Okay.
Hello, everyone.
We are back in session.
It is 2023 and we have two more sessions to go.
I am excited to be doing today's session on off-chain or physical objects or claims that
are linked to NFTs with the very, very well-known G-Money, who is not just one of the great
collectors of the space and he is a business builder in the space and has done a lot of
interesting physical objects.
So, first of all, welcome to the course, sir.
Well, thank you for having me.
It's a pleasure to be on and it's definitely an honor.
So what we're going to do today is kind of a mix of a presentation and a discussion.
I'd like to go, VT, through a few background slides to make sure everyone gets up there.
Make sure everyone is on the same page in terms of the concepts.
Then we'll work through some examples and then, since we have the founder of a, actually,
one of our example slides, dig into detail like why it was done this way, what's the
opportunity or what does this look like over time.
And so we'll go that way.
And at any point, G-Money, if I'm off-base on something or I didn't say something that
you think should be out of just jumping even during the slides.
Okay, great.
Okay.
Did I have control of the slides?
I don't seem to have control of the slides.
Huh.
I do.
I don't seem to be able to switch the slide.
I think you might have control of the slides, I think.
All right.
So the session of the course we titled it Off-chain Objects.
And then I thought to myself, is that right?
I mean, it's sort of, it is, of course, right.
But I was also playing around with a couple of other words, physical objects, right?
Because there's some things that are off-chain but digital, like, you know, are we right, PFS?
That is true for a lot of NFTs.
But I think that's something different than what we're discussing here.
And then I was wondering even if the word objects was correct.
And I think it's not, or it's partially correct, but it's not fully comprehensive.
I think the right word is claims because we could be representing things that are not
an object, but for example, could be an experience.
If you have an NFT that represents a ticket to a concert or a night in a hotel room, it's
not an object.
You know, you haven't gotten the concert hall.
But it is a claim in the physical world.
And I think for the purpose of this session, that's my mental framework that we're talking
about, you know, the other 11 sessions of the course we're talking about natively digital
assets all the way through.
This is the session where we're talking about physical matters.
And physical in this case claims, which I think this is the right model.
Now what type of things could they represent?
And this is in no way an exhaustive list, exhaustive list is everything in the world.
So I'm not going to start writing down every single thing in the world.
But evident crypto a long time.
And this idea of representing physical objects with crypto tokens predates NFTs.
We've been talking about this for many, many years.
A lot of people tried to do it with fungible tokens, they turned it with colored coins.
And the areas that people typically start with the ones that I've heard over and over
and over again, are no particular order real estate, clothing, precious stones or gold or
what have you.
It's where people start, right?
Because I think these are things that might have sufficient value that people think about
them and they're easy enough to make the mental leap.
Maybe someday are washing machine will be represented by NFT, but it's a harder mental
leap to see how that works, right?
So and then the claim may not just be ownership, right?
Could be ownership.
Could be that if you own this NFT, you own this physical object, do that.
It could be rental.
If you own the NFT, you have access to this car or holiday home for this week.
It could be access.
If you own the NFT, you can come to this country club.
If you own the NFT, you can go to this concert.
If you own the NFT, you can have dinner once a week with dream money.
It's a physical claim, right?
Redemption, which in all it's kind of similar to ownership, but I split it because I think
it's a different implementation form.
So there's people who say, well, you own the NFT and the NFT and the physical note together.
And as long as you own an NFT and you can redeem the NFT for the physical and the NFT
goes away, right?
And so the first is almost like a gift voucher.
It's not a good one.
It's kind of like a gift voucher for a physical object.
Whereas the redemption model is whereas the ownership model and they go together and they're
permanently together.
The NFT never gets burnt.
And you no longer have the physical object.
You send the NFT to the next person.
So the NFT and the physical object always live together.
And then there's this, I was thinking about it, but it also exists in the art NFT world
with some people have made blended or hybrid objects.
I am absolutely not going to write the word digital in the presentation.
But we bought a few of them recently and it's a beautiful NFT, but it also comes with a physical
painting in a frame.
And those are meant to be a unified piece of artwork, the NFT and the physical object
that comes with the art.
I'm sure there are other examples than what I mentioned here, but I think this is the
80%, 90% correct.
I think we're going to think about it.
I think you'd add here, G-money?.
Yeah, I think to add one thing that I want to be immediately, the things that I thought
of immediately as to what is an NFT that people can conceptualize really well is a mortgage.
And to your point is like that's a claim.
And it helps people understand to the point you made earlier that pretty much everything
in the real world is an NFT.
We just don't call them NFTs.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, all correct.
That we have that we work with abstracted claims on physical objects is absolutely true.
For me, the one that I think users to describe to people is title deeds for real estate,
right?
You never transact the real estate itself.
You transact a piece of paper.
When you buy a house, you're not, even if you're buying a piece of land on a mountainside,
the land doesn't know anything's changed, right?
Maybe there's a fence, maybe there's a lot of fence, but nothing has changed the moment
you buy it from someone.
What has changed is we've shuffled around a piece of paper in someone's office.
And then when we have accepted as a social construction that the person who has access
to do things with that land is the person whose name and the county registrar's office,
right, where the land registry in places where it's more centralized.
And it is no more, but no less abstracted than how NFTs work, right?
And because a lot of people say, oh, but NFTs are just making it up.
There's no real linkage between NFT and there's no real linkage between the title deed and
your land.
The linkage is a social construction.
And in the case of land, a set of laws and regulations that say, well, if I have this,
I'm allowed to be here.
And if G-money comes into my field, I can ask him to leave.
And if he does, I can call him the power of the state to get him out of here, right?
But the physical land doesn't know anything about this.
It's just a piece of land, right?
The thing that matters is the piece of paper in the office.
And so I think one way to think about it is we're talking about replacing that piece
of paper that is sitting in someone's filing cabinet or now on some databases where they
publicly visible, transactable, composable, talking.
All right.
Let's go to the expansion.
Now, physical claims do require a trusted counterparty, right?
And this is the major difference from the rest of digitally native tokens.
By the way, this is the way all society works, right?
So this isn't a negative statement.
This is the way how everything else in society works.
But it's important that this is a really important topic because I've seen many white papers
and presentations over the years that either don't understand this or like pretend not
to understand this, but it's important and it's different.
If I have a art blocks token in my wallet, okay, I have it in my wallet.
I don't need any third party, right?
And there, I mean, the code is on chain.
Like literally everything is in my wallet.
I can send it to you, you can send it back to me.
At no point do we need to request someone to do something in order to own the art.
Now, when we bought this hero piece in an auction, well, they transferred the token,
but then also now they have to ship the physical part.
And so I have to trust that the seller, in this case, I trust them as an auction house,
but like that the seller is capable of like packing it up correctly and mailing it to
the right place and getting appropriate insurance and not breaking it and, you know, all of
these things right there, the counterparty.
And if we ever send it somewhere else, we have to do the same thing, right?
There's sudden the counterparty in that case was the auction house was the seller.
And generally, you can think about the counterparty.
I think it's these three categories.
Maybe there's a fourth that I missed.
The most obvious one is the issuer of the claim, right?
If 90cc says, I'm going, if you own this NFT, you get this piece of clothing.
Well, the most obvious counterparty is the firm is going to say, I've showed up, I've
redeemed the NFT, I've burned the NFT, I want my t-shirt, right?
And so we have to trust that the t-shirts are there and you're well organized firm and
you haven't lost them and you'll send them to the right place and all of these things,
right?
And the same thing is true.
But this is our day to day life in the whole world, like when you booked a room at Marriott,
you're trusting the issuer of that claim that, you know, the Marriott on Canal Street is
in fact there and operating.
And when you show up and you say, like, here's my reservation from booking.com, and there's
a yes, Mr. 6'5", tonight, you have room 272 and the room's clean and it's available,
there's not someone else in it, right?
You're taking on a variety of counterparty risks that, as a general rule, married is
very good at if they rent your room for a night, they will deliver the room for the
rent you.
No, and sometimes they must have the new book and the same person, right?
There's a little bit of counterparty risk, there's not zero.
But within boundaries that society operates, right, it operates more or less okay.
That's one model, right?
The issuer is the counterparty.
Another model that you see, and some of these startups, we mentioned here, operate as well,
there's a centralized custodian.
And you're going to say, look, we're going to have, we're going to have gold bars as NFTs
and diamonds as NFTs, and how do I know the diamonds really there?
How do I trust that the person sends me the diamond that I bought?
Well, me, the centralized firm that's operating this NFT, the product or marketplace, says,
look, I have a big vault and all the diamonds are there and you guys can trade the NFTs
and the diamonds are not going over, it's always here, right?
It's always right here, and you can always come and then redeem it and claim it and get
the diamond.
And so you don't have to trust every single seller if they're going to deliver, right?
You just need to trust the custodian, in fact, the diamonds are there.
And this is how all financial markets work, right?
I mean, when you're buying and selling shares of stock, they're held in a custodian, it
changes, the shares never move just in reporting of who owns them.
This is how literally the US stock market's working, it's a centralized custodian.
And then there's one interesting idea I saw here and I'm sure we'll see more of this,
where they're trying to build a network of decentralized custodians, right?
So there was that one custodian, there's multiple custodians in an operate, like a node in the
network and say, oh, I'm storing this physical object here.
And I was trying to think if there's like a fourth version of this was not obvious to
me what it would be, and the issuer of custodian or network of custodians.
Have you seen another model on this?
No, I think that's pretty comprehensive.
When I was going through this framework, like, I was pretty much the same.
And I very much felt like there would be a need very soon of having these centralized
custodians within crypto because to your point, it exists today, right?
I mean, if you were to look up what a free port is, it's a centralized custodian where
exactly to your model that you said with real estate is the same type of transaction that
happens with art already.
Yep.
And then what does the counterparty have to do?
Well, the counterparty has to make sure the claim is executed.
That the authenticity is matchbook on both sides, right?
Like, they've got to manage both sides of authenticity.
That the concert is actually happening, right?
And Taylor Swift will be there.
But also that the claim ticket you've come with is the right one because if they recognize
the wrong one, then two people are going to be fighting for that seat, right?
So that's a managed, the authenticity of the product or service and of the claim ticket.
And then, you know, general quality assurance, which is everything from, you know, it's not
broken and it's there and has a lost your soul order.
Your bed hasn't been made.
I mean, it's an endless topic.
Quality assurance could mean anything.
And basically you're trusting the counterparty to deliver what is what has been bought through
that NFT.
Okay.
Let's go to the next slide.
Now this to me is a very big point because I've had this discussion with many people over
the last two years and they say, okay, this is fine, but why do you need NFTs for this?
You have all types of databases that do this now.
If you go to Expedia or booking.com, you can go and buy a claim on a hotel room in New
York on January 23rd.
And it works fine.
It's just a database.
You don't need all the aggravation of crypto and wallets and gas and Ethereum and all the
stuff.
Right.
And it sounds at first glance like a good question.
And but it's actually not a very good question.
It sounds like a very good question.
It sounds like a whole gosh, right.
We don't need to do this.
And the reason the big opportunity is too full.
How does it work when you go to booking.com?
Well, each each hotel has its own reservation system, right?
And they allocate different groups to different other systems.
Right.
They might say, I'm holding these 10 back because I'm going to do something for my conference
or whatever.
Booking.com can book these whatever, 100 groups.
I'm simplifying this.
And then you buy it on primary on primary.
It works.
Okay.
But you still don't see the full order book, right?
You see what you're seeing in a certain marketplace.
It's like content management systems before the Internet.
If you went to someone's content management system, you see the content there, but there
might be content or in this case inventory in a different system.
And you won't see that inventory.
Right.
So one, relatively smaller pieces.
Well, if the inventory is just represented as an NFT, the platforms might compete on UX
or UI, but you'll see all of the inventory anywhere.
You could go directly and see all the inventory on a generic platform.
It opens your ether scan or whatever.
You could always go see the inventory.
But that's not the big idea.
The big idea is you develop a secondary market.
And so what do I mean by this?
Let's say it's January 23rd and I need to be New York and it's time sensitive and I haven't
booked my hotel.
Right.
And I don't know.
There's a conference happening and you go and see, oh gosh, it's all sold out or this.
I mean, New York never really sells up.
But the approximate is all sold out or there's only these five options instead of the 100
options.
Is that really true at all?
Is it really true that I cannot get a room that I am not the highest possible bidder
for at least one of the other rooms?
You almost recognize it's in fact, not true at all.
In fact, that night in New York, there will be some couple from Massachusetts that booked
the room six months ago and paid 200 bucks for it and they don't have a time sensitive
reason that they want to be in New York.
And if I could find that couple and say, hey, would you like 400 bucks and I'll take your
room at the 23rd and you can come back any other day.
You're not 10 cents.
We're just here on holiday.
You're an elderly couple and would you prefer to come back next week and also put $200 in
your pocket?
And ask me, oh, yes, that sounds very good.
Like they win and I win.
But there's no way to do that now, right?
Because the secondary, the claims once they're issued are fragmented.
They're missing.
There's no easy way to trade a digital good for currency.
Trustlessly, we know how this works, right?
There's all point of crypto.
And so if you imagined instead that every room for every night and every hotel in New
York was represented by an NFT and think about how opens he works today, right?
The interface would be a little bit different, but conceptually, you go there and go on the
page on a New York City and say January 23rd, hotels four and five star, midtown and below.
I'm putting a collection wide bid of $400.
I'm pretty certain in that world, which is always a way, right?
In that world, that bid would hit instantly even on a night that most hotels are supposed
to sold out, right?
And what this means is you can actually create secondary markets and everything.
And here we're going to have an intellectual discussion with somebody who's like, oh, I
don't like markets.
Why does everything have to be markets?
The point is in a capital economy, everything's ready markets.
This just makes the markets more correct, more efficient.
If you help people make a voluntary trade that they couldn't have made previously, you've
increased the utility in the world.
You haven't decreased them.
Now that, and then you can do all types of, I mean, wild things, right?
You will have people arming hotel nights, right?
As well, that sounds bad.
But sometimes the size of hotels, market prices will come into line.
I was thinking about this during COVID when some governments were like paying hotels preemptively
to book some rights in the future to keep them alive.
I'm saying, no, this would make more sense that the hotels could sell those claims cheaply.
And someone else could take on the risk that the lockdown ends and they can sell them more
expensive, right?
The hotels needed some minimal amount of cash at point X to lockdown to not go bankrupt.
And they had these future claims that nobody's booking because nobody knows what the lockdown
is ending.
But some financial industry will take that risk at some price.
There's some prices that I know I don't know what the locals are doing right in.
I'll buy the hotel room now for $30 and hope to resell it for $130.
And that happens to some degree with travel agents.
But again, just like NFTs, what they're doing to the fine art market, right, is democratizing.
If you wanted to buy, if you wanted to buy a key pairing, you basically have to walk into
one of X places in the world, what's the price?
physically.
If you want to buy a ringer, you just need an internet connection.
And there's no specific extra advantage you have if you're a fancy institutional investor,
if you're an art expert, if you are just a random person, you have the same first class
access to the distribution rails for fine art.
For everyone in the world instantaneously, it's amazing.
Also true for artists.
I mean, I mean, I'm an obvious institutional artist.
Distribution rails can't fix them, right?
But the fact that you, brand new artists, you can be an 18 year old in India, and you
will have the same distribution rails as Tyler Hobbs says.
Not the same branding, not the same promotion, that's different, right?
Not the same reputation, that's also different.
But before you didn't even have the distribution rails, right, you would have that 18 year
old kid in Andobot couldn't get into the gallery in London or in Soho or in Miami or
Switzerland.
Right, but here they have the same rules.
And this model is now extensible once this happens, once this happens, to everything,
not just art, everything.
Everyone can have the same ability to buy, sell, trade, claims in the physical world,
instantly, globally with an air connection.
Arguably this, someday, will be a bigger deal of a native initial.
Quite a way in the future, I'll come back in a second, but arguably will be bigger because
this can represent everything, including the whole physical based economy, which is the
vast majority of the largest asset class in the space, in the world, by a lot, is real
estate, right?
So actually, in real estate, can come and owner or rented, and I'm just being renting
an apartment, hotels or rental, rental, right?
So once we can make efficient markets, if it sounds weird in the hotel space, think
about it for the real estate space.
Real estate is extremely sticky, a liquid high transaction cost, right?
Imagine if every apartment in Miami, you could put a bid, ask for, etc, and like, hey,
I need liquidity, I need to get out of my apartment now, right?
I need to be out now.
You put a low ask, right?
You put a low, by now price.
That will get sniped in a way that it won't happen in the current system, right?
And so, bringing markets, including secondary markets to all the world's physical goods
and services, is another one of these, like, give you huge ideas.
But unlike the native visual here, VT, let's go to the next slide, there are challenges.
The reason NFTs took off first in native visual, the reason Fedenzas took off, is because Fedenzas
didn't need permission from anyone to mint the token and put the code in the token.
And that, to take the simple example, is not truly real estate.
A binding sale of real estate has a bunch of semi-now arcade paperwork that needs that.
And if you don't do that paperwork, you haven't actually bought the real estate.
And so, I cannot just spin up an NFT collection, say, hey, this NFT represents my house.
And if you buy the NFT, you now own my house, because you could go then go to the
title office and still going to have my name on it.
And for the title office to accept that the new owner has bought it, they're going to
want to see it as it varies by country.
But in many countries, it requires a physical signature, right?
And witnesses and all these things, right?
So, understandably, that house is important.
People don't want to lose their house for bad transaction.
And so, there's in many cases, a regulatory bridge is one of the things that keeps saying,
that needs to come in place.
Well, that coming place tomorrow for real estate is Congress working on allowing us
to trade NFTs representing houses now.
They're currently complaining if they want to shut down crypto or whatever wild ideas
they get, right?
But will this happen?
And yes, it will happen for the same reason that these signatures happen, right?
Eventually, we will be able to represent claims digitally.
They will be legally binding, and that will take care of the first bucket.
The second and third bucket are kind of the same, but, well, I separate them as follows.
And I'm going to ask too many about this.
Like, you know, how do I know the shirt that I own is the same shirt as the NFT, right?
How do you actually make that linkage?
The third is the counterpart of stuff, like how is it actually, how is the physical delivery,
the physical execution happen?
And generally, because of these things, the space is still quite immature.
I don't know what percent of the NFT market represents.
NFT is the physical component, but it's pretty small.
And the NFT market itself is very immature.
The NFT market is maybe a $10 billion market cap.
It's like, I don't know, 1% of crypto and crypto is still a very immature asset class, right?
So this is the immature end of the immature end of a fairly immature asset class.
But this also has the opposite perspective that this is why there's potentially a big
opportunity.
Once things are mature and working and they've spent decades, we in society have spent decades
getting them to work in a boring manner, there's usually less fewer business opportunities
because it's now quite efficient.
So anything you'd say here?
I think that this is pretty spot on.
You know, I've been experiencing a lot of these firsthand, right?
I think when you talk about legal frameworks of, first off, you have governments trying
to wrap their head around NFTs.
And now, as I think, my thesis is that NFTs will be coming into the real world and that
this tech will be coming into the real world.
And you do have to deal with the issues that you have highlighted here, right?
It's like, how do you associate the physical with the digital?
How do you handle shipping, insurance, damages?
How do you prove authenticity?
To me, these are all things that the space will have to deal with heads on, right?
And really deal with archaic laws that already exist, right?
And how you kind of retrofit that and create a framework for going forward, which I think
will be really interesting.
And to your point is where this is where a lot of the opportunity lies, right?
Because once people figure this out and once people understand exactly how these things
will be handled going forward, then a lot of those opportunities will then be gone by
them.
Agreed.
Let's see the next slide, VT.
So this is a slide I use a lot.
And it's very conceptual, right?
Like there's not actual dates in there.
All the things on the left are the things that could be done natively digital or intangible
assets.
And intangible assets are big categories, post to $80 trillion category.
And all types of things can be in there and those can happen, I think, faster because
you don't have to solve these bridges in the physical world.
And then abstracted physical or tangible assets, which are services and goods.
I think services like come even faster than goods.
It's going to be less of a regulatory hurdle to sell a tailor-subtricate ticket than sell
your house, right?
And then ultimately, ultimately, the ultimate claim is governance in the physical world.
I think that will come too.
Now, I think we will see more of the ladder of the physical stuff in the second half
of the decade and digital as obviously started now and will continue.
It doesn't mean we have to wait until 2025.
This is, we have people like G-money and he doing it today.
But because of these specific topics that need to be solved, it will take longer to ramp
up.
So, I think these are my general topics.
Let's go to 9DCC, which I think is a couple of slides forward.
And before we get into any sophisticated thoughts, tell us what it is.
Yeah, so at a really high level, 9DCC is a crypto-native luxury lifestyle brand.
And the reason why I felt like that there was a need for it is when I was going around
to conferences and I was going around and meeting people in real life, I quickly realized
that the same way that I can signal that I'm a crypto-native with my crypto-punk, and
that was my thesis for buying my ape when I did was this is a flex, this is a signal
that I am sending to my peers in a digital world.
Nothing like that existed to the way that I wanted it, in terms of an aesthetic that
I wanted to wear, that I could signal to the real world that I'm a crypto-native and having
the quality of product that I wanted to wear in terms of production.
You know, just generally like things that I would wear, it just didn't exist.
And so rather than wait for somebody else to go out and build it, I decided to do it
on my own.
So let me put it back in my words.
Obviously there's all types of quote unquote flexes in the physical world in terms of existing
physical products, but you from an aesthetic or messaging perspective, they're not crypto-native,
right?
Like there's existing luxury brands are not crypto-native.
So yeah, so I felt like that there was this kind of like if you had like these two subsets,
right?
It's like, you know, you could, I could walk into a Dior store and I could buy a shirt
off the rack and I could wear that out.
And that would obviously be of the quality that I wanted.
But that wouldn't signal that I was a crypto native.
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I feel like there was a lot of product from
the crypto world that, okay, I can signal that I'm a crypto native with it, but it wasn't
necessarily the quality or the community that I would necessarily want to be a part of.
And so I feel like there will be this growing intersection of the overlap of those two communities
over time.
I'm going to take a step back here because you very famously were one of the first people,
maybe the first person to pay an awful lot of money for a crypto book for your ape.
And I think that kind of snowballed the big rally in crypto punks.
Tell us a little bit about the logic because you said it was like that logic.
So let's tell the group that logic.
How do this all start?
Yeah.
So, you know, I, when I found NFTs, it was August of 2020, and they like almost immediately
made sense to me because I started playing Fortnite at the beginning of quarantine.
And that was back in March of 2020.
And when I was playing with all these kids, you know, teenagers, the first thing that they
would ask me is, you know, what skins did you buy?
And skins that they don't give you any special powers.
The only thing they do is change how you look while you play that game.
And these kids would be changing their skins every, you know, 10 to 20 minutes, depending
on how long the game was.
And I was, I said to myself, like, there's this massive super cycle here where that kid
is 12 years old today, 10 years from now, he'll be 22 and he'll have his own disposable
income and he'll be totally okay with owning a purely digital asset.
Now at the time, I had no idea what NFTs were, but it was an idea that stuck with me.
And when I found NFTs, I was like, wow, this is your skin on Twitter, right?
Like this is literally, you know, the same way that if I got a limited edition skin that
now trades on eBay at a premium, this type of thing would happen.
And to your point is, there is a secondary marketplace that exists for, you know, the
value of this thing to be found on in a free market.
And so I started delving down the crypto rabbit hole, the NFT rabbit hole, because I was already
in crypto.
And I saw crypto punks and I think the floor was maybe around $1,000 at the time, but
I said, oh, these are too expensive.
I want to find the next crypto punks.
And I ended up minting a bunch of chromisquiggles and, you know, Snowfro and a few other OGs
where, you know, they told me, what are you doing?
Like, you know, you should be buying a crypto punk.
You should buy a zombie or what, you know, or something like a big, a rare one, a super
rare one.
And, you know, I started spending some time really researching it.
And that's kind of where I developed my thesis, which is my, my pin tweet in my Twitter,
where, you know, humans are, you know, social creatures, right?
And even though the technology of how we interact with each other will change, but the one
thing that doesn't change is, you know, the way we signal to each other, the way we interact
with each other.
And like a really simple example that I always use is, you know, if we were to meet for dinner
6529 and we were to sit down and I were to show you my bank account, like that, like,
that would be weird, right?
That's just not how humans like interact with each other.
But I could almost send a very similar signal by wearing a nice watch, by driving a nice
car, by wearing nice clothes that, oh, you know, you don't know exactly how much is my
bank account.
But judging by the nature of the things that I am wearing or consuming, you can have a
good idea of like, oh, if this person is doing X, then, you know, it probably signals Y.
And that's just the way humans operate because that's, you know, that and that's been since
the dawn of time.
And it's not just humans, right?
It is other animals that do certain things or have certain behavior patterns.
That is, let's say, for mating or for social hierarchy within their groups.
And so my thesis very quickly became that, okay, the same way that me wearing a Rolex
to a nice dinner allows me to send a signal in that smaller group.
Me spending a certain amount of money that's verifiable on chain for a picture also sends
that signal of one, you know, what part of the community am I a part of?
But then two is also it's a verifiable signal that has a ton of scale, right?
So when I drive a Lamborghini through my neighborhood, then maybe only like 10 to 50 people see
it that day.
But if I buy something that's worth the same amount as that Lamborghini and I make it my
profile picture, then that scales to thousands, if not millions of people with the same, with
the same exact outlay.
And so that was like my original thesis for CryptoPunks and the APE.
And you know, it just, it was, to me, it's like it's signaled after spending, you know,
some time in the space in the NFT space, it's signaled what I thought would be maybe the
most crypto native OG community in the NFT space.
And so for that reason, people would want to be associated over time and it would hold
that provenance and it would hold that upper echelon within the community, even, you know,
through in into bear markets and bull markets.
Got it.
And then I think a big part of that turned out to be turned out to be right.
And then you're now saying, okay, when I'm interacting with my crypto community in real
life, how to represent these same things.
And that's a lot of, let me ask you, you're saying, is this somehow different?
And how is it different that you say, well, look, I'm making nice clothes.
What's different about that?
I think that there are a few things.
I think one is I'm integrating the technology into it, right?
But also it's like, you know, what does it stand for?
Right?
Because like I said, there is no, like I could wear a Bored APE, eight on my shirt, but that's
just generally not an aesthetic that I would want to wear.
And I think like for me, like the aesthetic that I created with 90 CC is something that
I would be interested in wearing.
I hope others would be interested in wearing.
I think it's a level of quality of, you know, I've been to a lot of crypto conferences.
I mean, people spend a lot of money on clothes.
People spend a lot of money on how they look.
And so, but the problem is is that there's no way to signal that you're a crypto native.
So I think that that was, that was the first pillar that I wanted to solve.
But then like where I think things get really interesting is, you know, kind of what's mentioned
on this slide here is where, you know, you can have a certificate of authenticity that
travels with the physical product, right?
And when you look at watches, right, I think watches are a great example where if you buy
a watch with paperwork, it's worth significantly more than a watch without paperwork, right?
So, you know, there, there is a good, a good proof case that there is a significant amount
of value placed on that certificate of authenticity.
And the more interlinked that you can make that certificate of authenticity with the
actual product, then the less risk there is of that thing being a fake, right?
You know, secondhand goods, secondhand luxury goods is a massive business and it's growing.
Like fake goods that are made is a massive business and it's still growing.
And so all of these things that there's, there is a lot of need for this, but there isn't
necessarily a solution out there that works at scale.
Because when you want to make, if you were to buy a product secondhand, you need to take
it to an expert that could still doesn't guarantee that it's actually real, right?
Because every, each and every day, fakes are getting better and better in terms of quality.
So that somebody that might have caught a fake, you know, three to five years ago might not
be able to catch that fake today.
So what better way than to have a certificate of authenticity that is provable on a decentralized
ledger by just scanning the shirt instead of, let's say, having to increase that cost
of transaction by having to go to an expert to verify that it's real.
And even then that verification doesn't necessarily guarantee that it's real.
So you said there's the tech.
How does that work?
So it's really simple.
So on all of our iteration one and iteration two shirts, you can see in the patch where
the nine is on both those shirts and those pictures, there's an NFT chip behind that
patch, which you can then scan.
And it takes you to a page that shows you the NFT that represents that shirt on the blockchain.
And that it is held in that owner's wallet.
So there's a little chip embedded in the shirt.
Yeah.
What?
Yes.
And you can longer it with a wash it.
Yeah.
And this and the NFT, if I go now and just buy one of these NFTs online.
So where's the shirt?
How do I get it?
So the way we did the drop mechanic was we partnered with 4K, which is a centralized
custodian, to your point that you were saying earlier, right, is what I found that, you know,
when you take a look at, you know, sneaker culture and you take a look at the resale
market, a lot of people will buy more than one product, right?
So you'll buy like people always say, one to one to cop and one to one to rock and one
to cop.
And so what ends up happening is people will store a pair of sneakers in their closet
and they will never wear them.
And that stays stored in their closet until they dig the day they go to sell it.
And so my thought process is if I'm only going to be storing it in my closet and the
only time I'm going to touch it is when I actually go to sell it, there's technically
no reason for me to take delivery.
Much the same way that stocks work, right, is like you don't physically take delivery
of the shares when you buy and sell it.
You have a claim on those shares that is managed by a central database that will tell you that
runs their own ledger that tells you you buy or you own or you buy or sell an asset.
And so what we did is we partnered with 4K, so when we made all of the shirts, we delivered
them to 4K and 4K then issued an NFT voucher which represents that T-shirt in their warehouse.
And we can go around and you can trade that a thousand times.
And then at any given point in time, whoever owns that voucher can then go to 4K and claim
that shirt and get it delivered to them anywhere in the world within three to five days, which
I think is an insanely amazing feat considering where we are with the resale of goods today
where it happens on eBay, it happens on StockX, the cost of transactions is way higher because
you have to verify things that might be in the condition that might not be in the condition
that they're supposed to be in, but then also the length of time that it takes to verify
that something is real, to get it sent from the seller, to the authenticator, to the buyer,
just like there's a lot of friction there.
And I feel like by placing these assets in a centralized custodian that to your point
is can verify the condition that they're in and can verify delivery and that there's
actually an actual physical product there, you then make the friction much lower, right?
And you increase this ability for people to conduct commerce on a much global scale.
And does 4K charge the, let's say I buy the NFT, now I have a claim on a shirt at 4K,
do I have to pay annual storage?
How does it work?
So the way we work the first shop, the first shop has free lifetime storage, the second
shop has free storage for two years, free storage and insurance for two years.
And then afterwards, I believe the fee might be like around $2 a year, per shirt.
I don't know the exact thoughts off my head, but it very much would work in terms of like
if anybody sees, and this is like long term, but if anybody has seen storage wars where
somebody were to default on like their storage fees at some point, then they obviously forfeit
the asset that's held in the warehouse and then it would go to auction.
Right.
And then if, so I can trade and then the person who buys it knows the shirt bagging it, if
I redeem the shirt, does my NFT change from like a mid pass NFT to a kind of ownership
NFT?
Yeah.
So what ends up happening is when you claim the shirt, you burn your NFT, which is basically
a bearer instrument for that shirt in their warehouse.
They ship you the shirt.
When you get this fit, when you get the physical shirt, you unpack it, you then scan the tag
and then you can pull the NFT into your wallet, which acts as the certificate of authenticity.
So like for me, like one of the things that I had a really tough time wrapping my head
around and you know, when I when I met the team in IYK, it made the most sense to me
where up until that point, all the solutions that I had seen linking the physical product
to the digital NFT didn't scale because it works great on the primary sale, right?
It works great if you are the first person to buy the product for me.
I ship you the shirt and I ship you the NFT.
But now what happens if you want to turn around and you want to sell it to somebody else,
right?
It doesn't scale because if you were to if you were to give them that shirt and somebody
were to give you cash, then you need to go home and send them that NFT.
Now as soon as you have that cash, you are no longer incentivized to send them that NFT.
You'll get to it when you get to it.
But by and that's a push mechanism, right?
By using the pull mechanism, which IYK, you know, originally were the first people that
spoke to me about it.
I thought it was genius in the sense that whoever has physical possession of the shirt
can then pull that NFT, that certificate of authenticity into their wallet.
So you know, when they say possession is nine tenths of the law, you know, that that rings
really true in the sense that yes, you have that physical certificate of authenticity
that travels with the actual shirts so that in that interaction that I just told you about,
then as soon as you get your money, then the transaction is over.
That person can then pull that certificate of authenticity into their wallet whenever they
want.
So basically it's a custom contract that IYK runs.
And if you scan the physical, whoever has access to the physical good can pull the virtual
day.
Yes.
It's really interesting.
And like the thing that I really liked about it was that it was just nobody else had really
come up with that solution at the time.
This was, you know, over a year ago at this point.
And I was like, wow, that to me is something that's super scalable, right?
That because again, going back to the watch example where, you know, you have, you can
make an argument that the paperwork that certificate of authenticity is equally as valuable if
not maybe more valuable than the actual watch itself, right?
Because that's the proof that this is real.
Right.
And even though, and people can't, can they copy that?
The NFT?
The code is scanned.
No, because the code is like it's locked into the chip.
So, you know, if you like, if you wanted to, let's say, make a fake, right?
It ultimately wouldn't have, you know, you wouldn't be able to claim the actual NFT fraud
that originally comes from the 90 CC wallet.
You know, when you talk about provenance and we obviously talk about this with artists all
the time.
And the reason why I named the brand 90 CC is that is the wallet that is the proof, the
provenance, right?
All our NFTs come from there.
Come from that wallet.
So then you can chain, you can, you can track that chain of history, right?
Where it's like, it will come if you bought a shirt, you bought it from 90 CC.
It goes from 90 CC's wallet to 6529's wallet to whoever other wallet who buys it there
after you.
And that to me becomes super important, right?
So it's like, if somebody were to make a fake, they could, they can make a fake of everything,
except for the actual NFT that can then be pulled into the wallet.
So when you talk about, you know, verifying authenticity, all of a sudden, instead of
having to go to an authenticator to make something as real, it literally just comes down to
something as simple as a scam.
Very interesting.
Okay.
So what, what have been the challenges?
I'll say the challenges have been like dealing with the meat space, right?
dealing with all the things that that you were talking about in terms of, you know, regulation,
shipping, taxes, all these things that there isn't enough regulatory clarity around things
yet.
And we're trying to navigate things the best that we can.
While also like, you know, trying to operate at the forefront of technology of, you know,
a lot of this comes from these are things that I just want to see in the world as a consumer,
right?
If I'm spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on something that's expensive,
I would like to know like, verifiably, how many of them exist, right?
Like, I think this, this always happens, I think with a lot of the luxury goods markets
is where people like, you know, you'll ask is like, how many of these exist?
And they give you a number, but like, you can't necessarily verify that.
Like, they could be over producing or under producing.
And, you know, really relying on the customer's trust, but it's like, why shouldn't it exist
in a way so that people understand exactly how many of them exist in the real world?
Because that also affects long-term value as well, right?
Of like, you know, like t-shirts are going to be naturally deflationary, right?
In terms of, you know, there's wear and tear over time.
There's as soon as you wear one, right?
It's worth, it's worth a different amount than a brand new, never worn shirt.
So I think that will affect, it's going to be really interesting to watch this play out
long-term.
But I'll say like a lot of the, a lot of the stuff has been in terms of delivering quickly,
right?
Having an idea where, you know, in a digital space, I can have an idea and I can execute
it relatively quickly because there's no physical manufacturing component.
But I think when you start getting into the manufacturing of things and the physicality
of things, things start to get much more complicated, right?
And so I'll use like our second drop, which was iteration two, which we did with Snowfro.
It was the collaboration with Snowfro.
It was in our Basel.
And what we did was we made generative clothes on demand for, you know, five days at a pop-up.
So people would come in, they didn't need to have crypto, they can come in, they could
swipe a credit card.
They would mint an NFT, which was a squiggle variant.
So it was the same exact algorithm that Snowfro used to generate the chromiswiggle.
But instead of a squiggly line output, it's a straight line output with the 90cc logo
above.
As soon as that got minted onto the blockchain, we then printed that onto a T-shirt.
We then linked that NFT that the person just minted to the physical shirt so that it travels
with the shirt.
And then we boxed it up and handed it to the customer within 10 minutes.
And so to me, the technical feed of that was amazing.
The fact that we were able to pull that off, there was about 41 hours over the course of
five days that we were up and we were only down for 12 minutes.
And so the fact that we were able to do that, there's a lot of operational intricacies that
end up going into that.
But I think when I look into the future of the same way that we all want very personal
lines, digital products to represent who we are, I think we, as the manufacturing process
is catch up to the human imagination, we're going to start seeing a need and a desire
for personalization, mass personalization within the physical space as well.
So Snowfro was on the course earlier in the fall.
And that's one of his big ideas also, right?
We will see mass personalization, mass customization in physical goods as well.
And it's one of the things he hopes to be working on with Artblocks.
So logically, all kind of luxury brands at least are going to want to do something like
what you're doing, right?
And it improves their ability to say, this is the real one and someone else goes and
buys it on Canal Street.
It's not quite the same thing, right?
Exactly.
And I think one, you know, that from low hanging fruit is that certificate of authenticity.
But then also to the point you just made is, you know, mass customization of, you know,
how cool would it be if, you know, you walk into a Louis Vuitton store.
You pick out your favorite purse and you get that personalized more so than just maybe
having like your initials monogrammed on it, right?
You can have like your favorite prints or your favorite artist or, you know, whatever
have you kind of be printed onto it.
And so you get that element of personalization.
And I think that that's where the world is headed.
I think just at this moment, again, we're just held back by the manufacturing process
of how you can do something like this at scale because over the last, you know, hundreds
of 150 years, you know, it's been the exact opposite where it's like, how do you get the
lowest price product of making, you know, a hundred million of the same things for the
lowest cost?
Now, I think we're going to be running into the problem of trying to figure out how do
you make a hundred million unique individual things for the lowest cost?
And is there a way, and I'm not saying today, but somehow that the authenticity would be
visible in the physical world, obviously not going to go around scanning people's, I mean,
be weird if I came and grabbed your tag and like, I had to scan your edit of seat ship,
right?
But like, is there a way where that does sort of happen in like AR or something?
I mean, I could see that possibly happening with AR, right?
So in a world where we're all wearing like Google or Apple glasses, or AR glasses, where
you know, it could say, you know, like verified real almost like, think of it maybe like a
verified collection on OpenSea, right?
And I don't know like the exact capabilities of what that tech would look like, but I could
definitely see a world where that ends up happening.
And you know, like, I think it will lower the amount of fakes out there, right?
Because there's that like social and public shame of people, if people find out that,
you know, you have a fake Rolex or whatever it is, I think it's going to be interesting
to watch the dynamic play out in real time.
But I do, I do foresee a world where that can happen.
I mean, if there was some world where it's the same world where if you are demonstrating
what's in your wallet, right?
If you can, the same world where you can show that you own your punk in the physical world
is the same world you can do this because all you need to do is show the NFT, right?
We don't need to touch, we don't need to touch your shirt.
That could be kind of awkward, right?
If you have the NFT, then you have the NFT for this in the same way that if you have
a punk, you can show a punk.
So if you have some type of augmented reality glasses, which are going to happen, right?
And if people are somehow signing with their device, I guess their wallet, right?
Their public addresses are wallet, then maybe you could do it that way, right?
You could imagine happening about that.
Yeah, I mean, I could definitely see that where you can showcase the collection that
you want people to see, right?
So if you go to a nightclub, maybe you probably showcase a different collection than if you
were to go to get coffee at Starbucks, right?
Yeah, really interesting.
I mean, I can see how this could be appealing to obviously crypto native fashion companies
like yours, but lifestyle or whatever the right word is, but how it could be interesting
on the traditional providers who have a large problem with counterfeit, right?
Yeah, I believe it was, I think, $80 billion last year and expected to grow.
I think maybe double digits to share.
What else are you seeing out there that you think is super interesting, challenging?
What's the future of 9DCC?
Where do we go next?
You know, I think to me, the most compelling part of everything that we've done over the
last six to seven months has been the gamification of IRL.
And you don't want people coming up to you and randomly scanning your tag, but I think
what we saw in our Basel was that people do enjoy that and people do like to connect,
right?
Because, and I noticed this really early on after the lockdowns ended, is that we were
making all these connections online, but people want to connect in real life.
And I can make an argument that probably the biggest utility of NFTs is connecting in real
life as people make these friends in Discord.
And then when they go to a conference, they want to meet up in real life and have a meet
up for their communities.
And so, and this was really born from the idea that I ran a POAP event in June of 2021,
where I tweeted out, you know, show up to this place, and this is during BTC Miami.
And I tweeted out, show up to this place and, you know, collect the POAP, the person wearing
the G Money shirt.
And about 80 people showed up over the course of three days.
One of those days, there were two guys that met up that didn't have anything in common
other than the fact that they both followed me and they both showed up to the same coffee
shop at the same time to collect the POAP.
They ended up starting a venture fund together and they ended up co-founding a few dows together.
And I think about that a lot because these are two people that otherwise would not have
met if it wasn't for me sending out that tweet.
And as I think about, how can I then increase these interactions to happen at scale so that
I don't need to be that center spoke for people to connect.
But I can rather create this network where each individual person in that network could
basically become their own node and create their network around them, which will grow
the entire network.
So what we ended up doing and for anybody that ever sees a 90cc shirt out in the wild,
you can go up to that shirt and you can collect the POAP because each shirt distributes its
own individual POAP.
So it is proof that you met that physical shirt.
And what we did with our Basel is we ran two contests concurrently where there was a leaderboard
for the people, for the person that would collect the most POAPs from unique individual
shirts.
And there was also another leaderboard for the person that distributed the most POOPs.
And this was run over the course of five days.
We distributed close to 5,000 POAPs over the course of five days.
And this was all people running around Miami making connections.
I had a lot of people reach out to me saying how it was an amazing icebreaker, right?
Because a lot of times, even if you see somebody wearing a shirt that you like, a lot of times
the conversation is, hey, I like your shirt, thanks.
And the conversation ends there.
But I think as humans, we crave that connection, right?
We want to connect with people.
And so what collecting a POAP allows is a lot, it allows that icebreaker to happen in a very
authentic way, right?
Where it's like, oh, hey, like, you know, you see somebody wearing the shirt, you collect
their POAP, maybe, you know, it takes, you know, five to 15 seconds to actually go through
the process.
And in that time, you start talking to the person and it's like, oh, where are you from?
What do you do?
What are you into?
Maybe a new friendship forms, maybe a new business relationship forms.
Who knows?
The possibilities are endless.
But I do think that like by being able to gamify these connections that are we seeing
in Discord, in Twitter, like in a digital space and bringing that out into the real world,
I think that that's where like the real secret sauce is.
And that's what gets me the most excited about what we're doing.
Okay.
Very interesting.
What are the things that we should have discussed about 9DCC or the challenges opportunity setup
future that we haven't discussed yet, that we should cover?
I think, you know, we, I think overall through the entire presentation, we've been discussing
it, but I want to really lean into like the composability of it, right?
Which is really like what makes crypto so powerful is composability, right?
And everything that we've been talking about, and I think the hotel room example that you
use is a great example of it is like when you can take, you know, non-fungible/
semi-fungible assets and make them as composable as possible, what, you know, how valuable does
that become, right?
And so I'll use the t-shirt says an example, but you can also technically use it against
like hotel inventory, right?
Of being able to then post that as collateral in an NFT lending platform and take out a
loan against it.
Like, I think I probably took out the first on-chain loan against a t-shirt about two
months ago, where I posted as collateral.
I had somebody that was willing to lend me money against it.
And now people that own a 9DCC shirt can then post it as collateral and get a $125 loan
almost instantaneously by posting as collateral.
And I think that these value unlocks that start to happen in markets that are very immature
that don't have access to this type of capital, right?
Because what I'm describing is a margin loan against a stock.
It is a mortgage against a piece of real estate.
It's nothing that's very esoteric or complex in the traditional finance world, but you're
going to open up these markets and give people access to this capital that otherwise might
not have had it.
And that all really comes from composability.
Very interesting.
Let's go see the other slides.
There's some examples and I think one of them is your partner, so we can actually, I want
to get your views on them.
I think they're in some of the slides.
So, Mattereum, this has been going on, they've been working on this for a while and it's
not the case, but my understanding and we might next running of the course get the founder
Vinay to talk to him about it.
The general, I'm going to summarize it, it might be wrong.
But like my general views they spend a lot of time thinking about the contractual aspects.
I don't think they worry so much about the gamification, or there are mental levels, how
make sure that the sales of these assets in ABCD jurisdictions are legally binding and
have a legally binding contract that people can use. Do you have a different sense of
how they think about it? I think that's the way they think about it. I spoke to Vinay
I think almost two years ago at this point but from my understanding he was thinking about it
at more of the contractual level and how you can maybe sell a piece of real estate on chain
between a counterparty in let's say Europe and the United States and dealing with the laws
and how that works. So I think he's thinking at a very high level in terms of that.
Yeah we need to get him on in the spring and talk to him. He's very interesting.
I follow him on Twitter he's very interesting so it'll be good to get his views. What's the next one
VT? All right so 4k I think you should present the slide in
Talisman 4k since you're an actual customer 4k. Yep I mean I love the product. I had
I originally wanted to make create a centralized custodian back in I think it was December of 2020
where I remember when Nifty Gateway did the the beeble drop and there was I think it was like
an eight-week trading window where you can trade the digital asset and then there was like a six-week
claim window where you can claim the physical the physical piece that came with the drop.
And I remember reaching out to somebody on the customer support staff I'm like well
you're gonna you're gonna crush the trading like one-step physical window is done because
I know there's gonna be more value I think long-term in keeping the digital and the physical
component combined. I think we saw a lot of people over the last like you know two years really
disconnect that because people didn't necessarily care about the physical component but I do think
long-term people are gonna want both of those together. So I really early on I was like there's
going to be a need for this centralized custodian much the same way that free ports exist in that
yeah I'm gonna I'm in a whole this physical asset someplace because I don't need to take possession
of it but I do want to have the access to a 24/7 global marketplace and at the time
like I spoke to a few lawyers and nobody had any idea what an NFT was and when I explained the
contract it really was I feel they they didn't I think they didn't totally understand it and I
spoke to a few people and it seemed like there would be enough legal risk that I didn't necessarily
want to do it as a US citizen living in US jurisdiction but I said I will like if I find the
founder that wants to do this this is like I think this would be a massive business I was introduced
to to Richard maybe like maybe a year ago or yeah maybe a year ago a year and a half ago and I
mean I loved it obviously because I had that idea organically myself as well and I saw that he was
already doing it and so you know we spent a lot of time talking and what I think is really interesting
and I had him on my podcast a few months ago was being able to bring like a lot of different
um ask real-world assets on chain like he even said like the possibility of bringing like
like the caretaking of an animal on chain and I think he has to figure out the logistics of that
but I'm like ultimately the world where it's like you know like um those like you know take you
know pay a dollar a day to like feed like a monkey or something like you could technically run
something like that off the 4k protocol which I think becomes like very interesting um and like
I don't know the legality of the complexities of that but at the very least right is like you can
take you know something like a Rolex watch something like I have some sneakers that are custody there
I have 90 cc shirts that are custody there but then also by building out on the protocol layer
then other people can create also their own storage on top of that right so it's like if I have an
empty warehouse here in my backyard I can then take custody and verify that let's say that Rolex
is real and that it's stored in a location in a safe location uh and be part of that 4k network
that ultimately starts originally with their protocol but then builds out globally and like
what does that mean for the implications is that network builds out so I I think that there's like
a lot of really cool stuff that that can be done with this right and what I'm I'm really interested
about on the uh on the composability layer is now being able to take that real world asset
and then use it as collateral for other things right and I think this is where
when you have that zero to one moment where I think it's going to be very difficult there's
going to be a harder time bringing real estate on chain then there will be bringing watches on
chain or sneakers on chain because financing mechanisms for those two industries that I just
said don't exist on a global scale yet, whereas you know getting a mortgage for real estate is like
it's a massively global business that already has its processes flow and place and it already has
you know its industry and its people with vested interests whereas if you're able to take something
from zero to one and provide capital and provide access to capital and financing that a market
might not already have I think you're going to see faster adoption than you will you know I
firmly believe real estate comes on chain I just think it will take much longer because there's
already a mature industry around it. Makes perfect sense what's the next let's go to the next slide
do you know about corn lord I do I'm I angel invested into it they're very similar to 4k right they do
physical custody of assets and issue you in nft they've teamed up with with brinks as their
vaulting partner so you know they've had a few drops I believe their first drops might have been
on polygon I'm not exactly sure I think they were on on an L2 to start but I'm not sure where they're
they're currently issuing their nft's okay and what do we have next and then. Americana I think
it's trying to be the open sea for physically backed nft's right is that are you are you very familiar
with them I'm not very familiar with them I know that they're chipping products and creating I think
a marketplace for those products I haven't I haven't had the opportunity to chat with their team
very closely just like you know in passing at you know at like a cocktail hour or something.
Okay, do we have anything else let's see do you want to take on the artifact sneakers I think I
know how they work but you brought you might you probably pay more attention to the details
yeah I mean listen artifact I think they've been trailblazers in the category right and you know
I think they they got acquired by Nike because of you know all the cool things that they were doing
I think that you know all the things that they've done have been like really pushing boundaries and
I you know I think most people know what they do and you know they've created these digital
components and then also for the most part usually have these forging windows where you can then
claim physical product at which point they fulfill that product and then send it out
and I believe, it's interesting to watch these different drop mechanics and you know, I know this
as well because I'm going through it with the stuff that I'm doing at 90cc whereas I you know I
don't know if we have found out like the best drop mechanics just yet so I think you're gonna see a
lot of playing around, with how drops work with how you know how do you fulfill physical product
right because especially when it comes to something like clothes or sneakers, where everyone wears a
different size, you can't necessarily pre-sell sizing but you know because then you fragment
the market a little too much right and it's like what you know what is that right balance between
liquidity and the right balance between getting the product out there and and time frames but
you know I think artifact has has done an amazing job for the physical digital space
over the last two years and you know they're they're always going to be a team to watch.
And you know for the audience I think most people know that they're now owned by Nike right and so
I view them not just as an interesting organization but my guess is this is like the
R&D lab for these ideas in Nike in general and the ones that are successful will probably see
rolled out at Nike scale which is just an absolutely gigantic scale right like so
yeah and I look at this and I think when you want to talk about you know mass adoption
and consumer adoption like you know when you have brands like Nike and Adidas coming into the space
like you know I mean it's almost inevitable that you know you at some point soon you will be getting
adoption because these are brands that drive culture right these are brands that you know
probably you know Nike's probably one of the coolest brands on the planet right and so
whatever it is that they do and to your point is I I would take a strong guess that artifact is
almost like their web 3 R&D team and when things work within artifact then they start scaling that
across their organization and that's when you're going to start seeing a lot of people start to
get onboarded into the space you had actually helped bring Adidas into the space right
yep I partnered with them board apes and punk's comic for their for their initial drop
and how did you and I'm curious for me I don't know procedural perspective you're
sitting there you want some NFTs you think you think big companies should do this but I assume
these big companies don't didn't then know really much about NFTs how did you make that happen
um so you know I got randomly DM'd by somebody on their team who told me you know he loved what
I was doing he worked at Adidas on their web 3 on their web 3 team and he wanted to chat now I had
no idea if he really worked at Adidas or not but I figured you know what's a 20 minute phone call
like you know what if he really does work at Adidas it turned out he did and you know we ended up
having these like amazing conversations because because my thesis and my thought process behind
you know working with any large organization is that I want them to onboard onto crypto rails
onto decentralized rails right because at some point right and this is almost like the world we
live in now is you know your your conglomerates that exist in the legacy world today will try to
you know do something that is let's say web 3 but not entirely web 3 you'll be like let's say within
their their wall garden of an ecosystem and they'll call it web 3 you'll be let's say a digital
collectible but there won't be true ownership there and so you know the more of these brands that we
can build on truly decentralized rails then the better it is for all of us as consumers right
like when you think about when you see all these movies about these dystopian futures of what that
world looks like usually it's where there's you know one one person or a small council of people
deciding and making decisions for all of humanity and people you know don't have any say in what they
can do with their assets right and the more digital our lives become then the more that these high
councils can control what it is and and what it is and what we do with with our assets and so that's
why for me like building on Ethereum building on you know EVM compatible chains is something that
I firmly believe in because there is you know asset ownership there where okay maybe if you
violate the terms of service you can't play in that world but the assets you own are still yours
right there's there's always that story that people say of you know how I think Vitalik was banned
from World of Warcraft and that was like part of his reasoning for creating Ethereum right where
he lost you know he found like a bug in the system was able to take advantage of it but then lost his
account and lost all of his work because of it when and and that's like well I should have ownership
over my property because I paid for it right like you know how valuable would it be to a gamer that
you know let's say spent a thousand dollars on Fortnite the size they don't want to play Fortnite anymore
right instead of just having a thousand dollars of sunk you know skin cost that they can never get
back if they can get some sort of return on that saying like okay somebody else wants to buy these
I don't want to own them and I think that you know the more that we can teach these brands to build
on these truly decentralized rails I think the better it will be for society because then that
leads to more adoption on those decentralized rails which leads to more ownership over your
personal property in the future I couldn't agree with you more this is I think where we are fully
aligned I think you and I focus on different things but the general objective is the same that the
more we can get people to use standardized public interoperable rails the better the world will be
in the long run okay let's shift gears and take some questions for the from the audience and I'll
go vp I'll go into the discord so that I can find the questions as they're being asked and give me a
second I will see what what the people want to know
all right privacy concerned walking around with a scalable NFC could lead to dioxing or even
tracking how do we protect privacy with NFC readable wearables risks of document tracking and
it's a good question well how do you think about this um so with regards to tracking we don't
track any data right the NFC chips are like not powered right so that so there's no like tracking
of personal data all you do is basically like you can scan you know where that shirt is at one
point in time right and you know this is something I've thought long about as well with you know and
I think we're probably going to be moving towards a world of zk right where you can uh at test that
somebody was somewhere without that person necessarily having to sew things on blockchain I just don't
think that the tech is there just yet but I do think long term you know people will be able to
turn on or turn off like you know privacy concerns and certain stuff like yeah I don't want you know
let's say um people that collect my po-op to kind of know where I am at a given point in time if let's
say I'm at a party at a specific event right and this already exists with let's say when people scan
po-ops uh per se is like you scan in uh you collect the po-op for that event um you have to be there
to collect that po-op I think over time we'll probably see a move towards whether it's zk or
maybe not everything is stored on chain or you have the opportunity to kind of um send that po-op
like after the fact so you don't necessarily know who's there in real time um I think that these
are all concerns I've definitely thought about it I just I feel like at the at this point in time
we're like in the proof of concept phase that we can then iterate on and tackle those privacy
concerns but I I definitely you know as somebody you know as pretty much everybody on the planet
is probably tracked through their phone uh realizing how important that data is and making sure that
you have the trust you know you have our trust that you know we're not collecting you know real
time data on where you are uh in order to you know geotarget or whatever have you
right and I don't know if the question was meant that you attract them could someone I don't know
how the tech works could someone use a remote reader to scan someone's shirt at a distance
no I I don't like because because of the like the the like the communication field for that is
solo like you have to you have to put your phone like very close uh to the actual chip in order
to get because again there's no power in the chip so it's kind of powered by the device that
scans it so the device has to be close to kind of like utilize it sorry that's the the near field
and NFC right like so I if I were wearing the shirt and someone wanted to scan my NFC chip
I'd notice because they'd be right next to me yeah they they'd be rubbing their phone up against your
shirt could be awkward it could be um okay here's the question how many people put their shirts
in storage I guess your initial drop how many people said give me this t-shirt I'm wearing it
down in Miami and how many have kept it in the vault for future results yep so um from the initial
drop I think we're at a little bit above 40% of people that took delivery of the shirt to wear it
and from the second drop I think we're at around 50% um you know we we did about 50% um live in Miami
of the mint because we really wanted to showcase the you know the actual generative manufacturing
process live on the ground and then uh you know I think the interesting thing about the second drop
is it's probably more of a collectible as well it's like it's an affordable chromisquiggle uh
interestingly enough there was a father son uh his son had always wanted a chromisquiggle but
they were priced out of it um because they found out about swiggles too late he took his son out of
school for a day and they flew down together had this experience where he minted a squiggle a shirt
as a squiggle variant and now that like his his son's uh version of a squiggle so I think that like
wow the interesting thing is going to be uh you know seeing that like collectibility play into
things as well because there you know this one this is a rift right so this one is rarer than than a
floor next question are there companies out there working to build platforms specifically
the designs to enable this concept of moving from databases to markets across industries
I'm aware of teams doing this individually fly fishing restaurants links down and golf
but is anyone building out the tooling to do it across industries I have answers but let me hear
your answer but I'll comment on this I don't know anybody that's trying to build a platform like
this at scale I think even as you were presenting it I feel like it becomes very industry specific
because I think some of the hardest stuff is to get the buy-in right like I think you have to be
in the travel industry and very high up to be able to convince like you know uh booking.com
Expedia and all these companies to come into this same protocol so I think it becomes very
industry specific at least for the foreseeable future but I but maybe I'm wrong I'd love to hear
what you think 6529 yeah um I guess my super abstract view of this is that if the outcome
um is anyway NFTs NFTs are the platform right like the whole point generally
network type protocols whether it's TCP IP or SMTP or Bitcoin right FTS works specifically
because you don't have to get everyone to agree to do something together right like the social
coordination costs are really high because you're just oh I want to do my platforms I was all
know I have a better idea I'll do it this way than someone else who I have I have access to the
market in France and I'm going to do it this other way and so and I think a lot of these are going
to need industry specific tooling right the solution for how it works on restaurants is going to be
different than golf courses which is also going to be different than apartments which will also
be different than fashion and so for me I don't know I don't know what a generic tooling would look
like other than the generic tooling being NFTs and so like if people do whatever they're going to do
on their individual workflow but in the end um people can uh represent their claims when NFT
then you get to pick up as the issuer all of the infrastructure that is being built generically
for NFTs right like you don't have to build a marketplace there's going to be many marketplaces
right you don't have to build a lending platform you don't have to build the gallery to display
them right because people are going to be building these things for NFTs as a whole and if we get
like a couple of years in the future another maybe order of magnitude worth of adoption in
people and applications I think it's over right like then the incentives you're not going to have
to like tell companies things about like decentralization it will just be obvious that if they issue
their claim as an NFT it is better for them than trying to build an end-to-end infrastructure by
themselves because they'll never keep up with literally the whole internet building infrastructure
for brc721s and 1155s or whatever the the variations will be on other blockchains right so I think
that's where I come out of this one the next question is for me um I will laugh about this one
can we use NFTs as proof of knowledge passing courses college courses etc really yes there
if you pass the exam with other those courses you're going to get an NFT absolutely
you are in specifically the, um, the service that we'll use NFT as a proof of knowledge
okay i think i have a follow up on that for you um when when you issue those NFTs will they be
sold out so this is a great question and I have discussed this in great detail with the unit team
and that it all start with a conclusion they will not be sold out and I'll tell you why because
that was their first question maybe sold out if I have an educational credential that I'm
going to keep for years decades right well the odds that my wallet is not going to be different
20 years from now is literally zero right I've gone through three wallets or ready since I started
with NFTs and looking maybe me as well I have I have my nuisance wallet my safe vault maybe
won't change but the odds that the average person in this class is not going to change their wallet
zero zero like people might have started with a hot wall then maybe they might go to a treasure
maybe they'll go to some social recovery wall maybe they'll later go to a multi-sick wallet I mean
and this I think all these things are going to happen in the next 18 months not in the next like
18 years right so a model where we say oh it's so bound because a model where people are going to
get stuck needing to move them and then what that's going to be is someone is going to have to come
to UNIC and say move it to this new wallet and I need to somehow explain to you that I'm the same
person and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. I believe it is operationally impossible right and for this to exist over decades right so I start with I don't think the soulbound model generally works I'm not
actually quite bearish on the Soulbound model.
I think it needs to be solved with other ways.
And it's like, oh, do the other ways are problems?
Yes.
It's just the Soulbound one.
Effectively, the only way you solve the Soulbound
is to just make it centralized.
But if you make it centralized,
then Munich might as well just keep it in their database
of people who have completed the course, right?
Then what's the difference?
You can always call up Munich and say,
hey, did I complete this course, right?
So that's back in one.
And then it's interesting to see what Munich
and other academic institutions did in the past.
So I don't know if you ever discussed this on this course,
one of their, they had, I think,
where the first issue to plume was on the blockchain
as on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Pretty long before and if these.
And their solutions were interesting
because it is, it was a hash into the Bitcoin blockchain
and you got a PDF and those are merciful
for all these things that we're using now
for allow us to what have you.
And you could check if the hash of your PDF
was in that transaction, right?
So there it was interesting
because it wasn't even in your wallet at all, right?
You just have a PDF.
And that PDF you could check if it was,
it's like the end of chip, right?
Like you can say I have this off chain good,
but I can tell you if it exists
on chain transaction.
So that's one model, it's portable with the user, right?
So that's one interesting model.
Now on NFTs,
and I think what's gonna happen on this course,
though George and I haven't finalized it,
well, there's a couple of things you can do.
First of all, we're gonna let people
if they choose put their name on it, right?
If they put their name on it,
they have to pick one person that it is, right?
So if you want to say,
if I say I'm Mike Smith, I completed this course,
selling my chip, I was like,
oh, what if they sell their credentials, right?
Well, if my credentials are Mike Smith,
and I sell them to Sally,
what good is it gonna do Sally?
Right, like I'd have to find another Mike Smith.
And I was like, well, I don't wanna do that,
I wanna put my ETH address.
Okay, that's fine.
You can put 6529.ETH.
But then it's really only relevant to whoever
has built up reputation as 6529.ETH, right?
And it's not generically sellable, right?
I mean, why is that gonna be useful?
What'll be useful to you?
If you said, like, hey, look,
I completed the course, here's my certificate.
And on the certificate on the NFT,
it says 6529.ETH.
I was like, wait, that's not you, right?
Is it all well?
What if,
or what if someone takes the course
in someone else's name?
Well, sure, that's a risk,
but that's not solved by sold-bound token.
That's solved by KYC, right?
And so then there's an interesting question.
Do you want to, you know, obviously for,
I understand if you complete,
go on from this course and do the degree program,
you will effectively get KYC
because the University want transcripts
and all these other things and like,
you're, I don't know, driver's license passport,
I don't know what they'll need,
but like, you don't get KYC, right?
Now for a course like this,
where someone is going to show their credential
in their wallet, right?
To me, the right answer,
they're in the right balance
between decentralization and practicality
is that it's not sold-bound,
that people can either put a physical name on it,
or they can put an enist name on it,
and then they can move it from place to place,
and you know, their physical name
is going to stay with them the rest of your life,
presumably, and your enist can actually transport
across wallets, right?
I might change, I'm using some model treasure
at 6.529.eth, right?
Do I think in 20 years,
the same treasure is going to be working now,
I'm pretty sure it won't be, right?
I'm pretty sure we're using something else,
but I can certainly 6.529.eth, right?
And if I had a certificate that was issued and signed
by 6.529.eth, okay, what differences it make
if it's in the difference of theorematics?
So, that's how we're thinking about it.
I think we'll be making some decisions soon,
and we'll probably like, tweet about it
and what the trade-offs are,
but I just think you have to assume that the soulbound token
concept is effectively for this purpose,
unworkable, or indistinguishable with being centralized,
and then see how you work out those solutions.
Yeah, and I tend to agree with that.
I've been thinking a lot about it, right?
Where it's like, it's almost like,
effectively you're creating like an account, right?
And then each wallet is almost like a sub account
associated with that account.
And to your point is like, you don't know,
you know, you don't know if you're going to use your wallet
for the rest of your life, probably not, right?
Because of the nature of technology.
So you need to have that ability to self-transfer things.
So that makes sense to me.
I think that that's probably, and I think delegate cash
is probably one of those examples, right?
Of like almost creating like a user account,
and then you have all these sub accounts,
and you can then sexualize risk, right?
From a different perspective, but I do think that like,
these rules apply to that as well.
Yeah, delegate cash fixes another problem,
which is an all the delegation solutions,
which is not minting from your cold wallet, right?
But I think for this problem of which,
the other people, the reason people always ask
it like is it so modern on is,
but what if someone else gets the certifications
of the person at the course, right?
But I think the answer to that is,
you can put a name on it, but your name can also
be a real name or it can be an ENS.
And the ENS abstracts away,
not just a hot wallet, it can abstract away your name wall.
No, right?
Now, let's say someone's self,
let's say I sell my whole digital identity, okay, fine,
but like, honestly, I'm gonna sell my whole digital identity.
I'm not gonna do it because of a certificate
from a MOOC course, right?
I mean, like there's bigger issues at play there than this, right?
And it's putting the card,
if tomorrow you turn into six times a night,
I think it's okay, fine, but like,
I don't think the real issue is that you'll also
get my MOOC certificate.
Yeah, makes total sense.
Okay, I think this was a great session.
I think we've ran basically,
we try to keep them an hour and a half,
maximum two, we're right on time.
I want to thank you so much for coming and joining.
We very much appreciate you taking the time.
It is great to learn from practitioners in the field.
We now have, this is for the members,
we now have our minting ton of T-word for faster,
so this will mint us in an FTE, I think soon,
maybe by next week we'll have the site
where students in the course can mint NFT
of any of these sessions and keep them seeing them,
or just review them online
or we need to get them into the campus as well.
And it will be there as a resource going forward.
So it's not just the core certificate
that's going to be NFT,
each piece of course material is also NFT,
including this session.
And so the people can benefit from it over time.
All right, well, thank you.
And I think we can wrap this up.