, will do it. And like, the one thing we've realized over time with Ethereum is it allows anybody to speculate on anything. And anybody can spin up a market for absolutely anything. And, you know, there was a tweet today from like Elon Musk and McDonald's. And they mentioned McDonald's tweeted some random token and someone instantly launched a token and it went up like 10,000%. So that's just like what Ethereum enables, right? So you bring in like the history of art and obviously art has forever been an investment for people, a collection for people. You bring that on chain, you make it accessible. And most importantly, you give like instant price discovery and liquidity to art, which in the traditional art world is very hard to come by.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  People are going to be interested in that, right? Now, like, what, what should ultimately these marketplaces strive for? I think we're in that discovery phase. I mean, I'm sure it's going to be a big topic here going forward in this conversation. But clearly, I think giving some type of revenue back to people that help build your platform, whether it's token holders or whatnot, and not just taking all the fees and royalties to yourself and building a true community, right? Like, we've seen that with Looks Rare over the last few weeks. People have kind of poked at OpenSea in the past for that. So I think that's going to be the battle going forward. But yeah, I mean, humans just love to speculate. I mean, we speculate on literally on rocks, right? So why not speculate on JPEGs on the blockchain?

• 10:39David Hoffman?

  DC, I want to throw that same question to you. Why do humans trade JPEGs? And what about our platforms that we trade our JPEGs on really need to build around in order to facilitate this?

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Well, I think that, you know, just echo the points that Eric made, but I would also add that I think people are, you know, the idea of digital scarcity is still relatively new for a lot of people. And so for a lot of people entering the crypto space, NFTs are actually becoming some of their first exposure. And they're excited about the ability to kind of own these unique digital assets because it's so foreign to everything, their entire experience with computers prior to this point.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  So I think there is some of that novelty, but I think a lot of it is very primal and it's just kind of within our DNA and our nature as Eric mentioned. As far as what marketplaces should be optimizing for, I really think that there's an opportunity for marketplaces, which really serve the collections that they're offering up to the buyers of them. And I think right now we have very much kind of like a one size fits all to how we're approaching marketplaces. But the way that you're selling an in-game item is perhaps not the same way that you should be selling like a fine art JPEG or NFT. And I think there's a lot of opportunity there for a new entrance to come in and and and play that kind of role.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  So Zenica, I'll call you out here and say, I know you helped to advise Looks Rare before their launch. You know, as

• 12:06Speaker 04

  I didn't advise them. I was, I got in on the strategic strategic round to invest.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Okay, got it. And you were excited about the idea of a new platform. So as we're thinking about a new platform and a big competitor to OpenSea, like what were you hoping that this platform optimized for and and did? I mean, same question, but you're you're kind of deep in this.

• 12:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. So in largely what Eric said as well, rewarding the users of the platform, I think, is is huge. And it's sort of a gripe that people have had with OpenSea for a while, again, them taking all the fees. And on top of that, you know, there were all sorts of issues that probably still are with OpenSea that people aren't loving, like usability and like the lack of customer support. Obviously, whether there should be excellent customers customer support or not is, you know, when you get fully decentralized, maybe that's not a thing, but we'll have that true with OpenSea. And so Looks Rare comes along and says, hey, we're going to build from the ground up and have a token that we edge up to everyone who uses OpenSea and who uses the platform going forward so they can, you know,

• 13:05Speaker 04

  partake in the the revenue. And yeah, it seems like that they've got the customer service so far, but you know, clearly it's very difficult to build a marketplace. Otherwise, we would have seen 100 competitors to OpenSea before now. And even Looks Rare, it's like, you know, I'm I've invested in it. It's not the best platform. It has things that they need to improve upon. But, you know, if they continue to do that, I can see them continuing to claw market share away from OpenSea.

• 13:32David Hoffman?

  Well, I think like everyone here from just personal experience, I've used the Looks Rare platform because I've also used OpenSea. I think everyone has used OpenSea, all the viewers, that's kind of even, you know, the external world, OpenSea is at this point synonymous with the NFT industry. So in addition to OpenSea, and perhaps in addition to Looks Rare 2, what non-OpenSea NFT platforms, marketplaces have you guys used? And what really stands out about them? Eric, do you have a non-OpenSea platform that you enjoy? And why do you enjoy it?

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say first that comes to mind is probably Foundation, but you could also put like SuperRare and Zora in there, right? And like, to me, where those differ is they're kind of more focusing on like the one of ones, which I still personally think is going to be a next big wave in NFTs, right? Everyone's focused on the 10K profile pictures and these collections, even art blocks, right? Like 1,000 generated per collection. There's definitely going to be a wave of one of ones where, you know, that is for people that don't know, an artist creates literally just one piece, like a traditional artist, like say like Van Gogh, right? And then you just collect that and that artist becomes popular and then those pieces go up. We're really seeing that with Xcopy. Xcopy does some collections, but he has a lot of one of ones that are now

• 14:51Speaker 03

  selling for millions of dollars. And I think we're going to see that wave and those other platforms. I'll take Foundation. I just really appreciate Foundation's UI, but the user experience, those apps are kind of going for more of that, right? So it's not like these, you know, there's, there's a lot of competitors now, but they're really not necessarily even going after the same space. I think we're seeing a little bit of a divide between, you know, the one of ones and the collections. And I'm sure like Looks Rare and OpenSea, of course, you can like trade them on there, but it's kind of weird. They show up as like, um, Foundation tokens, like not really the artists and stuff. Um, so I think we're going to see this wave coming through as well. Um, and you know, those platforms are going to be big in their own right, as people

• 15:32Speaker 03

  kind of start discovering this more unique art. Now, what's interesting, right, is like a lot of the power around some of these collections is the communities they build. Some of these, you know, communities, you know, like if you go on like the Doodles Discord, right? I think there's like 30,000 people in there. Um, if you go into like your one of one artist, there's probably only like 100, 200 people in some of them because not many people have them because they didn't make a lot. So that's where it gets interesting, right? Because community kind of is everything in crypto.

• 15:58David Hoffman?

  DC, I want to ask that same question to you. What non-open C platforms do you enjoy the most? Why do you enjoy them? But if you could also build on what Eric said, if you want, about how different marketplaces are finding specialization in different types of sectors of the NFT world? Anything you want to add to all of these things?

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the marketplaces that I've used outside of OpenSea have that kind of specialization. So I think like SuperRare, for example, offers a really nice curated experience. And a lot of it is one of ones, but they also have that curation of the artists that are exhibited there and they offer that secondary market for their own pieces. And I think that's a really interesting utility that I expect to see more from projects moving forward. I think also just the CryptoPunks marketplace is actually a really good example of a market, the original, one of the original NFT marketplaces. No fees. I think that the CryptoPunks pioneered a lot of really interesting mechanics, even pre-GDC 721 standard, that I think that's going to come back around.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  And I think like Genie XYZ is also a really interesting one because they offer this aggregator service. And for those of your listeners who might not be familiar with Genie, Genie is one of a few aggregator apps that are come to the fore. And the way that they work is they basically index listings across all these different marketplaces and they serve them up to you. And you can then buy the ones that you want. You can look for the lowest price. You can also list through them. I think there's a lot of opportunity for that. And I think actually aggregator, and I know we'll probably talk about this a little bit later, but are going to help kind of flip the script a little bit because I think a lot of times we're thinking in like this web two mindset of we all need to go to one marketplace and everything needs to be there.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  But the properties of web three actually allow us to be decentralized in the marketplaces that we choose to list and buy things from. And I think aggregators are going to help us achieve that vision.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  I want to ask Zenica in a minute, I want to ask you more about where you see this all going, what features you think you'd like to see more of in these NFT marketplaces? And you know, maybe what what features you'd like to see fixed? But I want to give you an opportunity to talk about their marketplaces that you're potentially interested as well, interested in as well. And also on this question of of sort of specialization, do you think we see it a little bit in the art market? Do you think that'll be the case for gaming? And for, you know, all these different industries that this is disrupting ticketing? These will all be sort of separate places that you'll you'll go to.

• 18:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I definitely think that's where we're heading. I mean, my answer to the other marketplaces I've used in like a pretty much the same foundation, super rare. I think that as time goes on, we are going to see more niche marketplaces pop up. So sort of like what DC was saying before, you'll have a marketplace for gaming assets. Because if you if you're buying a gaming asset, it would be nice to see what it looks like in a 3D world. You know, around, maybe you can try it out, try it on a skin, try it on your avatar. And art, you obviously want, you know, looking at art and OpenSea isn't just the best viewer experience. We're going to see more and more niche marketplaces pop up. And then aggregators will be where a lot of people do their shopping, you know?

• 19:14Speaker 01

  So to use like a still like, what do you feel like is is working right now in our system? And what are the big areas that we want to see improved? The big features that you want to see starting to incorporate into these marketplaces?

• 19:27Speaker 04

  Um, I think Looks Rare introduced a good thing with like the bid on collection and bid on traits aspect. I like that. I think what I personally use a lot is just like the the stats page of say OpenSea, where you can see like where the recent activity has been over the last 24 hours, after the last seven days. You get a good feel for like what's trending, what the market is liking. Something that I don't think exists yet, and I think should and will and may be controversial, but is like targeted ads, like they know what's in our wallet. They can find out what's in our wallets. You know, why isn't everyone's homepage when they go to OpenSea a bit more targeted towards, you know, this person only ever buys photography NFTs? Why are we showing them 10k?

• 20:11Speaker 01

  A curated feed. It could be ads or it's also just a curated feed.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah. It would make for a better user experience, I think, and allow the users to discover things that they're more interested in that they may not have otherwise. At least give us that option, I think.

• 20:26David Hoffman?

  Eric, I know you're a big fan of just analytics and metrics and insights. What would you like to see as a feature for built into some of these NFT platforms with regards to analytics? Is that a big untapped part of this NFT industry? Is the combination of an NFT marketplace with NFT analytics?

• 20:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, it absolutely is. I mean, like, for example, I woke up this morning and there had been like 40 CryptoPunk sales. And like you have to like go to CryptoPunk's website and just kind of like do it yourself. Like, oh, there's like 40 punks sold from like 65 to 80, like who's buying them? Like, I don't really know of any, like, there's some like Dune dashboards out there and stuff. But like analytics is not tapped into at all, especially like, like immediately notifying you analytics, right? Meaning like, oh, this guy just swept five board apes and this is a heavy hitter, right? Like, should I go over here? Everyone's got their like Twitter bots that they're subscribed to for notifications. But NFT analytics are definitely lacking, especially around like who's buying. You know, we always see this with ETH, right? Like, oh, a whale just bought a bunch of ETH.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  Or, you know, today we saw exchange inflows, like we don't really have that. I mean, there's some stuff out there, but it could definitely get better, right? And just in general, the viewing on these sites and kind of like the market inefficiencies of like bidding and counter offering? And like who's bidding on your stuff? Are they like lowballing everybody or are they an actual serious bidder? Like, what do they own? Like, it's very tedious if you want to go have an NFT day. Meaning like you want to go like pick some stuff out or list some of your stuff and try it, you know, get some liquidity to buy other stuff. Like, it takes hours and hours. And like, to me, that's still the benefit of being in a token versus NFTs is like the efficiencies, right? On a token, you've got all these analytics, you can get out quick, you can get in quick.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  And this is going to be solved through things like, say, NFTX. And I know there's a bunch of stuff launching around like, you know, collateralizing NFTs and all this. So we're going to get more efficient markets. But yeah, it doesn't, the analytics goes along with this because it doesn't quite feel like an efficient market yet. But especially with the fragmentation of liquidity amongst sites and all that stuff. But we'll get there.

• 22:34David Hoffman?

  DC, I want to turn the same question to you. What about the NFT marketplace is working? Or perhaps what is really broken and really frustrating you when you go and do your NFT stuff?

• 22:45Speaker 02

  So I think, I mean, you know, in, in, and a lot of us will point to OpenSea and be critical of it. But I do think that they have done a tremendous job in terms of providing a marketplace, which has allowed this economy to scale to the point that it has. And I think that's been incredible. However, I think, you know, riffing off of the point that I made earlier, the idea that we'll all just use one marketplace forever and not really anything else probably is not tenable. It isn't really compatible with a web three decentralization point of view. So I actually think, you know, if I'm going to articulate what I think the future of NFT marketplaces looks like, I think we're going to eventually see every project basically have their own marketplace.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  That is designed and tailored around maybe like a custom UI or some standard UI elements that can be recycled across projects. But is designed to promote discoverability and, and quality display of their projects assets. And you're going to have aggregators, which are basically aggregating the activity. And I think even OpenSea will basically become an aggregator as well, because then it becomes who can provide the best experience to the customer in terms of the discovery process. And I think that discovery process is actually something that's really important and it is lacking in a lot of ways. Because if you want to go like discover all of the work that X copy or Dimitri Sherniak has done right now, it is like extremely, extremely difficult to do that.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  You've got to kind of look at their link tree in their Twitter profile and you've got to like piece it together. And then you're not even finding all of the pieces. And, and there were actually a lot of really easy opportunities for people to come in and buy up some of these pieces cheaper from big name artists, because there was such an inefficiency in just finding these. Right now, you know, and the stuff that does get listed on OpenSea, going back to that, like I said, it kind of is a one size fits all model. It's more like going to like a Walmart or to eBay rather than to an art gallery or an auction house. You know, I mean, and look at the success of like the big auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's. They have been creating these pretty, I mean, they haven't been tremendous. There've been a lot of criticism, but they have done a good job at creating these experiences around when they sell things.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  And that brings in more high end buyers and people are excited to buy. Another thing that I think is not working or is going to be an issue is fees to do these kinds of trades are still too high. And a lot of that does come down to Ethereum gas fees. So I think actually, within probably a year or two, a lot of trading is going to be on Ethereum layer twos from assets that are initialized on layer twos or assets that get brought over there from layer ones. So those are a few of the things that I think are not working today, but there are solutions in the pipeline.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Do you think we'll get to the point where there are, you know, regular sort of IRL minting experiences? I think about Crypto Citizens, if anybody's tracked that project, they bring you to their site, to their gallery in whatever city and have you mint in person. When I hear you talking about sort of what Christie's and Sotheby's are able to do, do you think we'll see more of that down the line where where there actually is this sort of physical component to minting NFTs more so than we have today?

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Totally. I think that we're kind of in the early stages of bridging actually this digital world into the physical one. But the the groups that have done that have been very successful. I mean, like with the Board Apes, they've now created real world utility for their NFTs and for the people who hold them as kind of membership cards and passes into their parties and things like that. I think also like Art Blocks establishing their house in Marfa as like a location and a place where people who are passionate about generative art go and make a pilgrimage. So I to go visit there. But I think that there there are a ton of opportunities for mixing these digital and real world experiences that we barely tapped into.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  I'm curious broadly on on y'all's thoughts to how how social media, and I don't mean that as in necessarily our existing social media platforms, right? But how social sort of signaling, etc., plays into all this. Zeneca, I'm curious, you talked about these curated feeds. Do you see these platforms ultimately becoming their own sort of social media platforms or some of them? How do you think the kind of social part of this gets integrated in the long term?

• 26:55David Hoffman?

  You're muted, Zanika.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  You're muted.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  Sorry. I think, um, yeah, we're such social creatures, obviously, and so much of what like the buying and selling in the NFT market and the crypto market happens is because we see people on Twitter say, hey, I bought this. And then everyone starts firming in and it's because of other people buying it. It makes sense that marketplaces or aggregators will integrate that into their, into their platforms, whether it's like literally, you know, a Twitter feed of people like posting about it, or if it's just like analytics, like Eric was talking about, you know, this wallet, this whale, this person just swept five board apes pops up on your feed. You're like, okay, let me go click on that and, and check that out. And then you can maybe click on their profile. Um, they'll have analytics of, you know, what, what they own. It's all, it's all public. It's all out there.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  It, it, once that's more easily able to be visualized and like deciphered, I think people will be, yeah. I, I think marketplaces will have that integrated for sure.

• 27:53David Hoffman?

  Eric, I want to allow you to answer a similar question about social media elements built into NFT platforms. But I also know, um, you're just also interested in the financialization side of just all things Ethereum. So there's also things like, you know, fractional, and you already mentioned NFTX. What other just like add-ons or plugins could NFT marketplaces add to their features in addition to just like social media stuff?

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. To me, this is the next wave we're going to see here in 2022 on NFTs. And it's basically merging DeFi and NFTs, right? So you've got a lot of people across the world that want to get involved in board apes or punks or whatever it is, right? But not many people can afford them, um, but you'd still like to get exposure to it, right? And this is like, one of the cool things Ethereum enables that isn't enabled in the traditional world is, hey, let's fractionalize a crypto punk. And thousands of people can own a part of it. And if crypto punks go up, you make money. If they go down, you don't, and you're a part of the community now, right? So fractionalization to NFT is going to be huge just from people wanting exposure, of course.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Um, and then, uh, there's a ton of untapped potential and using NFTs for collateral and borrowing. Against them and speculating on them, right? Like, that's gonna be a big wave. Now, this gets really tricky, of course, because the NFT space is generally illiquid and hard to price. So I think early on, it's only gonna be stuff like grails, right? Like art blocks, grails, crypto punks, bored apes. Like, that's pretty much all you're gonna be able to use probably as collateral, because they stay relatively stable. But yeah, all these things that just allow you to add DeFi to art, right? Like, my favorite thing about Ethereum is analyzing what, what things does Ethereum enable that?

• 29:37Speaker 03

  In the traditional world outside of Ethereum, you couldn't do, right? We've seen some stuff in DeFi around that. I think my bull case in general on NFTs, and I've said multiple times for over a year now, I think NFTs are gonna be a hundred times bigger than we all think now, and that's because of things that you can do with them. I mean, the the most obvious is what I mentioned in kind of in the opener is just bringing instant liquidity and price finding to NFTs through just marketplaces that Ethereum enables. But bringing like fractionalization and DeFi aspects to art, I mean, that's just next level, right? It's gonna push us, it's gonna push them even further. And, you know, it's gonna make people more interested, for sure.

• 30:16David Hoffman?

  Do you think adding in these financialization components is actually the responsibility of the marketplaces? Or do you think that that's kind of should be left up to the rest of the ecosystem? Like, should it really be a button on OpenSea to fractionalize your board ape? Like, or where, where do you think this feature should lie?

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, if OpenSea had the bandwidth, they would probably be doing it, but I'm assuming they're, they don't have it at the moment, because then they would really corner the marketplace. I think we're gonna see it come from smaller teams. And definitely what I've seen coming through, like, you know, teams launching, looking for funding, like, there's gonna be a huge wave in the next six to nine months of these applications. And most of the things I've seen, they're all gonna be independent teams. I, you know, eventually will like an OpenSea integrate like a smaller team or like acquire them, like they just acquired Dharma, for example. Will they try to acquire teams to bring fractionalization onto platform? Maybe. But from what I've seen, that's not these marketplaces focused at the moment.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  We're gonna have these smaller teams build these, let's call them NFT Legos, and then maybe the platforms will, you know, try to swallow these teams or integrate it or whatever it might be.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  I'm curious about like fraud and spam prevention, which I feel like is is personal to a lot of people who have been screwed, you know, whether by the fault of some of these marketplaces or not. DC, I'm curious where you think this goes, how you think we can get better on this if we can, you know, how much of this is sort of out of the control of the marketplaces? And it's sort of user be wary or beware, or how much can we really do to prevent people from being, you know, spammed or otherwise hurt?

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, at least from a spam perspective, look, I think I get a bunch of NFTs in my wallet that are not really things that I want to have on my wallet, but I just accept that they're there. And by the way, if you receive NFTs like that, for anyone who's listening, I just advise you not to really bother to move them because it's not worth your, it's not worth interacting with the contract, it's not worth paying the gas, there's really no point in doing it. I think the fraud piece is something that is kind of interesting. So one, what we have seen many of these marketplaces do is they have started to take on this role of verifying collections and OpenSea has been doing this for a while. That also means that they decide what what assets can get listed on their platform. And a lot of people will say, well, that's not permissionless, that's not

• 32:37Speaker 02

  censorship resistant. But I think there is a trade off there that, you know, they do provide some utility by actually doing that filtering. And that's like the first level of filtering that you get. However, we've also seen some kind of troubling situations where NFTs have been stolen from a user's wallet, typically because the user has made some kind of mistake in it, whether they gave their private key to someone or whatever. We've all seen this happen a bunch with NFT communities. I mean, there have been a lot of bored apes that have been stolen in this way. And there's some really unfortunate stuff that can happen there. So what what happens is the thief acquires that NFT, they then list it on OpenSea at a price below the floor price, it sells basically immediately. And then whoever has bought that NFT now owns what is effectively

• 33:22Speaker 02

  stolen property through no knowledge of their own. Then later, the person from whom that NFT was stolen, reports that to OpenSea and says, hey, this NFT was stolen. And really, what happens is that Person got stolen from and also to some extent, the person who bought it got stolen from because now that NFT cannot be sold on OpenSea again. And that's apparently a legal requirement for operating a marketplace. And I talked to someone at OpenSea and they kind of said, look, even if it was like, if you go to, if you go and buy a stolen bike, the police can actually like take that bike from you and say, hey, this was part of a crime and was stolen. We need to seize this. And so it's just kind of one of those terrible situations, which I think reduces confidence for the buyer that's buying

• 34:06Speaker 02

  these very expensive NFTs in some cases. And then they're told, hey, you can't list it here and you'll never be able to sell it on OpenSea again. Now luckily there are other platforms now that are more decentralized, like LooksRare, where you might be able to list it there. You may be able to list it on Rarible, but I think that some of these issues, I don't really know how we get out of them legally, but I think they're going to continue to be things that we need to think about.

• 34:29David Hoffman?

  DC, you bring up a really good point about the points on the decentralization spectrum that many of these NFT platforms optimize differently for. And while it is really nice that we have alternatives to OpenSea where you can take your Bored Ape to a different platform, if for some reason it gets frozen on OpenSea, at the end of the day, OpenSea is also the main place of liquidity. So it's permissionless, but still also kind of permissioned if all of, if OpenSea just does have that monopoly on top of liquidity. And these are some of the questions that we want to get to. In addition to what I think are also some really other fun questions such as, why do NFTs on layer two kind of rub people the wrong way? And do we think the Ethereum L1 will maintain dominance in the NFT marketplace?

• 35:14David Hoffman?

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• 38:06Speaker 01

  We are back. We have a bunch of good topics to talk about in the second half of this show. But I want to circle back first quickly here on this question of of social and social media and platforms and how this plays out. DC, I'm curious on your thoughts. I mean, I'm personally surprised that we haven't seen more like. I like, you know, I like something and then I see more of it. That curated feed thing we were talking about with Zenica. How do you see this playing out? Is this going to happen on the marketplaces? Are we going to see it evolve in some different way? Where does this activity ultimately take place in your view?

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Sure. Well, I think, you know, it's really difficult to put all of this responsibility on marketplaces. And I think actually moving forward, marketplaces, they are going to be for discovery, but it's really going to be where people buy and sell, not experience their NFTs. Because they're not really tooled to do that appropriately. And two, there's just so many kinds of NFTs. You might be better off experiencing them somewhere else. So I think we're going to see a proliferation of gallery apps. And we already see a few like gallery dot SO is one that I'm very fond of because they have a pretty clean format. You've also seen platforms like Hype Launch with more social features. So I think that you're going to have a lot of different ways to curate and present your collection to the world.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  I'll never send anyone to my OpenSea page because it's a hot mess. But I would rather be like, hey, come look at my gallery dot SO page, which is linked on my Twitter, by the way, if you want to check it out. But that's where I arrange all my NFTs exactly how I want. That's part of my collector's journey. And I think people need to connect with their NFTs in that way. I think also this rise of like the Twitter hexagons is like pretty interesting. And for those who have who have been under a rock over the past week, we've had Twitter now allow users to verify their NFTs on the platform in their profile pictures. And basically, if you do this, it turns your little profile picture into hexagon, which signals that you own the NFT behind that profile picture.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  I think like sharing and using NFTs like that is going to become really common. And I think I think the next logical step for Twitter is to like add a little side profile page that you could visit. See, hey, what NFTs might I be selling and do you want to buy them? You know, I mean, I don't think, I don't think that's a far leap from where we are. But I think the final point that I'll leave you with here, Carly, is we're really going to see deeper integration of these kinds of concepts with these metaverse apps. And I think it was Zenica who mentioned this idea of being able to look at your 3D NFTs in 3D, what some kind of 3D metaverse, right? And there's a bunch of them that are emerging right now. But being able to interact with them and even have like a shopping experience within that, that doesn't feel like you're on eBay.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  And I think that's like the future where we're headed with some of this.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Well, what I think is so interesting about that is something I'm fascinated with. There's some of these like mega apps that are much more common in China and throughout Asia like Pinduoduo. I don't know if folks know about this, but it's really this merging of social and commerce. And that's sort of what you're describing here is is sort of shopping and hanging out with friends and sharing all in one place, which it has surprised me that some of our web two social media apps haven't leaned into that more. Is, is, is what you're picturing as you talk about some of the, the gallery piece of this, like you and all your friends will have your, your gallery account, your art will be up there. I'll scroll through a feed, I'll see all my friends, I'll like your picture, I'll follow somebody new. There's a collector I love. It'll, it'll feel much like these sort of web two apps to a certain extent,

• 41:34Speaker 01

  but it's, it's really about highlighting and focusing on your NFTs and the way that you want to present them. Is that what you're picturing there?

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Like if I have a gallery app, I could imagine like even having a special section of that saying, these are the pieces that I have for sale and being able to articulate the story behind them and so on. But I think like this idea of like, when you're in one of these metaverse apps, like Nifty Island is one that I'm involved with. Like if you're in Nifty Island and you have, and I've got my museum there, I could even have like a for sale sign next to the gallery placard and say, hey, you can buy this piece if you want to. So I think that that's, that's kind of the future that I think when you, we talk about metaverse plus marketplaces, that's where I see it headed.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  It's sort of that financialization of everything piece that Eric's talking about too, in its own right way, right? Like you're just walking through everywhere now is a marketplace. Everything can be speculated on. Everything can be bought. It's either a utopia or a dystopia.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I mean, to that point, the concept of a marketplace historically has been to allow the buyer and seller to have some degree of mutual trust. And the reality of like a platform like Ethereum and Web 3 is you don't need an intermediary for that. You just need the smart contracts. So yeah, you can trust anybody halfway around the world without any intermediary, and you can do a direct transaction with them. And I think we'll see a lot of that.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  David, I think you're muted.

• 42:55David Hoffman?

  Thank you. One thing that we definitely need to see happen in order to see broader NFT adoption is cheaper access to NFTs. The Ethereum L1 has already priced out most of the globe. And something about NFTs on Layer 2s just rubs people the wrong way. At least that's my interpretation of things. Eric, do you have an opinion about why that is, or if that's true or not?

• 43:20Speaker 03

  So I agree with you until I would say a few weeks ago, when I started going down the Treasure Dow route. And I'm fascinated by this project now. It's like blowing my mind. Just yesterday, they've launched this thing called Bridge World. And it's just, we haven't poked around with it. Just go poke around. They've got basically like staking and economics involved with a game. They've got an NFT marketplace. It's like play to earn. It's pretty wild, right? So I think we're seeing this migration to Layer 2. And I don't see Layer 1 to Layer 2 migration of NFTs being a very big thing necessarily. I think native Layer 2 NFT apps is where things are going to really take off. Like Treasure Dow, for example, launched on Layer 2. Well, I take that back. Their original staking was on Layer 1. They did a migration. But like a lot of the new stuff has just been on Layer 2, right?

• 44:03Speaker 03

  So I think now you can start experimenting with stuff like this, more gamification, because you have to do more transaction fees. No one wants to do that on Layer 1, right? So I agree that like, early on, like the collections launched on Layer 2 just didn't look as good. The marketplaces weren't there, especially on like alt Layer 1s. I don't know what they're doing on alt Layer 1s. With art, but you can basically pick them out of this, like out of a line, which one was launched on Ethereum, what was it? But I think we're about to see a proliferation of native layer two NFT projects. I think we're seeing it on the DeFi side. Where a lot of just native layer two DeFi apps are really taking off. It's it's for NFTs next, but it's not going to just be launching a collection in a marketplace.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  It's going to be taking it further because you can do more transactions and that's going to be around gamification of this stuff.

• 44:51David Hoffman?

  Zenica, do you have any experiences on L two NFT shenanigans? Any insights or actions that you've taken and experienced while doing NFT stuff on layer two?

• 45:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I recently jumped down the the bridge world treasure magic ecosystem. It's fascinating. You really got to check it out if you haven't. Yeah, honestly, it's just a really pleasant experience to transact with no gas fees or basically no gas fees. And I think we're going to see more of that. I I also definitely have the like the stigma against most NFTs on L twos just being spam, basically, because, you know, sometimes they are spam and up until recently, I'd never really considered them as sort of a place for high value NFTs. I think L one Ethereum is just has been where the premium NFTs are by and large, it's where most of the market is. So the marketplaces on L twos haven't been great and the bridging experience hasn't been great. The just users aren't there.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  I think going forward, yeah, we will see more and more. We just have to see more and more adoption on L twos. And that's where a lot of activity will happen. And L one will be for like these legacy, these, you know, OG collections that they'll probably stay on L one. Maybe some of them will bridge over. We've seen, you know, a few projects launch on L one and then bridge over, especially like the gaming ones like Etherbox and there's a few others. Because for gaming, obviously you need the more transactions, but yeah, I think we're getting there. It'll probably take most of this year and maybe next year is when it'll really be normalized that that's where a lot of activity for. NFTs just is going to take place because it's just going to have to, you know.

• 46:26David Hoffman?

  DC, what do you think about the long-term dominance of the Ethereum L1 when it comes to NFTs? Do you think it's going to retain like the vast majority of market share? Or just how do you think the the world of NFTs in L1 versus L2 is going to play out?

• 46:41Speaker 02

  So I think the reality is we have a lot of very important kind of culturally relevant NFTs that started on L1. And basically, all of the prominent NFTs we know of today are on L1. And because of that, it creates this accretive network effect onto Ethereum L1, but more broadly to the Ethereum ecosystem. So I don't think NFTs on L1 are going to go away anytime soon. That being said, I think the path of sending an NFT from L1 to L2 is going to be is fairly is much more straightforward in general. So if you wanted to take like, you know, 100 CryptoPunks and move them onto Arbitrum. I don't know if you can do that yet with what they with with their bridge, but you will be able to at some point.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  And that will be and then you'll have those 100 CryptoPunks potentially being tradable, you know, at at much lower fees. But then you have to pull them back to L1 if you want to use them on L1 again. So that but anyway, the point is that path is more straightforward. The issue comes in when you've initialized the an NFT on L2. And then if you want to somehow pull it back to L1. And for some NFTs, that is doable, but it has to kind of be thought about in advance as that NFT is created. So I think that for some NFTs like artwork, they're going to put in the investment to do that. I think for a lot of in-game items, though, well, first of all, if it's an in-game item and they're using one of these common contracts. Like I think Immutable Access set up some contracts that allow people to pull to L1 as well.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Then you're kind of already set. But I think a lot of game NFTs are just going to be initialized on layer two, and they're just going to stay there for the most part. And they're never going to come to layer one. And I think that's kind of the future vision. Like, I think within three years, it'll be very exceptional that your average user is using Ethereum layer one, to be perfectly honest. So a lot of this activity is going to be on layer twos. And gaming NFTs are going to be absolutely huge on layer twos. And we're already seeing that with some of the success. of immutable X and other platforms. I think where we're looking at like fine art, you know, these these NFTs that really represent these unique artworks that are worth a lot of money. That's going to take longer for those artists to get comfortable with creating work on L2.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  And that's where I think the assurances of being able to pull back to L1 become more important.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  I will say, as we're we're talking about immutable X here, and I think this is a story I I partly shared with Zenica on overpriced JPEGs a couple of weeks back. But I've had my first experience with some NFTs that natively arose on immutable X. And I say it is dangerous, that no gas thing. I've never been a day trader and I like blacked out and woke up three hours later. Just like traded for like, I was like, what is happening? So, you know, because we're for, you know, on on mainnet at this point, if I'm going to make a quarter of an ETH, there's no, I'm like, that's that's going to be wiped out by gas. It doesn't matter. It's not even worth it. But like, no gas fees, it's like, I don't leave worlds, you know, warning.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  It gets really gambly there real fast. But I it made me quite bullish on it, to be honest. I think immutable X and and, you know, obviously they're making a big bet on gaming. I think it'll be interesting to see what they do.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Okay, I think maybe we close out here with with some broader NFT markets talk. That's my favorite thing. That's overpriced JPEGs. We're getting into our world here hardcore. I guess I'd love to hear from y'all. If there was ever three people that this would be a good question to like, what NFTs are y'all bullish on these days? What are you excited about? You know, what's what are you tracking?

• 50:09Speaker 02

  I guess I can.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Throw it to Zenica or Eric, you've got it.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Zenica, go ahead. No, Zenica, go.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  Okay, I'm I'm obsessed with Crypto Cobins. It's this amazing PFP project. The art is unique and different. It was founded by five women who, you know, it was their first real foray into the NFT space. And they just got together like, hey, you know, let's create a collection.

• 50:31Speaker 04

  The community is is just different. It's just different to every other project that I've ever come across.

• 50:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I really love it. I think it's I'm obsessed. And every time someone asks me recently, like, what NFT project do you like? That's the one I go to.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess recently what I've been most fascinated with, I'd probably say Doodles. I don't know. I saw them a few weeks ago and like just something captured me about the art. And then they kind of took off. So it's of course easy to get biased when the price is going up. But so not financial advice, but I don't know, something about them like just you could hang them on a wall, walk by them and never really get tired of them.

• 51:12David Hoffman?

  Are they differentiated enough? Cause they all kind of look the same to me.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  So it's funny, right? Like I have this talk a lot with people like, so I'm a punk guy, right? And like bored apes rose and I, I can't see the difference on bored apes. And I talked to people that end up bored apes and they're like, oh, I can't see the difference in punks. So like, I think it's just like, unless you live in that community day to day and you're like obsessed with the traits, like you don't really see it. Um, but yeah, I don't know. I just, I just like the art. It stands out to me as something different. Um, and yeah, I guess I already mentioned my, my latest like just hours of research has been around treasure Dow and the stuff they've launched there around like legions and you know, their treasures and their small brains and like all this stuff. So I've been, I'm becoming more fascinated with like applications that are trying new things

• 51:59Speaker 03

  as opposed to kind of just launching PFPs, right? And you know, I will say, and I know for a fact DC will back me up on this one. I'm sure, but I, I think generative art will make a comeback and I think one of ones will be a new wave. People are sleeping on generative art right now, but like it's truly unique, right? Like people are just copying the 10,000 unique trait thing. Um, generative art is going to have a comeback. So I've been not going to lie. I've been scooping up the floor for a few weeks now and some of that stuff.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  But you're, I, I know we're going to throw this to DC because I'm, I'm very eager to hear DC's answer. I will. Another shameless plug for overpriced JPEGs. Our guest next Wednesday is Poopy, co-founder of Doodles. I have to say, I'm not a doodles owner. I'm not a holder. You know, I was really impressed talking to Poopy. I, I, I think it's fair to say that I really think he goes deeper on the project than he ever really has in an interview. And, and I That's an impressive team. So as a, as a bet on the team person, oh my God, dang, I wish I'd grab myself a doodle. Uh, also very much with you on the, the generative art, art piece. I think there's, you know, digital art still just makes up such a fraction of, of the total art market.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  And there's so much room for that to grow and generative art is really your most digitally native art in some ways. So, um, really excited to see where that goes. Okay. DC, what are you excited about?

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Well, I am excited about some of the newer stuff. Like I'm really interested in the meta hero project, which, uh, and punk's comic, which G funk and the team have done a lot of really interesting work. I'm really interested to see how that universe builds out, but I actually think now is a great time to be thinking about some of these older NFTs, which have been comparatively de-risked. And I wrote a tweet a few weeks ago, which I'll just share with you guys here. And I said, the NFT kind of market evolution. And if you think, I'm just going to go through the stages very quickly, but when we started, none of them were valuable. Then you have early kind of counterculture, like X copy, even larva labs and other individual artists creating that early work.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  New early adopters arrive. That's like a lot of the types of folks that you have on, on, on today's discussion, right? We were, got involved with some of this. The early stuff becomes valuable. Then you have the corporate and mainstream arrival. And I think that's the stage that we're at now. Right? You have Adidas, you have Nike making moves by acquiring artifact. And you have a lot of these big brands now coming into the NFT space. And so we're at a point now where mainstream taste is also almost starting to overrun. And we're becoming oversaturated, oversaturated with it. I mean, even like Jimmy Fallon and, and Paris Hilton are talking about board age with each other on this tonight show. It's kind of like mind blowing when you see, I mean, that happened, I think it was yesterday and I watched the clip. I was like, wow, didn't, it's kind of crazy.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  But, but after that mainstream taste phase, you're going to see some of this quality counterculture stuff and early adopter work. Kind of come back and that value is going to soar with these collectors who come in and they want to get something that's authentic. That's kind of foundational to this movement. So I think actually now is a great time to be looking at some of that stuff. If you can afford it, I know the price tag's already high, but if I'm right, in like five to 10 years, this is going to look like absolutely nothing on some of these.

• 55:08David Hoffman?

  Well, guys, that was all the alpha that our NFT panelists could give you. And I actually want to ask this question because I think it's very, very timely. If ETH goes down in price and God forbid goes into a bear market, how relevant is that to the NFT industry? How relevant is the US dollar price when it comes to NFTs? Eric, I want to start with you on that one.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  I guess first I would ask, have you been watching the charts the last three weeks or have you not?

• 55:36David Hoffman?

  Wait, are we in a bear market? Sometimes I just can't tell if we're in a bear market.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  And NFTs have decoupled from crypto.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. That's what's weird, right? So we're, I think ETH hit at the max, like 56% off the top or something like that. And I mean, Bored Apes just keep going to the moon. Punks had a pump last night. Doodles are up from like 5 to 12, like all this stuff. You go on OpenSea, there's random collections pumping every day, right? So I do think we have not really seen a correlation between the two. And honestly, having watched Punks pretty much since the beginning, they've never been correlated to ETH price. They've pretty much just always independently traded on ETH only, right? And this is like the ETH is money thesis, which we won't get into this in this podcast. We've had plenty of those in the past, but like,

• 56:28Speaker 03

  our, the future of art is priced in ETH and people are okay with just making a few ETH, even if ETH went down 30% overnight, right? So I don't really see any of the collections. I have people repricing as ETH itself changes in price. What's interesting is like, maybe it looks cheaper to people that have been looking to enter with USD, right? Like ETH fell 50%, the Punk floor stayed at 70. People are like, oh, look, Punks are 50% off. But I think as far as like an overall market repricing, I think they're pretty decoupled. And I mean, it kind of seems like they're almost moving independently, like ETH dumps, NFTs pump, NFTs dump, ETH pump. So we'll have to see how this plays out over time, I guess.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  I would love to hear Zenica's answer to this because you and I talked literally a couple of weeks ago, I think, or a month ago, whatever it was. And you were saying, usually NFTs do best when the price of ETH is stable, right? And that, and that when it pumps, that's no good. And if it, you know, dips, that's no good. And if we're not seeing that, what are you making of this? And are we in a new paradigm or is the, is the crash coming?

• 57:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I agree with Eric that there's it's relatively decoupled. Like if we just look over the last year, we've seen ETH pump and NFTs pump at the same time. We've seen ETH crash, NFTs pump, and every scenario has happened. So we can't really look at history and say and make any sort of reasonable prediction. I do think that when ETH is like crashing or rocketing in a short time period, NFTs, they may not crash or do anything, but people are just a little spooked to trade, partially because gas is just crazy. When, you know, when ETH is pumping or crashing, you know, the DeFi activity on mainnet is just crazy and gas is consistently high. That kind of cuts off NFT activity at its knees, at least for, you know, 90% of collections.

• 58:18Speaker 04

  So yeah, I think that when ETH is stable is probably when NFTs pump the most. But I mean, aside from that, I think it doesn't really correlate too much. But I do think for people who have been sitting on the sidelines, again, like Eric said, and have been thinking about entering the market and have said, even at the low end, like $1,000 for an NFT, that's too expensive. Oh, but now it's $550. All right, I can justify like, and a lot of people have said, hey, I really want to get in. Oh, I love that collection. I want one of those. And, and most people who aren't in the ecosystem, they think in USD or whatever the native fiat currency is. So I think in that respect, lower ETH price is good for the market overall.

• 59:01Speaker 04

  But I don't necessarily think that a huge ETH price is going to be bad for the market.

• 59:06David Hoffman?

  Carly, you want to ask your next question?

• 59:10David Hoffman?

  When you unmute yourself?

• 59:11Speaker 04

  You mute.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Yep. See, this is probably live streams. You can't cut that out, can't edit that moment out. I actually wanted to push on something you were saying, DC. It felt like you were talking about, you know, the, the, maybe investing in some of these older projects that as new entrants come into the space, will respect history and will buy into that. I had heard the, the opposite argument made specifically around Coinbase and the argument that maybe Coinbase onboards a whole bunch of new people to NFTs. And they're not necessarily people that out the gate are going on spend six figures or.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  NFT probably have a date towards some of these newer projects that until recently were not quite so highly priced. Again, I think this is something Zenek and I talked about it and he maybe didn't agree, but would love to get your reaction to that thesis that in the short term, we're going to see pumps on some of these lower priced projects as new entrants come in and are a little wary to spend fifty, a hundred thousand dollars at the gate.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. Yeah.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Your reaction or?

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think that's absolutely right. You're definitely going to see a lot of interest in some of these lower value NFTs, which still have are like culturally interesting and and I think a lot of it, the way, I mean, my vision is a lot of it kind of trickles up, right? And so the people who buy some of those, give liquidity to someone else who might go back and buy the art blocks piece or the Crypto Punk or the ape or the Autoglyph or whatever, whatever that NFT they've been eyeing for a while. So at the end of the day, it just brings more money into the ecosystem and it is beneficial across the board. However, I think personally from my point of view, some of the older stuff just has a very attractive risk profile that I think, I think a lot of people in the space get in and even if they've made a lot of money,

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  they focus on these newer kind of more trendy projects. But trends kind of change quickly. And I think a lot of people will even say, well, the trend has changed on Crypto Punks and no one cares anymore. I'm like, okay, let's see, let's come back to that point in five years or three years and let's see if that's really the case. I what we've seen actually as, as board apes have moved up, the punk floor also is rising along with it. And you're seeing that kind of across the board for some of these older collections. So I think it's very much like a mutually beneficial situation.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Rising tide lifts all boats.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  Pretty, not all, but a lot of.

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  Guys, I went, I saw a collection yesterday. It was like the cool Maury Doodle friends or something, a derivative of four projects merged into one. That's the, the point of the market we're at right now.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  Why not?

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  That one maybe is not going to make it.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  That's a top signal.

• 1:01:47David Hoffman?

  Guys, I want to thank you for spending all of your time with us on this overpriced JPEGs bankless cross panel. This was fantastic. And I just want to give you guys, if you guys want it, you guys don't have to take it. But if you guys want just a floor one last time, just to share, open ended question. Actually, there is no question, just open ended thoughts about NFTs at large, anything that we haven't discovered or covered that you guys still have thoughts on rolling around in your head. I can just leave that for the taking whoever wants to run with that.

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  I would say aggregators. DC, I think, mentioned it, but aggregators are going to be huge, right? I've been messing with one like genie XYZ. You can go in and if you want to sweep a floor, you can pick 10 NFTs and one transaction, you do it. I think that's the start of it. I think we're going to see a decoupling of, you know, like we were talking, the social layer is on the top, like the galleries in the middle is the aggregators in the bottom is hopefully truly decentralized marketplaces because props to OpenSea, but we need to get to where Ethereum's values are, right? And that's a uni swap like exchange of liquidity. So I think aggregators are going to be the story, you know, and that's social layer around galleries over the next year or so.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I'll offer my parting shot and just say on the on the question that you guys answered a second ago about where are we in like the NFT market cycle, I spent the past 24 hours basically stream of conscious like analyzing and tweeting about this topic because I think it's super interesting. But I think one of the point I think I would leave you with, think about how NFTs are different from the rest of crypto, because I think in a reflexive bearish situation, you do see a lot of people panic sell their fungible cryptocurrencies because they can. And they're just like, I'll rebuy it later. NFTs have a psychology that is much more complex than that. It's really difficult to brick. People get attached to their NFTs. And even if you want to sell them, you're not going to get instant liquidity at the

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  price you necessarily want. And so there's a lot of barriers to selling. So I think that as a lot of crypto participants have come into NFTs, we're still trying to analyze that. But a lot of the new participants are not, a lot of them didn't, were not really involved in crypto before. And I think that's going to change the character of the market going forward.

• 1:04:04Speaker 04

  And I will say, I mean, I think something we're going to see this year, which again Eric alluded to is that the ability to collateralize your NFTs instantly and it'll start off with the blue chips and then it'll probably expand to more collections. I would say just be wary when that happens, like people are gonna take on a lot of risk. Markets might pump, but I predict the first real enormous crash and bear market will happen as a result of that liquidity unlock and then eventual crash. So keep that in mind.

• 1:04:38David Hoffman?

  DeGen's gonna deGen and that just perfectly leads into what I'm about to say next. Guys, thank you so much for coming on. Of course, crypto is risky, ETH is risky, NFTs are risky, NFT marketplaces are risky, collateralizing NFTs is going to be really risky. You can lose what you put in. We are headed west. We're on the frontiers. Not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot for stopping by this Bankless Overpriced JPG's livestream panel. Thanks, guys. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your

• 1:05:19David Hoffman?

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