The Chopping Block: The Inside Story of How Blur Toppled NFT Giant OpenSea - Ep. 459

Transcript

not a dividend It's A Tale of Two fun now your losses are on someone else's balance sheet generally speaking airdrops are kind of pointless anyways um I named trading firms who are very involved I like to have the ultimate D5 Protocols are the antidote to this problem hello everyone Welcome to The Chopping Block every couple weeks the four of us get together and give the industry insiders perspective on the crypto topics of the day quick intros first up we got Tom the D5 Maven and master of memes next up we've got Robert the crypto connoisseur and captain of compound next we've got tarun the Giga brain and Grand Puba at Gauntlet and joining us today special guest we've got Pac-Man the baron of blur and then finally you've got myself I've received the head hype man at dragonfly

so the four of us are early stage investors in crypto but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice legal advice or even life advice please see chopping block.xyz for more information so Pac-Man great to have you on the show I see you're here uh in the in flesh and Bone I assume that's what you really look like the real human Pac-Man yeah the real human Pac-Man you know usually I see that you don't present as yourself but I'm glad for this show you've unveiled your your true colors great to have you joining us man thank you sir thanks for having me it's gotta have been a crazy review so quick by way of background Pac-Man is one of the founders of blur uh he is operating pseudonymously I want to caveat before we get into the show that dragonfly we

are investors in the blur token so we're you know full full full disclosures but this it's basically within the last week that the blur airdrop has gone live and the token has started trading and uh you guys are now by far the biggest publicly tradable nft token uh how does it feel it must be absolutely crazy for you yeah it's been absolutely incredible definitely very satisfied with the results so far fair enough satisfied's a good answer wow that that sounds that sounds like a an earnings call type of phrase Robert you're you're the only other person here who's had a token Lodge besides Tom and his meme token you're

the only other one who's had like a real legit token launch I I I I don't know because I've never had that experience and I hope never to because it sounds horrifying wait there's no dragonfly token when's the dragonfly airdrop you guys are definitely eligible when it's live but so far we're uh you know we don't we don't reveal too much about the the criteria for mining it but what does it feel like what does it tell me what it's like to launch a token what does it feel like yeah honestly it's mainly exhaustion you know in the 48 hours then yep to the token launch I I literally did not sleep so it was like 5 a.m and we were slated for a 9 A.M PT you know 12 p.m ET token launch and there was just still some

like final to Do's to finish up so I was like okay I'm gonna try to like sleep for 30 minutes close my eyes for 30 minutes could not sleep uh Woke up had a coffee um you know went through the Toca launch we delayed 90 minutes of course and then launched and it was just like absolutely insane everything held up which was phenomenal and then I had a few interviews later in the day and uh still was not able to sleep until probably around like 3 4 a.m that evening so first time in my life that I stayed up for 48 hours straight which was uh quite interesting no wow that's intense Robert what was the what was the day that you launched comp token like it's a very different time you know I don't even remember at this point it was so many years ago you

know I just remember you know the excitement of wondering what would happen next right and wondering you know how would it get used and wondering you know when would it get used and wondering you know you know was there a bug you know at that point you know most of the code was tested but new and at this point you know governance tokens and governance systems are you know run-of-the-mill but really it was just a sense of just like wondering you know what would happen next because it was you know in 2020 it was you know a very different era and there was a lot less tokens being launched and so you know I I feel like you know for anyone that's

gone through the process it's you know it's mostly just like you know curious you know observation and does it feel like it's different to launch token today than it was back then or is it basically the same like Adrenaline Rush as it must have been in 2020. well in 2020 was scary right because like there was you know so many fewer of them you know now I I feel like you know there's a there's a Playbook you know and granted you know everyone innovates on the Playbook and Blora is not doing it the exact same way as everyone else does you know but then it was anxiety you know inducing I can imagine okay well so speaking of the Playbook so I wanted to kind of structure this episode as a bit of a case study because blur has been one of

the most incredible kind of developments of a new product in crypto and there's a lot of really interesting things you guys have done strategically to break into the nft market the market of nft marketplaces so I'm gonna I'm gonna do a little bit of setup before we jump into kind of getting your perspective around the strategy of how you've done blur but a lot of people I think who are listening probably don't know that much about about blur or even about the history of how blur came to be and so the history of that really starts with openc so openc I think everybody in crypto knows openc the largest nft platform historically they basically had a monopoly going into essentially you know mid 2022 they were the dominant platform by far when nfts really kicked off in late 2020. uh last year they did

21 billion dollars in gmv they had over 500 million dollars in fees uh raised enormous amounts of capital at really crazy valuations and openc historically they always enforced royalties and royalties are going to be kind of at the center of a lot of the the conversation and the strategy that blur really innovated on so for a lot of people so we had a big debate about royalties on The Chopping Block this was like three months ago back when magic Eden first turned off royalties and uh for those of you who didn't catch that royalties are basically when anytime there's a trade of an nft if you enforce royalties that basically means that you're enforcing a percentage of that trade as a fee to go back to the nft issuer so if Yuga Labs they're the

issuer of board Apes uh if you trade aboard ape then if they if if this Marketplace is enforcing royalties they will take you know X percent of that trade and they'll send it back to Yuka Labs as a sort of fee for uh anytime their collection is traded and historically these were always enforced now royalties though are not enforceable at the protocol layer there is no way to enforce royalties directly in the code and this is kind of the weird thing about royalties that a lot of people don't understand royalties are actually more of a norm than they are something embedded into the software so now this Norm has always been enforced basically because you know in part because openc just dominated the market and everybody kind of understood that like well you know this is part of the the ethos of

nfts is that you do these royalty things and it's all good but then came pseudoswap pseudoswap was the first really dominant nft Marketplace that did not enforce royalties uh it was it was an amm and the amms just you know they just decided not to do royalties and they started gaining a lot of market share that pushed magic Eden to start not enforcing royalties and that triggered the conversation that we had about this big nft royalty debate uh and then openc finally felt the pressure to do something but what they did was very interesting what they did was that they allowed you to continue enforcing royalties on openc only if you blocked competitors that did not enforce royalties

um so Pacman talk us through what that was like when you guys saw openc going through this move what did you think how did you understand what they were doing strategically because blur was already live at that point yeah it was it was quite interesting you know you're totally right that it kicked off with sudo and it's somewhat of a basically a prisoner's Zama when it comes to royalty enforcement across marketplaces and pseudo was kind of the first Defector you know in the space and what happened from there was uh within a month of pseudo's launch gem which is actually owned by openc uh integrated pseudo into its aggregator and Gem at the time was was the leading Marketplace aggregator nft aggregator basically lets you you

know buy listings across marketplaces you know blur is now the largest uh aggregator and Marketplace by far but at the time gem was the largest and they integrated sudo and it was quite a surprising move because from our perspective it seemed to be antithetical to open season's entire position it seemed like it would cannibalize their own business why would you you know actively support a protocol that is you know circumventing a fee that you're adding into your own Marketplace and it was very clear to us that it would Kickstart this domino effect that would be you know something that the the entire space in general didn't want so what happened after was after gem integrated pseudo within three days x2y2 which was another leading Marketplace at the time uh prior to blur's launch um they went to optional royalties

immediately and they cited Gem's move as the reason for why uh and then now both of those marketplaces were getting share you know due to a lower fee structure and we launched and basically our goal was to pull Traders away from those zero Roti marketplaces by giving them a carrot and the carrot was we're gonna give a larger airdrop to traders who honor some royalties at least compared to honor no royalties and then you know within a few weeks there are a few hot collections that launched that blur ended up winning a lot of volume on and then openc came out with this approach and it was somewhat surprising to us because there are two reasons why it was surprising one was it fundamentally

altered the culture of the space where it suddenly became okay for collection creators to put in you know whitelists or blacklists into the native asset the nft itself basically introduced centralization into the underlying asset and that was just to us such a slippery slope that was basically against the entire ethos of this space you know if you're going to introduce centralization in that way why not just trade a JPEG on a server and you know you can pay with eth and you know like it gets you the same thing you can enforce royalties that way but it kind of just like went against what what we felt was really awesome about nfts which is this you know permissionless asset that can trade anywhere around the world 24 7. once you

own it you own it it's yours to do with with it what you want and so they introduced this and they basically made it okay for the collections to you know basically introducing centralization into the underlying asset and then not only did it do this but also we know from D5 that you can't really enforce these types of restrictions at a technical level like if there's always workarounds um you can always create like wrappers you can do code golf like you know people have tried to make tokens that can't go below a certain value and it's like it never works so so many of these attempts have been made in defy already and you know at the end of the day whether you're restricting an erc20 or an ERC 721 they're all just tokens that

you're restricting you know nfts at a technical level you know there's still assets on ethereum so it was clear to us that okay this This Could Be an Effective temporary measure but it's not an effective long-term measure and at this you know while ineffective they also just kind of permanently change the culture of the space at the same time so it just kind of seemed like a double whammy um that was very unfortunate we at the time actually adopted that policy within um a week because we saw that you know obviously openc at the time was the leading Marketplace it was very clear that there would be a shift from the craters like if you're just thinking about from like an EV perspective like you know a collection Creator basically has to adopt uh Open Seas like filter policy and then you know if the

royalties were going to be enforced in a temporary State we might as well you know play along in the prisoner's dilemma and cooperate because you know as long as for us as long as there's something that was being adhered to at a cultural level we thought it was reasonable for us to continue to enforce royalties on those collections until you know until someone's defected again effectively so we adopted it but it just it didn't really make sense to us wait so when you adopted it did openc remove you from the default block list no actually it was really funny they uh they did not because um you know when we adopted it we said we'll adopt it for collections that uh incorporate this filter but for collections that don't incorporate this filter and including existing collections like older collections like azuki or board Apes you know these were

really decentralized assets right that's you know one of the reasons why we think that they're still the blue shifts is that they're really these decentralized assets and they didn't have any sort of way to restrict the trading so they could still trade on pseudo they could still trade on xcy too so when we consider that it just didn't make sense to enforce the full royalties on those collections because it was obvious that the traders who are very price sensitive they would go to you know those alternative venues but they openc basically said uh because blur isn't doing that they're not going to be removed from the filter list I see so even though you guys are trying to play nice they're like no scrubler like we're not going to take them off I think a lot of people who are listening this conversation who are not very deep

in nfts might be confused about what we keep talking about royalties royalties royalties royalties it seems like royalties is like at the heart of this big conflict between all the big marketplaces in nfts maybe just just just to kind of build the intuition why are royalties so fraught why are they so important why are people arguing about them because we're not talking about fees right fees are also another element of it which is that you know uh openc has the highest uh take rate of any of the nft exchanges but the big fight has been over royalties why do you think it is that royalties are this giant Battleground yeah I think a lot of it is path dependency to be honest you know the way the way the nft culture started was pfps like larger collections they weren't the

norm it was initially like one of one art you know like small batch Collections and for like one of one artists you know this whole concept of royalties made a lot of sense because collectors of those collections they have a very personal relationship with the art and they have a personal relationship with the artists and they'll oftentimes want to pay the royalty because they want to honor the artist and help sustain them um it's a really beautiful thing pfp collections as they got big it kind of became the norm to still have the royalties and it kind of became like the default way that a lot of these collections would monetize not from like a total monetary perspective but from like a cultural perspective so you know if you look at yoga labs for example like they make most of their money off

of the mints and and actually a very small proportion of the money that they've made has been off the royalties but I think it just kind of became the norm for everyone to expect when we when we looked at the market it seemed rather sub-optimal from uh from a value capture perspective for the collection creators to be honest because you know in in any sort of financial Market any increase in take race results in a non-linear decrease in trading volume if you decrease the take rates you can have significantly more trading volume you can have tighter spreads more liquidity there's a lot of things and then there's a lot of things that can only happen once you have more liquidity and it felt to us like the space was kind of being held back by this Norm that wasn't

actually long-term optimal but it was the norm because that's kind of how uh you know how the space started effectively that makes sense okay so there's there's a lot of kind of cultural path dependence to how royalties played out and how they became such a an important Battleground both symbolically financially and even emotionally for why all these exchanges were fighting with each other over this concept of royalties and trying to enforce them on chain through blacklisting each other and doing all this other uh all this other complicated stuff you could argue that royalties were sort of like liquidity mining for artists in that it like attracted artists at a certain time you know in 2021 where you're basically arguing that they got this like annuity

that would you know be there perpetually and that's why you should put your art in an nft and I think like one there's yeah there's just some point at which it became an unreasonable subsidy relative to like Market friction also by the way history we all know this this episode is your Victory lap episode but we'll get to that we'll get to that we'll get to that so go ahead Tom no I totally agree I think um from my conversations with artists and galleries a lot of them initially viewed you know digital art has been around for for a while but a lot of them viewed the attractor of nfts as you know a reaching a bigger Market but also getting asked to the secondaries it was sort of sort of a very like semi-famous moment where

like not an artist but Mark Cuban was talking about tokenizing you know Cavs tickets and letting them trade um on like an nft exchange and then someone was like no like you know you know you can't enforce the royalties on chain and he's like wait what's the point of the tokenization that if I don't get the second the secondary speeds and so it's like I think even you know somewhat sophisticated people sort of sort of missed this point wait wait wait wait wait are we we're calling Mark Cuban who lost a lot of his money in Iron Finance uh the sophisticated person here just just checking I'm trying to be kind I'm trying to be kind on the Pod today so the other thing that always struck me as strange about this story about royalties and again I'm trying not to take too much of a victory laugh because

we I did predict that this would happen but the thing that also struck me strange is that crypto you know in crypto we find a way to tokenize almost everything right pretty much anything that can be on chain we find some way to break it down into tokens and trade it but for some reason people never did that to royalties they never tokenized their royalty stream and then sold it to third parties um there were a few projects I did this year and there but it wasn't widespread it wasn't common but this seems like the obvious way to understand what royalties are right like when an artist you know ends up working with a music label what they do is they end up basically selling off vast majority of their royalties to the label right in order to basically get an upfront payment to allow them to

go create art or whatever do you know take and also take away most of their risk if nft artists had done this what they would find is that actually you can just sell this offer lump sum payment and basically sell it you know you could have sold it to The Exchange in the first place so there's nothing about even the nature of royalties that guarantees that they're structured as an annuity if you just sold it off up front which you know you could in principle then um I think the Norms would have been very different if in fact when royalties were created that they were initially tokenized and most people would just sold them alongside the initial nft end yeah I think it's it's very interesting you know ultimately I think especially on on Twitter what ends up happening is there's no Nuance that's allowed in any

of these conversations and there's Nuance at multiple levels there's there's Nuance in the types of nfts right so like pfp like large pfps like a zugi or azuki or Yuga like those are like venture-backed companies like those are startups and that's a very different Beast than like a one-of-one artist that sells like super rare and uh collector that's buying a bunch of art is very different than a retail user who's a newcomer is very different than a Trader who is going to be very price sensitive uh is different than like a market maker um and you're now now after our token launch um you know there are a lot more market makers in the space than there were before which is something that's quite interesting um which is what you know what we were hoping for ultimately but you know

basically there are all these different demographics and use cases and the conversation has only ever been a binary you know will you fully enforce royalties or not fully enforce royalties and it's like the market has tried to apply a one-size-fits-all solution to a market that is actually very segmented so it was just like it was just very surprised not surprising I think I'm not surprised anymore but it was more so just it was like okay this is gonna be a short-term like noise effectively because this conversation like the market will do what the market is going to do this conversation can prevent it for a little bit but the market is ultimately what's going to win out at the end of the day and you can't really stop the market forces so it just seems kind of like an inevitability but it was

it was a conversation that lasted for a lot longer than than I think it needed to and we could have focused on more productive conversations but it wasn't able to just because of the lack of nuance 100 yeah all markets tend toward efficiency over time especially as they become more competitive but okay let's let's continue on with the case study so okay so openc thousand pound gorilla they they start blacklisting you guys for collections that that uh are if they if they want to enforce full royalties they have to Blacklist blur as well as pseudo and a bunch of other stuff okay now separately you guys are doing so sort of two things that are happening I think on the blur side so one is that you guys observe the rise of aggregators like Gem and Genie blur launches as an aggregator initially but then you also

have your own proprietary liquidity meaning that instead of just being a pass-through to being able to shop on a bunch of other exchanges you can list items directly onto blur and onto blur's order book and part of what was so brilliant about blur and what and I think a big contributor to you guys success was the nature of your liquidity mining program so if you look at the other two big upstart tokenized nft exchanges X2 Y2 and looks rare both of them had token airdrop mining whatever programs but they were both terribly designed in that most of what they incentivized was wash rating in fact we see if you look at the metrics on chain enormous amounts of wash rating hildabby from dragonfly posted some great analysis showing how much of the volume

on these two exchanges can be easily identified to be watch trading talk us through what did X2 Y2 and looks rare do wrong what did you learn from them about how not to design a liquidity mining program and what you guys did instead yeah that's a great question so for context blur started 400 days ago so today's day 400 press epilar and if you zoom out and go back to January of last year it's really interesting because as soon as we started working on blur uh looks rare launched about like a week or two after and then x2y2 launched soon after that gem as well launched about the same time so all of these players that came into the market they came into

the market right as we started building blur and so we had to start from a point of uh building from you know behind everyone and you know shipping faster than a competition to to eventually pull ahead but something that we benefited from even though you know having a late start is was was uh frustrating is we got to observe what looks where next to Y2 did and what we learned was that you know clearly the airdrop program that looks rare did was incredibly successful like it got everyone talking about looks rare it got so many users into the funnel but you know if if you spend any time in you know web 2 e-commerce startups you know you'll know that you can you know put as much money as you want into like Facebook ads so prior

users But ultimately if you don't have the retention you're basically just burning money and you know that was kind of what we saw with these marketplaces where they did these massive areas drop campaigns it was very good for customer acquisition at the top of the funnel but the products themselves and the niches that they were serving were not were not good and there's two issues with it one was the marketplaces themselves just like were not really that great like they were effectively competing with openc but at the product level they were worse and also if you study web 2 marketplaces you can see that it's basically impossible to actually unseat a large Marketplace once it has established Network effects like even Craigslist you

know they haven't changed their product in in like 20 years and they still do about like a billion uh in Revenue every year so Network effects are really really strong the only way that you can actually create a new Marketplace or exchange or anything that relies on network effects is you have to Target a different segment you see this in token world where you know even though coinbase was very dominant binance came out they targeted the crypto Natives and they created a better product for them and then expanded from there FTX as well actually uh pulled off the strategy very effectively you know their big issue was stealing everyone's money but outside of that like they actually had a really good product like most of the people that I know they actually prefer trading on FTX you know even though STS launched so late in 2019. so the two big issues

that we saw were that they launched and with the worst product and they didn't have a product that could retain people and then they they incentivized wash trading uh they incentivized volume whenever you incentivize volume basically what you'll have is some Mev guy will do a uh you know or girl or they uh will do a EV calculation and be like okay I can trade this much amount and I'll get this much in you know tokens back and then I can sell them and then there's a profit and I'm just gonna keep on doing that and what that means is that you're bringing in watch Traders into your Market you're not actually bringing in real users and so we avoid did that by only incentivizing liquidity and never volume and that resulted in real users coming into the market so incentivizing liquidity though is

subtle right it's very easy to know how to incentivize trading volume how do you incentivize liquidity without letting it be gamed yeah it's quite it's quite difficult I think a really good model here is if you look at Curve uh curve has done a great job incentivizing so on curve right it's like you're only rewarded for providing liquidity for the sample coin Pairs and uh you don't actually get any rewards for trading the Civil coins right the only reason you trade is because they have such a great liquidity and so that's a great setup um it's it's quite easy for Curves to kind of do a calculation there because you have stable coins they're like fungible assets for nfts they are non-fungible assets so it's pretty difficult um you know when we did our our airdrops basically we incentivized listings and

we didn't publicize any sort of formula for it because um it's difficult to design a formula that is like a one-size-fits-all solution you know these are non-fungible assets so um you know you could incentivize just floor listings but then what you get is you know people aren't going to list their mids or their rares right there's different tiers of nfts and you're just going to get people listing all the items near the floor and also like that's not even necessarily what you want because now you just get a ton of uh you know massive cell walls that are very difficult to break through uh and that's not necessarily a good outcome so listing incentives are quite difficult bidding incentives are a lot easier actually we were able to basically have a single formula for that because you know bids are it's just like liquidity on a trading pair right so you

can you can look at the liquidity and because it's fungible you can come up with some formulas for doing it and it works pretty similarly to curve where you basically you know take the integral of like the the bid over time and and then you basically like some some value function over time that you can assign to each bid based on its position in the order book you know without getting too much into the weeds basically you can you can come up with a pretty good formula for for bidding it's quite difficult for listing but you know we did our best and you know it it worked uh even though it was kind of opaque the Robert what are your thoughts as the granddaddy of liquidity mining what are your thoughts as the the concept of liquidity money has gotten more and more complex with trying to do that for nfts

now well the profits you know when compound began the distribution of computers there was no phrase called liquidity mining it wasn't intended to be liquidity mining it was sort of an accidental byproduct you know I think the science behind all of this has evolved a hundredfold you know in the two ish years two and a half years uh since I mean like two and a half years ago is like the Stone Age when it comes to creating and scaling protocols um you know back then it was basically just playing with rocks and sticks now it's you know I I think blur is bringing science to this in a way that there was no science back in the day right um I I I completely agree with the point that you want to you know create

underlying like genuine liquidity you're not trying to get like wash trading or like things that don't contribute value back to the protocol you know I think that is one of the intelligent things that you know blur is doing where you you see any issues like this one looks rare and other platforms where it's just it's it's junk Behavior it's not like useful behavior and so by focusing on the provision of liquidity like that's what makes the actual Marketplace better and so by focusing on that I think it's the correct area to focus on I remember when we were looking at all the nft marketplaces like we we really wanted to back one of these absurd marketplaces but every time that we looked at the liquidity mining programs they were just so obviously wrong

like centralized exchanges figured this out a while ago like ever since F coin people have known that trade mining is broken it's just wrong like you it's the wrong thing to do and every time you do it you will get the same result which is watch training you just get tons and tons of watch trading um but designing like you said Pac-Man doing this for nfts is complicated it requires a lot of careful thinking and making sure that again you're not like there's so many different ways to game protocols that are on chain where you don't exactly know who this person is you can't exactly tell you know is this person on the other side actually uh you know a counterparty making a legitimate trade and so it's all about mechanism design and thinking very carefully about you know if you were it's very it's very

much about adversarial thinking if you were a airdrop farmer uh or an adversarial you know airdrop minor uh how would you do it and how can you defeat them as best you can yeah absolutely it's it's quite interesting there's so many different ways that people would try to game it you know just on the on the bid side um you know one thing that is very common that we see and it's it's funny I wish the I wish like the exploiters would just kind of give a little bit more respect to some some of the ever put in because like one of the obvious things that people do is they'll um they'll of course try to like civil attack like they'll split up their bids across different accounts and the reason why you want to do that is in

case the the points get like curved at all right so if they get curves on the upper end you obviously want to split it into a lot of the different small accounts another one is you know people keep their bids up and then if they see a transaction in the mempool or someone trying to sell into it they'll immediately withdraw their eth from the bidding pool and it's like you know this is the most obvious you know Ploy ever you just like you can just like query for that so easily and detect that and and filter that out and then you sort of risk Ward scheme and they're more like Advanced way uh like you know modifications of that scheme uh that we're aware of but you know ultimately it's pretty it's pretty hard to you know cheat it on the bidding side because it's like you know liquidity whether

you're farming or placing a bid you know completely just because you want to like buy an item if someone sells into it like liquidity is liquidity and as long as your liquidity is staying up there you're taking risk because someone can always sell into your bid and so you're you know you're providing real value there and unless you're trying to like game it by making it so your bid like can't be sold or something that can't be bought into which is pretty easy to detect you're ultimately taking real risk when you bid so it is it is like a really nice structure where we are able to kind of effectively assign like a real point system and formula to the bidding incentives and and that worked quite well okay so if I had to sort of uh take a high level summary of what made blur

successful like what the Playbook was I think it started with aggregation kind of learning from jam and Genie which came before you guys the second prong was the liquidity mining which started creating the proprietary order book that allowed you guys to start competing toe-to-toe with openc then let's go back to the royalty side because the royalty is really where the drama accelerated particularly within the last couple weeks uh this is the part that I think at some day there will be a Harvard Business School case study on what happened between you guys in Royal and open C on royalties so you guys wrote this blog post uh very recently where you encouraged your creators to start blocking openc instead of blocking blur talk us through what happened there what

was that what was the Gambit how did you think of this up yeah so you know ultimately we've always maintained the position and we've shared from day one that any sort of on-chain filter system is circumventable we didn't do anything uh since November was when opens kind of first came out with their filter system we didn't do anything for three months basically because we were still thinking through you know what what position makes sense we really didn't want to put something out there and then have to change our position you know we saw this happen on Solana where magic Eden they tweeted we will never get rid of royalties and then like

literally four weeks later they changed their position and it was just it was just like not a good look you know because it's like if you just like think through the problem it's like very obvious that you you can't like unless you can enforce it on chain there's just no way you can actually maintain that promise you know otherwise you know magic Eden would have to go to their shareholders and say hey like we're gonna do like we're doing this and we're maintaining this and we're gonna lose market share and No One's Gonna trade on us but like you know we're gonna maintain this position like they would have to go and do that and obviously they're not going to go and do that and they did it and openc was basically taking a similar approach we really didn't want to put out any sort of

approach that we'd have to you know go back with our on our word on so whenever when we came out initially we said you know we'll adopt this filter policy it was like week after obviously came out with their policy we said we'll adopt this as long as it's not getting circumvented and then if it does get circumvented then we'll then we'll change our policy uh to match and uh we didn't do anything we started seeing some new marketplaces come out that were uh you know taking a royalty circumvention approach to growth which was fairly obvious we we knew it was going to happen we knew it was going to happen from you know from the moment that the system was introduced but you know we kind of bited our time because we didn't want to take action unless it was needed we started we started to see

that happen and then uh and then basically we just kind of put into to uh action the plan that we had from the beginning which is um you just need to make it so that the only like plus EV move for openc is to basically remove blur from the filter list and the way we did that was we said you know if your collection blocking blur you know it's still going to be tradable umbler it's just going to be tradable without the full royalties with a minimum point five percent but if you block open C it'll be tradable with full royalties and then you know of course the the only plus EV move there is to start blocking uh open C and and then you start to see that and then you know

within within two days openc had decided to remove blur from the block list and then they basically matched our policy so can you can you go into some of the great details like how was this move possible and I think maybe some details about Seaport and all this might be helpful for people to understand how this worked yeah there are there are multiple ways that you can do it you know you can create contracts that basically you know the way that the block worked was it was a very primitive block it basically was um you know whenever you trade an nft you have to approve a contract to spend it similar to how when you like trade your week on uniswap you have to you know approve uniswap to to spend the week and uh basically this

uh filter that obviously created would uh you know look at the address that was being approved and and basically just fail if if it was like a blacklisted address and so you know you could obviously just like switch addresses but then they can like update their filter list you can do something Dynamic where you know sudo kind of has like a dynamic pool system where each pool has a different address so that makes it like harder you know for us we we felt like it would just be easier instead of you know changing the marketplace protocol we could just use C Port itself uh which is opensees you know Marketplace protocol that they that they rely on and they're not going to block their own Marketplace protocol of course so we basically just use their own protocol and then and then there wasn't really

much that they could do about it so this is like a trojan horse type attack it almost seems like the best analogy which is that once you start piggybacking on their own infrastructure you became like you know it's they sort of needed to do some kind of chemotherapy type approach if they wanted to save themselves from being able to still block blur is that a fair summary yeah ultimately that is fair and you know we like we don't try to Glow or parade things around at all ultimately it's just you know this it's all right we'll glue it on your behalf because it was pretty amazing to watch I got to be honest we were uh we were we were floored when we saw what you guys were doing on chain thank you sir thank you sir um you know ultimately just the moves

that they were making just it didn't make sense to us it didn't seem like it was actually furthering the space it seemed like a very self-protective move you know I think they brilliantly framed it as a pro Creator move uh even though it was very you know clear to us that it was it was not it was not a pro crater move and I think that the rest of the space kind of saw that um you know just a few days ago when they switched things up to many people's surprise so let's talk about that so you guys Throw Down The Gauntlet you say hey guess what if you want to block us you have to block yourself and creators should instead join us and block openc if they want to be receiving full royalties on blur and within what was it like within a few days

yeah I was like four Day hours okay so within 48 Hours openc announces for the first time ever after being throughout their entire history the highest the highest fee and full royalty enforcing exchange through all of the nft Boom for the first time ever they announced that they are no longer enforcing royalties and they're going to zero fees for a temporary period of time basically all of a sudden to try to win back market share and in their explanation they basically say look guys we tried our best we love the creators we really try to to fight for you but you know the the the capitalists are here they've broken down the doors there's nothing we can do anymore uh to to protect you from there

uh from their savagery uh what what was that like for you guys when you saw this happen what was going through your mind you know it's fine I I won't I won't reveal too much because I do I do try to respect the privacy but you know in general we've tried not to antagonize open C we we like to be cordial when we can we've had conversations with them we had a conversation with them before they made this move about enforcing royalties on collections that um that you know were whitelisting both blur and open C at the same time and you know I made it very clear of them it's like we don't we don't want to be antagonistic here like let's just try to find a solution and uh that makes sense for everyone like it

was you know when if you read in our blog posts you know what we say at the bottom uh you know why that has an open C remove blur from their block list and we say you know I think that they have the same goal but we just have different perspectives on on what makes sense as a solution and we try to be neutral and then before they made the announcement I was like Hey like you know like let's keep on trying to collaborate like hoping you make like a neutral announcement and then we read the Tweet thread and it's like blur is the reason why that we're going to zero fees that I was like oh my God this is definitely not neutral um so I was just kind of like shocked initially I was like it the tone was just like very surprising to me it was

it was very disappointing honestly but then I think I think the there was an incredible outpouring of support from the community um towards blur afterwards I think a lot of the community kind of saw the market and the players and the motivations behind the players in the same way that that we saw versus before I feel like there was more of like a rose-colored lens that just wasn't actually matching reality so it was kind of validating in a way because you know since since we had launched like after after openc launched the operator filter collections would launch and they actually you know it was just so confusing for collections like popular collections launched and they didn't know how to implement the operator filter and we literally would help them block blur so that they wouldn't trade

on blur uh because openc would zero out royalties if a question traded on blur so we're literally like helping devs uh as their collection was launching block blur and you know this entire time the general like sentiment was that blur was like evading royalties and like trying to like hurt royalties and it was quite upsetting because you know we've only ever really tried to maximize royalties but in a way that is ultimately sustainable and not not going against the market forces because it was very clear to us that you know there's gonna be a sustainable end State at some point in time this like whiplashing like full you know All or Nothing royalty enforcement it's just it's just fundamentally unsustainable this is very clear to us that there was fundamentally unsustainable we've really tried to work towards something about sustainable but

it kind of felt like the entire time that we were antagonized and that kind of started shifting um you know since they made their move so that that was validating I would say it really is a David versus goliathroid because openc honestly throughout all of 2021 2022 you know the product was just at a standstill they were just kind of soaking up all the liquidity all the trading volume and we always wondered like is when is somebody finally going to take a run at them and it just felt like you said you know it's so hard to in seat marketplaces once they have that that Network effect of the buyers and the sellers and liquidity and all that stuff that um I was just like is this ever is the reign of openc ever going to end and within basically the last week for the

first time ever blur is the first ever nft exchange since 2020 to have more volume than openc uh with users you guys are almost neck and neck for users it's it's absolutely insane to watch and uh it's it's a good reminder that no matter how strong you think a monopoly is does always a path to be able to unseat it and blur through a bunch of beautiful strategic moves you guys have showed a path to do that thank you I will say you know the thing the thing about Network effects is they really are so brutally strong you know so so brutally strong the only reason why we thought that there was a chance was because you know even in the bull market uh when there

are more retail than uh in the space than there are now if you just did some basic data analysis you could see that actually the the majority of volume was driven by a small handful of power users and any sort of you know speculative or financialized Market over time professionalizes you saw this in the token trading Market where you started with like Mount gox and like coinbase very retail friendly way to buy and sell crypto and then over time you have more and more professionalized infrastructure develop Finance okx derabit you know who'll be um all of these more advanced trading platforms arise and then of course the volume professionalizes and now it's like a handful of market makers make up the vast majority of volume in the space it was very clear to us that nfts were

heading in that direction and then even in the bull market nfts were very much you know a power law driven so the only reason why it was possible was because structurally the market was not sound as it was no one was serving the power users it's funny because as we were building blur we had so much commentary about how it would be impossible for blur to you know make a dent in the network you know Open Seas Network effects were too strong and then now that we came out on top and have more volume than them we see a lot of comments like oh blur is succeeding just shows that anyone can still Mark a share from any of these marketplaces at any point in time and it's like it's just it's really it's it's funny because it's just like that's that's not actually how

the market works the network effects are incredibly sticky the only thing that is possible is if there's a huge unmet need in the market there's really only two segmentations that make sense it's retail and professional no one was serving the professional Market before blur but now that blur is dominant amongst the professional Market you know the same things that made open C so hard to unseat are going to be the same things that make blur so hard to unseat so you know of course as as core contributors I generally really think I generally think that you know staying paranoid at all times is the right operating model so it's not about you know resting on our Laurels or anything like that but it's just you know people who say oh like blur like this you know blur succeeding just shows how weak

these Network effects are they're not they're not accurate at all about that I think it's also a sign that like so you guys have to get so many things right to unseat open sea right like there's sort of multiple or another way to describe that is that openc had to had to mess up in multiple ways in order to end up losing market share to a new upstart exchange and you know one can argue about what those strategic mistakes were but it's very clear and I think most people kind of had this feeling about openc is that they they kind of had gotten a bit too comfortable with their position and these kind of always happens when you have a ineffective Monopoly that gets knocked down is that they get very comfortable with this idea that ah you know we kind

of we have a lock on this Market we can kind of do what we want we can set prices however we wish we don't have to be responsive to to competitors and suddenly you you they get woken up and here we are now with uh both both openc and blur now having the same fee structure after basically like you know a good two years of open seat just raking in cash and completely owning the market yeah it's quite interesting because you know when we started our vision for blur has not changed in the past 400 days but everything that had to happen you know even just you know starting and raising our 11 million round from Paradigm building up a team you know primarily through our MIT Network Galaga and I we recruited you know through our

network from you know friends who had worked in trading and real-time systems so you know like our Engineers from my Citadel if everyone's capital a very unique engineering team that had the capability to build such a system and then even then in that time we've had to build you know in stealth uh really non-stop uh every single day and also we were reliant on you know the existing players basically not catching on and building what we had built until we gained sufficient market share so all of those things really had to align in order for you know Bliss to to succeed and and then now it's like we we see we just see people in the market being like Oh like this this new player is going to be the next blur or this other player is

going to be an Explorer and it's like it's if I wish it were that easy for us to get to get to this position um and also I think lot of times what I've seen in the market is the nft space has not internalized the lessons that the D5 world has internalized which is like so strange because you know it's like this is all like web3 crypto like we're neighbors but it seems like there's not as much uh cross-pollination as we would have assumed and we've seen in defy that anytime there's a leading protocol developed whenever someone copy pastes it it can get like some traction But ultimately you know they just they just get smaller and smaller and smaller you can't actually gain any share by just copy pasting you know the the leading player and we see people you

know copy pasting blur and then you know excitement for the the copy paste uh protocols and it's just like that's that's not really how this space works and it and I just I really wish it were that easy for us but it wasn't and you know we'll of course stay on our toes and never want to be hubristic but I would just it just doesn't really seem like the market internalizes a lot of lessons that are just like you know right across the street really in the D5 world I just want one thing as an analogy I would maybe kind of compare to is maybe maybe this is a bad example for some reasons but but you mentioned it earlier Pac-Man which is FTX you know I remember in 2018 and 20 2017 there were just like a million new

centralized exchanges like everyone and their mom was like I'm gonna make a centralized exchange like if you were a Chinese unicorn you somehow had to have a I'm making a crypto exchange centra's exchange plan and you know none of those exchanges had any differentiation other than like hey we're just going to like bring our users from our app into this which then of course Chinese government slapped them in the face and said you can't you know FTX came out of this this sort of like weird thing where like everyone was kind of negative on crypto exchanges because all of these exchanges that had raised tons of money had kind of like failed and their main thing was just focusing on sort of the institutional broker dealer type of

people uh at the very beginning so there's a lot of similarities I feel like I was wondering where you're going to take that but okay it's the institutional you know like Pro yeah thing okay I thought you were gonna say like oh it's the liquidity from Alameda and I was like no don't I don't think you I don't think you want to go there uh okay the beautiful thing there is yeah I mean one of the beautiful things about daps to non-chain protocols is that you know unlike the essentialized businesses everything is on chain everything's verifiable it's so cool when when we build and see you know there's so like so many of the dashboards that I've wanted to make myself I just search on Dune and and there's already something there and it's

great and it's honestly like they they made it like look prettier than I would have even made it so it's like it's more appealing to to use even internally than anything I would have done so having everything be on chain is really incredible I think that there are a lot of parallels though and it's that that's ultimately what we saw if you look at the token trading world you see seen this tragedy play out multiple times where binance did it with you know coinbase right like they built this crypto native exchange and then they expanded from there and then FTX of course like token infrastructure is is even more financialized than nfts nfts are moving in that direction but obviously it's like still very very early ultimately you know FTX pulled a similar strategy where they focus even

on an even more of a niche uh than binance did and then expanded uh so ultimately there are there are definitely uh parallels there and you know FTX did not help our growth but what's cool is that you know all the growth that blur experience has been in the wake of that you know financial crisis that FTX class in the in the worst bear Market that we've seen in crypto so that just makes us you know even more excited about the space because I think the nfts have really proven to have a longevity and stickiness that no one really expected I think you made a really good point around sort of these existing players not picking up on the meta shift towards you know these sort of these professional Traders and away from one of ones to pfps and we're also leaning into sort of the way pfps are traded

with collection bidding and floor bidding and like you know sort of this new Dynamic versus just having having a your generic you know order book that might be more fitting for a different type of asset what do you think is going to be the new meta shift or the next meta shift and how nfts are traded people been trying to make nft amms for a while and they've kind of had very you know middling success do you think that's going to be what the future looks like or how do you sort of see the next generation of exchanges yeah I think that you know the general Trend that you know as as contributors we're building towards is ultimately if you look at token trading infrastructure you know it's had a decade to professionalize and you started with spot trading and then you had you know

derivatives margin Futures options you know et cetera Etc and as that advanced infrastructure was developed obviously the space The Tam of the space grew massively you know beyond what anyone really expected we're seeing a similar Trend in nfts but it is a different asset class so we've seen a lot of like copy paste attempts where there's you know literally like a lot of the protocols like the nft5 protocols that we've seen today are like literally copying pasting D5 protocols and just you know changing it so that it works with erc721s instead of erc20s and you know not nothing that we've seen has really excited us but I will say that I think that that is the general direction that we're gonna see in the space that's something that we're very excited about

because I think they're just you know massive growth there and obviously something that we're we're actively researching but I I wouldn't say I've seen anything you know particularly exciting just yet and when it comes to the amms you know when when uniswap launched there was so much fun about it because it is a fundamentally very inefficient model the there are many reasons why it works you know one of the reasons is you know for for essentialized exchanges it's like getting listed is such a pain and you you know for most tokens like they can't even get listed on a lot of these exchanges right so uniswap kind of had this like if you look at the market structure you know unisop serves a need that basically like even though it was

so inefficient and shitty like it was actually your best option um and then of course there's also you know some specific regulatory reasons for why they couldn't offer a off-chain order book like ether Delta did this and it got shut down nfts as digital Collectibles they they operate in a different regulatory environment you know all of the marketplaces operate with a you know off-chain order book or off-chain Oracle and when you compare an order book model to an amm model the order book model is much more Capital efficient so when we when I've seen the excitement around amms and nfts it's it's been quite surprising to me because it is fundamentally a more inefficient

model any system that you can design via an amm you can design via an off-chain model more efficiently so it just you know when we've seen some you know the excitement is you know never say never right it's like the thing about technology is that you can never really predict when things will will work or don't work you can only kind of take educated guesses but I would be very surprised if the amm model really proves to be a you know successful leading model in the space so back when you talked about how now that blur has really kind of busted out on the scene a lot of people are murmuring about oh this thing's gonna be the next next blur that's gonna be the next blur how do you think like how do you prevent blur from

getting blurred how do you stop somebody from aggregating you and doing a similar Playbook that you guys did on openc to you yeah I think that when you look at the defy World you've seen this play out already where uniswap got sushied and you know by literally just being copy pasted and then unisoc came out and they they you know sushi sushi by dropping their own token and it you know sucked people back away from sushi and and then of course you're gonna swap one one out right as soon as she wasn't anything new when we look at the market structure it's like if you had asked us to build a competitor to openc going after retail by introducing a tokenomic model and

like liquidity mining I would have said you know find another team to do that because I don't want to waste my time and there's much better things to do ultimately it would have been a I I think a Herculean task I think basically impossible to actually go after Open Seas Market the same way that uh going after the same you know retail user base there's not really any sort of token incentive that you can provide that makes up for lack of liquidity right so like if I'm selling like a fifty thousand dollar jpeg it doesn't like I can't really get enough tokens to make out for the fact that like if I list on a new Marketplace going up to the same user it might not sell at all and I just can't really justify not listing on like the main marketplace so

there you can't really utilize token incentives like make up for a lack of liquidity you can really only go after a specific segment that isn't well served so I think when I when I observe the market people talk about vertical marketplaces in general I'm not very bullish on the vertical Market thesis uh it's like you don't really see vertical exchanges for tokens even though there are many different tokens with different use cases you know I I think there's a few types of nfts where vertical markets make sense and I think that you can do do something there like for example ens there's a site ens Vision where it's like you get to type in the names you can filter by like alphabetically and upload like a big spreadsheet of names like you know buying and selling domain names is a very different experience

than buying and selling uh you know pfps and so if like you can carve out a niche there you don't even need like a token model to do that like you can just like carve out a niche there maybe the token model can like accelerate things a little bit as like a marketing expense but you know ultimately it needs to be something where it the existing users just not being served very well and when we evaluate the nft market today I don't really see those same horizontal gaps as we saw with you know open C and the pro market now maybe that can change right it's like hard to predict the future but as it stands today you know people people talk about like blur getting blurred and it's just like you know it's just I really wish it were

that easy for us like it would have been just so much easier um you know I had I literally haven't left uh the office in a month like I would take uh um literally haven't even stepped outside uh of the office and just like to imagine you know a team just like casually uh you know dropping a token copy pasting uh our designs and and doing some sort of model and vampire attacking blurry would just it would just it would just be surprising I'm sure open city was surprised too when they uh saw this happening to them but I I I take your point and it sounds like you guys have been through a gauntlet to get to where you are and um I guess the the last thing that I want to end on so first of all this was really fantastic Insight thanks for sharing this I think

you know we spend a lot of our time talking entrepreneurs because of course the four of us are investors and a lot of entrepreneurs especially now after the collapse of FTX and the market kind of being in this weird State a lot of people just feel like you know what can I do you know like how can I how can I actually get some traction and how can I actually take on an incumbent when there's so little dynamism in the market not that much is happening and you guys are a perfect example of how just understanding enough about the microstructure of the market and having enough insight about how to create a better product and go after users you can go after the biggest fish in the industry you can go after one of the most highly valued private companies in the space and you know end up going

toe-to-toe to them and bringing them down the the the last thing I want to end on is about royalties because I think you know before on the show uh we had a debate about royalties and I was I was firmly on the side that I thought royalties were going to go away that they were going to be a thing of the past and now I think we're basically there I don't think there's anyone at this point who really seriously believes royalties at least in the in the state they were before obviously now you guys are enforcing I think 50 bips royalties and openc is doing the same but it's kind of like uh it's sort of like the royal family after the end of the monarchy you know like they're sort of there as figureheads but they they don't they don't really do anything anymore

um what do you guys think to ruin Robert Tom like do you think this is good this is bad are you disappointed are you like how do you feel about the death of royalties I I think it's good and bad so I think it's bad because I think it violates the original expectations and intent of a lot of the creators that made nfts right whether they are rightly or wrongfully thought that they were implementing royalties correctly they expected royalties so I think doing away with them is fundamentally bad because even though you know their fault they got had right all the creators like because

they're not as good technically as like the Open Sea and blur development teams okay like the creators are on the losing end here and I think that's fundamentally somewhat bad I think long term it's potentially good because it's going to force everyone to up their game and to build systems that actually work and are resistant to blur and are resistant to other platforms and implement the technology for royalties the way people expect or they're going to make fundamental changes and rethink it entirely but long term I think it's going to lead to sort of like a better end state but you know I kind of think it's you know a sad thing that

varieties are going away not from their own volition but from the platforms really kind of cutting off the artists and creators Tom what's your take yeah I mean I think we were always in kind of a weird like unsteady equilibrium when it came to royalties right and we knew that something was going to shift you kind of saw this stuff bubbling under the surface the way it was in the past was kind of weird where artists were almost sort of free writing and relying on these third parties these exchanges to like generate revenue for them when in reality they should be thinking about how can I get buyers to want to pay royalties to me like instead of just there's this third-party transaction happening over here and I somehow get to continually skim how can I actually

build up a stronger relationship with the people who are going to be part of my community and like as we lean into that more so I think it's a nice sort of wiping this late clean and hopefully creating a new opportunity for people to think about what the futures of nft Economics are going to look like true I kind of more um of the mindset that you know the market microstructure being more efficient means like you can start doing more clever things with nfts maybe it's not like lending or perps because that's just like copy pasting an idea that exists but maybe it's some notion of of like a different form of trading that just doesn't work at high royalties streams right like I mean there's just

there's just a ton of products that work better when the slippage costs are lower and you know it could be that it's something where there's a new product made to avoid slippage costs so you know like perps in some ways exist as the largest market in crypto because people wanted to avoid the spot trading costs and they wanted more leverage with low collateral right like kind of very simple needs it they also kind of were popular because spot trading fees were so much higher than perp trading fees for a long time arguably that's that's sort of the binance how you know the binance FTX kind of era of the last bear Market was and so

I just think it's going to be more interesting to see what kind of yeah the future type of products look like I do think there will be something like that has Leverage uh but it'll only kind of work at like very low fees and some notion of how you can like fractionalize collections correctly and like only offer leverage on certain parts of them and not others but there's a very there's a very mechanistic answer in line with true but how do you feel how do you feel about the death of why is that why is that such a bad thing like come on I didn't say it's a bad thing but I just want to know because it's an emotional response what is your what does your heart tell you to read so so you know I used to make a lot of generative art and a lot of my friends

who I had meet at Art conferences got really rich in 2021 a lot of them quit their jobs and were like hey we're just gonna like live off our nfts art blocks streams and stuff like that and you know I feel like I was really happy for them but I was always like this seems unsustainable and uh yeah the lottery ticket's over I don't know it just seems like the natural state of nature like they're all so angry and every time I talk to them I just like I'm like you you don't realize that you won a lottery ticket right like I I just like take take it and just like accept it but somehow people want to pretend lottery tickets or annuities

yeah well I'd say my take like I said I when we were on that debate I was probably the most vocal anti-royalty person not because I think royalties are bad in and of themselves but I just think they do they just don't really make sense and they were always kind of doomed for this outcome unless they can be enforced on chain the number one thing that you learn in blockchain is that if it's not enforced in the code it's going to eventually go away and I I can't think of a single counter example to that pretty much ever that if this thing is not actually enforced by code that it won't survive and royalties were that royalties were basically a gentleman's agreement from a bunch of monopolists that they were going to keep paying the subsidy to artists and eventually

economics and competition and all that stuff reared its ugly head as it always does and all of a sudden the Goodwill evaporated because people started to feel their market share under threat and at the end of the day I think the thing that it forces people to do is to innovate that's always the answer it's always always always the answer is to innovate so whether that's innovating on the side of marketplaces whether it's innovating on the side of artists was people trying to figure out different kinds of revenue streams that they can earn from their from their supporters and from their fans I I don't think it'll ever be the case of like oh open C is no longer charging uh they're no longer enforcing royalties therefore artists are going to starve like that's obviously absurd that's not what's going to happen what's going to happen is that

artists are gonna have to find new ways to despite the fact that markets are now becoming more efficient and trading fees are lower uh they're going to find new ways to engage their audiences and they will step up to the task because that's what human beings do so Pac-Man I want to give you the last word how do you feel about the uh maybe let's call it the uh the uh the assistant homicide of royalties definitely feel fatigued and and somewhat regretful yeah when when the the royalty debate first got very heated and obviously came out with the operator filter you know we try to have conversations with a few players in the space and you know just like lay it out and just be like hey like here's here's all the logic here's here's what we

think is gonna happen here's what we think could maybe alter the course and uh like let's try to have a conversation with it about it ultimately none of those conversations were fruitful there is basically zero interest in having a conversation and I think now a lot of the players in the space kind of feels like open C pulled the rug out from under them and I just know that you know if those conversations were had there could there could have actually been a plan push forward that that likely could have been a different you know because multiple paths were possible it's not like this was the only path possible so I feel like there could have been a plan put forward that would have made everyone actually a lot a lot happier I think it's very hard to adapt to changing metas especially once you get

used to existing metas like everyone is at risk of that you know including ourselves right so it's very important to I think maintain like neuroplasticity especially when it comes to the the web 3 space which is just the space changes on on a week by week oftentimes like day by day basis and it's just very important to keep that in mind um until you reach like a steady state then you can't really get used to any sort of meta and even once that that steady state is reached who knows what new change is just going to change the meta so um you know I think we're here now we can have productive conversations I think that you know the the space will innovate this is a really incredible primitive that hasn't changed you know I wish I wish it happened in a different

way where I think people could have really been a lot more prepared than they were but you know we're here now and I think that the like ultimately nfts survived the worst bear Market in history and are really one of the only things that grew in that bear Market ultimately my belief is that nfts are more accessible to the broader public than even tokens I think that they're going to get bigger than tokens I'm very excited about that future and we're going to continue working to make that happen honestly I think in the long run you guys did open see a favor because competition the one thing competition does it makes everybody step their game up it makes everybody get better and that's true for openc it's obviously true for you guys now that openc has really woken up to the threat that blur is and I think it's also true for

creators that creators have to step up and they have to do more in order to earn their earn their keep if they want to keep on their lottery ticket uh they got to earn it every single day rather than just win it uh you know when nfts are are going crazy and the consumers win at the end of the day this all benefits them that's right so Pac-Man uh thank you for walking us through your thinking at blur it's been incredible to see your guys success and uh wish you wish you and your competitors all the best thank you sir all right that's it for this week signing off thanks everybody [Music]