Digital Culture: The Power of Web3 Communities

Transcript

going to get started with some introductions I'm Amanda casset AKA amanda. eth founder and CEO of Serotonin we bring the world's breakthrough Technologies to Market and uh I'm Luc anets I'm the CEO of pudgy Penguins hey everyone my name is Alex you might know me as zabon I'm the CEO and founder of isuki hey I'm Josh and co-founder and COO of magic Eden so just to get started we've had digital culture since the dawn of the internet in 2021 2022 nfts really came to dominate web culture where are we now where what's

The Cutting Edge of digital culture what's coming next where can we see it it's uh it's never been better I think and so you moove the the price aspect from it but uh I say this all the time and I just gave him his flowers but uh the the top nft projects have never been breaking boundaries and pushing barriers the way that they have over the last uh six to 12 months so uh I I I think at its core you know these are digital Collectibles these are the next iterations of Ip businesses uh and I think you're really starting to see that come into fruition here especially over the last 12 months so I think we're at the really beginning stages of something that I think is ultimately going to be the future of collecting uh the future of Collectibles and ultimately the future of uh how people identify on the

internet so I think we're still in the first inning and as uh the last 12 months goes and you know just recently Z announced uh the purchase of anime.com and how they're going to tie that into the entire ecosystem I think uh things are about to get really exciting here pretty soon and uh you know remove price from the equation and narratives and all that it's uh it's the next generation of something special Z what do you think is happening on the edge of digital culture yeah I think um to me web 3 culture is about is is all about participation and you see a lot of that I mean at this conference everyone's here um you know building the network and contributing and trying to build something together um and that is also uh I think always at the Forefront of web the culture to me um and what's

happening now I think is um people's identities and their contributions and the attribution of what they contribute is starting to become uh more of a common theme um how can you actually identify who someone is on online what actions they've taken what they've done to actually contribute to a brand that's something that we're actively trying to uh figure out with isuki is um we we really uh came up with this concept of how can we co-create this IP together that was the original vision for isuki and then uh we just had an event last night and every every merch thing that we sold everything we displayed is is created by the community right so it's really about co-creation and that now how do we add attribution in the picture so that people can get rewarded for um

the things that they put in I think that's the next evolution of web3 culture to me um and something that I'm really excited uh about you know all these nft projects now we're we're kind of leading the charge there everyone's finding their own Lanes um Doodles is doing a great job in music and entertainment we're um doing that for anime Pudgies you guys are doing that across the board on social media on toys and um now with abstract so a lot of amazing things going on Magic Eden you guys are AC cross chain um as well so um that's kind of how I see web through culture developing cutting edge of digital culture all right I'll take my stab these guys already said all the all the good stuff uh but I would say just to frame it a little bit in in the last

cycle with nfts you saw a lot of just experimentation about like every Creator was just coming out kind of like just messing about right figuring out what works to some degree in the last two three years you've seen the cream basically rise to the top like which is why these guys are still here right these guys are grinding they're doing amazing stuff and we were just talking before that one of the big things that's happened over the last couple couple of years and and I think you really need this is you start to have the really hardcore Believers really get galvanized right and that forms the core of the communities that really really then build some amazing things over the coming years and for us like how we think about it because we are very different to to to These Guys these guys are the creators right they are building

the IP they are um owning that kind of consumer brand on our side we are building the platform that enables all of these different assets and all this content that could live and you know that's why we have a lot of conviction about you know the being the home of web3 being the home of buying selling minting trading any kind of activity or verb that you want to have and then doing that on on as many chains as possible because people are going to experiment with different content and all these different chains so how we feel about it is that yeah it's I agree with LC it's like it's it may not look the same but it's it's as rich as ever and I think what you're seeing now is just the the the cream is rising to the top so what's on The Cutting Edge is

it's never been better the cream's rising to the top we're going multi-chain we're focusing not just on co-creation but also on attribution um these all sound very exciting but let's just talk about hard things and address them straight on we saw a 97% drop of nft trading volumes since uh the 2021 Peak by September 2022 by 2023 the market size was a third of what it previously was and then here we are in 2024 um and nft sales hit a low uh this past month in August of 374 million

which is the lowest volume all year how how does that what does that say about the future of nfts and how are you handling it maybe let's start with Luca and diversifying into toys it's it's crypto I I mean I I I'd be remissed if anybody here was building in crypto and wasn't ready for a 95% draw draw down this is the industry that we're in they said this about altcoins they said this about ethereum they said this about Bitcoin that's just the nature of it I mean fundamentally the stuff is so obvious I mean there's one statistic that I think just matters above all else and just assume that nfts become nothing more than what they are today uh they today have disrupted the collectible business the collectible business is a $500 billion market cap business today 99% of Collectibles are physical yet 1%

is digital yet digital Collectibles have a slew of Pros that physical Collectibles do not there's no spoofing issues there's no an authenticity issues there's no friction when buying or selling there's no insurance there's no storage issues in principle you know physical Collectibles I think have that physical you know attachment and and pro but I think that's a little bit overrated but granted I think we could all agree whether you're a physical or digital Maxi the the discrepancy between that is not 99 to1 is it 80 to 20 you know 70 to 30 50 to 50 uh you know that's up for debate but I think the consensus is is that Gap is going to close and uh like you said the market caps here are so low uh that when you take you know 10 20 30 50 billion dollars uh and you and you again the

cream rising to the top I think there's going to be a couple projects that are really going to capture that discrepancy uh and so I think from our perspective uh you know the opportunity is huge the uh the the the fluctuations in the volatility of crypto is not something that worries me personally you know it's been two and a half year since these things are really started going on a draw down and crypto usually happens and and goes in three and a half and four year Cycles I think fundamentally you see this whole craze with meme coins it just takes one thing to kind of Kick this thing back up one really hyped Mint one really hyped run I mean back earlier in the year py Penguins had a monster run the whole Market kind of came and then the entire crypto Market just kind

of fell off and then you know nfts cooled off with it so I think we can see that these things still have momentum they still have legs there's nothing more fun in crypto in my opinion that nfts that that can be open for agreements or disagreements but I would assume most people here have minted they understand the the joy of you know ripping something or getting a rare and I think when you also look at the fair distribution that comes with nfts I think it's just a an unparalleled mechanism so you know my bull case here is there's been a huge unlock in uh sophisticated tooling uh in the nft market that we didn't see in the last cycle you know businesses have never been building better products and doing more more important and and break through things not just only for nfts but I think for crypto in general I mean

look at what I think we've done for crypto from Walmart and Target and legitimizing the the space to non- crypto users bringing the family together around a brand that I think no other brand in crypto could have really done with these guys are doing for anime and you know kind of establishing a foothold in the industry Doodles is you know taking over you know some of the most important you know film and uh and and music spots in in the world I think we're we're we're we're pioneering and leading the charge and what I think consumer crypto is really supposed to be about uh and uh and I think the Believers and the people that are here today are really going to reap the rewards so when that uh that speculative fervor comes back it's not if it's when uh it's going to get really exciting so

I think I think we're still in the first Innings here digital Collectibles are are are here to stay it's naturally obvious it's instinctually obvious and I hope it is for everybody in the room so I think that's my take super interesting to see this Market in context of the total dig Collectibles Market rather than the nfts market and then also even if volumes are down that maybe certain projects are more dominant and that those are accelerating super interesting um Z so wanted to get your take on this volumes are down um but you're expanding into anime and games what does that look like yeah I mean I share the same sentiment as Luca um and I think if you only look at the transaction volume I

think you're missing a big piece of what nfts enable um and I think you know there's a lot of people that got um it's same with any speculative asset right when price goes down people lose money you know they get burned by it they leave the space um but I think it's been you know a couple years since uh 2021 and then um I think I think a lot of holders are starting to come back because they're starting to realize that there's really no other community like an nft community and this time around when they're going to come back what they're going to realize is wait some of my favorite Brands and communities are a lot more developed now and getting mainstream adoption whether it's Walmart or you know uh uh you know uh getting the entertainment and media

out there and um uh breaking in a web too and you know for us we're making authentic Japanese anime and um you know we released the first episode of our Anthology series and that's gotten traction if you read the comments people are like man I love this IP how can I see more they don't have any idea that it's nfts um and that's what we need right something that not good in web 3 or it's good for an nft project it needs to be good period and that's what we need and that's what projects are starting to develop and you know get out there and so when these holders are coming back this time around they're I think going to be very pleasantly surprised to be like wow there's quite nothing like it and I'm very excited to be back and I'm very um you know bullish

about the space and the communities that that I'm a part of um and you know for isuki the first couple years has been around building this premium brand around anime right so building isuki into a nice brand curating a nice community of really talented creatives to co-create with us um and now I think what nfts enable is you have this community how can you mobilize and Inspire this community to do something much greater and so for us it's this vision of what we call anime 2.0 where how can we give more ownership to the fans and creators that make up this passionate Global anime Community um and uh how can we create something that really

incentivizes um you know the whole uh community of creatives to contribute to this ecosystem and that's what the isuki community now the nft holders can be the stewards of right to be early in this new movement to get more creators on board and um I think that's what nfts and web 3 can really enable and that's this next evolution of you know what we're doing and that's not measured by purely transaction volume right because there's uh always a new meta there's you know Meme coins obviously uh really took over uh the narrative in terms of uh speculative price action and so there's no way nfts can compete with that uh in this phase but um you know of course uh we we do what we think is best um using nfts as as a technology and I think it

enables something much more and think we're we're all doing that today so it's really interesting how how Luca has gotten into this larger category of Collectibles and how Z you gotten into this larger category of anime and both of those are these growing exciting categories that aren't dependent on today's nft market volumes um but I wanted to lay out that kind of nft Market bease actually uh to talk about magic Eden because you're such a counter example to that be case um you just overtook blur you raised uh 130 million at a 1.6 billion valuation seeing volumes really increasing how are you pulling that off yeah it's F I'll address the the 97% draw down thing

first cuz I think it's funny because uh I like feel nothing at this point you know I think to be building in the space you just kind of got to live with that and I think it's really good we are like a bit of a counter example in the nft market uh or just in crypto in general because uh I think about our business now it's like it's it's much more Diversified as a as a business and to to just illustrate the point a little bit um you know we we started in 2021 right when everything was basically going going crazy going bananas and um our year we're going to have a better year this year in terms of users Revenue every metric that you can you can name as a business uh way better than 2021 and what's the reason for that even even if

nfts seem down is that I'd encourage you to basically just scratch underneath the surface a little bit and you wouldn't see all the stuff that these guys are working on as an example if you're just looking at the price or the volume that's being traded you just wouldn't see it you also would not see that under the hood how much uh nft cont content has actually been created on on a bunch of different places no longer is it just ethereum right the ethereum market is I don't know the exact number probably down 90 plus percent right from a pure volume perspective but if you look at Magic Eden and where all the users are actually trading all the users are actually consuming content minting it's on places like they're minting on Bas they're buying and selling ordinals on

bitcoin um they're buying and selling gaming assets on polygon and salano right um and then there's also the ethereum market too so the market is just a lot bigger and it's a lot wider than it was a few years ago and why is that uh important it's because there's to to basically uh illustrate how early we are from like a uh an entire marketed industry it's like I agree with what Luka was saying as the first inning but just imagine because nfts enable a couple of really cool things if you strip everything else away it's any asset can be uh basically digital and have prop rights any asset is immediately just International any asset is immediately tradable sendable you

know you name it programmable right and if you just apply that to basically any physical thing in the world you you got to believe that that thing is going to be absolutely massive and we are just right at the beginning of that so I don't have like a strong point of view about oh is it going to be this type of asset that type of asset it almost doesn't matter we should just be wherever the content and wherever the user users are going to go um and we are not very opinionated about that um and that's why I think magic Eden has become a little bit of this counter example where as you know even though the narrative in the market has seemed a little bit more quiet than it was in 2021 like our business is actually doing a lot better like many orders have magnitude better than it was

in 2021 hold up hold up you guys raised a you guys did a recent round uh this was this was the last round that we did I was going to say nfts are down 95% in volume you got to spare a dollar that's super interesting we we we started talking about IP and we're in web 3 so we're talking about infrastructure and it's really interesting that your strategy for growing volumes on Magic Eden has been so infra focused getting into the salon ecosystem getting into the ordinals ecosystem maybe you can comment um directly just on the role that infra has had on Magic Eden's growth and then I want to ask you to about infra as well yeah yeah absolutely so it's funny we so

we started off as a salon of marketplace and those of you who who knew magic eating in 2021 that's what you would have known us for and we had this thesis that uh over the long run right let's call it 10 years 10 plus years um you would basically see that many many different assets would get created on many many different places so it didn't um as a as a platform and as a company we were not going to be dogmatic about where those assets would be created right so we said to ourselves very early on we should just be we should just be all over like imagine effectively um as exchangers support you know token trading and things like that they're never going to support the long long tail of all of the asset creation and that's where we should support that

we should basically be the the onchain version of that right where the long tail goes like we should be there so we started expanding into different ecosystems very very early in 2022 we did evm eth polygon now we're on base we did Bitcoin one of the first on bitcoin uh that became a very very big Market uh did a about a billion dollars in volume in in just may like just a few months ago right ordinal and runes so we have taken this very cross-chain multi-chain lens the second piece of the infrastructure that I'll mention that people may not um necessarily know about for magic Eden because people know us as just purely an nft Marketplace is as as this experience has been built out users then have to to figure out how do they

get on all these different chains right and it's like a very complicated problem with all these different wallets that are out there and we ended up building also a cross chain wallet to accompany the marketplace experience so if a user is a salana user and they want to go buy an isuki how do they go do that instead of having to download multiple wallets like transfer money from or eth from coinbase they can go to magic Eden wallet swap soul to eth and then join the yuzuki community right making just cutting out all those steps uh and making that very sess has been a big big area of investment for us so that that's kind of the the the big Focus you know we're going to continue to build that out we have many aspirations around supporting probably 5 to 10 more chains later this year and then over the 5 to

10 year you know time Horizon I think that's going to get a lot bigger with basically all of the l2s that are coming out and coming out online now super interesting building infra to be able to tap into the demand from all those different ecosystems and then getting into the account abstraction wallet abstraction side to build out the ux um Z I wanted to ask you um you guys are on ethereum on arbm as an L2 do you have any plans to build infra yourselves do you want to go multichain yeah so the way I think about infra is um like I think back to 2017 is when I joined the space I worked for a project called zerox which is a decentralized exchange protocol it's

actually when I met Josh and he he was at dyx and we were Neighbors in San Francisco um and we started at 0x by being a protocol right sitting at that infro supporting other dexes to build on top of us um and uh we use this um uh you know system where we can support what we called relays teams to build exchanges on top of zerox and what we found is that um it's very difficult to find teams to build the exact type of apps that you want that utilize the infer in the right way because there's a lot of things to consider with um you know dexes in this case with liquidity and getting market makers Etc and it got to

the point where we were still making um the core protocol but we had to just commit to building our own app on top of it as well and so that that became matcha doxyz which is a um Dex aggregator um that you know a lot of people uh you know you guys might have used it today um and so what I learned from that is uh the the infra is important um to support the type of applications that you want to build um and for us now it is suuki years later um the the infra that arbitrum provides um as an L2 is you know they have a whole product Suite um and you know we're utilizing their product called orbit to spin up our own L3 chain and

it's called anime chain and for usim chain anime chain yeah so you can see that everything we do is kind of synergistic and just the anime vertical um and uh you know isuki obviously is an anime IP right so we've been doing that and um we we good at is you know building something that resonates with the uh end user that that loves the IP and arbitrum and um you know all this info that exists now makes it really easy for us to spin up our own chain being being anime chain um and so what's missing now is how can we create a flagship platform on anime chain to actually onboard um and expand the anime industry and take them onchain and um we just announced uh this past week that

we're building anime um which is going to be a platform for anime fans they they won't even know that it's web 3 to start and so you can go on there uh and sign up for the wait list today you with just an email three clicks you register you can um get a pack of stickers to use when the platform goes live and those stickers are actually nfts on anime chain and each user uh with uh an email gets a wallet um on animate chain as well um through account oft raction and so they don't even need a wallet they don't have to pay gas you know the user doesn't even know that it's um you know blockchain and that's to us what consumer crypto is um really attracting

that that crypto stuff away um and so uh for us we put anime.com first because that's what the end user um uses first and Anime chain is the layer that sits under that and um you know that you don't have to focus on that because um we're taking care of that in the back end and I I think that's how real consumer apps should be and I think that's the next evolution of what what consumer crypto would be super exciting when anime coin uh sounds very cool um so Luca you you announced an 11 million raise led by Founders fund to build uh among other things an L2 from your parent company Igloo maybe tell us some more about your infrastructure plans and

what role infra plays for Pudgies yeah I I think we see the same opportunity in l2s that we saw when we bought pudgy Penguins when we bought pudgey Penguins we just felt like we had an unorthodox approach on how to look at things and we thought we could do things differently and we thought we could win uh you know in in in building nfts and and providing value to our community I think the same thing uh when I look at l2s I think l2s have a little bit of a broken ethos in a mindset and I actually appreciate Z's perspective on this but it's uh it's this general purpose approach naturally from an entrepreneurship perspective is like really contradictory uh or paradoxical to what it means to be a good entrepreneur a good entrepreneur doesn't get into a business with 10 different priorities a good entrepreneur

goes into a business with one priority and general purpose blockchains I think fundamentally are broken in the sense that you have to optimize and try to do 10 things really well and try to build an ecosystem across many different facets I think for us we really want to be the consumer chain and we want to own consumers on evm uh and naturally I think pudgy penguins have been building for Consumer crypto for the last two and a half years uh I think we've been the face of that obviously we've experienced some serious pain points being in walm being in Target now pudgy toys are in about 10,000 different retailers across the country but we're not really in the physical product business we're really in the Trojan Horse business so for those of who are not familiar you know pudgy penguin toys actually come with a

QR code those QR codes point you to pudgy world you get an email and a password or you input an email and a password you're giving nfts through a gast experience and through nothing short of a $5 purchase of a toy you're now onchain participating and digitally collecting and so that experience fundamentally we had a lot of different issues going around to a lot of different chain just trying to optimize that experience and ultimately what it kind of came down to and what we saw was like look nobody's focusing on consumer and consumer only and the sacrifices that you have to make to make a good consumer experience are not necessarily the sacrifices that you can make when you're optimizing for defi or AI or data or some of these other things these people are doing and so the elephant in the room was like look we need to own

this experience nobody's owning consumer on evm we want abstract to be the consumer chain and uh we raised that round we actually bought a frame frame which was an amazing chain being built for the last year by uh by a group led by a developer named cigar some of you guys may or may not be familiar I actually worked with uh Z quite a bit and so fun fact he was a mutant ape uh at first and we've seen his journey has been awesome you should have told me that I would have uh I would have it would have been a little bit different of a deal um just kidding but uh and that's what I think we want to Pioneer I think when you guys are are looking at pudgy Penguins when you're looking at Igloo when you're looking at abstract I think what we want to be is we just want

to we want to Pioneer consumer crypto we want to lead that charge uh and uh you know I want to do it alongside people like Z and people uh like magic Eden obviously so U you know that that's our infrastructural uh Endeavors and uh hopefully you guys will see some more things here shortly but why build an L2 like what will the L2 do that's different that's missing in the market right now I think it's a it's again it starts and stops like a fundamental mindset I think uh there's some compromises on the infr layer uh or on the actual chain side that I think you you kind of have to position on the other side of it I think there's actually uh I think it starts and stops with the mindset so for example you know uh most l2s they they want to optimize

for sequencer fees so they'll they'll basically say everyone can come build on my chain right but ultimately it leads into like a really fragmented experience and so one thing right now is like curation curation is not at the name of the game or customization or personalization or what is that actual zero to1 onboarding look like so I think for us you know rather than trying to build an ecosystem that does a ton of different things that optim optimizes for a ton of different things uh we're really trying to just optimize for one experience only which is consumer and so we're making the necessary tweaks on the Chain side uh we're making uh a huge tweak on what it looks like to build the ecosystem so I want you guys to hold me accountable to this but I want abstract to be the most fun ecosystem in crypto I

want to own fun at least for the next 12 to 24 months as our primary focus uh and I want to leave everything else uh to to other people to kind of figure out and so uh if you're building the next great defi Innovation uh I'll send you over to our friends at bar chain or or arbitrum but if you're building fun and viral applications I want abstract to be the home of that I want to innovate and and Pioneer and kind of build out some of the Tooling in terms of what it looks like uh to to really take account account abstraction to the next level uh I think zero to one onboarding is broken today so a huge Focus for us on the engineering side is actually making the best uh zero to one onboarding experience we actually did we think we're going to do that through abstract

Global wallet which we announced a couple weeks ago uh so I actually think it's less of a hey we're going to do this one thing differently I think it's more of a ethos and a mindset right which is like hey we want to do consumer we want to do consumer better than everybody else and if you want to go build you know blockchains can power many different things uh but you guys can you know builders that want to do that can go do that in other ecosystems uh and I think just focusing on consumer and consumer only is ultimately uh going to lead to a lot of interesting developments super cool I mean inside our ecosystem we we've been talking so much about consumer crypto and about building the infra necessary to enable it wet abst abration account abstraction easy onboarding but this consumer crypto

narrative hasn't been the major narrative this cycle it's really been institutional adoption ETFs uh the the Enterprises finally getting in putting crypto on the balance sheet do you guys see any symbiosis between the increasing institutional adoption and what happens in web 3 culture and I ask this because in previous Market Cycles with the emphasis on nfts we've seen so many new newcomers to crypto start with true Sovereign wallets and root ownership of their assets but now we're seeing a lot of these volumes going into nft into ETFs where they're not you know owned directly by users and it's not

necessarily a portal to get into the cultural side do these phenomena go together or are they separate I I fundamentally think they're separate so I actually wrote a whole article about this I encourage you guys to read it because I I spent more time than I probably should have on it uh but I actually wrote about what is consumer crypto and and ultimately what does that mean I actually think consumer crypto is the final frontier and I think like you said uh you know we've broken through to the institutions in a way that I think we all hoped and dreamed uh you know five years ago uh you know that that we would get in terms of the ETFs and so now that the ETFs are out there we know that the institutions are playing they've always been playing and they've always been a key factor in the in the

GR in the in the growth of prices within this industry uh but consumers and ultimately breaking through to Consumers is the place that we have to go if we want crypto to to be what we want it to be uh consumer adoption is going to be the ceiling that I think creates a a potential for a hundred trillion dollar Taman but I think if you if you go on its current trajectory maybe crypto can have a a 10 10 trillion doll market cap or1 15 trillion dollar market cap but I think if you want it to be the next the the the rails to the next versions of the internet economies you have to break through into consumer and you have to do it fast the elephant in the room which I think most people don't don't really think about is today ad adoption is

driven by Price going up or Price going down the problem is is crypto is an alpad driven industry and most people who come into crypto for that speculative reason to make money end up losing so just use an anchor of a million people of a million people come into crypto 950,000 of those people are losing money another 50,000 uh are maybe making money or they see the opportunity and they stay but that that's that stairway to success is uh ultimately handicapped by this drive that is basically price and I got into crypto to make money money most people got into crypto to make money but I think we need to lean into other habitual habits that I think have higher upside I think fun has higher upside I think I've stayed into crypto and I'm here today because I have fun within this industry I think

most people would probably uh feel the same I think digital ownership being censorship resistant uh you know having the ability to have this borderless liquidity pool which I think add just so much opportunity I mean these are the things that we really need to lean into uh and ultimately that's going to be driven by consumer adoption and and and how consumer crypto is being driven forward so to to answer your question seamlessly I think uh you know on one side institutions are here they've broken through in the most meaningful way Capital will continue to compound but they're not going to get really really excited and there's a lot of sideline Capital probably a majority of sideline capitals waiting for something really tangible to break through that happened in 2020 with defi that happened uh also in 20121 with nfts I think institutions really saw the opportunity

there uh but now they needed to see the next interation of that and so that's why I'm just a huge believer like consumer crypto has to be the place that we have to go and if we just continue on this habitual cycle for of every million people you know 950,000 of them getting burned and you know being uh you know cynics around the industry we're never really going to get to where we want to be and and and narrative drives everything narrative drives the world that's one thing I learned about while working in this business and right now the narrative outside of the crypto native and outside of the people that support the industry uh is not as good as I think people think and I think that's the handicap that we have today yeah one I have one take on this which is I think that it's it's as simple as

this the institutional stuff like the ETFs and everything they drive more credibility and legitimacy to the industry as a whole which doesn't directly correlate necessarily with like more retail coming to use our stuff like immediately but that legitimacy is very very necessary because over time it acts as a bit of a trojan horse so like people they get the eth ETF or maybe the salana ETF that's maybe coming or like whatever ETF and they start to see like what are the narratives what are the pervasive narratives that are driving that ETF and they start to look a little bit deeper a little bit deeper and then they start to discover all the stuff that we are building right so I think this this effect it takes it takes a long time like people tend to

underestimate um these time Horizons but when it happens it will happen very suddenly and I have very very high conviction around that and then the last piece I'll say is around this price point uh that Luca was making it's true like a new user today does not want to come and buy a $30,000 item that that's just not going to happen realistically and that's why I think one of the most interesting pieces of activity that we see on on on our platform magic Eden over the last six months has been uh we do these mints and these mints they're usually like a dollar or maybe they're free right they're usually very very cheap and there are in the like there's a like hundreds of thousands of people

that are minting these items so we did one like for the Olympics to mate the Olympics um we did a bunch of other ones that were just around like smaller crypto native communities and they did hundreds of thousands of mints and the reason behind that is because people are still interested in collecting and they're interested in basically joining different communities but the way they do it and the entry point has to be has to be a lot more um the barrier has to be lower right so it's it's kind of like infra is one piece price point is one piece legitimacy is another piece so this like digital community native communities versus institions it's like both have to happen but over this time Horizon um it's going to it's going to definitely help yeah I think it's a great point about how they're different

audiences but they have some symbiosis from the legitimacy on the consumer side normal consumers don't buy a can of Coca-Cola and then expect to make money on it they expect to consume it uh and so Point well taken about price uh Z what do you think is there is there some kind of synergy between the institutional consumer side this cycle yeah the only thing I would add is um I think now U I don't think there's one major narrative that's driving um this this industry I think institution is one of them but there's also you know rwas there's mem coins there's IP and there's so many things and I think that just shows that the industry is maturing and we have to advance across all these areas in order to you know show more

legitimacy and show what's possible um with you know what it is that we're building um and uh you know I think back to like 2018 was around when security tokens were a thing right and people were saying oh the institutions are going to come they're going to tokenize security and that's going to be what drives the majority of token trading volume on exchanges um and then we realized actually that was kind of early for that and um it kind of died down and then 2019 2020 defi summer came around which is very I think authentic to web3 culture because it enabled a lot of new use cases on crypto rails that wasn't possible before and so I think we'll see that e flow of like you know we're going to see more institutions come in or oh

there's some really uh organic things happening that's really exciting but ultimately what drives this space is narrative and you know you talked about this a lot it's up to us to drive that narrative right we can't wait to be like what's the next narrative going to be like no what we're building on the consumer side is what's going to bring a lot of people fun experiences and that's going to on board the next wave in my opinion so I totally agree with you um on that Luca um and so let's drive home this narrative right let's make it happen um so and and then institutions they'll do their thing hope this salana ETF and all these things so we all gotta kind of you know hit it from all angles that's my perspective I love it to wrap it all up as we build this narrative and

get our community involved let's just go super lightning what would you like people in the audience today to do what can they what action can they take to start getting involved in your community oh I'll okay uh yeah I'll just use it as an opportunity to Shi magic eeden a little bit we're all going to do it right no I I'll be quick so um download Magic eeden Wallet cross chain wallet go mint in nft uh you'll find something more delightful than you probably might think is there and um I'm extremely extremely convicted about the long-term future of nfts and just digital ownership Universal uh digital ownership ownership is going to be

Universal and um yeah feeling as bullish as ever yeah so you know I was just in Japan um and we're meeting with some of our Japanese IP partners and there's these massive companies like too and TOA they made some amazing animes that you might have watched like Dragon Ball jiujitsu kaisen what's amazing is they're starting web 3 IP right following a very similar Playbook to what isuki did years ago and they see the potential of it right and so I think if you want to join the isuki community and be at the Forefront of what the next generation of anime IPS can look like I think it's a great opportunity to do that now um and if you just want to check out what we're building on the consumer side you can check out anime.com you can sign up for the wait

list and um kind of go through that experience and U be one of the uh earliest folks to to check out anime.com when is live and I I think from my side uh you know go to your local Walmart or Target or uh we're in a lot of stores around the world uh show uh maybe get a a pudgy penguin toy give it to a friend or a family member collect maybe some of our nfts and if you're interested to see us uh run back another success story maybe give abstract chain a follow on Twitter but thank you guys for your time and uh hope to see you guys around thanks everyone thanks to our panelists thank you