Two Bored Apes - NFT Podcast

Episode 32 - Twitter Q & A (9)

March 03, 2022 Two Bored Apes
Two Bored Apes - NFT Podcast
Episode 32 - Twitter Q & A (9)
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Episode 32 of Two Bored Apes is the ninth Twitter Q & A episode, where Jaime and Roy answer questions from the community. They talk in detail about the pros and cons of Creative Commons licenses or short CC0, the recent activity in the NFT market that is dominated by PFPs, and if this could potentially change in the near future - and much more! We hope you enjoy this episode.

Show Notes:
More info on CC0
The article that Jaime mentions: where are your NFTs
Roy's tweet about Pixelmon Kevin
Additional info about On-chain NFTs

Where to find us:
Two Bored Apes Twitter
Jaime's Twitter
Roy's Twitter
Zenacademy Twitter
ZenAcademy Discord
Abstract of the Day
ZenAcademy YouTube
Roy's Newsletter

Jaime:

The hosts of Two Bored Apes are not registered investment advisors. The podcast is for entertainment and informational purposes only. Nothing said on it should be construed as investment advice.

Intro:

Two Bored Apes, talking NFT's, De-fi, and some random stuff! uh uh uh uh Two Bored Apes, talking NFT's, De-fi, and some random stuff! uh uh uh uh

Jaime:

Welcome to Episode 32 of Two Bored Apes. I'm your host Jamie. I'm here with my friend and co host Roy. Roy, how are you?

Roy:

I'm very full.

Jaime:

As per usual...

Roy:

Yeah but this was like I just finished eating 30 seconds before the started of this podcast.

Jaime:

What do you have? Let's start the podcast off right. What did you eat Roy? Had Greek food, we had some calamari, some lamb, some halloumi, some chips... Oh, I like a nice seared halloumi, and the halloumi was seared?

Roy:

It was seared yeah.

Jaime:

Hmmm, I'm into that.

Roy:

How you Jamie? Your hair looks fine.

Jaime:

We got... I did get a haircut, yes. The calamari though. Now. This is like a fried calamari or was it just

Roy:

We actually had a couple of types of we had we had fried calamari and then we also had like, baby octopus, yeah. Yeah. Should we talk about NFTs?

Jaime:

In a bit. I remember the first time you ever visited we went to Haruki east and you order you order calamari. Do you remember that Roy?

Roy:

I remember going to that place. I do not remember ordering calamari.

Jaime:

Well, that's a little factoid for you. I guess we can talk about NFTs if you want to. I think we should. That's what that's what the people are here for. Right? I'm gonna sip a little water. Alright, this is a this is a Twitter Q&A. And we have a variety of questions from people on Twitter that we will answer and we're just gonna jump right into it. First question comes from chesco. @francescofalah says, what are the pros and cons of a CC0 project? Maybe you'll take can tell people what CCO is, and then we'll wax out...

Roy:

Right, CC0. Although, more people have been saying CC zero, which I guess is more technically accurate, um, is a type of basically it means that a piece of intellectual property or anything, doesn't have copyright associated with it. Nobody owns the the copyrights to a thing. It's basically in the public domain, anyone can do whatever they want, basically...

Jaime:

Stands for Creative Commons.

Roy:

A good example is like the works of Shakespeare, anyone can do whatever they want in terms of releasing, if you want to go to a play of Romeo and Juliet, you don't need to get the permission from Shakespeare's estate, or from Disney or from some company. But if you want to go and create a new Star Wars movie, you can't really do that with

Jaime:

there's a little bit of a difference, though, let me just interrupt. So I like because those things are sort of what's called in the public domain where, you know, at some point maybe I'm and I'm Shakespeare might be a bad example, where it's so old that it was never really copyrighted. But a lot of stuff, there's like a copyright for a trademark shouldn't slam the table probably. And somebody owns the rights to it, but after like 75 years, or whatever, then it goes into the public domain. And then anybody can do it, Robin Hood's example, just one of these old stories that anybody can adapt. But now in NFTs, we're seeing specific examples where people are creating the project and immediately releasing the rights of it to everybody under this Creative Commons license. There's like, a difference in the intention were right from the get right. He's right, trying to put it out there, as opposed to some of these other ideas that just have transition into being in the public domain.

Roy:

Yeah. So what are some, why would a project do this, for instance?

Jaime:

Well, I think one of the, you know, it's, it's so new, that a lot of it is theoretical, but I think what a lot of people that are proponents of the idea are thinking that, you know, if the intellectual property is at all interesting or compelling, other people will want to build on top of that, and that will just basically grow the public's affinity for that project in general. And, you know, sort of the old world thinking is that the brand would get diluted or something like that, by having other people work on it. But, you know, the, the web3 narrative is sort of that it would... it can get built up by just having more people doing stuff with nouns and cryptoadz, just as two examples that are that are trying to do that.

Roy:

Yeah, and I often hear people say, like, why would a project do that? What isn't a lot of the value in holding sort of the copyright and the intellectual property for these projects? And, you know, one response to that is sort of what you said maybe by allowing anyone to create it, it will increase the public's affinity and the brand value and stuff and like the original assets will go up in value. But also, some people aren't thinking about how can they maximize the profit of this thing? It's just like, Yeah, this is a cool thing. We want to see it out there in the world and more people building on its let's just go CC0. Yeah.

Jaime:

On that note, I think, one specific example, that's sort of analogous that I've returned to because sometimes people will be like, Well, yeah, if you don't own it, how is it in any way valuable. And, for instance, if you have one of the first copies of the first appearance of any famous comic book character, Superman being in Action Comics 34, maybe was issue, Spider Man, being an amazing fantasy 16. You don't own the rights to this character of Spider Man just by owning that. But yeah, it's the inception of a very popular character, intellectual property, whatever you want to call it. And this is the sort of artifact that goes all the way back to the origination of it. And by being scarce, because there's not that many of them because they're old. And, you know, being verifiable, and all that stuff that NFTs already have built into it. It's just a valuable thing for collectors to own. Yeah. And so in that sense, it makes plenty of sense to me, that a CC0 NFT could be very valuable despite conferring no ownership rights over the intellectual property, if that intellectual property becomes popular. Just one more level to it, though, is that, you know, with these comic book examples, you're owning one of you know, 10,000 of the first copies of Spider Man, whereas with the NFTs, you would be owning Spider Man, you know, this cryptotoadz, for instance, if it somehow became a very popular figure in popular culture, you're not just owning the first story of it, you're owning it. Yeah. And again, you don't have to own the intellectual property by owning the NFTs for that to be a valuable collector's idea to people who care about the character.

Roy:

Yeah, no, that's, yeah, that's a great analogy. Um, some of the cons, I think, that I've heard and can agree with are if sort of, say specific vision for the brand that maybe the creators have, and they have sort of the ability to execute on that. It can be sort of detrimental? Do you have people out there building conflicting intellectual property and stories. Like, for example, CoolCats, you know, that they're very family friendly. They're going for, like, you know, kid friendly, maybe they do a kids TV show. It would be damaging if there's someone out there doing like, some murder horror, you know, thing with cookouts as he enjoyed it, it would potentially be detrimental to like the brand and it would be confusing for like fans and for people going, well, what is this, this is horror CoolCats and there's this.

Jaime:

Yeah, but that's, that's valid, that's a con to you know, applying CC0 to some project that doesn't even, that's not going to do it. What, um, concept of the negative or the cons of using CC0 on a product that actually is CC0 and, and sort of wants to let other people do it. You don't I mean, I, to me, you can have a similar thing to where you're talking about, like murder or CoolCats or whatever, right? But, for instance, any of these CC0 projects, people could just use it to spew all sorts of terrible hate or whatever, and go, we love Russia's invasion of Ukraine and have it come out of a Cryptoadz mouth of something. People might think that's damaging that, in that sense, you know, just anyone being able to do something and you not having a legal recourse to stop them from using your imagery in it can have some sort of a negative effect.

Roy:

Yeah, definitely. That's, that's another danger. And it's... Yeah, I mean, that that's just one thing that can happen by going CC0, you basically relinquish all legal control and rights to stop that from happening.

Jaime:

Right. Yeah. I think also, sort of one thing that could be bad about it is for instance, you know, you do your[...] off right, and you've got these Blitmaps, and you make them CC0. You know, if you want to make official Blitmap merchandise, for instance, it's it's easier to make a knockoff. I mean, again, this this kind of just goes back to the legal thing, but the idea of being able to charge a premium for like a real product bag versus a knockoff product bag, makes more sense to me then to be able to charge a premium, If you're[...] dumb Hoff trying to sell Blitmap merch versus other that that has an equal legal footing to putting out Blitmap merch, it's it's harder to actually say that mine is better or more official, even if it is technically more official. It's like that sort of the point of what you're doing is that we're all officially able to use this IP. So why why do I need yours? Yeah, you can kind of get railroaded, if you still, you know, like, if you're doing CC0 and trying to just totally step back and go it's it's in everybody else's hands. Fine. But if you still are trying to like guide it a little bit, you're you're, you're sort of handcuffing yourself a little bit, maybe when you do CC0, not CCO...

Roy:

Yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, it's like you said at the beginning, it's something that's quite near you, and we haven't really seen it play out. And it's probably going to take many, many, many years before we can look back and say, Oh, it was probably a good decision for this project to do it, it may have been a bad decision for this project to do it, and so on and so forth.

Jaime:

As far as NFTs are concerned, I feel like we haven't really seen the just the results basically, of CC0 or non CC0 intellectual property. Like, it's just all so new, that almost every implementation of this intellectual property is just like, more NFTs or like, just, there's only been a little bit built on top with this, you know, there's some merch, obviously for for various projects. But it's still, like, we don't we don't have any Netflix shows or anything like that, from you know, NFT based intellectual property. So we really can't say, what are the in practice pros and cons, we can only kind of wax poetic about theoretically, what what is this enable? And what is it hinder? And kind of assume how that may or may not play out in the future?

Roy:

Yeah. It's it's really fascinating thing to discuss and think about, um, I had a chat on my YouTube videos series thing, interviews with John Rogers. Yeah. Great way of deciding, yeah. Just deciding it, describing it. I really, this is good. This is good. This isn't good podcasting, and all that. Ah, but yeah, he was head of franchise development at Disney. And he worked on Star Wars. And he's really, um, he knows a lot about this. And something that he mentioned is how he is a bit surprised that a lot of projects for giving sort of like full commercial rights, Bored Apes for example, to shareholders are making it absolutely full and not like some sort of somewhat restricted license. And but he was saying that even for

Jaime:

and on what you mean by restricted or so because, like, go to like CloneX ones where it was like up to 100,000. I think punks had that as well. Does he mean? Yeah.

Roy:

No, no, not in the financial sense. But in terms of what you can actually do with it, like he does a lot of traditional companies will be like, you can do whatever you want whatever money but you can't create anything that's like drug paraphernalia. Yeah, underwear. And so he, the example he gave is like, you know, it's great to give you a full rights. But what happens when someone goes out and creates a Bored Ape Yatch Club shotgun, and then goes and kills people? Right? That's, that's quite damaging, potentially the entire brand, maybe would have made sense to have some sort of restricted license.

Jaime:

Which kind of just goes back to what we're talking about in terms. Yes. bad actors doing stuff with it that reflects poorly, and lowers the brand affinity? Yeah. Um, I think we've kind of answered this pretty good, right?

Roy:

I think so. All right. All right. Next up, @AntiClux Why are 10k PFP projects the most popular NFT format so far? And what's the meaning behind it?

Jaime:

Hmm, good question. Um, do you have an answer?

Roy:

Um, I think the first part of it like why 10k It's sort of just like, Cryptopunk started with a 10k collection. And then it just seemed like that was just what projects did and it's just became become like, the status chord and it's, it's a nice round number and for the market size and stuff. It's just fit. So I think

Jaime:

You get a lot of variety. But yeah, have some harmonioussness... Yeah, I think that kind of was just, you know, punks started. And unfortunately, I don't know much about whatever Curiocards and all that other old stuff really. But then, of course, apes did it. And then we just have a lot of people pseudo copycatting apes from that. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Interestingly Gutter Cat Gang who came very shortly after apes, and to me read very much like they were just copying the idea did a much smaller size, but for the most part, yeah, 10k is very popular. But in terms of going beyond the number what why is the profile picture project thing so popular and resonant do you think?

Roy:

I think it's a like, combines the whole... combines a few things like the collectible nature. So when you have 10k, and you meant as generative, it's like, there's this whole gambling rarity, like opening packs element was like, Oh, can you get it everyone people enjoy that. It combines the art, like a lot of them have really cool art, different art people can appreciate that. But probably, more importantly, than all of that is it's just really easy to identify with these PFPs. And like, people have been using avatars for decades, ever since internet been around, you'd have a forum, you choose an avatar, you'd, when we played online poker, you'd have an avatar and games, you'd have avatars. So it's just a concept that people can understand and be like, Oh, now identify and relate. This is now my digital identity. This meant digital. Yeah. And that to

Jaime:

And so much of the NFT community is on Twitter, and is me... Yeah, I don't see a point in time when they go away. It's on Discord, where you have profile picture projects, and then it's just inherently an advertisement, essentially, for that NFT specifically, and that NFT project more broadly. So you know, as far as like Metaverse land, or just straight out art projects, whatever other you know, NFT categories, you want to discuss the ability for them to constantly be being advertised without effort. And for you to be able to identify them with various groups of people. And even, you know, once you get to the deeper level of, you know, the individual that has it intertwining that with your own actual personality, and identifying with it, like, you know, I have some great art blocks art that I love, and, and love more than, you know, any of my profile picture projects nfts. But there's 0%, where I'm confusing myself, yeah, there is very much there is a sense that I am a number 9838, right, which is just, that's a powerful, weird, new thing, that I think, you know, as much as I have found the space to be bubbly in in its valuation of all these projects, or I shouldn't say all but a lot of these projects for a long time and have tended to be proven wrong, sort of by the market, in the short term, because they mostly have kept going up. It's a super powerful thing that is just like, you know, belonging is a is a big thing in humanity. Obviously, we're social creatures. And there's been all sorts of different ways that we've done that, all right, but the way that this directly adds finances into it is a very interesting thing. And the way that like, the hierarchical structure of say, like, I don't know if you know who the Freemasons are, or whatever, but like, any sort of large social club, um, you know, there's some sort of tiered nature to a lot of those. But that has to do with politics and who you know, and who your father was, and all that stuff. This there's an interesting sort of initially democratizing thing where it's just, I could have been to the gold ape, you could have mentioned the gold ape, Elon Musk could have mentored a crazy eyes with brown fur whatever. But then you know, it, it allows you to pick what you like, in the secondary market, and you can identify more strongly with that. It's just a, it's an interesting way to, you know, get human coordination going together. That I think is just like the potential is still so huge and untapped as far as I'm concerned. And I think, you know, a lot of people that are maybe skeptical or like purely in it for the money are kind of regularly looking for what's going to be the new thing, what's going to be the new thing and thinking that profile picture projects are very much you know, of the time I think they just aren't going to endure and be massive continuously. just like, as more people enter the space they're going to want to have a lot of them are going I want to have a PFP a profile picture and identity, and maybe several. And then that's a question of, I was gonna say, that's just another thing though, the idea of having multiple, yes, something that some people I talked to buy into it. And I feel like the way I am and and for see people in general being is that you only really need a second one if you happen to sell your top one. But I guess, you know, definitely some people are going to want to have alt accounts and stuff like that. Or, you know, just in various different social circles, digits, you know, largely digital social circles have different ones. But to me, that's still strange. But, you know, it's worth like a year into this shit. Certainly in four years, I could be obviously proven wrong and think that this version of me is a moron forever thinking that I wouldn't simultaneously before of them or whatever, right? Continue. Sorry to interrupt.

Roy:

Um, I was saying, yeah, it's who's gonna know? Like, I mean, yes, we can agree that yet, almost anyone who joins the space is likely going to want some sort of Avatar PFP. But is it going to be the existing collections or new stuff that comes out in a year, in five years, in 10 years, and that's really, really hard to predict. Um, to go back to like what you were saying as well before about, like, how it's just not the same with art blocks, because we don't identify with with it. It's like, this is Two Bored Apes, not Two Fragments Of An Infinite Field. Yeah, this is not two plots of sandbox land. This is not to this, that or the other, it's really just very personable about any

Jaime:

Even in the future. If theoretically, if we were somehow doing this show within a sandbox plot. It that would just still be this setting. And us and it's hard, you know, humans have some level of selfishness inherent to them. Right? How am I ever going to think an NFT That is, mine is more valuable than the NFT that is me. You know what I mean? Like, my art is something that reflects on me, and I have this other than me, me, me, me. Yeah. It's just that that's more powerful in a way. Yeah. That is, I think, hard to overstate. Yeah. It's so yeah, I think we answered that. Okay. Question three.@luca_marcello says, what's the advantage of holding your crypto in a wallet e.g. Metamask, Versus on an exchange? Okay, let's let's dive into this one. The crypto is always, it's just, it's on the blockchain, right? It's never, it's never on Coinbase, it's never on Metamask. Right. These are the things you're using to interact with it. Just I want to clear that up. But, you know, this goes back to the old Bitcoin added, right? Not your keys, not your coins. And so ultimately, the advantage of it is that the security of it is up to you. And the usage of it, the transferring of it from one place to another, all that good stuff is up to you, when your keys are held in a wallet that you don't control. For instance, on a centralized exchange, you are now beholden to just any bad, powerful people within the company that can get a hold of it, or any, you know, phishing scam sent to a random employee in there can now cost your coins. And, you know, that's getting like, within the legal sphere, or whatever, then if you want to step back, you also have the thing where now we have a lot of jurisdictions and governmental agencies that are, are going, we're gonna confiscate this. And, you know, you can be for or against laws, all that, whatever I don't want to, I don't want to get into that. But ultimately, when you have them in those places, they are subject to those laws, and the government's can yank it from you. Whereas again, if you if you are the only one that is actually able to use your coins, because you're having it on Metamasks, so to speak, and a wallet that only you control, ultimately, you know, people need to torture you for your seed phrase to get it from you. Definitely there is a sense that certain people who are just not technologically savvy enough, the risk is probably greater that you're going to lose access to your stuff if you're doing self custody versus having it on a centralized exchange. So it's not only better to do sales, but that's sort of the benefit is that you don't have to worry about somebody else fucking up in any way legally. Non legally, yeah, and having your stuff get lost.

Roy:

Yeah, there's been sort of like a bunch of instances over the years where centralized exchanges get hacked, or they themselves rugpull and run away with people's money because they have access, it's there, they have custody of the coins. And so if something goes wrong, you have very little recourse. And that's like, yeah, and then there's like, minor little things are like somewhat minor in the form that these centralized exchanges have to be. Basically, they have to adhere to certain regulations. And again, for better or worse, you can agree or disagree, but I know so many people who say, I'm trying to buy something, but my ether is in Coinbase, and they won't let me withdraw it for seven days, I can only withdraw$2,000 worth or something. Whereas if it's in your Metamask, if it's in a... like, wherever it is your own self custody wallet, you can do whatever you want with it at any single time. And then, yeah, the risk and the downside, as you mentioned, is if you lose access to your, your personal wallet, your Metamask, your seed phrase, like let's say you, your house burns down, you didn't have a copy saved somewhere else. You have no way of accessing it, it's gone. It's just absolutely gone. With centralized exchanges, there's usually some way of verifying identity and then you can get back in. So it's definitely a trade off on that. And yeah, it's just a trade off. Yeah,

Jaime:

I wanted to go back to what you were saying about centralized exchanges being hacked. That's just another thing where ultimately, they're a much bigger target. So in you know, you have some funds that are in Coinbase, and that's in a wallet that controls $90 million worth or whatever, you know, a hacker can use a much larger amount of effort, time and resources to try and get access to that than they ever would trying to individually target your $7,000 that you have. That's just a minuscule part of that bigger Coinbase Wallet. So, you know, again, it's a lot about pros and cons. In terms of security.

Roy:

We can go, yeah, we didn't need to get into any more detail there. I think we've sort of covered that. Okay. All right. Next question. @StormyBrick, why do you think the NFT space is in a slump at the moment? The rugs, the loss of confidence in project delivery?

Jaime:

Is it in a slump? I'm not sure if I...

Roy:

I think it is, I think, okay. January was fairly bullish. And I would say, first of January was very bullish. But I would say last month or so most of February was it was like spotty, overall, kind of bearish. Like...

Jaime:

I feel like the volumes are still high, but maybe floor prices are coming back. I mean, again, this is this is a thing that we have to talk about, unfortunately, every five episodes at least or whatever, but eth prices are going up right now. And, you know, there's always some question of how much of an inverse correlation there is between eth prices in US dollars, and then NFT prices in eth, which can definitely be a factor. But yeah, January was just there was a level of ecstatic bullishness that, you know, those can last a long time, it could have lasted all the way until now. But eventually, sentiment turns because you just can't see that forever. And you're going to have some sort of inevitable pullbacks, I do think there's a growing sense that you know, within the community of NFTs that there are bad actors who are just continuing to crank out projects that are able to take a ton of money out of the economy. And they aren't particularly interested in actually building up, excuse me, an interesting NFT project. They just want to mint stuff and get money and then just fuck off. And the the scale at which it's happening, and the scale at which we, as a NFT community are becoming aware of it, I think is growing and that is making people sort of bearish in the short term, but also bearish on like, as we try to get more people in, how are they going to having just come in and only have let's say 45 minutes a day to research NFTs which is like a lot a lot for random person just coming into it to differentiate between these things and not just get rug pulled left and right or whatever. It's it's hard to feel like we're going to be able to onboard people and have them just be able to differentiate between good and bad when the bad is, is getting so much more numerous as a percentage and so much more sophisticated.

Roy:

Yeah, no, I pretty much agree with all of that. Yeah, I mean pixelmon is probably like the biggest example...

Jaime:

Thats the current one for sure.

Roy:

Yeah, it basically they raised almost $70 million. And it was primarily just 19 year old kid who had a website and some very basic unity models.

Jaime:

Which, by the way, he wasn't saying were unity models, right? It was, you know, they were, they were acting like we've created this art, whereas they were buying packs of, of voxel art on unity... is all very shady. And, or maybe it wasn't even voxel art. They, it was regular 3d art. And then they put it through a voxel filter. I think I saw Yeah, regardless

Roy:

Something very, very, not worth $70 million dollars. Probably not worth $7,000

Jaime:

A real sleek video at the very beginning, right, where they were kind of teasing what the game would look like. And I think that got people excited. Yeah, turns out that was just sort of a movie. A clip. Yeah, that they had put together and had no bearing on their actual progress in creating this game that people were looking forward to. It was basically it was it was for lack of a more delicate term a knockoff of Pokemon, right, it was gonna be like a three dimensional pixelated or voxel as we know a 3d pixel was called version of the concept of Pokemon, right? Yeah,

Roy:

yeah. And people got very excited by it. There's like, Oh, I like Pokemon. I like the idea of a game and...

Jaime:

I like Pokemon... I like Pokemon. I haven't played in a couple years, but that was that was a fun year. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Pokemon Go. I think again, some of the actual newer Pokemon games. Alicia, Nick both love them and play them a lot. We might be getting off topic of NFTs by me talking about that. But they are good games. They are. They're really good games. Which one was your first one? I played Pokemon Blue way back in the day. I don't know.

Roy:

Yeah, it was blue or red was one of the first two I don't remember which one. Good stuff. They were there was that was so much fun.

Jaime:

It was really fun. Back to the Twitter Q&A.

Roy:

Um, what do you think? Yeah, I mean...

Jaime:

Loss of confidence. Okay, here we go. loss of confidence in project delivery. We didn't touch on that we didn't touch on like the rugs and stuff. But I think specifically with that one, it seems like CoolCats is probably the best example of it. Right? It was a project where, basically, I think the entire community really believed in that team. It was like a very sort of clear number two slash three behind, you know, Apes, or punks and apes. And they hadn't really stumbled at all. And now as they've released the Cool Pets and the game that's sort of supposed to go along with it. They've they've hit a sort of major stumbling block. And so people's, I guess, ability to assume that these roadmaps are all going to go smoothly is is getting proven wrong here... that a little Toby here here I'm trying to get, um, and so people are just kind of losing a touch of that bullishness. And maybe another example could possibly be PunksComic. I don't know I you know, I'm so not in the PixelVault community. But the time between issue one and Issue two of that was enormous and not at all what it's like, when you're waiting for comic books in general, because normally, in the comic book industry, a comic book series, you have one issue every single month, and then maybe, you know, every 18 months or whatever, there'll be a little hiatus for the artists to catch up something like that. But the speed with which with, with which they were delivering was a little bit poor. In some respects, they were making a lot of promises so It's hard to deliver on all of them, but...

Roy:

yeah, no, I think that is the prime example of a loss of confidence in a project's ability to deliver and then and then you combine that with the rug pools with the low effort projects that are just capturing so much liquidity and money and time and attention and it's not surprising that the market is it is in a little bit of a slump. The volumes are lower than they were last month and seem to be dropping a little bit and low prices. It hasn't like crashed we're not like no some, at least for the bluechips and the down a bit 30 40%, Like Bored Ape we're like 120 130 eth...

Jaime:

119, I think is the one I remember. Now they're like 80-85. So it's somewhat significant. To expand on that just a little bit. Um, you know, again, when you're thinking of a project that's as revered and successful as CoolCats not being able to deliver when you're looking at the projects that are tier three, tier four, tier five below that, that, you know, nobody believes in the team as much as they believe in the CoolCats team, or, you know, very few people do. I think, you know, when you see stumbling there you go, how are these people actually going to deliver on all these promises? Yeah. Yep. Okay, yeah, I'm gonna I'm heading on to the next question. Yep. I can't see. Okay. Okay. The next question is from @ColinLieb says, have profile picture projects peaked? What's the next large scale NFT trend?

Roy:

We've sort of already touched on this a little bit. Um, I don't think they've peaked. I think that they're just always going to be. Yeah, it's something that maybe we go back almost a year and like, people were saying after the, you know, there were 10 projects after the Bored Apes. Ah, alright, that's it. They've peaked the what's the next...

Jaime:

I remember singing bulls on the block? And that was like, you know, late June.

Roy:

Yeah. So crazy. Ah, I always remember my famous CoolCats team DMS me. And I'm like, Ah, I don't know. I think the markets a bit saturated.

Jaime:

Like for third cat project guy. Yeah, we got Gutter Cats, Moon Cats. And now another cat? No, we can't support that. Cryptokitties?, I do... Yeah, like, like we touched on earlier, I kind of think it might just always be the biggest category of NFTs. But I could see, as a percentage, it becoming less, but I don't know what it's going to be replaced with. Because of all the other stuff that might replace it. I feel like, um, you know, specifically Metaverse Land is one where I think prices have gotten out of hand in general, for how usable and numerous they are. So I don't necessarily foresee them gaining much ground on profile picture projects, I guess I could see art, just pure art NFTs, growing as a percentage of the overall NFT marketplace a little bit. But I think that's always kind of going to kind of be a minority in the sense that, you know, maybe it'll grow from 4 to 9 now or whatever like that, in a way that's not really threatening to profile picture projects dominance. But I, I still have a sense that more other stuff could could gain on them. But I think maybe it'll be stuff that I can't even really foresee. I mean, again, gaming is obviously another big factor. And I think as the game start to actually come out, perhaps they'll really take off and take some of the shine off of profile pictures.

Roy:

Yeah, I think gaming assets will really, eventually be I don't know if as big as PFPs, maybe maybe bigger, but certainly as a percentage, they'll go up. And I think wearables and like Metaverse fashion and stuff, because then it's like, currently, it's a tiny, tiny fraction of the market. You can't really use your wearables as like, alright, I go to PFP. That's my identity. But when we're running around in Sandbox, for instance, and then all of a sudden, you have a PFP. But now you can just like put on a new skin dress it up? Yeah. Have a certain gun, a weapon, a backpack, all that kind of stuff. Well, one

Jaime:

of those Bored Ape Yatch Club shotguns you're talking about? Yeah.

Roy:

Exactly. When that happens, I think they will capture more, more and more of the market as well.

Jaime:

Yeah, I mean, wearables that's a that's a good example of one where the current percentage has got to be under 1%. So yeah, you know, if it really catches on to any degree, that'll, that'll have a lot of room to grow, for sure. Yeah. Whereas, and again, back to the profile pictures. We've talked about this before. And I think this is something that I probably talked about quite a bit more than you but it just seems like the amount of them right now is so high relative to the amount of people that buy into the concept of identifying yourself with one of them. So it seems like you know, we can have another 200,000 people onboard NFTs, which I believe will take some amount of time that's you know, not super short. We can have them onboarded and and all the people existing already have plenty of profile picture projects to just dump on them. And, and we're still having new projects come out every single day adding on to that supply. Yeah. So it's just...

Roy:

It's so crazy. But like, again, we thought this in June last year, yeah. And then it kept going. And then it crashed in like, September, October. And we're like, okay, we knew it was coming, he's gonna crash. And then January came around and things, were even crazier and hit new highs. And then now we're coming down...

Jaime:

The speed with which NFT is our main streaming too, I think is faster than I anticipated. Hmm. I don't know if you agree with that or not. But the amount that the public at large has become aware of them that happened faster. And the amount and speed with which they're becoming not only aware, but not inherently hating them, or being very skeptical of them is also happening faster than I imagined by I think a lot. Yeah. It's I mean, again, we've talked about how time is weird is the thing we like to say. But we've only been here for a year, a year. It's crazy. And if you think about the difference in in how much the general public knows about them, and how dismissive they used to be of them. And all of that has happened in a lot less than a year. I don't know. To me, it feels like that has been happening faster than I expected.

Roy:

Yeah, same. It's, it's good to see... I think it comes down to again, just like the the relatability or like the different areas of life that people can find that interest them in NFTs again, gaming and gamers can find something like artists and creatives, musicians, photographers. So many different people find something that they can enjoy the NFT space, where prior to this with crypto, it was basically just finance and tech people.

Jaime:

Yeah. Sorry, I was just gonna say use and you still with them have that lewer That you could make money on it? Which right? Yeah, that was sort of the only thing maybe with crypto coins because it was like, I don't know how many of the people that were just jumping on to the crypto bandwagon were like, really caring about the tokenomics or whatever solution this particular ERC 20 purported to be solving. Whereas, you know, the actual use cases for a lot of these NFTs are more attractive to people, but you still have that possibility of making a little money on them.

Roy:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, apparently a lot of people used to say they thought defi was going to be what made crypto go mainstream. And it just clearly never happened. I mean, yeah, even now. So many people who are into NFT's barely know a defi is or reigns...

Jaime:

Us for instance, it's in our theme song and we never frickin talk about you. Yeah, it's it is funny, because at the time, you might have thought well yet like, why not defi right. That's, that's what crypto is, right. We're, we're decentralizing money. And And now, what what do you layer on top of money? A whole financial system, right. And we'll decentralize that. But this whole fun cultural thing of NFTs it just wasn't really a thing. Except for a very small, you know, I don't want I mean, I guess all the people that are OG in NF T's enough to actually have been around in 2017 aren't listening to us. So I don't need to worry about telling them. I'm aware that a couple of you guys exist that or whatever, but it was like, tiny, tiny, tiny. Yeah, um, and it's certainly something that I think is has started to and will continue to mainstream people into crypto so much more effectively. Yeah. And yeah, it's just it's just not slowing down. I'm just crazy and great. Yeah, Yeah, I was. I was just listening to us the other day. Somebody had asked me about me acquiring that Damien Hirst Currency. And I had talked about how on Twitter, I talked to multiple people after I tweeted that I got it that had gotten into NFT's accidentally, because they were just traditional art fans, and they they heard about this Damien Hirst, and they got it. And they were totally sure that they were going to be converting it into the physical, right? Yeah, of course. Of course. I want a physical Damien Hirst, I don't want this nonsense NFT thing and have just totally bought in to what NFT's can be, are are going to be all that stuff. And, um, you know that that's the main thing. Now you say this, you know, sort of a similar thing about how gamers can find it. I don't personally see that gamers have gotten into NFTs, because of gaming NFTs. Certainly it's possible to happen. And I think more so it will happen. But, you know, definitely in the long run, there's just so many use cases that we'll be able to onboard. So many different people to NFT's, for totally different reasons. And then it'll just expose them to the wider concept of NFT's, and how they can do these sort of interesting different things that they didn't think maybe that they were interested in or know about. Do you actually have maybe examples of people you've talked to that that have gotten into NFTs purely through gaming?

Roy:

No, exactly, I think, yeah, it's more of a, it will happen. Like, yeah, I believe that it will, it's sort of there's definitely a lot of opposition from the gaming community and from gamers about NFT's. And it's not a, it's very reasonable for them to have that sort of skepticism, because of how sort of the gaming the direction the gaming industry has been moving over the last 10-15 years, or what it used to be. Alright, you pay $50, you get a full game, it's finished, it's great. You can play it for 100 hours. Wonderful. And then you can sell the game to a friend or whatever even lend it to a friend. Now it's like, alright, you pay $80 presale, I will ship a game that barely works. It's full of bugs. And then every month, you're gonna have to pay an $8 subscription fee. And then there's DLC. And then there's in game items, which you can buy and you don't own and there's loot boxes. And as the gaming industry has been, let alone like casual gaming with microtransactions. And like the gaming industry has just been fleecing consumers basically, and making the gaming experience worse. And so from our perspective, we can see how NFT's can make that better. But if someone doesn't really understand NFTs they think, Oh, this is just another way the gaming industry is going to take our money.

Jaime:

Yeah, I think also the people that are sort of of that Yeah. And they're probably also hearing a lot of just the thinking, the only times they hear about NFTs is they're hearing about cryptopunks, or board apes or maybe fidenza or something. And they're hearing these enormous numbers. And they're going like, you know, we as a few proponents are going but wouldn't you like to own your in game assets rather than just sort of rent them from the company. And now, they hear these prices? And they're going like, yeah, I don't want to pay$30 to rent it from them. But I definitely don't want to pay$220,000. So, right, and thinking they're just going to be totally priced out of this. And like, you know, pay to win is sort of an expression that you hear a lot in gaming nowadays, because of the way they kind of go, you know, you can grind for eight hours or give us $4. I think when they hear they think about that concept, and then they hear these NFT prices, it only seems like it's gonna make things way worse for them, rather than potentially quite a bit better. Like, you know, us and NFT proponents are sort of hopeful that it will. general negative bad press about how and if he's bad for the environment about how NFT's like people getting scammed left, right, and center. And yeah, all this kind of stuff that makes mainstream news way more than like, the dozens or hundreds of projects that have been building real cool, interesting games. Right? Yeah. All right. Next question. Oh, is this you?

Roy:

I think it's me. Stan Viana says what is one thing you would suggest a community do to not stall in this weird market? Also, what was your best flip? The two very different questions.

Jaime:

Okay. That is, ah,

Roy:

what is one thing a community could do to not stall on this weird market? Um, I mean, it's an interesting question. I think it depends on what the community is trying to do is probably the first thing to think about. And then just doing that...

Jaime:

It's a terrible answer.

Roy:

I know, I know.

Jaime:

Like, there is a sense that like, yeah, staying true. If you actually have a community, it doesn't necessarily it doesn't stall. That's not what a community does. But when you have something where you're kind of just focused on floor prices going up, and you have a fictitious community around trying to have that happen, then once the floor stalls, then the community stalls. I think there's something to that, where like, you have to differentiate between a real community and a fictitious community. And this question is almost inherently asking About propping up a fictitious community, because if you have a real community, why is it going to stall? Because market prices are coming down a little bit? That's a community maybe?

Roy:

Yeah, I think it comes down to sort of what will your community do, I think, do things that booster the community, community building events and stuff that makes people want to be part of the community for again, more than anything do with price or money? And I get people asking me this fairly frequently. How do you build a good community? I'm launching an NFT project, what should we do to build a community and to me, it comes down to like, look at what people did to build communities before NFTs without NFTs because humans have been building communities for 1000s and 1000s of years. And there's a lot to be learned there and...

Jaime:

Agriculture...

Roy:

Sure. Don't think we're gonna have agriculture in discord yet.

Jaime:

Really one of the first things that brought people together right...

Roy:

Let's go a little more 21st century and look at like

Jaime:

Assembly line? Yeah.

Roy:

The printing press, um, no, but like a bookclub. Three things that make people want to come to your discord and have fun, poker nights, trivia nights, community building events, you know, have Twitter Spaces and have little like, art contests and meme contests and conversations that are insightful and interesting. And that people that get people like, want to spend time in your discord in the community, interacting with other community members interacting with the team, because I think that's where a real community gets built. And, you know, it takes time, but then as people continue to come back, and, you know, take part in these events, they they meet other people, and hopefully that they like the other people and then make make these relationships and like, stuff, that's, that's really the heart and soul of the community, it comes down to like, getting people wanting to spend time there. And how do you do that you, you come up with events you have try and steer the conversation in ways that are deeper and more insightful and meaningful than floor price. And, and even then, just like, what the project is, and what they're building, like, there's so much more to a community than just what the team and the project founders set. So much of it comes from within the community, themselves. Usually, they're drawn to the project because of the the team and the founders and the vision and whatever, whether it's the art that appreciates them, or the game that the potentially building or the comic that they're releasing. But then now you have a group of people who have somewhat connected by a common interest, give them something to do together, and then they'll have fun. And then yeah,

Jaime:

Yeah. I mean, ultimately, you want to provide a experience, right? So it can be educational, can be entertainment. It can be something in between, but you have to give people a reason to, but what is the point of this community? You know, what I mean? Um, and what is the benefit of being a part of this community, and it kind of goes from there and and that's going to be very individual, I would say, based on the project, because, you know, if you're, if you're talking about the ZedRun community, what they're going to do to keep that community together is quite different from what the art blocks community is going to do, to keep that community together and you have to, you know, be cognizant of what type of community you have. And and go from there. Alright, second part of the question, what was your best flip? Is that converge? I'm so jealous. I would... Park cherries very good.

Roy:

I don't like cherry flavor things. I'm less jealous now...

Jaime:

It doesn't taste like an artificial cherry taste. Are we sponsored by Kavita? I'm shoving it. Like,

Roy:

What? What was your best flip Jaime?

Jaime:

I sold a Summer Fragment Of The Infinite Field for 32 eth that I had minted for like two or three eth. I think that would have to be it for me pull up my activity and get even more exact, but that would definitely be it. That's a hell of a flip. Um, I don't think I've sold an NFT for that much. You don't have a seller. Like I mean, yeah, that's where you have a bunch of them and then you kind of slowly sell off bits and pieces. But yeah, terms of big big sales. I don't, you don't really done one of those...

Roy:

The largest that I can think of was a blocks of art, the blocks of art project on art blocks minted for like, I don't know, point one or point one five, and then I sold it for about 14 eth. Which just a is that 1,000x. That's probably 1,000x. That's crazy. Yeah. And then I had a really crazy night during the period when I was like a crazy aggressive flipper. I minted these things I think they called dope shivers. And I'm into them for .02 or something. And I listed one of them five eth and it just sold.

Jaime:

I'm looking at my tax spreadsheet. So the fragment that I'm talking about, I minted it for 2.553 eth. I guess it was two plus a lot of gas. And I sold it for 28.8. eth. I mean, I guess it was 32. But after the feed on OpenSea, it was 28.8. So that was like 26 eth and it was probably only three weeks or something, maybe not even right. I think it was probably...

Roy:

Very short. Yeah.

Jaime:

I have another one when Blitmaps were going crazy. I think maybe the floor was around six or something and somebody undercut it and I got one for four. And it was like kind of right before things started going parabolic in August or wherever. And I was able to sell it for 17.5 eth. Like very shortly thereafter. That's a great one.

Roy:

I'm thinking about it. I did sell, I think it was a Mutant Garden Cedar. But I minted I think a few of them at point four. And then again, when things are going crazy, I sold one for around 20 eth.

Jaime:

I never liked those. But I was disappointed that I missed them when the prices were going crazy. Yeah. I like the concept. But the actual art itself never appealed to me.

Roy:

Yeah, I would say I'm much the same.

Jaime:

I'm sure. Do we want to think about stalled communities or best flips a little bit longer? No, no, I think we've answered that. Okay, What is a best alternative... Is this the same person?

Roy:

This is three people who had variations on the same question. Okay, maybe the first one.

Jaime:

I'll read the first one. And then while you talk, I'll maybe glance over the second. Yeah, versions. What is a best alternative for project founders to build a great allow list without discord vibing/grinding? Yeah, we had a few questions are just the same basic,

Roy:

Basically the same thing...

Jaime:

You are going to be, I'm sorry, you're going to be a lot better at answering this because like, once whitelist started becoming thing I just tapped out. I read on Twitter that people are super sick of it and all that. Yeah, I never did any of the discord crazy grinding that people got into for it. And I never released a project like yours that that would have given me insight from that perspective. So go ahead.

Roy:

Yeah, I mean, I never, I never did the grinding, like I was basically one foot out the door when it was already becoming mainstream one foot out the door from flipping at least, um, basically, you know, projects, discovered that, you know, gas was crazy people hated gas wars how can we avoid that, oh, we'll just whitelist a bunch of people and they can mint and we'll give them like a 24 hour window. So whenever gas is low without having to compete with one another. And then what ended up happening was, I mean, and that that still is a pretty good solution for projects where there's insane demand and a limited supply. problem was that every project decided, hey, let's do that. And for a while people found these these whitelists these mintlists spots valuable. And so they people fighting over one another to get on them, and then they get on them. And they'd mint because everybody that mint out it will go up in value, and it was great. But then the market turned a little bit. And it started being the case where not every project minted out and started flying on secondary. So people would still, you know, try and get these spots. And at the same time projects, were giving them out more and more freely. And then it ended up in this situation where there was 5000 people on the list to mint, but then everyone was like waiting and seeing and like, oh, I only mint if everyone if it looks like it's going to sell out, then otherwise, I don't want to be the first one to mint I don't wanna be the first 100 because then if only 200 people mint at a 10k that's a bad investment. So it ended up being in this face where the mintlist spots were not that valuable. And then we sort of tanking full circle again when I guess demand picked up especially in January and projects started getting a ton more hype and then it became Like everyone wanted to get on these mintlist spots. And that's sort of kind of where we are now still for hyped projects. And people started even we came full circle even more where projects said, Hey, let's incentivize people on the mintlist to mint by making it slightly cheaper than the public sale. So there's that. Which brings us back to the whole FOMO round bonding curve thing that began this whole thing off with hashmarks last year, which people ended up hating but I think I think it's a pretty nice middle ground to give people on the mintlist slight discount, and incentive to mint, perhaps. Anyway, the ways people got on to the mintlist got more and more elaborate and difficult overtime. It used to be...

Jaime:

I see good memes on Twitter, like, yeah, the one where it's like a custom Mario level where it's like, yeah, things are spinning. People going like, this is me trying to get on them.

Roy:

Basically, projects were like, alright, we don't want to give it to just anybody because then bots and flippers will get it. We want to give it to people who show that the genuinely interested. And so I was like, well, how about we give it to the people who are most active in the discord you can very quickly see based on the amount of messages people have posted. And it's great to do that. If it's like a retroactive thing, you'd have to just go to three months, you reward the people who've been organically active. But when you say, Alright, we're gonna give a mintlist to anyone who grinds to level six, which requires, I don't know, 500 messages, then people just sitting there spamming GM, hello, etc. Fake conversations all day. No one's having fun. And then they were like, Well, how about we we incentivize it, make it so that if people invite other people to the discord, then because we can track how many people everyone invites, alright, if you invite five people, you're guaranteed a spot. And then it became if you're invited five people, you go into a raffle to win a spot. And it was like, alright, well inflate out discord numbers, but then people started buying that and it's just yeah, no one really loves it. And it ends it ends up not really working out well for the projects either because they get a bunch of people who are on the mintlist who are just there to grind these mintlit spots and then wait and see. So in terms of Alright, to answer the question, what are the best alternatives to build a great allowlist without discord vibing and griding. First thing I would say is consider whether you even need a mintlist in the first place. If you have that much, like only really consider it once you have, I think quite a bit of demand, then then start figuring out how to give out these spots and realize that what you have is something of value. So again, retroactively reward people who found your project early, who were in your discord, who are good community members. And it takes a bit of time and effort. It's not just anyone who grinds over five, maybe you have to have a team member whose pretty much full job it is to like, look out for people who are helpful. Or maybe you deputize them community managers and get them to like, you know, find people who have been helpful. And then you can do things like partner and collaborate with other NFT projects, and exchange if they're coming up with a launch soon. And your community wants to be part of the project and community wants to be part of yours. You can you can exchange some spots and stuff like that. Um, yeah, but honestly...

Jaime:

I was thinking about the concept. Like, I remember when Bato launched. And they were they gave the tokens freely to people who had been part of certain projects. And I thought, you know, specifically with that project, and it being an art project, then giving it to owners of art blocks was a smart way to make sure that people in your project are people that are already in this space and have shown an interest in something that is similar to what you have. So excuse me, excuse me again, what about the concept of, you know, allowing minters from projects whose communities are specifically interested in, you know, the same area that you are trying to build in? That seems like sort of a smart idea? You still need the demand. But if you have the demand, and you're trying to figure out, who do we let in and like, theoretically, hopefully, how do we make sure it's not just cynical flippers just in it for the money, you go? Well, who is in the, in the projects that have the community that are doing similar things to what I want to do?

Roy:

Yeah, and that's basically what more projects are doing. And the good ones do it in a manner where they so let's say, you're launching a PFP project, you go Alright, we're gonna go partner with CoolCats and give 250 spots to the CoolCats community, give out to their community. We'll go partner with the littles with the Bored Ape Yatch Club with all these communities and give out like one to 300 spots to each community.

Jaime:

What's What's the bit way one that he was saying was, oh, we give something to that community.

Roy:

Yeah, I can't even remember yet. It works well if the communities you partner with basically share a vision and align with yours well, it what doesn't work well is when you're just giving out 100 200 spots to anyone that will take them. Yeah. So I think the projects that work well are the ones where like, they take time to partner with projects who have communities that they would generally like their members to be part of it. And then you're always gonna get some amount of people from every community who are flippers, but you know, flippers are not evil. And I think projects, having some some quantity of flippers is helpful to, you know, spur secondary market activity, and it's healthy to have some percentage of flippers you just don't want to enjoin at...

Jaime:

Because then you don't have a community.

Roy:

Exactly. Yeah, I don't know what the ratio is. But yet,

Jaime:

it is worth kind of going back to your, the very beginning of the answer that I think where you're just going, like, the reason we ever started doing any of this right was to avoid gas wars. So you have to go, you know, is there enough demand that there would even be one anyway, if there's not, you probably don't need one. And, you know, is there another way to avoid the gas war, I mean, for instance, the way you launch Zen Academy's token, now, again, that's an ERC 1155. And it's different in terms of the supply and in all of that, but that is another way that you don't need to make a allow list or Whitelist, necessarily, but you can still avoid the gas war, which those were designed to circumvent. So, you know, even with a profile picture project, like, again, we talked about this earlier, but like the 10k numbers sort of arbitrary. And if you have randomization actually happening during the the minting process, rather than, you know, ahead of time, and then picking which of those randomly assigned once you get, you can probably just have a more open minting style that lasts whatever amount of time and then allow the actual demand to drive how much supply there is. And then also having you know, that happen means that there isn't going to be this insane rush that causes the gas war that people want to avoid, which means you would have needed DLLs. So you can just kind of have a more casual mint with with maybe possibly not a set in stone ahead of time cap on the supply. And I feel like that's not really something we ever see as a profile picture project where they go, we don't know what the supply is going to be, we're gonna be open for three days. And you know, there might be... That would be an interesting thing, I think.

Roy:

Yeah, and you can you can still do it with like ERC 1155, you can just say we're gonna sell mid passes for right. And then each mint pass, at the end of a week, you just redeem it for a PFP. And maybe we end up with 220 people, maybe we end up with 12,000 sort of depending on how demand goes. And you know, people say, well, there's always a risk that not too many mint, but the project does not necessarily have to end there. If your entire if the success of your project is predicated on selling out 10k You're in some senses, setting yourself up for failure. Yeah, and I think you can, you can, you can, many collections can succeed selling out like 500. And then having if the if that's 500 People who are really passionate about the project and the community and the art and stuff, you can always release a second collection, you know, in a few weeks in a few months of just open it up again, you know, and then whoever wants to join can join. And,

Jaime:

Yeah, there's a lot of possibilities. If you are really building and you're really building something interesting. The initial men is just that's just the initial men. And it's like, yeah, if you think about what almost any really successful project is now, versus what it looks like on day zero or day one, it's, there's a big difference there and a successful project. Okay, next question comes. What? Um, it's me, right. Okay, yeah, you're right. I read the first one. And then

Roy:

@hammmer_ says What other partnerships do you foresee?(Building off of Cool Cats X Puma, Adidas X BAYC). Kind of maybe add in Nike and artifact but let's say anyway, curious about potential partnerships for Doodles. This is not something I've thought a lot about. Have you thought about what other partnerships or companies might enter the space?

Jaime:

I sort of have? Yeah, I mean, I've talked a little bit on the podcast before previously that professional sports teams, the way that they have very actively engaged community already that's built around, you know, this sort of, it's like a thing that's not static, but you also have a history that you can tap into And it's kind of dynamic and and all that. There's just a ton of stuff that can be done with him. I don't think necessarily that they will be going the route of partnering with existing profile picture projects so much. But I could definitely see there's a lot of potential there for them to either do their own NFTs or yes, collaborate with various NFT projects. I don't I don't think doodles necessarily is a specific good example of that. But I feel like in general, sports teams are going to be doing a lot with NFTs, and possibly some projects that are, I would, I would think they have to be ones that have huge supply would be good examples of ones for them to partner with. Also, you know, like art blocks, for instance, but also places like super rare, and foundation, those sorts of things, I think there's going to be just a lot more partnerships of them with traditional art, where the traditional art world capitulates to some degree and acknowledges Yeah, this is our, yeah, this is a valid way to own it, and blah, blah, blah. And there's just going to be nice. I think, in the future, more examples of, of, you know, NFT native art getting shown and respected in more traditional art spaces. Did you happen to see the giant announcement snowfro made earlier today? No.

Roy:

Yeah, I mean, he's basically talking a lot about this, how he's spent the last like three weeks, every other day in a new city, talking with traditional art houses, galleries, artists, and stuff about, again, just how excited they are. He showed he had his own showing, I think it was in New York,

Jaime:

I saw that. But yeah, this particular announcement you're talking about?

Roy:

Yeah. And it's just like, he was just talking about how cool it is that they comment around like that, they are starting to see how there are some people from the traditional art world who are getting very excited and buying NFT's. And similarly, the people who, including himself, are buying traditional art as well, because it goes both ways and sort of like the world emerging. And obviously, the traditional non NFT art space is much larger than the NFT art space right now. But you know that that disparity is is probably going to shrink?

Jaime:

Yeah, boy that this is on topic, I think. But that setup that they did in Miami, it just looked amazing. I mean, yeah, all the all the videos and stills I saw of the way that they were showing that art looked fantastic. And yeah, so much better than you normally see. So as the ability to take this art that's on the blockchain that we're mostly just seeing on our phones and our computers, and to be able to scale it up and and keep it classy. Rather than just going to here's a Samsung TV, you can see the cord running. It's not the same dimensions as the piece of art. But yeah, throw it up on there anyway, like, once we're past that and doing more of this stuff. I think it's gonna be impossible for people that are appreciate traditional art, not to appreciate some of this stuff. And yeah, that's so right for, you know, collaborations that benefit both parties, which is, you know, ultimately, I think, what you need out of a collaboration or partnership. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's, it's so crazy to think that our blocks has only existed for like 14 months, 15 months. And it's, I kind of scribbles the other day. We're getting off topic. The Daisy Ruins?

Roy:

Yeah. Well, I

Jaime:

Well, I mean, again, I have so much art blocks. Um, yeah. And I'd much more finite amount of money. So it seemed like do I really need to spend seven and a half eth on more art blocks? Now I kind of wish I did. Yeah, you know, what else? I could see. Like, just snack brands. Partnering with it. Go look, this is our, our Bored Ape pretzels or some shit. And then anybody who has one can get a free bag of it or whatever. I don't like... I some sort of sort of simple, like mascot type situation happening in that, like, where it's just kind of easy to go. Here's this product and now we're just slapping this cartoon on it for for branding purposes. I could see that sort of thing being a space where, you know, NFT communities try to get more mainstream and whatever from that. Wow, these, you know, food companies. Try to make themselves a little bit hipper and have a new avenue for for advertising, I could see something that really works well for both communities. That's kind of simple in that respect to.

Roy:

Yeah, yeah, we really, for the most part, we've seen even the examples given here. It's like merch, it's Puma, Adidas, Nike entering it. A couple of others. I can't remember off the top of my head, but we haven't seen too much else, I think. Uh, yeah, every industry, you were gonna find them in the NFT space, whether it's their own NFT's, whether it's partnering with existing collections.

Jaime:

Yeah. And just, I mean, this is a thing that's been hypothesized and teased and various stuff, but like, we will certainly be seeing TV shows and movies at some point, with intellectual property that comes from NFT projects. That's only a matter of time. And that'll just be another example. When eventually Netflix goes, Yeah, we want to buy the rights to this movie or whatever. Yeah, I think I think that's gonna just have to happen. Probably before the end of the year, we'll see something. Something necessary necessarily the finished product, but the deal, right. All right. Our next question comes from @juljan1311. Drill, John, something like that. They say you think art blocks is coming to Coinbase? It would be important for generative art, best from Hamburg. Hamburg, that's is that close to you?

Roy:

It's in the same country. Well, you're an ignorant dumb American. Oh, my god.

Jaime:

So I, I quickly Googled art blocks Coinbase, ahead of time to see if they had made an announcement, I couldn't find exactly them saying, hey, they're going to be one of our launch partners or whatever. But they did do. They do some market updates that they call around the block. And in issue number 18 of that they specifically did talk about our blocks for a bit. They show some ringers, they show some of fidenzas. And also just in general, like their artblocks is too big of a part of NFT's for me to conceive of Coinbase not having them. And they've teased so many different projects as being a part of them. So I definitely think that they will be buying or tradable just in general, on Coinbase.

Roy:

I tend to agree I have a vague memory of when Coinbase first announced their marketplace, I remember there was like an image of a ghost and a couple other collections. And I think there was a squiggle but maybe my brain is just making

Jaime:

Yeah, I can remember the ghost I think maybe I can remember like apes and cool cats. Yeah, maybe but I don't necessarily remember art blocks. But yeah, I would be stunned if they didn't include art blocks that would be wild to me.

Roy:

Yeah. would be important for generative art. It would be Yeah. Yeah. Somewhat. Somewhat. Yeah. @cryptoNFTmum Why are all doxxed people always... why did you put this in? Why are all doxxed people always so good looking?

Jaime:

I thought it would be fun to teach our listeners about sampling bias. Ah, okay, go on teach our listeners about sampling bias, well, Next question. Yeah. So you have you know, this group of, let's say, 1000 people, right, and over here you have, you know, the most unattractive of the 1000 over here you have the most attractive of that 1000 And now they all have the option to doxx, you're gonna have a lot more, I can't remember which end of the spectrum was but you're I mean, but hold on a second. There is a sense that this gonna have a lot more people on the attractive end of the spectrum, voluntarily showing who they are in real life doxing themselves so to speak. And that's what's called a sampling bias. And that I believe is why all doxxed people are so good looking. That's it.

Roy:

I thought you're gonna like point out some ugly

Jaime:

I was done. But sampling bias is sort of an important thing that's worth you know, thinking about and knowing about in general and also in the NFT space. I mean, if you go I see all these people on Twitter that are talking about how much they think this projects floor is going to go up for some shit. You have a sampling bias there of people that are fucking already own a bunch of that stuff. So you have to think about You know, what are people's incentives for doing and saying what they are, versus, you know, people that are choosing not to do that same thing? And a kind of, it's going to come back to a sampling bias a lot of times. That's, I didn't, I didn't know it's gonna be so controversial to include the question, but

Roy:

it's not controversial. It was just funny.

Jaime:

lot. It was certainly a lot less about NFT's and all the rest of it. Yeah. No, there we go. sampling bias. You're up next. Now. I now I would Google sampling bias to make sure that it's the right bias that I'm thinking I'm quite sure it is.

Roy:

I think it is, I think yes. Um,

Jaime:

Yeah. Um, the last question spoiler alert, spoiler alert. Comes from MarkRocha225. They say what's the advantage of onchain NFTs in the long run? And what do you think about the development of onchain NFTs in the future?

Roy:

The advantage of onchain and well one of the advantages of on chain NFTs basically is that they're not dependent on anything external to the Ethereum blockchain, basically.

Jaime:

So dependency, Etherium keeps going. So the NFT.

Roy:

Yep, a lot of NFT's like Bored Apes, for instance. The actual NFT itself, the thing that exists on the blockchain is not the actual image of the NFT is a bunch of text, data. And within that data, there is a link to a URL where the NFT where it points to the like an image file of the NFT the or not of the of the ape, for instance, and that is hosted...

Jaime:

Which people associate with whorth as NFT but it's not.

Roy:

Where that is hosted is important. Because if the place that that's hosted, goes down, for whatever reason, effectively, your NFT no longer is represented by an image. It's just it's just...

Jaime:

The thing that you think of as the NFT is no longer actually connected to it. Yeah. So to me, it's like you kind of have levels of security. And again, it kind of goes back to dependencies. But the the most stable NFT is going to be something where all of the all of the data, all the art is just right there on the chain, because the only thing that you need to survive there is the Ethereum blockchain, or whatever blockchain, the NFT happens to be on. But you know, mostly we're talking about Etherium. And then after that, you're looking at something like our[...] or IPFS, which are really robust, decentralized systems for storing data. But again, now, still, it's It's decentralized, it's robust. But it could go away at some point for whatever various reason or reasons. So now you have in order for my NFT, to stay the way that I think of it as I need Ethereum to survive, and [...] or IPFS, you know, and now after that, you go to something that's even worse, like, on the OpenSea shared contract forever, now you need open seas servers to stay running, which is something that's even less likely because, honestly, in 70 years is OpenSea still gonna be around? It's, it's, it's not at all certain we've seen companies become big and and go away before and specifically in the NFT space. There are examples of people who had NFTs, I actually read a good article by I think artgnome is the guy. He had some xcopies from before xcopy was xcopy. And it was just it was on some marketplace that neither of us have ever heard of. And well, all the images were stored there. And that's where the NFT's pointed to and it's just now he's got these xcopy NFT's that maybe should be worth millions but are not worth squat. Yeah. So yeah, it's it has to do with what needs to survive for your NFT to still be what you think it is when you're initially getting involved and the on chain ones have zero dependencies besides the blockchain itself, or I guess if you want to be like, a douchebag, you could go you know, the internet and a variety and all that. Yeah.

Roy:

Um, it's probably worth mentioning like, why, why doesn't every project just be on chain then like, if it's, why would a project rely on external dependency? And basically, to write anything to the Ethereum blockchain costs, money costs gas, and the more information that you're adding to the blockchain, the more it costs and image files are quite large, and the data is just a lot of information. And so it's extremely, extremely expensive to are prohibitively so prohibitively expensive, like It would cost 10s of 1000s of dollars, if not hundreds of 1000s to upload just a single, like, high quality, you know, 4k resolution image. Yeah, where and that's why basically every single NFT you see that's on chain is like these pixelated, you know, tiny, low resolution images, because that is a foreign. Yeah, yeah.

Jaime:

Good point. I mean, you know, so the other, there's sort of like hybrid stuff like art blocks, for instance, the image is not stored on chain. But the image is also not just basically a link in the NFT to an image off site, you basically have the code that can net basically all the code to reproduce, the image is stored on chain. So you don't actually have the image on chain. But you can reproduce the image on chain with only the on chain data plus like JavaScript or whatever.

Roy:

Yeah, some of them don't even require JavaScript. It's just like, yeah, yeah. But it is because various levels of like, onchaines and and how, yeah, how dependent? Yeah, all that stuff. But alright, let's get to the second part of the question. What do you think about the development of on chain NFT's in the future? Um, I think we're seeing people innovate and get better at finding ways to store more data on the Ethereum blockchain, or like, effectively on the Ethereum blockchain. I'm not technologic...

Jaime:

Blitnauts somehow found a way to have the images on chain, even though they're not exactly pixel art. Yeah, they must have done something crafty there.

Roy:

Yeah. And there's, yeah, there's all sorts of crazy technological stuff people have figuring out and innovating that I'm neither of us really understand properly. But

Jaime:

I think I think there's, you know, when we talk about the, the value of NFTs, and you know, sort of crypto stuff in general, about how these things are, like, you know, Legos or building blocks, and how it's sort of interoperable, I think, when you have a, you know, this NFT over here, where the trying to have them be really to the camera anyway, where the image is stored on chain, versus something where you just have a link on chain, the ability for other smart contracts to really interact with, the actual image that we're all associating with the NFT is much stronger over on the side where you have on chain images, versus ones where you just have an on chain link to an off site stored image. And so I could, I can definitely see in the future somehow, whether that really on chain stuff is more able to be plugged into pipelines of code of smart contracts that are just kind of doing interesting things. Yeah, no 100% In a way that literally is sort of reflecting it, and actually has to do with the specifics of what you're on chain images. Because, you know, you can sort of do the same thing with the other ones, but you have to like query off chain to have the specifics of what the image is. And so the ability to actually have, you know, not just what project it is, but what piece from that project, have some sort of relevance to the smart contracts that you're interacting with, is going to just be much smoother to do with that on chain stuff.

Roy:

Yeah, yeah. Like one thing you can do is so often, even though the images stored off chain, again, using Apes, as an example, the trait data is stored on chain. So what another smart contract can do is alright, I know that ape five, six, two, nine or whatever, I know it has gold fur I know it has laser eyes... But you still cannot reproduce exactly what it looks like based just with the on chain data. But if it is, say a blitmap, or a chain runner, where it's all stored on chain, you can literally just reproduce the exact copy of that into your contract into your game into your world or whatever you're building. And

Jaime:

yeah, you can you can do do like derivative stuffs with it, again, where it's just everything is happening on the chain, and it's only using stuff that's already on the chain in order to do that. And again, yeah, you make a good point by saying it's not just that the NFT for my Ape says this is a 9838. And here's the link to the image on the chain. We do have the information about the traits and stuff. So again, there's going to be some level of interoperability with the smart contracts and stuff that can work with the specifics of your thing, but It's all slightly abstracted. And in order to, you know, translate, what does the trait toga mean? You have to again, look at these offs off chain images to be able to translate that, whereas again, the on chain stuff, it's all there. So you see, you know, my blitmap, for instance. You know, if they also had traits, and one of them was toga, you could not only see that it has toga, but literally see what toga means within the context of this NFT project. Because it's just right there on the chain, it means it means you got a gray pixel here, a great pixel here, and like a red pixel layer, for instance. Yeah. I'm looking at Blitmaps now... Did you see the merch the other day?

Roy:

No, I did not.

Jaime:

I can link you to it after this. But somebody made some cool looking merch, none of the ones that had any of the compositions that I have, so I'm not as interested. But it looks pretty cool. Yeah.

Roy:

I've been the older like the teasers that Don keeps tweeting out about like the blitnauts running around in this 2.5D gaming world. It's just it's all very exciting, and makes me just baffled that the prices are not, I don't know.

Jaime:

Yeah, well, that's one of those things where I'm, I'm sure we've talked about this before, or at least I have, but the idea of supply and demand, you know, traditionally, we always think smaller supply means higher prices, if you have the same amount of demand. And I guess that actually still holds true here. But when you have a certain amount of supply, that allows it to become more of a community thing, which kind of does the self reinforcing game type thing. And it's like, just as a, for instance, if you have a profile picture project that only has three NFT's in it, you're just you're never going to be able to build up demand from that project. Yes. There's, there's no sense of community. Yeah, you know, I guess, in theory, if, if people did only three of them, you know, they might end up being very prized, but yeah, really different thing. And, again, the total value of those three would probably not be nearly as big as if he did a 10,000 picture. Yeah, thing. Anyway, that's, that I think, is part of the reason possibly that blitmaps have not been in gutter cat gang too. These projects are super legit. Um, and, you know, again, in theory, they have much smaller supplies than these other things. So why why are they not big? And I think it's possibly because the size of the projects, in terms of the number of NFT's is not big enough to get that real, self sustaining marketing system on Twitter and discord or whatever, of just people having them as their profile pictures.

Roy:

Yeah, no, I agree. 100%. I think that that's a huge part of why. It just hasn't taken off quite as much as some of these other collections. But I think, as they add to the universe, and yeah, like the I think the rivals are coming soon. Or the enemies. Yeah. And yeah, and if those are new, NFT's and the collection size is larger, and it's a Don project and people get excited for it, then maybe, yeah, anyway.

Jaime:

Um, there was talk of us playing a chess game, a very quick chess game. Uh, huh. On this, are you still interested in that?

Roy:

I was hoping. I was hoping to play a few games. So I was less rusty.

Jaime:

Because I maybe I'll see you next time. Maybe I'll be you next time.

Roy:

Oh, we can play now. You can beat me for the very first time.

Jaime:

And what are the odds of that? Right. Alright, I'm going to give a good we'll do one minute with no increment. Okay, so it'll be over really quick. People that don't care about chess don't have to get subjected to a whole long thing. I'm gonna send you the link. This is this is nerve racking. It's way more nerve racking. We've played 200 games of chess. You've never beaten me. This is cool. I had a couple where I really should have though. Are you going to share your screen because you're more technologically savvy?

Roy:

Yeah, sure. And you've been playing chess every day 10 games a day for like last year and I...

Jaime:

But my rate my rating is still nowhere near what your rating is. So let's not try and pull out an excuse already. Let's see. Sharescreen... room tab... window. That one this is this is terrifying. All right now, by the way, I never played this fast either. So it's actually is not to...

Roy:

Should be like one plus three or something else. No, no, we just carry on clicking join game.

Jaime:

Oh, of course you got the white pieces. Alright, good luck. This is some great podcasting. Oh god this is really really quick Oh fuck. I just got this queen. And I was gonna nah, god damn alright give up. Fuck. Okay, that was interesting and really, really, uh, less than a minute, really, really unenjoyable for the people that are not doing the video podcast. Only.

Roy:

I don't know. Maybe when I choose you queen, it was like,

Jaime:

Yeah. Anyway, that was us playing a quick game of chess. Uh huh, duck. It's so cool. It's so fast.

Roy:

I like at the bottom. You can see the score. 99 and a half.

Jaime:

Yeah, actually, you can see that I did get a win there rose like

Roy:

that. That was not a real win. That was Yeah.

Jaime:

You timed out.

Roy:

Yeah, this is this is the game that you won.

Jaime:

That was a strong response there. Yeah. You're like e5. I don't know what to do. I give up. Um, what a great ending to the podcast this has been no? I think so. It was great ending. Ah, all right. This has been Two Bored Apes, talking NFTs...

Roy:

and Kevin's. And some. I think we're actually doing the Kevin project as well. By the way.

Jaime:

I don't know what that means. Oh, project. I know that Kevin is the famous pixelmon.

Roy:

Right. Yeah, I was. I jokingly tweeted out yesterday, should I just...

Jaime:

change the screen back to just the two of us? What

Roy:

How do I do this? I jokingly tweeted out yesterday, should I just spend 7 eth on and buy a Kevin? I was never actually going to do it. But then. And then like, I was like, hey, maybe I'll just do like an MS Paint collection. And then we'll sell them and send all the money to Ukraine. Or support Ukraine. And then even then it was like kind of a joke. And I wasn't really serious. And then Zagabond, the founder of Azuki stands me and he's like, Alright, let's do it. And I'm like, alright, well, you got the devs you got the you know, you can create it. And then earlier today, I crowdsourced and just tweeted out hey, maybe this is happening. Send in your best MSPaint versions because I'm, I'm I didn't have the time to sit down and create a bunch and now I've got like 30 Kevin's that are all memes as the people created and we might get it out in the next day or so and send some money to Ukraine. Yeah, right. Get that edge off. That's that's so cool. Oh

Jaime:

Oh my god. That is crazy. And just even crazier. Oh my god. Justin, son. What a fucking douchebag Ah, hey, you want to give a negative shoutout to Justin son for being so out of touch and smooth? The other day?

Roy:

He gets our first official boo.

Jaime:

Yeah, maybe that's true. Oh, I was. What's that word? I was what? That word game that we play. Oh, what am I thinking? I was literally got so excited about was me just I wanted to talk to you about how excited I am to see the new Batman movie. Which I don't know that we need to be on the podcast for that. You want to play What am I thinking? Yeah,

Roy:

I wanted to get sidetracked about how excited I was to see Spider Man and then Rachel booked which is they speak German. But let's play. Let's play. What am I thinking?

Jaime:

Alright, let me think of a word here.

Roy:

Look around your room.

Jaime:

No, I'm not gonna do that again. Huh? Okay, I got one. I've got something that's on my desk. 3, 2, 1... vigilante. Vigilante.

Roy:

Golfball... vigilante and golf ball. Okay, all right. 3, 2, 1... Punisher.

Jaime:

Batman. We get we're getting pretty close already bad.

Roy:

We're maybe too close already.

Jaime:

Alright, um, who is between Batman? And the Punisher? Okay. 3, 2, 1.. Daredevil! Yes!

Roy:

Daredevil!

Jaime:

Oh my God, that's great. I love Daredevil. Batman. is a great idea. Great. I just watched one that was game.

Roy:

My first instinct was the Joker. But...

Jaime:

to think of somebody with guns for a little bit. Anyway, we don't need to we don't need to get into our thought process all that much.

Roy:

This if we are doing a POAP that would be the code but we're not...

Jaime:

We're not doing... click on links in the show notes subscribe. What do you what do you have? I'm trying to end the episode Roy?

Roy:

Hum, Vitor had a pretty cool idea about I don't know if you saw it. How so much of the... Like the only discord community really have for Two Bored Apes is in the ZenAcademy Discord. But you need a ZenAcademy token to participate in the discussion. So he had the idea of like airdropping on Polygon, something to listeners who want be part of it.

Jaime:

Smart idea. We're gonna do it. That's a good point. But I think it does. I mean, Zedrun

Roy:

Yeah, we just need to figure out how to do it. We just definitely gonna do it. I mean, why wouldn't we do it? Assuming the collabland works with polygon assets? Because we're probably not going to airdrop on ethereum main net. That's right. Yeah. must have like, I'm gonna say must I think that they do. I'm confirmed roles or whatever, and their discord. Yeah, I'm actually we don't even need collabland in theory, right? Just like, make some code. Make some code?

Jaime:

Like whatever collabland is doing to confirm that you have these things in your wallet on eth main net, as some programmer could also do with polygon. Absolutely. Right. You know the people you've got the money so you can just hire him and Roy's gonna get this done for our listeners. Even if collabland doesn't support polygon. This is an onchain promise from Roy.

Roy:

Onchain? Onchain promisse?

Jaime:

You know maybe I'll mint as an NFT to make it on chain all right. Um, I'm gonna try to end the episode again. This has been episode 31

Roy:

32 Jaime. Bye.

Jaime:

Ep 32. Thanks for listening, etc. Bye.

Intro:

Two Bored Apes, talking NFT's, De-fi, and some random stuff! uh uh uh uh Two Bored Apes, talking NFT's, De-fi, and some random stuff! uh uh uh uh

Intro
Why are 10K PFP projects so popular?
Holding your crypto in Metamask vs. Exchanges
Why are NFTs currently in a downturn?
Did PFPs peak and what’s the next trend?
Building a strong community to stay afloat in this crazy market
Best NFT flip of Roy and Jaime
The best alternatives for whitelists for project founders
Adidas, Nike, what’s next?
Jaime on sampling bias
1min chess Roy vs. Jaime
Let’s play - What am I thinking
Outro