Two Bored Apes - NFT Podcast

Episode 2 - I Say Scarcity, You Say Scarcity

August 17, 2021 Two Bored Apes
Two Bored Apes - NFT Podcast
Episode 2 - I Say Scarcity, You Say Scarcity
Show Notes Transcript

On Episode 2 of Two Bored Apes, Jaime and Roy talk about Damien Hirst's NFT project "The Currency", Fvckrender's "FVCKCRYSTALS" project that launched this week, and, of course, also talk about Art Blocks. Finally they weigh in on the great penguin drama of August 2021.

Show Notes:

The Currency
https://www.heni.com/

Art Blocks: Pigments Gallery
https://artblocks.io/project/129

Art Blocks: Fidenza
https://artblocks.io/project/78/gallery

A really great collection of Fidenza pieces
https://www.bonafidehan.art/

FVCKRENDER Crystals
https://fvckcrystal.xyz/

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

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

Stories in Nature Photography Project
https://opensea.io/collection/ashleykaplanphotography

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. And today's episode of Two Bored Apes we talk about Damian Hertz NFT project called the currency. We talked about Pudgy Penguins. We talked about art blocks, we talked about the Bored Ape Yatch Club Mutant announcement. We talked about Cool Cats. We talked about fuck render crystals, and we probably get sidetracked and talk about some other stuff.

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 Two of Two Bored Apes. I'm your host, Jamie, I'm here with my friend Roy. Right. How are you?

Roy:

I am I'm tired. You know, I'm I'm fatigued with NFT's is what I would say. I think I've had enough. Well, not enough like enough enough.

Jamie:

This episode two of our podcasts about NFT's and you're opening it by saying you're over NFT's?

Roy:

No, I've told the minting dozens.

Jamie:

This has been episode two of two. We hope you enjoyed the show.

Roy:

How are you Jamie?

Jamie:

I'm good actually. And I'm I'm not tired of NFT's. But I've been slightly out of the NFT... slightly out of the NFT space for about two days now. Which seems like a very long time. It is, you know, NFT's so. So I guess we're in different places. So let's talk about your burnout. What are you talking about?

Roy:

It's just I mean, if you've been in the NFTs space for even a few days, let alone a few months, you've noticed how there are just dozens of new projects popping up every seems like every day, but certainly every week. And I've really been minting a lot of them just because I noticed Yeah, that there's there's definitely money to be made minting projects and flipping them and holding some of them and having the value go up. And again, it's definitely I guess addictive is the word or it's hard to look at a project think you can make money on it and then decide, You know what, I'm not going to mint that. And then what happens is that, well, at least for me, I'm spending most of my day minting project, looking forward to minting a project, finding out a project that's upcoming, and the details about it. And then in the aftermath, trying to decide what the value of it is listing it. And then spending the next couple of hours checking the floor prices and deciding if I want to list or or delist. And then another project comes up. And then it's yeah, it's

Jamie:

gonna say by the, by the time you're done with that there's another project, right, I mean...

Roy:

Yeah. And because I generally don't just flip everything, I will have remnants of every previous project that I've minted, I still sitting in one of my wallets, I've got a few from all these other projects that I still need to kind of keep track on and decide what I want to do with them. And it's gotten to the point and I know this is the epitome of firstworldproblems. I have too many NFT's. But it's gotten to the point where I just can't keep up with it. And I'm almost stressing out about not being up to date. So yeah, that's the fatigue part. And I really want to start cutting back.

Jamie:

a few days ago, you're looking for things to sell. And you're you're kind of telling me these same feelings you're having. And I had you give me two of your you gave me two of your wallet addresses. So I could look through the wallet and tell you what was okay for you to listen for sale on that wallet. So you could cut down on the amount of work. Yeah, I also remember, I'm sorry, I also remember the other day I was looking at your main wallet after you had won the auction on an abstract of the day to see which ones you could get a print of that you already owned. So I typed in like abstract into your thing. And I mean it narrowed it down from 1100 NFT's to like 78 And I was like this is I'm not gonna scroll through all of these. I gotta find a better way. Yeah, sorry to filter by collection rather than just typing in the name. You have a lot of

Roy:

ridiculus Yeah, yeah,

Jamie:

I definitely was feeling similar feelings to what you're feeling. I just had feeling a lot, maybe three weeks ago or something. But I found that for me, I've been able to channel a lot of that energy into working on my own NFT project and a little bit planning this podcast to where I go look, I'm very happy with the NFT's I have I know that I could probably sell some of them right now and put that money into things that are going to be profitable to mint and then possibly sell very quickly and then you know I can use those proceeds to buy back what I just had that I like long term but like you're saying that gets exhausting and is a basically never ending 24 hour a day seven day a week job. And it's just it's it's not as fun as just holding the projects you like, and then actually being a creator and building something. So I definitely was feeling that. And it doesn't help when you have people around you that you see, being so successful making money at these things. And also just, you know, in general the nature of society, we're definitely told to keep trying to attain more and more wealth. And you go, Well, I'm pretty darn sure that if I mint this, at point O eight, there's going to be a chance for me to sell it at point three, within like, an hour, on multiple projects a day, it's, it's tough to just turn that down, when you see that in front of you. But I luckily have, for my own sanity been able to do that lately.

Roy:

Yeah, that's definitely sort of the creative side of things. Definitely what I want to be doing more of, I mean, we have this podcast now, which there's some extra work that I could be doing to help it and there's ZenAcademy, this project platform that I want to launch next month, that still needs a lot of work. And there's my newsletter, and I mean, there's all these things that I can be doing to create rather than just buying and selling NFT's. And I mean, it's, you said it was more fun to create. And I mean, for you probably because you're creating art, and you enjoy that. Not that I don't enjoy all these other things. But I really did love the buying and selling aspect of NFT's and the trading and following it a lot. Up until maybe just a couple of days ago, when I started getting, I hit sort of like a wall like yeah, a turning point

Jamie:

It's definitely fun. But when it comes to a point where you kind of are better at researching it and realizing just how many there are. And it's it just becomes an all consuming thing. If you if you get to the point where you feel like it is a bad financial decision for me not to keep researching these, not to keep minting them not to check rarities, not to, you know, list the right amount of them for sale at the right different prices. And, okay, now there's a new one coming up, but I no longer have eth which of these 1300 NFT's do I list for sale? Is there anything I can sell immediately without having to, you know, short myself on what the true worth of it is all all that stuff when it's when it's constant and it feels like you can't You're making a mistake to not do it. That's when it stops being fun. Yeah,

Roy:

you made a great analogy the other day, something about a garden and weeding and I can't remember it. Maybe you can tell me what it is again and tell the audience because yeah, it was really great

Jamie:

In in stock investing, which I did a lot of in my life and still do. There's a saying that you don't improve your portfolio by Oh, no. It's basically you don't want to water the weeds and pull out the winners or whatever. Oh, God, this, this is awful. But basically what I was saying to you specifically, that was, you know, adjacent to this was that you've clearly grown something very good. But now it's getting so crazy that it's overtaking you. So you need to stop planting new stuff. Prune down what you have to a much more manageable level. And then once that's manageable, you can worry about trying to plant new stuff.

Roy:

Yeah, that's exactly what I remember even.

Jamie:

It was probably even more eloquent the first time I said it,

Roy:

yeah, cuz you were taught you typed it out. And you probably had time to think about it and formulate it in the most eloquent way. But yeah, so that's, that's sort of where I've been with my NFT's the last few days. I mean, I, I had this feeling last week, and I was like, I'm gonna sell a bunch of stuff. And I went through my three none. So I have four wallets that I use now, which is in and of itself, crazy. And I went through all my non main ones, and I was like, I went through every single NFT and listed for sale, and at a price. And then I was like, Okay, I'm gonna wake up, most of its gonna be sold, and I'll just vote and then you know, obviously most

Jamie:

of it, that's it. Well, I was really,

Roy:

really, really underflow prices or just if there was a rare one, it was way below the floor for that rarity. But I mean, I guess for certain collections, the market wasn't there, and I wasn't that much on the floor just to have this anyway, so I still ended up with a bunch and then I've talked myself into minting more and yes, I mean, I'm in the same spot, but I'm telling myself now I'm really going to do it and I'm going to focus next day. So tomorrow basically just on listing stuff and more importantly not buying stuff like I've done I've done a really good job the last few days of listing lots and lots of things and selling lots lots of things for me is that I'm online I'm on Discord. I'm on Twitter, I hear these anyone talking about this great project coming up and people trust them, right? Yes, like easy to get drawn in.

Jamie:

So what about just taking the proceeds from your sales and rather than turning them into new projects that you're minting 60 of buying, like one blue chip and ft so to speak that you're willing to hold that, yeah, that that will lock it up, but not also give you more of a headache that you have to think about and, and do all this research to figure out how to properly monetize

Roy:

this definitely something I've been thinking about, I've really been eyeing an archetype, archetype archetype.

Jamie:

We never got to the bottom of this. Well,

Roy:

I think I'm right still. So

Jamie:

I know that, um, but we as a collective have not gotten to the bottom of it. Anyway,

Roy:

I think when we were talking last, they were maybe 13 eth 19 eth. And now the floor is 20 or 21. So obviously, it's gonna obviously everything in artblocks has gone up this last week, we can talk about that a bit. So it's not like I'm unhappy about it. It's just that the goalposts has been moved a little bit further and flipping these other projects into the 28 eth is harder than getting into nine. But yeah, I think that's a pretty legitimate idea. But I think what I really want is just to sort of stack some eth for a while because I basically had 90% of my, maybe 80% of my crypto portfolio in NFTs, and I'm very bullish on NFT's. But you know, it's not immune to a market correction or crash, right.

Jamie:

So you're proven to be very bad at holding eth and not turning it into equities.

Roy:

Well, so I have, I've set up a vault account now connected to a hardware Wallet. So I think I've Well, I've sent a lot of NFT's there. And I've also started sending some ether. And it's just that extra layer of friction, or the extra step that makes it harder for me to just ape into a project so that I have to get my ledger connected, you know, to approve the transaction. And half the time by the time you duel that an opportunity is passed. And so I don't even bother. So I think that's a really good way for me to hold my eth and not necessarily spend it on NFT's.

Jamie:

Yeah. So you alluded to ArtBlocks going up to you are you want to get into that?

Roy:

Yeah, sure. So as has been the case of the last maybe six weeks, it's been another crazy week for our blocks where the price the full price of everything has just gone crazy, I think

Jamie:

floors and ceilings, it's worth noting both just the prices of

Roy:

everything all over the place. So just maybe an hour or two before we started recording this. The floor price of all curated projects and op looks is essentially 1/8 I think there's two or three that are point nine 9.98. But everything else is above 1/8, which is just an astronomical thing. Minds milestone. Yeah. I mean, this time last week, there were things under point five, I'm pretty sure. So and I was looking months ago was under point. oh five. Yeah.

Jamie:

Yeah, I was looking at my aerial view today, which was has always been and continues to be one of the cheaper of the curated projects. I got it for point 06 eth. Not that long ago. You know, I mean, it might have been late April or May point 06. And now you can't get one for under one. Yeah. It's really pretty. It's really crazy.

Roy:

So that you mean that's the floor. We've seen the ceiling. So we have the highest ever sale on our blocks about six times a week. There was Yeah. So the the highest of all was a 750/8, squiggle sale, creamy squiggle. That was a couple of days ago, a couple days before that there was a 408th ring as sale. Just before that there was a 350/8 I think bring a sale. And just before that there was a three inch and 28th tunnel pump sale. I'm probably there's a 380 fidenza sale, probably some of them forgetting but it's really been an absolutely insane week.

Jamie:

Yeah, and we discussed the archetype archetype. Floor going up. And I also remember getting down to about nine and once it got to nine, that was when I started looking at it as well, if it comes down a little more, and I try really hard, maybe I can get one. Because, you know, lately, I've just been really loving them, and specifically the colors in them. I love the palettes that the artists use for those. But anyway, the the ceiling for that the highest ever, as far as I know, was 110 eth. Until I believe it was yesterday. Vincent van dough, bought one of the cube ones for 320 and just smashed the ceiling on that project, which then of course shot up the floor because everybody is now valuing the project as a whole, excuse me, much higher, and it went from the nine and I think it had maybe crept up to 13 or whatever and had already started running. But then after that 320 a sale on The Cube. It shot up to like 18 or 20. Yeah, it's I mean, that's an uncommon

Roy:

occurrence. where some whale usually even some vendor lately comes in and just buys a very expensive piece in a collection. And people immediately value that collection as a whole much more and the floor right now. Yeah. So that was cool to see. It's been interesting week INNOPOLIS. A couple other reasons. So first up, they had a curated drug plan for Friday, they generally have one every Friday, and they had to delay it, because I think there was like a bug in the code on error in the code. And they just, I guess, needed time to rectify that.

Jamie:

Yeah. I don't know, specifically if bug is the right word, because I'm not a computer scientist or whatever. But I believe the, the issue was that the image wouldn't render consistently across different browsers. And so they had to, they had to fix that because they like to be browser agnostic. Yeah,

Roy:

it's just fair enough. I'm reading the announcement. Now, smokefree says bugs, so I'm gonna go with bug. Yeah. Okay. And but he also says, Yeah, I'm not going to read the whole announcement. He says what I just said, yeah, exactly. The other interesting thing that happened in envelopes this week is that there's a project on our blocks called crypto donations. It's a factory project. And essentially, it is unique in the sense that the only way to mint one of these crypto nations is to visit a physical location. In LA, there's an art gallery there called Bright Minds, bright moments, I think, bright moments. And basically, they came up with this plan that they said it would be cool to have people come in to mentor rather than just go to the website. And they teamed up with our blocks to collaborate and use their platform. And they said, Okay, we're gonna allow 10 people a day to men, and then we're going to have this run through the whole summer, and mindat 1000 in total. And so that had been going great. They had a lot of, you know, new people to NFT's come in, they had people who ended up looks traveling from across the country, maybe did it. Yeah. And then the massive TV personality. Head of Disney, a CEO of Disney

Jamie:

or he was he was the CEO of Disney until about eight months ago or something. As COVID happened. He was like, I am not interested in being the CEO of a company with these giant theme parks that are packed with humans during a once in a century epidemic. So I'm out peace.

Roy:

Fair enough. Yes, I mean, he was there and minting and it was going great. Getting great exposure for up blocks and getting

Jamie:

very cool project. I wanted to get one for sure. I still do but continue with the story.

Roy:

Um, so yeah, essentially, what happened is that their minting process or capabilities were hacked, or the security tool was compromised. Basically,

Jamie:

there was a special token you needed to mint it that was all in one wallet that I guess somebody there controlled. And that person's, you know, crypto security was not up to snuff and some sort of phishing attack or whatever, gave people access to it. And then they just minted the, you know, the hacker essentially minted a bunch of them.

Roy:

I think a few people had access to the token. So it wasn't one. Like it wasn't all in one basket. But yeah, I think there was a Dao and they had access to it, and one of their wallets go compromised. And it was basically just lack of wallet security or not even necessarily lack of, I guess that's, that's probably the best way to put it. But yeah, anyway, so these hackers came and got this BRT as the token and use it to mint out the remaining 300. And something, crypto divinations. And it was sort of chaos and anarchy in the app looks discord for a couple of hours and around in the community, because a lot of the op block stuff and crypto Phoenician stuff were asleep, essentially, and couldn't respond in real time to what was happening. And we could all see them being minted. And we knew that there was meant to be a hard cap of 10 per day. So we knew something weird had happened. And basically, the result of the resolution that they came up with, is to make it so that these NFT's that they stole, they essentially blank tokens, so they don't have the artwork of the divinations. And I think they use the collaborative with open sea to make that work one way or another. I don't know the technical specifics. But

Jamie:

they're basically I think they're, they're editing the metadata on the token, so that the display image on open sea is like blank or something even worse than blank that indicates you shouldn't buy it. Something to that effect,

Roy:

something like that. I haven't actually seen it myself. But interestingly, there are some people that still want to buy it because they think it's an interesting story and

Jamie:

Right. Yeah, that's that's kind of the interesting thing with NFT's and like all this provenance stuff, like the the famous MibA, tech, stuff like that it kind of gives these individual NFT's. more value in some people's eyes because it's just more of an interesting historical thing. And, you know, the nature of the blockchain means that history of the piece is immutably stored there.

Roy:

Yeah, I mean, Mona Lisa was stolen, right? I'm not comparing this. I had no idea. Oh, really? I'm pretty sure it was. I think that's where

Jamie:

I find that painting not particularly interesting. Yeah, totally.

Roy:

I mean, I think from an artistic point of view, obviously, it's good because of the artists and all that kind of stuff. But the value comes from the fact that I was stolen and there's you know, a lot of attention placed on it, and it has this story and you know, provenance behind it that a lot of other artworks don't, so I'm not saying crypto Venetians, Mona Lisa, but you know, me they watch they be run on these stolen crypto Venetians

Jamie:

Yeah, podcast you definitely hear occasionally, various like punk Maxis will talk about alien punks, as if they're all going to be worth more than the Mona Lisa or whatever, someday. I'm not sure I buy that. But they're I mean, they're certainly plenty valuable already.

Roy:

Yeah, I don't think they'll be more valuable. I think it's as close to valuing something as priceless as can be as the Mona Lisa.

Jamie:

Yeah, like, is the country of France ever going to sell it? Yeah.

Roy:

It seems ridiculous. Um, anything else happening up looks of note this uncovered?

Jamie:

Well, I got high and stared at pigments for about three hours. So for me personally, that happened. And it was a pretty profound experience. I love that project so much now. So alluding vaguely to what you were talking about earlier, just in terms of the NFT space, I will look ahead of time at art blocks, drops that are coming up. But I only have so many hours in the day. So I'm not like staring intensely at every piece in the test net minutes or anything like that. But I'm looking at a few for a little bit of time and getting a sense of do I like this, do I not like this? Do I think the market will like it, do I not think the market will like it, and kind of make a decision from there. And with the pigments, I decided, this is something that I like this looks cool to me. And that was kind of the extent of it. And so I minted one, and I was happy with it. And I was just kind of paused there for a little while. But I thought that some of the price action that we were seeing in them early on was sufficiently positive that I thought, Oh, these might be really going somewhere. So specifically, when I talked about the price action, I saw somebody in the art blocks, Discord server talking about which curated projects have had sales of over 10 ether or something like that. And even though pigments was a brand new project relative to all the other curator projects, it had more 10 Plus eth sales and every project except for like six of them are something which was very impressive. And so it just made me think, oh, I should look more at these. Because again, it was also already a project where I liked the look of it enough that I was super happy to Minh and super happy to not at all plan on flipping the piece. So then, that day, I said I'm going to I'm going to really look at these. And the floor at that point was almost four. So it was at the point where if I buy this, this is going to be basically the most expensive NFT I've ever bought. And if I don't buy it soon, and the price appreciates much at all, maybe 50% or something, it's really going to be out of my conceivable price range. So I opened the project on open sea and just kind of opened tabs on various floor ones and started to look at the different palettes. And I want to I'm gonna just pull up what the other property is. I can't think of the name of it. But it basically is like the texture or the method of rendering. I'm going to I'm going to pull this up so I stopped just it's going to bring there's going on with it. But the main thing I was looking at was the the palette but I learned as I was doing it, okay, sorry, I have it here. It's called layout is the other property. The layout is really impactful. And it kind of makes it you know, some of one of the palettes is like it looks very sort of smoky and airy with very, very tiny particles. There's another one called flame that really has a very, sort of post impressionist Oil Painting brushstroke look to it. That's really amazing. But anyway, I was just staring at these literally for three hours I was I was trying to find ones to bid on or to just buy outright. And I was like, Well, let me look at them for a little while to get a feel for how they do, because this is an animated one, not just a totally static one. So I wanted to get a feel for how they changed. And like the amount of things that I was able to see in these was amazing. And I just kind of fell down the rabbit hole of them. And really, it's it's a top top tier project for me now and I love them. And I have a total of three of them. It would be sort of ludicrous for me to get another one even though I desperately want one. So as far as things that happened on our blocks that happened on our blocks for me,

Roy:

yeah, I remember, I was chatting to you that night when you're going through them and you lose your mind being blown. And they're amazing, he made me go and look at them again in more detail. Because I'm my process is sort of similar to yours, where when a project is coming up, I look at some testaments and get a feel for it. And then maybe immediately after I look at mine a little bit, but I don't do enough of you know, spending an hour looking at various minutes and detail and spending time with them and understanding them. And I just spent, you know, a few minutes staring into I have to, excuse me, the two of mine. And yeah, it was really eye opening and amazing just to see the just the different shapes and the different things that were happening in the movements. And the way the colors were like blending into one another, it was really, really cool. And just having you talk about them again, just then and what you said earlier about finding some big ticket items. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna be buying and pigments after this, or at least very seriously looking at them. And maybe that'll stop me flipping crappy little NFT projects,

Jamie:

at least for a little while.

Roy:

So, you know, I

Jamie:

wanted to I'm gonna keep talking about these just for a little bit. So one thing that is interesting is that when you look at a bunch of NFT's on open sea, it's not really the same thing as looking at the NFT itself. So one example of that would be like a Chromie squiggle, you see a lot of people out there that don't even realize that Chromie squiggles are animated, because when you are searching through them on open see, and you're looking at the thumbnails of 10 of them, for instance, none of them are moving. So you go okay, they're these squiggles. But then when you look at the actual individual one, and you watch them animated, it's a much different thing. And so I was searching through pigments and then filtering by the different layouts, or the different palettes. And so I would have these, this palette that there's only seven or whatever. And if you're just looking at the thumbnails, they all looked similar enough that you go Oh, is there really enough variety in this project? I'm not so sure. Or you go at least Is there enough variety within these palettes. But then if you open them up individually, it's a totally different experience from one to the next one. And another thing that's so amazing about it is there's so much in each one that like, you know, when you're looking at one of the pigments for seconds, say zero through five of it, you're looking at something that can be very, very different from what it'll look like on seconds 25 through 30, for instance, because the amount of the composition that is made up of the really dark part of the palette versus the really light part of the palette, and how that contrast makes various images kind of pop out or recede into the project into the piece. Rather, it's very different from what you were seeing at that earlier moment in time and what you'll be seeing, you know, another 10 seconds down the road in it in a really amazing way. And it's also so high resolution that in that same thing. To really appreciate one, I might have to just go, Okay, I'm just going to kind of stare at the top right quadrant for this period of time, unless something kind of added my periphery, and the rest of the piece really pops out that I can't help but look at because there's just kind of so much going on in each one.

Roy:

Yeah, you make a really good point about the difference between viewing something on open sea and the up looks platform itself because there are just so many projects where I'm still finding things out that I had no idea about, I mean even taking the current squiggles for example, it took me a while to find out and realize they were animated up to just browse them and open see. And even beyond that I only found out maybe a week or two ago that if you looked at if you didn't on our blocks you could change the color the background by I think pressing spacebar It would change the shading from different from white to black and back

Jamie:

to grayscale. And I really liked them with a darker background. Yeah,

Roy:

me too. I thought people just, I don't know, put the background on themselves or there was an option, you can get a black or a white, but you can actually change the shading to maybe 12 different gradations. Yeah.

Jamie:

One other specific art blocks project where you kind of get, I mean, there's, there's almost a never ending number of them. But where there's a real big difference between browsing on open sea and looking at sort of the real thing is singularity where there's nothing animated about it or any of this, but the resolution that you're seeing on open sea, even when you go into the specific NFT. And not just the thumbnail of a bunch of them, the way it looks, there is so much worse than if you actually go to the project on art blocks and click on live or click on image, the resolution and the way it's you know, the shape of the circle is so much more perfect. And it's it's it's really a stunning image in a way that open see does not do it justice.

Roy:

Yeah, I mean, I could go on and on about other projects where the just better to view in our blocks, but I think pretty much every project, obviously gonna be better not blocks, some more than others and see, like,

Jamie:

yeah, something some do translate pretty well. But you're definitely right, that they're all going to be better. But some are getting done a big disservice in a way that they're not when you when you look at the source stuff.

Roy:

Yeah, um, do you have any more up looks related things otherwise, I'm gonna jump to another.

Jamie:

I literally could keep going. But we have to talk about things other than art blocks, because this is not an official art blocks project.

Roy:

It's limited time.

Jamie:

We don't have unlimited time, there's so many things, I'm going to show the art

Roy:

related project because I had a crazy day, and that is the currency by Damien Hirst. So I'll give a quick rundown of what the project is. Damien Hirst is a very famous, prolific traditional artist, so not an NFT, not someone who just come up in the NFT space, he has been around for years, probably decades, I think, I don't know, I'm super well, but yeah, he sells art for tons of money. And, you know, he's well known. And he decided a few months ago to enter the NFT space and create a project. And then a few projects, essentially. And he did it a little bit. I mean, that in and of itself is big news, when you get a massive traditional artists entering the NFT space, it's going to create hype, and people are going to be interested. But he added an extra layer multiple extra layers of sort of complexity to the project. And I guess the the main aspect of it is that he said, I'm going to create 10,000 pieces of art, and sell them as NFT's. And after one year, everyone who has the NFT will have a decision to make, they can either burn the NFT. And in return, I will send them a physical copy of the art, or they can decide to keep the NFT and in that case, the physical copy will be burned. So he's created 10,000 physical copies and 10,000 apiece. And essentially it's going to result in sort of like a scarcity game theory element where scarcity scarcity scarcity archetype archetype. Potato Potato, I'm

Jamie:

right about this one, for sure. Are you maybe

Roy:

it's an American thing? Yeah, I guess yeah. Um, but it's going to create a dynamic number

Jamie:

one. So then, of course,

Roy:

it's going to create this dynamic where obviously if more people burn, so like the punks comic, we have more people burn the NFT, meaning that they get the physical and the NFT becomes more rare, and vice versa. And generally, the more are the more valuable. And so he released his project, maybe a month, six weeks ago, and there was sort of an application process where you signed up to signal your interest in buying it. And then they, I think, somewhat randomly picked to one because there were many more people who signed up than 10,000. And I was fortunate enough to get one. And then there were sold for I think, 2000 US dollars, or Yeah, around that. That exact amount. And you could pay in crypto if you wanted, or with a credit card and traditional means as well. And for maybe a month afterwards, they they had gone up in value just because there was much more demand initially than the supply. They kind of immediately tripled it. Yeah. So they were going at around I think three to three and a half eth. So when they sold out eth was maybe around 2000 And it's all for around one eth. And sort of in the last week, maybe five, six days ago, it went up to and the floor was around five to six eth. And then in the last 24 hours, there's just been a few whales essentially came in and just bought up everything. And the floor hit around 12 eth today, which is, I mean, given current eth prices as well, considering where it was when they first sold it. So eth is around 3300 Right now 12 The floor, you know, we're looking at 35 plus 1000 US dollars for something that

Jamie:

yes, 2000 not that long ago. So did you mention the part where you had to get approved for it, and he laid out specific NFT's that they would scan your wallet for that would give you preferential treatment?

Roy:

I didn't mention that. But that you can talk a

Jamie:

bit about that. Well, so exactly what I said happen where you had to apply to be able to actually even get one of these. And they said specifically, we're going to scan your wallet. And if you have crypto punks, auto glyphs, or date Yacht Club, or artblock stuff, we're going to favor you in the choosing of who gets these. And if you don't, we're gonna disfavor you, which was interesting. And we could probably talk about that for a long time, I don't want to so much, I do just want to complain that I believe I messed this up hugely by accidentally hooking up my regular wallet to it, rather than my vault where I actually keep my nice artbox pieces to almost all of them and my ape, and basically prevented myself from getting either a great NFT that I could hold or a great piece of art that I could get by burning the NFT. Or the equivalent of what what did you say 12 eth. Now, I know 11 eth profit in just a couple of weeks, which is a bummer. But what are you going to do then if T space is full of regret and missed opportunities, but and you want to talk about the art of them? Or how many you got or anything else in the subject? Um, no, I mean, let me just say this, you, you refer to him as a traditional artist. And when you say that, you just mean that he is not an NFT crypto Native artists, because I believe in what you're referring to as the traditional art world, he would be considered a contemporary artist, and a traditional artist to them would be more of like the classical painters from the long, long, long, long ago.

Roy:

Okay, yeah, I definitely meant just basically nominal, T and not generative, because I mean, that's sort of there are generative artists, not in the entity space. Although why these days, it seems like a lot of them could make a lot of money and probably are moving more towards the empty space now. Because of that, it just, it just works. So well, generative blockchain technology. And I know some artists have sort of concerns about the environmental impacts, but Right, they can use profits to offset that, which some of them are doing, or they can look at non Aetherium based blockchains. to also

Jamie:

look forward to the proof of stake future. Yeah, we have been sort of promised.

Roy:

Yep. Whenever that's whenever that's gonna come. Yeah, the the actual art of the currency is not, I don't think anything crazy special, it's essentially just 10,000 images that look very similar. It's just a whole bunch of colored dots. I mean, they look nice, the aesthetically pleasant, but,

Jamie:

again, the palette is definitely pleasing to look at to me. So that I think that was part of the project was a little bit. I can't think of the word. No, no, I want to use the word experimental. But that's not it conceptual, that's what it was. So he called it the currency. And it's sort of about how, or I basically inferred this maybe a little bit from his video that he had with Stephen Fry on the website for it, but about how currency is fungible. And it's all kind of just this paper that we put value on. And then so for these, he also wanted them to have a lot of that sameness. And I don't know, you could listen to his actual video where he explains it better. But there was, there was something rather intentional to how similar they all are. Not to mention the fact that you know, this guy is such a huge artist, and for a project this big, but also with a lot of other projects. But what he actually does is he has assistants that are basically doing what he tells them to do. So the actual art that you're seeing wasn't literally produced by him. In most cases, it was literally produced by people under his direction, and sort of crank out 10,000 Of these, you know, he had a lot of people working to put these dots down. And also I'm just gonna keep going for a little bit. He's he was working with dots a lot earlier in his career colored dots. And he said he spent a long time trying to get his dots to be perfect. And then he got his dots to be perfect. And now he's just at this different further point in his career, and now he kind of wants to work with these imperfect shots. And if you look at it, there's like drip edge. And they're not all perfectly round, there's a little bit of maybe, you know, extra paint on the right side of one, for instance. So it's not a perfectly symmetrical circle, stuff like that.

Roy:

Very cool. I mean that there's definitely a lot more to the project than just, hey, look, he just blurted out a bunch of dots pay me money. A lot of people. I mean, I guess a lot of people who didn't do much research saw it as another cash grab. But, I mean, he's made plenty of money. I don't necessarily, I mean, obviously, he's gonna make a lot of money from this. But I don't think that it was just a pure cash grab. I think he's genuinely interested in the concept of NFT's and the fungibility and non fungibility of currency. And,

Jamie:

yeah, he also talked a little bit in that video with Stephen Fry, where he's talking about the burning decision of people. And he was talking about how to him the way his mind works and his understanding of our and all of that is, he fundamentally believes that the physical art is a better thing. And so if the market decides that they're more happy, burning those, he will feel something negative about that. But then he was also quick to acknowledge that he feels that that's basically just a flaw in him, and an implicit bias in him, rather than some sort of external truth that he's tapping into. And then, you know, placing that judgment on, which would, which was interesting, and showed sort of an open mindedness and awareness of where he's coming from, versus the new landscape that he's sort of venturing into with an NFT project.

Roy:

And all this talk is making me I have mine listed right now for about 21 D listed. Just it sounds really cool. I mean, but I think if I never want to sell and NFV I'm about to cough, excuse

Jamie:

me. If I had one, I think I would probably be going for the physical, if I was taking all financial things out of the equation, because that just seems so good to me. He's such a big artist, and to have an actual physical of his in my position, possession would be super cool to me. Yeah,

Roy:

I think. I mean, it's impossible to know what's going to happen financially, like the value of these things over the next year. Yeah, would just be cool to be in the position to be able to decide that I guess, right. Do you have anything else to say about the project?

Jamie:

I have. That's fine. I have an art block thing that I want to talk about. Now that we've talked about this, but I've been seeing people on Twitter lately, posting their fidenza prints that they've gotten blown up and framed and hung, and they look awesome and are making me feel some of that FOMO that I had for cadenzas a while ago that I had gotten over, I'm feeling it again. And I'm curious where you are in that process or whatever, because I know you own at least one fidenza Maybe to

Roy:

know just what I had for I foolishly or not, I mean, in hindsight, obviously foolishly sold three for under one Eve. A lot of people did the same.

Jamie:

That's amazing. Yeah. Um, but now have you gone back to look at just how insanely because you know, it's never look back and go to my room. You can go oh, well, if they were all floor ones, it's only this much. But what are the odds that they were all exactly floor pieces? I mean, she's I know, they weren't like spirals at least

Roy:

correct. Yes, I made a quota. Keeping the quote unquote rarest one. So the one I have is right, a rose color palette, and it's got soft shapes. And it's the only one of that color palette with soft shapes. So I quite

Jamie:

liked those soft shapes. Yeah, look, really to me. Why that? fidenza A lot. A lot of good looking art in that project.

Roy:

Oh, yeah, we could go on about that. Let me talk quickly about by the

Jamie:

way I say that, like fake sarcastically like, it's so obvious, but I'm sure there's a lot of our listeners that have never looked at fidenza before in their life. Yeah, if you haven't we we definitely both recommend that eautiful art check them out.

Roy:

Yeah, and view them on we'll put a link to them on our books because that's where it's best viewed. So, yes, I had four I sold three I think pa I used to feel pretty bad about the fact that I sold three when they were you know, 5/8 90 floor and cetera, et cetera. But I got to a point where I realized you know, if I kept all of them, I may have just sold them all by now. Like, I may not have just kept the one but because I sold three I was I just held on to it for dear life. I was like I'm not going to let go this one. At the time when it was 2010 it was a lot to me. It means still is a lot to me, but I've been fortunate to grow my crypto Portfolio A bit more. But if I had for at I may have just listed them all sold them and have my have my eth but because I sold three and was feeling so bad about selling them, I was like, I'm just never selling this one and I've kept it and I literally delist. It's it was listed at 250 eth a couple days ago and I released the delisted it because I was like, if this sells, I'm probably going to be more unhappy than happy, which is ludicrous. But Happy. Sad. Yeah, it's ludicrous thing to think about. But yeah, I've gotten to the point where it's not. Like when I first listed it, it was like, alright, some if some crazy rich person comes along and falls in love with my specific one, maybe you'll pay 250 Even though the floor is 12 eth. But now the floor is 40 Something eth. And there's been sales for over 250 It's not outside the realm of possibility that it could sell. So let's

Jamie:

get back to the

Roy:

question, What am I going to do? Raise the print and thinking about it? I definitely obviously I'm going to get a print. I am currently living in Munich, Germany, as you know, and being I do know that you do. And I'm from Australia and plan to get back to Australia. Me My fiancee in two, three years, it roughly three years. So I don't really I've been holding off on getting a whole bunch of physical art because the logistics of transporting it from here to there. I've sort of caved in the sense that I'm pretty sure I want some now. And I'm gonna get some smaller prints. Easy to carry, but with my feet fidenza I want like a giant print. I think I'm definitely going to talk to Tyler Hubbs I mean, in the disco channel and bonafide Han, and fidenza expert just to get their opinion on what size might be best for the specific fidenza. I have. And then yeah, it's going to be hung in the house we have in Australia. And it's yeah, it's going to be ideally, a forever piece of art for me. I'm jealous. She can see. Yeah, I mean, I understand.

Jamie:

Okay, so we can move on, because we had already finished talking about our blocks. And now here we are talking about our blocks again. But let's talk about the board APR club. What? What's the newest happenings there? Right?

Roy:

They made an announcement this week. So when they first launched the project, and they had a roadmap, and they listed a whole bunch of stuff. One of the things they listed was a mutant breeding program. And that was sort of the extent of it, like it wasn't explained in detail what it was going to be. And there's been a lot of speculation and I guess hype around ever since then, and haven't really divulge too much about the whole program, what it will look like other than to say that you weren't required to apes to breed and into the in the sense that I like the word breeding and NFT lingo basically means that generally you will use two NFT's to create a third NFT. And they're saying, Well, you only need the two apes, you can just use one theory.

Jamie:

They also specifically did say that you would not have to burn the if it wasn't going to be a situation like that. You would have your app and you would still get whatever this meeting thing is. Yeah.

Roy:

So this week, they finally announced an announcement of an announcement basically saying mutant a breeding coming soon. And obviously, everyone who has an ape has gotten very excited about that. And we'll see soon what that is, what do you think the breeding program is going to be? Um,

Jamie:

I don't really know. I'm, I'm very curious about it. I wonder if they're going to be I don't I don't really know, I haven't put a ton of thought into it. To be quite honest with you. I remember when I initially heard about it, I was, I was thinking very much in in sort of a scarcity mindset, and didn't necessarily love the idea of them, making these other apes or pseudo apes, as it would sort of take down the scarcity, essentially, of the original apes, but I've sort of come around on that, but still haven't actually put the time into thinking about what I think the project will be like, or what you know, reading about other people's predictions upon it. One thing I've thought about is, like individual traits, if it's sort of a thing where you will take your ape and then you'll be able to maybe say lock in three of its traits and then roll for one of the other traits or have have some sort of thing where you get to have a little bit of influence in what of your ape stays the same and what of your ape changes in the mutant breeding process. And then You know, I also think there will be some level of just across the board change that differentiates because obviously, you know, if you just change one trait of my ape that's just kind of kind of be another eight, there needs to be something more different about them to differentiate them entirely as mutant rather than just different traits of my own eight.

Roy:

Yeah, maybe like some green skin or glow. Right? And like that. Yeah. I also haven't put a lot of thought into it. I I guess I never really shared this kasidy concern scarcities the concern on the supply numbers as much as you because I sort of trusted the team wouldn't just flood the market, because they've just generally made good, conscientious decisions. Oh,

Jamie:

yeah. So I think just in my head, I was probably thinking of them as being too similar to the apes. Whereas like, you know, for instance, what they've done with the dogs, the dogs are sufficiently different from the apes, that is in no way, just increasing the supply of the Apes. Whereas the way it's, you know, called breeding like, Yeah, I'm thinking a little bit more like Zed or axes, where it's, you're creating something very similar to the existing NFT's. That's and it's just maybe a little bit less quality or less pure or whatever, then the the ones that you bred it with?

Roy:

Yeah. So I guess, I guess we will see. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, that was an announcement of an announcement. So that's not true. Yeah, we

Jamie:

we basically got a logo for it. Yeah. That would ultimately, that was almost all we weren't. And I guess, sort of just the update that it is coming soon. Yeah. There's also like the treasure hunt thing, which they sort of alluded to there's there's a lot of great stuff on the horizon for that project. What a great project.

Roy:

What a great project.

Jamie:

It's such a bummer that I only have one I will never, I honestly feel like I'll never be able to directly profit from it. Because I can't I can't sell my

Roy:

one. Well, yeah, but it's it. Yeah. Maybe they will find ways to add value in like getting the dog that I mean, you can sell your dog.

Jamie:

I mean, I literally I sold the one I got and got one that I liked more and reminded me more of my in real life dog, because it had its tongue sticking out. And I have a St. Bernard who's tongue is basically never in his mouth. Um, but yeah, I was not going to not have a dog.

Roy:

Yeah. Well, maybe by the way, even give you some value.

Jamie:

The my wife, by and large, thinks that NFT's are stupid. But the one and ft she ever basically cared about was this dog coming out of it, cuz she is a huge dog person. And I mean that in both senses of the word. She loves dogs, but specifically, she loves big dogs. We had a mastiff and now we have a St. Bernard. Big fan of big dog.

Roy:

She listened to Episode One. Oh,

Jamie:

she definitely does not listen to your stepfather does he's a big fan, but she is not interested in listening to this. Yeah, that's fair.

Roy:

Um, yeah, I think you make a good point about having only one ape and not being able to sell it or get a ton of financial value out of it. I think a lot of which is fine. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people who felt the same way maybe sold their dogs to get some sort of that, that financial gain, but I think there's value to holding at least one eight, but

Jamie:

they've they've specifically told us about value that it will have, it's it's relevant in this treasure hunt thing that they're going to do in the future. Yeah, they're going to have some sort of specific utility for at least that part of the roadmap. I also do think that like, seemed like you're ready to move on, but I'm just gonna finish this. You know, there's a lot of sort of plans in various projects about these virtual worlds that we refer to as meta versus. And to me when you have sort of these profile picture projects that kind of transfer to these meta versus, and it becomes a different thing when it's not just a picture, but it's sort of an inhabited thing. In a three dimensional world. The idea of, you know, like, we used to play a lot of RPGs and stuff, and you'd have pets in those games, like skeletons if you're a necromancer or whatever. I think having an elite pet in the sandbox, Metaverse, for instance, is going to be awesome. And so in that sense, I definitely just want to keep this elite pet to have around in in these future VR meta verses. And I think the board ape kennel clubs are going to be top top for that. Yeah,

Roy:

I've got three apes but only one dog and you making me want more dogs. Dogs Great. Well,

Jamie:

but you only you only Nessus although man it would be also just be cool to have a pack. My wife would love that.

Roy:

Yeah. Yeah, we can talk about board at your club probably all day, just like applause. Yes. Let's move on to another avatar project that will maybe true that's been getting a lot of attention this week, the penguins. So

Jamie:

oh, man, I had a, I had a corny way to get into this. I don't know. No. Well, it's gonna be even worse now that it's set up like this. But I was going to say, right, should we talk about the elephant in the room? Or should I say penguin in the room? Yeah, you're? Well, yeah. But wow, that really has been an insane project that we can talk about.

Roy:

Yeah. So let's talk about the pudgy penguins. Specifically, there's another penguin project called the party penguins, and we'll get to them. But alright, so I'll sum up the pudgy penguins. A little bit. So they released I want to say a month ago, maybe not even that long ago, three weeks, so

Unknown:

it was definitely not that long ago. Yeah. And essentially, they

Roy:

released I think it was 1988. Maybe it's just a tails, right? Eggs. So penguin eggs, you buy them for point oh three, I think the sale price was and they said, All right. In a week, we will hatch them and your penguins will be revealed. And a lot of these projects where you buy something like unrevealed and then they reveal them. People will buy and then during the week up until reveal, they'll probably be trading at a premium, maybe 50%, sometimes more if it's really hyped, and some people will sell before the reveal. And then after the reveal, what generally happens is that people will sell off the like the common ones, the non rare ones for lower and lower prices eventually going under men, and then the rare ones will fetch a premium. And then there's this maybe several day period afterwards where the community is deciding whether this project is going to have legs, whether it's going to be successful. And if if it is then prices continue to take off. If not, then they sort of fizzle out people undercut the floor and, and rare ones no longer sell for much. And that's basically what happened with the penguins. They fizzled off. I mean, they went up a little bit. And then very quickly, the full price dropped to literally under point two, maybe it hit point or one at one point.

Jamie:

Yeah, it stopped caring quickly. Yeah, essentially,

Roy:

I myself, I minted maybe 20 eggs, and I sold, a lot of them pre reveal. And then post reveal a hung on to a few for a few days, nothing much happened. And then I sold all but two, I kept two specifically because Rachel, my fiance loved them and said I couldn't sell them, which in hindsight is an excellent decision. But I was I was ready to just, you know, be done and dusted. Say, alright, the project didn't really work. No one loved the penguins. And maybe for a week, they sat there at under point or two. And then they just started to gain momentum and pick up some, like new holders and the price kept going up over course, maybe three or four or five days that the full price just doubled every single day. And maybe this was that would have been a good hint that I should have gotten into them earlier. Because when you see that sort of momentum, something's happening, it's for a project to go from point or one to point five, in a few days. It's insane. And there's a lot of talk on crypto Twitter and discord about whether this was artificially pumped by a specific group or a specific person, or if it was sort of organic growth or what right

Jamie:

so there was specifically there was sort of a lot of buys near the ceiling or that would break the ceiling that people felt suspicious of. Because they would be sort of new wallets and spending, you know, the the amount of money for a high end penguin that people spent on high end apes when the project was two and a half months old, and had a for price that was 10x What the floor price for the penguins was at the time. So they were saying seeing like 2015 Penguin sales very quickly after the project had started. And people just were not super trustworthy of that. And again, in a lot of wallets that had like zero other NFT's.

Roy:

Yeah. And I mean, there was definitely some suspicious stuff, I guess you can say like that going on, or just unusual, maybe not even necessarily suspicious. Um, and then sort of culminated in this point. I want to say three or four days ago, where it was announced that there was a New York Times article out on the frickin pudgy penguins. And I mean, a lot of us in the NFT world I think, had seen what was happening to the penguins and kind of ignored it kind of dismissed it saying alright, this is some crazy hype thing. It's gonna die down. It's just You know, another avatar product that don't have anything of substance behind it? And I mean, I was definitely in that category. I felt like alright, you know, I had a bunch, I lost, I sold most of them. Okay, if I kept them, I would have made tons of money. But you know, I missed that. So I actually sold one of the two that I had left at maybe just under one

Jamie:

right what Rachel said, Yeah, well, she

Roy:

said, keep them for a while, like, I couldn't sell them price reveal. But then then when they hit one a plus, I was like, Well, okay, I should sell one. And I really, again, I thought, you know, this project, I wasn't paying close enough attention to it really see what was happening. And I just thought, you know, 1/8 is 1/8. And I mean, sort of a point oh, three point a jerk. I remember. And yeah, I did that and move on with my day. And then yeah, a few days ago, this New York Times article comes out. Everyone is talking about the penguins. The full price was around two eth at this point, and I just had this strong, overwhelming urge and just feeling gut feeling really, I was like, I need penguins. There's something happening here. I don't fully understand it. I don't know. I don't know why it's happening. I hadn't done the research into whether this was some elaborate, orchestrated pump and dump scheme by the Wall Street bets. Group, like some people were insinuating. Whether it was wash trading, like some people were insinuating whether it was a scam, all these things didn't really factor into my decision. I just saw what was happening on crypto Twitter, I saw what was happening in I joined the discord and the vibe I got it was similar to the vibe I had joining the board at your club discord a few months back, and back then I was I basically just bought floor apes. And so a few days ago, I was like, Alright, let me just get as much as together as I can. From my wallets. And I bought four more penguins. So take my total of five. And I tweeted about it. And like immediately got, it was by far the most controversial tweet I've ever made. And you know, there's a lot of people who like,

Jamie:

it's about penguin pictures to picture files of penguins. Yes, very controversial. Yeah. What a world we live in. Yeah, it's crazy.

Roy:

Yeah, some people didn't like that. I was, quote, unquote, supporting this project for one reason or another.

Jamie:

But you were also pretty open about the way you were doing it. You know, you weren't, you weren't saying I believe in this project fully 100%. You weren't saying anything like that? You were basically reiterating, or I guess it would be the opposite of reiterating, because it was, we were basically saying what you just said here is, which is that there appears to be so much interest and momentum and excitement in this project right now, regardless of where it came from. And regardless of regardless of where it came from, yep. That right now there's a self sustaining excitement amongst people in this project. That is something that I want to take part in, basically, yeah. Yeah. And we also know, we have the disclaimer at the front of the thing that nothing that we say on this podcast is financial advice. That is for sure true. But I just will also want to sort of double down here and say, you have a large, NFT portfolio. And what you did in these penguins, where you're just seeing this crazy excitement, and then going, I got to get out of this, you did that with a very small percentage of the amount of money that you're putting in NFT is worth right. Yes, I was not going all in by any means. If you're not using rent money to buy penguins, just because penguins are exciting.

Roy:

And I said this, like in my original tweet, but in the follow up tweet, basically, that this is a very high risk play. I do not recommended, etc. It's, you know, it's not financial advice, of course, and there's a very good chance that it's going to crash and burn just because it had gone from point O one to two e three, it hit 40 to one point.

Jamie:

Yeah. And so you just felt that if you're going to have a big, diversified and ft portfolio, in that moment in time, you decided the best portfolio for me would include some of these penguins. So you got some penguins.

Roy:

Yeah, I mean, I didn't really think of three that much. But that's basically the conclusion that concretely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And since then, I have I mean, within a few hours, I was already contemplating selling just because there was so much sort of fun and noise that I was now starting to dissect and wade through because it was really just a gut feeling when I bought it. And then I went back and did more research and due diligence and I liked it not to sell partially part of it really was because I publicly tweeted about it and then people Like, well, you're just pumping and dumping, and now you're going to sell on us. I was like, Well, I wouldn't do that. And so I was like, well, I could sell and then you know, use the if I made a profit and give half of it back to the community, or all of it, and giveaways, etc. but I eventually came to the conclusion that you know what, I think that there's definitely something to this project. And I was content to hold them. And I still am. A couple of the biggest reasons why is that there are some really big D fi players. So d phi is decentralized finance. And it's sort of where a lot of people made money in crypto before like before 2021 or whatever, basically, yeah, last year, basically, they call the defy summit in 2020, where all these protocols were coming out, and people were able to make ludicrous amounts of gains, essentially. And so some of those people or players had not really entered the NFT space too much. They they had started to do so in the last few weeks. I mean, we don't know who Vincent van Gogh is. He's a big art blocks buyer, but there's a lot of speculation that he popped from the defi defy space. There's the

Jamie:

I think, I think if you look at his wallet on ether scan, that was sort of confirmed he definitely had a lot of random coins. I mean, I guess that could just be buying the coins early. And then but I think when you're when you're playing with that many different coins, yeah, stuff like that. A lot of it is you're farming your state Yeah, you're doing all these things. So constitutes Defy.

Roy:

He was getting involved. There was three hours capital, three hour capital, which is a big defy, or just a big crypto group that makes large investments in areas and they started getting involved in NFT's. And then there were a couple other people I follow. Keyboard monkey is one of them. And another guy, Twitter's GCR I don't know exactly

Jamie:

what it is. But anyway, Weiss is another one. Yeah, he is.

Roy:

And so I saw all these guys getting into the penguins, and they were sort of embracing it as a meme, sort of like Dogecoin for traditional crypto. They just decided that they liked the penguins. And I mean, there's no rhyme or reason as to why it was these specific penguins. Exactly. It could have been.

Jamie:

We're recording a podcast. My wife and my dog are now in the room. My very large dog is now on the bed with me. Oh, that's as I tried to record this podcast. I thought

Roy:

my dog would be a little earlier today.

Jamie:

My wife is giggling

Roy:

I will we can hear she she's not going to listen to the podcast, but she's gonna be on the podcast. Um,

Jamie:

what was I gonna say? She just said hi, Roy. I first said hi, world. Oh, she did. She said hi. Hi, Roy. She's gone. Okay, yes. She's informed us that she's a little drunk.

Roy:

I inferred that.

Jamie:

Yeah. pudgy penguins

Roy:

will know to give you the detour a little more. Earlier today. No, no back to dogs. Okay, in real life, it was thundering a lot. And there were storms here. And we have a dog as

Jamie:

opposed to thundering in the NFT world. So yeah. Okay. And real life, it was thundering in real life, there

Roy:

was thunder, and our dog was going crazy. And this is just a few hours ago. And I was like, I knew it was scheduling these podcasts of the two of us I was expecting Cooper my dog to be the one interrupting and making machines fast asleep. And back to the penguins and defi. We had these, these big defi players entering the space and they essentially decided, for one reason or another, you know, penguins are going to be our meme thing. And I read that timelines, I looked a little bit their wallets and their activity. And I personally don't think it was some massive orchestrated thing where they were like, You know what, let's buy these ones really cheap, and then pump it up. And literally one of them publicly tweeted what he was doing. He's like, Well, you know, I decided I wanted to buy 500 Penguins. And he wanted to do it in sort of a way that didn't indicate to the market that he was doing it. So you know, try to buy them all in one block. Yeah. And and he he's posted some screenshots of chat logs he had with developers basically saying, can you build this for me and I was saying, it's gonna take 10 hours, and he decided that's too long. He wanted them right then and there. So he just basically sent a bunch of eth to a bunch of wallets of his assistants and said, just stop buying penguins. And so that's probably why we see random some of the random World Bank penguins. This guy just said, you know, I'm going to send 10 Here 10 if he had any kids by penguins, and so we just saw the floor got eaten up. I think that was from about point five to point nine. And that was one If I play and then another one came in thought, similar things or thought, I just want one penguin and they they spent 150 eth on a penguin avatar, which in the NFT world is a ton of money. And in the real world, it's a ton of money. But when you're crypto rich, it's not. I mean, some of these people have ludicrous amounts of money. And 150 eth is literally a drop in the bucket, but it moves the floor significantly in the NFT space, so the ceiling, or the ceiling, or both? As is usually the case. So yeah, yeah. So I started seeing these these kinds of things over the last few days, and it's kind of made me more confident, and bullish on the penguins, not enough that I want to get more, but I'm not really panicked or looking to sell. And it seems like we've seen a couple of times, now the floor, hit four, and it's dipped down to around two, and then went back up and down. And it seems like whenever it dips, there's plenty of action and activity and people are willing to buy. And I think if these big defi players really are embracing it, they're just gonna keep buying, like, Yeah, they'll just keep buying unlimited penguins to eat, basically, they're not going to let the floor go down. And yeah, so it's a crazy situation.

Jamie:

What I feel like I think about this is, I felt like a little bit, I saw the same thing happening with these were, specifically, you had a lot of apes being sort of upset and skeptical about what was happening with these penguins. In a way that to me seems similar to what happened when punks were observing what was happening with apes, where they felt like we're the only ones that are legitimate, this, and this thing coming along being yet is somehow worthless, while my profile picture is legitimately worth all this money. And when they are observing these new profile pictures that they think are worthless, it reflects back on them and goes, Wait a minute, is this thing that I have actually not worth all this money I've been telling myself about. So it has to, you know, if you have a certain mental state, that it it's a little troubling to some of these people. And so I felt like I was seeing some of that. And now on the flip side of it to sort of the positive, I think, like, do you remember in the ape community when Captain trippy spent 50 eth and broke the record for the highest ape sale?

Unknown:

Crazy? Yes,

Jamie:

I remember it pretty specifically. And I'm definitely gonna feel like an idiot if the exact number wasn't 50 What I'm saying how specifically remember what I believe it was, and I remember at the time going, Wow, that's like a really big deal. Wow, that kind of seems crazy. But it's also sort of a legitimising thing for the project. And what I've found is that, now that we've sort of seen this sort of thing happen with apes, it's, there's been a proof of concept that this can happen. So now when we're in sort of the future relative to that timeline of the apes, for these penguins, people can sort of do what Captain Trippi did, and sort of stake their flag and go, this is a legitimate project, you can pay a lot for these v's are going to be worth something. And you can do it one week or two weeks after launch, rather than having to wait six weeks, and you can do it when the floor is only one eth rather than having to wait until you have an floor of three or four. Because we know that this is a thing that can have value. Because ultimately, none of them have any real world intrinsic value, you can't eat them, you can't live in them, you can't burn them for fuel. It's all just sort of status symbol, and community and access to community, all of that stuff. So now that we have this proof of concept, you can sort of speed it along, in a way that to me, these pudgy penguins, and the people that are supporting them and putting money into them have done in a really successful way that, you know, felt threatening or illegitimate to people that had sort of an April mindset, but we're not in April anymore. You know, we're, we're in whatever month it is August. You know, it moves fast. And I think they're the way that apes were able to sort of build on or build adjacent to what punks did. Now these penguins are doing it and you know, some people that have sort of an old world scarcity type mindset, or scarcity, as you would incorrectly say, find it Trump's archetype when these new projects come along, and have this sort of quick success, but to me, it's sort of, it's just it, it's just building and it's bringing more people. You know, one thing that we saw with these penguins was there's sort of a lot of, in addition to these defy people, a lot of people on crypto tick tock, which is apparently, we're getting in on it. And now there's, you know, those legitimately a lot of people getting their first ever NFT's, their first ever profile pic. And FTS with these pudgy penguins. Yeah, and just to get to my personal thing, I meant to 10 of them, I saw the same lack of excitement that you did, foolishly listed all 10 of mine, instead of, you know, listing five, or seven or eight or whatever. And they also for point 042. And then when they started going crazy, I was like, vaguely into the Fudd, because I missed out, basically, but, um, you know, regardless of, if I think there was people, it is, it's such a weird thing, because, again, ultimately, all of this stuff is there's no way to value them financially, that is analogous to the way you would value something that creates cash flows, like a rental property, or a stock or a bond, this is a different thing. It's ultimately, just just these things that are very ephemeral. So I lost my train of thought a little bit there. So I'm going to have you pick up for me, okay. I did it so far that I forgot that I was talking about penguin.

Roy:

I'm gonna get back to what you said a little bit before about how it's analogous to when apes were first around, and the punk community was sort of like, just missing them and

Jamie:

right, and then eventually they became legitimate in the eyes of almost every punk.

Roy:

Yeah, and I mean, I think the punks were right to be skeptical because as you say, the proof of concept hadn't worked up until then, and rehab stars, for instance, Avista What is it odd?

Jamie:

Odd Fatah's? Art avatars? That's what I'm trying to say

Roy:

advertise hash masks that had been even even avatars hadn't really taken off in the same way as

Jamie:

a little less than those two. Really? They hadn't sold out until a couple

Roy:

days ago. Yeah, but they had different editions that sold I can't remember the correct word. Right. Right. Um, but anyway, back to? Yes, I think it was right for people to be skeptical about these apes. And for them to wonder, you know, they'd seen hash masks go up in tons of value and they come crashing down. And then you know, a couple months later, the AIDS come along, they go up in value. Yeah, maybe they'll come crashing down, I probably the most likely scenario was that they would come crashing down. But because of this perfect storm of the NFT space blowing up more eyes more money, the the value that the team behind the project had delivered and continued to deliver in the community. Just the perfect combination made the ape successful. And so now we get to a point a few months down the line where these penguins come along. And it it's not quite I mean, it's not the same as the apes. Obviously, it's not the same as the punks. It's a new thing where it's essentially a meme that there's not the roadmap, there's not the value. So in the same way that the punks maybe didn't see value in what the apes were doing, I think, some not all of the apes and the punks now, don't see value in what the penguins are doing. And actually, interestingly, I feel like punks are more likely to accept penguins than apes or to penguins, just because of reasons I guess maybe they will connect to the defy space. Maybe they

Jamie:

Well, there's also like, as far as you're talking about roadmaps, punks, there was no roadmap and no, like, this is sort of this weird technological thing we can do. Probably nobody will care about it. But it's kind of fun. Let's just do it and give them away for free. And now, all this time later, they're sort of a historical thing. They're a status thing that have all this value, but whereas the apes was more of a specific thing, where it seemed like we're going to release these, and we're going to build a thing that's bigger than them with them at the center of it. Yeah. And then and then the pudgy penguins are closer, like you're saying a little bit to the punks, where they don't really have a roadmap. They're not saying we're gonna release, you know, Penguin babies later, we're gonna we're gonna give you a 3d model to put in the metaverse. There's like none of that. Or I mean, I guess I shouldn't say there's none of that, because I'm not in the discord. I'm not checking it that closely. But you're saying it and you're an authority figure. So

Roy:

no, I think you're right, that there really wasn't much of a roadmap and plan and the project really wasn't promising a lot and wasn't really going anywhere. And then all of a sudden, it gained all this traction. So now they're coming up with roadmap and a plan to move forward and add value. Just because they now have this big community and they there's power

Jamie:

and a big treasury to from all the royalties? Oh, yeah,

Roy:

I'm sure to have that. Um, so yeah, it really is a case of it being so different to the apes that maybe a lot of apes can't really relate or see the value in it. And I'm going to add one more point, which hasn't been mentioned yet by us. But a lot of people are against the project, because they there's a specific team member, Cole, who he's just been very controversial over the last couple of months in the space. He's been involved with projects that have been unsuccessful, or, I mean, pickles are one example. But literally, the pickle project, they promised nothing and right. Over delivered on that I haven't really dug to the bottom of all the controversy surrounding him. I know people are saying I mean, people dug up like his history, before NFT's he ran a business shipping. I want to say,

Jamie:

Claudia, that said he didn't didn't actually send the product. Yeah, that specifically in the NFT community, one of the big knocks on him that I've seen is, he would do so on Twitter, a lot of people in the NFT, space will do giveaways, they'll say, Okay, I'm going to give away this NFT, if you like and retweet this tweet, and then tag two of your friends in it. For instance, I will put you in the running to get this free NFT. And this is a guy who, from what I have read did a lot of these and then would not follow through and actually deliver the NFT's. And then he ended up getting called out on one of them specifically, and was like, Well, of course, I'm going to give it away, I was always going to give it away, and then eventually did give that NFT away to one of the people who entered it. But the people felt like he had planned on only getting the free traction, the free followers and was not actually going to give the NFT away until he was aggressively called out on not actually giving the NFT away by a lot of people. I mean, I guess I tend to agree that he probably wasn't going to because for sure, there's a lot of people in this space that are doing that sort of thing. And I don't understand why you wouldn't just have a pretty quick timeline, and then do it. But ultimately, we are not in the universe where he didn't get called out on it. So we can never truly know if he was or was not going to pay out on these various giveaways.

Roy:

Right? I I've heard that I haven't, I didn't follow it or dig into it, see how accurate it was. But I think what you're saying makes sense that a lot of people run these giveaways, and for sure a lot of them don't intend on giving anything away. Another thing he did that was controversial is that a lot of people, he has maybe 15 20,000 Twitter followers, and a lot of people in that position will get offers from projects saying, hey, we'll pay you to advertise for us. And he did that and basically didn't disclose that he was getting paid to advertise for the product products, he would tweet out like, hey, this project is awesome, you know, etc. I like it for these reasons. And not it came out later on that they gave him a kickback or free entities or whatever. And that's just I mean, I think that's just not, that's just a no no, basically. And I mean, yeah, I guess I just give him a little more benefit of the doubt than most people in the community. I think maybe it's naivety but I'm out that he's pretty young. He's naive, maybe he's, he seems like he's trying trying and learning and getting better guys definitely

Jamie:

being forced to learn where boundaries are ethically as time goes on, and also the success of this project, or so far successful, but I guess we can't know for sure that it will continue. Even though again, it seems like now it's got enough money and enough community in it. And enough excitement in it matter will, to some extent keep going at a much higher level of success than a lot of these profile picture projects. But you know, now that this project has gotten to that level of status, there'll be more eyes on him and he won't, you know, have to do theoretically, these fake giveaways and stuff like that. Yeah. You know, followers and whatnot.

Roy:

I'll just say one more thing, I guess in defense of him, which is an he probably shouldn't mind me saying this. I'm in a private discord with him and a bunch of other people. And when the penguins were like, going off in value, I think the flow was point 4.5 points anyway had doubled a bunch. And I mean, there was still a lot of fun surrounding him. He was like, guys, I want you to advise Should I just stepped down from this project because, you know, there's eight people on the team, and I'm bringing it down, potentially because there's always drama surround Joining me, and I mean, he could have just been lying and trying to play that angle up to look good in our eyes or something. But I choose to believe that he's generally like struggling with all these decisions and just trying to navigate the space the best he can so fast moving and so crazy. And we're all human and fallible. So yeah, I mean, I think I haven't seen like very hard, convincing proof that he's allowed to call a scammer and a fraud. And I haven't seen that yet. I haven't dug to the bottom of whatever happened with the company he had a lot of people were complaining about not getting delivered things. But again, I mean, if that happened years ago, and he's learned from it, people can change. And yeah, who knows, but I think that's not enough for me to say the whole Penguin, pudgy penguin project is just awful, or Well,

Jamie:

I mean, ultimately, it's It's way bigger than him. Anyway, it's, yeah, it's in the hands. It's bigger than the whole team. And he's 1/8 of the Jason Van dough and a waste and all these guys, it's like they're already in it. Yeah. And again, back to the thing, the all of these projects have no intrinsic, traditional value, it's all about the community and how much people like them and want them. And regardless of all the information we have about how shady this guy may or may not be, or used to be, people, people like the penguins, and, again, to, I say again here, but I don't know that I actually covered this, but back when they were minting, I looked at them. And I went, Oh, these are cute. You know, a lot of a lot of the art for a lot of these profile pictures I looked at and I go, that does not look appealing to me. These were cute. I would say as far as cute profile pictures go. I think cool. Cats are the cutest. I think pudgy penguins to me, were number two. So I was like, Yeah, I'm definitely gonna miss some of these. And, you know, for these profile picture projects, a lot of the is truly that simple. Do you think it looks cool or not? Yeah. And people want to rock the ones that they think look cool. And these ones definitely for a lot of people look pretty cool. And now they've got a community. And they have fun. They're making memes, they're sending them to each other, you know, like all this stuff. You got the people thing, which is like very fun. Which we can get into a little bit, I guess. But but that's just the sort of thing that you have with these successful projects. And again, you know, we're talking about a decentralized world. So even though he's a part of the team, these these, these are all decentralized projects. And the success or failure of them depends so much on just the individual holders of it. Not the people who started it, not the people who are making the decisions, because everybody's making decisions.

Roy:

Yep. Pretty much. This is the world we live in.

Jamie:

We live in there very few people actually living in this world. Yeah. Although, people, yes, but all the people listening to this podcast pretty much are some of those select few living in that world?

Roy:

Yeah. My partner fiance, Rachel, she will be listening to this. And she got her Metamask wallet set up earlier today. That was cool. A bunch of time browsing open see finding cool things. And yeah, I think she's got the bug. She's like, Oh, this is cool. This is cool. This is cool. Oh, it is fun. Yeah. Yeah, it's really fun. Um, cool. Cats. You mentioned them Do you want to talk about they had some pretty big news this week?

Jamie:

Sure. We can talk about that they had basically two big pieces of news. Now. So I remember one. I know there was two and it was the same day.

Roy:

I'm maybe I'm just forgetting. So the piece that I remember is that there's a collab collaboration announced with putting them in Time Magazine.

Jamie:

Yep. And the other one is that their merch store opened? Oh, right. I didn't. They had they had teased it weeks ago. And they looked very, again, cute. And, um, but it was basically just sort of a picture of like a cap and or a shirt with a cute, Cool Cat on it. But then I believe it was the exact same day as the Time Magazine announcement, the merch store went live.

Roy:

Wow, big day for them. I do remember that now actually had a quick look at this store. And I remember thinking this stuff looks great and cute. Do you know if it's still open? Is it limited time limited? Or?

Jamie:

I don't think it's a limited thing. So I think you can just go there right now. And it's I don't think you need them in the wallet. And I don't think there's a finite number in the run. You can just get them. Oh, that's very cool.

Roy:

I actually I read a cool Twitter thread by I can't remember off the top of my head. Um, maybe I'll find it and put it in the show notes. But it was a fellow ape who basically described why he likes the Cool Cat so much as sort of the next big appetite project and it's Part of it is because it is really cute. And the art has that appeal to like this, this mass appeal. And I think his specific argument was that as we get further and further into this NFT world, and these projects are going to like, bleed out into mainstream culture and TV shows and television and books and comics and stuff. He thinks that cool cats is so well positioned to be like a children's TV show and books. And in a way that punks aren't really bought apes aren't really like you can do some maybe more edgy comic stuff, but they just the cool cats have this immediate children's appeal. That is an enormous market. And they could really capture that. I mean, obviously, a lot of the big companies, Disney's gonna come along with NFT's and use their own characters. And maybe they'll just started doing

Jamie:

that with some Marvel stuff on the Oh, yeah, they will take us way off topic. Yeah, we start talking about me. I do what I do want to talk about this whole idea of,

Roy:

hey, you say Vive, I say VV.

Jamie:

Oh, interesting. Yes. Is a recurring second is Brian Jamie disagree about as a word? Yeah. Anyway, you're talking about the proliferation of the NFT intellectual property into these other mediums. One thing I was looking at recently, which was, you know, because ultimately, like, if you're trying to do a TV show, or a comic book, for instance, with these projects, you can't, you can't fit 10,000 of them into it. But the way they are designed with all these traits, so for instance, as you know, I have a deep, deep love of Roman history, and that apes have togas as a trait for the clothing. And it got me thinking about how, in the future when, if and when these are really mind for the intellectual property, you can do so many disparate stories with so many different tones, in terms of how dark they are, if it's comedy, if it's drama, somewhere in between, with just these different groups of apes, for instance, so you could get a bunch of toga apes, get them into a Dao, for instance, a decentralized autonomous organization, and create a cartoon show that basically is just a dramatization of ancient Roman stories using toga apes. And you could do a separate, completely different thing, different team behind it, but telling some sort of sci fi or realistic space stories with the ones that have spacesuits on, and all that different stuff. And it, it really is exciting to me, and sort of allows different groups within these groups to sort of collaborate and do their own different things that are, on the one hand competing, but on the other hand, are enhancing each other by just bringing up the entire status of the project, and showing what can be done with the intellectual property. And then theoretically, you know, you can have crossovers where this group created this interesting story with their group of cool cats or apes, or whatever. And then this other group did this other interesting thing, and then you can just bring them together for a collaborative project. It's like the possibilities in the hands of creatives are are limitless.

Roy:

Yeah, it really is amazing every every day to try his a new concept or idea that's basically mind blowing, and awesome and cool.

Jamie:

Yeah, I want to organize the toga a polders. together and discuss more seriously this as an idea. And unfortunately, I have only so many hours in a day, so I haven't been able to really put a ton of effort into it. But I put out a couple little calls. I guess this, this podcast recording will be another one where I vaguely tried to get people excited about this prospect. But I think that is something that has potential for sure. Just back to the the Roman history stuff, there are super fascinating, dramatic stories that people would love to learn about and hear and see in HBO did the Rome show there's been successful Spartacus stories, there's a never ending amount of really fascinating stories there. And, you know, it's all it's, it's just real history. So nobody owns those stories. You don't need to pay anybody for it. So in this sense, you can just, you can just go ahead and write it.

Roy:

Yeah. And use the apes as characters. Yep. Yeah. Um, so one of the projects I minted tonight, after telling myself I'm not gonna meet anymore, actually, there's a lot of NFT I mentioned it was, it's called Galaxy Fight Club and what their goal is and what they're aiming to develop is essentially a super smash brothers fighting game bot using NFT's. So Super Smash Brothers is a video game that's been around for probably a couple decades, which takes all the Nintendo characters, and I think maybe that spilled out into other characters now. But you take Super Mario, you take a Pokemon characters, and it'd be just a fighting game. And you had all these. I mean, a lot of the appeal to at least me, and I think a lot of others is that you play Super Mario Brothers and Pokemon and these games, and you know these characters, but that never interact with each other. And now with Super Smash Brothers, you have this universe or this world where they could all interact. And so summon this galaxy fightclub project, this sort of trying to do that, but with NFT's where you can have wicked craniums fighting board apes, or I don't know which partnerships they've secured so far, but that they're definitely good. craniums? And, yeah, I mean, the more stuff like this, we see going forward with projects, not just within themselves, have communities that do things, but like inter project collaboration interests are very inter Yeah, yeah, it's possibilities are really cool.

Jamie:

And there's also there's already a lot of overlap in ownership within all these projects. So the way to get these deals sort of done is a lot easier than it might be if you're trying to get Marvel and DC to collaborate, for instance,

Roy:

definitely. And I think a lot of people, not a lot, but some people, like, especially at the moment with what's happening with the penguins, like say, the apes are looking at them and saying, you know, we don't like them were better, etc, they're gonna crash, I think we should really be like lifting each other up and like, saying, you know, if you're forming a great community, that's awesome. That's cool to see, we can raise plenty of space for

Jamie:

I think, ultimately, what happens with a lot of that is, is it's coming from insecurity. And it's coming a lot from probably specifically people who have a too much of their net worth in NFTs, and specifically too much of it in this one project that they now feel is threatened by this new project. So somebody who has an ape, one single ape, and that ape is, you know, 80% of their entire crypto portfolio, and their crypto portfolio is 90% of their entire net worth or something. And these people exist. Yeah. And that's, you know, again, that's sort of, I think, a little bit dangerous. But if you have a regular income, and are just sort of aware of how drastically can fall and aren't going to feel too emotionally damaged, and whatnot, if that happens, and your cost basis was low enough, blah, blah, blah. It's it's strange and crazy, but not that bad. But I think that sort of strained financial position in these single projects is making people fearful that something new and shiny can come along and threaten that value that they have been telling themselves they have and is solid.

Roy:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you can, a lot of people will probably find themselves in a situation where they made a sound financial decision buying an iPad point, or eighth. And then all of a sudden, a few months later, it's worth half a million dollars if they have a slightly rare one. And

Jamie:

it really is, that would be a very rare one.

Roy:

That's very okay. $100,000 for slightly rare one. And it's, yeah, that can very easily be 98 90% of your net worth. Right. But you mean, yeah. It's not necessarily bad financial decision to be holding on to that or

Jamie:

not, but it will cause you emotionally mate. Yeah, to feel more scared by something called pudgy penguins coming along, and having all this success rapidly. Yeah,

Roy:

I mean, again, ultimately, I think if pudgy penguins is successful, it's just going to make apes more successful. And punky I

Jamie:

agree wholeheartedly. Yeah. Again, I do actually want to touch on this. As long as the community of apes doesn't react in an in a negative and aggressive way that makes them just seem less cool. Yeah. So like, one of these technology writers that I really like he's actually more specifically, I would say, a media writer, Matthew ball, he talks a lot about the affinity that people have for these intellectual properties. And so you have something like Star Wars they'll talk about and you know, if you have if you own Star Wars, and then you create a new star Star Wars movie, you make all this money from it. And if you do it successfully, you're also building up the value of all the previous Star Wars stuff and in the future stuff, because you're just building up the love for it. But if you do it in a way that upsets people, you make a bad quality one, you're actually lowering the value of all this stuff. So even though there's now more of it, it's all collectively less valuable because people don't like it. So if pudgy penguins are ascending, and then apes are acting like such scared, jealous, dickheads, for instance, towards them, and people are observing that apes will then become less cool. And it will actually not be good for apes that the penguins are succeeding. But it's not because the penguins are succeeding. It's because they're reacting negatively to it. Yeah. And making their own thing less cool and less desirable.

Roy:

Yeah, are well, one thing I want to say what I was thinking while you were saying all that is that Game of Thrones Season Seven basically tanked the entire

Jamie:

Yeah, that's a great example. Yeah.

Roy:

I think that by and large, it's sort of the vocal minority. That's the community against the penguins, for sure. Yeah.

Jamie:

So I, I will say me personally, I'm willing to engage in debates about all this stuff. And I did do some of it on Twitter, where I'd go, Well, you know, if this is legitimate, why didn't this or you know, just various things where I specifically would go back and forth with a little people? A couple people, but I wasn't, I wasn't saying this is all a scam. I wasn't saying any of that stuff. I would just going. Yeah, well, but like some people's point of view is this. Can you not see that just that sort of thing? Where I'm willing to get into it, but I wasn't just sending out tweets to my whole following going on? Can you believe this? People are paying? You know, it is it's so hilarious people, literally people with a $50,000 profile picture of an eight being like, can you believe that people are paying $7,000? For a penguin profile picture? Like really? Yeah,

Roy:

if we sat down the whole system full?

Jamie:

Yeah. Right. And again, I think this also, I think, does go back to what I was saying earlier about how, as the as it moves forward, and we have this proof of concept, a lot of these things can move quicker. And so the people that have their mindset of this is how long it should take for for your floor or your ceiling gets to this level. It's like that that's not the case anymore. Because we've proved that that could happen. So we can just speed this process up. If people like it enough, and we put our money into it. It's like it's there. Yeah, sorry. Sorry that you thought it took longer for the ceiling to get to 50. But the ceiling is already 50.

Roy:

Yeah, pretty much. Um,

Jamie:

we have a couple more things on our list here. But it feels like we've been going for a while now. What are we at?

Roy:

We're on our 40. So we could go last episode is close to two hours. So maybe we stick?

Jamie:

Alright, let's let's talk about the fuck render crystals and wrap it up.

Roy:

Well, before we get on to that, I just want to quickly add, you want to talk about art blocks so far? None I'm penguins. Just because there's another penguin project, which I sort of touched on, but Oh, right. Party penguin party penguins. And I can't talk too much about them. Because I don't know too much about them other than that they're competing for penguin project. And essentially, it seems like there's some sort of Twitter war going on, similar to what happened with the A Oh, me bit.

Jamie:

I'm gonna I'm gonna interrupt you right there. This was another example of the Fudd. So to speak, fear, uncertainty and doubt is what stands for everyone. That people were saying was happening with the penguins is that pudgy penguins supporters were buying party penguins, and then immediately listing them for less than they bought it for to push down the four prices on them. This is what people on Twitter, were saying. I extremely didn't care enough to look into it. This This was a specific accusation that was being hurled at the budget.

Roy:

Yes, I also heard that and also didn't really look into it. But yes, so this is another penguin project. I personally don't find them as cute as as visually appealing. I can see why some people might like the more they maybe have a little more character and different variety of traits, but I mean, the visuals aren't really what makes or breaks a project, I think, necessarily. But yeah, it's just another project that is competing with the big penguins and it sort of seemed like they're gaining a lot of traction. I think the flow price maybe hit point five or so after being around point one for a while, but it's sort of fallen back down to about point to five, and I guess we'll see what happens in this war between the penguins over the next week. It's I think, if it's, I'm seeing a lot of memes flying around on Twitter, and it seems like it's all in good fun. And it could be a situation where it ends up helping both penguins and the entire NFT space if people are having fun with making memes and enjoying themselves, and that's kind of what this is all about. Really? Yeah, so let's go to the crystals. Now the fuck round of crystals? They are? Do you wanna explain them?

Jamie:

I can try. I don't know a ton about them. Basically, I'll tell you what, I know you Alodia is

Roy:

just going a little quieter. I don't know if you stepped away from the mic or you unplug something.

Jamie:

I just tried to replug the things in how do I sound now? A little bit of the same? Yeah. Testing 123. Testing.

Roy:

Little light.

Jamie:

I'm going to do a full on plug. Oh, it's good. Yeah. Okay. I don't, I didn't really do much. But I wiggled stuff. So fuck render is a artist in the NFT space. He does. I want to say basically realistic three dimensional animated stuff, if I had to describe it. But not somebody I was super familiar with. But it seemed like he was very popular amongst people that are sort of deep in the NFT space and have been around a while. I think the biggest thing where he came to my attention, actually, unfortunately, was he had his wallet hacked, maybe two months ago, two and a half months ago or something at this point. And it was sort of a big story. And I just vaguely remember that. But aside from that, I didn't really know much about him. And then this project was one that I heard about, they looked interesting and quite different from most of the different NFT projects that were around, I knew that the drop size that was ostensibly available wouldn't actually be available to people because he had up to previous projects that you could burn one of in order to mint one of these fuck crystals. Before the open drop for the crystals was available for everybody else. And the total number was still only like 4100 or something. So it was going to be pretty scarce relative to all these, like 10k projects. I knew that and I knew that people who were pretty Oh, geez, in the NFT space, were big fans of his art. So it seemed like financially speaking, this would be a profitable thing to men. And that was about all I knew going into it. Also, I knew that he said specifically that it was going to have some sort of utility within what he calls the fuk render verse, which is sort of his own Metaverse, I guess. And that, even though they were art pieces individually, it was sort of separate from his pure art. Because again, it was going to be acting sort of as an access token, or a utility token to his fuck render verse.

Roy:

Yeah, that's basically my understanding of it going in as well. I mean, and still now, he specifically wanted to differentiate his art from his utility NFT's. So I think up until now, maybe he had identities and he was giving some utility to holders of them. But he wanted to make this delineation and say, I want to build this universe and add utility, but my art is separate. So then

Jamie:

the utility will spring specifically from these crystals, rather than the other stuff.

Roy:

Yes. So he had like a burn mechanism where if you own some of his art before, you could burn one in exchange for two crystals. And that's where like half of the supply went. And then the rest was open to a public sale. I think. Point 4.4 It was point

Jamie:

4169. Yes, that's how that's how NFT's we're gonna put six nine or 420.

Roy:

Yeah. And yeah, it's sold out incredibly fast. The website in the contract was excellent. I mean, it didn't crash, and it was really well and well executed. But I think within a minute or two, they'd sold out immediately. Yes. Or it was huge gas. Well, yeah. And immediately,

Jamie:

one bought. Yes. So there was one bot that was set up to try and buy these before anybody else. And I'm not to get too much into the technical weeds. But they to pay the Ethereum network to get ahead of everybody else, they basically put in a super high price for what they would pay the miners to include their transaction in the current block on the Ethereum blockchain, but they forgot to actually put within the transaction, the amount of money that needed to go to the artist for the NFT's. So they ended up burning, I think it was like 5.5 ether worth of eth on the transaction fee, but didn't include the money for the NFT's. So they did get ahead of everybody, but with a transaction that couldn't actually get them NFT's. So they burnt 1000s of dollars.

Roy:

I think it was like this amount of gwy is

Jamie:

30,500 wire some Yeah. Which is insane. Like the most I've ever typed in was like 1200. And it was so scary to me. I think I deleted it and just even tried to do that transaction. This person did 10x That Yeah. And and forgot to include the money for the NFT's themselves.

Roy:

Yeah. I have no love loss for them. No, I, the most I've entered was for this drop. I think it was above 2000. Maybe close to I think was around 2500. I needed to secure any of these crystals. Yeah. And immediately they're trading on the secondary for pretty much teknicks There were between three to five eth say for for a little while. And they sort of settled now around the two eth. Mark. And yeah, it's just it's kind of a cool drop that happened this week. And it'll be interesting to see what value is provided to holders over the coming. Weeks, months years, because a lot of the value. Pretty much all the value in these crystals is just sort of future hope that Brenda can deliver benefits to hold us and right. I mean, he is a prolific artist, he does create great art. And I think it's a good investment to hold some of these crystals. So I've got three or four myself, and then you me and another friend have a few in sort of a collective. Fund. Yeah, we hold him yes as well.

Jamie:

It's basically a Dow but it's not a doubt. Yeah. Yes, we're using trust because we're friends that can trust each other.

Roy:

Yeah, we don't need the the Dow aspect code. Yeah. Joke's on you guys. I have the crystal. That's true. Yeah. And anyway, we're going to get into specifics. But yeah, I think that kind of covers all the things we wanted to talk about. On the episode.

Jamie:

What surprisingly got through that list that I didn't think we were going to be able to get through all of Yeah,

Roy:

we did cut out a couple things before, which we're going

Jamie:

to talk a little bit more about punks comics, but we figured we covered them well enough last time in the new news wasn't big enough to nothing too crazy. This happened. No. So let's just wrap this up with a quick plug section. What do you want to plug right?

Roy:

I don't want to plug. I'm gonna say our books. It's crazy. Genuinely, I don't have like, I have my own newsletter and Twitter and stuff. But I don't have any specific projects yet to plug.

Jamie:

Those are projects. Well, not Twitter.

Roy:

Yes. But I mean, I pledged last week and right. Yeah, I mean, if you listen to this

Jamie:

could have new listeners this week. Right? This is true. But I will still plug up looks because I love Rs.

Roy:

And we never talked about it enough. And yeah, it's a great, great platform. Do some reading and get involved if you're not involved. I think just come join the discord is really fun, friendly community. And like you don't need to own a piece of art blocks to be there. You don't need to spend money. Just look and appreciate some cool art and talk to some people and maybe you get interested in want to buy some art and it's a good place to be. It's probably my favorite place like discord wise and just in the NFT space is the artbooks discord. So

Jamie:

yeah, yeah, definitely the Block Talk channel in that Discord server is a lot of fun to hang out. And

Roy:

yeah, also just like the individual channels for the artists, they're great to just pop in and out over and see what's going on. Yeah, so that's my

Jamie:

friendly community very helpful in teaching you stuff about it and all that good stuff.

Roy:

It's also really sort of self monitoring or just sort of like, what's the word in like, if bad actors or people who are just there to shill their own bags and just like angry people, they just sort of get weeded out and the community is so friendly. That like those people don't fit in and they just write don't stick around for one reason or another if they're really

Jamie:

Yeah, why People definitely come in there. They're new to art blocks, and they, you know, get three pieces of one project. And then all they want to do is talk about, Well, isn't this project undervalued? And they learned pretty quickly, hey, you can stay here. But that that's not what we're doing here. So you need to stop doing that if you want to keep hanging out here. Yeah. All right, what do you want to plug, um, I will plug the same thing that I plugged last time. If you like abstract art, check out my abstract of the day project. I'm, I'm doing one piece a day, I'm, I'm pretty proud of the work. I feel like I'm getting better. We'll have the link in the shownotes. And one other thing, my sister is a fantastic photographer. And months ago, as I was really getting into NFT's and realizing what a transformational technology, it was, specifically for creative types said, Hey, Ashley, you should look into NFT's for your photography. If this is not a thing you've ever heard of before, she extremely had not heard of it. And it took a lot of conversations with me and a lot of hand holding. But she has now gotten into it. And she has a collection on Open. See it's called stories in nature. So if you just type that in, if you're into nature photography, she's got some great photos that you could buy as NFT's there. So check that out if you're into it. And again, we'll have a link to that in the show notes.

Roy:

Yeah, it's really cool stuff. I bought a couple pieces because I I love the photography. I think photography, NFT's are becoming a bigger deal lately. So she right pretty good time to get into the space, but of the photography entity projects I've seen and I bought into a few of them. This is definitely I would say my favorite of them. So that's Yeah, it's really cool that yeah, she's she's

Jamie:

legitimately great at it. And it's also cool because she's the San Francisco based photographer. And what she has done for her traditional job there is she does like a lot of family portraiture stuff, where kind of people are sort of hanging out in natural settings for sort of engagement photos or maternity photoshoots stuff like that. Um, but for this, it's sort of art that she has photography, art that she has just sort of taken for the love of photography, and her love of nature. And now she's sort of putting it out there for people to appreciate and collect if they want to. Very cool.

Roy:

I just cancelled my listing for my Damien Hirst the currency just because of what we're talking about. And I want to keep it cool. Yeah, later that night.

Jamie:

This has been episode two of Two Bored Apes. Thanks for tuning in.

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