Digidaigaku, DeGods/y00ts, The Stoics & More with Alexi Cortez | Overpriced JPEGs Recap #36

Transcript

[Music] hello everyone gmgm welcome back to another episode of overpriced jpegs i am joined today by alexi cortez who is the product manager slash head of community slash classic startup situation which is titles are always in flux and you you know just are doing what you have to do to make the company succeed um at dot earth which is a web3 gaming company a little bit cryptic right now i think more will be revealed about this company over time um but founded by some some known names that are also i think anonymous at the moment one of the more complicated

introductions i've given but did all of that sound right alexa spot on yeah i love it and and uh this is our weekly recap episode so alexi is joining me here today to talk about all the latest in nft and metaverse news over the past week uh we'll talk about the updates to youths we're going to talk about digidagaku which is a project i think is cool and you should be tracking the stoics project honestly really talking about a lot of new nft projects that i uh i'm just kind of tracking thinking are interesting and sure we'll get into some other stuff as well um i also alexis want you to talk a little bit about your background for folks you worked at at meta i think when only when it was facebook but you can can clarify um and and have been in the gaming world

via that for for a number of years so i want to get a little bit of your backstory but before we get into all of that we do need to hear a word from our lovely lovely sponsors and i need to remind you that if you are listening to this podcast and you are enjoying it please subscribe if you're listening on a podcast app rate and review it really helps us out when you show support in that way and uh with that here are the words from our sponsors metamask is the leading web3 wallet to get you access to everything you need in web3 if you're just getting started on your nft journey you need metamask and if you need to fund your metamask account in order to buy that nft that you've been eyeing well now you can do that directly through metamask just click the blue buy

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two day at immutable.com all right welcome back alexi can you tell us a little bit about how you ended up in the gaming web 3 world and what you were doing previously at meta yes um so it was all on accident and before i was in web 3 i was working as an account manager at facebook and the gaming team and so i was basically servicing any gaming companies that were running ads on facebook um and through that work i was specialized in the instant games platform and that's basically like the app store of facebook where you can not download games and you can go play um and i got into gaming on accident like i interned with facebook one summer and i

was actually pretty pissed off i was on the gaming team i like wanted to do like retail or like ecom or like travel or something that um was a little closer to my lifestyle and then i ended up on the gaming team and loved it the people were super smart like the clients were super chill like the just the general vibes of gaming really were awesome and then i never left gaming so i went back to give a little context you had said to me at one point like why you liked gaming so much you sort of teased it there but can you flush that out like why you liked working on the games team yeah the just like the the culture of gaming is really awesome it's like a pretty small industry and you get to know everyone fairly quickly but i think

my favorite part is like everyone's fairly logical and like very data driven so me that was a sales rep i had like a fairly easy time in sales because it was never like as long as the numbers were people believed you and as long as you gave strategies that made the numbers work then it was a really easy job um but most of the time like the clients were really laid back like i was friends with most of my clients and then i would hear horror stories from friends at facebook that were like on retail that had clients that were just really um not grounded in facts or not very effectively and like their job was just infinitely harder so i've loved gaming and then like people in gaming tend to stay in

gaming so you end up seeing the same faces over and over again and working with the same crowd and it's a great crowd so i'm i just love working in gaming i love that okay and then and then you by accident ended up in web 3. yeah so um i think it was like september 2021 and like nfts were super hot and i it was just kind of like on the sidelines and one of my friends had just quit facebook um and joined reddit and then quit read it to go do web 3 full time and she had like made a ton of money doing nfts and i was like um okay i need to pay attention to what's going on here and i impulsively bought a ticket to nftnyc just to like dive in and i ended up meeting my current boss

at like a random happy hour like i went to this happy hour just because i had a few hours to kill and i went by myself and i see this guy standing by himself next to the bar and i was like okay i'll go talk to him and then it turns out that um we had like he worked at zynga and he was familiar with instant games platform like i was working with zynga um on the facebook side on their instant games platforms with like all this weird overlap um and then he kind of like pitched me this idea of dot earth and was like we're hiring product managers and like i know you're in sales but like would you be interested in this job and i was trying to move into products so i was just like uh-huh and then nodding away like yeah i would

be willing to consider product management the job that's actually my dream yes um and then small world his beyonce was my biggest client at facebook and so i get a call from like his fiance a few days later being like oh my god i already have a mutual friend and she sends me a picture of them and i was like oh what so it's just like all of these lines connected and it just it was like the perfect job for me and then i had to take it so now in web3 gaming what do you feel like are the biggest differences that you're observing if you can speak to it like between the the gaming world and web 3 and the gaming world at large gaming world i think web 3 versus web 2. it's like web 2 you can buy your way out of almost

everything like you launch and it's like it's not very brand heavy like it's very game specific and like title heavy and so like you can mess up as a brand for the most part especially if you're like a small game developer like or smaller studio and it's not public like you don't really get any flashback like you can do a lot of testing really quietly and sneakily and like buy your way through testing and web 3 is the opposite where it's like very brand oriented um a lot of like testing very publicly and like experimenting very publicly and learning in public and like it's just kind of crazy like if a game doesn't work or a lot of times in web 2 like a game wouldn't work and

it's fine you like go back to the drawing work board you like tweak it a little bit and then you release it and here i feel like people are so quick to dismiss projects if it's not good versus like sticking around which is also why the dgodz project is so interesting but like you have a lot less room for error in web3 because it is so public and because people are not very patient so i think that's interesting uh that's interesting and actually that that segways us well because into d gods because i feel like every project in web 3 messes up and so my instinct is that there actually is room for forgiveness in web 3 because everybody kind of messes up in public but i i see what you're saying as well i

think it's sort of you know what what part of the project where in the in the flow of things how they handle it after like you know where all of that falls um you know both can be true so let's get into d god's utes um we gave a a decent overview of this project on last week's episode so i don't know if we want to totally go through all of that um i can give some of the youth updates but what are your what are your initial feelings on on mutes d gods are you were you on the list you have a what's what's the update i was not on the list unfortunately i was like full vacation mode no service during all of this so i wasn't able to take advantage of any of it i feel like it blew up pretty quickly

though like all of a sudden i was hearing about dust and and now it's like youths is one of the top five projects or like d gods is one of the top five projects so it's been pretty impressive how they've been able to um have such a successful mint during such a quiet time in the market and i love how they're just like fully embraced that they failed earlier like the the three lines that they shared like i'm blanking on them now but it was like their big thing is like we yeah we kind of like we failed we tried again we like we learned some we tried again and now we're here kind of a vibe yeah so and so they're the number one project at solana and the the top 10 projects behind them combined market cap still is less than the market

cap of d gods alone and solano which i think is um it's incredibly impressive do you like the product or do you think it's like it'll it'll flame out i like it do you have a view on that i don't think i have like a super strong view i'm super impressed with the project i like it the art is like a little underwhelming for me honestly but like at least from a from a youth standpoint i like the d gods i like the mechanics that they've baked in with like the changing of the the art but it's still being within the same collection like that i think is fairly unique and something i haven't seen a ton but yeah i'm curious to see how it does i feel like it has a really strong start and i can't imagine it totally tanking in the next week or two so we'll see how it

goes okay so you just mentioned the ut's art but i'm not convinced we have seen the youth's art yet it's very confusing there is some stuff online uh alexander42.eth posted something thoughts on yout's art and then frank to gods who's the founder of the project replied to that post saying thoughts on ut's art which included some some images and frank said it's all right you know it's i could be better and so i'm like not clear if this is all a joke or because this art that we're looking at right now is not actually on the utes like twitter it's not on the youth site i'm still seeing the tubes the t-o obs which is what you have bef you know you basically tried that in for

your ute um okay well by the time this errors will probably have seen the ut art because minting or because like the waitlist stuff minting started you know recently we're recording this on thursday um that's a there was a little bit of drama there we'll get into that i think the big updates here today is you have or this week um you have this announcement that dust labs raised seven million dollars um so for for context for folks again we got into some of this last week but you know d gods launched it was a pretty hyped popular project on solana then there was some fight it sort of started falling as a project they revamped it by um

by saying basically by improving the art basically they redesigned all of the art and said okay like over the course of the next x number of months you can swap your d gods uh character for a dead gods for dead god's art the dead god's art was a lot nicer a lot more polished etc that sort of revived interest in the project it had this big comeback and um and but they have every kind of step of the way i feel like had these tech challenges and um uh frank de gods went on uh proof went on kevin rose's podcast and talked about this is how they he'll announce these sort of unrealistic deadlines on twitter as a way to force his team to like move faster to force

them all to move faster and to try and hit these frankly unrealistic deadlines and then they end up having to push the deadline back anyway but they also end up it seems having like tech challenges along the way so that was once again the an issue here with this latest mint uh and and this will get us back to dust labs for which they just raised seven million dollars but i am not entirely clear what went wrong yesterday during all of this again recording this on thursday and it was supposed to happen of some sort on wednesday i listened to literally 35 minutes of the hour-long spaces that frank put on and i i still couldn't figure out what the hell had happened because it was just like it started from the middle with people like i'm sad and my thing didn't work and i need to be reimbursed

so he was fielding all of these questions but never actually kind of gave an explanation for for what happened my sense of things is that after some initial mint and alexa if you have more intel you can chime in here but after the initial mint they additionally did a raffle that was to allow like it was gonna be like 10 additional people could mint utes or something and um and frank essentially messed up got confused it had been a long day of just things going on and thought it was supposed to be a hundred available to mint so changed it from 10 to 100 but they actually did only have 10

and so that unleashed a lot of chaos they had to refund a bunch of people who were trying to mint something that that didn't exist um and additionally it seems that even throughout all the whole day yesterday there was just a lack of communication from the youth steegodz team around like the minting process and for people on the waitlist and how many were going to be available they're keep the theme seemed to be that just like the numbers were off in this in this throughout this experience of like people expecting there were 3 400 for people on the wait list to mint and then it turned out being it was fewer and they had held some back for like a dow treasury they were setting up and just a lot of kind of miscommunications and then even some like kind of blundered

tech moments in in talking about how they were looking to rectify all this and this will get us back to dust labs which was the big announcement of the last week call it um i i think they're looking to kind of upgrade the the tech team not not in a in a dis way to the people they've been working with up to this point i think they're still going to be involved um but they have this really scrappy team that's very good at like let's execute really quick and looking to use some of the money from dust labs the seven million dollars to hire like a best in class sort of uh dev team to build out their future marketplaces and some of these plans that we talked about a bit on the podcast last week so long ramble there but that's that seems to be sort of the

latest in utes is like seven million raised blundered youths mint still a lot of enthusiasm for the project i also want to talk about just like a character profile on frank himself i don't know if you got to listen to the the proof um interview with him but i'll pause there and see if you have any uh any reactions i i haven't listened to him i feel like i haven't um interacted with him that much on twitter too so i don't know if i have any good commentary but now i definitely will go look at him after this do you think this is an example where i feel like you know d gods is a project that has had blunders in the past and seems to to consistently be able to overcome them

does that fly in the face of your theory that people in web 3 are less forgiving i mean that one i think the biggest difference is like they really owned up to it and i think a lot of projects like don't totally own up to it like they'll blame a lot of other things and like they just never accept the fact that it's their fault for messing something up but decons did a great job of just owning the fact that they've tried some failed and then are trying new so i think that that really lands well and it like helps build more trust with the community like when you know that the team you're investing in is like fully aware of their flaws and what they're capable of to almost hilarious degree so in this this twitter spaces that i was

describing i listened through like 30 minutes of this and i did at one point imagine if this was like an established web 2 like public company and i was just like laughing my ass off thinking about how absurd this would be where you have this like frank is a very like particular brand of bro who's like up there being like man you know it was just a really long day and you know i just it's been a lot and i was up at 2 a.m and like i'm like imagining something like public company ceo just like on twitter faces with a bunch of people being like uh jesus christ my brother like they're just it's just hilarious anyway so um so definitely we're we're in a totally different world over here in web3 and we're in our own like bizarre bubble but but to to that point you just made i

mean frank literally didn't let people say nice things about the project so he's bringing up all these people to ask questions uh and and you know tell them what went wrong effectively it's like this like airing of grievances call and you had somebody come up and was like hey i just want to say like i really appreciate you guys i'm still really bullish on the project and frank's like sorry i had to mute that guy uh this is not what this is about i i don't want to accept any compliments we've got probably 500 people in the audience here who really don't feel grateful for d god so like just absolutely no positivity like i just want you to basically like you know on me this entire call and then the next person who got up

like was like yeah i want to say thank you and like you know had a question he's like no stop like did you not hear what i just said like i don't think um so so i mean there was a there's a huge amount of taking accountability somebody else on the call was like uh we yeah we sh essentially saying like you shouldn't get any praise because you just did the right thing like you don't get a cookie basically for refunding people for a mistake that you made that's just like what you need to do and yeah and frank was like a hundred thousand percent that's exactly right like you know just we deserve all of the hate so um so i totally agree i give them a lot of credit for being really willing to take full responsibility i think the first contrast that pops mind is

like azuki and um their twitter space that went that was received way worse of like just very little accountability for past behavior so um so absolutely credit to the d god's team for that and that seems to be one of their strengths i will also say and i've written a blog post about this that i think i'm going to publish part of their ability to bounce back from missteps is i think there is a core to that brand you could like a vibe a je ne sais quoi like a whatever that really resonates for people and successful projects you need the the hustle the incredible hard work like you the the the ability to viral market which i think dgods does very well and in theory

used by extension they have all that but there's also just like will it hit the consumer in the right place and this is a project that i think hits the consumer or a whole bunch of consumers in the right place and um when i was listening to frank talk on on proof what was coming to mind was this story that dave chappelle once told of kanye west do you do you know it do you have a sense of what i'm about to say okay i'm gonna tell this story so dave chappelle on i think it was like jimmy fallon or jamie kimmel like one of the one of the jimmy shows um this was years ago told a story about hanging out with like a young kanye and it was it was before kanye had really hit it big and um they're hanging out a few of them

and they're watching never before seen episodes or cuts of the chappelle show and kanye apparently gets a call in the middle of this and he's like no like i can't hang out right now and like no like because i'm hanging out with dave chappelle watching like uh you know never before i seen episodes of the chappelle show because my life is dope and i do dope and then just like hangs up it's obviously supremely better when dave chappelle tells the story but that became kind of like you know viral thing x number of years ago that's like always stuck with me and there's a my life is dope and i do dope energy to the d gods team and on the one hand they're total idiots but it but that is the energy and like damn does the world love to reward like young

people but i would say probably men in particular like young men who just like are like we hustle hard but then have this just like i'm the man i love living my life kind of energy and i think frank brings that for all of his also just like bro flaws lack of sort of organization it would appear and so there's a lot that that gets forgiven in that dynamic because there is an energy there that people want to be around and want to be a part of and they want to drink beer from their shoe which is absolutely disgusting but again it's sort of part of the kind of youthful exuberance appeal i think yeah for sure i mean i didn't even know what utes was and like when i saw it coming up on my twitter i was like why do i want to be a part of this i like

don't know what it is i haven't seen the art i like don't know anything but like it looks cool and i want it yeah that's interesting my first impression was like why and this is why i didn't end up even applying to to join it was like okay yeah sure i guess like another one you know what i mean like why this over anything else and it's only as i've really taken the time to dive deeper that i feel like i understand the vibe and the energy and that comes from leadership right like we talk about these these projects are about community shore shore shore but this stuff starts at the top and it does start with um the energy and the vibe of the founding team and i think um i think again for for for

all of the ways in which i could see frank and the team being off-putting to a whole group of people because again it's a very distinct kind of a vibe it is your bro fatty vibe it also is exactly the reason that i think a lot of people are drawn to him um and for what it's worth he he strikes me as he's paying lip service to all the right things right he's paying lip service to things that make him seem like a good guy and like he's really in it for the right reasons and this isn't just like your typical kind of bro who's gonna then go and run the project with all that said he's 23 who the hell knows right like this dude could get bored in a year he's 23. again it's not like there is nothing the world loves more than just like a hyper

confident 23 year old dude who's just like out there looking like he's loving and living his life uh we we reward that handsomely in this in this world um okay enough about utes though it is like the project of the the flavor of the month for sure uh and in theory some big things coming from them and the seven million dollars they just raised um digi daigaku is this a project that was on your radar at all or are you uh are you what are you thinking about this i think it's really cool um i'm like there's not too much out there that i've seen but i think as someone that came from web 2 gaming into web 3 it's been super clear that there's a lot of

crypto people wanting to put krypto into games but i think it's been done in a way that like doesn't like doesn't necessarily have like good game design or like like it's not super fun they're just like people want games we're making games and like that's about it and so it's really cool to see other people from web 2 especially with like a really strong track record coming to web 3 and like immediately add something innovative like i barely understood what he wrote in that adventure um erc 721 thread because it was so technical but like all the tltr's i saw our recaps of that thread where like he's adding extended base play or like i don't know like gameplay functionality into a smart contract which is like new

and cool so it's like right off the bat they're innovating and obviously as a web3 gamer i'm excited to see any innovation that comes from that project so i'll give a little context here so did you die goku hits the scene i want to say even a couple weeks ago like it's been around for a little while so i'm a little late probably in covering it but there was a this recent thread that you just referenced that i thought was really interesting that was like all right got it gotta make sure we talk about did you die goku so here's the context for anybody who's missed it um it's a 2000-ish i guess it's a 2022. it's it's 2022 unique nfts so i'm assuming that's a reference to the year the year of our lord and savior 2022 whatever um the

and it's a project from limit break which is a new company founded by gabe leiden gabriel ledin and i'm blanking on the name as co-founder we can maybe look it up um but the gabriel ledin and his co-founder had previously founded oh say it again halpert no i can't say the last name nakagawa halper nakagawa and we apologize if we're totally butchering that um but the two of them had previously founded machine zone which as far as i understand it was like a very big successful it and remains a successful like web 2 gaming company they did mobile strike which was one of their really big games i think and fear of god or some some other one again not a gamer

but i have been going deep on the history of gaming and like reading books on it i'm like i'm like trying to play i'm playing catch up here so that at least from a theoretical perspective i understand how we landed where we've landed with games um so this is obviously something that gets people excited about any project that limit break this new company does because gabe ledin does have this and his partner have a really strong track record in the gaming industry and i know at least for gabe specifically he's been in the space in the gaming world for his entire career um he got his start like in arcade gaming when he was like 19 years old and um and yeah and then you know has just kind of worked his way through through the gaming world to get where he is now um

the first thing i actually saw about digi daigaku was that steve aoki was buying them and he like profited and i don't i think this is largely a joke but there was this like this like ongoing joke of like this is the first time steve aoki's ever made a profit on an nft and finally he did it congratulations steve you made money trading did you die cuckoos um so but but getting back to gabe leadon i think he's a really interesting character and and i encourage folks to go there's an interview he did we'll link to um on another podcast that was just really interesting he's just a fantastic articulator of ideas there were two things that that came up that i want to flag and i want to get your reaction to alexi so um

in this interview which gabe did last year um like june of last year i believe he was like when we get to the the point in product life cycles or or call it where we're really focused on design and ux and like let's move a few pixels or or let's gamify our app a little bit more so like more people stay on it or click an extra button or buy an extra thing it means we're out of ideas he was like the really innovative technology the ux doesn't matter he's like if i built a time machine you know and it was the ugliest most like unuser friendly thing of all freaking time there would still be a line

you know around the world trying to get into the time machine and once we're at the point where we're just like moving pixels around and trying to like squeeze the last like drop out of a lemon or whatever through through design like it's a dyeing industry dying is probably not exactly how it phrases like look there's still great margin there you can make a lot of money but it's not really innovative or interesting anymore and this was again back in june of last year but he was starting to say like you know i'm tracking what's happening in nfts because that is a space that's really interesting and he's like it's funny because you've got all these vc's being like well the ux isn't good enough and he's like that's a good sign the fact that this is an industry that is growing in spite of how the all of

the design experiences are in the ux like it is itself a sign that this is a really viable industry i thought that was a brilliant point that i really hadn't thought about um so i want to get your your thoughts on that and and of course that's i think what ended up leading him to joining web 3 now full time yeah that's funny you bring it up i forgot who i was talking about this with yesterday but you were talking about how like product market fit doesn't have to be pretty and like you don't need to have a ton of employees like and one example and i'm totally gonna get the facts wrong but i read about this like i think a year or two ago was like how craigslist is like a multi-million dollar company and has like 10 employees and it's like the

ugliest platform like terrible ui like kind of sketchy but like it does the job and it like will not die um but i never heard that from the from like the innovation perspective and i think he's spot on like when you're trying to fine-tune and optimize tiny tiny things it's like what are you actually working on totally yeah um that's funny you're right why hasn't craigslist either been like overtaken or just improved like that is the sketchiest looking site of all time i feel like it just it reminds people of like the the the whatever want ads in a newspaper and there's like a nostalgia play there or something i have to look up the revenue because it was something absurd and i i

want to say it was like five employees or also something yeah craigslist generated 660 million revenue last year oh my god i you know i guess it's that it's the first mover advantage thing like if you're just early enough that problem and you become the place that everyone knows they need to go to when they have this very specific problem which is like just something that needs solved or sold or bought like damn you know i guess you can make it the ugliest 1990s looking damn site that you want um okay the other thing there was a couple other things gabe said that his he thinks the ultimate dream of the internet is just to put everybody on the same screen at the same time

and i thought that was really cool and really resonated with increasingly how i'm thinking of the metaverse which is just that like we're all hanging out together in virtual places you know um i i've mentioned this before but i think it's the ceo of every realm i think maybe they've changed their name but they're like a metaverse investment company that's spun off from republic and the ceo said like to me the metaverse is like if you're shopping on free people online and your best friend is also shopping on free people online like you guys both suddenly know that and it's no longer like like you know that so there's that visibility across the screen essentially um and also having interviewed hermann narula who's the ceo of improbable which is the tech company that hugo labs has partnered with to do the

other side metaverse and him really focused on this problem which is like yes we've all made so much of the fact that you know travis scott's concert in fortnight had like 14 million people attend and raised 70 million dollars or whatever those numbers are but they were in cohorts of 50 or 100 people like you weren't actually all at that concert together you were in like a siloed server with you know 100 other folks at one time and um all of that coalescing to really yeah just craft this picture for me that gabe was articulating a year and change ago of like that's the end state of all this is like when can all humans if we wanted to like exist on the same room be having the same experience at once

online and uh it just struck me as very prescient that he was sort of already thinking along those terms i mean i guess only a year ago right it's not like it's been that much time but he strikes me as incredibly thoughtful so it's not surprising to me that anything he's doing in web 3 now is getting attention and it seems like it's well deserved yeah for sure and i i love what he said about like or what you said about if you're shopping on free people you should be able to do that with a friend or like you should know that your friend's doing that that's something that our founders have mentioned too how like like living this virtual world should feel fun and social and like you're not doing it siloed by yourself it should be like an immersive experience whether that's immersive like from a 3d sense or

immersive from like a social connection sense but like the matter verse is more about connecting and like having the shared experience with other people so last thing on the digi daiku front and this is what you were referencing is so so uh most recently gabe put out this post let me pull it up here um he he basically took a screenshot of a bunch of code they've written and he said for those who did some searching through our new adventure erc 721 token that we released with digidigaku spirits a mouthful uh we thought we'd give you an in-depth explanation of where we're going with the new adventure quest system so we'll post a link to this in the show notes here for anybody who wants to dive deep on this like you said

like you know i'm not technical enough to fully have wrap my head around it i'm talking to robbie ferguson who's the you know president of immutable acts later and i'm going to get him to explain it to me um but but my understanding is that basically as you said there's actually gameplay mechanics they've released an erc 721 like a smart contract that itself has game like play mechanics somehow baked into it and then your digi daigaku nft which of course is a smart contract has functions and calls whatever so it can essentially plug into these smart contract games one thing that started out to me is like as you do these adventures as you do these quests and you make progress your progress update you know will be stored on your

digi daigaku like nft smart contract and metadata which is is really interesting and gets us into uh concepts around you know your nft changing and evolving because of actions you take this is something i talked about with danny cole like there's people on the art side who are thinking about this but it's it's obviously really interesting from a gameplay mechanic step as well um and so anyway just struck me as somebody who's incredibly bright incredibly prescient has a lot of experience in in the gaming world and so could really be poised to do some interesting stuff here and uh i was excited to see that thread because

again despite not fully understanding it i did recognize that it seems he's doing something quite interesting there were others who were saying it was um they took a lot from cooltopia which is interesting and um the cool cats team was like excited about it they were like no this is great we spent a lot of time thinking about how we were gonna write the the contracts for adventures in cooltopia and we're thrilled that somebody is finding value in it and pulling from it yeah i i love that the cool cats team responded like that like i'm glad that they're happy that people are innovating on their ideas versus like being defensive really keeping it so that's cool for the space yeah good overall coin shift is a leading treasury management and infrastructure platform for dows and crypto businesses who need to manage

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to keep up with the frontier and coin shift makes that easy so sign up at coinshift.xyz bankless there is a brand new staking feature in the ledger live app today we all like staking the assets that we're bullish on and now you can stake seven different coins inside the ledger live app cosmos polka dot tron algorithms tezos solana and of course ethereum with ledger live you can take money from your bank account buy your most bullish crypto asset and stake that asset to its network all inside the ledger live app through a partnership with figment ledger also lets you choose which validator you want to stake your assets with and ledger is running its own validating nodes offering a convenient way to participate in network validation and it even comes with slashing insurance ledger live is truly becoming

the battle station for the bankless world so go download ledger live if you have a ledger already you probably already have it and get started securely staking your crypto assets okay a couple other nft projects to cite here this is a fun episode i feel like the last number of weeks it hasn't really been about nft projects because you know it's been about the blue chips and there's been sort of other news coming out and this one is really like a a reversion to the to the og days when like new projects came out and there was a lot to be excited about on that front um the stoics by another gabe we've got two games back to back the stoics by gabe weiss um are you a gabe weiss fan do you have context here you want to give folks any any kind of context or

i'm happy to kick it off kick it off okay so gabe weiss a long time artist who started getting traction i want to say the summer of last year or so i think he released his first piece his first nft in like february of last year um but my understanding he's in the space in the bay area um is he's like spent years as like a community organizer i think in like the political realm somebody can correct me if i'm wrong on that but he has a background in sort of the community community organizing world and i think there's a tide of politics there so you know i know for him the the nft thing felt like this perfect bridging of things he loves which is like he's a

community organizer type and he's an artist and and so um he really hit the ground running it it felt like at least to me you know i'm sure things always are harder and take more work than than it can feel on the inside but um but last year and i think his first project was called like art by gabe weiss like it was something very basic um and the way he describes his work on his website i can pull this up but it's like stream of consciousness meets cubism or something um and he's got this concept of like stream of consciousness which i think is very cool and so he has a new project coming out that's minting it was supposed to mint today okay it is i'm looking now it was actually supposed to meant yesterday but then they had a

um they had such a bot problem that they had to move the mint so we'll talk about that so it's minting today today's thursday um and but yes very cool art and um i i think actually the mint today is only for sorry i keep updating this is only for pre-sale people i think like the the initial there was the mint for his holders then there was a mint for like some allowance folks and i think the public mint hits this weekend um what do you think of the art have you seen it i have i really like it i like that it's not like just another pfp project that we're talking about and it looks like he has some really big fans like the first the first tweet he has pinned is like one of him and garyvee holding the stoic so yeah it looks sick

i'm not on the allowance but i have let's call i'm gonna try public mint this weekend yeah um again we'll link for folks who want to go check it out it's um there's like a picasso-esqueness to it i don't know it's really um i i agree i really like it i think it's very cool and uh yeah he's got ties i don't know if gary's like an early holder of his but he was giving away allowless spots for i guess his future mints at v-con so i know there were some people at v-con who you know are entitled to mints now because of uh because of having met up with him there or you know whatever the case was and um he also i know i don't know this is how he got his start but he has uh he's known in some ways for like drawing on

interesting things like he did a whole thing on um uh phone books and i heard him say like i just was taking these items that felt like useless like why the hell do we still have phone books and like why are we getting phone books delivered to us and so why not draw on it and like make something useful out of this object that is in today's teen age like kind of useless and i think he did it as well with cheerio boxes he was like my kids go through an obscene amount of cheerios boxes and we had all of these cheerio boxes at home and i was just like this feels like so wasteful so he was he turned it into art so just a cool person a cool artist seems very genuine um again does a lot to kind of build community and um

and do right by by people so we love to see it and i actually i think the art is really cool like i i totally resonate with it so um and i haven't noticed until right now i'm realizing that it's mixed media like there's some that are open or some over like music notes um maybe there's a chromebook in here too but it looks like there's a bunch of really fun things that he's drawn over oh money just came up but yeah yes oh my gosh right he does what does he do i think he does an initial painting i don't think it's a photograph oh no no this i think what he does he does an initial painting he then takes like a photo like a very whatever high-res picture of the painting and like uploads that and then puts

digital elements over the photo he's taken of his irl painting i'm pretty sure that's part of his process there's something there's something like that that i know he's done before so you picked up on that that was yeah that that there is this multimedia map element to his work yeah which is super cool yeah um we love we stan um okay the next uh project slash nft that i'm calling out here is is called player zero this is one i'll admit i think i have like early like an early look into this there is like a public bait not public there's a like a beta mint happening right now but it's very hard to find information about this

right now like on a website um so i'll keep folks updated like as i get more public information but i'm still gonna gonna tell people about it which is um this is a like virtual record label so so i should say this it's a it's a record label um and it's got some people with some serious connects to the music industry backing it and involved in it folks who have like written songs or worked alongside like the biggest acts in the space and and like probably 10 people for whom that's the case like who have worked with really big names in the space who are involved in this project so it's a record label but all of the the stars right everybody that they have signed is a like virtual character pulled from projects you'd

recognize me bits uh cyber brokers i think moon birds has somebody in there and each of these stars each of their you know clients um have like a different style so like it'll be edm i think the moon bird is edm again i hope i'm not like i hope i'm allowed to reveal all this um they are minting things right now so i think it's okay um and they have their their cyberbroker is a pop star and they have um a like her first single is is out so i'm gonna play this single i want to get your your reaction i won't play the whole thing i just want to play a little piece of it and then we'll we'll get thoughts on like just the concept of a record label with all virtual stars

um let me know if you can hear this because obviously the goal is that podcast people can hear this maybe we can input we can insert it or something into the um into the pod if it doesn't come through great here for folks i get a little bit lonely sometimes it still feels empty so this is a cyber broker and i got so many emotions in style for no reason but what about you [Music] i'm like that's a banger that sounds like the next like viral thick dog song it um

it literally it really does remind me of college like that feels like a song that would have been popular it almost reminds me of clarity not fully but the you know the zed song clarity that was like such a like my freshman sophomore year of college like in the in the frat basement like whatever [Laughter] um yeah it's it's kind of banging so again i'm hoping we're allowed to share this uh we'll insert a little snippet of it into the episode for people to hear and we'll share it but um yeah i'm kind of into it i have slightly mixed feelings about the like the digital pop star thing um or the virtual pop star thing only because i'm like god we're like we're literally just

automating away those jobs too um but it's pretty cool yeah and i don't know nearly enough about fluff world but like fluff's doing something like this too isn't it like all of their nfts are sold with um audio oh that's a great so i've been trying to get fluff or asmr altered state machine is like the parent company to fluff world i guess right there the parent company i think that's the relationship there i've been trying to get them on the pod for a while because they're doing a lot of really interesting things with like ai machine learning stuff i know like i think they're you know these fluffs have like their brains and then they're trying to make them so you can go program them to like go play like play to earn games and make you money on the side i don't know

weird stuff like that i don't know about the audio components of what they're doing but that wouldn't surprise me i'm almost positive that they have something similar where like one of their fluffs is like a virtual pop star and it's like people that wanted to make music are like now making it through fluff anyway i'm probably butchering all of this because i like don't know nearly enough but i mean it's such an interesting thing yeah and we've talked about this on the pod a couple times now but like you know the vmas now have best metaverse performance as a category obviously that's geared towards like real humans who are doing in metaverse performances but i'm sure down the line like you know creating a digital pop star and building him or her they or whatever up

into as a star and like giving them their traits and their personality and their vibe and their brand and like that will itself be a job um and i'm sure there's a lot of like managers out there that are like that sounds so much better than having to manage a real person with all of their like needs and pick the green m ms out of the bowl in my dressing room they're like amari which is the name of this virtual cyberbroker star like doesn't give a what color her m m's are like she does whatever we say have you seen the fake influencer it's like an ai generated influencer i like stuff yes the other day on twitter it was like oh cool i'm gonna follow her and then like two days later i get something on google that's like fake influence or like ai influencer

gets brand deal or something i was like wait why do i know this name and turned out wait you didn't know she was fake so is it that is it so there's a there's a couple of these there was the one there's one really big one i can't believe i'm blanking on her name which is probably the one you're describing who's got like brand deals now um but then there was another one i can't believe i'm forgetting all the details of these uh it was a company who had who oh it was like that rapper there was like some company that like or whatever that was like our like new like rapper and it was a metaverse rapper and they got so much that they like backtracked basically immediately and we're like yeah we take it back this isn't a thing we're going to do

anything with um so i mean look it's coming it's it is hard for me to wrap my head around because it feels like don't you want the don't you want to see real people but like i heard this song and i'm like i would still listen to the song like you know i don't i don't i don't care music that's like my bigger question so this is i believe my understanding is all these these ten plus names of people who had worked with big who worked with big acts um among them are like the songwriters and i'm sure i don't know who the vocalist is right but um so again that's part of their like very jacked team are people who are writing the music um and putting it out yeah i mean hey most of these pop stars don't write their own

stuff that's what makes taylor so unique anyway so it's like you know again just like a less a less needy version of a of a pop star we have today so that's called player zero again we'll we'll kind of um the public mint is supposed to start on september 14th this is why i don't think i'm saying anything untoward by announcing any of this um because we're like six by the time this air is five days out from i think a public mint oh it's all given those details so essentially um they're doing these mint passes um they're on the pricey side i think they're somewhere between like three and five eth to mint these like initial passes um but the idea is you're in on the ground floor of player zero and you'll have say in future directions of the company and the stars and you get

access to their to all of the nfts they're going to drop with the music that they release for free i believe if you're one of these early pass holders there was also um i don't think any of this is like fully fully determined yet but that's like among the the kind of benefits and maybe access to concerts and shows and different things so um player zero folks we'll keep you posted um wow on and on we go with these nfts the only the other one i wanted to mention we can be quick with this one is grand leisure the grand leisure nft by pool suite um what do you think of this did you check it out do you know did you know about cool suite you're obsessed yeah i mean their minting experience was so cool i was sad that you had to connect your wallet or authorize

something before you could play around with that thing i agree um they have this like i guess you can customize your own nft and it's still within the 10 000 collection um but i was like dying to make my own character but yeah i was super impressed like it was a beautiful minting experience the branding was awesome like were you familiar with pool suite before this not at all so this is uh you're like hitting the nail on the head of just like pool suite is just they're just master branders like they're their main site it's this whole retro beach as the name of this new drop implies leisure like brand that's their vibe and they just nail it

like you go on their main site and it's like retro music it's like your boombox for the beach and you're like retro 80s cell phone like it just they just are so good at crafting a mood um but then i the the i think their first nft drop for like the main pool suite like access club was just one of those where i like wasn't clear enough to me what exactly i was getting i think they have some like membership perks for people in la and i was like well i'm not in la so i didn't meant a part of that um and now they're doing this this grand leisure nft which um do you want to tell people a little bit you were beating around it but like what exactly the the minting experience is in this character thing yeah so you basically click on like mint now or

there's two options it lets you either like customize one and that one's more expensive it's like 0.25 eth and then the other one was like you can get a free one that's like one of eight and like they're less unique and i forgot what else was going on with it but obviously i wanted to customize one and so i click on that route and it takes you to this like cool like machine type of screen where in the middle it's this like like blank canvas and then it has all these buttons on the side like adjust skin tone adjust hair adjust eyes but you have to connect your wallet and authorize the transaction like you have to basically approve the transaction and then you have 24 hours to create your nft but to your point it's like it's so immersive like they thought through

everything it was like the music was spot on like like every pop-up was branded like every messaging was branded like the buttons were super retro like i was just dying to to do it i was like borderline considering um paying for it but i was like no the merge is coming i want you i want my ease is coming i didn't go through with it but it was um i was super impressed yeah so and and so it's it's these avatars obviously but you can basically they're trying to get people to make their own like an avatar in theory that looks like you you don't have to do it like that but you can customize it so you can get an avatar that really like actually looks like yourself which is always funny to me that like we talk about like how do you want to represent

yourself in the virtual world and it's like i want to be like an alien pig like you know i want to like i don't want to be anything like me you know um and and then yeah they like the screen to create your custom avatar and if you want to make it like you is like an old-school computer is is what it's like designed to look like i think is like you know an 80s and 80s desktop you know and it's um it's just it's very cool so i i don't know who does the branding for that team but they nail it everything they i've ever seen them do is just has just totally nailed it um cool okay as we uh get close to wrapping up here obviously the merge is coming soon it's so close we can taste it bankless that had a

funny tweet i think it was still like it was like a month ago or maybe it was at the beginning of yeah beginning of last month i think that was like um stop asking what the date of the merge is and start asking if you have a date for the merge because like we're that close and i that that's a refrain that just runs through my head it's like uh we're we're so close and um somebody posted it it was making their own so i'm sure many people have seen it we'll link to the tweet below somebody posted about um you know the steps you can take to basically get your proof of work tokens um so eth holders will get dropped each proof of work tokens so long as you're kind of positioned to receive that airdrop because you do have miners who are

gonna kind of continue a fork of ethereum that is proof of work um the consensus and this is very much my feeling is like these tokens may it may initially be worth something but like pretty much everyone's selling them off like these forked tokens are not gonna be worth anything in the long term so um it's just gonna be a race i think to dump i don't know if there's gonna be buyers for it i suppose maybe there's a strand of of people out there who are like into this and are going to be buying them but i think it's just like a race to to dump on like the first 10 minutes of buyers that might exist and otherwise it's probably nothing but um but you know it doesn't it doesn't hurt to get an air drop can't hurt to to try and get it so we'll post this red so you

can track that um is that your feeling as well alexi yes i called my dad too and was like you have e3 like make sure you're doing these things and he was he checked and he was like i have five dollars and actually he was like when i bought it and you sent me five dollars but now it's it's tank so now i have two dollars and forty cents that's hilarious that's my plan that's awesome so you're gonna you're gonna do it get it and then dump it yeah yeah same i'm like honestly like i don't know who's gonna be on the other side of these trades but um nervous yeah not nervous like hopefully there's a buyer yeah

to be determined um binance suspended ethan weath deposits ahead of the merge i have no real commentary around this but i do want to talk about another move that finance announced recently that i i think is much more controversial but have seen very little chatter around to be honest um any any commentary on temporarily suspending ethan wheath deposits ahead of them or withdrawals deposits and withdrawals okay ahead of the merge i'm good no okay so the big one that i find very curious is that binance has delisted usdc uh from their platform or they they are they will be removing usdc from their platform and they're auto converting any usdc that remains on the platform

into busd which is their stable coin like damn that's some bold that's also like centralized right there but i guess they're you know giving the warning for people to move their usdc out if they don't want it to auto convert but like hot damn uh thoughts on this alexi yeah i was shocked like i i'm i'm like confused and curious to know where the line is for like d-listing and like listing tokens because like i don't know what the logic was here i mean i know kind of what the logic was but like like what's to stop them from removing

tether i think they are they they're also removing tether hold on i'm gonna pull this up right now we gonna find out they removed usdc which is the second biggest staple coin from a market cap perspective so now they're like pretty well positioned to become the second and then tether's the biggest but like i don't know that's just crazy binance to delist three stable coins and fold balances into busd um okay beginning uscc

packs dollar and true usd okay so it's t usd it's not tether um got it yeah i don't know again this is it's and maybe it's just that i'm um not in the right like crypto circles for this like i'm more in in the nft circles than the d5 circles for the most part but uh but i feel like it's not getting enough sort of attention in in the circles that i'm flying in because i i totally agree it seems like a it's such a bold move it's um i don't know exactly what their what their logic is for do for choosing these three um somebody in a group chat i'm in made the

point that you know it's it sort of does two things at once from the perspective of of finance i'm sure which is like there'll be headlines saying they're de-listing usdc as there have been and there will be a whole group of people that will see those headlines don't know any details and maybe think something's wrong with usdc so it's sort of like you know a hit on the brand of it's one of its largest rivals while of course then also just like in immediately instantaneously making a market for their own coin because suddenly there will be all of these holders of busd who you know didn't didn't know they were the usd holders yeah it's crazy and it is such a centralized move like this is like giving me apple vibes like i feel

like apple does this a lot where they'll like randomly enforce something that penalizes other people and like puts them in a better position but we like keep using apple like finance being one of the biggest exchanges if not the biggest like what are you going to do about it you know yeah cz who's the founder of finance uh cz the founder and ceo of binance tweeted that the move is intended to consolidate stable coin liquidity on the exchange okay he also asserted that technically speaking the stable coins will not be delisted from the platform i don't understand emphasizing that users can still deposit and withdraw the tokens except that they'll all be busd so what are they um is it like not de-listed but it automatically

gets converted i guess interesting i guess you can't buy it i guess you can't buy it and sell it but you can still withdraw it got it i think that's what it is it's like you'll no longer be able to buy it and sell it your coins will be converted but i guess i guess what if you transfer if you newly transfer usdc into the account you'll be able to withdraw it it's it's it's strange um okay anyway just vlogging that and i think that's it that's the show folks lots of interesting stuff this week uh but again all mostly just nft projects that i think were kind of cool and that uh wanted to talk about and um

otherwise you know everybody get ready for their their merge parties i have so much going on that on well september 15th which i guess we still don't know exactly which day time this will happen right september sometime between the 14th and the 16th yeah all i know is there's a party in austin happening for the eighth merge and i got a ticket excellent oh what night is it is that on the 15th i don't know it's between the 14th and the 16th i'll double check maybe it's the 15th david david hoffman of bankless hopefully i'm not blowing up a spot is having some people over so i i want to go to that but i also have i i have a friend who's performing a dj set that night that i've promised i'll attend and i have my parents in town so i'm supposed to be

getting together with my parents so i'm like a lot a lot happening on september 15th man it's a big day yeah okay my party is september 15th yeah it seems like that's the day that everyone's sort of convened on um cool well alexi thank you so much for joining we'll have you back someday when you can uh you know share a little bit more about the ultimately mysterious dot earth and the ultimately mysterious founding team and until next time thank you for having me [Music] thank you so much for watching this episode of overpriced jpegs if you liked this conversation if you liked this episode please go ahead and hit subscribe it helps me out it helps the

show out and it means you will get alerts and updates when we post new content thanks again