DeFi By Design EP#44: Exploring the Metaverse with Charged Particles

Transcript

[Music] d5 slate team [Music] what's up y'all real quick if you like the d5 state content on twitter and youtube and sub stack please please give us a like and a subscribe on this video on youtube and join our channel join the community we'd really appreciate it we're pumping this stuff out for you all as much as we can and we really enjoy the support and the community that we've built thank you very much enjoy what's going on guys welcome to episode 44 of the d5 by design podcast uh it is july 6th today after a long july 4th weekend i'm sure a lot of you guys got after it

had a good time i know that i did i was celebrating canada today on the first and july 4th independence day on the floor so good little batch of uh of of good time with friends and family and now back into d5 uh and the markets are just kind of hanging out but the mft market is just as hot as it gets i mean we're seeing axi infinity token going nuts uh their protocol has been uh i think i think it surpassed most of the d5 protocols in terms of some sort of revenue or or protocol driven profit um absolutely insane growth there and a lot of nft projects and just overall the space at large here today with ben ben has been working with charge charged particles for about a year now

from the i from the idea phase all the way up until now with their interesting nft proposition uh which is is a type of vault that i'll kind of let ben explain a bit more here on in the cast i'm here today of course with robbie robbie how are you doing today my boy good morning good afternoon uh yo yo yeah doing well um just getting after it it is the start of q3 really just like it feels like the start of july so um like this is the second half of the year you know we're just we're just uh moving right along and it feels great so super hyped to be talking to uh ben from charged particles there there's a lot going on in the nft space and honestly i was

i was a little bit behind on the whole nft wave um you know the the whole um one for one and and all the uniqueness i i was able to understand around nfts but i thought it ended there so i'm super hyped to talk to ben and and explore some of the the complexities and and some of the you know higher order um opportunities that can be used in nfts and can be applied using nfts so i will pass it off to ben and let him introduce himself and a bit about charged particles thanks guys well so one you guys celebrated both canada day and fourth of july

so i only celebrated fourth of july but uh we got a canadian on the pod with us gotcha gotcha we're actually charged particles where uh we have a canadian entity so a number of canadian members of the team so i was reminded that it was canadian day or canada day sorry uh but man that's a that's a full weekend indeed um so yeah thanks thanks for having me on guys my name is ben lakoff um the business lead and one of the co-founders of charged particles uh my background's in finance uh but have been with charged particles since uh last summer so i met rob c cord who uh was the founder and visionary behind

charged particles in something called getcoin kernel which is a web 3 accelerator distributed accelerator so we met last summer and really got going on charged particles a lot more and got us to where we are now and i was kind of during the start of the world waking up to the concept of nfts because i mean they've been they've been around for some time right like i mean they were here in 2017 with crypto kitties but the world didn't really understand the power of them it seems like until about a year ago or so yeah and i i don't think the world actually truly understands the power of nfts i mean so backing up what is an nft it's a non-fungible token

it's a token that's not fungible it is a unique token so yes we've seen lots of use cases with art or in-game items but these are just scratching the surface of what's possible with a unique token so some sort of access token a ticket an e-gift card financial products i think this this term non-fungible token nft is just incredibly broad so we are starting to see the world waking up and saying oh this is this is rather interesting and useful um but our and these any sort of media file can be turned into an nft so we're going to see experiments all within this uh quite a bit

and and heating up in my opinion right and i think the i mean the biggest thing in mind is the community that is behind these nfcs whether it's an artist like for example i have glass animals tickets in charlotte uh in september and you know as part of the vip package they give you an exclusive nft that's kind of like you know you were here in charlotte you were probably drunk as hell and you had a good time with glass animals here's your nft right and so i think i think that kind of community behind okay like i like glass animals as band as an artist i want to support them right and i get this nft uh let's kind of dive into how how the brands make um you know these these communities possible so i think starting with kind of crypto punks as as a community and and as a

brand there's kind of this this concept of there's only 10 000 of these basically jpegs that are um you know that just look like people's heads that are just caricatures effectively um you know but there's just there's this big big community of oh geez kind of behind it um you know i'm curious what your thoughts are behind the strength of communities with regards to the legitimacy of nfts you know such as crypto punks or others yeah so i think it's it's flipped this whole pseudonymous i i'm an anonymous defy djinn thing on its head right and it's uh it's more of a this is me this is who i am as a person represented by these nfts that i own

so as you know some of the qualities of a blockchain are public transparent and permanent so when you start exposing who you are as a person through your nfts you know you hear a lot about like a digital flex and it's like you you're digitally flexing who you are what your what your wallet looks like which is which is crazy for people to think about right i mean i i um i'm out in venice uh venice beach california and there's a nft art gallery um that has opened up like a physical gallery for nfts and uh part of what they're doing is they're bootstrapping this it's called bright eyes

um uh they're giving away crypto venetian so um these uh algorithmically generated um nfts to anybody that shows up and during a certain period of time and they're limited and all the things but i i did this with a friend and it was her first time going through this and i was like look like just send me your address and i can look it up on ethersand i can see everything that you owned i can click there and go there i can see what um nfts you have and where you got them how much you paid for them all of this is public so this is this is what gives these things value it's a perfect provenance but it also it provides this rich history of who you

are as a person so do you have a crypto punk do you have a board a yacht club like do you have me bits what what kind of community do you align yourself with and then it has this very powerful bringing together the community aspect that is that is very difficult to replicate so you talked about the concert in charlotte so as you go to a number of these other concerts and perhaps you're collecting nfts as you go along well you look back in a year and you can see it's like this this um virtual digital scrapbook of where you've gone and what you've done that provides a lot of insight of who you are as a person what's your and what

is interesting to you and you can take all of this on-chain information at some point and and do some really powerful interesting things with it sweet yeah no the the concept of that kind of uh snapchat snapchat kind of take take a picture and you save it to your camera roll and then you come back and and a year in the future it says oh yeah one year ago today on chain is is very very powerful because i mean as you said you you build this digital identity um you know it kind of goes into like the metaverse you know like what if uh there's a club in the metaverse where you can only get in if you own a crypto

punk so it's like a whale club right or you know things like this right like like this glass animals like if you have the nft from year one when they launched it year two you get tickets at twenty percent off because you you know you purchase that nft you have it that is that is verifiable so i think uh the the verification of ownership um and the digital library of history are some of the most interesting use cases uh for nfts for sure yeah the business applications are are just they're thought-provoking because i think we haven't really had to dig deep into a lot of other um applications that that come about in cryptocurrency it's kind of like yeah this is money you know if we consider it

money and we can transact and find these arbitrage opportunities trading investing and staking but all of those are you know financially inclined whereas nfts are are more you know i want to say entertainment value but it's almost not it's almost like social capital um rather than you know economic capital and yeah i mean andy mentioned you know some really cool applications there in terms of like a 20 discount um you know we can think of more like uh you know you have this glass animals nft and you get their new album you know a week before it's released um so i think a lot of these business applications are super cool and and um i mean i'm sure there's you know people that have spent a lot

more time thinking about nfts ben you know i'm sure you're you're one of them and i'm curious you know what are some of the more just powerful business applications here at play that you know either charged particles is working on or you know another project and the ecosystem is putting forth yeah sure uh so i mean talking about that in different business use cases uh this is part of the overall like digitization of everything so if you think of this future state that i uh rather subscribe to of something like a ready player one sort of metaverse where we spend more

and more of our time all of these things that you interact with all of these digital assets there are assets and they're ownable so they can be represented as nfts so you have your virtual land you have your virtual building you have your wearables you have other assets within the game maybe your crypto heart that you hang on your wall so all of these can have a value so the ability for it it's such a different thing versus like a piece of art on my wall it's a piece of digital art i can rent it out to somebody in a trustless manner i can uh use that bundle it together with all the other assets in my house and quickly easily take a loan

collateralize by those asset values um and then everything in between so i i think as we move toward this more digital world like these nfts will will play a more central focus and like what you were talking about nfts is access tokens fantastic use case um there's there's a number of different projects that are working on this so collab land is a good one unlock protocol mintgate these are all figuring out a way to say hey i have this glass enft look i'm a fan what does that get me within this ecosystem maybe i it's an access token to a zoom call once a month that's

you know a bit of a master of mine maybe it's access into a chat group maybe it's access to a a hidden part of the website where you can do exclusive deals or merch maybe it's discount tokens and it it it's not quite the same as a fungible token that i can sell and trade but it's it's still a unique i own it so i can sell it if i want but it just kind of sits in my wallet and grants me access uh in these different ways so it's a great way for creators to interact with their community and do something new and innovative and show their appreciation and then later back to the having this rich history of who those people are you can you can tell so much more

about these people um as time goes on awesome and we're seeing clear clear paths for innovation you know amongst any of these protocols and ideas that we're mentioning a lot of them you know sort of still still in the ideation phase and in the digital only phase i imagine we see some real world connections um you know you know guys like mark cuban with the mavericks tickets and such like that but i'm kind of curious where where does charge particles fit into the nfc space um you know what are you guys looking to innovate uh or what problem are you guys trying to solve yeah so charge particles is a protocol nft protocol that allows you to deposit

things into your nft so using smart contracts we give each nft its own smart wallet that enables it to hold other tokens so what does that mean when you think about art so we went live with our art dap which we've had two million dollars plus of nft sales it's a novel new use case you can create a piece of art you can fill it full of social tokens you can time lack those you can fill it full of interest-bearing assets like ave-a-dye and you can fill it full of other nfts so it's it's this way for artists to differentiate themselves and and package things up into one

meta nft but when thinking about nfts as more than just art um this is this is when things get really interesting so an nft is a a ticket to an event with a value that's accruing in in value over time this yield bearing assets um like defy assets containerized within an nft it adds this this time element so maybe talking about nfts as um an access token within an ecosystem well if you deposit a hundred dye into your nft that's earning yield a die then you suddenly have this this this new token mechanic

which we call charge accumulating within your nft so it's able to distinguish how long you've held that nft so maybe as more yield accumulates in that nft it means you have more power within this ecosystem so you can create these new tiers of you have an nft you get this you have an nft with a thousand social tokens you get this you have an nft with ten 000 social tokens you get this you have an nft with social tokens and x amount of yield you get this and a portion of that yield can go to a charity can go to the other uh to the community that you're supporting you can kind of break this up in new unique ways so

charged particles at its current state is a art dap and an nft protocol we have a number of different projects spinning up new and exciting ideas things within games if you think of an nft is an in-game item holding interest-bearing assets that maybe equate to more power holding other nfts that if i battle you it kicks out another nft to you as like it congrats you've won uh there's there's a lot of cool use cases so um yeah we we're we're doing a lot of things we have a great community of people getting really excited about building some some really fascinating stuff and and using our adap um that's live it's on polygon layer two so you can do these

things on uh at low to no cost which is always more fun because it's uh it's trustless we don't have any login you know everything costs a little bit of gas which is great for privacy but um not that fun when you're paying five five or ten bucks every time right right yeah so i just wanna you know i guess yeah getting some clarity on on charged particles because there's a lot going on here um the two main takeaways that i got from really the the offering of charged particles is interest bearing nfts and seniority baked into these tokens meaning um like the time element you can track

how long someone has owned something and you know grant some power or yeah like credibility to that to that time um and now i'm taking a look at the charged particle site and i just want to make sure that you know i kind of connect the dots here um you know i see on the marketplace you have the highest charged particles are and i think this is right but are those the nfts that are uh gaining the most interest i guess the highest apr yeah or they have the most accumulated interest so that takes into account account principle how much you put in there time how long

it's been in there and apr so at what interest rate it's accruing so right now we rank the the marketplace based on different assets right now it's based on dye so if i have 10 000 die in an nft and it's been there for a year well i probably have quite a bit of accumulated interest but if you have 10 million die and it's in um you know usdt ausdt it's earning a higher interest maybe you have more than me after a month or something so it's a we're trying to rank it to like gamify it a bit who's uh deposited a lot of money with a higher interest rate uh over time and a portion of that interest can be directed to

charities i think i think there's a lot of like charitable things you can do with charged particles um we've had people sell an nft with a portion of the interest going to charity um going back to them the creator like a royalty there's there's a lot of like creativity levers you can pull here yeah yeah and monetization goes deep you know there's there's lots of complexity layers that you know you mentioned are flexible and you can pull those levers uh you know depending on what what you're trying to accomplish so i like the tiered aspect right we can create tiered communities um you know whether it's people who are paying more for a subscription whether it's people who have you know

earned more endows right you kind of can set up these incentive mechanisms um that allow people to act uh in certain ways with regards to getting a reward um you know let's talk about bringing nfts and and and gaming kind of this web three gaming world you know what's your you know do you have any experience first and foremost kind of in web three games you know do you have you played any have you invested in any you see any success what's your experience there in the gaming world yeah so i i've followed it uh i've invested in a few uh i haven't played mini um but i think pre layer two uh these things were very difficult right i mean they

cost every time you're doing a transaction uh it's costing a little bit of money so having these layer two options has been very very helpful to breathe some life into these things but um game games are tough tough to develop tough to keep people engaged keep people interested keep people um playing uh so no it's it's it's not really a good specialty of mine um i think avigachi is like an interesting one that uses a very similar technology and that you can have an in-game item with interest bearing assets inside those interest bearing assets equate to something within the game but

charge particles is a more generalized version of that so not just ave a tokens not just avagaches being able to hold and retain those accumulating assets but more generalized so any nft any underlying d5 protocol so you can have this nft that's uh earning yield from ave and compound and yearn whatever other underlying d5 protocols we have all containerized into one basket which is nice because then you can transfer the one basket so maybe it's a maybe you know back to the gaming thing you you do something within a game and you earn this nft that's yield farming all of these other

nft or these d5 protocols all containerized as one nft and you can receive it just with one click transfer or an erc721 transfer we say productive assets a lot on this show and i think you know we're speaking of products and yeah productive nfts now which is brings it to a whole other level if you could have you know your your art in a vault with some with some tokens that are also earning money so you kind of get get yourself in an nft that's making you money well being able to showcase or appreciate you know or or of course depreciate in value um you know i think bringing it back to the gaming concept i think um one downfall of this web 3 gaming is while

the incentive mechanisms are certainly strong to play there there is a strong uh involvement of monetization with these games i think it kind of kills the gaming spirit a bit um you know some point you know some of the whole point of gaming you know for me personally at least when i do do it is just to kind of step out of the matrix and relax and not worry about it right but then you know you bring in axes infinity and you've got these people earning money and all this stuff while it's amazing for for folks in third world countries who are using it for income it kind of in in my view diffuse defeats some of the purpose of gaming um you know but i do i do recognize and admire the incentive structures that that that aspect of monetization can

bring and it's something unique to crypto and blockchain right that you have this this token mechanic that you can build into the game that's incentivizing people to do certain things within that game like yeah of course you can do this within a normal game but you're earning in-game credits or something that aren't nearly as fun as some wildly speculative token that you can trade on dexes or a yield farm on the outside of outside of that world you know dude i remember the small love potions back in uh 2020 of axe infinity bop first three axes and then uh you know started started to breed them and realize that

in order to play the game you had to get some small love potions he had to go to uniswap to buy some to breed and to yeah i mean it makes it more yeah much more of a gamified experience um which i mean to kind of give myself a counter argument doesn't even make it feel like it's you know it's it's real money it's just kind of like a fun game and you're kind of playing with these internet tokens yeah yeah exactly no i think i think um i mean the the future that we want to see and believe will happen is that these games are progressively decentralized over time so i mean you know it's not going to be snap our fingers and it's this completely decentralized

game that like your assets from one game can be transported into another that can be transported across all of these different things but i think that's the direction we're going in in some an undefined period of time and that's where we'll be eventually so it's it's fun to see this progression as we go down that path yeah yeah and we you know we were just we were just having conversation about kind of the the decentralized nature um and and composability of a lot of these applications and it got into kind of like the the digital identity realm right like um you have you know this collection of of items that represent your your

digital portfolio and i i think you know you said it it's almost like a digital flex um and i i think there's a there's a future here where you know all of these games are somewhat they're almost somewhat realistic if you can start to port the same character into the same into different games um and you touched on that a little bit how we're not there yet but ultimately you know if decentralization kind of procures enough of this then um that interoperability will allow all these games to connect and you can kind of play them all with the same character which is your digital representation i've never been much of a gamer but like

that that sounds like a really appealing type of um just it sounds extremely entertaining honestly yeah and we'll get there um but it's important to note that like all of these things all of these foundational building blocks for this this that future state each of these things are represented by nfts and it's like the nfts play an integral part of this future state that we we envision yeah yeah absolutely um and i guess kind of moving moving off of gaming here um i'm i'm keen to understand how charged particles can start to bring in some more

um non-crypto native people and you know maybe that means artists and graphic designers and and whatnot um and bring these bring newcomers to crypto and and the d5 space uh into nfts um and just you know what kind of brings this question to mind is we have someone on our team he's he's the editor that you know edits these podcasts but he's also a graphic designer and we tossed around the idea of getting into nfts and you know designing some and and putting up a open c store um but it it never really you know held i'm curious kind of what is some of the holdup that i you might have seen from some of these artists um and people that are a little bit

hesitant to jump to dive into the nft space but can certainly contribute and add value here yeah um yeah i think that's that's an interesting question there's there's a couple things in there so um what is the hold up what is the issue i'd say um crypto's hard crypto is hard for people to grasp i think because of all of the information misinformation out there so it's it's almost too hard to get started so they don't start right and i get this from a lot of friends i was talking about nfts all of last year um and i have graphic designer friends and and people that could have made a boatload of money and

and figured out this whole new thing which is nfts um but it's just it's hard it's hard for people to like jump into something they don't really understand so i think crypto as is like makes things difficult and then nfts are also another hard concept for people to grasp so like us with charged particles we're so many steps down the rabbit hole that for people to understand because you need to understand blockchain and distributed systems okay you understand that you need to understand ethereum and why that's important okay that's that's like kind of another big leap in smart contracts then you need to understand nfts most people nfts don't make any sense right

it's the right click and save i don't get it it's it's this concept well in in crypto that are familiar with ethereum nfts are still foreign you know exactly exactly and so so i think it it takes so many steps to kind of get to that point where like holy okay i see how this digital file being represented as a unique token gives this thing that used to be infinitely replicable this is the joy of digital content you copy paste send they copy paste you instantly have infinite replicable uh replicated uh files and being able to pull that back and say no

actually this is the one digital unique version of that yeah you can copy it a bazillion times but this one has a home has a place on a blockchain i think that's a very difficult thing for people to understand but nfts have provided this rare trojan horse almost to get people into the crypto world because it's like i don't know there's a gold mine out there i want to just make nfts and be a bazillionaire and then they do it and it's like oh what's a wallet oh what's this and it like it it sneakily gets you into um into crypto so even something like nifty gateway you know it's like hosted you don't have to worry about it it

serves the same purpose as something like coinbase i friends and family that are on coinbase that literally do not know what a private key is and that's okay eventually they will and eventually they'll get there but this provides this vessel for them to jump in start paying a little bit more attention to it start start listening a little bit more diving down the rabbit hole as they say and then eventually you know they'll self-custody their own assets and do all of these other things that we think are really important yeah and even that that uh glass animals you know concert nft is a part of that trojan horse um you know as glass animals these other bands start to distribute these nfts people are like wow that was part of my

vip package you know i paid x amount of dollars for it i want to use it i want to find out what i can do with it and yeah that's just that's just like you know who is it alice in wonderland just taking that first step down into the rabbit hole oh yeah and i think i think so the other question you had in there was uh how are we doing uh at charged particles to kind of uh help onboard people so as i said i mean we're we're a few steps down that rabbit hole so difficult but um one thing we've been thinking quite a bit about is um almost a trust account or like a starter package for people so the idea is that um you rob can custody an nft for

one of your family members or perhaps the guy that helps you out that's interested you have this nft that you keep putting things inside of for him you hold it you take care of the private keys all of that stuff so as time goes on and he learns a little bit about synthetics you say okay i'll put a little snx in there he learns a little bit more about barnbridge like i'll put a little barnbridge in there here and learn something about ave you put a little ave tokens maybe you put an nft so you start accumulating all of these things into this this nft this nft container for this guy and as soon as he passes this this test of like understanding private keys and how they

work you say okay here you go and you hand them you you send over that entire basket full of all of these goodies that you've been accumulating for him over time so obviously this is there's a number of centralized risks involved in this but i think you could do it in a very decentralized manner there's cool projects like rabbit hole that you know you you graduate to this ability to own your own nft full of these goody baskets and you get this this bundle this welcome to d5 package uh that could be really really interesting so it serves as almost a trust because you could even have all of these assets that you're putting together into the nft time locked until certain date in the

period in the future so maybe this is a child and you want to time lock it until they're 18 uh all possible and then you can transfer it to before they're ready but they can't actually unbundle it before they're 18. forced forced huddle yeah the time lock is certainly um an application for you know building a a child's you know savings account or trust fund or you know whatever you want to call that super super cool actually as you were describing that i i saw you know definite synergies and and possibilities for us at d phi slate we talk a lot about like a d5 curriculum and like a modular course that someone can go through to really take the steps

and i think that's a great great application of uh the nft basket that you're describing right you go through the out of a module you get a little ave in your basket you can't access it yet but once you move through all of these modules you take maybe your test at the end congrats you know you unlocked your your nft basket and and now you have access to all of these um coins tokens that you just learned about yeah and the other the other wild thing that you can do is you could have this container be art that's that's a given it could be an nft an art nft but you could have the underlying assets that you're

putting in impact the way that that art looks so you think it's like uh i don't know it's it's something blank it's just like a shitty blank white box but as more assets go in or more charge is accumulated on those underlying assets that blank box turns into a normal box and then it turns into a treasure chest and then it turns into a treasure chest overflowing with gold like as more and more assets go into it so there there's a lot of quite what better way to incentivize people to learn more about crypto and d5 than like literally showing them something that's accruing in value

and changing to look like something of more value as time passes and they save or more yeah it reminds me of a like a spotify playlist um you have like this playlist cover album cover but it's for your playlist and it's made up of all of these album covers that you know are are from the individual songs um yeah i mean but imagine that playlist being truly ownable so you own that uh playlist and then being able to trance that transfer that playlist to me and i can unbundle it and take all of those other things and have true ownership of them that's that's the main difference but yes and like royalties you know as more people listen

to it and whatnot tons of possibilities which yeah it is really exciting because there's tons of smart people out here yourself included that are working on nft applications and i mean nfts it to me is clear that we're still just scratching the surface i think we've gotten pretty deep into a lot of the the crypto applications and it's almost a fair point for someone you know a newcomer to come to this industry and say well i missed out you know bitcoin went from a thousand or a cent all the way up to 60 000. like hey you know i'm late you know all you guys were early made a lot of money i'm late but i think that's not that's just not

the case for nfts it seems like the applications here are so extensive that you know art was just a low-hanging fruit and now that we're starting to explore more of the possibilities here it's unlocking more and more value yeah and i think also the the problem is and there's not a clear solution to this is even when i have people that are you know i talk i talk clearly a lot about nfts and we we have these discussions and they're like okay i'm in like i want to just invest in nfts like get where can i put a little bit of money and have like broad exposure to nfts and it's like

yeah that's i i mean you can go on openc and like you know it's like if i want to invest in art it's like like go to a dealer and like buy a bunch of random pictures that i don't know anything about so it's it is not simple and i think with charged particles we we also have a um with these building blocks that exist like you take a charged particle nft you can fill it full of art that you've curated so some have some you know you're essentially making a fun you fill it full of governance tokens of other nft protocols and then using one of these fractionalization platforms you take this nft put it into a smart contract break it into erc20 so fungible tokens

so these are basically shares in that meta nft so it's it's a security obviously like these underlying tokens represent value in this meta token that has governance tokens and nfts of value etc etc um but that that we're we provide the building block somebody will inevitably do that i'm sure and give this new access token the crc 20 into like an nft investment and is that is that is that pretty similar to what nftx is um yeah so nftx would be like the the platform you'd use to fractionalize it we don't do that

but i'm saying you can use charged particles plus nftx or um niftify there's a couple other ones and like pair those together to create this index fund basket of nfts and uh governance tokens and so that sounds fairly complicated for the newcomer so for the newcomer right if that was me and i asked how do i get exposure nfcs you know would i buy a a fund from an nftx would i buy the b20 token would i um you know try to buy something you know more new and cheap like what what would you say you know for for somebody who wanted to invest i know you just kind of answered it but you know

yeah so if i if somebody had done that or i had done that or i knew somebody uh who did that i would recommend buying one of those erc20 tokens that represent a piece of that overall basket but um yeah for like it before that exists which is uh now or or at least i haven't looked lately i'm sure i don't know what exists um so for like broad uh nft exposure i think there's a number of like investment dowels that you could be involved with uh which is a whole another rabbit hole i mean i think uh the confluence of dolls nfts social tokens d5 these are like the

four macro trends not necessarily in that order that are so fascinating to me within crypto um but getting involved with a dow um which for your listeners if they are not familiar a dao is just decentralized autonomous organization and the dao that i'm speaking of would be a smart contract-based investment club we all put a hundred dollars into a pot and then we vote based on where that three hundred dollars is invested um and then have you know 33 percent uh ownership of whatever we share the investment in so that's that's a good way to get invol involved and purchase

uh through that dow uh some some art the other option is just buying governance tokens and some of these underlying um protocols and and what they're doing um which is also also another way um because it's it's more of a like picks and shovels sort of thing you own the underlying protocol that is enabling nfts to be more and more mainstream uh your you're making a bet on like the overall industry yeah you're you're owning a piece of the marketplace revenue rather than potentially potentially cool yeah i mean then there there's like so many different directions that nfts

could go and and that we could go with this this podcast which is super cool um and i mean yeah there there's just tons that we could talk about and more business applications and whatnot um but i i think we are getting close on time so you know let's uh let's shoot off a couple rapid fire questions um you know we'll we'll just hit you with a couple and you know one sentence two sentence answers is fine and then um yeah that that'll be perfect yeah so the the one that i like to ask a lot of the people that are on the podcast is what is um one of the most critical aspects that you know isn't available in d5 or nfts just yet

um but you you think is critical to the ecosystem's evolution as a whole um yeah what is the most important thing that charged particles is not working on really most important thing that we are not working on or that the defy ecosystem needs or both those almost feel like different questions um the most important thing that the yeah that the defy ecosystem needs that charged particles isn't working on i'd say clarity on regulation the most important thing we need is we're hiring devs so uh my dms are open there you go yeah it seems like devs are always in

demand in crypto well the ecosystem as a whole needs it right like we need business-minded people to think through these what is the bleeding neck that we're solving et cetera et cetera but like ultimately you need smart people to help build these things as well and sorry i know it's a rapid rapid fire back to you what is uh what is your first nft purchase if if you don't mind sharing and how much was it first one i'm not sure probably ava stars um just because i had a conversation with jimmy uh who's nft 42 and he really really captivated me with what he was working on so that that might have been my first one

uh already uh this one might be a little bit more personal uh what is the most amount of eat you've ever spent on nft on an nft uh not that much honestly i mean i buy little things from our platforms but um i i've made a pretty significant investment in my career in the nft world so uh it's it's tough to like really really buy a ton of of these things but no i dabble cool nice what is um or i asked who is the person you'd like to be uh i guess stuck in an elevator with and um pitch nfts and charged particles if you had an elevator pitch

one person you know anyone in the world yeah i mean what's the goal of this just to turn his mind around on the space or or just because i i want to talk to these people orchid investment yeah to really just pitch them on nfts and and um unlock their mind on the possibilities of charged particles yeah i'd say uh i mean i'd love to be stuck in an elevator with howard marks or warren buffett or ray dalio uh so i'd say any of those guys that would be stuck in an elevator i'd love to talk to them about krypto and nfts

nice traditional finance guys oh yeah cool um i would have i would have apple would have said kanye west and gotten him to uh well that would be a lot smarter right like get one of these guys and they actually do an nft yeah yeah uh do you believe nfts are changing culture you know like do you think they have the power to shift culture yes yeah pretty straightforward there um cool i mean i guess my last one is what's the next um nft wave right so we saw the art we saw the pixelated images you know what captivates the crypto community or the broader world as a whole next you know is it art is it

music is it film like what industry what is it what's your prediction yeah uh so nfts is a gigantic category so i think the next big wave within nfts overall will be something much more financial so having this intersection of d5 and nfts in some way that we can't really uh predict or understand or or think about yet so i think nfts will just be integrated into d5 in a number of different ways and that will be the next big wave yeah i agree it's it's it's like a a concept that exists in the real world um that we don't really have yet in d5

is basically ownership of things um right like you know you have like a deed for your house right but there's no deed for your ethereum wallet type thing you know there's no proof of this and that so definitely keen to see how how that works out i know unit swap v3 is working on some stuff there but um yeah guys that's about all that i got for the rapid fire ben you're an absolute great co-host interviewee interviewer i know you had your own podcast guys so check out ben's podcast as well we'll link it in the description of course give them a follow on twitter all that jazz you know if you're interested in learning more about nfts i learned a lot today guys thank you very much for coming on rob and ben and it was a pleasure thanks so much appreciate it and would just encourage

your listeners if they're interested in finding out or finding out more or learning more about these things jump into a project discord raise your hand start asking questions and and and be helpful and it's amazing what you can kind of create from those interactions yeah yeah that that's certainly it thanks for coming on ben and i'll just echo that because i i've found that's the most effective way to get involved as well is you know don't try to learn about everything all at once pick one project or two projects really dig deep um and you know find out as much as you can so thanks ben it's been great thank you guys