Two Bored Apes - NFT Podcast

Episode 1 - Alpha

August 10, 2021 Two Bored Apes
Two Bored Apes - NFT Podcast
Episode 1 - Alpha
Show Notes Transcript

On the first-ever episode of Two Bored Apes, Jaime and Roy talk about Art Blocks and the recent changes to their drop mechanics. They dive into the Punks Comics project and (attempt to) break down all the complexities involved. They also cover the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Blitmaps, and the Royal Society of Players.

Show Notes:

Roy's Newsletter
https://zeneca33.substack.com/welcome

Roy's Newsletter on Punks Comics
https://zeneca33.substack.com/p/letter-12-punks-comics

Jaime's Abstract Art NFT Project
https://opensea.io/collection/abstract-of-the-day

Blitmap
https://www.blitmap.com/

Punks Comic
https://punkscomic.com/

Royal Society of Players
https://www.royalsocietyofplayers.io/

Most recent curated Art Blocks Drop (Pigments by Darien Brito)
https://artblocks.io/project/129

Modern Finance episode with Snowfro
https://modern.finance/episode/art-blocks-erick/

The Defiant video on Art Blocks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsQQWjaqnBA

Packy M  article "Power to the Person"
https://www.notboring.co/p/power-to-the-person

Jamie:

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. On today's episode of Two Bored Apes, we talked about the Bored Ape Yatch Club. We talked about Blipmaps we talk about punks comics. We talk about artblocks and their new drop format. And we talk about the Royal Society of Players.

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

Jamie:

Welcome to episode one of Two Bored Apes. I'm your host, Jamie. I'm here with my friend Roy. Roy, how are you doing today?

Roy:

Pretty well, pretty well. How are you?

Jamie:

I'm pretty good. I cannot complain. I just had a decent NFT sale. I finally sold my coalescent

Roy:

Coalescent What's that? I know what it is...

Jamie:

you don't want to call us. And as you're playing dumber,

Roy:

we're doing this podcasting thing. So you know, I'm trying to be okay host

Jamie:

it's it is a generative art project. And it's sort of under the umbrella of art blocks in a way that is slightly unclear. But on their official website, it says powered by art blocks. So I think they are maybe have some sort of a deal with art blocks where they are able to utilize some of the smart contract. And there's only one drop on it so far, that the site is called infant FM. And the drop itself was called coalescent. And there's only 100 pieces. So it's a pretty scarce thing. And I quite liked a lot of the art pieces in it. But the price had run up quite a bit. Maybe not sure if you remember maybe two weeks ago or something like that. And it just seemed like it was a good opportunity to free up some eth for some new stuff that I want to mint or bid on. Cool.

Roy:

So what do you sell for?

Jamie:

2.75 eth

Roy:

Pretty good. Pretty good.

Jamie:

Do you say eth? Or Eth?

Roy:

I say eth. Because I say ether for the theory,

Jamie:

right? No, I also say ether. Yeah, definitely. Okay, fascinating.

Roy:

Yeah. What are we talking about? Generative Art should be showing artblocks. That's something that we're both pretty

Jamie:

weekend. However, I'm just gonna let the listeners know right before we started recording, right said maybe we can talk less about art blocks. Yeah. Because then now you're trying to jump right into it.

Roy:

This to pull back the curtain a little bit. This is literally the 12th time we've recorded episode one of this podcast for one reason or another. We've had to re record and re record and have practice recordings. And so last night, we did what we thought was the official real deal. We did like an hour and a half recording of this podcast we sent to our audio engineer today. And he basically came back and said, well, halfway through Jamie's mic, something happened and the audio is bad. So you should record again. And yesterday, we probably spent 50 minutes talking about our blocks. And so coming in today, I was like, well, maybe we could talk less about artblocks, but historically has not been the case. So and immediately just jumping into artblocks. Yes,

Jamie:

exactly. Well, actually, let's, let's actively avoid it temporarily. And then eventually, we'll probably just circle back to it because all roads lead back to our blocks for us. But let's talk about the Bored Apes Yatch Club. Okay. This podcast is called Two Bored Apes. It makes sense. Let's start there. What's been going on in the Bored Ape Yatch Club lately?

Roy:

Well, I mean, the last month has been absolutely insane for them. They're, I mean, really the last three months ever since they launched but in the last month or so the floor price has gone from, you know, three or four eth up to sitting between 14 and 15 eth. Now, we have over 5000 unique owners, it's we're getting some 5000

Jamie:

Or is already, sir? Yeah, 5000. Somehow I heard

Roy:

500 150 ish today. And yeah, I mean, it's all happening for the apes. We're getting a couple of apes auctioned off at Christie's in Hong Kong in September sometime. And I guess that news spurred on a bunch of new people wanting to buy in and yeah, I think that you were telling me before we started recording that there was some massive, like high end sales of apes, but

Jamie:

today was the first ever million dollar sale. Whoa, yeah, it I guess it only kind of counts because it was a bundle with a dog. But it sold for 375 ether.

Roy:

We're both gold. Okay, yeah, that's still but

Jamie:

then. Yeah, it's crazy. And then I saw later a couple can't remember these numbers for sure. But I think one was like 175 and the other one was also something like that, and neither one of them had goals. or trippy for or even noise for, for that matter. It was like, I think they were maybe both blue beans or one was like a pie and hat situation, something like that. But it's just the amount of different traits that are rare that are really getting valued according to their rareness right now seems to be going up. Yeah. Because it seemed to me for a while that like trippy fur was really valuable and gold fur was really valuable. But aside from that there wasn't so much risk, because statistically, I believe the black suits are actually the least common trait of all trades, but they were definitely not trading at parity with like the almost equally rare traits of gold, for instance. And they're still not actually but they their price certainly has gone up quite a lot.

Roy:

Yeah, I think the ape or apes that are getting auction are going to be wearing black suits.

Jamie:

Yes. All three of them. There's three of them. One of them's cheetah gang. I can't remember if any of them are are laser eyes or blue beams or anything like that. But yes, all three are definitely suits and one of them is a chettah. Wow.

Roy:

It's it's just been a crazy period for apes and for the whole crypto space. I think I mean, crypto punks. They've seen a meteoric rise, and I mean, their flow has been tripled in the last. It seems like last week, last 10 days, maybe.

Jamie:

Yeah, def if you if you just go back maybe three, four weeks or something at this point, all the NFT projects that we might call blue chip nfts. Which to me and you I guess maybe would be like crypto punks, board apes and artblock stuff have just gone meteoric lately. I guess other people would say stuff like auto glyphs, but those are kind of off my radar in a way. So I don't think about them as much. Is there any other projects that you would put on that level?

Roy:

I think I probably put zedrun up there. I mean, they they've been around for a long time and are well established, they just raised a bunch of money. So I mean, I had a lot, I probably still do have a lot to say against them, just because of all the teething issues they've had over the last couple of months. And like their drops, I have a

Jamie:

very, very intense love hate relationship. Yeah, for Zedrun.

Roy:

But I think the fact that they've been around for so long, that, you know, continuing to at least try and grow and build and plan for years decades in the future. I would consider them blue chip. Yeah.

Jamie:

Yeah, that actually, if we I guess we can talk about them briefly the the new update that they had, maybe a week ago or something at this point where they were, they're announcing that some right now, one of the big problems with Zed run for people is that if your horse is not good, you just are going to lose money racing it. And that's basically a fact. So they have, you know, the class one through five races. And ostensibly, if you had a bad horse, you'd be racing in class five against other bad horses. But in reality, that's not really how it works, because there's a lot of great horses that end up in class five as well against you. And so they've added to different types of races. Now were one of them is only for horses that have a 0% win rate. And so in that bracket of races, now, you'll actually only be racing against other horses that are back, which will really give those horses a lot more fun and utility, because they'll just have an actual chance to to win, which is really cool. And then I think they added one that's an intermediary, one that I think you have to have maybe below a 10% win rate or possibly five to think, five.

Roy:

But yeah, I didn't follow super closely with the news in the article. But it sounds like all of the changes seem to be good changes that are geared towards sustaining the ecosystem in the long run, I think.

Jamie:

Yeah. And they also announced that they're finally activating the fatigue, which is basically a trait that they said has been inherent to horses the whole time, it's just they have never activated it. So basically, right now, if you race a horse five times a day, or 20 times a day, it has no effect on how it will do in the races. But they want to make it so if you race a horse 10 times in a row, it's going to get progressively worse. And the different horses are going to have different sort of thresholds for how quickly their fatigue negatively impacts their racing and the degree to which it negatively impacts it. But all of them will be affected by it which is going to again, I think help out the people with the less elite horses not have to face such stiff competition all the time from the top tier horses.

Roy:

Yeah, I mean, I have really tough to horse, I got really lucky in my very first job to get one. And I mean, I It's probably hurts my bottom line a little bit. But I'm still really happy with the changes just because, again, it's good for the whole ecosystem. And it's it shows how forward minded they're thinking, I think, yeah, I

Jamie:

think it, it might actually help it in the long run really, because if the, if the game is going to be sustainable for 10 years versus two years, even if you're making a little bit less per unit of time or whatever, it's going to be a lot better for you if it can really sustain. Yeah, definitely.

Roy:

I guess, definitely. When you think about the breeding aspect, and the fact that so far, that's been unaffected. I mean, and they did, they did make a change a few months ago, where they reduced the number of, I think you had to offsprings a month, per female. And now it's just one again, I guess, keep the ecosystem a little healthier and potentially not flow, right.

Jamie:

They didn't want to flood the market with supply too much. And I think for for the male horses, maybe used to be able to do seven, yeah, offspring a month. And now it's three if I'm remembering correctly.

Roy:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's right. We should also

Jamie:

just, this is probably a caveat, we're gonna have to make a lot throughout this podcast, but we do not know the x infinity world very well. But if we're talking about Blue Chip NFT projects, and we're talking about Zed being up there, it's It's kind of insane not to talk about x infinity, which has a marketplace in and of itself, that's bigger than open seas marketplace, which is just astounding. And it's it's probably not right for us not to include them. So let's just include them. But also with the caveat that we don't understand them well enough to really get into it. Yeah, I but I'm slowly working on acquiring the knowledge to understand and participate in the XE world because it is amazing.

Roy:

Yeah, it's very exciting I, I have the desire to participate and invest and get involved, but it's from what I can hear what I understand it takes, you know, even like one or two hours, at least, to understand what to do, how to do it, let alone the actual time of setting up a, like a breeding system, or they have this thing called scholarships, which I think essentially is you do like a partnership agreement with other people. And you essentially split the profits where you up, you pay the upfront, like running costs to get the axes and the other parties, do the gameplay and the planet earn aspect, you probably know more of how it actually works.

Jamie:

Yeah, that's pretty accurate as, as poker players ourselves, we would basically refer to it as staking. But I guess in the NFT, worlds in defy world, staking has another meaning. So that might be confusing to us. But yeah, basically, you just purchase the axes, which have a pretty high cost entry for a lot of people. But they have a nice little earn rate. So you know, if you if you have access to save 1000s of dollars to where you could get these axes, but you don't have enough spare time to try and earn $70 a day with them. And then you can find somebody else in the world who has the spare time to try and earn $70 a day with axes, but not access to the 1000s of dollars that it takes to get the axes to begin with. You basically just come to an agreement where you both provide what you can, and then you split the profits in some predetermined percentages.

Roy:

And because of the way smart contracts and stuff can work, it can be done in basically a trustless manner. Correct? Right?

Jamie:

I think so. But I think unfortunately, my understanding of it is that so just so people know, the people who would be doing the playing in that situation are called scholars, I think that they're basically in such a low status situation, that a lot of the people who hire them, and I think maybe they're called sponsors, but I don't quote me on that are able to basically take advantage of them, just kind of by squeezing them and going, you can either give me, you know, 65%, or we're not going to do this at all. And, you know, the other person in the place where this is happening most common right now is the Philippines. It's very big in the Philippines to have scholars over there. And so if these people are literally using the money that they earn with your axes to pay for their food, and their rent and stuff, it's it's pretty hard for them to try to drive a hard bargain and get fair value if you want to be an asshole that takes advantage of them, which I believe lots of people are doing. That sucks

Roy:

that makes me want to like set up these days scholarship programs where they're very advantageous to the other party.

Jamie:

Yeah, there's of course we should also Say there's lots of people that are being cool and are sort of trying to free people that are scholars under unfair percentages, and getting them set up with better deals. And it works out great for both parties that way. And that actually is part of the motivation for me to get into it. Because I would love to be doing that and be able to offer these people a much more competitive rate. That can, I mean, if you actually read some of the stories are pretty heartwarming. Because the size of the XE market is just so big that if you're in a country, that's still economically developing, and you can take part in this without having to pay the upfront costs, you can really improve your quality of life. And to be able to do that with NFT's is kind of like an amazing proof of concept of the way that these can actually have real world positive impacts. Very cool. Very cool. I think so this by the way, this is our board a yacht club segment that turned into Zed run and is now covering Axi,

Roy:

yeah, I mean, I was just about to make another detour and say, Would you consider this as another blue chip? Punks comics? Because they've been you know, they've had a lot of attention this last week. And you know, they're relatively new, but

Jamie:

they I don't think I would, but I can see why you would say that. I think it's definitely one of the most intriguing of all projects out there to me. But I feel like it's a little bit too new to necessarily be one. It's also, you know, like something like crypto punks, or bored APR club is kind of not promising to do all that much. And it's so much about just kind of being a cool status symbol, although obviously, the board APR club team is trying to do a lot of stuff, and is making progress in it. But ultimately, it's sort of about a digital flex, as people call it. And so they're already doing it, whereas to me Punx comics is trying to do so much. And so much of it is still theoretical. And the price action is about people basically believing that it will happen, but I feel like it's a little too early to, to feel like it has actually succeeded in its goals. But obviously, the market is so confident that it will succeed that it has for sure succeeded as like a financial product or whatever.

Roy:

Yeah, no, that's a really good point about

Jamie:

how, yeah,

Roy:

a lot of the value is in future. roadmap conditions being met.

Jamie:

Yeah, like, it's almost as if it was zet or xe, and people are just buying up the assets before the game is in place. And it's like, if they're getting bought for a lot, you could call that a success. And it really is, but it seems like it would be too early to consider it, you know, a blue chip.

Roy:

Yeah, no, I think I agree with that.

Jamie:

Let's we should talk about them, though. Because that is such an interesting project that's so much more complex than other projects. Yes, why

Roy:

don't why don't want to sum up for our audience, the whole punks coming in, say one or two minutes.

Jamie:

For our listeners, he's been very funny because it's such a complex project that that is not possible to do. Also, I'm gonna say right off the bat, I have never had one. So my understanding of it is probably more limited then yours because you're a bit more of an active participant, but I guess I'll start and then you can maybe take it from there. But basically, punks comics started and the idea was, we are going to create a comic book and it's going to have characters that are crypto punks. And that's basically the level one of it and then the level two is sort of all these interesting financial let's see rewards in system setup. So when you get the Punx comic NFT you have two options with it you can do what's called staking it or you can burn it and if you burn it you get access to a Dow called the founders Dow right. And what is a dowel? A Dow is a decentralized autonomous organization. So it's kind of like a little baby government but everything that happens sort of happens automatically because the votes are on sort of pieces of code that will be run rather than stuff that needs to be enacted by various people, at least in a theoretical sense. Okay. So um, and so that is almost as if it's a little bit like this specific Dow that is, is a little bit like in an FTX hedge fund and they're sort of just trying to collect rare, interesting, valuable assets. And so if you burn your punks comic NFT, you get a percentage of ownership in this dow. And the other option is to stake the comic and then you get a percentage ownership of the 16 Crypto punks that were featured in issue one of the comic, and there's a little bit more complexity to it than that. Do you want to take it from here?

Roy:

Sure. So the other benefit to staking is that you get you'll get sent a physical edition of the the comic book. So it'll be sent out in, you know, packaging that keeps it in mint condition. And there's obviously I didn't board it is what, what that's called, and that's what you call it to compensate. Yeah. So if you burn your, your NFT, you essentially lose the right to get that physical addition. And so there's some value played on that, placed on that. So and, obviously, there's now an element of game theory, where so we're currently in this two week window, where anyone who wants to burn their comic needs to do it, within this two week window. If they don't, then you lose the option to burn when it's over. And anyone who hasn't burned will then have the opportunity to stake. And so there's this sort of game theoretical game theory aspect where the more people that burn, the more favorable it becomes to stake and vice versa. So I personally think the best strategy is to wait towards the end of the window, and you can have as much information regarding what you want to do. But clearly, a lot of people don't agree with that, because 1000s have already been burned. And just to think of it from an extreme point of view, if 9999 people burn their comics, and you have the only physical comic available, and are the only ones staking, meaning you get, you know, 100% Share and the 16 Crypto punks, obviously the value is enormous. And as more people stake then your value goes down and staking so yeah, yeah, I think that's the that's the gist of it. The staking versus burning aspect.

Jamie:

That's actually kind of only the gist of it for like level one, because now they have the main pass and stuff, which we'll get into in a second. But I want to go back to what you said a second ago about having 100% ownership of these 16 Crypto punks that were featured in the comic that is actually not totally true. Because if I remember correctly, that the Dow over the next two years or something slowly acquires 25% of the comments. Yeah. So you know, it's a really complicated structure. Yeah. Which is super interesting, because you know, so many NFT projects are basically just like, you know, just avatar projects that have he's a donkey, no real way to even value them other than how the market does it. Whereas this, you have actual, you have actual assets that that already have defined values. And then you have varying percentages of ownerships of them. And those ownership percentages change over time. It's a really interesting thing. And another thing we should say is that there's going to be merchandise and someone owns 100% of the merchandising value or 50% or something, do you what is that?

Roy:

I think that so yeah, if you're struggling to understand I wrote a substack newsletter article on the topic, and I would recommend reading that because I I'm struck substack newsletter

Jamie:

articles and posts substack newsletter article blog posts, yeah.

Roy:

I read some. Yeah, well, I'll put I'll put the link in the show notes. But to get back to what you said, yes, there's merchandising. And if I'm remembering correctly, the revenue or the profit generated from selling merchandise will go towards buying back the punks tokens, which are the tokens that are generated to those who are staking that comic. So essentially, it increases the market value of those who are staking the comics. I'm sure it's very complicated, but

Jamie:

it Yeah, and did you see today? I think a couple people have been just just donating assets to the founders vault.

Roy:

And happening I think a little bit for the last few months I've been they got three apes. Oh, wow. That's pretty significant. Yeah.

Jamie:

And then also beanie did something where and he, he's not behind the project, but he's sort of the face of it. He's actually specifics of it. But he he did something where he gave like $4 million worth of value back to the community, I can't remember exactly what it was, or better on Twitter.

Roy:

So basically, let's talk about the mid passes because it ties into that. So what the company behind punks comics called, they called pixel volts. What they have decided to do is create this avatar project, because I think a lot of these avatar projects have found tremendous success over the last couple of months. And they thought, hey, we can do that we can do a really good job of that. We can tie it in with our comics, we have Chris wall, this amazing artist who can you know, work on creating these avatars. And they decided instead of releasing the the NFTs T's for these avatars in some sort of public minting launch, they said anyone who owned or is a comic orange one at this specific snapshot date will have the opportunity to mint a mint Pass, which essentially gives them one metal hero NFT. And so there's 10,000 comics, there's gonna be 10,000 metal heroes. And the value, the market value of those is already, I think two and a half eth or something absolutely absurd. And they only released two days ago. And so the thing that you're thinking about with beanie giving back to the community, he had roughly 1000 punks comics. And so he's basically eligible to get 1000 med passes. And I think he said he's just going to give those back to the community one way or another

Jamie:

1000 out of what what was the total supply? 10,000? Yeah. Wow. So he controlled an awful lot of it.

Roy:

Yes. Yeah. I mean, that was a slight concern with the way the Dow is set up, because it becomes less decentralized. If one person controls 50% of the votes or 20%, obviously, and the fact that he had so many comics and was burning them all he said that his intention was to burn them. His means that, you know, he was going to get significant sway in the way that the Dow was run. And some people may not have loved that as a concept. I mean, a lot of love that he specifically was behind it, but it

Jamie:

gets a bit of an abrasive personality here. And people on Twitter talk about how a lot of what he's doing. He's intentionally being inflammatory on Twitter, sometimes just to drive engagement people say, Yeah, I mean, it's definitely great. But this move that he did by just donating those mid passes is going to get him. Certainly a lot of goodwill with at least the punks comics owners.

Roy:

Absolutely. And I think I mean, I've always said Love him or hate him, he has that personality. One thing is that is pretty undeniable is that he has made a lot of money in the NFT space. And he knows how to make money as having him on board and his interests aligned with those who are punks comics holders, I think has always been a good sign or a good. Yeah, a good thing if you're profit minded.

Jamie:

Yeah. And so you were saying these mid passes are worth two and a half eth or something right now, ostensibly. Shouldn't they have been worth point? 08? Based on the initial plans? Yes. So

Roy:

they cost point 08 to mint. So for every punks comic you had, you could get one for point 08 And then anything on top of that is just what the market has placed the value of one of these and if these meta entities to be once they're revealed and released.

Jamie:

And so I think initially, what they were saying was that if any punks comic owners did not buy a mid pass for point oh eight, then that was going to be a meta hero that just a regular non comic owning person in the NFT space could meant for point away at a later date. But then because, excuse me, the mid passes became so popular, they basically scrapped that plan and now are now only keeping all of the meta heroes at least initially for punks comics owners.

Roy:

Yeah, that's that's accurate. I think yesterday they made that announcement when the value of them was 1.6 eth. And it's only gone up since then. And I think the rationale was sort of twofold. One was that if they had some sort of public launch with, say, 1500 min passes available at zero points or eighth while they were trading on the secondary market for say, two ether or two and a half, just the logistics and the gas will and involved with selling out these there's no way to do it that what's going to result without having like 99% of people unhappy or 95% of people unhappy. And the other half of the miners Yeah, the miners and the whales are tech savvy people who could run bots and figure out how to get these mid passes and be happy. And the other aspect was they were like hey, well we have community who have already believed in the project and invested in it for most people months, so why not just give the opportunity to have these passes back to the community one way or another? So, yeah, I think it was a good move.

Jamie:

And now there's a little bit more complexity on top of that, too, right? So these meta heroes are now they're saying they're going to be assets in a game. And within that game, there's going to be like eight planets. And all the heroes are going to be aligned to one planet. And each of the planets is going to like earn some ERC. 20 tokens? Yeah. And there's, there's the Dow for each planet. Yeah, I really, there's like, we have Dows within Dows. It's like a very Russian nesting doll situation of Dows. Now,

Roy:

yeah, I need someone else to write a substack newsletter, Blog Post article, so I can read it. I can understand. Yeah,

Jamie:

yours. Yours is now out of date. I mean, everything is accurate. But there's all this other stuff on top of it now.

Roy:

Yeah, it's It's so wild. But it's also really cool. I think just because they're pushing the boundaries of what's possible with NFT's and the technology and the community. And I think that they themselves are coming up with a lot of these ideas, you know, not on the fly. But as the market is evolving and maturing, I think this whole I mean, I don't know, personally, maybe this whole thing has been planned for six months. But I think the whole meta hero avatar aspect was a relatively new creation idea as a reaction to the market, loving them. And perhaps taking it to the next level with gamification is part of a reaction to the market loving gaming, NFT's, and being more into those lately. Yeah, it's just it's

Jamie:

a little bit humorous how little the comic is actually, to the story and project at this point. I mean, so normally, for a comic book, what happens is you have one issue come out every single month, and they always come out on Wednesday. It's not that that matters. But they released issue one months ago, there's barely any talk of when he was coming out. Nobody seems to care about issue two coming out. But the project is still going crazy, because there's all this interesting stuff being done within it on top of it. And yeah, it's just it's really taken off. And I'm, financially speaking, I'm quite bummed I did not get involved in this. And gosh, again, this, this is a project that took a long time to sell out. So it's not like I didn't have many, many opportunities to get in on it.

Roy:

Yeah, I mean, we can talk about that a little bit. Just as a general concept, actually, my next newsletter topic is going to be on projects, that sort of the stigma behind projects, not instantly selling out and how people a lot of people think of that as a failure, or, like they're scared to invest if they see a project that has been open for minting for, honestly, more than a day. But if it's been open for multiple weeks, and it's not selling out, then people are scared to mint. Those who did mint are concerned about the future of the project and might list the NFT's on the secondary market for bloemen price. And it sort of creates this endless self fulfilling prophecy, where it sort of sets the project up to fail a lot of times. And we've seen several instances now of projects that have taken a long time to sell out and gone on to be spectacularly successful. And punks comics is one example. Another one is avatars. They took forever to sell out literally I think he is at least months this year. And they've now I guess at least for the time being been successful. blit maps is another one which was open for minting for a couple of months and has just exploded in like full price the last couple of days. Maybe we should talk about them a little bit.

Jamie:

Yeah, we should. I think that though the success of these projects is giving people a little bit of sort of intellectual ammunition to fire back at that type of FUD, as we call it in the community, which stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt, but Fudd aimed at projects that don't sell out immediately. Now, there's, as time goes on more and more examples of projects that did not do that, but still ended up being quite successful. So And the

Roy:

opposite is true that we have more and more projects that instantly sell out but then going to be

Jamie:

yes, definitely. There's a ton of Avatar projects that are basically just for date knock offs that are basically just sitting at or around mid price or you know something that's maybe 234 X mid price but is not at all higher than where it was on day one in the early secondary market. And there's just there's not that ravenous, excited, motivated community like Like, it seemed like there might have been on day one for these projects, even though they sold out instantly there. That was, that was all the enthusiasm for the project happened in that two hour period. Yeah. And then people just slowly stopped caring.

Roy:

Yeah, I think because a lot of the time when there's this hype behind the project selling out, and then people are interested, they, they're really short term minded, and they're looking to make, like instant profit and flip for 2x 3x 4x. And a lot of people aren't invested in sort of the long term vision. I mean, I'm sure some of them are. But you know, a lot of these projects, they have these cookie cutter roadmaps, where there's not anything super special differentiating them between, you know, the other three avatar projects that dropped that week, there's always going to be a charity donation component, there's going to be maybe a comic book, there's going to be like a Metaverse 3d file. I mean, it's just very standard stuff. And yeah, once the initial hype dies down, they start working towards these roadmap items. But they in and of themselves aren't necessarily super exciting. And and people have with a short attention spans move on to the next hot thing. Or they they sort of navigate towards these more blue chip projects, or ones that have substance to them. Like flip maps, let's let's get back to them.

Jamie:

Okay, why don't you tell us about blip maps? I mean, you had it certainly tell me about that many times before I ever minted one. Sure. So why don't you tell our listeners about them as well?

Roy:

Alright, so blit Maps is a, it's a project that launched I think, two and a half or three months ago. And it took them about two months to mint out. And the basic premise behind the project initially, was that they had a group of artists create some pixel up 100 different images, essentially. And

Jamie:

that was 100. Do they get 100 unique artists, and they all made one? Or do you know how that worked out?

Roy:

That they didn't do that certain some artists made multiples, I don't know how many artists they had in total, maybe 10 to 20 artists. And the founder of the project, he DOM is His name, He Himself created some of the art and they got some other artists involved. And so if you were to go to their website, and you wanted to mint a bitmap, first of all, you'd be like, What is a bitmap? And, you know, they described it, basically, the concept is you take two pieces of this pixelated art, and you'd take the composition of one, and the palette or the color scheme from the other, and it would create this brand new, unique bitmap. And that is the thing that you pay for and does the NFT you get, and it was all stored on chain. And I mean, that's a big thing in NFT space, where essentially, it means that if as soon as you mint, your you have true ownership over the NFT, you know, the bitmap, project, platform, company, website, etc, can go down, you will always have access to your NFT as long as Ethereum lives on. And that's not the same for a lot of these avatar projects where what you're buying is essentially a JPEG hosted somewhere on the internet. And the NFT is just pointing to where that is hosted. So

Jamie:

right and so if if wherever that image file is ultimately actually hosted goes down, your NFT is now pointing to a broken link. Whereas when you have something like bitmaps, where the art is simple enough. Now, let's just get into this a little bit. The reason that so many of these other projects don't have their actual data stored on chain is that it's just not realistic to do that. Because to store data on chain is prohibitively expensive. So if you have an image file, that's like one and a half megabytes, that costs like 1000s of dollars to directly store on chain. So basically the mean what you end up? Yeah, I don't remember what the actual things are. It's probably somewhere between but it is it is a ludicrous amount of money. And people would not be willing to do that. And certainly not for a project where there's you know, like 10,000 of these images or something like that. So when you have something that is simple, like crypto punks, or bitmaps for instance, where the total number of pixels involved in your image is only like 100 or whatever, it actually becomes feasible to store the data on chain. And then what you have is a much more robust and ft. That has less ways to actually, you know, vanished from existence, so to speak, that, you know, all the other NFT's would still exist, but the thing that they would be pointing to or representing or having ownership of would just be gone where As these other ones, you need to take down the entirety of the Ethereum network for them not to still be the way they are, when you initially buy them.

Roy:

Exactly. And that's one of the things that attracted me to the project. Another one was that as far as I'm aware, what they were doing in combining two images into a third one on chain is the first time that had been done. So anytime something is sort of a first in NFT's or cryptocurrency it's often valued for historical reasons and other reasons. So yeah, I mean, those two aspects were cool. I liked. I mean, I personally like the art. I liked spending half an hour on the website, clicking through all the different options. And

Jamie:

that was fun. I definitely enjoyed that too. Yeah, I mean, it.

Roy:

It's not as it wasn't as simple and straightforward and mindless as a lot of other projects where you go there, and they're like, hey, click here meant, how many do you want 10? Okay, pay the gas. And here you go, you had to put some more time and thought into understanding it. And that's probably part of why it took so long to sell out. But yeah, it I enjoyed it. And then part of what made me so bullish on it, I guess from the beginning, but even more so as time went on is I was in the discord I was listening to the things that the founder and the man behind the project and the team working on it, were saying, and like their vision for the future. It, it was big and well thought out. And you could tell that they were working on their project and the vision every single day. And so just to give an example, one of the things they came up with was to, again, because all these avatar projects have been so successful, they thought, Alright, let's do something in that vein. And they came up with these things called blit knots. And they're essentially a bulletin on is like, How would I describe a person with like, let's say, a television head. And on the television screen, you could display your bitmap. And so they would say, if everyone who owned a bitmap, they'd be able to get one of these for free, maybe just pay gas. And they started really revealing some of like, the images and the graphics of these footnotes. And I thought they look pretty cool. And as a concept, it seemed cool. And then, I mean, they started revealing more of their roadmap and the long term vision of building games and a universe and storylines and enemies. And yeah, I mean, all of this. And you could for months have, let's say two months have minted one for point one eth. And now they're worth five eth or something.

Jamie:

Yeah, I think they work like basically two weeks, two or three nights ago, and then one whale came in swept up the floor all the way to five eth. And now, you know, a couple people have capitulated, and I think it's sitting right around four and a half right now. Yes. Which is, I mean, a great return if you got in at point one. Yeah, man. So for me, personally, I, I got the one after you begged me to do it multiple times. I honestly, I think I might have just got it. So you would stop telling me? Oh, well, and yeah, thank you actually, genuinely. And it was it was fun looking through my different options. And trying to see which combination of composition and color is going to make something that a I like in B, I think maybe the market will like later if I ever want to trade out of this. That was a lot of fun. But I still didn't, you know, so like this, the stuff we were talking about, about how the data is stored on chain that is cool and good. And I appreciate that. But I felt like I was already sort of getting so much of that durability in my NFT's by investing in art blocks that I didn't necessarily want to get another project just because of that, I felt like I kind of needed something else. And then when they released the bulletin on our I was like, That is really cool. I thought it looked great. And that got me excited. And basically was the sole reason that I ended up meeting my second and now. Now I'm a big fan of the project. I don't have either mine listed and I have no real plans to sell either one, even though they're both 45x From where I got them initially.

Roy:

Yeah, that's always a good sign. Like a barometer where if the price goes up 20x But you're still not very tempted to list for sale, then. Yeah, that's what it's always Yeah. And there's

Jamie:

also there's a huge difference for me at least. But I think I've definitely seen other people say this for project where you have to have something or two plus I guess, versus one because if I had one of them, it makes a lot of sense that you don't necessarily want to sell because if you do you feel like such an idiot if it keeps going up precipitously, whereas any of the projects that you have multiple of when they go up a lot, it feels much better to go okay, let me grab some of this profit now by selling one and then I can find To just still hold one for the moon possibilities as it goes up. And this is a project where I have two of them. So I have the opportunity to lock in these huge profits, and I'm still not interested in it. Yeah,

Roy:

I think I pretty early on in my NFT career, I, after having only one of a sudden NFT I was like, You know what, if I want to get in a project, I just have to buy two just because it's so agonizing to be in that position of only having one and trying to time when to sell it. And, you know, you don't want to be stuck holding something if it does crash and go to zero, especially if it's been up like 50x. But then sometimes it's so insane in the NFT world things you all 50x and then go up another 5x from this sometimes. Yeah,

Jamie:

I mean, if let's just maybe start to transition into our blocks and example that is fidenza. Has they minted at what? Point 1.1 7.17? Was it? Yeah, pretty sure. Okay. I thought it was point one. But either way, the the floor on them now is about 35 ether, and they're only like two months old or something. So that's just an amazing, amazing

Roy:

growth. Yeah, that that what a project I had. Yeah.

Jamie:

So we were talking about the the bitmaps in the way that the data is stored on chain. And that makes it much more sturdy, so to speak, as an MFT. And our blocks is like that as well. But the art blocks images are quite large files. So you can't actually be storing those on chain dt. So do you want to try and discuss how they're doing it to make theirs much more robust, even though their image files are huge. And so you can't actually store the image itself on chain? Or should I try and jump into that?

Roy:

My basic understanding is that they store the code that generates the image file on chain. But

Jamie:

right, they store that, and then what? That that's basically the smart contract for minting it, and then everybody's NFT sort of has the different attributes that you basically pass into that. And the output would then be your image. So in this case, again, you have all of the data you will ever need on the Ethereum blockchain to actually get out the NFT that you initially meant, and you're not relying on any sort of outside storage to be able to generate that image. As long as the Ethereum network stays up, you can always generate the image that you think of as your art blocks NFT.

Roy:

Yeah, I think you might also need JavaScript to be around because a lot of the code

Jamie:

I'm not actually quite smart enough to understand how the different languages work and if like, it's inherent to the Ethereum blockchain that it's it works with these different languages or stuff you know I'm not

Roy:

let we trust and pull even snow for essentially we do we do is Yeah, I love that guy. I mean,

Jamie:

if we want to talk about snow fro or do you want to talk about pigments or some sort of high level

Roy:

Gosh a little about snow for and then we can get into up looks at a specific project. Yeah, every time I mean, for those who don't know snow for is the founder of art blocks essentially the creator the genius behind that he he envisioned Eric something, Eric cauldron, I think, but you know, snowfall was what he goes by is online, Monica,

Jamie:

and it looks he's got green skin.

Roy:

Alien like, zombie like zombie zombie. Yeah.

Jamie:

This is very humorous for people.

Roy:

Anyway, he basically had the idea for art blocks this generative art platform. Years ago when he was minting his crypto punks. The fact that he was around and had the foresight and knowledge and ability to mint crypto punks years ago. Just goes to show how, I guess OG he is in the crypto space now.

Jamie:

Didn't he meant like 56 Different zombies or something?

Roy:

Something like that. Yeah. It's so crazy. Yeah.

Jamie:

So now there, the floor on them is like $6 million.

Roy:

Yeah, it's really ridiculous. And there was a really great documentary video by the defiant which I watched a couple days ago. And he basically said that when he was sitting there minting all these rare zombies. He had the idea of well hang on, maybe this should be like randomized. We have blockchain technology. We have smart contracts, it would just be more fun, maybe more fair, more equitable. If instead of being able to pick all the rare ones, you came to this site and said, You know, I would like to meet one and then randomize me, which one I get? And so you know, a few years ago, he had this idea for up blocks. And it has obviously worked on it for a long time and seeing it come to fruition and it's now a wildly success. And every single time I read a post by him in the discord and announcement, just a random post, replying to a question. I listen to him in an interview. Anything he says it's just it's so thoughtful and smart. And like, yeah, just well thought out, you can really tell that he's got integrity, and he is a genius. And that's just such a killer combination to like, if I'm, I have such a significant portion of my NFT network in our blocks, and a non insignificant part of the reason for that is just faith and belief in snow Fairy and the rest of the Xbox team. And I don't think that that's like a dumb thing. I think that that's a just a huge plus for the whole project. So anyway, go for

Jamie:

it. So far, it has certainly proven not to be a dumb thing. Yeah. Let's should we give maybe just a quick shout out also, he appeared on the modern finance podcast. So if you kind of want to hear this story from the horse's mouth, that's, that's a great way to kind of hear the history of him in crypto and NFTs and art blocks and all that.

Roy:

Yeah. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. So shall we talk about? There's been a lot happening in flux lately, there were there was the most recent drop the most recent curated drop pigments. So we can divide a bit.

Jamie:

Sure, we can talk about that. Let's let's go back, maybe one more to the previous curated drop, or at least the difference between those two curated drops and all the previous ones. And what was happening that made them want to take this step.

Roy:

Sure. So you want to get into it. It. Yeah,

Jamie:

I was sort of setting you up to get in. Okay, sure. I'll get into

Roy:

like, I've been talking for five minutes about snow Troy. So

Jamie:

I know you're so knowledgeable, Roy, the people want to hear from you. So what has happened is that artbox has become a lot more successful lately. And what was happening, and I guess this was also happening some before I was around, I remember people talking about a couple of the curated projects from before, where where there was really significant gas wars, but it was it was happening again, and more consistently, where people were coming to the understanding that any curated art blocks drop was going to give you an FTS, that were worth a lot more than the mid price, which was usually somewhere like point one or point one five ether. And because this became standard knowledge and was spread far and wide, you had tons of people trying to get in on these crops, because he was basically guaranteed profit. And so what this did is it created an exorbitant demand for block space at the time of the release of these projects. And it resulted in what are called gas wars, which is basically people just having to spend a lot of gas. I assume most of our listeners know what gases, but basically, it's the fee that you have to pay to the Ethereum network to have your transaction added to the Ethereum blockchain. So because so many people were trying to mint these art blocks projects at the same time. And because the Ethereum block space is so finite, people were spending 23456 times as much money in fees to the Ethereum network, as was actually going to the artist who created this stuff on art blocks. And the community was not into it, they wanted more money to go to the artists, and they wanted less people to get burnt, trying to get a piece and just failing, which is not fun to jack up your gas price really high. And then agree to pay this sort of seemingly exorbitant price for something that's ostensibly only listed at point one, and then still not get it. That was, there was a lot of people that were not having fun with that setup. And the way that the various parties were getting rewarded. You basically had the miners and the flippers were getting rewarded in the community was preferring that the artists and the long term collectors would be the people that get rewarded more. So the community, the artbox community, the higher ups there snow fro and I guess probably Jeff Davis and some others. Were trying to think of a solution to this problem or an attempt at a solution to this problem. And what they ultimately came up with as their first solution was what's called a Dutch auction. Now do you want to you want to tell our listeners what a Dutch auction is?

Roy:

Sure. So a Dutch auction essentially is a an auction where the the price goes down over time. So they list These are blocks pieces at to use the curator drops as examples, beginning at 3/8. And every five or 10 minutes it would drop by, say point two, five or point five eth. So those who were either very wealthy very willing to pay the maximum amount or are willing to pay that, because they were afraid that it would sell out at that price could can mean to three eth. Those who may not want to pay that much for the art can sit back and wait. And they can wait for to drop to a price where they're more comfortable paying. And what effectively happens is this interesting price discovery mechanic where there's also like a game theory element where the community lot of people don't want to, I mean, basically, people want to get the art for as cheap as they can. But they don't want to miss out on getting it. So a lot of people in the last few drops have been saying, you know, let's wait and hold off on minting until we see more people minting because then once a lot of people start minting then you start getting worried that if you don't click the purchase button, you might miss out. And so it's sort of like this giant worldwide community game of chicken where if a few people start minting, it sort of gets the ball rolling, and then everyone starts jumping in. But if no one really does too much of that in the first place, then the price keeps dropping and dropping until eventually, enough people are saying, You know what, that's a good price. I'm very happy to pay that. I'm happy for the artists to get their cut and blocks and charity aspects to you know, I'll pay 1.25 ether, for example, which is what the last job sold out. And yeah, so I am personally a big fan of these Dutch auctions, because at least for the last two curator jobs, what we've seen has been sort of a casual pace where there wasn't really a gas war, if you wanted a piece at a reasonable price that most other people ended up paying, you could likely get one you know, people who tried to wait till the very end and risk getting it slightly cheaper. Maybe those people miss out. And that's that's just part of the the process and the game, I guess. But I personally much prefer it to the old system of gas was because, as you say, it results in a lot more money going to the artist to our blog to the platform. And they've also introduced a mandatory charity, charitable donation for these dodgy auctions where, you know, instead of if people are spending 1.5 million and odd, instead of 1.2 million going to get a theory miners 200k Go into the artists and 100k blocks. Now it might be 500k, to the artist 500k to charity, and 250k blocks, and I just like 100k to the minus. And I just think that that's pretty just just better. And the only people who really lose out are those who were buying the art, specifically to profit and immediately flip it. And I guess also people who previously were buying the art to hold it, and now have to pay more for the art or maybe they can't afford it now. But I think by and large, the community members and collectors who fall into that category, even if they can't afford the art, they realize that it's a good change for AP looks as a whole and that I think generally happy for the artists to be making more. And yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of these attractions.

Jamie:

So that last point about collectors maybe not being able to get it. I think in this last one, that would have been true. But the second most recent one, the final price ended up going all the way down, I believe point two, five. And so with that price and the reduced gas because of how much less crazy it was, I think the effective mid price, for a lot of those pieces ended up being pretty comparable to what the old one was. And again, the distribution of where those funds went, ends up just being much more, I guess we should say probably equitable to who deserves to be reaping the rewards from from all that money.

Roy:

Yeah, and I mean, we've only seen two curated drops for the Dutch Dutch auctions. I should probably mention here. So I've looked at the platform. For those who don't know, they've broken down the art into sort of three categories. They've got curated, which is, as you might expect, curated by a board of you know, people who've been chosen because they they're specialists in art or they have an eye to something in that vein, and they will the

Jamie:

various various generative artists will basically say here is a project that I want to do. And so they'll just submit these proposals. And then the curation board basically looks at all of them and decides what they think is maybe the coolest The best, the most different innovative, whatever. And then that will be what they decide to add as a future curated art blocks drop. Yeah.

Roy:

And they're basically the most official art blocks drops. I guess that's,

Jamie:

that's as official. Those are it's the highest tier highest tier

Roy:

species that and then they have two other sections. One is called the playground. And that is effectively any artist who has released a curated project is allowed to release other projects in this non curated section. So it doesn't have to go through the same vigorous testing and sort of testing it goes through not the same vigorous like approval process of these board members racing on it, curation. Yes, exactly. And I mean, there are some limitations, I think they can only have one open at a time and after one sells out, there's like a month cooldown waiting period before they can put another one up. So it just doesn't flood the playground all these projects, but it's what it gives these artists who have already passed curation, the ability to maybe try some new things and different things. And then you have the factory which is I guess freezing tea is the lowest tier of our blocks, I guess it takes less of a stringent it's easier to get a project into the factory than it is to get one to curate it is the simplest way of saying it. So not Not anyone can just get into the factory, you still need to have so very difficult. Yeah, you certainly to be a generative artists, you still need to know what you're doing and be able to create something that looks good and passes a lot of rules. I think one of them is that the code has to be very efficient, because it's running on the Ethereum blockchain.

Jamie:

Yeah. So maybe something about it, you can't have more than 600 lines of code or something, if I remember correct.

Roy:

In my mind, the number is way lower than that. But maybe,

Jamie:

maybe maybe that was infant FM that had that women? I'm not sure, yeah. But that's fine. Either way, to quote me on that

Roy:

there are stringent limitations. And what was I saying? Yeah, so I mean, there's the three different tears. And so there's been plenty of drops in the playground and the factory over the last two weeks. And some of them have used other options, and they've had varying levels of success. But you were strictly speaking about the curated drops over the last two weeks. And we've only seen two of them. And as you said, the first one did drop all the way down to the lowest price of point two, five. And then the second one, the most recent one pigments, they basically sold that at 1.25. So it's definitely still too early to tell, you know, what the next one is going to be and what it's going to look like in a few months from now. Maybe the the average collector will end up paying less for curated pieces, but my hunch is that the price is probably still gonna say pretty high.

Jamie:

Yeah. So I think essentially, what we have happening now is that the previous way it was happening, so much of the price discovery was happening in the early secondary market. Whereas now it's happening literally during the drop. And so that extra money between the lowest possible mint price in this Dutch auction, or the flatmate price in the previous format, and what the secondary market actually decides it's worth that money used to go to do flippers, whereas now that money is going to the artist and charities.

Roy:

Yeah. So I mean, good changes all around, I think.

Jamie:

Yep. For everybody. But the miners and the flippers, I think it's a pretty great change.

Roy:

Yeah. And I mean, nothing, nothing against the flippers, they, they weren't doing anything wrong, they there was an opportunity to make money, and they seize it, that's part of this whole decentralized nature of the blockchain, it's equal opportunity. And, yeah, I think that

Jamie:

nothing against the miners, either. I mean, they're literally running the entire network that all of this recipe gone. But they're going to do just fine, even if they don't have an exorbitant gas or for any given artblock strop, whereas, you know, a generative artists may have been making very little money for literally years at a time. And then having that curated drop is something that's going to be, you know, it's they're going to make a ton of money, but it's sort of years and years of work, you're finally kind of getting that reward all at once. So it's it's definitely great to see more of that going to them.

Roy:

Yeah, I agree completely. A complaint I've seen a lot over the last few days is, especially with some of the factory projects, where artists are making large amounts of money, people complain that these artists are going for cash grabs and just, you know, in it for the money and it's just it's hilarious to think that these people are they've been working on generative art for years, sometimes decades, which literally basically no one in the world cared about and basically paid any money for and to think that they're in it for the money now, it's like they're in it because they love and the money is just the market,

Jamie:

a market to like you're only they're only getting money out of it if people want to pay that

Roy:

exactly, the market is finally deemed that their work is valuable. And that's awesome, right? Yeah,

Jamie:

yeah. And so a little bit of what it seems to be happening though, is that people who are new to art Glocks kind of saw how successful it was. And don't really grasp how much different these new meant prices are for these Dutch auctions, relative to what like a factory or playground drop used to be. And so they're still under the impression that if you meant an art blocks project, you're going to have an immediate opportunity to have a 3x profit or whatever, not realizing that, Oh, you just paid two ether for something that one month ago would have been a point one ether drop. So you're already at 20x. So you know, you know, some of these people are capitulating quickly, and you're having prices that are below mid price in sort of the immediate secondary market. And they're kind of feeling burnt. But there, they were just being very opportunistic, which, again, as you were saying, it's okay to be opportunistic, but they didn't come in with a level of education as to what the opportunity actually was, and why there used to be an opportunity and why now, for them, the opportunity doesn't exist for those guaranteed immediate profits, if they're going to just mint it out at the first most expensive stage of a Dutch auction.

Roy:

100% agree. All right. We want to talk about

Jamie:

my first ever NFT was an art blocks piece. Did you know that?

Roy:

I did because we have done eight recordings on this podcast. Oh, that's right. I'm so sorry, people sunset. Right.

Jamie:

Right. Yeah, that's a factory project. So that just for me, I have a real special feeling in my heart for the concept of generative art. And from art blocks as a place to do that. I just thought it was it was so fun. And interesting to have this piece of art get created, right then in there. Through, you know, randomness of the transaction hash, plus the artists code. It was it was just really exciting. Yeah,

Roy:

it's just fun to me. I mean, that's something I miss a lot lately is because of how popular app blocks has gotten out. I mean, up until a week ago, you could go to the website, and there'd be several projects in the factory that you could pick and choose and mint a piece of art from. And now essentially, they have all been minted out. And whenever a new project launches, it gets into that almost instantly. So the ability to just, you know, if I feel like minting smart go on top looks and mint, something has effectively, right?

Jamie:

Just yeah, I mean, I'm just like three weeks ago, or something like it was like, there might have been 15, open factory projects, maybe more it would, there was so many of them. And, you know, they were all getting minted, just so relaxed, and slowly and casually. And that was a really kind of cool thing. And then all of a sudden, it just sort of caught fire. And they got minted out. And it was it was also fun at the time to sort of be hanging out in the art blocks discord when people sort of collectively decided, hey, you know what, let's just, let's mint these out right now. And you would get a couple and people would show them off. And, and the, you know, the minting bot, which would show them in the chat. But now that it's all gone, it's like we can't do that anymore. And, and the fun of that is a little bit gone. And you have all these people coming in, that are sort of expecting those immediate profits. And then and then getting sort of angry when they don't get them not understanding how it used to operate and how slow some of those, you know, huge guaranteed in quotes, profits that other people were getting, how long they actually took.

Roy:

Yeah, it's, it's a little bit of a shame to I mean, to not have that aspect of uploads anymore. Maybe we will someday in the future. But it's hard to imagine a point where there are just open projects available to MIT. Maybe they do like an open edition style without time limit. But I think the DOM experimenting with open additions for a while. An open edition is essentially where there's no limit on the number that people can meant. In terms of the number I mean that they've been open editions where they say, okay, in an hour, people can print as many as they want. But

Jamie:

it's been exactly two of those if I remember correctly, one up looks Yeah. Transitions and flowers sort of a to

Roy:

yes. I mean, I think they got me to four and a half 1006 ish 1000 which is so many myths and essentially flooded the the secondary market and prices crashed. And

Jamie:

I guess people didn't actually like they didn't crash that much. No, I mean, I think if you minted one, and you sold that before today, unless you paid way too much in gas for nobody reason you're still getting a profit at this point.

Roy:

Yeah, I think it's about breakeven, but they were trading and flowers.

Jamie:

It's not like it's far below men. I mean, very few of them are still going for below men. And they I think they both look great. I think transitions especially, is a project where I really, I really love the art. I mentioned two of them, and I have just no plans to sell them at all. I actually, I got one of the ones that has the confetti palette, and I love it.

Roy:

It's great. I'm into 40. It's ridiculous. And so the whole premise is you can make as many as you want in the owl. And there's no limit. But because it was taking some of my transactions several minutes to confirm, I was literally sitting there with multiple browsers and multiple wallets open minting multiple transitions at a time, just because I love them so much. And yeah, I haven't sold a single one I have no plans to sell anytime soon. Yeah, they're a really cool drop, and they have 4700, I'm looking at the numbers now 4700 minted, but still have them seem, you know, unique and different. And

Jamie:

yeah, just whatever of the great things about that project, too, is that you just take a single piece. And you if you so it's a three dimensional animated image, but you can also zoom in and change the angles. And if you do either of those to a significant degree, the what you're looking at is so much different than if you were zoomed way out or zoomed way in, or, or looking at it head on versus sort of a sideways view. And so one piece of art from that project can effectively be you know, 1000s of pieces of art, if you just turn your sort of, if you turn yourself into a camera man, and place the camera in a different place, it has a totally different feel. And they they all look great to me, I think it's so cool.

Roy:

I looking forward to the day where we have really cool digital displays for NFT's. And

Jamie:

yeah, I'm very eager for that as well. Yeah, I desperately want to have one of my 720 minutes, which is another artbox curated drop from a while ago. And it's basically what these are is there 720 of them. And they basically represent every minute of the day. divided by two, because it basically treats am and pm as equivalent in this. And it's what it is, is it's an actual clock, and it's animated. And each of the different 720 minutes has one specific minute of the day, programmed into it where the clock just goes bonkers. And it's like exploding with all these interesting colors. And it's like really a kind of a visually astounding thing. But it only happens for this one specific minute for each individual piece. And it's it's like almost a like a bit of a Buddhist thing where, you know, it kind of forces you to be in the moment for this one minute a day if you if you own one, and you remember, Oh, my time is coming up, I'm going to look at it. And then you're just you're only doing this one thing, appreciating this piece of art for a minute straight and getting. I don't know, I don't know if you've actually done it, but I have one that goes off at 148. And it's really been a bit of a spiritual thing to watch it during its special minute whenever I have the chance to, especially more so at the 1:40am one words, just I'm sort of winding down for the day. Usually, I'm alone I'm not I'm not really doing anything I'm not out and about and I'm just appreciating it. And it's it's a really awesome project. I love those. I kind of want to buy more. You just

Roy:

made me want to go and buy one right now. I wonder how many people listening are going to be running up looks are very cool. Yeah, they are very cool. I I desperately want one displayed as well. I mean, like I like a lot of projects that I want display the pigments drop recently. That's it would be great to just have on a display. And I mean, for those listening, I mean, we're gonna describe some art here, which is not great podcasting, but essentially, it's like a if you've seen one of those old Renaissance paintings with clouds in the sky, it's like it's got a bit of that effect going on. But the clouds are moving and like different colors and palettes and they're just swirling around and meshing together and we'll post a link to it in blue so you can check it out. But I would just love to have one of those on a pretty large display just always on and just changing and yeah, it just,

Jamie:

I just pulled it up on the website. I'm going to read the first two sentences of it because I feel like it kind of describes it pretty well says pigments is an exploration of color and spatial distortion. Each instance is an abstract representation aimed at evoking a micro or macro environment, from unknown substances, or oil in a canvas to nebular formations. And to me, that's pretty accurate. And they're all animated slowly. But when you're looking at them, it can definitely look like literally like oil on a canvas. Or you can, just like it says, they can look like you know, sort of galaxies forming slowly. It's a really interesting drop. And I would definitely recommend people checking these out on the art block site, they look really beautiful. And I mentioned this to you before, this project, in particular, to me has this fun duality, where, if you look at it looks a lot like a traditional piece of art that you might find in a museum. But it also contains these components that are totally impractical to do with traditional art and that you could only do with the power of a computer. And that is just a really special combination that I think people maybe subconsciously really appreciate. And also, obviously some like myself, appreciate it consciously. And I think that people who own these to appreciate are gonna love, appreciate visually, I mean, and also people who own these, because they think they'll appreciate financially, probably, I think, will do well, because, you know, if there's a scarcity to them, like there are to all NFT's, but it's also just sort of a beautiful piece of art that I think over time as people look at them, art lovers will want to own them. I think as

Roy:

time goes on, I'm noticing more and more that we're sort of living in this art revolution, and all sorts of people who, myself included, to an extent, had not a huge interest in art, and not a huge appreciation of art, finding through NFT's and really loving and appreciating them. And it's literally bringing joy to people's lives, myself included, because some of my art pieces, not just our blocks, but let's talk about some my apple expenses, I will look at them, and they just make me happy. And I like putting together sets of you know, three pieces from the same collection or three pieces from different collections that have the same color palette, and just seeing how they work together and visually, like match up. And it's just, it's fun, and it's cool. And it's great to see more people loving art. And I personally enjoyed the whole journey. And I've spoken to many people who said, you know, I got an OP looks cuz, you know, I saw lots of people making money. And I ended up loving it, you know, I've got these pieces and I don't want to sell them and then buying more. And that's kind of what happened with me i prime like a large part of why I got into Roblox was because it was early my NFC Korea, and we had a friend who said, you could probably sell this for you know, 5x in a few months. And I was like, this friend. Sounds good.

Jamie:

Yeah,

Roy:

I'll trust you. I like minting things. And let's do it. And then, you know, fast forward a few months, I have, I don't know, 300 400 app workspaces. I can't even imagine listing 80% of them just because I love them. And yeah, it's, it's really crazy.

Jamie:

And it's a funny thing to wear. What has made them so financially successful, is the fact that so many of the people that own them, are not thinking of them in financial terms, it's just this is this is not for sale, this is a beautiful piece of art that I want. And then so when people come in to the secondary market and try to acquire them, there's barely any that people actually want to get rid of, for any sort of reasonable price. And then, on top of that, when they do do it, when they do do it, when they are able to successfully buy one from one of these people that really doesn't want to sell it. So many of them are taking that money, or at least a large chunk of that money and going ooh, you know what this is gonna allow me to buy a singularity which I never afford before, or an archetype or, you know, just for the listeners. Those are two pretty expensive artbox projects that may be if you had a couple other things you would have really wanted one but couldn't quite afford and then you finally capitulate and sell some some other piece and now all of a sudden you can afford it and you you end up putting the money right back into our blocks. For other thing that again, you have no intentions of selling because it's it's a piece of art that you've been I'm just appreciating and desiring for so long that that was me with singularities for a long time, I loved them. And the price was just too high for me to justify getting, especially because in particular, that one the very best pieces were like crazily too expensive. But but looked so great to me that I really wanted one. But I also found of sort of the lower end of that project pieces that I also really loved. And after I, you know, successfully was able to sell a couple other NFT's, I finally had enough to where I went, Well, this is still quite expensive to me. But I think in the long run, the price is probably going to run up from here. And I really want to own one. So it's probably now or never, so let me just bite the bullet and do it. And I ended up getting one for two Aetherium. And they, they basically stayed there and didn't really move much for a while and then kind of just exploded a few weeks ago, when all of our blocks is going off. And now they're definitely too expensive for me to realistically be able to buy one. But again, I have no desire whatsoever to sell it because I love the art so much.

Roy:

Yeah, they're sitting at around 10 to 11/8 is the floor for a singularity now, which is just crazy, but it's crazy. Yeah. You exactly right about not wanting to sell I had someone DM me on Discord a couple of days ago, asked me about a specific Ecumene opolis I had, which is a playground drop. And he was like, how much? Would you be willing to sell that one? I was like, not for sale? Like almost any other NFT I'd list some crazy price, in case they want to pay. And obviously if he was like, I'll give you 500 eth. For some ludicrous amount, I would say yes. But just my immediate reaction is no, it's just not for sale. I love it. It's

Jamie:

sort of a thing where like, if you're going to give them an honest answer you sound like, like an opportunistic Jackass or something. Because the only price you're willing to sell it for is one that the market has clearly decided, is more than any of the pieces in this project are currently worth. Yeah.

Roy:

Alright, so we did a pretty good job of not talking about our blocks until we started talking about our books.

Jamie:

But we were planning on talking about just maybe not quite as much as we normally do. And I guess if we were to stop now, which we theoretically do. That would be a reasonable amount to talk about it, I guess for this episode. Yeah, sure. Yeah, you can expect at least this much art blocks talk in probably every podcast we ever do. Many are both huge. Yeah. Almost everyone, for sure. Yeah. There's always going to be new drops we're talking about and just actually about to start talking about another one. I have really been loving archetypes lately. And

Roy:

you say That's another archetype.

Jamie:

You say archetype. I do. Hmm.

Roy:

I feel like it's archetype. Well,

Jamie:

and I feel like it's alright. I guess there's is there an either? You're gonna go to the website, isn't

Roy:

he? Well, at least I haven't he written in my, my spreadsheet where I track the prices? And yeah, I guess I feel like I've heard other people or isn't a I didn't even say archetype.

Jamie:

I think it could, it might be totally fine. Either way. Yeah. And probably isn't that interesting for us to keep talking? Oh, you gonna say? I just that I've been looking at them a lot lately, and really loving them. And having that sort of same feeling that I had about the singularity. Except now I think those have a floor of about 93. Whereas when I was pining over the singularities before was like, just under two. So these are even more impractical for me to buy. But boy, do I want one?

Roy:

Yeah, I've really been eyeing them a lot these last few days as well. I almost pulled the trigger when they were around 13 A couple of days ago, and they've dropped since then tonight. And I mean, 13 Nine itself would be by far my largest NFT purchase, let alone 13. But yeah, they are really, really nice. You spend a

Jamie:

decent amount on a couple of those Ecke monopolist is in the early secondary, didn't you or did you get in so quick? I got it all your prices are like below two?

Roy:

Yeah, I think I might have spent like two and a half on one. But I got I think three or four on secondary under to eighth.

Jamie:

Man what a disappointing drop. That was for me. I was trying to get my father in law in on the drop because he finds this entity space really interesting. And just kind of enjoys hearing me talk about it and has seen some of the success I've had so he wanted to get in on it. So I was like Okay, Jim, it's coming up. blah, blah, blah, let's let's let's do this, he funded a Metamask, all that good stuff. And then, for one reason or another, he wasn't actually going to be able to participate in the drop. But we were talking about it ahead of time. And I was sort of preparing him for the gas war. And he was like, well, Jamie, what what are you going to put in for your gas price? And I said, Jim, all I know is I'm going to put in such a high gas price that I guarantee that I get one. And then 20 minutes later, the drop was over. And I did not have fun and it was devastating. And they looked awesome. And the secondary market immediately took off. And then I bid on a bunch of them in the early secondary market. I didn't get what they're devastated.

Roy:

Well, maybe if blocks prices keep dropping a bit more, you can get one. Yeah,

Jamie:

it's also fine though, like, this is a thing that if you are deep in the NFT space, you're just gonna have to get used to not being able to get some things that you want. Selling some things too early. Oh, you're not getting enough of things that do well, buying too much of things. There's going to be disappointment coming at you, from every direction in NFTs, and if you can't emotionally get past that your your NGMA. Right.

Roy:

Yeah. Which follows, not in the NFT space or not, as in ngoi means not gonna make it and a common expression. When someone's doing something smart or successful in the NFC space, you say that they GMI

Jamie:

they're gonna make it. Yeah. And if you say, well, what's the point of that? Why would somebody pay that much for it? I can just right click save as that person NGMA.

Roy:

All right, um, what do we get, we're getting close to an hour and a half, we need to figure out how long we want these podcasts to be.

Jamie:

Okay, let's, I'm going to name three projects. And you pick one of them. And we'll talk about that. And then we'll go on to the plugs section and wrap up three different choices for you world of women. Whatever the name for that rabbit project from yesterday is, and Royal Society of players, you pick one and we'll talk about it.

Roy:

I want to pick rural society of plays, because I don't know as much about it as the other two. And you do and I want to learn but I want to quickly mention the rabbits just because they have had such an insane 24 hours. They basically means it out last night four point or nine and within less than 24 hours, the floor was 1.8. So that basically 20x And then just that isn't saying for one day, it is insane, even for the empty space.

Jamie:

That That reminds me of that rocket project, which is again, I said pick one of these Yeah, basically seem to have picked two and that no, I'm bringing up another one.

Roy:

Let's talk about Royal Society of players. Why don't you tell me like a bit about it?

Jamie:

Okay, well right now I am walking to another room with my laptop to get my charger. So apologies if the sound quality is doing anything right now. But I do not want my laptop to die while we're doing this. I have a charger and walking back to the room that I record in. Our listeners are for those

Roy:

tuning in now if it is Jamie walking to charge his laptop

Jamie:

and only the audio of it. Just really good stuff here, folks. Okay, now, plugging it into my computer.

Roy:

How about how about I start I'll talk a bit about what I know of the Royal Society. I'm

Jamie:

logging the thing. All right, whoa. Getting back onto my seat that I record from Okay, and here we go. Okay, Royal Society of players want me to start?

Roy:

Yes, we've been waiting for this moment.

Jamie:

I thought I thought we were just really enjoying me walking in one room to another. Okay, so Royal Society of players. Let's talk about this. Um, so on a base level, the NFT's that you're minting look like playing cards, they have twos through aces, just like in a regular deck, as well as Joker's. And they have, you know, like other sort of Avatar projects. They have different visual traits that have varying rarities. But in terms of the way the project operates, it's what we sort of call in the space a utility project or a community project where the value isn't just the image itself like something like our boxes. It's about getting rewards, direct rewards, essentially for owning them. And a couple examples of that might be the house of Kiba or probably the biggest one would be the Medicaid would you say that's accurate? It's

Roy:

the other one's V friend. Gary Vaynerchuk says,

Jamie:

oh, yeah, the friends. Okay, that's a good one. But that? Well, I guess I don't know enough about that project. But to me, the only thing I knew about in that one is that it's basically you just get a, a free pass for a few years to his big convention is, are there other benefits in it,

Roy:

that's the one that I'm aware of, I'm sure that he's finally got a

Jamie:

must, there must be. Yeah. So that's basically what a utility project in general is, but this one has a bit of a different component, because the different cards can be arranged to make poker hands. So if you have two aces, that's a pair of aces. That's obvious. But there's so they're doing things where they will give rewards for people who have different hands, rather than just individual ones, which kind of increases the amount of trading and acquiring of these that people will want to do, and allows them to just come up with lots of different ways to reward people at different tier levels. And the thing that I most was attracted to about the project is that and you know, that V friends thing undercuts me a little bit here. So I wish you didn't bring it up. But to me, when I think of these utility projects, I really I think about the meta key and how Suceava and stuff like that. And in those all of the rewards are digital, you're getting airdrops of wearables for decentraland. And you're getting 3d models of your 2d NFT's. And just lots of things like that, which is cool and interesting. But the Royal Society of players is really interacting with the real world in an interesting way to where, you know, like, for instance, they're having a big rooftop party in New York City later on this week, I'm sorry, later on this month. And if you have any card, you're in for free, and it's a beautiful place, and there's food and there's drinks, and it's all free for you. And if you don't have one, you can still go to this party, but it's$500 to get in. And then that$500 is going to the treasury of the Royal Society of players, which will then get used for further awards in the future, which is super cool. And they're doing a poker tournament later this month, as well, that has a$10,000 prize pool, that again, it's free to enter as long as you own a card. And it's just, it's, it's really interesting to me, and it seems like a project where if the team behind it works hard. And they are not greedy enough to just try and take all of the money from the initial sales and the royalties from the secondary market sales, and put them in their pockets, but rather reinvest them into the project, it's going to be a super cool community. That's a lot of fun, where, you know, if you got in early enough, the amount of rewards you'll be able to collect from it over time are going to exceed your initial investment of one one other specific one that they have some poker, the best hand you can possibly have is a royal flush, which is a 10, Jack, Queen, King and Ace all have the same suit. That's called a royal flush. And if you have one of those in this project, what they've done is they bought a z one, Zed run horse. And for people that don't know about that run z one are the absolute best breed of horses, basically. What is the actual term genotype? Yeah, so z one is the best genotype the most premium horses and what they're going to do is, they're just going to breed that horse as many times as the game of Zadran allows you to, and they will just be perpetually giving the offspring from that horse, which is in and of itself an NFT. That should be worth 1000s of dollars, to a random holder of a royal flush. And that's, to me super cool, especially as somebody who I only have two that are on horses, and neither one is particularly good. I would love to get another good horse and I do have a royal flush in the Royal Society of players. So I'm excited to hopefully get a great horse out of it.

Roy:

Yeah, it all sounds really cool. I've heard a lot of people in the community talking very positively about it. And something I noticed. So I'm a big stats guy, as a lot of people listening might know, I publish daily stats on the NFC market and look at things like flow price and number of unique owners. And I saw something with the Royal Society of players that I hadn't seen any other project, which is that the number of unique earners was going down every single day but the full price was going up which to me indicated the community was really strong. It may not have been attracting too many new members But people within the community, we're really happy to keep spending more and more money on the community. And I think that if you have a strong, tight knit group, it can be very successful, especially, as you said, if the team is not short sighted and reinvesting, you know, some of the money back into the project, etc.

Jamie:

Yeah. And based on the updates I get from their discord. I don't spend a ton of time there. But I do read basically, every announcement that they add everyone to, it really sounds like they are they have that right. Long term focus in the right work ethic to make this into a really cool project. And I'm actually possibly going to go to the party in New York. My my sister in law lives in New York, I'm only like a three hour drive away or something. So it's, it's a feasible thing. I'm not sure if it's going to happen, but it's it's definitely on my radar, something to do.

Roy:

Yeah, sounds fun.

Jamie:

I'm definitely going to play the poker tournament. Yeah.

Roy:

I mean, that sounds like the right thing for you to do. Yeah,

Jamie:

yeah, I'm sorry, no card, I have cards,

Roy:

I really, I like the idea of having cards because I want exposure to the project. And in the financial sense, I think it's going to do well. But the only thing that's held me back is I don't think I'm going to participate in a lot of the reward options. Like I'm not obviously going to a party in New York, I'm probably not going to play a poker tournament. If there's any sort of giveaways that require active participation, and stuff like that, I'm not going to get maximum value out of it. But it could just be that the project is cool enough that the value of the entities goes up, even if I'm not getting all this extra value myself.

Jamie:

Yeah, that's sort of an interesting thing with varying NFT projects to where the value of the NFT itself relies on, not just it, but also the way that you utilize it. You know, an obvious example for you would be your Zadran, horse, Platinum spirit, great horse, super valuable. But the market value of the horse is, in some ways, more valuable than the horse is to you, you know, assuming that the market is perfect at pricing things or whatever. Because you are so busy doing so many different things that you can't actually breed it optimally and race it optimally, the way that somebody else who's less busy or has their fingers in less NFT pies would be able to and and this Royal Society of players sounds like another one like that where you have to be somewhat actively participating to actually get the value out of it.

Roy:

Yeah, 100%. I, I found myself in a bunch of these communities. I have a house of Kiba membership. I have a Medicare membership. I have a land land vault members. Oh, land

Jamie:

vault. That was another one that I want to mention. Yeah, yeah.

Roy:

And a lot of it is I really believe in the projects. But I know that I'm not getting maximum value out of it. But I'm not willing to sell them because I think that they're going to do really well long term. So it's something that it gives me options in the future to jump in and try and I guess get some of the utility value out of it. But I mean, for some of them that just literally add dropping things to you. So it requires zero participation. And that's kind of cool. Yeah. But yeah, on Zed, Ron, specifically, I had basically the same thought, maybe a week ago, and I tweeted out saying is there or there should be a bit essentially a service where someone can manage my stable of horses and prepare for a percentage of profits. And currently, as far as I'm aware, there's no trustless way for that to happen. You basically have to find someone you trust to give them access to your your NFT's. And they do that the raising and breeding. And but based on some of the replies, I got to my tweet, it sounds like people are working on finding a solution to this, whether it's the Zed project team themselves, and incorporating it into the platform or some third party site, but I think that's going to be early.

Jamie:

I'm sure if you were like sufficiently talented at programming, you could make some sort of smart contract where somebody had to lock in collateral at least that you would be able to confiscate if such and such happen where they you know, tried to abscond with or trade your horse to somebody else. But that would involve collateral and programming and all that stuff. So it's, it's not it's not the awesome solution. That's easy. No, that you want?

Roy:

No, it's the solution that I want someone smarter than me to come up with and implement in a easy to use way.

Jamie:

Approximately how often are you are you still racing platinum spirit on a daily basis? Yes. So many,

Roy:

one of the good things about the state of the market at the moment is that when you enter a horse race, it can take like eight to 10 hours for to actually run that race because there are so many people wanting to race and the way that horses are set up is they fill and then I think there's one race a minute that runs. And so in the past, I hated that, because I was like, Well, I want to be racing 100 times a day, I had all this free time, and I wasn't able to. But now I think of it sort of as a blessing, at least in disguise for me, because I don't feel like I'm missing out too much on the value of my horse by only checking dead wrong twice a day and entering platinum spirit into, say, six months or

Jamie:

so giving you time to do all the other stuff. And yeah, but they're implementing

Roy:

these new changes, I guess with fatigue, it's going to be similar, where I won't necessarily want to be racing it a lot.

Jamie:

Yeah, I mean, I guess also, depending on the specific fatigue stats of your horse, too, because like, if you have one that fatigue slower, it probably will be a situation where you're wanting to be even turning it over more than you did when there was no fatigue for any horse.

Roy:

Yeah. And it's, it takes time to race and figure out the fatigue level of different horses. And yeah, I really need that. That stable manager to be a thing. Because I mean, I've been breeding because I had a bunch of horses. And when breeding reopened, I was like, Well, I'm just gonna make more horses. And now you can breed once a month. And it's been more than a month, I think. So I bred more horses, and I let me see how many I think I have like 40 Horses now. Third 31. And most of them I haven't raced probably, I mean, some of them seem like they have decent ish, that's but they need to be raised at more distances and someone with the time and the knowledge ought to be raising them and figuring out where they're good.

Jamie:

If you I mean, if you have a big stable that if you wanted to maximize. So that would be a totally full time job.

Roy:

Yeah, I know, people who essentially have had, like, their wife, or their best friend, or someone they really trust come on board and manage this table. Because it's so large, and it's so profitable to do at the moment that it made sense.

Jamie:

So yeah, I guess the easiest thing for someone like that would just be kind of just to try and sell everything at approximately market price. And then just kind of have a manageable stable that is, is just generating its money by creating new horses, that you then just give to the market to somebody who can more properly get the value out of it, and then hopefully have them you know, pay you a present sum of money that's equal to their future cash flows, discounted blah, blah, blah.

Roy:

Yeah, I think my issue with that is I'm so I guess bullish on Zed in the long run that the price that the market is willing to pay for my losses isn't what I don't. Yeah, so yeah, it is what it is.

Jamie:

Yeah. Our friends and I joke sometimes about how like before bed will go, Okay, we should listen, NFT's for sale, and then we'll go through our wallet of hundreds of NFT's and and be able to talk ourselves into why we shouldn't sell a single one of them. Yeah, it's so

Roy:

difficult. It really it's so hard to sell NFT but has to be done sometimes just to get more liquid to buy more entities to buy

Jamie:

more. Yeah. All right, let's, let's, what were you gonna say?

Roy:

I was just gonna say, yesterday, I, for the first time in maybe two months actually sold NFT's took the eth and withdraw it to Australian dollars in my bank account because it just seemed like a smart thing to do a bit of take some profits. So yeah, but yeah,

Jamie:

well, I mean, we have a we have a friend. I'm not going to name names, but he has a very large NFT portfolio the other day that his electricity got turned off. Yeah, he's

Roy:

got crypto punks. He's got

Jamie:

Yeah, people literally joke on Twitter and stuff about about this sort of thing where it's like, oh, I'm eating ramen noodles. But I have all this turned off because he was too you know, busy in the NFT space to take this fiat money and give it to the electricity company that feeds electricity to it's just

Roy:

pay them in eat? Oh, yeah, that's point.

Jamie:

Point was connect your Metamask to the election. I mean, why can we not do that?

Roy:

Yeah, that's gonna, it's gonna be so great.

Jamie:

Let's, let's get this wrapped up and move on to the plug section that we're going to end each show with what do you what would you like to plug right?

Roy:

I will plug so currently the biggest thing I guess is my newsletter I write about NFT's. I try and write a new letter once a week. Sometimes it's a little bit longer in between newsletters, but yeah, I'll post a link to that in the show notes below. And yeah, I guess I have a project I'm working on but it's not really ready to be plugged yet. It's called. I'm gonna plug it anyway. It's called Zen Academy, and it's essentially an educational website plot. form community that I am building and developing and creating, because I've found that there is a lack of good education in the NFT space. And there's a very steep learning curve for someone new to the space who wants to get involved. And there's not I want that to be like a goto website and for people to say, hey, if they have a friend who's new to NFT's, how do they learn about it? Go check out Zen Academy, and it's going to teach people what an NFT is the history of NFT's how to use meta mask, what meta mask is probably what the theorem is, I mean, just there are so many basic concepts that are taken for granted, I think, by those of us who've been in the space for, you know, even a couple of months, let alone longer. And yes, I'm working on this. I initially wanted it to be launched around now. But I'm pushing it, say a month back. So mid ish, late September is when I when is going to be out because I want to do it right.

Jamie:

All right. And do you want to me, I do, I create art, I create abstract art. And I have a project, it's on open sea, it's called abstract of the day. And if you like abstract art, I would love for you to check it out. Just like with your substack, we're gonna have a link to it in the show notes so people can check it out. Actually, today, I just put one up for auction, which is the first time I've ever done that. It's Day 59. I've been doing it for 59 days in a row now. And for the first 50 days, I priced them all at point 01 eth. And then for days 51 through 100. My plan was to put them all at point 025 eth. And that's still what I'm doing. But I also have really appreciated the way NFT projects can really have interactivity between the community of collectors and the artists themselves and how you can sort of reward them. So I have a four drop series called seasons, and I'm doing one once called Spring, one summer ones fall and one's winter, and the owner of these NFT's is going to get a little bit of a reward, you can read about it on the actual page for the for the spring one, but I'm auctioning those off, rather than doing it at the flat price just to because these are the first pieces that are going to come with a little bit of extra utility. I thought it might be a fun thing to do. And you know, have some almost like the art blocks project have some of the secondary market come right at the beginning rather than after the the pieces sold initially.

Roy:

Very cool. I'm a fan of the abstract of the date.

Jamie:

Prager, you I'm I'm a fan of it too. i It's weird to say but you know, I, I used to love to do watercolor paintings, but I had never really done digital art. And this project was sort of a way for me to learn digital art. And I really, at the beginning was minting a lot of stuff that I didn't feel that happy and proud of, but I wanted to just keep at it. And now I've gotten to the point where I really do like a lot of the work I'm producing. And it feels good. And it's exciting, to get better and make art that I like and sell it for a reasonable price to people that want to and in the people that have been collecting it and are willing to resell it have been able to collect decent little profits on the secondary market. So it's it's also working out for my collectors.

Roy:

Yeah, it's really part of the magic of NFCs in like, yeah, unfolding before our eyes, this wouldn't have been possible, like realistically, a year ago.

Jamie:

Yeah, actually, this also makes me want to plug the article by Paki M who writes a subset called not boring. He wrote a article called power to the person and it was the sole article that got me into the NFT space, I had a couple friends that were into them before me and I genuinely didn't understand how it wasn't just a scam that my poor friend was falling for. And this single article totally opened my eyes to it. And it's very much about how these really empower individuals to get value out of their labor in a way that is disintermediated. Where, you know, previously creative types had so many layers of people taking some of the value from them, between them and they're in their final audience and the crypto space and NFT's in particular really allow you to go directly from creator to consumer and it's it's really interesting the way it works.

Roy:

Yeah, I think that might have been the same article that really got me I guess invested in NFT's and understanding it and

Jamie:

also a funny thing happened. I read it he talks about how crypto They're sort of the first ones. And I read it and I was so convinced about how awesome NFT's were. And the fact that the crypto punks were sort of the first one ever, I was like, the historical value of these things is great. I'm for sure gonna buy one, I hopped off of the chair that I read it, went to my computer, and went to my group chat with my friends that were already in them. And I was like, Guys, I'm buying a crypto punk. This is great. And then had the rude awakening that they were already $30,000 or something. Yeah. And I was like, Oh, I guess I'm I'm not buying crypto.

Roy:

But if I remember you bought some punks tokens or something. I did

Jamie:

buy a couple punks tokens. So I ended up having like 2% of a punk or something.

Roy:

Yeah. And now the 140,000 or something each,

Jamie:

right. But I ended up selling those punk tokens later to do some other NFT stuff.

Roy:

Yeah, I think that's a big thing with like, the NFT space and like, I really want to punk and I've wanted one for a while. But I I could sell some stuff and get one but it's the opportunity costs of like not having 40s or 50s. Now liquid and the opportunities that I could, you know, grow that faster than by sitting in a punk. I'm making me think that maybe I'm being what's the word cocky or something saying that? Well, I'm just gonna take that road into 150. And then I'll buy a punk and you know, but

Jamie:

and hope that punks aren't 160 Exactly. Yeah. The other thing that I find funny and I I've been sort of observing this in you is that you'll have this plan where you go, Okay, hang on, I'm going to sell stuff to get the punk. And then let's say you start with zero eth. And all these NFT's, you sell like 10 eth worth of stuff, and get yourself part of the way to the punk. And before you continue selling it off. You've now spent five other FTEs Yeah, and it's like you're on some sort of treadmill, but you can't make any progress.

Roy:

Well, like yesterday, I had probably the most Ethan I've ever had in my my wallets. And I I was like, This is great. I'm getting close. And within say two hours of feeling good about having my eat. I all of a sudden had like no eth I had 42 rabbits. I had a bunch of planets. And I had some other project. I can't even remember what I bought.

Jamie:

Rabbits are working out for you though.

Roy:

Oh, those rabbits. Yeah, I sold most of them. But it

Jamie:

was over. We're not talking about the fourth project that we said we weren't gonna and we're already in the plug section. Right let's let's wrap this up. All right. This has been episode one of Two Bored Apes. Ah, thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed it. And in one week's time, we should have episode two out for you.

Roy:

Thanks for listening

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