23 Burst results for "PFP"
The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
A highlight from How To Earn Free Cardano!
"If you want to stake your crypto without having to risk leaving your coins on an exchange, without having to lose custody of your coins, well, staking on Cardano has never been easier, and we're going to go through some options. Let's go ahead and discover crypto. Alright, well, first, why would you not want to keep your crypto on an exchange? Okay, within the fine print of these exchanges, if something were to go insolvent, if something were to happen, if there's sort of a bankruptcy issue, those coins are probably going to be lost forever, or at least you're going to lose a portion of them forever. And if you do get anything back, it's going to be legal proceedings, and it's going to take you years. So the phrase, not your keys, not your cheese, or not your keys, not your crypto, has never been more important. And Cardano has some novel solutions that kind of can get around this. Personally, I'm actually no stranger to this. I've lost, essentially, 2 ETH to Celsius. I don't know when I'll get it back. I don't know what I'll get back. And I guarantee, it'll probably be a fraction of what I originally lent. And you know what? At this point, just give me 50%, just give me 75 % of my ETH back, and I would be happy. And this kind of leads you to the question, what is the point of staking rewards if you're just going to end up losing your crypto? I was trying to get I think around 10 % for my ETH, maybe lost forever. What can Cardano do? Cardano actually has tons of options. You could stake on hardware wallets like a Treasure or a Ledger. You can also self -custody on web wallets like Exodus, or you could use a Cardano -based wallet like Yori, or I'm going to go over NAMI today. NAMI was founded by the same person that founded Facebuds. Facebuds was the first 10K PFP on Cardano. This guy has been building for years and years and years. I've been a big fan of his wallet. Today, we're going to be using Chrome. And, folks, you got to be very careful with Chrome extensions. So we're going to use the link from NAMI's actual wallet. I got the NAMI link from Barry's link. Barry apparently named NAMI after NAMI from One Piece. I don't know. That's for the anime fans out there. I'm not so much a fan of that, but I know this is Barry. I've been following this for years and years and years. So I'm going to use the link for the NAMI wallet here. And I'm going to use the link in the NAMI Wallet X account. That takes me to namiwallet .io. And then I feel comfortable going to the Chrome store. I typed it in into the Chrome store. There is only one. There doesn't seem to be any counterfeit apps. Guys, you always got to be careful. There could always be a fake, a phishing site. You just got to be very, very careful. Double -check your URLs. I'll lead you to the NAMI Web Store extension here. I've already have it downloaded. It looks over 200 ,000 users, about 169 rankings. So if you were to Google it and you pull it up, it only has 1 ,000 users. You know it's not the real one. So let's go ahead and go over NAMI now. After you download it, you can either create a new wallet, in which it'll give you your seed phrase, be very careful when you write it down, and then be very careful when you're storing this. Or you can go ahead and upload one of your own wallets. I already have a wallet on here. And we are already staking the Berry pool right here. You can also use this Cardano wallet to hook up to a DeFi application like a menswap. And if we go ahead and click here where it says Berry, now Berry is the staking pool. This is what I have an available reward. So I am staking my Cardano. I haven't claimed it for months. So my 562 has earned me 10 .7 Cardano. But say I want to restake the 10, I would go ahead and withdraw. So we're going to do that now. Okay, you can see the 10 .7 has hit. I now have 573 from 562. And now that is automatically going to be restaked. And then now my next reward should be slightly higher from 560 to 570. You know, maybe I get an extra, you know, 120th of a Cardano now. And the way staking rewards works, it's a little bit like a lottery system. There's a lot of different Cardano staking pool operators, all those SPOs. These SPOs all have a, you know, a random chance to be assigned some staking rewards. You might get lucky and get your staking rewards up to 6 % for an epoch. An epoch is what the Cardano uses for its basis of time for the issuing rewards. So you might get lucky, get 56 % for that epoch, or you might get unlucky, only get 1%. If you have 100 Cardano at the end of the year, expect about 3 .3 extra Cardano after 12 months. If you ever want to change who you're staking to, you can see right here, it says Barry, we're going to switch it to someone in -house. That's right. We have BJ. BJ stakes as well. He has the NES pool. We're going to go ahead and unstake here. And you'll see that I'll give you plenty of warnings here. You'll no longer receive rewards. Rewards from the two previous epoch will be lost. Full balance will be withdrawn. And then the two ADA deposit will be refunded. You have to re -register and wait 20 days to receive rewards again, okay? So I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to lose out on a month's worth of rewards basically for you so we can walk through this process. Alright, let's go ahead and confirm here. So about 30 seconds later, the delegate button is now blank, and we're going to re -delegate to a new staking pool operator. So the NAMI wallet is automatically just going to put you to the Barry pool. So we need to go to pool .pm here. So when you go to pool .pm, you'll see the little NAMI button on the top right. We're going to go ahead and click that and just go ahead and leave us. We're going to give access to pool .pm. Pool .pm is give it as the Etherscan equivalent kind of of Cardano. And now you can see it is unstaked. And so let's find ourselves a new pool operator. Back to the main page by clicking the pool .pm tab here. And then you'll see on the right, it says staking. Go ahead and click on staking. And then you're going to hit search after hitting the staking tab here. And then after that, you will see the pools right there, folks. Me, I'm looking for BJ's NES pool. Type in NES. It looks like he has the only one. Now, if there were two, I'd have to talk to him and, you know, then, hey, make sure we have the right one. See how much aid is delegated. Then we would compare the numbers. He would say, oh yeah, I have 7 .9 million ADA delegated. And then one of them would have 7 .9 million. And the other one would have like 47 ADA. So after you type in NES, go ahead and click join right here. Sign your wallet transaction. And then you just got to wait for confirmation. Now we're going to have to wait a couple epochs before we start getting rewards. BJ doesn't even know I'm doing this, so I'll surprise him in person. I'm sure he'll have a good kick out of this. He's currently in Magic Las Vegas. So you'll just wait for confirmation. It might take a while. And after that, you'll start earning rewards. It is that simple. I'm not losing custody of my Cardano. My other Cardano is still in the other stake pool. So I don't have to worry about, you know, any kind of centralization or, you know, if one entity goes down, I'm not feeling bad about it. If they don't do the right thing with their software and all of a sudden, hey, I'm not getting any rewards. No one's getting any rewards. They're like, oh, I didn't do the update. You don't have to worry about that. I feel very, very comfortable in the Berry pool. If anyone is doing the updates, it is Berry Alessandro. That's all you got to do to stake your Cardano. You don't got to worry about Celsius going under. You don't got to worry about a Terra Luna style collapse. You don't got to worry about Sam Bankman stealing your Cardano and running off to the polycule. Hope you learned something as we discover some crypto today. Let me know where you stake in your Cardano. That's all you got to do to stake your Cardano. See, let's get a low mileage lease on the twenty twenty three Jeep Grand Cherokee four by four nineteen a month for twenty seven months with five thousand five ninety nine to assign tax title license extra. No security deposit required. Call one eight eight eight nine two five. Jeep for details requires dealer contribution and lease through Chrysler Capital. Extra charge for miles over twenty two thousand five hundred includes seven thousand five hundred EV cap cost reduction. Not all customers will qualify. Residency restrictions apply. Take delivery by ten to Jeep is a registered trademark. 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The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
Fresh update on "pfp" discussed on The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
"I don't, I don't, I don't want to make fun of people's light. I used to be a chubby boy. Uh, I used to be, uh, I was, I was poor and chubby, which is always a, uh, a fun, yeah. I looked back. I was like, how and why? And, uh, I would just eat a lot. I would cook. I started cooking ramen packs at like seven years old. And, uh, so I would just, I would get home and I would just be crushing ramens and little Debbie cakes. Uh, so once I became self-sufficient as a second grader, I just started shoveling food. Couldn't help it. I couldn't help it. So I was poor, but I was eating like back in the day, 5 cent ramens, 10 cents. So, I mean, you could be kind of poor, but you can still get your calories. I would say the way the U S is set up, it's actually the poorer you are, the higher, the possibility of you, you know, being overweight is certainly the higher, the possibility you have high fructose corn syrup, which is BJ's favorite ingredient. He actually, I've seen him drink it straight from the bottle. I've seen him shoot it up. Anyways, we're not going to talk about that. Uh, we don't, we don't want to talk about people, uh, you know, doing drugs here or people rolling one, you know, but that takes us to the biggest gainer, which is roll a bit here. Roll Bitcoin is up 8.9%. Hit the like button. If you rolled a bit today, uh, we have maker up 7.5% Bitcoin cash up 6.5%. Radix up 5.6%. Terra Luna classic of 5%. And then after the top five, we get into chain link, e-cash, synthetics network, and Bitcoin SV here, uh, theory and classic also moving up. So a lot of these older coins you see on Robin hood two years ago, moving up today. All right. Now we look at the biggest losers and then we're going to, uh, jump ahead to the picture of me again, DC. Oh, I would never do that. I would never do that. No, it is Nexo losing, uh, the most here. It is down 4.1%. And then we have Algorand at least cracking into the top five, top three, if not the biggest loser of the day. And yes, I am a holder of immutable X immutable X is down, but they had a good week last week. Yeah. They are still actually up for the seven day. They're at 4.5%. So, you know, not too bad. All good things come to an end and have to retrace a little bit, but it's still up over maybe a healthy retracement like my, uh, forehead here. What else do they have going before, uh, God's unchained? What about gods of chain? What else do they really have besides that? I mean, that game was phenomenal. They, they have worked with Gary V doing some stuff in the past, but yeah, I mean the, the gamification explosion that was going to happen, we're going to be, you know, the blockchain for crypto gaming. It just really hasn't panned out that, you know, it seems like they have to make the games in house similar to Nintendo in the nineties. You know, they didn't have a bunch of game makers knocking down their door, trying to give them the next halo, the next metal gear solid. So they'd looked around and you said, you know what, Tim, we're going to release super Mario brothers world and we're going to crush everybody. And that's what they did, but they did buy game freak, which gave them Pokemon. So, Hey, that was a good one. Uh, has any, do you watch the Tetris movie? Not yet. Good stuff. I started my second anime ever second anime ever. I'm not counting dragon ball Z. My first anime death note, thoughts, thoughts, not an enemy guy thoughts on death. I haven't watched that one. Death note's great. Uh, I'm starting a one punch man. I watched my friend made me sit down and watch one punch man. Cause he said it was going to change my life and I'm the same person. Well, I'm now doing a thousand pushups, thousand situps and running 10 kilometers a day. So, you know, preparing for that one punch, it's jobless reincarnation. I'll tell you nothing about it. Watch it. All right. All right. Uh, let's see. All right. It is time for us to talk about the CCP. Say hello to the CCP watching at home. And if you got a ring camera, go ahead. Turn over your shoulder. Wave to the CCP. Hey, Hey, CCP, you got that webcam that the light's not on. Go ahead. Wave to your webcam. Say, Hey, Hey, CCP. All right. A billionaire Everground founder reportedly placed under police surveillance in China as fears of collapse grow. Uh, he was the, uh, the chair. He is the founder, former CEO, I believe former CFO as well. Uh, Bloomberg reported, uh, he's been put under police surveillance, raising fresh doubts over the future of the property developer amid mounting fears of a collapse that was in shockwaves through China's beleaguered property sector and the wider economy. Many are saying globally here, uh, he, uh, car Yon. I think his name is here. Uh, he was the chairman, like I said, uh, you know, former CEO here, uh, known as Zhu Xi, uh, Xi Yin in a Mandarin was taken by police earlier this month and is being monitored as a designated location. Maybe the same place. Jack Ma of Alibaba group was at a, it's not clear why he's been placed under residential surveillance. Maybe because, uh, Hey, you're, you're kind of giving us a bad name here. All right. Evergrande, which he founded in 1996, wrote China's real estate boom and held firm as one of the country's biggest property developers for decades. Their growth was stellar fueled by heavy borrowing and his sprawling empire expanded in areas as varied as electric cars, bottled water, streaming service, and a football team. Sounds like Donald Trump or something there. Uh, just missing the airlines there and a partridge in a pear tree. Yeah. And, uh, more Largo, uh, $17 million valuation. Yeah. You gonna buy it? I mean, I probably get some money. I've seen a lot of people making offers. Yeah. I'm sure. I'm sure. Uh, I'm not there yet. I'm not there yet. I'm, you know, I'm just a one comma guy, you know, just a one comma club. Are you in the one? All right. I'm not in the two comma club. I'm not in a two comma club. No, but yeah. Okay. One comma has a, that's a large area, but for some reason I think it was like 1000, but yeah, I guess, I guess you can get some other, some other figures in there. Comma, comma, comma, comma. Uh, Junie Lee. Uh, thank you very much. I like your PFP. I like it a lot too. All right. Uh, let's see. DXY is on fire. Yeah. We're talking about that 10 month high, pretty close to that 12 months. You know, we passed that. And what's even worse about it is it's, it's getting levels of saying it's like overextended to the upside, but it keeps smashing through them. And if you guys go back and look at charts, bull markets and bull trends are when you see rejection, things like levels of resistance and levels of saying you're overbought get smashed. Same thing's happening with oil. I do. I do agree with Garrett Soloway oil is, I think closer, but I think the Dixie has at least it's going to get up into like 107, 108 range. Does it crack back to 110? We'll have to see. All right. The oily boy is going to be happy if that thing goes up. We'll see how that goes. Um, I love Chick-fil-A, but wish they had be real for real bread. I don't know what that is. It was in the DZ likes. Uh, it talks about there's the 40 manmade chemicals, uh, in a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich. Yeah. 50 different different compounds, 40 of a manmade, but, but it's pretty blessed. It's pretty good. You don't have to pray over it before you eat it. Just, you know, you can eat it right out the bag. The other other restaurants you definitely need to pray. Yeah. Chick-fil-A has been avoiding the cancellation culture, you know, they did a good job. Yeah. Uh, you know what it was? People were like, I'm not giving up the sandwich, man. I'm just not going to do it. I don't care. All right. Uh, let's uh, because when it packs people's lives, eh, you know, the, that moral compass can go out window. All right. Uh, let's talk about $3.2 billion. That was his net worth. Uh, according to a Forbes real time tracker that is today. However, in the past, just about six years ago, it was $42.5 billion when he was ranked the richest person in all of Asia, uh, even more than Jack Ma. Uh, although I think Putin and Xi Jinping are probably worth, uh, hundreds of billions. I don't know. Uh, who knows? Who knows? I'm just, you know, giving it the old eyeball tests as penguins would say, JP Morgan, CEO warns of rising energy prices and geopolitical tensions and CNBC TV 18 interview. Uh, this is a back on the still on the CCP thing here. He's engaged in a comprehensive interview here. And during this conversation, he cautioned that individuals and businesses should anticipate climbing oil and gas prices, kind of what Tim was saying here, as well as increasing interest rates. He emphasized that his primary worry at the moment is ongoing geopolitical climate. Well, we'll see how that goes. You know, we, we do have an election season coming up in America. Will they ratchet back? Uh, I don't want to say wartime efforts, but just global tensions or will they increase global tensions? Because it's like, Oh, you better choose my side because the other side is crazy. No. And it's another thing. Like there's a lot that could go on here. There's a part of me that believes a lot of things could have act to be, get better because of JP Morgan and Jamie Dimon saying this also, I think I was listening to Ivan on tech this morning, making a great point. Uh, election season is next year, guys. You do not want to be responsible for the economy going into a shambles. We also heard Jerome Powell say that the expectations we really shouldn't see a recession until 2027. Well, they can keep kicking the can down the road. If they can actually, if, if the current administration convinces Jerome Powell to at least stay paused or even get a couple of rate cuts in this year, that's going to be a nice little catalyst for them to say, look, we're fixing everything. What you don't want to stagflation where the interest rates stay high, but inflation keeps getting out of control. It's one of those things is like, Hey guys, let's, let's lower the interest rate, let inflation keep going up, but at least we're now making it easier to borrow money. We're helping the economy and stagflation doesn't happen. But then of course that will impact heavily in 2027, whether the president is the current sitting president or a new president, there's gonna be a lot of mess. Yeah. There's also going to be a lot of stagflation this winter as people have those inflatable reindeer on their front yards. Yes. And then they'll have to inflate the stags. True. So it's another form of stagflation. I will stop this stream. That was a bad one. When do you put up your decorations? So I have the Halloween out stuff already. I would like to wait until November 1st. Some people will say Thanksgiving. I think that, you know, we, I think you get out a little sooner. I'm a day after Thanksgiving kind of guy. That's more normal. Yeah. How do you feel about it being in Walmarts already? That's a little much, but you know what else is in Walmarts? But that's later. That's later. That's later. And did Joel get one? No, they're not, they're not actually, that's a good spoiler. They're not in Walmart yet. At least not. Yeah, but she bought them on Amazon. So they're now I think getting dispersed to Walmarts, but that's, again, that's later on the show. We're going to knock up a truck like the Sopranos allegedly allegedly get the penguins. Yeah. You know? All right. Let's talk a little bit finance here. Binance sale, a Binance sells Russian unit to day old ComEx and exits the country. They're set to fully exit Russia with the sale. We'll have no ongoing revenue split is said on Wednesday. They agreed to sell the entirety of its Russian business to ComEx as looks to fully exit the market over compliance concerns. As we look toward the future, we recognize that operating in Russia is not compatible with Binance's compliance strategy as we try to comply with the onerous rules of the West. It was reported earlier this year that Binance was facing a department of justice inquiry into whether Russian customers were able to access the exchange in violation of US sanctions related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In August, the firm said it was cutting ties with sanctioned Russian banks. You know, it's one thing to cut ties with the Russian bank. I don't think we should be cutting off Russian citizens from Bitcoin. I don't think any exchange is doing the right thing. I understand what's happening. The Treasury Department Department of Justice leaning on them. So I guess this message is less for the exchanges and more for the Treasury Department. Stopping a Russian's access to Bitcoin is tantamount to violence. And you're committing violence against these people because a lot of people, you know, this is how they can leave their country with their net worth. This is how they can leave their country without having to shove diamonds up their crack. Alright, that isn't a good thing. We don't want that. Yeah, NFT, LV, Las Vegas, Biomex, junkies, and the monkeys, the shanks, and the banks. I like that. I like that. Yeah, we're gonna have a good time in Vegas. It ought to be a good time. Alright, Wall Street Journal article about Binance. I actually saw this yesterday and I purposely didn't want to cover it because it read like an article from 2021, 2022, 2018. It read like all the articles, zero new information. Wall Street Journal spread FUD about Binance again. CZ immediately responded. This newspaper declared Sam Bankman freed a hero. So the paper that declared Sam as a hero is saying Binance is in trouble. In the news published, they claimed that Binance was beginning to collapse. Their sources based the claim on an unnamed source. So we have an anonymous source and claimed that Binance's other founder, Yihi, saw one of his internal messages. According to Wall Street Journal's alleged source, Yihi issued the following message to employee company employees. She stated like Michael Jackson. She seems like a smart person though. Every war is a make or break situation. The only thing that can defeat us is ourselves.
Crypto Altruism Podcast
A highlight from The Web3 Nonprofit Episode 3 - Black Women Blockchain Council
"We feel that as we're building this ecosystem, there's a need for so many different hands to be involved so that we can build it the right way. I see blockchain as a revolution. I see it as an opportunity to rewrite the wrongs of the past, or at least try to start with a fresh start and create opportunities for everyone and not just a select few in tech. Hi there, welcome to the Web3 Nonprofit, a special 10 -part crypto -ultrism podcast series exploring stories of nonprofits who are leveraging Web3 technology for good. My name is Drew from Crypto -ultrism .org. In this series, we will chat about the highs and lows of being a nonprofit in the world of Web3 and how organizations of all sizes can leverage this transformative technology to grow their impact. So let's dive right in. Welcome, welcome to the third episode of our new very special 10 -part podcast series. In each episode, we will be highlighting a different nonprofit organization that is innovating with Web3 technology. Now before we dive in and welcome our guest, I want to give a special shout out and thanks to Endowment for their partnership in helping bring this to life. So before we get started, I wanted to share a special message from their team. Hey, it's day. So as you know, Endowment lets you gift over a million US nonprofits and thousands more globally and you probably want to support a lot of them. You might be like, I want to support five different organizations. Does that mean I'm going to get five different tax receipts and have to bring them all to my accountant? And I've got something that I think can help. It's called a donor advised fund. You might hear it sometimes called a DAF. Think about it as your personal giving account where you can make one donation and get one tax receipt. Oftentimes you can write off the full amount and then take your time. You can grant to those five orgs, 10 orgs, however many you want all from one place. And because Endowment funds are all on chain, they're faster than traditional DAFs, they're way more affordable and they're transparent. You can follow the money all the way to its destination. So if you're ready to simplify your giving life, go to app .endowment .org and click the start of fund button. And now a word from Larry at the lawyer box. Endowment does not give financial advice that is a job for a licensed tax professional. I love that. Definitely head over to endowment .org that's E -N -D -A -O -M -E -N -T .org to learn about their incredible work. Okay, now the moment we've all been waiting for. For the third episode, we're excited to highlight the work of Black Woman Blockchain Council. An organization incredible with a mission to create a safe space that inspires, trains and activates a talent and economic pipeline of Black women pursuing professional and entrepreneurial careers in blockchain and fintech, including inspiring and educating the next generation of diverse and inclusive blockchain leaders. Today, we welcome to the podcast, Olayinka O 'Danneran, founder and chairwoman of Black Woman Blockchain Council. So let's dive right in. Okay, Olayinka, thank you so much for being here today on the Web3 nonprofit podcast. So excited to have you. Thank you very much, Drew, for having me. I'm excited to be here with you as well. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And, you know, really excited to learn about the fantastic work you're doing with Black Woman Blockchain Council. I've been following it for a while now. You're really doing some really great stuff to just build up, you know, inclusion and to make sure that it's a really positive space to build in. And so to start things off, I'd love to hear your story of how did you end up working in the nonprofit sector? Well, I have to go back a journey to how did I even get involved in the whole blockchain space, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So it was around 2015, I wanted to do a startup and I met up with a guy that I had reached out to simply because his name was in a magazine that I was reading about a local startup and she had referenced his name, so I was like, okay, he must be a great person to reach out to. I ended up reaching out to him. We met in D .C. and he was talking about Bitcoin and every time that we met, he kept talking about it. So it piqued my curiosity and I started going down the rabbit hole and fell in love with the technology more than the cryptocurrency and actually got myself involved in the ecosystem as an educator through Black Women Blockchain Council since 2018. That's been going as a benefit LLC, but more for for profit. We really wanted to build a lot more programs in this space to provide access and resources to the black community, especially black women in this space and young girls as well. And so we figured going the nonprofit route would make sense for us to be able to tap into our networks and get them to feel incentivized to donate money so that we can bring a lot more of our programs to life. And that's really how I got involved in 2021. We started Black Women in Blockchain and since then, it's been a great journey that we've been going through. We've had several great sponsors and donors of our effort and brought forth some programs and we're looking to bring forth some more. Definitely. And I'm excited to learn more about those programs, including the training and mentorship and stuff that you offer. I think that's so important and I'm really excited to hear about that. So maybe to start things off, can you please just like at a higher level, introduce listeners to Black Women Blockchain Council, including your mission and impacts? Yeah, so Black Women Blockchain Council, we're here to provide education and awareness about the blockchain technology. Our goal is to make sure that no one gets left behind in this ecosystem that we're building and that there's plenty of resources that are presented to the Black community as well as underrepresented communities within the space. So that way we can continue to grow and really create solutions that can be social impactful. I love that. And I want to dive now a bit more into your programs and on your website, you mentioned how your organization is committed to empowering Black women through comprehensive training, mentorship, networking opportunities, and visibility programs, which is great. Love that, super important. So tell me about the programs you offer. Tell me more about this. Yeah, so we have educational programs. We have a two -track certification program that we created with ConsenSys, which is part of the Ethereum Foundation. They're a huge organization out there and they're really diving in into helping a lot more people get involved in the blockchain ecosystem, in particular, the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem that they're working under. And so with them, we've been able to create these certified programs to allow individuals to one, understand the foundation of blockchain, two, dive deeper into the realms of being a developer. In this space, there's still a lot more people that are just understanding the basics, but not really understanding how to create the technology or build the technical code, I should say, the technology, right? So we want to make sure that women in particular have access to that. And our goal is to bring on board half a million Black women blockchain devs. And that's an ambitious goal by the year 2030. We feel that, you know, as we're building this ecosystem, there's a need for so many different hands to be involved so that we can build it the right way, right? I see blockchain as a revolution. I see it as an opportunity to rewrite the wrongs of the past, or at least try to start with a fresh start and create opportunities for everyone and not just a select few in tech. I love that. And, you know, that's something I've heard consistently when I've spoke with builders, you know, especially builders from communities have been like traditionally excluded from like traditional tech circles and those sorts of things is that like, it's almost like this feeling of like it's wet cement, you know, we can just kind of build from the ground level, have a say in the development of this new ecosystem and learn from the mistakes of web one and web two and build from that and build a more equitable ecosystem. So really appreciate the work that you're doing. I think that's fantastic. So let's say that there's someone listening right now that wants to get involved in that course or take part in the certificate program. How would they go about doing that? Yeah, they can go to our website, bwbc .io and click on BWBC Academy. That will take them directly to our LMS learning management system that we've created specifically for this course and also for individuals to interact with others who are taking the course. They can do it that way. Or they can go to community .bwbc .io forward slash sign up and they'll be able to quickly sign up for the course that way, too. Very cool. I love that. And so you mentioned earlier that you're a public benefit LLC, a nonprofit benefit LLC. Tell me more about the structure in the community behind the organization, because I'm you know, I'm not as familiar with this this type of structure. So tell me more about this and why you chose this. Yeah, because, well, the the it really starts with what the intention of the organization was. When I came into the scene around 2015, not a lot of people were talking about blockchain. And, you know, it was it was a tech space for tech bros. Right. And so you you got surrounded by that. And but then at the same time, you saw opportunities around 2018. There was a huge uproar about a Bitcoin conference and that created avenues for women to really stake their feet into the space and let it be known that there are women in here. I started seeing opportunities being passed around and my fear was that we were in the verge of recreating Silicon Valley in the sense that only a certain group of people were known as the builders of tech. Right. And so I didn't want to repeat what I feel was a mistake. I saw it as a way for us to be able to create an avenue, as I mentioned before. So with BWBC, the intention was really to go into it, creating an opportunity to be impactful into the ecosystem that's being built, as well as the black community. So our intentions wasn't really to generate money, but really create avenues that allow people to to gain the sources, gain awareness. And so the benefit aspect is really what drove that. And so we wanted to make it clear to people that we're not just a fly by night. We really want to have intentional, beneficial programs for the community to get involved. And that's where Benefit LLC came from. Yeah, that's amazing. That's really cool. And, you know, you'd mentioned around, you know, a woman building in Web3 and blockchain. You have a really beautiful piece of artwork in the background there that says the future is female. Love that. That's beautiful. So, you know, what advice, I guess, would you give to two women that are looking to build in the Web3 ecosystem that are maybe hesitant because of this perception of like, you know, that it is maybe reality to some extent, too, that it is, you know, just a tech bro dominated space. What would you say? What advice would you give? I would tell them not to consider it that way. I would tell them that there's a lot of women in this space. One of the things that I've been privileged to have in this space is surround myself by women left, right, front, back, you know, and they're everywhere. So I don't know that type of tech space where there's no women. I know the tech space where there are women because I've been fortunate to be surrounded by them. And I want to let other females know that we're out here. We may not be as vocal. We may not be the one that are pushed to the front, but we're the one that's building. We're the one that's educating. We're the one that's creating community because, you know, you can't have blockchain without community. And Web3 is solely based on community. And the people that are actually taking the time to build that foundation to make it sustainable are the women. And so there's a lot of us here and we're coming from various backgrounds. You could be tech adjacent. And when I say tech adjacent, you know, attorneys are needed more than ever in this space. As educators like myself that are in this space, you know, we have a lot of hackers going on. So if you're in cybersecurity, you're needed in this space. Policymakers are needed. So like these are avenues that women tend to, you know, gravitate towards. But for some reason, they feel that they can't be in tech. Yes, you can be in tech. There's a lot of opportunities and positions for you. And I would say don't let the fear stop you because you just may end up realizing that you love it and you love being here and this is where you need to be. Because right now we're still in the build phase. And so we want you we want all voices to be added to how the structure is being built and what type of foundation so that it can be sustainable. We have so many different, you know, negativity that are coming our way that we're trying to build something sustainable and impactful to society. And women are important in that. Yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, what you said there, too, really stood out to me around, like you don't have to be, you know, a developer, a coder. Right. And I knew that like a lot of people have this perception that you need to have a computer science degree or background and be some super coder to be able to engage and be successful in this new ecosystem. But I think you're 100 percent spot on that, like anyone, no matter what your background can find a place in Web3. Right. If you're a lawyer, an artist, an accountant, you know, a creative. Right. There's just so many opportunities in this space for you to join it and to have an impact, which is great. So I'd love to shift now, if that's OK, a little bit, you know, because you mentioned earlier that you've done some fundraising in the space to be able to raise funds to help get this off the ground. I'd love to hear about your experience fundraising with crypto and, you know, what advice you'd have for other nonprofits, whether it's, you know, a benefit LLC or a charitable organization that are interested in engaging in crypto fundraising. Yes, so for me, it was easier to transfer into fundraising through crypto because I'm in this space, I know how it is. I've been able to meet individuals like Alexis Miller, who works with Endowment, that was able to bring us on board to their platform, which made the exchange from, you know, crypto to US dollar really easy. So I suggest that, you know, this is not a plug, but it kind of sounds like it. You know, Endowment was a lifesaver. The fact that they had such a platform in place really was helpful. But, you know, it's it's just it's just preparing yourself for the future. Right. As a nonprofit, we got to think of avenues, different ways of, you know, fundraising and different ways that people are going to show up with their funds. There's a lot of people that, you know, a couple of years ago made a lot of money in crypto, knowing the IRS is now looking at that and they're thinking, you know, long term capital gains or, you know, taxes, the word taxes is now introduced into this space. A lot of people are looking to actually, you know, find ways to assist them in being deducting their taxes. But I want to say that they're looking for ways to donate, you know, to a really good program or something that's social impactful. So, you know, this is an avenue that a lot of nonprofits are missing out on because they're not looking at crypto. I think it's it's it's just being more sustainable in this space, you know, to be able to take different resources and different funds as a nonprofit and as a new nonprofit. You know, we we can't afford to be closed minded to the way the funds are coming. Any opportunity for us, we're going to research it. We're going to look at it and see if it's viable for us. And it just so happened that crypto was something that we definitely were able to receive. Yeah, definitely. And Love Endowment as well. Huge fan of the work they're doing. Excellent platform. And Alexis, I think it was actually who connected us as well. So shout out to Alexis. Thank you for the work you're doing. But yeah, that's great advice. And I think that, you know, like nonprofits, a lot of nonprofits that I've worked with are struggling to kind of like keep afloat and keep up with all the tech advances and everything and, you know, really relying on kind of their traditional donor base and everything. But that donor base is also really, you know, aging out as well. And, you know, they're really struggling to, I think, attract new donor bases. I think what you said around like it's a great way to like future proof and like, you know, I think, yeah, definitely spot on. And, you know, I think fundraising, too, is just one piece of the puzzle, right? When it comes to the benefits of blockchain and crypto. And so I was wondering, like, you know, beyond fundraising, what are some of the ways that other impact organizations like Charities, B Corps, whatever it is, can leverage blockchain technology to grow their impact? Yeah, I mean, like NFTs, non fungible tokens, right? A lot of people have heard of NFTs, you know, a couple of years ago when people were making ridiculous amount of money, all for what they deemed to be PFPs or profile pictures. Right. But these NFTs can also be a way to incentivize your donors by giving them something, an NFT, an artwork that are either created by the people that were impacted by that donation, by the program that, you know, a symbolism of, you know, a thank you for helping us obtain our goal. I think a lot of people will find value in using NFTs in a way that will be more commemorative of actions that donors have done. And yeah, and it could also be a way to make it fun for especially the younger generation, because they're all into NFTs. So, you know, imagine if a sponsor or sorry, a donor, imagine if a donor decides to present you with some crypto currencies, right? And you send them an NFT just simply as a thank you. That's really impactful for them. And also they will keep it within their portfolio or their gallery. And others can see that NFT. And once they see the NFT has your name, it's another way of marketing, you know, that's nonprofit. So if someone sees it, they can click on it, see the name and then decide to research it, look into what you guys are doing and consider donating that way. So it's it's an ongoing gifting platform or avenue or vehicle that you can use. Yeah, definitely. I know and I think NFTs are so fascinating because a lot of people like look at them and NFTs are just no JPEGs and whatnot. But I think that there's such a cool opportunity there for like nonprofits to use them to engage donors, like you mentioned, right. You know, to recognize and reward them. It can be like a really cool like badge of like a proof of impact. Right. Proof of impact, yeah. Yeah. I've also seen like dynamic NFTs where, you know, it can be updated, you know, as you donate more. So like there's some really creative use cases there. And you're right, too. It can also be a way for the nonprofit to tell a story or to raise awareness of the work they're doing, too. So, yeah, I think that nonprofits should definitely not be so quick to discount NFTs. I think they can be a very valuable tool for them in their in their yeah, in their growth. So, you know, obviously, a lot of nonprofit leaders are skeptical about Web3 and many rightfully so as well. Right. You know, there's been a lot of unfortunately bad actors that I think have kind of tainted the space a bit, you know, which has resulted in a lot of negative coverage, that it's a lot of scams and, you know, bad actors and those sorts of things. So nonprofit leaders are skeptical. So for those that are skeptical to get involved in this new and emerging space, what advice would you give to them? Oh, if you're skeptical, I would say, you know, read up on the technology. Right. Because I did come in being skeptical of crypto, one aspect of, you know, the technology and decided to read up and started seeing, oh, there's so many different possibilities in this space. You know, my background is also in cybersecurity, so I know about hackers and vulnerabilities and all that stuff. And I want to say that just to say that, you know, the breaches and incidents that do happen in this space is not only isolated to this space, it happens elsewhere as well. It happens with fiat, you know, US dollars as well, you know, so you're not really going to prevent all kinds of, you know, vulnerabilities. But however, that should not be the reasons why you decide to stay away. Another thing is, you know, regardless of the things that are happening when it comes to the vulnerabilities and the threats and incidents, so many different industries are already incorporating, you know, the different type of use cases. We have Visa, you know, that just stepped up, you know, their game again. They issued NFTs, now they're doing, you know, USDs, you know, stable coins. And so, you know, there's a lot of people that are slowly changing and things are changing around you, you know, you don't want that negativity to stop your progress into what the future is going to be. And the future is coming. The future is tech, you know, and it's female, but, you know, the future is tech, you know, and it's important for nonprofits to stay up to date. Every single time when people ask me, you know, about why should people be concerned about, you know, crypto or not using crypto, I always think of Blockbuster, right? They were a well -known company when I was younger, you know, used to be able to go to their store, rent out videos and all that stuff. And everybody thought that they were going to be here forever. All of a sudden they're gone, right? They're replaced. And the younger generation have no idea who they are only because they didn't change with time. So as nonprofits, we have to change with time. We have to be kind of one step ahead, you know, wear multiple hats. And I hate to say it, but kind of experimental, you know, in our approaches, in our marketing and in everything, right? Because if we get to the space where we're just stagnant and say, this is the only way that we're going to receive, we're going to be left in the dust. So you do have to conform to tech. You know, even A .I., nonprofits can't be close minded to A .I. is very helpful to a lot of people. The same thing with blockchain technology. You have to be open minded to it. Yeah, definitely. Wow. Great advice. Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, I think, you know, it's the future, right? And to stay afloat, to stay relevant, to stay impactful in the future, you got to, you know, stay up to date with these new technological trends and movements. So, yeah, that's some great advice there and great advice all around, some great insights. I appreciate everything you've shared and obviously weren't able to cover everything about the work you're doing. So for those that are listening and that want to learn more and get involved and support the work that you're doing, what's the best way for them to do that? Yeah, so you can go to BWINB .org, which is Black Women in Blockchain, and find out more about us. We are doing a fundraiser right now. And, you know, you can check out our fundraiser. Our goal is to raise money for programs that we want to implement. One of them is a mentorship program for the younger generation, high schools and college students. It's an 18 week course that we're trying to launch. And this 18 week course will allow these younger generations of females to be able to tap into careers in the blockchain space because there's several different careers and give them access to mentors within these different careers so that they can have the opportunity to maybe transition or look into the possibility of transitioning into these wonderful, lucrative careers that are happening in the blockchain space. And there's plenty of them. It's not just developers. You have influencers. As I said, you have regulators, policymakers, lawyers, attorneys, educators, so many different positions and roles. Yeah, definitely. Thank you for sharing that. And of course, those listening in, all the links will be in the show notes so you can follow along and get involved in this incredible movement. And to end on one final note of inspiration, if that's OK, I'd love to hear a recent success story or win that you've had at a Black Women Blockchain Council that you can share with the audience. Yeah, a recent success story was our ability to provide a fellowship program to college students to attend one of our conferences that happened earlier this year. It was the Women of Blockchain, the International Women of Blockchain Conference, which is an annual conference that we put together. It gives you access to different women in this space. As I mentioned, there's a lot of us. And you get to hear from them and what they're building, how they're showing up in this space. And it's a three day conference. So we were able to provide free room at the hotel as well as their travel expenses. And that's something that a lot of conferences don't oftentimes do. They will lower the price for scholar students. But I remember being a college student, you know, I remember not having the resources, but I want to attend. And so we made sure that they were that they had the opportunity to attend for free without having to worry about how they're going to come up with the money and gave them access to a lot of networking. And to this day, a lot of them are finding success in this space. So I'm really excited about that and the potential of what's to come for them. Yeah, totally. That's amazing. I love that. What a great opportunity for those for the scholars to be able to join that conference. And yeah, I think back as a student, I would have never been able to afford to and transportation hotel and, you know, all that stuff to go to a conference. Right. So that's so important and so inspiring for those individuals that we were able to go. So thank you so much for all you do to uplift and build in this space. And thank you for sharing all the fantastic advice you have today for those listening and definitely check out the show notes to follow along. Hopefully you can also support this movement because they're doing a fundraiser right now. So thank you so much for being here, Olga. It was a pleasure to have you. And thank you for the work you're doing. Thank you, Drew. Thank you very much for having me. A huge thank you to Olga for joining us today on the Web3 nonprofit podcast. Make sure to check out the show notes so you can learn more about their work and consider making a donation to this incredible organization. They're actually running a fundraising campaign right as we speak. A big thank you again to Endowment for their partnership in this podcast series. We couldn't have done it without them. So thanks for listening in and make sure to join us again in a couple of weeks for next episode. Also, feel free to head over to cryptoautism .org to learn more about our work and feel free to shoot us a message if you'd like to chat. Until next time, let's keep showing the world the good of crypto.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from GEN C: Growing A Web3 Brand With Austin Hurwitz, Head of Business Development and Strategy at Doodles
"Gen C is the generation of the new Internet. In Gen C, the C stands for crypto, but it also stands for creators, the connected consumer and collectibles, both digital and physical with on -chain provenance. It stands for culture and characters, the ones we play in games and the companion ones that AI is building alongside us. It stands for community and digital citizenship and the new set of transparent and trustless tools being built to govern them. These are the people who were raised on a different philosophy on how they look at money, how they look at identity, how they look at privacy and how they look at the hybrid digital and physical spaces being built all around us. And finally, how they reimagine their relationships with the communities and companies they interact with. We focus on how brands large and small are building for these audiences. Welcome to Gen C. Avery, we are back again, as always, Gen C, not riding the wave, creating the wave. We have a great guest today in Austin Hurwitz. He's head of business development and strategy at Doodles. He was at Amazon before. He's been in the music business and really understands that ecosystem. So really excited to talk to him. But first, how are you? I am doing great. Excited to talk Doodles today. Excited about everything that's happening in this summer of on chain. Just actually walked past an outdoor billboard that is featuring on chain summer, which is, of course, Coinbase's big initiative, which you talk about. But summer's in full swing, Sam. How about you? How's life in New York? It's humid. It's hot. It's a little annoying, but people seem really happy. And yeah, I think things are great. I'm very happy that I'm not really traveling this month. I know you're all over the place. I have Europe coming next month because crypto never sleeps and crypto always travels. And crypto loves conferences. Crypto does love a conference. So there's a couple stories that sort of popped onto my feed that I thought we should talk about today. The first one, and I know we want to also address this with Austin because I think you guys were helping them, Doodles, with a Crocs collaboration, but everyone loves a sneaker drop. And it was just announced yesterday, Adidas and Bape, the Japanese brand, they're doing an NFT auction of 100 physical sneakers. You get the NFT. It's then redeemable for one of 100 only pairs, which is already going to make it a pretty rare sneaker for anyone who does collect. I know MoonPay is powering it from a commerce perspective. Is there no depth? Is there no bottom to the sneaker NFT ecosystem? Apparently not. Apparently everyone wants sneakers. Always, always, always. What I thought was interesting about that drop is in a world where I'm seeing so many brands look to put the tech under the hood, put the tech underneath, invisible, abstracted, words like that are floating around everywhere. Adidas is really leaning into putting the tech front and center and selling NFTs in a world where I was just looking at the Google trend line for NFTs over the past five years and you could probably imagine what it looks like. Interest has just dropped off so much in the world of NFTs, but I think it's interesting and it's actually quite differentiated that Adidas is leaning into this, really continuing to embrace the NFT ecosystem through their communication, through alts and through drops like this one, which are very focused on exclusivity and almost unabashedly focused on commercialization. Because it's an auction. This isn't something that's $5. I think that's actually why it's like, okay, they're doing it, they're leaning into it, they're doubling down in a world where like 90 % of people are pulling back. Right. So the thing that keeps jumping out for me is in a world of luxury collectibles, where you're seeing more and more younger people getting into that sector, and whether it's sneakers or it's wine or it's watches, I think people are starting to recognize, oh, I can actually invest in things and those assets can appreciate over time. So in that world, and I've actually been doing a lot of deep dives into this through the lens of wine, because wine actually, and I know we talked to LVMH about this weeks and weeks ago, but it's hard to ship wine and store it correctly and do all of that in investment grade wine, anything $100 or over. If you're never actually planning on drinking it, the worst thing you can do is take that wine and take possession of it. The best thing you could do is actually just keep it as an NFT, have it be in a storage facility that's at the right temperature where it doesn't move ever, and then wait until I sell it to you and then you decide I want to drink it for an anniversary and I'm going to redeem that NFT for the bottle. And so I think of that through the same lens, I look at these sneakers that I think there's something down the road in the world where half of my collection is really just a digital collection in a wallet and I don't need to physically house it. And then only when the person wants the physical asset do they get to request it. But a lot of the trading should happen in an on -chain manner that's secure and trust first and all of that. So I do think there's something really interesting. I'm very fascinated to see how much these go for. I'm not someone who will spend thousands of dollars on sneakers, but I have a feeling at only a hundred of this collaboration there's a chance these get pretty pricey. I agree with you. I'm excited to see and I also love that it's an auction so the market sets the price which I think is smart, it's strategic and it also kind of protects Adidas versus what we've seen some, you know, luxury hype drops do where they set the price and they set a specific quantity that don't move. I think this allows Adidas to treat this as a win sort of regardless of market pricing and demand. So I actually think it's a smart strategy especially how far in they already are. And the interesting layer is if you were part of the Adidas alts program of which there's a couple thousand all NFTs out there, any bid you make your bid is increased by 10 % if you hold the alt. So it actually just rewards that there might even be an interesting gamification of if you think these are gonna go for $2 ,500 that buying an NFT for $200 now may be a benefit in your bid thinking which is also like an interesting dynamic. The next areas I So there's two things that jump to mind. The first is Zynga, which is one of the most successful mobile gaming companies is about to come out with its first Web3 game. So they have a studio called Web3 Zynga, I think they're called. They have a trailer out for a project called Sugartown. And it's one where you can use NFTs, you can earn a point sort of currency that the currency itself is not a blockchain asset, the NFTs are blockchain assets. But I did think it was just interesting that the large game studios are starting to pay attention and something where, you know, just think of the people who still 10 years in are playing Candy Crush. You know, there is an unlock that will come of the folks who just love mobile games to play on the subway and planes that might enjoy the fact that maybe there's an earning mechanism to it. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on the Zynga game experience. So funny, I was actually just looking at a proposal for something for one of our partners with Activision, and they of course have Candy Crush. And yes, a lot of people like Candy Crush a lot, you know, millions, probably millions are playing it right now at this exact moment. I think it's interesting. I just don't think we've yet seen that much demand in any of these Web3 games. But if anyone can crack it, it's Zynga. You know a little bit about how the game market works. I'm sure many of our listeners do too. It's not like your first one's always a hit. Oftentimes, gaming companies will need to try a bunch to find that Candy Crush. So let's see, maybe Sugartown is it. It's gonna be exciting. And related to that, the first time I ever heard of Zepeto was through you. Zepeto is an Asian market metaverse. Yes, very large one. Very large one. I think there's 300 plus million people who are on Zepeto. And they just announced a deal with Jump Crypto to take $13 million in seed money to start incorporating NFTs and potentially on -chain currencies into their metaverse. So they're a competitor to Fortnite, to Roblox, to Minecraft, to some of the biggest ones out there just by their sheer numbers. So it feels like this has the beginnings of a big deal. We don't know if it's a big deal yet. But as I think you and I've spoken so many times that gaming may be the way that Web3 gets to the masses, and maybe in ways that they don't even know they're playing in Web3. But I thought this was like kind of a good signal in some respects. Did you have any thoughts about it? Yeah, I bet Rudy Lee is behind this. We should have Rudy come on at a certain point on Gen -C. He has actually been thinking about this for years. And we've been talking to these guys about a bunch of different things over the last two and a half years. But I think that they are looking very closely at what is happening in this Web3 world and thinking about how this can integrate with both their immersive experiences that they've built already and ones that they might build in the future. So I'm excited to see where this heads. I, you know, appreciate that they're coming in now, a little like post hype cycle, because they've been doing their homework and being really thoughtful. And the only build I'd have to what you just said, Sam, is I think it's a compliment. It's not like an or, like you have a TikTok, and you have an X, and you have an Instagram, they're all slightly different. I think the same is true for those like gaming experiences. Like just because you play Fortnite doesn't mean you won't play Zapeto. In fact, there's a lot of overlap between those audiences. Some distinction, of course, and some demographic trends. But I think increasingly, we'll see consumers playing in multiple immersive experiences sort of depending on their mood, depending how they're feeling, depending on if there's, you know, a piece of content that's interesting and exciting. Yeah, I think what you're saying is something that we always forget as consumers, but we know really intuitively as marketers, right? In the sense that, you know, if you were listening to Christina Aguilera during the day, you're also listening to Nelly Furtado during the day. Exactly. And maybe the Nelly Furtado audience was a little cheaper to get, but you knew that that's how you got to the Christina's audience in a more cost effective way, right? So I think that the AND strategy of maybe there are certain assets that are completely tied to in game, and maybe there are certain assets which get access because there's a loyal and rabid community, that I think is an additive strategy that why would you not think about it if you were in the metaverse game, which doesn't mean you have to give the keys to everything away immediately. It just says we're willing to dip our toes in and see where this goes. And then maybe it creates a network effect that becomes giant in our business. Per usual. Brilliant, Sam. I agree. Anytime I drop a Nelly Furtado reference, I... It's spot on. I was gonna say people know how old I am. So it is what it is. All right, Avery, we are going to jump into a break. When we get back, we do have Austin Hurwitz, Head of Business Development and Strategy at Doodles. Really excited to hear from him. And we'll see you after the break. All right, we are here with Austin Hurwitz. Austin is the Head of Business Development and Strategy at Doodles. Super excited to talk to Austin. There's a lot happening with Doodles right now in the world. But first, Austin, just to answer the question, what is a doodle? That's a great question, Sam, Avery, great to be here. A doodle is anything that ignites your creative expression. It's playing a sport. Anything that gets you really igniting your imagination is what we want to empower through doodling. Yeah, it's a joy to work in such a company with a mission like that. But some of them seem to be like, made of vapor, seem kind of invisible. Like I'm just, you know, and I know you've not been there that long, but I'm wondering is like from a Genesis perspective, right? Like doodle is just in my head is creativity in a nutshell, right? So was that kind of part of the genesis of the artwork? Yeah, I mean, for those that know Burnt Toast, I think his entire basis of art is around creativity. And he recently had the opportunity to also serve as a host in the doodle campaign for Red Bull. So he's always been about really expressing creativity through his art. And I think, you know, the doodles, the 10 ,000 generative PFPs are a reflection of that. So it's not just the humanoids, if you will, but it's also ice creams and popsicles and mine, which is a coffee head, which I think really identifies well with my personality. It's highly caffeinated at all times. So yeah, it is very much like joy in a variety of ways. That's amazing. And we will definitely get to all things doodle art. But Austin, we want to hear also about you. How did you get into this world of doodling? How did you get into this role? What's been your journey and what's kind of landed you as the head of strategy and business development at a company like doodles? Yeah, I had a very interesting journey. I worked in entertainment for the last decade. Coming out of school, I went to work at Amazon out in Seattle, serving as the head of independent label licensing for Amazon Music. So I helped negotiate contracts with record labels and get Amazon Music Unlimited off the ground, which is like their Spotify competitor. It was actually in this process that I started to dive into crypto. Before we went live, I had the amazing responsibility of ensuring that we had rights to everything that was going to be distributed, which for anyone who knows anything about music licensing is a pretty tall task because the data is all over the place. You have labels that have some of the data, you have distributors that have some of the data, publishers, a lot of splits aren't even put out into the world before a song is released. And so I spent weeks on end looking at the Copyright Office records to determine if we had someone to pay or not. And that kind of clicked in my head of, okay, I can see a need for decentralization for a ledger, and really sparked my interest in crypto. I wrote a white paper around the licensing implications of crypto back in 2017, and then kind of put it to bed for a little bit. The first wave didn't really work out. As people know from back then, they tried to take a top -down approach, and none of the labels were really biting on that. And yeah, so I ended up working at Amazon Music for five years. I then went down to LA to kick off Troy Carter and Susie Roode's company, Q &A, which is now Venice Music, and operated as the head of product there. So I built the distribution software to get music on the Spotify's and Apple's and Amazon's of the world, took us out of stealth mode, and then actually led our Web3 efforts as that big wave was coming around music. I did that for about two years, actually got into doodles my first week as part of really diving headfirst into Web3. And so I got to meet the founders in Twitter spaces every single day, was going to all the events, and was really trying to actively participate. And then when I left Venice, an opportunity came up where Julian had actually reached out. I was looking to expand the team and felt based on our interactions working together on the music side when he was at Billboard and I was at Venice, we had a great working relationship. So I joined at the top of the year and it's been an incredible ride so far. Love that. We certainly talk a lot about music here. I personally come out of the music industry a long, long time ago. And one of the things I ask anyone who has been involved in the Web3 side of the music is kind of like, what state are we in the evolution of on -chain music? We hear a lot of people wanting to be the Web3 Spotify, right? I think most of people don't really understand the actual logistics of streaming audio and how the economics work and how the server space question and how much amount of logistics you have to be in the music industry. So my question for you, just as a tangent, but knowing that you spent some time in this space is, do you think on the music side, we are going to get to a point where Web3 is challenging more of the Apple Music's of the world, or should we be looking at Web3 and musicians more along the lines of early collectibles and being able to say you were at the first show or you have the first band t -shirt? Where do you land on that spectrum? Yeah, I find myself oscillating between the two and I think it's still really too early to tell none of the products that are out there have really reached product market fit. But I have been really encouraged by the amount of iteration that is happening in the space. I look at a player like Sound XYZ, where they started being this effectively the sound cloud of Web3 and enabling collectors to own almost like trading cards of music as they come out. And they have like rapidly changed and iterated over time where these things used to go for an ETH. Now you can get in for like $5 where it used to be on ETH Baynet. Now you can get them on any L2 imaginable. And I think that iteration is going to continue to happen. I think it's very challenging Web3 for Music to directly compete with streaming. I think they serve very different use cases. I've always naturally gravitated towards the superfan use case. So less of the mainstream, I just want to listen to my Spotify while I go on a run, and much more of how am I developing a deeper relationship with this artist. And so I look at a company like Medallion, what they're doing and really bridging the web two and a half, if you will, the ability to create these fan communities, which are built on top of blockchain, but you can sign in with an email address, they'll create you a custodial wallet, like they really focus on not the financialization of the NFT, but much more of this is how you're going to track your provenance with the artist. So being able to collect things over time, being able to reward you as a fan, a lot of the early discussions around Web3 Music are, this was so great for the artist. And I absolutely agree, but people really had a hard time with how is this great for fans. And I think they're actually nailing a use case when it comes to fan communities that I expect to see a lot more traction on. So that's kind of how I'm evaluating the space right now. I think we're going to see more and more artists jump on board, particularly as they want to have a direct relationship with their fans and fans are looking to declutter everything that they're seeing on socials and build a more intimate relationship with these artists.
Epicenter
"pfp" Discussed on Epicenter
"Cool. No, I really appreciate that. Maybe just a final question here. So, you know, you talked in the beginning, we talked quite a bit about, you know, different categories of NFTs, real world assets, and you know, how like so broad. When it came to the actual, you know, NFT lending market, is that still kind of all focused on some of these art and PFP type things and hasn't yet reached to, you know, all these new types of NFTs? Yeah. So I think there aren't that many assets yet that are real world assets that are being represented. Uh, like, like Storm said, we're speaking to a lot of people at the moment and, and, uh, you know, what happened in this last bull run is exactly what you'd expect. The fully native crypto assets that are, you know, don't require high transaction throughput, you know, don't require, um, like a lot of speed and, and, um, uh, transaction capacity are the ones that found product market fit. So art really, right? And some of these PFPs. So you're going to seal them taking off and then you saw all of this infrastructure being built out. So, you know, like we mentioned, perps, lending, um, where you've got indexes, you've got functionalization, you've got 24 hour marketplaces. So now all of this infrastructure has been built and a lot of teams saw the potential there and then started, raised a bunch of money and now started building out the infrastructure needed to bring more of these real world assets on chain. Uh, and so we started seeing some loans, um, on these assets, you know, so, um, uh, we've done some loans on some empty, empty land. Uh, you know, there's been some loans on Rolexes, uh, you know, so, so these things are starting to happen, but there's just quite a, there's just not that many assets yet, um, that are, uh, that have been pulled on chain as those grow. Uh, you know, the ones that we really see taking off initially are the ones that we said that are more collectible, like, um, because there's a big overlap in the user base. There's a overlap in how they trade. There's an overlap in how you price them. They all eat pretty illiquid. So the characteristics of those assets are quite similar. I suspect once they come on chain, those assets actually will be better collateral than most NFTs just because, um, the thing that's new is how you represent the asset, but the asset itself has got a much longer trading history than, uh, what, you know, the new crop of crypto native NFTs, uh, have. So, so you'll much quicker see higher LTV, lower APR, longer duration loans for these assets. And I also think that there's quite a lot of collectors who are sitting on quite a lot of value that they just can't access at the moment, because if you've got a $50,000 watch, it's actually quite hard to get a loan from a bank on that. You know, if you've got a $50 million painting, sure, you can do that. So you've got a $10 million super rare watch. You're sure banks will kind of go to the effort of actually giving you a loan, but there's a huge amount of value in the, you know, 20 to a hundred thousand dollar range that just basically sit there at the moment. So, um, the, the benefit of actually bringing these things on chain purely as a way to collateralize it, uh, really becomes quite interesting. I think broadly, you know, alongside the tokenized collectibles, there's probably four main categories of, of real world assets. One of which has mentioned as the tokenized collectibles, you probably will start to have tokenized equity and, um, token positions essentially. So, um, from classic crypto investments. So that, that I think that will start to look quite interesting. A lot of other tokenized financial assets. So bonds, um, stocks, items like that. And then you'll lastly also have tokenized real estate on real assets. But of course the regulatory friction that comes with all of those items is much more significant than tokenizing a comic or a trading card or a watch as an example. Um, so I think those, but with that being said, once we do get that regulatory unlock, you start to then get like a very material addressable market, um, of real world assets on chain and accordingly then a material credit market that sits alongside it. Cool. Well, thanks so much, uh, guys, both for coming on. I think that was really great overview of like NFT finance and lending. And, you know, I think it makes a lot of sense, right? Just, uh, the enormous thing that's ahead of us. So I'm excited to see how that's going to develop and how these markets are going to evolve. And so thanks so much for joining us. Yeah. Yeah. We're excited. We're, you know, we're in it for the long run. Um, there could be say sometimes is where there's value there's finance, right? So, you know, as the value of things represented by NFTs increases the size of the financial ecosystem around, they will just grow, um, in accordance. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast, go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter. So you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released. If you want to interact with us guests or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps people find the show and we're always happy to read them. So thanks so much. And we look forward to being back next week.
Epicenter
"pfp" Discussed on Epicenter
"I'm actually curious to ask about that. So yeah, like using the NFT while it's being used, let's say on NiftyFi as collateral, does that, like, how does that work? Does it depend on the particular NFTs? Yeah. So that becomes a little bit more tricky because it, you start running into this issue where each NFT has some idiosyncrasies on how you allow, how you can use them, what affects their value, all those kinds of things. But so our solution to that is it's, should be going live in the next few months. We've got an integration with NOSA safe. And what that allows us to do is at the moment, what happens is we have a single escrow contract that all assets go into. So instead of doing that, what we will allow users to do in the future is, you mint a new NiftyFi safe, which is just a NOSA safe where you, as well as the NiftyFi protocol are signers on that actual, on that safe. And then essentially what we do is we block transfer of that asset during the loan period. So it goes into the safe, and then the safe in combination with our actual protocol just says, this asset is not transferable. So it blocks any transfer methods on that asset for the duration of the loan. As soon as the loan is finished, that transfer gets unlocked again, but everything else you can still do. So you can, you know, can still use that safe to connect to a discord using wallet connect. And you know, you can connect to any application that uses that asset and use it as is in the game, as long as the transaction doesn't result in a change of ownership of that asset at the end of it. We'll just refer to any transaction that does that. Yeah. That sounds like an elegant solution. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little bit more complicated and tricky than just kind of building a, like a vault that's like protocol specific. But you know, I think that the right solution there is to plug into the kind of infrastructure that has proven itself to be a core part of Web3 really. And you know, we don't then need to, you know, as account abstraction gets added onto NOSA safe and they add additional features, you know, you get all of that for free, just by using that as your escrow wallet inside NFT fly. And then do you have to also take into account, I think you mentioned it before a little bit, like, oh what if there are like other things that somebody could do with an NFT that maybe, I don't know, damage the value. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. I think that that becomes really difficult to handle in a generic way. Right. So, so I think that there's always going to be some, you know, doing these kinds of loans in these segregated escrows, what we're calling it really. You know, for art 99.9% of the time, it's going to be fine. For gaming assets, maybe not. Right. So I'll give you a good example of this is say you've got a crypto kitty, a crypto kitty, a virgin crypto kitty is more valuable than a crypto kitty that's been bred. Now that doesn't change ownership, but that's purely based on the internal mechanics of the game and the community that people value virgin crypto kitties more than they do non-virgin ones. Now that's really difficult for any third party platform to go write a set of rules for that, make that acceptable for every single possible asset out there. So, so I do think that there's always going to be some customization, you know, one of the big things we are doing as we kind of keep evolving the protocol is finding hooks and places where people might want to inject some custom logic into into the process, you know, so basically being able to say, well, when we lock a crypto kitty in this, in the escrow smart contract, there's an extra set of validation that you need to do to make sure that the actual transactions can go through. Obviously there's, there's some gas costs implications there, but I think over the long run in general, this is a problem that you have much more with NFTs than you do with EOC 20s, because most EOC 20s basically operate in the same way. You know, they don't have built in logic and built in, you know, properties that might change as part of usage inside of another protocol. Whereas because an NFT can really be anything, it's just a unique digital, ownable thing. It can really be anything. So in some scenarios, it's harder to have very generic pieces of infrastructure built for them. And what does the, what does the NFT5 roadmap look like? What's next for you guys to build? Yeah. So, so what I mentioned earlier, you know, duration I think becomes really important. So, you know, so different features that really make it easier for both borrowers and lenders to take more risk over longer duration. So you know, things along that lines are things like refinancing interest only loans, where at least the lender is getting interest payments during the actual loan period. You know, potentially early repayment of loans so that you can take out a long loan, but you know, you can repay earlier. There's no so safe that we, that we spoke about you know, so and then a number of different things that just make it more efficient for lenders to deploy capital. So you know, at the moment we've got, you can make offers on individual assets. You can make offers on like a whole collection. And then we've got API integrations like StormSED where you can watch our order book and make these individual offers, but just expanding that and kind of making it easier for less technical people to compete with what the bots guys can do, making the collection offers more powerful, being able to limit it to specific ranges you know, those kinds of things. So where are the, where are the interest rate levels at the moment? Varies a lot depending on the assets. So Storm spends day in day out dealing with these things. Maybe he's got a better view there. Yeah, absolutely. I suppose because of first concept, it's been fascinating to watch even over the last let's call it six to 12 months rates, just continuing to fall across the board. And that's really a function of there's quite a lot of lenders who are actively involved in the space and like really actively deploying capital against NFT loans. And so as a result, the more lenders, more competition, it's fantastic for borrowers because they're essentially competing to undercut each other to secure these loans from borrowers. So, you know, where are rates more specifically? So probably for something like a crypto punk, maybe I can go through some of the more major collections that are active on the platform, something like a crypto punk, as an example, if you wanted to get a 30 day loan, you could secure somewhere in the range of 80 to 90% loan to value at a rate of in the range of what's called eight to 10% APR. And actually similarly for one year duration loans against crypto punks, you could probably look at somewhere in the range of 70 to 80% loan to value, maybe a little bit higher on the APR side, let's call it 10 to 12%. And again, that's for, for a one year loan. So probably, you know, alongside punks, there are two other, you know, what we term like the really true blue chip collections. Like we're, we're lucky we have a very unique lens through which we see the NFT, market is like the NFT credit markets. And so we really get to see like what collections are being underwritten or underscored as like the true blue chips, because it has the lenders like offering the lowest rates for the, for the longest terms. And so alongside punks, you also have chromey squiggles by of course, the legend that is snow fro and then auto glyphs as well, and early larva labs a general generative our project. So they're probably your main three lowest highest LTV and also lowest APR collections. And then for other collections more, let's call it, you know, other kind of profile pictures that, that you might classically know, apes, for example, it's going to be a little bit higher on the, on the APR side, maybe in the range of 15%, maybe looking at something like a 70% LTV. And then as you migrate across like the risk spectrum, let's call it. So the lesser known projects, you probably get up to maybe in the range of 20 to 40% APR on the typical durations are around 30 days. So that the classic duration on the platform is 30 days. I know what actually maybe some of the best art blocks curated collections, you probably getting similar rates to, um, so, uh, the squiggles and auto glyphs, right? Maybe slightly, slightly higher, maybe slightly lower LTV just because they're not quite as liquid, but, you know, things like for densers or ringers, um, you know, those, those kind of top tier art projects are also getting, um, rates kind of in that, in that same range. Yeah, that's a great point. There's a very strong bid on, on the kind of top tier art blocks across the board. And actually just generally art blocks more generally, uh, too. So the kind of full collections of art blocks there. Yeah. Thanks so much. That was very helpful. This is like a kind of related topic. I wanted to talk a little bit about, uh, so, you know, Steven, you know, you mentioned in the beginning, right? You were an artist and that you, you know, did some work around generative art. I'm like wondering also like zooming out a little bit, you know, what's the, what's the state of the NFT art market and what do you feel are the most interesting and cool things happening? Yeah. So I think broadly you have two big groups. Um, so it would be the fully on-chain generative arts, and then more the one-of-one arts, uh, where it's, um, it's not fully generated on-chain, you know, the artist produces some kind of digital image that they then associate with an actual NFT versus the fully on-chain generative arts, which is, you know, autoglyphs art blocks. So, you know, there's a few other protocols that are, that are doing that now. And these assets essentially the image itself is not stored on-chain. What's stored on-chain is an algorithm that given a specific hash can re-generate that image at any resolution. So, so those are kind of the two broad groups I would say in the on-chain, um, uh, art side of things. Uh, the generative pieces are typically part of a collection. So, you know, they are 512 autoglyphs. Uh, you know, there's, um, so, so there's more of those assets. So they typically have a larger collector base, which makes them a little bit more liquid. So they trade a little bit more often. So it's easier to know what the price is. If you do get a default, you, it's easier to, to, um, to sell those items again. So, so those are kind of the two broad categories there. I think both of them have found strong product market fits, you know, store, maybe you can talk about some, some big sales and prices and how they've held up in the, um, the recent market. Yeah, exactly. So I think it's been very interesting as the profile picture markets across the board has kind of been relatively weak and the prices has lowered. It's called it over the last six, six to nine months, where you look at the higher end of the art blocks market in particular, it's actually remained very, very solid and stable. And in some pockets has increased significantly. I think when you look at something like the recent goose sale at Sotheby's for $6.2 million, I mean, this is a category which is here to stay. You know, it's, it's known, um, that there are some ultra high net worths and high net worths now starting to dabble in the market and build their collection in the generative art space. Um, so I think it's a category that becomes of increasing interest to the traditional art world. And then as a result, you know, um, they're kind of are these well-established credit markets, which exist alongside them as well, which actually helped to support, um, the prices of those assets as well, because when you are seeking liquidity against the assets, instead of previously, your only option was either to sell the assets, whereas actually now you have two options, you can sell the asset and, or take a loan against it, which is actually a very typical approach with art collectors in the traditional art world. Yeah. And I think another way to think of that a little bit is to say, is to say, you know, profile pictures at 30 ETH are very expensive for a new kind of asset that still needs to find like exactly where it's driving its value from. Whereas, you know, with Ether, that's very cheap for one of the, well, basically the first example of a new category in modern art, right? So, so there's, and then a lot of these ultra high net worth individuals that Storm was talking about, uh, they aren't necessarily crypto native. They own traditional artworks, uh, and, and they're buying in dollars. So, you know, when these asset prices for these NFT, art assets are dropping in ether terms, at some point, these collectors are looking at them and like, well, you know, in dollar terms, that's actually just really cheap for what I'm buying here. And that's kind of why I think you see this floor almost in the dollar price of some of these assets. And as Ethereum fluctuates, it just doesn't drop below that specific floor because there's a set of buyers that are just saying, okay, 30 grand or 50 grand for a, for a crypto park is actually cheap. So whenever they drop below that price of USD terms, I'll just buy them. And what's the, what is the impact of AI on all of this? So AI art as a category itself, um, I think is actually quite fascinating and it's one that I'm actually very passionate about. Um, probably one of my favorite collections out there, if not my favorite are the lost Robbie's by Robbie Barrett, a fascinating story behind them. Um, and I mean, it's very interesting to see whenever one of these trades, uh, typically they range in the, let's call it 175 each to 300 each range of, of, uh, trade prices. It's, it's very interesting to see a very visceral reaction of people on Twitter, um, about how, you know, some people just consider it completely, uh, you know, disgusting or they, they just don't, don't get it. And I think when you look at pieces of art and it actually has that like a motive, uh, capacity, you're probably looking at what is a quite a powerful piece of art. Um, so I think as a, as a category, it's fascinating again, in some ways, it's similar to emergence of generative art, where you're marrying, um, the medium of the blockchain with art. I think it's very interesting here. This is the new dawn of your marrying a medium of AI, a new emergent category with art as well. And I think as you, uh, transverse the art history timeline, you know, in many years time, they will actually be two seminal moments in, in art, art history, being, uh, you know, blockchain based art and AI based art as well. Yeah, exactly. And I think also the, the blockchain based arts and AI based art feed into each other in a way, because one of the biggest reasons, you know, it's generative arts and digital arts has been around for quite a long time. They just, they just never really, it's really hard to actually as a museum or as a collector to buy them, right? Like, what are you actually buying? You know, um, are you buying a TV that's representing these, these images or buying a print out of that image, but you can print as many as you want there. Uh, and, and I think if you didn't have the blockchain AI art would probably be less interesting because I don't, I think it would be AI graphics then as opposed to AI art, because you can't say that this is an original and this is the one that I'm actually actually selling. So, um, you know, this is another reason why I think on-chain art as a category is just going to keep growing because there's going to be new things you can do, you know, like, you know, new technologies come out. Um, but it's now just a new medium in the same way that you've got painting and sculpting, um, and performance art. Now you've got, um, on-chain art as well. I think when you look as well, like the Rafik Anadol piece that's in the MoMA in New York at the moment, I mean, I saw it in person, it's AI generated, absolutely fascinating, absolutely captivating. And you look at the people sat there for 20, 30 minutes at a time, just taking it in, which just simply doesn't happen with, um, traditional, you know, painting medium, for example, that, that existed to date. So I think, you know, we live in this attention economy and these artworks as an example of generative artwork, as you watch it, watch it render in as part of the fascinating engagement that you have with that work in the same way, you know, uh, the Rafik piece is just, it's utterly captivating and it's taking art, I think, to a whole, whole new level.
Epicenter
"pfp" Discussed on Epicenter
"So it's, yeah, this is a different risk profile and different kind of borrower who will do each one of the two. So, you know, variable interest, variable duration is probably more suitable to a trader who's trying to unlock some liquidity, maybe to chase some yield in another protocol somewhere. And as soon as that yield isn't profitable anymore, you can just move the asset out of, out of that loan and you can stop your actual license there. Whereas if you've got a fixed duration loan, you're kind of locked in for that period. So you talked, I mean, yeah, this is very helpful and interesting. So you both talked about lending, right? So the use case of lending and then, you know, this pool and peer to peer model. Aside from lending, are there other major, you know, kind of types of default, I don't know, people trying to do like options or, I don't know, is there something like perpetuals or like, I don't know, what other kinds of instruments have people come up with around NFT? Yeah, well, you've took the two concepts that you touched on there. There absolutely are protocols active in that space. And the perp side in particular, probably, it's a very difficult area. Again, it comes back oftentimes to the issue of having an oracle for what is quite an illiquid asset. So there's NFT perp as an example, which is active in that space. And they are in the process of revamping their protocol to refresh it. But one of the very interesting areas, again, as you know, as we're positioning ourselves and have positioned ourselves as, you know, very much a base primitive within the NFT lending world, you do get interesting integrations with these other protocols whereby, you know, they're coming to us to talk to us, Hey, you guys have the best regarded smart contracts in the industry. You've been around for the longest and, you know, we would love to work with you and build our protocol on top of you. So as an example, we're actually in discussions with an NFT options platform who are, you know, going to integrate alongside us, you know, as part of that. So potentially leveraging our smart contracts and settlement layer as part of, you know, a major part of their, their platform. But there are a lot of innovations in the space so far. I think one thing that has many protocols I've struggled with somewhat is just the level of liquidity in the market. When you compare it to the fungible token or the URC 20 token markets, they typically tend to work a little bit better from a composability standpoint compared to NFTs. But that is something which we're seeing that shifting. Yeah, I think the, that's a very important point. Even the most liquid NFT collection is probably less liquid than the least liquid ERC 20s, right? So they just, um, they just weigh less active. So things like pricing is much more difficult. Um, you know, oracles are much more difficult. So this is just, this is some idiosyncrasies in the actual NFT market, mainly due to not to so much the fact that it's an NFT standard, but the types of assets that are suited to being represented as an NFT by definition are more unique. They're not fungible, they're less liquid. So they just have a different set of properties, uh, that, you know, so certain products don't work as well. And there's, you know, new products that are kind of, um, more interesting and different. And I think quite a bit of opportunity exists in that as well, in a market that's, you know, completely non fungible, there are areas where you can specialize and really, um, kind of take advantage of, you know, from a lender perspective, lender perspective or as a borrower. And for example, you could specialize, we mentioned earlier on the podcast, but you could become, you know, a very specialized sneaker lender as an example. Um, and although you, you understand that, um, the liquidity in those assets from time to time might be a little bit spotty, but you are still comfortable and confident of taking on that inventory risk because you're a market specialist in that area. Yeah. Yeah. And can you just talk like a little bit about sort of the size of the NFT market? So if you compare, you know, NFT with let's say liquid tokens, when I guess there's a whole bunch of different dimensions that one could look at, you know, I dunno, the total market cap or like trading volume or, you know, the size of the lending market and maybe the size of the lending market, you know, relative to the total market cap, I'm curious, like what are some of the things that stand out to you the most? Yeah. So maybe I can talk a little bit about penetration. Maybe you can talk a little bit about more like overall size of the markets. So if you look at art lending, for example, in the traditional world, it's like $1.4 trillion asset class. It's got a roughly 15% penetration. So 15% of that $1.4 trillion is being held in collateral as a loan, mainly with banks or, and galleries. And if you're looking at penetration in the NFT space, probably sub 2% at the moment, you know, it was a little bit higher, I think at the peak of the bull run, but it's dropped a little bit now. There's a roughly a hundred million dollars in outstanding data across all protocols at the moment for NFT lending. But really, you know, kind of, I think of this as similar to where DeFi was pre DeFi summer. There was kind of, you know, these protocols, they kind of built the core product. They found some product market fit with a core set of users who are very deep into the space. And they kind of draw, you know, there's quite a, there's quite a lot of concentration around a few big holders, quite a lot of concentration around a few big lenders. And we kind of, we predict that in the next bull cycle, you're going to see that, you know, expand and explode quite significantly because now you're going to have this infrastructure and multiple options to, cater to different types of users there. So, so that's kind of the overall lending market size. I mean, if we can look, if you think about the overall markets, you know, 56% of the estimated value in the stock market are, is intangible assets. A lot of them that are non fungible, right? So if you're looking at the traditional world and the total value of all items in the world, most of that value is actually non fungible. So buildings, super tankers, your car is non fungible. So, so I think the total addressable market of what's eventually going to be tokenized and represented as non fungible is as big or even bigger potentially than the EOC 20 or the fungible market. But we're still very, very early in that adoption cycle. Yeah. And just even to add there, some additional stats as well, just to give you a sense, like you look at the global equities market, it's about 120 trillion global real estate is 320 global debt markets, 300. So, you know, roughly between all of those, if you kind of got, you know, roughly even like 2% penetration there, you begin to actually eclipse the size of the EOC 20 market in and of itself. And maybe in the near term, 2% is a little bit on the high side, but now I can easily see in the next, maybe let's call it two to four years, like half, half a percent of some of those assets starting to come on chain. Because we are speaking to a lot of the protocols behind, you know, that are, that are actually, actually doing this. And, you know, it's happening a lot faster pace than people I think realize. One thing I'm curious about, so I was like looking at some of the stats and I mean, first of all, what stood out to me was that like, you know, actually NiftyFi's stats looked like pretty good, right? Where, okay, it's down a bit, but not that much, right? From like the sort of peak. And then, you know, there was also like a stat for, so yeah, I mean, there, there, you felt like, well, that probably looks better than most like DeFi charts, right? For like DeFi protocols. But then when there was also the thing where you had the, like the other lending competitors, and then you have basically like Blur coming in like a few months ago and just now having on these charts, at least if it's correct, like something like 90% of the loan volume. I'm curious, can you talk about like what happened there? Is that correct? Like what's, what's going on and what, what did Blur do? Yeah. Yeah. So, so I think important thing to, for some reason volume really has been the metric that a lot of people look at in the NFT lending space, which doesn't really make any sense, right? And if you're looking at DeFi lending protocols, you're not looking at daily volume, what you're actually looking at is TVL, right? So how much data is collateralized in the, in the protocol. And that's very much a factor of two things. It's both your volume and your duration. And, and so what we're seeing in Blend is if you compare them to, so Blend is the Blur lending offering that they've got. So if you compare their durations to the peer-to-peer protocols, you know, so our average duration is almost 40 days. The average duration for a Blend loan is 0.9 days, 0.94, roughly. So they just have to do significantly more volume to keep the outstanding debt. So that's, so that's one thing that's kind of, it's very much skewed. So looking, yes, they do 90% of the volume, but they need to do 6% of the outstanding debt every single day, just to stay in the same place. So on the outstanding debt side, they're actually kind of more in line with everybody else, kind of in the 18 to $20 million at the moment. That makes perfect sense. Yeah, yeah. No, no, I agree. I agree with your reasoning that seems like a more relevant metric or protocol like that. Exactly. And then, I mean, the other thing that's also happening there with Blur and Blend is that there's very strong token incentives at the moment that are going on. And just because of the way the incentive structure is, the incentive structure is set up, taking out a loan as part of your process, if you're trying to maximize the number of points that you, low points that you're getting as part of a specific trade, taking out a loan on an asset that you bought in a bid and then selling it out of the loan contract actually gives you extra points because you get bonus points for taking out a loan and selling assets out of the loan contract means you bypass royalties. So it's actually the cheapest way to, sell an asset. So you'll see a lot of the Blend volume is really a function of the spot volume. So the more people are kind of getting assets hit on bids, the more likely they are to take out a loan. And it's just part of that kind of optimization loop that people are using. Are there royalties things interesting? Does that have some applicability as well in the NFTify case? Like let's say in case someone's loan gets liquidated, then royalties are due for the creator? Yeah, at the moment, there aren't royalties being paid out on a liquidation, just because it's quite difficult to have a standardized, on-chain way to know exactly what those royalties are. So, you know, our things all get settled as part of the actual loan smart contract. But, you know, so we're very open to adding those in what's there is like a fully on-chain way to actually determine what the royalties are for a specific project. And then typically at the end of a loan, if it's been liquidated, the lender will go to one of the various marketplaces and sell it there and determine at that moment in time, whether they would like to or not pay the royalties at that moment. Because paying royalties is something that's sort of like the factor is mostly optional or how does it work? Pretty much there's not an easy way for projects to enforce this at the smart contract level. We've seen a number of projects essentially migrating their ERC721 contracts to allow them to block marketplaces that bypass the actual royalty payments. So we'll see where that kind of ends up. You know, it's, it's quite a, it's a bit of a game theory set up there where you kind of asset producers are trying to maximize their royalties while platforms are trying to maximize volume. So the cheaper the cost of transaction, the more likely you are to take, to take that volume. I think you probably see, you know, these real world assets platforms I suspect will probably have a little bit more power to enforce royalties, you know, because, because they actually own the physical assets, you know, they can just say, well, you can't redeem this asset until you've paid royalties on that actually due. So, so I think that they've got a stronger moat in terms of royalties as being a value stream for them. And this is another reason I think a lot of the projects that raised money kind of during the last big bull run, a lot of them were really relying on royalties to kind of be their ongoing cash flow and revenue. And that's largely evaporated over the last six months or so. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I guess it was always something that was kind of like, well, can you really enforce that? Right. And that's interesting how quickly that seems to have sort of moved to the, you know, I guess, equilibrium of everyone ignores their royalties. Yeah. I think it's a scenario that's a big double-edged sword and that for creators, the blockchain offers you a new avenue to access, consumers, customers, which, you know, from which you can, you can generate revenue, but on the other side of that, one of the great aspects of Ethereum in particular is the permissionlessness of it so that you can create essentially ways around, you know, giving creators their dues essentially. So definitely a double-edged sword there. Can you talk a little bit about this, maybe comparing Blend and NFTify or maybe are there like, what are the other kinds of NFT lending protocols doing and what are kind of the main dimensions on which they differ? Yeah. So I think, you're thinking about peer-to-peer versus peer-to-pool, that's a little bit more of the technical level. If you're looking at it from an end user perspective, I think the big distinction there at the moment is, is it fixed duration or variable duration and fixed interest versus variable interest? And that just, you know, fixed duration, fixed interest is just much more interesting for a specific user cohort. So typically people who have longer term views who are collecting these assets because they want to collect them and they actually want to hold them over the long run. And then there's a separate cohort, which is much more trader focused or like much shorter term deals, trying to maximize yield over, you know, 48 to 72 hours, something like that. And those types of asset owners really prefer variable duration, variable interest, because they can come in and out of those loans in a shorter period of time. And then, you know, then I think the other thing, which is a little bit less of an issue right now, which was, but more of an issue in the past that I think will become an issue again, is can you actually use this asset while it's being used, locked up in an actual loan? Right. So at the peak of the bull run, you would have lots of airdrops and events and, you know, you had to sign into this Discord with your board ape so that you can get access to this other thing that then gives you a mint or this other thing. So, you know, you wanted to be able to use the asset while it's in escrow. So typically the it's easier to do that in peer to peer versus peer to pool because assets are more like pulled into a big bucket together. But I think that is the big differentiator right now. And then, and I think over time as these assets become more and more have more of a history, you know, people are more willing to lend over on them over the long run, you know, I think features that really drive longer duration are going to become more important over the next six to 12 months.
Epicenter
"pfp" Discussed on Epicenter
"Yeah, so that's basically the risk that, uh, the lender has to sort of calculate with that, okay, if this NFT drops in value, then all of a sudden it can be the case that doesn't make economic sense anymore for the borrower to actually repay the loan and then they would, they would sort of default, even if they, let's say, normally could, you know, maybe they have the money and they could pay, right, but like. Correct, correct. And, and many, many, uh, borrowers actually use, um, the protocol as part of a hedging strategy as well. So essentially to protect their downside in the instance that the value of their NFTs does fall. And on the other side, you know, many of the lenders are very sophisticated individuals, former traditional finance individuals, and just generally very deep NFT finance people. So they, they understand the risks for the most part of, of, uh, of kind of the, the structures there. So, um, yeah, it's, it's very interesting space. Um, and then perhaps moving on then to the peer to pool model, um, which is a little bit different. It probably more closely resembles what you're used to seeing with AVE or, um, kind of balance or one of these types of, of pool models, um, where essentially on one part you have the borrowers, uh, and again, you have the lenders, the lenders place into one generalized pool and amount of Ethereum or USDC as an example. And then the borrowers can retrieve Ethereum or USDC from those pools by depositing their assets into the, into the pools. Typically those, um, terms are preset by the pool itself or by the protocol itself. For example, if you had a board ape at, you know, uh, floor price of 30 EATs and I had a 50% alone to value, um, specified on the pool, you can withdraw 15 EATs from the pool. Typically with that approach, there is no duration set, so you can borrow indefinitely in theory. However, you do need to be conscious of essentially your health or LTV ratios in those pools. So if they fall below a certain level, then there is the risk that you can have your assets liquidated. And typically as a result, the liquidated assets are placed into a an automated auction mechanism where they're listed and people can bid on them, um, and they're liquidated that way. Whereas in the peer-to-peer model, it's the individual lenders themselves, which carry out the liquidations. And just one thing that occurs to me here, I don't know if that's correct, but it seems like in the peer-to-peer model, maybe you don't need any kind of external price oracle, but in the peer-to-pool model, you would need that? Yep, that's correct. Absolutely correct. And that's one of the reasons where we really back the peer-to-peer model here, just because we already seeing it with a few of the peer-to-pool protocols is because you have this time-weighted oracle. So you need to have a time-weighted oracle because these assets are pretty illiquid. So, you know, if you're just looking at the, the immediate price, it's quite easy to move the floor price of that asset if you own enough of them. So, so you have the time-weighted oracle which then means big whales in the market can, they know when the next price move is coming and they can essentially position themselves because they've got, you know, a lot of capital, a lot of these assets to either move the next, the next price that you're going to get from the oracle around or predict what it's going to be. And essentially, you know, dump assets into the market just before, just after one of those updates. So so I think that is a very key difference between the two. And I think the other big thing is predictability and control for the asset owners. So, you know, if you own, you know, an autoglyph, for example, you know, it's only 512 of them. They hardly ever sell. They're really hard to get the hold of once you've actually sold one, they typically only sell it when the prices are going up, when the markets are where the prices are going down, all this is hold them. And in that scenario, you might end up as a, in a peer to peer model, maybe there's a, there's a spike down in the price over the short term, but you still want to repay because you believe in six months it's going to recover. And you know that if you sell this asset now, you're not going to be able to buy it back before, before the price recovers. And in a peer to peer model, because it's fixed duration, fixed interest, it's you always in control. You always know I need to pay this much on this date. And it's my choice to decide if I do that. Obviously Excel circumstances might mean that you can't but still you're in control. Whereas in these peer to pool models, and actually on the blend model too where it's variable duration, variable interest, you're exposed to market movements in that actual load. And if there's a temporary price push down, your asset might get liquidated. Typically these liquidations happen at the worst time because the market's dumping is probably quite illiquid.
Epicenter
"pfp" Discussed on Epicenter
"So in theory, uh, which has got an interesting concept, you could become the world's largest watch, sneaker trading cards dealer without ever taking physical possession of an item, which I think will be quite interesting. And similarly, you can become, you know, a major lender in the space without ever having, having to take custody of an asset. Cool. Well, let, let's talk about NFT finance then. So, you know, you mentioned a bunch of the different types of assets, and of course, a lot of listeners will be familiar, I think most of our listeners will be, you know, reasonably familiar with DeFi and, you know, no kind of the primitives from there, but what does the NFT finance space look like and what are the most important, you know, kind of like primitives and innovations there? Yeah, sure. So I think there's two main distinctions that you want to make when you're considering the NFT lending market, and that is whether the protocol is a peer to peer model or whether it's a peer to pool model. I think that's the two kind of buckets into which most NFT platforms fall, um, at the moment. And then of course you have, um, structures which sit on top of them and leverage them. But for the most part, the building blocks of the industry are peer to peer, peer to pool models. The way that the, uh, I should mention NFT file in this case is a peer, peer to peer platform. Um, it's a platform or it's a structure that we really back, um, it's worked very well for us since the start as really a lot of, um, excellent aspects about it that make it very borrower friendly. Um, so just to maybe dive into what that actually looks like. Um, so peer to peer platform, as you can imagine, it's comprised of two sides. On one part, you have borrowers, which come onto the platform. On the other side, you have lenders, which come onto the platform. The borrowers typically own NFTs or various different assets, which they list, um, on the platform. In this case, it's a gas free transactions are listed on NFT file. And then lenders come onto the platform and they compete, essentially compete for the assets, which they would like to lend against. Um, and so what that typically looks like lender set bids structured around loans of value of assets around, uh, the different APS, which they would like to receive in return for the loan. Um, and that's kind of the typical approach. The borrower will then have a look through the various different terms that have been made available to them from the various lenders, and they'll select the terms that work best for them. You know, some, some lenders have a shorter time preference where they only want to loan for, let's call it three or so, sorry. Some, some borrowers have a shorter time preference where they only need capital for three or seven days, or on the other end of the market, we're actually seeing quite a lot of loans for 365 days. So full, full years. Um, so with that being said, at the end, at the end of the term of the loan, what the borrower does, they simply, uh, it's a fixed fixed term loan APR is fixed at the start of the loan. So at the end of the duration of the loan, they know exactly what they have to repay on the date on which they were paid. Um, at that point, they repay the loan, um, which is initially placed in an escrow smart contract, the assets, or the NFT is placed in an escrow smart contract. It's then released from the escrow smart contract back to the borrower at the end of the duration or at the repayment of the loan and the lender receives back their principal plus the interest, which they offered. So that's in summary, uh, the, the peer to peer structure. And then, so just to jump in there, if the lender, that the borrower doesn't repay on time, then the lender can foreclose the asset. The borrower keeps the loan principal and the lender will receive the actual NFT.
Epicenter
"pfp" Discussed on Epicenter
"Awesome. And thanks again. So my name is Storm. So my background, I'm originally from Ireland. And so essentially I kicked off my career in the investment banking space in a speciality called project finance, which is essentially infrastructure, renewable energy finance. Did that for quite some time around five years before I really fell down the kind of crypto rabbit hole when I discovered, well, I suppose actually I've been in crypto since 2014. I doubled in it as a student, but at that point in time, I was more interested in buying beers than kind of adding to my, my stack of crypto. So I discovered at that time, like really fell in love with it. Kind of followed it very closely over the course of kind of five years. And at which point I kind of really fell down the rabbit hole, as I said, in 2021, which when I discovered NFTs. So I kind of started in that space, collecting some trading, some flipping, some of the usual kind of a classical NFT degenerate story. Um, and, but I did also kind of, uh, begin to discover NFT finance at that point in time as well. It was quite interesting that not only could you buy and sell assets, but also you could be into kind of as part of your trading strategy, take loans out against them as well. So I started there as kind of a manual lender and the NFT finance space, but then, uh, kind of since partnered up with a developer, a business partner, developer, and we started doing a lot of automated or programmatic lending and the NFT space as well. So really kind of, uh, got very deeply involved. Uh, after a time came to know all of the, essentially all of the major lenders in the space, uh, and quite some of the borrowers in the space as well. And after you've been in the space for quite a while, you, you, like it is a very, very deep rabbit hole from which you really can't emerge. And probably as we, as we continue on the conversation later today, like there's a lot of very interesting aspects of the markets that are creeping up, but I think are really going to be exciting over the next couple of years. Cool. Thanks so much for these intros. Uh, so you mentioned already a little, you both kind of touched on it a bit, right? And so this is basically like the NFT market and can you just, uh, let us know like, what is the state of the NFT market today and maybe also just draw a little bit, yeah, the main things that are going on. Yeah. So maybe what I can do is give like a very high level kind of overview, uh, and then Storm, maybe you can dive into a couple of things that, uh, are actually going to looking quite interesting going forward. So, so I think there's broadly two kind of groups of NFTs that are, are active in the markets and I would classify them really as the top end of the art markets and collectibles, uh, and then everything else really. Uh, and the top end of the art market, the reason I have put that differently is because I think that's really the sector of the market that has actually found product market fit, you know? So these, um, art pieces are, they finished, you know, there's no external dependencies. A lot of them are fully on chain. You're not relying on a team or a project to go build something out. That's now going to drive value to these assets. You know, they're just pieces of art they finished. Uh, you know, you can just, um, everything that you need to know to evaluate them is almost in the past, right? You know, the artists, you know, the history, uh, the work is either good or it's not, you're not waiting for any future things. Then there's this whole second set of the market, which is more company-like or utility, you know, so I would say, uh, profile picture projects, PFPs would fit into there. You know, a lot of the new areas around ticketing and music and royalties and all these kinds of things, they're very interesting and, you know, a lot of potential there, I think, but much more risky because they still have to prove product market fits. And that's, you're seeing it actually in the prices. If you look at the, like an index that's mainly made up of top end art, they've pretty much bottomed and not really gone down any further. Whereas if you look at PFP projects and all of everything in that category, they still have quite a lot of headwinds ahead of them. Um, so yeah, so that's like broadly how I would put those to you. Uh, I think the other thing to also just bear in mind is that, you know, NFTs the wealth effect really takes an impact. So if you, if you look at the prices for secondhand luxury watches, like Rolexes and Patek Philippe, and you overlay that graph onto the prices for Bored Ape Yacht Club, it's almost a mirror of each other. I mean, the Bored Apes are slightly more volatile, but you know, the peak was in March, April, they've slowly been going down since then, starting to bottom right now, some signs that maybe the next few months they start turning around. And it's really, uh, these are illiquid assets that are luxury purchases. Uh, and like every other luxury asset in that class, when people feel rich, they start spending more money. When the markets turn around, these illiquid assets are the last thing you sell. So they tend to hold their prices for a little bit longer and kind of, um, drop, uh, after the address of the market's actually dropped. Yeah, that's a great point. Thanks Stephen. Um, and I suppose the way that I would frame it in some ways is that the NFT market to date has been a great placeholder for what is to come probably over the next, call it one, one to three years as an example, particularly when you look at the profile picture markets, which really has actually just been the lion's share of the market to date. It's kind of been a good experiment in NFTs as like a base technological primitive and how you can kind of stack that with other kind of composable, um, technology structures on, but sit on Ethereum. Um, like there's been kind of some good, interesting highlights, particularly around the areas of alongside the ones that you mentioned, Stephen community building membership, just general interaction with fans. Um, it's a good way for companies to release products. So it's a completely new way for them to release products, which, uh, you know, never discount the concept of companies trying to sell people at large, more products. Um, it's, uh, it's, you know, it's been an interesting way for artists in particular to express themselves. That's been a definite bright spot, like the emergence of a lot of creativity on chain, whereas, you know, artists or creatives generally might not have had that outlet before. And then one important area definitely worth mentioning, we're starting to see a lot of green shoots in the area of real world assets. So this, these are physical or financial assets, which are starting to make their way on chain. Um, and then just generally, as I mentioned, kind of like the concept of digital asset composability. So like, which is a really, really important one where essentially you kind of ask the question where, how do pure digital objects or alternatively digital objects, which represent physical objects, how do they stack, you know, in the DeFi Money Lego composable worlds that we live in on, on Ethereum? And I think like, you know, over the coming years, the, this composability of NFTs with other primitives really starts to form a, quite a significant bedrock, you know, an economic bedrock on, on Ethereum, which will be quite interesting. I'm curious if we can dive in a little bit into, yeah, the sort of real world asset bracket of the market. What, what has most traction there? Like what kind of use cases? Yeah, so I think, um, there's sections of the market that are actually very similar to the collectibles that I've already found some traction in, in NFTs. So, uh, and that, you know, watches, sneakers, uh, uh, paintings, basketball playing cards, those kinds of things. Um, so the reason I think those will probably take off first is it's relatively easy to store those things in a warehouse and tokenize them. Uh, they are fairly unregulated. So you're not having to jump through a lot of regulatory hoops. They kind of act very similar to, um, the actual NFTs. There's a huge overlap in the holder base. So a lot of the people who started collecting NFTs were just collectors at heart. So they already had a stamp collection or magic, the gathering cards under their bed or multiple watches that they're collecting. So, so there's, there's just this, um, big overlap between the actual borrower base or the actual collector base there that I think, um, uh, connects in quite easily. Uh, and then I think the, the other reason is now that you're starting to have some of these NFT financialization, um, services that are kind of cropping up around NFTs, tokenizing that asset all of a sudden means you can do things with it that's much more difficult to do if you don't actually take an up tokenizer and bring it on chain. So get access to 24 seven markets, you know, OpenSea, Blur, all those kinds of things. You get lending markets, you get fractionalization, you know, there's a whole bunch of this infrastructure that has been built over the last two years that all of a sudden actually make it worthwhile to bring those assets on chain. So in this example, uh, let's say you mentioned like watches, sneakers, and stuff. So this would, you would have an NFT and that can be redeemed then for the actual physical objects, something like that. That's correct. The object, the physical object is stored with some custodian and anyone can go there and basically give the NFT and they get the... Yes, exactly. And that's kind of where we're seeing a lot of the traction at the moment. So there's quite a few people like 4k.com is basically building a distributed network of warehouses where you, you send in the physical assets, they bring it on, take some photos, maybe do a 3d scan, mints an NFT that represents the assets. And then, um, basically that NFT, the actual asset stays in the warehouse and that NFT can start trading, uh, you know, go through OpenSea, go into the loan. And then at some point, if the owner of that NFT wants to redeem the asset, they can burn that NFT, uh, and in return, the, the warehouse sent it back to, to that person.
Epicenter
"pfp" Discussed on Epicenter
"This is Epicenter Episode 508 with guests Stephen Young and Storm. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization at the blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Farvin Crane and today I'm speaking with Stephen Young and Storm. Stephen is the CEO and co-founder of NiftyFi and Storm is Head of Business Development. NiftyFi is kind of the first NFT lending platform. It's one of the leading and earliest projects in the NFT finance space. So today we're going to talk about NFTs and NFT finance and NiftyFi and, you know, sort of like where all those things are going, pretty excited about this, especially because I'm not very deep in NFT space, so I'm excited to learn more from these two, yeah. So thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us, Brian. Excited to fill you and your readers and your listeners in on some of the happenings in NFTs, even though we're kind of in the depths of a bear market, we are all still pretty bullish on this side. Absolutely. Thanks for having us, Brian, very excited to chat. Cool. Maybe you can just start off, if you guys could both introduce yourselves and share a bit, like, how did you, you know, how has your sort of journey into crypto been and how has it led to NiftyFi? Yeah, sure. So my name's Stephen. I've been in tech basically since I was a teenager really, learned to program. My first job was writing a game in C++ when I was still in high school. So it really has been in my career from the start. And I live in South Africa. I spent two years just as I finished high school living in the UK. And then around 2016, did a calculation and figured out that I was earning less in dollars 15 years into my career than I was in my first job living in the UK. And that was basically because the South African rants purchasing power just fallen off a cliff. So I was still in South Africa, enjoy the lifestyle. All my friends were here, but I was looking for a way to kind of escape the financial system here. And really that's how I kind of came across crypto. And then late 2016, bought my first crypto, you know, basically using all, instead of paying into my retirement and UOT, I was buying crypto, which is probably not the most risk like management style for retirement, but you really, you know, like given how badly the South African rand was doing, you really was kind of my only option to, to really exit the system here. So that was 2016, went full-time into crypto like 2018 and then started niftify end of 2019. So basically spent the first two lockdowns in South Africa, writing the first version of niftify and launched in June, 2020. And then my interest in NFTs really came from the way that I actually learned to program as a kid was by doing essentially generative art using this program called logo. It's a less derivative that's essentially used to teach children how to program. And you do that by drawing pictures on the screen with this little turtle. So, you know, so I was into generative arts really as soon as I got into programming. So when NFTs came around, you know, combining art programming, and then I spent most of my career working for financial services companies. So, you know, you know, adding in finance on top of that and you kind of basically have niftify.
Epicenter
A highlight from Stephen Young & Storm: NFTFi P2P NFT Lending Protocol: From PFPs & Art to RWA
"This is Epicenter Episode 508 with guests Stephen Young and Storm. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization at the blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Farvin Crane and today I'm speaking with Stephen Young and Storm. Stephen is the CEO and co -founder of NiftyFi and Storm is Head of Business Development. NiftyFi is kind of the first NFT lending platform. It's one of the leading and earliest projects in the NFT finance space. So today we're going to talk about NFTs and NFT finance and NiftyFi and, you know, sort of like where all those things are going, pretty excited about this, especially because I'm not very deep in NFT space, so I'm excited to learn more from these two, yeah. So thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us, Brian. Excited to fill you and your readers and your listeners in on some of the happenings in NFTs, even though we're kind of in the depths of a bear market, we are all still pretty bullish on this side. Absolutely. Thanks for having us, Brian, very excited to chat. Cool. Maybe you can just start off, if you guys could both introduce yourselves and share a bit, like, how did you, you know, how has your sort of journey into crypto been and how has it led to NiftyFi? Yeah, sure. So my name's Stephen. I've been in tech basically since I was a teenager really, learned to program. My first job was writing a game in C++ when I was still in high school. So it really has been in my career from the start. And I live in South Africa. I spent two years just as I finished high school living in the UK. And then around 2016, did a calculation and figured out that I was earning less in dollars 15 years into my career than I was in my first job living in the UK. And that was basically because the South African rants purchasing power just fallen off a cliff. So I was still in South Africa, enjoy the lifestyle. All my friends were here, but I was looking for a way to kind of escape the financial system here. And really that's how I kind of came across crypto. And then late 2016, bought my first crypto, you know, basically using all, instead of paying into my retirement and UOT, I was buying crypto, which is probably not the most risk like management style for retirement, but you really, you know, like given how badly the South African rand was doing, you really was kind of my only option to, to really exit the system here. So that was 2016, went full -time into crypto like 2018 and then started niftify end of 2019. So basically spent the first two lockdowns in South Africa, writing the first version of niftify and launched in June, 2020. And then my interest in NFTs really came from the way that I actually learned to program as a kid was by doing essentially generative art using this program called logo. It's a less derivative that's essentially used to teach children how to program. And you do that by drawing pictures on the screen with this little turtle. So, you know, so I was into generative arts really as soon as I got into programming. So when NFTs came around, you know, combining art programming, and then I spent most of my career working for financial services companies. So, you know, you know, adding in finance on top of that and you kind of basically have niftify.
DARKWEB.TODAY - Hackers & Cyber SECURITY
"pfp" Discussed on DARKWEB.TODAY - Hackers & Cyber SECURITY
"So you want to build a web three, but yo, what does that mean exactly got PFP's NFTs? So what makes you different from the rest of these projects that give me the notion to drain open sea and turn the ocean wash them broke them with promotion hoping when their sales get posted ghosted 'cause that's when they dip and leave the most land holding shit and hot gold brick went cold so quick when there's no ethics got me thinking tell me what am I here for? Tell me just what am I here for is it the seeds of greed on beating or is this lead in me to be more it's my prerogative to live with what I got I got to eat with I just thought I could make a difference but I can't stop let me get a witness front run y'all know my past scam first that question last man we were hated talking liquidated thought it was a game to steal and muscle explained it away part of the hustle but it is not a game when you miss you trust you'll get this question thrust upon you tell me what are you here for? Tell me just what are you here for the seeds of 3D feed in or is this leading you to be more? You got to live with what you make and will you give or you just take in? Is it forgiveness or self hating if we're the 8 and is it too late and what lies have you been hiding by injustices you justified you feel so dirty so can't clean you have no hope and I hope to redeem you and victimize in someone else. We also victimize ourselves and we can compartmentalize but behind your eyes the truth resides so tell me what are you here for? Tell me just what are you here for? The seeds of green you feed in or is this leading you to be more you're a hacker breach in system but did you first receive permission? You want to abound me at the force and it sounds to me like that's extortion. With a honey pot or ransomware and running them, you got to be aware that the cost is high for law sale garden and flip flops can find. It's not forgotten to kill me and we can still change course but begin to heal. You must feel remorse. You can't defend, but you can make a man so there's a question you must answer Friends.
DARKWEB.TODAY - Hackers & Cyber SECURITY
"pfp" Discussed on DARKWEB.TODAY - Hackers & Cyber SECURITY
"So the VR, it's in spatial. And what I've got now is like a main sort of welcome and information center set up. Where you can learn about hideous hackers and you can learn about what I would consider like the three pillars of the community I've been building. And so a lot of times when people say, oh, I'm building a community that's like followers, right? It's like how many people are following you. And that's not what I mean by community in the sense of what I've been doing for the past 6 months. What I've been building is really a resource network to support the community that is going to come now that now that I've built this foundation of resources available to the community that I want to build. The community of holders and folks we're trying to keep safe. So what does that mean? It means that guys like Hannibal here, you know? Huge resource to the whole web three space. And hackers Dow. Guys who are building in this space and all the white hats and the blue hats who are educators in the red hats and the good hackers in this space who are doing that work that helps us play offense more than more than defense in some cases to understand how we can help keep people safe. That's huge and important. So my first priority was to build those relationships, ships up with the good hackers, we call them, right? On top of that, then I've got sort of a mental health pillar, if you will, right? So I've got a network of mental health professionals and advocates who are available inside my community so that when people come in and they want to jump into a group session or even request an initial session with a professional in this mental health space that they can tap into those resources. I've got a degree in social work and that's where my heart's at, right? And so this is, this is really secretly a mental health and big compassionate project in addition to all the fun stuff that we can do. At its core, it's compassion and empathy. So the third pillar of this, so I've got cybersecurity and overall wellness and mental health that they're component really is that network of projects that are building from their heart. And so when I say projects, I mean artists, musicians, the traditional PFP projects that are building communities and the DeFi communities and the people are building DApps for the space and all the people who are really pioneers and sticking it out and building from their heart and building something honestly in this space. And so those are the types of projects that I'm putting into the metaverse, if you will, and to this spatial gallery, and I mean, the good news is that it's really, you know, it's got a great foundation already. But I've got like literally ten other galleries that I'm going to build out just for like musicians and just for these other visual artists and just for projects that have given back component and projects that are more investor focused and so on and so on. I've got categorized of good folks that I've come to know and I'm ready to build out even more space because my objective is to be able to shine a light on the good in this space. So. That's what the galleries are for and what happens is when you share your story with these hackers, what I'm going to do is the first thing I'm going to do is invite you into this gallery where you're going to be able to take a walk and a tap into old news resources and learn some stuff. But also there are a number of projects that have offered a free NFT to folks who share their story. And this isn't this is a compassionate thank you empathy, an expression of empathy, a token to really try to just take the sting out of whatever it is that you had gone through that caused you guys to have that pain and it's just a little something to take the sting out of it so that you know that there are people who care, right? And so telling the story is step one and it's useful because we're going to help the community learn from what you've gone through. And as a thank you, we want to give you an NFT and you can do whatever you like with it. You can even ask us to transfer it to someone else who is, you know, it needs it and you might want it even more than you do because there are folks who are like, no, no, I don't want that, I'm not telling my story because I want charity, but don't think of it that is all. Just embrace it and think of it as a thank you and you can even pay it forward if that's the spirit or what your heart wants to do rather than receive it yourself. So lots of options there. So you come in and you choose any one of these projects that's displaying our special heart in this space that is the heart when you see the heart next to the project that means that they're offering a free NFT. You've got to pick one. So you can look at all the different projects in there and you get to choose whichever one is like your favorite, whichever one tugs at your heart, you choose that one. And then you let us know and we coordinate a meeting, essentially, in Twitter space, and we coordinate a meet up in our regular Twitter space where we're going to basically transfer that directly from the artist or the project directly to you where they can say hey, thanks and welcome and personally welcome you into their community. And I don't know. It's just super cool. There's a couple other things that I believe are offering. And I say that because I think we've got like an entry level NFT potentially from our host here. Is that correct? Hacker style? It is. Due to you being in the council now, the high council has been discussing about doing a limited edition empathy collection. We do have a bunch of art that we did not use on the original collection that we can do something like that. So we will for sure be discussing that more on the back end. Yeah, awesome. In addition to that I can tell you that I've got a hideous hacker has a relationship with kind of a web 2.53 meditation company and right now they're only on iOS, but I will be.
DARKWEB.TODAY - Hackers & Cyber SECURITY
"pfp" Discussed on DARKWEB.TODAY - Hackers & Cyber SECURITY
"Get to really know about facilities. It could bring until 2020. 2021, where we started this course in about NFTs. I know it definitely started before then. But the entire bubble of it started within that period of time that I think about like, okay, how do I get to understand this? And also, you know, gets to how do I put this now? Fully understand the concept of its senses coming from the blockchain technology and also there's this particular asset that has been created that is called Bitcoin at the time material was also out. And there was this also repo. I was actually involved very much with repo at the time. Before I started getting to understand about exchanges, this was right now in 2019, 2020 as well. I certainly understanding about other exchanges like buying and I think the first one I came in came in contact with where I actually interacted with Bitcoin was local Bitcoin at the time. So over the period of time, it is actually been very, very interesting for me, finding out about NFTs doing a good deep dive on its to understand because I do have a background in communications engineering as well. So it just makes me a very curious individual who wants to really understand how things work. So in this sense, I must tell you, I've tried to understand what goes on within the NFT space, like what this utilities are supposed to be for. And I've gotten to also understand the community gets to bring and build over this period of time, you know, just being socially active at the moment, you know, understanding how people are using this particular PFP to build communities in such a way where it's just unbelievable to kind of support you get from the community. You know, I could just listen to career just create just a little bit ago. A minute ago and the way he actually stood up for what is going on here, it was just interesting to see like, okay, you've got my community who would back you up when you get both of us like that who would come to try to talk about what you're actually trying to do. So I've gotten to understand the community according to understand like it just changes the entire market in the game. That's why, you know, when you came here and I was asking markets and questions and feeling like chemo he knows all the shit with marketing in you don't know it until you actually try to do it because you can't get it one way bro like the honest truth is built in a community gets into be involved with the community and also trying to be a founder who is also trying to build utility with your product. It's almost two very, very far fetched games. You need to also get somebody to handle the markets and perspective. And trust me, handling the markets and perspective is something else because it's trying to a friend today was telling me how market is about manipulation of emotions. It's just getting people to really want to be interested in what you're doing. If you're listening to Alberto story today, he basically just told us about a very emotional story that you would want to understand who is this person who wants to understand okay how much of this person don't I want to know more from this person I would want to learn from this person's experience because experience is the best teacher if you ask me. So in this real sense, I just feel like nobody really gets it yet and we are all trying to get a look at this. I can't even remember what particular car company. They came in with millions of dollars actually to get into the market in space. They produced NFTs and not even how many they didn't they couldn't even sell lots of half of them 20% of their own means collection. So it's just being able to build communities just this NFTs like it has just taught me a whole lot and I've just enjoyed the space because when you really understand the walks of life you would know that everyone is supposed to be communicating everyone is supposed to be free to do business together without any rigid processes. So it's just a lot for me and I've just been love to space and I've met quite a few people on this particular space. It has just been an amazing and interesting experience if you ask me so I started here in trading where I was in school afterwards. I became an entrepreneur started businesses and just really enjoyed the space and I've also been built in within the space and I've just loved it and within the space and it's just great meeting great people every day and meets and really, really good individuals on the way. So yeah, thank you. That's my story. Thank you for sharing your story, Michael. It's very interesting and actually you are well one of the pioneers of crypto and what you know like actually yeah I think everybody that has started on like 2014, 2015 it's actually a pioneer, you know? Like a lot of people like nobody knew about crypto and lists like you were some kind of guy or like I think like doing best in something, you know, you know the market, what is moving but yeah it's actually crazy that for so long and all the experience you've gathered and still you know in web three and NFTs it's so much different. You know you've been all these years will actually not exactly on so NFTs you know, but you're right the market is totally different. That's why a big brands fail while entering a web three, you know they start doing the typical branding of, I don't know, I mean Instagram page and actually to be totally honest, that's how we failed at the beginning. Like we've been a year here now and at the first month you know we have a team of marketing and they're very good at what they do you know but once we got here nothing was like having results on the first, I don't know two months like we just had like, I don't know 5 likes and it was like what is happening here, you know our visual school our concept is cool, our posts are cool like the copies everything was cool you know how is this not working? And then of course we understand this is more than just saying what you're doing or whatever it's actually connecting with each one of you and I think that's when actually we've learned so much more not only from the experience but from other people's opinions like we love to do these spaces like how did you start? Because we actually want to hear how did you start, you know, it's not just like a topic to discuss things. I want to know because I got here for a totally different reason that other people do. So I think it's interesting so you can learn more about the space. Itself. So Lila, please go ahead. Yeah, I'll make it quick, but yeah, no, I feel like I kind of like what Michael said, you know, I kind of want to add on to it. I feel like there's so much to learn this web through environment. You know, when it comes to creating an NFT project, you know when it comes to investing into one or even building your personal brand, you know? I mean, I feel like PFP's in your name are one of the biggest things you know, it's like, I see a bearded buddy and I say, oh, that's Nacho or arce. A zillion or go and I say, oh, keel wire, however you pronounce that my apologies. But you know, I feel like the name and then the name and the profile picture, you know, the repetition of seeing them over and over again. It builds that brand and
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"pfp" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"And in 2016, I discovered Bitcoin. Like many of us, and I was quite early on. There was nothing very serious. It was really just testing and kind of understanding what this new kind of alt currency was. And it wasn't until a few years later that I fully understood the power of community within the space and how many folks just like me had been as curious and had been testing and developing really intricate tools and projects around blockchain. And so really getting more involved in 2020. And this is when the surgeons of PFP projects started coming up within the NFT space and I had been watching that space for a while getting really involved in community, but not necessarily joining a specific project as a collector or investor myself till July of 2021 when world of women launched. And that's finally when I was like, well, there's a project for me out here. And so let me dive in, let me invest and let me collect hence my PFP journey really, really took off. And in December of 2021, the project took off as well, started really investing my time and efforts in other female led projects in the artist space and PFT space and have not looked back ever since. Simultaneously, you know, we talked about web three, but I had always also been really interested on the gaming front of things and at the same space, although not web three, metaverses were popping up, left for incenter in the web two space, but also 2.5, right? And following both paths, there was this convergence of, oh my gosh, wow, now we have metaverse spaces. That are web three. And what will that do for brands? What would that do for economies? What would that do for our distant creators? So passion really took off. And brought that passion to Allo yoga. That's so cool. And I know you've been an entrepreneur and you've also been in corporate America, which is a sort of rare hybrid breed. I love what you just mentioned around your passion for both sort of gaming and metaverse and the NFT space coming together. You know, at Vayner, we probably have the most expansive definition of web three as being the next iteration of connected consumer behavior that's driven by a digital first consumer reality that can include things that are blockchain based, can include advanced computing, how consumers can sort of shift AI and can also include these immersive experiences like what you see in the metaverse. How would you define web three, at least in the context of how you're thinking about it at aloe? You know, I think our definitions are very, very similar. In the sense that web series core is democratization of the Internet, right? It's enabling via tooling via securities via a whole bunch of different things.
Kraken Blog
NFTs 101 Identity expression with PFPs
"3 p.m. Monday February 20th, 2023. NFTs one O one identity expression with PFP's. There was once a time when displaying an image of your real face on social media was standard practice. A holiday photo, a mugshot, a pic of you and your pug these were all commonplace ways of showcasing yourself to the world. But that time the post NFTs one O one identity expression with PFP's appeared first on kraken blog.
Unchained
"pfp" Discussed on Unchained
"Also, by the way, we all know this episode is your victory lap episode. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. We got to that. So go ahead, Tom. No, I totally agree. I think from my conversations with artists and galleries, a lot of them, initially viewed, digital art has been around for a while. But a lot of them view the attractive NFTs as a reaching a bigger market, but also getting access to the secondaries. It was sort of a very semi famous moment where not an artist, but Mark Cuba was talking about tokenizing calves tickets and letting them trade. On an NFT exchange and then someone was like, no, you don't, you can't afford some roses on chain. And he's like, wait, what's the point of the tokenization that if I don't get the second air speed? So I was like, I think even somewhat sophisticated people sort of missed this point. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We're calling Mark Cuban who lost a lot of his money in iron finance. The sophisticated person here with just checking. I'm trying to be kind. I'm trying to be kind on the pod today. So the other thing that always struck me is strange about this story about royalties. And again, I'm trying not to take too much of a victory laugh, because I did predict that this would happen. But the thing that also struck me as strange is that crypto encrypted, we find a way to tokenize almost everything. But pretty much anything that can be on chain, we find some way to break it down into tokens and trade it. But for some reason, people never did that to royalties. They never tokenize their royalty stream and then sold it to third parties. There were a few projects I did this year and there, but it wasn't widespread. It wasn't common. But this seems like the obvious way to understand what royalties are. When an artist ends up working with a music label, what they do is they end up basically selling off vast majority of their royalties to the label. In order to basically get an upfront payment to allow them to go create art or whatever, and also take away most of their risk. If NFT artists had done this, what they would find is that actually you can just sell this off for lump sum payment and basically sell it. You could have sold it to the exchange in the first place. So there's nothing about even the nature royalties that guarantees that they are structured as an annuity. If you just sold it off up front, which you could in principle, then I think the norms would have been very different. If in fact, when royalties were created that they were initially tokenized and most people were just sold them alongside the initial NFT mint. Yeah, I think it's very interesting. You know, ultimately, I think, especially on Twitter, what ends up happening is there's no nuance that's allowed in any of these conversations. And there's nuance at multiple levels. There's nuance in the types of NFTs, right? So PFP, large PFP is like a zugi or azuki or you got like those are like venture backed companies, like those are startups. And that's a very different beast than a one of one artist that sells in like super rare. And collector that's buying a bunch of art is very different than a retail user who is a newcomer. It's very different than a trader who is going to be very price sensitive. Is different than a market maker. And you now, after our token launch, there are a lot more market makers in the space than there were before, which is something that's quite interesting. Which is what we were hoping for, ultimately. But basically, there are all these different demographics and use cases. And the conversation has only ever been a binary will you fully enforce relatives or not fully enforce royalties and it's like the market has tried to apply a one size fits all solution to a market that is actually very segmented. So it was just like, it was just very surprised. Not surprising. I think I'm not surprised anymore, but it was more so just, it was like, okay, this is gonna be a short term noise effectively because this conversation, like the market will do what the market is going to do. This conversation can prevent it for a little bit, but the market is ultimately what's going to win out at the end of the day. You can't really stop the market forces. So it just seems kind of like an inevitability, but it was a conversation that lasted for a lot longer than I think it needed to. And we could have focused on more productive conversations, but it wasn't able to just because of the lack of nuance. 100%. Yeah, all markets tend toward efficiency over time, especially as they become more competitive. But okay, let's continue on with the case study. So open C thousand pound gorilla, they start blacklisting, you guys, for collections that are if they want to enforce full royalties, they have to blacklist blur as well as pseudo and a bunch of other stuff. Okay, now separately, you guys are doing some sort of two things that are happening, I think, on the blur side. So one is that you guys observe the rise of aggregators like gem and Genie, blur launches as an aggregator initially. But then you also have your own proprietary liquidity, meaning that instead of just being a pass through to being able to shop on a bunch of other exchanges, you can list items directly onto blur and onto blurs order book. And part of what was so brilliant about blur and I think a big contributor to you guys success was the nature of your liquidity mining program. So if you look at the other two big upstart tokenized NFT exchanges, X to Y two and looks rare. Both of them had token AirDrop mining whatever programs.
Tech Path Crypto
"pfp" Discussed on Tech Path Crypto
"The future of ripple, that's what we're gonna talk about today, really dive into where the, you know, not only the road map is going, but when you look at ripple as a whole, there's a lot of strategies that are happening on a global stage and today we wanted to dive in a little deeper on this. So getting into an interview, I think you guys are going to love it. My name is Paul barrel. Welcome back into tech path. Join me today is Boris elegant, who is the head of DeFi markets over at ripple. So welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Paul. I'm excited to be here. So Boris, we've had a couple of the ripple team members on our shows in the past over the past couple of years. Obviously our first person to really kind of break down what's happening in DeFi, obviously with XRPL and what you guys have been doing over the last 18 months, a lot of things have changed and happened. Can you give us a little bit of an update on XRPL as a whole kind of where you are and some of the immediate strategies that are starting to roll out? Yeah, absolutely. And I think I just want to kind of level set here before I get into that is really the differentiation between ripple and XRP ledger. XRPL is the blockchain ten year old blockchain. Ripple is a software company that builds on top of the XRP ledger and our flagship product is a payments product facilitates billions of dollars of cross border remittance flow. So that's kind of the difference between ripple and XRP. But the XRP ledger is, like I said, fully decentralized blockchain. And a lot has happened in the last year with XRP legend. Well, first off, there's over 2000 new tokens issued on the XRP ledger. I think we've seen tokens being issued across all blockchains, but it's really exciting to see that growth on the XRP. So over 2000 tokens, there are there's actually a new NFT functionality or new standard that launched in October. So now there are non fungible tokens live on XRP ledger, which has been really exciting and has seen tremendous growth. And FT activity on XRPL rivals that of salon are right now. Not a lot of people know that, but that's why I guess I'm here talking about it. And also, as ripple, we are a contributor to the ledger and we do put together certain amendments and other technological upgrades. One of the other ones we're working on is AMM functionality with XLS 30. So it's been exciting. Last year has been really awesome and it's been great to see the ledger continue to work, right? Block for block, it's stable. It's functioning. It's running at businesses are being built on top of it. Right. You know, this is the thing that we look at, especially when you look at kind of the evolution of what's been happening on many of the main chains out there. You mentioned Solana, there's also others, especially in the layer ones that have had some pretty amazing steps forward. Eth obviously going over to true proof of proof of stake. I want to talk to you a little bit about the consensus algorithm. Because that's kind of the uniqueness and the differentiator for XRPL, a software by ripple. But when you look at the consensus algorithm versus proof of work and proof of stake, what kind of give me the, you know, the pressure of why that is a better solution versus what some of the other chains are doing. Yeah, what makes XRP a really unique and different is the consensus algorithm. It is not proof of stake. It is not proof of work. You are not as an individual contributor. You are not rewarded for validating blocks, right? It's a very different kind of philosophy. The XRPL consensus algorithm is closer to BFT of Byzantine fault tolerance. It's closer to a call it proof of authority and what we use the community kind of uses internally. They call it proof of association. So there is a list of unique node validators. There's over a 150 validators on XRPL. And there's this unique node list that trusted list that is maintained by a number of entities. That connects that is a list of validators that are trusted by the network that are run by really actually a lot of universities, a lot of non for profits, some banks as well. So it's a wide list, and that list is the trusted list that is used to validate the blocks. And again, I want to really double click on this kind of difference in philosophy of XRP, not paying for block validation. That's a unique differentiator. And in order to run a node on XRPL, it's really run, it's really run by folks who are looking to build on the XRP ledger, right? You're building a business. So it's almost like a web two approach if you kind of think of it that way. You're not getting paid to run an AWS server right now when you're launching your business on web two or an online store, you're doing that because it's integral part of your company. And I think this is, this is something that we're going to see. I think a lot of companies really start to make this migration over from web two to web three. And we've already started to see this with some enterprise applications, a lot of consumer kind of loyalty components where blockchain becomes a big part of this. And then you get into the general conversions that are happening within web three on both the NFT space, PFP's, et cetera, as well as gaming, really kind of, I think setting the standard, but still at this point, it's very early stage on this. We see a lot of new development on this. What do you guys looking at in terms of the landscape for growth in the future? Do you feel like this is still going to take years to really develop out? Or do you feel like we are now at a point where there's some really heavy dominoes starting to fall? Yeah, we're definitely, I believe in a turning point. Let's look at the last bull market, right? And the last bowl cycle. I'm talking really not the 2021 one, but the one before that, right? Institutions were still pretty negative on crypto and blockchain technology. And then what came about it after the crash, you had all this building happen and that we had DeFi summer that came out of it. And what DeFi summer has proved is an application built on top of that is that you can do trading. You can do borrowing and lending. And there are significant efficiencies and optimizations having those processes run on a blockchain. And through this last full market and this current let's take bear market from my conversations that we've seen institutions being more just as excited about the promise of this technology and what it can do for them. And how it can really unlock a ton of value. So a lot of these, a lot of institutions are looking to make that transition, as you mentioned from web two to web three. But they got to get to web 2.5 first. And that process is really going to involve seeing how this technology can create really a benefit to their bottom line, how it can cut costs, create efficiencies, build trust where it's difficult to capture that kind of trust. And so yeah, I'd say we're starting to see those dominoes fall and I'm really, really excited to see what happens when we come out of this
DARKWEB.TODAY - Hackers & Cyber SECURITY
"pfp" Discussed on DARKWEB.TODAY - Hackers & Cyber SECURITY
"You want me to go ahead and jump on somebody else and I come back to you, brother? Is that what you want me to do? Yes, please. No problem. I got you. You know what? I was actually wanted to go to hideous. So hideous hackers, you guys. I'm going to give an answer real quick. These guys were awesome. They're basically doing very similar stuff to what we're doing. This is needed. If I were to look around and kind of see somebody that I think has a cool storyline back behind what they're doing, these guys are cool, man. Look at his PFP's dope. You know what I mean? They're like a hacker type pop culture type thing. Not only that, dude, this guy has a legitimately help people like we have. Like he's got a list of all the people he's helped. I have mad respect for the Eddie hackers. I'm going to go ahead and hand the mic over and let him explain exactly what they do. Hey, thanks so much. Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm honored to be here. I really feel like I'm at the intersection of a lot of brilliant minds, minds a lot more brilliant than mine. And it's great to be a part of what you guys are doing in the future of web three and keeping people safe, first of all. And thank you hackers out for a host of tonight. My name is Jim and I am the founder of hideous hackers. Wait a minute. Hold up. Hold up. I just got the end by Bill Gates. Have you guys heard about this? Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary with the free Windows one and FT men. Oh my God. This is huge. What should I do? Oh well, right? Right? I expect everyone here knows exactly what not to do. All right, but there are about 7 billion people who have an arrived yet who will need help from all of us to stay safe. And, you know, when I saw this schedule for tonight's space with it is hackers kind of right in the middle of everything I thought that's perfect because if I'm completely honest, to these hackers is nothing without all of you. Sure. Hackers Dow said something the artist dope, right? Thanks, Ralph, the artist. In fact, the art is meant to serve as a constant reminder that we all need to be careful and watch out for these scammers. But that's just the beginning. You know, what we really need to do is educate people about staying safe. And that's why I love all you guys. So what's my role? And what's the role of hideous hackers and all this? As for me, honestly, my superpower might be empathy. It comes naturally, but in web three, it's well informed by my own personal traumatic experiences. I won't go into those tonight, but my stories, you know, like many who have who have been hacked and scammed. All right? Let's just say I have a little extra room in my heart for these people who have been scammed. So, you know, it was my inexperienced and kind of boneheaded decisions to approve fraudulent transactions that motivated me to start building. I decided to create something that was going to help others avoid these scammers. You fast forward to right now and you'll see why I'm especially thankful to be among all of you. I'm not a cybersecurity expert, right? I'm a poster child for what not to do. It's your expertise. It's your voice. That people need to hear. You who hideous hackers wants to amplify. It's easy to see why I want to shine a line on hacker's style and all the other experts and legit projects in this room. But hideous hackers is really also a spotlighting good projects, artists, mental health, and wellness professionals and educators who we believe are well intentioned and working to build something real. So what are we doing over here at hideous hackers? Well, first of all, you know, I refrained from promoting until three pillars were well established or pretty much well established now. The first pillar is literally kind of all of you guys here who are in the cybersecurity space. I needed to align with the right experts and educators to ensure that our community would have current reliable information for staying safe. At second pillar is mental health. My college degree is in social work, right? So suffice to say, wellness is at the heart of hitting sackers, to be honest. And let's face it, you know, when we get scammed, it hurts. And the emotional pain might linger long after any financial losses. So in addition to providing peer support, hideous hackers is formed relationships with actual license clinical psychologists and leaders and the web through meditation space as well. And together, we're developing programs and content that are going to help people emotionally process the skins that have hurt them. We want to help them heal emotionally, grow, and maybe even emerge a little bit stronger. This third pillar is authentic relationships. I built kind of a cohort of artists and NFT and DeFi projects who are building something real from their hearts. And I'm just beginning to build on these pillars. So I hope you all will stay tuned. You already know, we're also so very early in this. Hack, we're witnessing huge global brands launching NFTs and failing. Yet, we're still here. The fact is until the rest of humanity arrives, we only have each other. Why actually I should say something like, yo, how often is it that we have each other? Let's go, right? But seriously, I'm honored to be amidst all of you. And just be part of this important conversation. And I'm thankful to be working alongside you with my little project. I can't wait to really start amplifying your passion, your empathy and your expertise and meaningful ways that help prepare web three for mass adoption. I know that was a little bit scripted. That helps me stay on track. We all have a little ADD, maybe in us, and that really helped me get through that. So I hope you guys took that in and my DMs are open and always love and feedback and questions and people who want to help expand my idea and grow it and challenge it. So thank you so much. That was actually excellent. It didn't seem too scripted at all. I liked it. And up top, I've put a link to his site as well. So everyone, please go follow him. He is doing an excellent job. I really enjoyed your presentation to be real with you, sir. So I'm going to go ahead and hand over to a met Lindy. I'm sure he's got a great question. What do you got? Yeah, I was going to just Paul hideous hackers here. Hey man, that was amazing. And mental health is the most important thing. I'll be honest, then we're all here for our reasons. Crypto NFTs, investments. It doesn't matter. I'm an addict, man. I struggle every day and life is hard for a lot of people. And when you said you're about that empathy, yeah, man, when you see other people going through the same thing, you've been through or you've messed up and you're trying to fight that. It's a big thing. So I congratulate you for making it through, coming up here, speaking, sharing your story and being a part of the community, my brother. We're here for anybody and everybody, just be nice to each other, you know? So thanks for that.
DARKWEB.TODAY - Hackers & Cyber SECURITY
"pfp" Discussed on DARKWEB.TODAY - Hackers & Cyber SECURITY
"I was trying as hard as I could to ask them. Then he'll packers. Wondering what you guys think of my one of one meme art. No. Append it. It's dependent tweet. It's the one of one that I'm trying to auction off. CL one to ten. Is it bad art? It's a good art it's definitely not like a quality bad. I'm so sorry. And you know that it's bad, right? Yeah, of course. God. Put it back if you want. I won't do that again, but I just felt like it wasn't yours. What do you mean it's not mine? I made it. I think that you made it at the instruction of that person. No, I literally just randomly made that. I made my own PFP. Are you so you didn't make it at the instruction of literally that person? What person? The one who just wrote you. Who wrote me? I don't know. I don't even know what wrote me means. No, that's Discord notifications. How do I show that? I also have this one. That someone bought for one soul. I encourage your DMs are off on Discord. I trust me. I already by now a chrome. There's a chrome, like a Google Chrome plugin. For logging and Discord without a token. I know this project that I'm involved in is using it on their website. And I don't know what to do about that. What? But there are nice project. No, they're not. They're learned to earn their education. So if I need to grab you by the sweater and bitch slap you, then I will, because I know that you've got something in you other than need for a bill. And if that's all that you are, then I'll kill you right here on the spot. They have good intentions, God damn it. Is on there. That's fun. We're not. So do we need an app for wurtele or is it 5 fucking letters? 5 letters is hard, by the way. 6 to 9. I already thought of a 5 letter word. Do we need an app? Oh, but you get 6 guesses? That's not even a point. The point is about it. Good intentions. So you're happy about the way that the hell is paid? Is what you're saying? Absolutely not, but I'm on the road. I might as well fucking you might as well take your money out and put them in what? Probably. What? Tofu thing. No, but I'm allowed to do that. I got the circumcision. Prove it, motherfucker. I could, but I'm not going to use your imagination. Again,
Verifiable Podcast
"pfp" Discussed on Verifiable Podcast
"So I call it maybe an art why some of these top influences top end 15 influencers also have some pictures of this NFTs on the device which they don't own. Maybe it might be different or owned by someone else or maybe they wanted to also use it to bring awareness about maybe a huge sale or something. Amazing that happened in the anti space. So right click save in an NFT doesn't mean you own the NFT. It just means you have the energy. You have a picture of the NFT, but the whole data that shows okay mister D PAC or fabric owns this NFT is clear for everyone to see on the blockchain. And it's something that's erased. The technology of the blockchain was made for people not to actually erase or extract data out of it because this linked up with several notes that several computers which save the same data. So even if you are trying to think you can delete it from your own end, the over thousands of ends which still have that data and everyone can actually see it. So click save in an NFT is in strong if you're using it for purpose like maybe to bring awareness or to give news about an NFT and that's why I think the technology of PFP's NFT P of P's was so amazing by which people don't really have to right click save the NFTs anymore because even the owner of the NFTs also right click save their NFTs to use as the PFP's with due to the technology by which you can just link your wallet to your social media like Twitter and other social media also trying to integrate the technology if you can actually do that. You don't need to right click save but you just link it and select which NFTs you want to.
Verifiable Podcast
"pfp" Discussed on Verifiable Podcast
"Welcome, guys. Turn it up, so if you're not new to this podcast, you find out that this sort of thing new to the podcast. Yeah. I tried adding in true to this episode. And I think it's not your perfect but still working on it. So today's episode I'm going to talk about how or whether it's right or wrong to actually screenshot right click save and energy. So a lot of people now have PFP's profile pictures of NFTs which they don't own. Okay, why I can't quite because, okay, I was once a victim of that. Having PFP's of NFTs that you don't own. And most people try claiming they own the NFTs when actually they don't own it. So love people. Especially some of the haters of the NFT space. And I don't think the mainly haters were people that haven't yet on this to the technology of NFTs, sometimes things that right click save in an NFT or screenshot NFT means you now own that NFT. But what makes you not the owner of that NFT is that data that it's stored on the blockchain that identifies mister a or mister B as the owner of that NFT. And the thing about the bloating is that every one can actually go up set it up and check it and find out who is really the real owner of the NFT collection and to find out the actually an impostor trying to claim who you are not. So right 15 right click save in the NFT. Is it right or wrong? I won't say it's wrong. Neither will I say it's right. I'm going to give you a reason why it might be okay to write which have an NFT. So if you are like a content creator or maybe you want to give updates about an NFT right click save in it isn't wrong. Most lot of people also write the save. Those NFTs to actually advertise or actually build awareness about something, maybe you collections sold out. Or maybe it got one of the items got a very high seal. They actually right click save it to actually show people keep this body so for a $1 million or maybe this crypto punk so for $500,000. So right to right click save and NFT for purposes like this isn't actually wrong but when you actually do it for a wrong purpose which I will get to very soon that's when it's actually wrong. So you can basically save an NFT. I can tell you that a lot of people who actually don't support their motion of okay right click save in an NFT or screenshot in an NFT have maybe one or two NFTs on the phone or okay. I shouldn't call it an NFT because it's been on the blockchain is the main reason why it's an NFT..