APECOIN—Bullish or Bearish for CryptoPunks? | Zeneca, Andy8052, Scott Lewis

Transcript

hey bankless nation welcome to another state of the nation episode where we talk about something hot that is going on in crypto today's episode what could be hotter than this the apes bought the punks david okay yuka labs biggest nft acquisition in history one one for the one for the history books in in all of crypto i think made a massive purchase of crypto punk ip from larva labs and also um purchase some punks and other assets along with that i believe we're gonna be talking about that today david what's the topic and who do we have in our conversation on today's state of the nation yeah this has really caught the nft ecosystem by storm people always uh speculated that at one point

in time some nft brands will start buying the ip of other nft brands but i don't think anyone expected that the second largest the biggest brand that has come out in the nft mania the board apes would buy the most original most og ip out of the crypto punks from larva labs so it's like ethereum buying bitcoin wow sorry maybe that's advice uh so there's been a lot of um just questions about what does this mean what does it mean for people to own nfts but have that be separate and distinct from the ip of those nfts what is larva labs going to do with the crypto punk ip do the crypto punks like this uh is this bullish for crypto punks and

if the cr are the crypto punk owners allowed to not like it yet it'd still be bullish uh so we're gonna unpack all of these things on today's state of the nation to talk about these things we have zenika 33 who you guys probably are familiar with he's a frequent contributor to the overpriced jpegs podcast with dr carly riley overall nft connor sewer uh owns more apes than he does punks but owns both so there's that also coming in uh you guys know andy8052 he's uh the the founder co-founder of fractional which fractionalizes nfts uh he's got a punk he is perhaps on team punk uh and of course last but not least we got scott lewis co-founder of defy pulse slingshot and hype hype as an nft

uh lore platform if you like to talk about your nfts and give them stories also a crypto punk diamond hander perhaps also on team punk so these are our three great guests they're going to give us their perspectives that's what this means for crypto punks what this means for yugo labs and what this means for the nft ecosystem overall it's that last piece that i think is the most interesting case study overall what does this mean for nfts right this is a fantastic case setting we get to see this play out in real time also speaking of real time david you ever lose you ever lose track of all of your wallets oh all the time all right man this is a way where you can always keep track of your wallets in real time this is called xerion uh you just plug your mighty mask wallet in

plug your ledger in you get access across all of your wallets now um that was a beautiful thing on ethereum alone i've been a xerion user from like day one as soon as they spun up an interface but now the problem i have is i've got all of these wallets across layer twos and other side chains as well well xerion has added the ability to aggregate those wallets too so i actually know what's in my wallet this is not my wallet this is an example wallet i kind of wish it was mine because you know pretty pretty okay nft uh profile but you can see here i could just flip from ethereum to optimism to avalanche with the click of a button i also have the ability to like bridge this is huge too this is the year of

bridging isn't it if you want to go from ethereum to polygon you could do that in one click in xerion as well so david what should folks do with xerion yeah there's a link in the show notes to go load up your wallet and it will tell you everywhere that you've ever engaged with across all the chains and it'll let you do all of your things all your multi-chain things all in one spot including look at all of your nfts that you might hold in different wallets so not only does it let you look at all your wallets on all of the chains but it also lets you look at all of your assets across many many wallets across many many chains so it is the ultimate aggregator too it's like a battle station ryan it's like you know it feels like you got like multiple screens

you're at a command and control center that's what zero is makes you feel like a badass basically yeah this is cool in the nft section you can actually look at the the value of all your nfts by floor price they added that feature recently so go click on the link connect your wallet to xerion david i got to ask you the question i ask before we begin all of these state of the nations which is what is the state of the nation today ryan the state of the nation is branding and i actually think that this is the crux of the issue because board apes are a brand cryptopunks are a brand and that's really what ip is and so when we are assessing discussing what this means for nfts what this means for the apes and the punks we're really discussing the value of these new metaverse brands

these new digitally native brands that exist exclusively on the internet rather than rather than transcending or starting physically and then moving on to the internet these are starting on the internet and these are really the fundamental questions of brands and of themselves so ryan we are just uh the state of the nation is branding we are branding the future right now that's super good i know a term you've used in the past too is this this term called headless brands so we're exploring a new type of brand right this is like a new age digital clout how to acquire it and i think the story of of um what happens with the apes and the punks will become super relevant into the future as the metaverse builds out as crypto builds out as we figure out what the hell we do with these digital property rights guys

we're going to talk about what all this means in just a minute with our fantastic panelists but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible so you've got some money but how are you going to use it you want to spend me shopping now bro when you know you should be saving you'll never buy a house at this rate but what if you could spend and save at the same time for the enlightened kind with inquiring minds a new world awaits set yourself free with completely flexible self-repaying loan technology supported on desktop and mobile seize the power of alchemix

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staking so if you don't have a ledger hardware wallet go to ledger.com grab a ledger and take control over your crypto hey guys we are back exploring this massive acquisition in the nft world uh apes by punks what does that mean we've got some excellent panelists i'm about to introduce you to before i do i want to go over a few quick things in case you haven't been following what's been going on uh so on march 11th board apes yacht club creators yugo labs they just announced their acquisition of crypto punks and also me bits which is a sub crypto punks uh type of brand collections from larva labs so that happened on march 11th to give you guys some context crypto punks and board apes

are like the number one and number two nft projects and it's not even close you know everyone else kind of trails off so punks their market cap is around 1.6 billion dollars for all these punk jpegs okay massive amount apes if you include the apes ecosystem at large is just under that 1.4 billion dollars okay so we're talking three billion dollars worth of digital property rights this is massive this is close to 20 of the entire nft market these are our two brands that have really entered mainstream consciousness you see a lot of celebrities sporting nfts that are either board apes or uh or crypto punks in some cases so we want to talk about what this means because for

uh yugo labs for board apes yacht club holders um hugo labs immediately revealed their plans to grant all holders of crypto punks basically the same commercial rights that were available to the apes which the punks didn't have before we're going to get into that um hugo labs has also said we'll see if the community believes this that this acquisition is going to be really good for punks and also really good for apes so let's talk about what this means is this good for apes is it's good for punks is this good for nfts what does this mean for crypto we're going to go over all of the implications i want to introduce you to our guest the first is xenica who's an nft connoisseur community leader you've you've heard him on overpriced jpegs podcast with

carly riley zenika welcome how are you doing i'm doing well thanks for having me happy to be here uh i've heard zenika you are maybe team ape a little bit skewed but you also hold uh punks too so maybe it's not accurate to call you team ape yeah i bought my punk like two months ago so i'm a very recent addition to the punks but i have both yeah awesome all right and then we have andy8052 he is the founder fractional fractional nft platform he's also been on bank list before more team punk i think andy how are you doing hey yeah i'm good thanks for having me back uh definitely as far as my bags go skew team pump also we also have uh scott lewis who's

the co-founder of d5 pulse also slingshot he is a crypto punk diamond hander uh team punk i think scott do you have any apes i do not have any apes i really like the project but do not own it all right well these are our panelists today we're going to dig into this topic um first guys let's talk about this this this first issue here which is like commercial rights to owners versus unwanted brand managers this is kind of a contrast a point that we're going to talk about a little bit but as we do i think it's important to to ask the question what were punks actually missing before like what did the punk community want were there some licenses that they didn't have some

abilities they didn't have that they really wanted uh zenika why don't we start with uh you for that question yeah i mean i think that's it's tricky to answer because the punks or the punk community it's it's a large community it's like thousands of people and different individuals have different wants and desires i think certainly there was some subsection that did want uh greater commercial rights because maybe they wanted to you know turn their punk into a brand and under the under lava labs they they couldn't lava labs you know had restrictions on what you could do with your punk uh but on the other side i think there's probably a considerable amount of the uh community who are pretty kind of happy with how things were with like this hands-off approach just like there's crypto punks there are you know

we're not trying to commercialize it lava labs is not trying to do anything crazy um yeah i mean again i think uh if things had continued as like lava labs were hands off and doing nothing people were probably fine but over the last year we saw live labs like make some questionable decisions and that maybe ticked off a few punks holders as well uh yeah it's hard to say honestly andy what would you add to that yeah and i think that covered it really well to be honest i think a lot of what crypto punk's owners really wanted more than anything was just for larva labs to like at the point where they were clearly they weren't building massive things for it just to like kind of never talk about them again and i think the real issue people took was okay we don't have rights but you're

also doing weird things and making like takedown requests against punk derivatives and that kind of stuff was really the crux of what some people took issue with so scott what would you add to this what kind of rights did the punk holders actually want yeah i think there were like two or maybe two and a half like kind of like solutions that people were hoping to see i mean the first was that i think a significant portion of acuity i just wanted punks to go cco um and and sort of let uh like let it everyone use any punk imagery however they wanted um and then i think there was

kind of like one and a half options there were different types of ownership uh one was just sort of like which i was actually in favor was the yugo labs style full commercial rights um and then i think there was like a little civil community that would really preferred kind of the rights go to a dow that punk holders would then govern um and sort of like full community rights but more like collective ownership rather than individual ownership um and yeah i guess like it's sort of like you know maybe is that irony uh when hugo labs bought it we ended up getting new collabs style like full commercial rides which yeah so there's something i definitely want

to to drive home about the nature of punks that is i think is a really integral point of this story crypto punks being the very first profile picture nft project before so many people even wore their punks as their profile picture it was the first og project that came around and and before really nfts had the monetary value that they have now and so it has this branding it has this culture has this style that's very unique and very crypto native um they're they're pixels they're called punks that's a reference in my in my mind as a reference to the cypherpunks uh and it's it's very decentralized which is very true to the nature of of cryptocurrency where there the larva labs never took a leadership position and never considered the crypto

punks as their project but as something that they just birthed and gave to the world uh and so that was kind of the ethos that i think really attracted a lot of uh you know early og crypto people and kind of why crypto punks are associated with like the kind of the ethereum ogs um yet that wasn't totally pure because as you guys have alluded to the larval labs were doing things that while while they did kind of have this hands-off approach they didn't also completely unrestrict uh the brand of crypto punks to be let loose uh and and so this i think this is really the crux of the issue where when yuga labs purchased the crypto punks ip some people are on the side of um

this is great now we have somebody actually uh allowing crypto punks to have the full commercial rights and then there are other people who are like well crypto punks were have never been about having a brand manager uh we don't want any leadership position on our decentralized vibe uh and so i'm wondering question to you guys which side of the of the of the of the aisle do you fall on do like do you do you think that this is a bigger offense to have a brand manager to taint the crypto punk brand or are you more interested in seeing what a centralized team can actually finally do with the crypto punk brand uh zenika i'll throw this to you i think to what scott was saying before about how there's a camp wanting the crypto

points to go cco i i would have i think like to have seen that just because as you mentioned sort of this was born out of like the ogs the early the cypherpunk movement and i think the community was really into like the decentralization aspect of it and even with lava labs uh they were largely hands off until this year as far as i'm aware and then yuga comes in and is sort of taking the board ape your club model and just applying that directly to crypto punks and we haven't seen you know what other plans they might have i think that they alluded that they're planning to be relatively hands off and this is the first just big thing they're doing giving full commercial rights i mean i think there's definitely a time and a place for centralized entities to take ownership of a brand and steer it in a certain

direction yuga has done that excellently with the board apes but i think to me it's probably not the right approach for the cryptocurrency i think i would i'm a huge fan of cco and i think that they would thrive more under that model than uh just going you know hey it's similar to the apes we're gonna take it we're now considering it our brand i guess and we're gonna see what we do with that andy similar question to you which side of the aisle do you fall on are you bearish because uh we have an unwanted wanted brand manager or are you bullish because now punk owners are going to have commercial rights i've actually had a pretty big change of heart here from when it first happened to now uh after just having more time to reflect on it and talk to people and

think about it myself but i think kind of at the start i thought it was not great i didn't really love it i think that definitely somewhat hurts the narrative of punks um as it kind of i think there's like now kind of this in the armor to just the idea of being like the og project that did stuff because the ip has changed hands at least just like in my mental thinking about it and so to me i was like oh that's not great i don't like it but then kind of as i've thought about it more i think the fact that punks were even ip was even for sale in the first place just makes me think that things probably wouldn't have been run better by larva labs long term and in my opinion hugo labs are like the

premier nft company and studio and if like punks had to go anywhere else i would want it to be you go labs and so kind of just like from the mindset that i think larv labs selling them to someone else and then that other group making them ccr or whatever is probably worse because it still creates the same like potential negative uh things around just larval labs not wanting the ip anymore and all that without having this really really great smart group of people who are well funded and are going to do cool things building and doing stuff with it so at this point i think like kind of of all the realistic scenarios that could have happened uh you labs buying punks is like pretty one of the best so andy are you

kind of like just like oh better than disney buying it something like this yeah it's like i don't like based on my understanding i don't think that there was a world where larval labs was just like hey you know what we don't want however many hundreds of millions of dollars we can get for this ip we'll just make it cc zero and so like kind of just accepting that that wasn't a possibility i think this is basically the second best possibility and overall way better than anything else that could happen i think that's a nuance that a lot of people have woken up to as a result of this where you know people think like oh you buy your nft and cool you own the nft no very a lot fewer people are realize that there is ip associated with the entire set of those nfts and that ip is owned

by someone even if you own the nft the ip is owned by someone else and personally i woke up to this fact as a result of this news and now are reconsidering and so andy kind of what you're saying is exactly what ryan said is that at some point in time that ip is an asset that will be owned by someone somewhere and so if larva labs goes under goes out of business it gets auctioned off it could have been bought by somebody that we don't like um i'm reminded of the uh the martin skelly guy that bought the wu tang album uh and everyone hates him right like that could have like some we could have had some internet villain purchase the crypto punk ip so who who's the worst purchaser you could think of the guy that bought the constitution how about that guy

uh and so and so andy what you're saying is like well uh yuga labs has been shown to be an excellent steward of an alternative nft ip in board apes and so you know perhaps this is actually best case scenario is that kind of more or less what you're saying yeah i think like i still have some relative concern around centralization of all the massive ip under one company all that's not ideal but kind of giving them the benefit of the doubt in a lot of ways there aren't very many companies or organizations i think i would be more happy to see on punk's ip yeah totally there there's a take from dc investor that i want to read off and scott i want to get your opinions on it because i know you and dc investor talk a lot at least on twitter he says

as a result of the hugo labs buying the the crypto punk ip i don't expect everyone to understand but it feels like my favorite corner bar just got turned into an applebee's i know it's scott do you share these sentiments not really no uh like i think it's like i think sometimes it's like the social the social dynamics of nft collecting and like the different people itself select into a collection um there's like a there's like a lot of like they attract kind of different types of people and they're all like their own little tribes in a sense with overlap it's a lot of overlap and so i think sometimes it's

like easy to get caught up in like the stereotype of like a punk holder and a board a holder and like maybe forget about the fact that like you know there's like a lot of traits in board ape that came from punk right and like it seems clear to me that hugo labs understood what punks were when they were making port apes and like i would still think there's of course risks that like they mess up the brand and that's true of anyone that like acquires a brand that's not the original founder or in larval apps case there's also the original founders mess up the brand um but i think sometimes like because we

have so much emotional attachment to the jpegs we kind of forget that like being a brand manager is a job you want done by a professional and like like um like like supreme and north face and timberland and vans are all owned by the same company and lots of other brands but like you know north face is still north face like in my eyes is like just someone that like knows the brand and like i think like i just want someone that's going to do like a good professional job is that scott is that better than a dow

owning it then like because okay so you go labs and we're maybe going to get to their slide deck at the bottom because that was kind of leaked and it's like it's like it's badass very hot it's pretty hot it's it's pretty amazing and you're like okay these guys can execute these guys are on it these guys are nailing it but like is that better than a dao owning punks let's say do you think that centralized brand management actually has some execution strengths and maybe a decentralized like group of punk holders wouldn't i haven't been that impressed with dao's being brand managers in d5 at least um

yeah i don't know i feel like it's something that like not messing up is something that's really hard for someone that's not like a professional at doing this and there's a lot of weird situations that have counter-intuitive solutions and i think if you're looking at like all the all the d5 doubts and sort of like how they ran into like really some really bad public dramas that hurt their brand values and like really interesting the larva labs did and like i think both of them were like really trying to do a good job it's just like what seemed like a reasonable thing to do was not at all a reasonable thing to do it like versus a versus like a career professional they would take the same approach i think like the things that are really

important for me is like liking the deal is that one like people can actually invest money in their punks and like be able to like use them long term and not get like that image that they create and the lore around that image create kind of ripped off by whoever down the road um and i think that creates like a lot of like really cool stuff and and i think it's it's more like like but like pairing that with what is already a very like crypto punch community does its own stuff right like they're not waiting for someone else to like when dev's gonna add utility to my nft right and so it's really like unlocking and like creating like a a better incentive structure within the crypto punx community

than like you know having a party at a great location that we all get to attend yeah i got i got it and i do wonder if like this uh the centralized brand manager thing might be like better maybe that's the way brands do need to be managed i mean look like a brand like apple and it came from like you know steve jobs meticulous curation like the br the brain of kind of one individual in a very small group i one thing i i i want to talk about really quick is this the cco that you guys have mentioned more than a few times so cco stands for creative commons license i believe i'm wondering xenica if you could just um school us a little bit on the cco license so like

you don't have to get into all the details but um with a cco license for my punk does that does that mean if i were a punk holder i could um like make money on it could i like license it to a movie house or an animation studio or a video game company uh does does it unlock me to do those sorts of things so how does cco unlock individual nft holders so i'm not a full expert on cco but my understanding is that yeah as we see on this uh this chart here cc's rocco means that the content is in the public domain there's basically there's no license there's no rights

reserved anyone can basically do whatever they want with the the ip so in the form of say uh bought apes lava labs are not uglabs owns the ip and they give a license to all apollos that license allows ape holders to have full commercial rights to do whatever they want to monetize their eight but it's still a license given by yuga you can at any point withdraw that license they can restrict that license they can uh disney can come along and buy yuga and change their license so you're still sort of beholden to the parent company the centralized entity with cceo there's no there's no license it's just

that this content is now in the public domain anyone is free to do whatever they want with it so generally the way copyright works is that uh creative work will go into the public domain become cco i think like 75 years after it's created or after the creator has died or maybe both or something like that so that's why if you go back you look back at things like the works of shakespeare sherlock holmes you know things like that they're all in the public domain anyone can come along and create a piece of work using that ip and no one can sue them for it this newly created ip that can be licensed differently so if someone creates a like uh the sherlock movies you know that those new movies

are not in public domain that's a new form of ip but it's the original you know the very fundamental part that anyone can use and so when it comes to nfts uh we have some collections that are have full commercial rights so apes now punks and me bits um and then other collections where they're cco so cryptos mfas nouns and basically what that means is that again anyone can do whatever they want with it and so the owner of say i have crypto cryptos i uh if someone wants to monetize it they don't need my permission and i if they monetize i can't go after them and say you know i want some money back and neither can uh you know the team or the founders of any of these projects it just it spawns creativity because no

one is held back basically yeah so just to unpack that a little bit more we were talking about this before the show just to really unpack this and get into the details and they're actually kind of interesting because there's there's relation to crypt the ethos of crypto in of itself board apes and crypto punk owners this actually isn't yet true for crypto punk owners um uh yuga labs has not yet given this this new license they just have stated their intention to um no one really doubts them just to just to clarify uh but board apes and crypto punk owners mutant apes and everyone out of yugo labs uh as in like i'm me and my crypto punk and scots crypto punk and andy's crypto punk those are our crypto punks and we hold the commercial rights to our crypto punks as in no one can go

make a movie using my crypto punk as a main character without my express commission uh permission and that's different from creative commons open which are the mfers uh the crypto toads which are public domains as in anyone can use my mfr to do anything that they want and they can adapt and change and do anything and it's very much the most like decentralized uh complexity at the edges version of creative commons and kind of the bold case for uh nfts that have creative commons opens is that the the uh there are zero restrictions on replication and reproducibility and that is a little bit like kind of like how we are trying to reduce the complexity of having as many

nodes as possible with blockchains like how easy is it to re reproduce this and we all know the importance of memes and virality in crypto and so that is that's cco and so but that's not crypto punks or board apes what uh board apes are in crypto punks is that i have the power over the nft that i own and so it's a it's definitely a different ethos baked into uh these different creative commons opens and what it really means for for nfts it's so funny because i see the value in both right it's like i see both both both like the the original larva labs that just flat out sucked but but cco versus you know full full commercial license i could see advantages to both

what's your take guys like i'm asking the panel which is better what do you think and uh andy maybe do you have any thoughts on this i think like you were saying both really have their merits i you know um punk 4156 who's a huge proponent of cco one of the things that he talks about a lot is kind of the power of like mimetics and when you're not being you know when you could basically make anyone can make a derivative of anything in the project um it generally is probably good for the original thing that they're making a bunch of memes about or t-shirts or whatever it's like free branding for your nfp so you know if i have some nft that i bought for 50 east if i bought a noun and then supreme decides to put it on a t-shirt i

think it's like pretty good advertising for my noun that i own and so you can make the case that like while i'm not explicitly making money from that their freedom to do whatever they want without having to ask me is still valuable but i think there's also kind of the other side of um you know what if someone just makes an exact copy and people decide that this exact copy is the only one that's valuable and you don't really have a way to stop them um i don't really know i like i like cco a lot i do think that there's especially with significantly larger brands that already kind of have the recognition that they are important like a punk or an ape cco isn't necessarily as important for like spreading the word about what your thing is or seeing it kind of

distributed everywhere online but i i definitely don't have like a super strongly held opinion that one is better than the other scott do you have any thoughts on this yeah yeah uh so so so like everything andy said is correct of course uh and it's like that for commercial rights it is a trade-off that other camp people can't like freely do small things with the nfts uh but i think it's like so the difference like yeah if if supreme is going to put your nft or your nfc collection on a shirt you want to do it and that's great and i think we sort of saw that with now and style and sort

of that budweiser ad like they kind of gave him the noun and then they put it in the ad and you saw the glasses for like a second or two in the ad and that was great but i think like the like doing the really big things with the nfts like if you had full commercial rights um and kind of maybe in perpetuity which maybe is where we're going eventually hopefully um you could actually build a clothing brand around the nft and that be the brand and so it's like um it's like if i want to use your nft somewhere and get exposure it's great cco and i i think since cco also uh include more closely aligns with sort of

the ideology ideology and ethos of the decentralization movement it's pretty good for bootstrapping a project um but i i think like the really chunky upside is when members of the community integrate the image of their nfts in like real sustainable scalable things they're doing whether it's businesses or different types of projects and and kind of like it's harder to do that with cco because if i make like a whole like if if i make a different brand from a cco nft um someone else can just kind of like use all that value i'm creating and when they put it on their own products too

and so i think it's like a difference between like depth for full commercial rights versus breath of exposure for cco so guys ryan yeah you want to say something before we're closer i was just gonna say it's super fasting that like board apes is taking the strategy because it does seem to be the case that like board apes is going after the chunkier uh upside as as you're saying it's like just going through their slide deck earlier and the celebrities that own apes right now just blew my mind like i'd remembered when some of these purchases were made but like like bieber owns an ape and like this whole list of celebrities so if they can get the celebrities to start

incorporating their own individual board apes into their brand right with a full commercial license that's just like exactly what they're going for so i totally see that it that it meets the strategy anyone have anything else to add on that before we uh move to the next thing uh i'll just add one one thought on cco versus full commercial rights and i think that i mean yeah i agree with everything that's been said it depends a lot on the brand and sort of like the the vision that the creators and founders have like some projects just make total sense to not be cco like i always use cool cats as the example they're a really cute family friendly type project and so not only is uh like when you go

cco it means anyone can create anything and it also means that they can create something that might taint the brand like someone could create you know these adult themes you know cool cats killing each other and murder and like you can't go after them you can't say anything it's like now and if gains popularity now that's the brand and it's out of your control it's just like it's taken on a life of its own and i think if you have a team that has like a really a direction they want to take it in and maybe they have a creative director and build out a brand it really is important not to go cco at least to begin with and i think yeah yeah i think that's a really good point we've seen some really really interesting stuff start to come up around lore and storytelling

with individual nfts from collections uh and there definitely is value there for them not having that be full cco and really be letting the community whether it's like jenkins the valet or like the bobo from azuki or something where that community who owns it really has the full say into what is this brand building what is the story we're telling all that kind of stuff well guys there's a whole other part of this story and that's really the story of yougo labs and what their plans are for the future because from what we can tell from yugo labs they got plans for the future uh they have as of last week they've airdropped the ape token and the ape dow to ape holders so we want to get your guys's opinions on that but also

it's really important to note that yuga labs owns five out of the 20 top nft projects between crypto punks board apes mutant apes kennel clubs and me bits those are the biggest nft ip that that exists and one company one centralized company owns it all and so we want we want to get you guys thoughts on that and really what does this mean for the future of yugo labs and uh we've alluded to their deck that doc that got leaked i in my my conspiracy is that got leaked on purpose because it's a really hot deck and we want to get your guys opinions on what kind of what's all going on all in that realm of the universe so we're going to get to those questions right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible if you're going bankless you need metamask

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ecosystem no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswap grants.org and help steer uniswap in the direction that you think it should go thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless all right guys we are back with our nft community leaders and we want to turn this conversation to the grander story of yuga labs but starting with the apecoin apecoin and ape dow was launched last week and the tweets read introducing ape coin dollar sign ape a token for culture gaming and commerce used to empower a decentralized community building at the forefront of web 3. a coin is owned and operated by the apecoin dao a decentralized organization where each token holder

gets to vote on governance and use in the ecosystem fund holding apecoin is the only requirement for membership in the ape coin dao guys uh no question just preliminary thoughts uh apecoin like crazy or expected or or what's up zenika let's start with you i mean it was expected in the term in the sense that they said it was dropping q on so we knew it was coming most likely uh in terms of the extent of it it's it's crazy it's uh i don't quite know what to think i think we all there were all sorts of wild theories like people were speculating and speculating like what's it going to be is it going to be one massive thing is it going to be like a staking thing it's going to be a dow i think it's

really smart that the way they dropped it in the form of an airdrop to ape holders mutant holders um plus like plans for this ecosystem fund as they call it that will be governed by the dow and then you know they want to build out all these different things you know in the web 3 space in terms like culture and gaming and stuff uh it's sort of like a dow but they've got this board of like this fully stacked board of people who are just like consumer professionals and can maybe help steer the initial direction of things uh and they launched with like a bunch of proposals for how we want to set up staking and you know they mentioned a marketplace and all sorts of cool things i don't know i think it's it's very exciting it's it's an experiment to say the least but it's exciting to follow

yeah andy andy what would you say is does this allude to with yuga labs plans for the apes and the apes ecosystem uh and any other general thoughts that you might have on apecoin and ape dow yeah i think one of the things that is a bit weird i don't know how to think about it is like kind of this separation that now happens between what is aboard ape in like the yuga ecosystem and what is apecoin in the ecosystem because they're not completely coupled with each other apes were able to like get apecoins and seemingly in the future we'll be able to stake and earn more um but they don't like have governance power in whatever apedow at least right now they don't i'd like to

see a proposal to make that happen i think that'd be interesting um but i mean i think it's really cool i it's definitely kind of at the forefront of how do you take an nft community and turn it into a real dow that's doing things and and building i'm just like personally really curious to see how they continue to build out the relationship between ape coin holders and ape holders who may not necessarily have the same incentives or alignments um if they don't like both own apes and apecoin scott there's a uh i want to get your take on the distribution of this we have 62 percent of apecoin went to an ecosystem fund that sounds like a community treasury uh 16 percent went to yuga labs 14 went to launch contributors

i'm guessing that's just like agencies and third parties that helped them launch the thing and then eight percent went to board ape yop club founders how are we feeling about this distribution any any opinions on that i mean i i think it's all right i i don't understand i don't think we know what apecoin is yet and maybe there's new cards that are being waiting to be turned over um and they know what apecoin is going to be or they're going to realize that a point has to be a bit more than it is right now um and i think the distribution is fine all right

um because i mean like the ecosystem the community pools like you can sort of just like forget about that and then take the percentages and the other things uh i think the launch contributors also included adventure of funders or vehicle labs um so it's a lot of vcs in the distribution um and you know they have they have responsibilities their lp's to return capital in the form of dollars probably um so that they won't be apecoin holders forever i mean probably some of them will be but not all um so i i don't know i feel like i'm like not looking at a full plan right now and i'm not sure if they realize that or

not well i think that's all generally run-of-the-mill vc distribution type stuff so maybe perhaps the distribution isn't totally an anomaly but what is an anomaly is the market cap of this thing is as of today it's at 11.5 billion dollars uh which is a high number i would say for an airdrop uh it's actually kind of made the whole if you've minted a board ape and then held it and done all the gotten all the other airdrops with that have been involved it's been one of the most successful investments of all time and so i'm here personally sitting watching these uh i don't have an ape so therefore i don't have any ape tokens i'm sitting uh at watching this 11.5 billion dollar valuation and i'm kind of wondering if i am i

just like i was sidelined for the entire ape run from point zero eight east to where it is now to a hundred eighth and i'm like wow am i seriously about to be on the sidelines once again uh and so question to you guys is like is it is this 10 11.5 billion valuation ridiculous or do you think there's a perhaps something under the hood here that um uh skeptics might be missing uh zenika can i start with you i i feel like it's kind of both it seems very ridiculous on the one hand like it just launched we don't know what it does and it's got a higher market cap than like i don't know ave or just some ridiculous things and then on the other hand it's uh if they can execute and build what they're like it's sort of like it's this

huge community thing that's like widespread and sprawling and like we we all know the power of memes like doge and sheba a lot of people that compare you know they said well doge had a market cap of 50 billion now it's like 20 billion of course ape can be higher but at the same token it's kind of ridiculous that doge has those market caps so you shouldn't necessarily be trying to compare and compete with that but it does prove the power of like this network effect and this community effect when you know doge rose to prominence because people are having fun with it everyone was on social media and tweeting about an elon comments and tweets about it and now with ape it's it has some element of that where the nft community at large are like very prevalent and talking about apecoin it's spilling over into the regular part of

crypto it's spilling over into celebrity life like imagine if bieber starts tweeting about a coin if eminem well eminem's not going to worry about it you know jimmy fallon mentions it on his show and stuff like that all of a sudden you now have this meme power which has you know it's mean power plus like they're potentially going to be building this whole ecosystem and have gaming and maybe bring revenue streams in if you can start spending a coin in games and other things um i don't know i think it's it is ridiculous but i wouldn't be shocked if it goes up long term yeah andy do you think we are stepping into the world where every single nft project mints their own currency like we just kicked that we just kicked that that off with the start of apecoin yes i think

basically none of them will do nearly as well or not none of them but most of them will not i think my understanding of most of the speculation around ape and everything right now is generally around the potential metaverse stuff that they are building there's a very large rumored land sale that was in the um in the docks and everything and so i think when you compare a coin to say um like sandbox or gala or some of these other uh like metaverse gaming projects uh the fully deleted valuations are like actually not that dissimilar and so like then the question is can

ape and whatever you guys building for the metaverse be better than those games and have a stronger moat and i think the answer is like maybe and so that's like kind of where i think a lot of the value is kind of speculatively coming in is that this is going to be the thing that powers this massive metaverse with the most popular nfts in it with like probably the best moat because of that um whereas you know some other random nft project doesn't really have those same type of engines as to why their erc20 token would be important or valuable and like up until now most projects that did have tokens it was just like farm the tokens to be able to mint more like babies of the collection or something and like without really much else going

on um and so i think that there is a couple things about yuga and sport apes and what they're building in particular that has like positioned them well uh in the sense badly stuck based on like what people are speculating that not a lot of other projects could duplicate very easily though and andy i i have maybe a a a follow-up question to that it's like which is sort of the skeptic's hat is like what if they're just minting a token because they can mint a token and like get billions of dollars because of the meme right it's like why does an nft project they already have a token it's their nft it's called a non-funchable token it's a token right it's one uh you know one purchaser sort of one one nft holder it's you know why

do we need a non-fungible piece of this like i understand it just suddenly generates billions of dollars given the meme but is this kind of like more more futility token stuff that we saw in uh in 2017 2018 where all these projects just launched tokens because they could and because the market wanted to buy tokens what's your thought here why do you think nft projects actually need a separate um fungible erc20 accompanying their project i think most probably don't i think you probably make the case that board apes also probably don't i would say like no one needs if you already have one set of tokens you probably don't need another set of tokens you could make it work some other way um but i i do think there's like this interesting potential decoupling of

like community and governance um kind of thinking about like there's a subset of people who really want to be in the board ape yacht club community and go to the parties and have it as a profile picture and talk about all the hype and snoop dogg and all that stuff and then maybe those people who like are legitimately interested in the governance of like how do we build out this metaverse world and how do we decide on who we grant ip rights to for different things or whatever else they're building and those two groups people aren't necessarily going to be the same and so maybe long-term what we'll realize is it made it make sense to separate those two communities where they both can be stakeholders and have different sets of tokens that kind of offer different

things where one is governance and one is like the social clout this is really cool like for example i don't see a lot of people flexing the number of ape coins that they have you see some people doing it but you don't see most people doing that but a lot of people have board apes as their profile picture and so it's just maybe just different use cases for different things that are happening long term and a lot of that is like speculating on a much larger world that requires governing and all of this stuff so who knows what'll come of that but that's kind of my if i had to defend them i think uh i think another way to illustrate that is that the apes if we're taking a metaverse approach and i think when when we take a look into the yuga labs uh labs deck you can

definitely see intentions to building out a metaverse and so if when we take that perspective the apes the non-fungible tokens the nfts are like the nouns in this universe and then we have the ape tokens which is like the either the currency or like the upside exposure to the universe which includes governance decision making kind of just how like you know capital is power and then we have nfts which are the items that the nouns that you are are that run around in this universe uh and so uh i think with the intention that i think we can have uh have pretty strong assurances that hugo labs wants to build out this digital world perhaps to andy that dichotomy of just like you know people that want to have

money and capital and power and governance over this ecosystem is different than the people that want to run around with their board avatars in this universe did you see that i can just like yeah go for it yeah one last thing it's um yes there's already tokens but in the ecosystem there's like 38 39 000 like board apes mutants and dogs and the cheapest one a dog is like seven eight eighth right now if someone new wants to join and be part of the board of your club ecosystem there was there's not really an easy way for the average retail investor to jump in i mean yes there's fractionalization it's messy it's just like it's hard to get exposure to this ecosystem prior to an erc20 and now it's like anyone can jump on coinbase and for

11.50 have one eight coin token um etc it helps grow i think at the ecosystem a bit yeah it lowers the barrier to participation down to basically the absolute minimum because you know that's what fungibility does because i want to uh i want to take a peek into this deck because it's really really if if you believe in the future of the metaverse you can see that uh in my opinion the yuga labs is on a race to produce the first version of the metaverse we all when we talk about the metaverse we all kind of talk and wave our hands like oh yeah the metaverse that's coming but i think if you look at this deck yoga labs has uh the intention of winning the race to actually building out a a metaverse uh and so so some of the lines that that

they come um that that they have uh oh i actually deleted the lines from my notes but it basically tells a story of just like a team with ambitious plans to be the first version to the metaverse uh and so they're just talking about all the different uh physical land uh you know excuse me digital lands which you know perceive our physical in the metaverse uh along with the ownership of ip how board apes are being owned by celebrities uh there's land auctions up for sale we now have the board ape currency uh we have board ape culture going outside of the internet and into the real world we have physical events like ape fest and like the yacht party uh but then also just like the potential for for

metaverse uh events and metaverse experiences uh and they claim that we are actually already living in the metaverse and so what's missing is some sort of instantiated digital land with goals and and stories and purposes so guys when you see these intentions out of yuga labs and kind of get the gist of this deck what do you see as the future for hugo labs what are they building towards what are their ambitious plans um zenikel throw back to you i mean it said it right there a meta rpg so it sounds like they're building this interoperable gaming metaverse which uh they released this video clip trailer i think a day or two after this got leaked which yeah to your conspiracy theory does seem kind of planned but it sort of shows off how there's um there's

board apes there's world of women there's cool cats there's uh cryptos punks mee bits and all of them are like in this car or whatever together um and it just it shows like the potential of all these different brands and ips coming together in quote unquote amethyst the metaverse and they're adding a layer of you know gaming and ownership into that with uh you know there's a land sale that they talk about in this and then there's all sorts of like economies that they're basically building a new economy using a coin as the currency i suppose um and yeah it's just it seems awesome honestly as someone who grew up in 90s and early 2000s playing you know mmo rpgs and games and stuff like that this it just

sounds extremely exciting to me it's like something i've said before it's like you know the internet up until nfts really and games it's sort of like we've been playing in play mode and now it's like this is like real it's like poker you play with play money but then you play with real money and it's like it's a different game and i feel like we're playing a different game now andy when you see some of the vibes that are communicated in this yeah what are you seeing out of the future of yoga labs i really like the deck i think that their the general way they were thinking about this open permissionless world and all of that uh is how i would if i had to kind of give my wishes for how the final metaverse that people end up using would be

uh would look i think in general it's incredibly ambitious and i have a lot of friends from gaming and building games like this is hard and takes a really long time um so that's the part of me that wants to be skeptical and just be like this is gonna you know whatever everyone reading this who's like wow this is crazy can't wait for it in 2023. i wouldn't get your hopes up like it probably will take a bit um but in general i think kind of the thing that i've always gone back to with them is they've executed it better than anyone else in the nft space in my opinion and so i'm not really uh you know i'm not happy to i'm not going to bet against them in this as well but it's definitely extremely ambitious uh

and i think but i think they laid out everything really nicely and i'm super excited for it you know what this reminds me of uh and this is totally unfair to invoke this but i'm gonna do it anyways but uh the pixelmon universe was kind of the same pitch where you had the nfts living in this digital land and and well that one turned out to be a complete you know not a complete scam but basically the bare minimum amount of deliverables to kind of check the boxes and left everyone very dissatisfied so maybe it's fair to say that this is the more honest goal of the more honest intention of building out what the pixelmon universe promised but now that we now it's coming out of yuga labs i think we have a lot more assurances that they are actually doing this with

strong resources strong intentions and honorable intentions scott what's your do you have any takes about that i think i just really double down on what i was saying this stuff is really hard to build like it's like hugo labs has done excellent at building this like social brand but um it feels like they probably need to acquire someone for like low nine figures to actually build this and those deals are not not easy to like close on um and i think it's really hard to like have a have an organization that's like really really really good at

like one type of business and just be like hey like you know we decided we want to beat facebook at building like hard new technologies um that's it's really big challenge um and yeah uh there's a difference between like uh planning and promoting the fire festival and actually like uh running the fire festival if you guys are familiar with that that documentary from a few years ago um i want to ask you another question because going through this deck you're just like also blown away by the the raw financials here um i mean like look at this pretty nice uh net revenue margins there

on on on the budget of like 2021 and 2022 for people who are yeah you can't view this on youtube right 84 profit margins like what kind of what kind of digital business not even the googles of the world are even close to 84 um profit margins here it's you know uh astounding when you're running a brand and i i guess this is uh kind of a question that david was getting to earlier now we have yuga labs that owns five nft projects of the top 20. are we in crypto are we worried about like we're always talking about decentralization here um but it looks like it's there's an empire that's building an nft branding empire that that's being built is are should we be

worried about this at all or is it is it fine for you know one company one brand manager to monopolize so much of the nft uh market cap and mindshare zenika what do you think about this i think yes we should be a little worried and cognizant that this is happening and this is also like we've all been talking and raving about you know how well yoga has executed and how great of a company it is it's they're a year old like if that like bought apes launched less than a year ago so while yes they've done excellently executed well built up a ton of trust and goodwill who's to know where they're going to be in five ten years obviously i have an enormous amount of trust in them um and but there's that word again trust we are trusting them to take steward of these

brands and build out something um and then not sell to someone that we all hate not sell to disney or or someone like that um you know what would happen if that happened seneca it's like what that's right that's an interesting scenario because they could right this is they theoretically could this is also consum a conversation the nft space which is like well if if larva labs can sell the yuga then a bigger fish can of course acquire you go and where does every big brand always end up it's like disney right so what if what if disney were to acquire you go what happens then i mean the the real thing is we don't know but presumably they would have their own opinions on the ip licensing and it might not be as fantastic as we're used to but

you got to imagine that uh yeah i mean honestly we don't know if they could come in and really just again because we don't own the ip of our apes or our punks yuga still owns it they license it to us so if whoever owns yuga owns that and that's something that can't really be reconciled until unless we look at cco projects and yeah it's it's this um conflict it's paradox between you know nfts and we keep saying it's true digital ownership it's true to digital ownership with an asterisk unless it's cco i think so i think that's something that punk 4156 is always talking about how like when you when you separate the nft from the ip

it's like it's just it's not cohesive it doesn't really fit in the grand scheme of things but i mean again something i say is like we live in a centralized world no matter what like we're all citizens of nations that have laws and regulations that at the end of the day we have to adhere to so as much as we love to tout decentralization and absolutely everything there's always some elements of centralization that are like a necessary evil at least probably for the next 50 years um and i'm willing enough to place enough trust in yuga to you know own some apes and have some exposure to the ecosystem and be excited by it but i think yes to answer your initial question we should be a little bit weary of this movement guys uh the uh the perfect thing just happened when it comes to live streaming

about yoga labs because uh verge as of recording just released that board ape yacht club creators raises raised 450 million dollars at a 4 billion valuation this is just now dropping from uh from the verge uh and they uh they actually answer some of the questions that we've been having here uh where they are you labs is partnering with a few different gaming studios to bring this new world called other side to life other side is an mmorpg meant to connect the broader nft universe they hope to create an interoperable world that is gamified and completely decentralized says a co-founder of the board apes yacht club um

yeah so that that news is pretty big uh four billion dollar evaluation raised 450 million dollars to build a corner of the metaverse so that it's super convenient when big news drops right as you are live streaming about it that's pretty cool watch out facebook yeah so does that mean does that mean uh in the long run the ip and the royalties have to end up in apedo why would that mean that scott i mean how can you have a decentralized world where one corporation owns all the ip forever yeah that decentralized it they did just

throw that it's going to be decentralized word out there very very flippantly not just decentralized completely decentralized so i remember uh yuga came out a few months ago and said that their vision for the broad ape yacht club at least was for that to be fully decentralized yuga itself wouldn't be so i mean maybe i don't know how that fits into this so is the valuation of apecoin probably speculatively based on owning the ip of board apes but also perhaps crypto punks too and me bits i'd be immortal i don't know but i think it's called apecoin but i think if apecoin goes to 100 and then goes back down to eight dollars

they're gonna have to think about it all right guys i think that we'll probably have to wrap it up here you guys in but before we do close you guys each have your own respective nft platform that you guys are working on so we want to give you guys a chance to kind of promote that and talk about what you guys are doing in the world of nfts uh zenka what's zen academy you want to tell us about that yeah zen academy is a platform a community that is focused on providing education in the web 3 and specifically the entity space because of how difficult the learning curve is for a newcomer we we've all been there we all have friends who come to us and ask you know a thousand questions and i wanted to create a community that you know

focuses on education and content that's found in like logic reason and not like the hype and speculation and fomo so uh it's a membership community but we are you know opening the doors as much as we can to people who can't pay for the membership um yeah come check us out uh just follow me on twitter and all the links are there yeah and we will get your twitter account into the show notes i believe it's already there scott you've been working on something called uh hype you want to tell us a little bit about that yeah so hype is sort of like a platform for like uh for lore and um a little bit deeper than like the the basic metadata that's part of like 721 standard um and so like if you're starting an ft project

and you want these some of the nfcs have backstories or other things uh other information bigger than just metadata different types of media in the lore um hype can be a platform where projects and owners can enter lore about the nfts and then the projects can take that as like an api and integrate that into their their website experience and then also that api is available to anyone else in the space analytics sites or secondary markets as a way to kind of create a more uh kind of kind of more contextual experience around a decision to like own or love more or understand a series a collection uh shout out to the dow punks

out of banquets dao who i believe have done a fantastic job adding their own stories and lore to their nfts um andy coming from the youtube comments a lot of people really want your hat tell us about fractional yeah our hat is the rarest thing that i own i think um even rarer than my jpegs but uh at nftnyc this year i'll have a couple available for some fun challenges to find me but yeah fractional is a platform for community ownership of nfts um kind of our big goal with all of it is to try to make these trustless and kind of automated experiences where you can buy into interesting communities and

things that are happening um we lately have been seeing a lot of interesting stuff with lore actually scott and so we should definitely talk more sometime i think just like kind of interesting ways for people to kind of build and create their own small communities around ownership of a particular nft or a group of nfts um and kind of in the same thing we were talking about with ape coin as opposed to board aviat club hopefully give people a little bit of a easier entry into some of these projects that's fantastic well guys thank you so much this has been a big news i think in the nft space really important for the bankless community to to understand what's going on it just uh will guide so many things that they decide to do next whether they're investing building or just journeying into the crypto space

even further so we appreciate you spending some time with us today thank you yeah thank you yeah thanks y'all foreign bankless nation of course none of this has been financial advice we don't know whether you should buy apecoin or not have no idea whether an 11 billion dollar valuation is uh is worth it but we do know that all crypto is risky so is eth so is d phi you could definitely lose which you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from

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