Are royalties dead?

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm Jaybird joined by my co-host Kyle reedhead and we believe that royalties are going to change the world that's why we're carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in websterite welcome to another episode today is a new format we're calling web3 hot takes where every week we're gonna break down the hottest news the debate the conversation that everybody is having on crypto Twitter and we have with us co-founder of wearable Alex salnikov to join us to

talk today all about royalties and marketplaces what is going on in the current situation with marketplaces like open C slashing royalties getting rid of them wearable standing for royalties there's a real divide where does this go long term what's going to happen and how does it affect you as a builder and investor in the space that's what we're going to talk about today so I just want to start by giving a little bit context and then Alex and Kyle get you guys to jump in modern newsletters are built on paragraph that's right paragraph is a brand new newsletter platform that combines the best parts of web 2 and web3 to supercharge newsletters for both

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paragraph We believe this is the future of newsletters because it's profound engagement it creates between creators and fans so whether you're a Creator writer or an Avid Reader it's time to check out paragraph and capitalize on the opportunity of being early what has happened so far is we have over the course of the last few years essentially learned that royalties are not enforceable on chain as a result of this we have seen many marketplaces Target different consumers by either enforcing royalties or not enforcing royalties that is basically led to the last year and a half two years of these

Marketplace battles Marketplace Wars where different marketplaces have pulled on different levers and gotten us to where we are today where it feels like royalties might never be a thing and there's real concern in the space the royalties might be gone so let's just start at the top of if royalties aren't enforceable on chain can we realistically expect people to pay royalties first of all thanks for having me and I know that's like a new format so where other talking all to each other than than an interview I feel like there has been a good attempt and

making it enforceable with the operator filter release for everyone I think there are nft statistics was having some data that it actually does work there is a lot of collection that did Implement I know that Yuga implemented it for all the new collections who else is big guys out there I think digas probably have it as well so there is a fair amount of people that did Implement operator filter there is an issue with the going backwards to all the collections that are already in place that can't implement it what would they do in this environment I'm hopeful that this works and the Royals will be

there with us what do you think I just wonder if we can expect people to pay royalties if they're not enforceable like who will pay royalties right like if we live in a world where people are going to look for the best return on their investment will they pay royalties now I obviously I want people to pay royalties I believe that it's important I think that there's there's a need for it and I think we can get into like who deserves royalties and not because I also think there's this question of certain artists deserve royalties certain businesses I'm not so sure that they deserve royalties right so I think there's also this question of when it should be part of your business model

but you know Kyle do you think that people will pay royalties if it was enforceable yes I think it becomes the norm of course and that is just kind of easy and it just becomes the thing that this industry does which was kind of one of the big like Promises of web 3 right with nfts was this whole royalty thing I think the fact that it's not at least not yet enforceable it was quite obvious that other marketplaces were going to come in and sort of go without right with competition that's just kind of how this stuff works and then a lot of people of course if they don't have to they probably won't and so I don't know if it's going to be a thing I mean we have tipping at restaurants which is I mean at least in America we do but not

in most parts of the world but in American Canada and that's very normal everyone does it and it's like 15 to 25 percent is like the norm and I don't you don't you rarely see anyone not tip unless you got really bad service but it's optional thing that's kind of played out so whether it actually does play out in this way I don't know right now I don't think that like a lot of the at least the projects from the last couple years I'm not sure that they really deserve Royal cheese I think they did it as that was their business model we're going to create this thing this community and we're gonna make money from royalties but it's like counterintuitive to their actual business which is build a community and then they want to make their profit off of people leaving their community so like it just seems all

weird to me but I think there are probably use cases where royalties make sense like art right that to me makes complete sense but again if you can't enforce it I just I don't know how you're gonna make this work you know China has the tax on the stock transfer and stock sales so if I had some stocks and I sold it to you they're taxing that at 0.1 percent it was just lower at these days yeah yeah really so that's there's the royalty right there Alex what's wearables approach to royalties it's very simple we have always been enforcing that and we will so it is we're consistent with this

I feel like the promise of the blockchain was in programmatic redistribution of capital which is nice and very powerful tool and by cutting out royalties we are losing one of the advantages why the market was there and there is always this debate like oh I want the best return on my assets so maybe I'll just skip this but sometimes paying a tax that gets redistributed back to produce for example Yuga you have your Yuga assets and Yuga earns money from royalties and then it uses

that to create new assets to fulfill that ecosystem to create the game making them more much more valuable so the world just as big it is close to taxes it is the interest it is the vehicle for funding the infrastructure finding the public goods and re doing something that is very important for your assets as well so the New Order just creating new work and making becoming more popular also improves your assets if you if you own the artist's work so that is very powerful tool and we need to have it and this whole issue arise from the fact

that it's not very enforceable on chain collections should be able to choose that but I also believe there will be worlds in which it isn't forcible and chain and we'll just have it operator filter is a great great step towards that adopt everyone I think everyone should adopt it actually you just said that operator filter which was what I believe openc made you said that that basically does work yet they just shut it down why any idea like why they would do that if it was actually working or could be something that works in the future he was working for people but not for openc I think that is the case let's see the series of events and the last November they lost significant market share by that time to blur that did not

enforce royalties and they released and operate our filters say okay if you if you block blur we are going to enforce royalties for you and in response to that both blur and looks rare they used to work around left by openc contract so they used the C Port directly from their interfaces and support I don't know why surprisingly has this ability to not just bypass royalties if you use it from the from on the contract level so it's not enforced on the contract level in Seaport and that's why this whole idea of attacking other marketplaces that don't enforce royalties didn't work out

they were just circumventing that by using open CSO and contracts so the only way to block them was to block the opens entirely and that's why people wasn't doing this and at some point there was even an equilibrium you could do it this way that you have royalties both paid an open CM blur for people and I I was hopeful that this is the moment when royalties like are alive there is an equilibrium on the market you can make happy like big marketplaces as well as yourself but then this equilibrium tip again so Alex

can you explain to everybody how much of wearable wearables business model from what I understand split between you have your Market aggregator and then you have your white label branded community-based marketplaces the white label the Branded Community Marketplace is I understand I can wrap my head around them creating royalty them enforcing royalties because it's a an experience of buying on a shop in that website in their ecosystem right and maybe the ux is different or maybe there's different features and it makes sense to pay a fee in that case right where I struggle with it is on the

aggregator side do you think that this is sort of a big question so you can take whichever way you want do you my main question is do you think that there's a place for an aggregator that enforces royalties and what's been interesting to see is since you guys announced this that you had a big boost in volume so and I guess I'm curious was that on your aggregator or was that more on the Branded white label marketplaces that you're doing yeah that's a great question so the Branded white label marketplaces they're always right okay they want to enforce royalties This is the End almost enclosed Community home where you want everyone to have royalties in that sense on the aggregator side we are actually

seeing much more traction not on the aggregated orders but on Native orders happening on the variable side that are people creating something unbearable or just listing something natively unbearable we have this program run that if you have your area locked for a certain amount of time you don't pay the marketplace fees which is kind of unique and cool so this is the native orders inside our order book on which we have always enforced royalties and will and a disenforced on-chain level so even if somebody access our protocol from the smart contract level it's still enforced you can circumvent that by just not passing that parameter through the front

end but now the question is okay what do we do with the aggregated orders and we want to become the royalty safe Marketplace that if you link to us you can be absolutely sure that the person coming would find an asset and would buy it and that would have royalties paid to the Creator and that's why temporarily we're removing the aggregation or all the guys that are enforce royalties and moving on there is basically two options either not returning back and grow the native Supply with these collections collaborate with the collections which we would love

to do we would love to become their go-to Marketplace and help them to have their consistent business model preserved or get the segregation back with the royalties enforced on top of this that would also make us royalty safe place for other people to link to but that would make us a little bit less competitive in terms of the prices would be a little higher than on the other places so this is the more or less two ways of going forward so far we had to chat with several collections they are leaning towards the first one let's go with you let's grow the native Supply because some of them are thinking to follow the

Yuga and even like block the Open Sea entirely and that would wouldn't make the second option to work if it was enforced on top of a graduated orders does it make sense am I losing you yeah yeah it makes complete sense who are some examples of the collections that you're speaking to are you speaking to like collection like nft project collections are going to put nft projects in quotes like a you know somebody who came out and started with a pfp are you more speaking to large web 2 brands or existing brands that are entering the space are you speaking more to small artists individuals solo artists more like small artists than the Nifty collections okay

yeah I think it's quite sensitive on like who's blocking who so I won't say the names yeah yeah okay and can you give some examples of on the Community Marketplace cider I think you call it Community marketplaces right where somebody like Mattel is an example can you speak about some of those and tell us what they do charge royalties I assume and tell it how that's working for this one is fairly easy because this are more vertically integrated ecosystems where the community and the primary market and secondary Market almost everything like stays within one place

and most of the items that are created with this Marketplace they stay on this Marketplace to be traded so there is literally no this like Free Ride dilemma and some other marketplaces tries to come and steal the market share by doing that so they are more or less safe in that regard we have seen some of the nft collections to come and say oh can we create our own Marketplace that would enforce royalties on top of everything else so we're going to direct people here we haven't had any one of those in production yet right because that would make sense if you kept it vertically integrated and from your website and from your Twitter you promoted your own Marketplace and that was the way that somebody new

entered your ecosystem whereas a Trader look Traders they're deeper in ecosystem they're gonna know how to get the best return on their investment they're going to do it a different way and I think this is where I come to on this is I believe that Traders will always find a way around like there's just no way we're going to but what I think that people don't realize is that right now 90 of the market is Traders right the majority of the market is Traders whereas long term that will not be the case a small percentage of the market will be traders long term we're just at

this one moment in time where they dominate the market and is it's leading people like open C to make what I believe are bad business decisions because they're caught up trying to capture this current consumer which like really I think they should just let that go to blur and stop trying to capture that consumer that's also the question where the nft market goes in general what do you think I feel like there is two big directions one of them is trading we can't ignore that right there are people want to trade nfts and the question is why and what kind of do what is the world how does the world look like in which

this is the important part and not just mean coins so I have an understanding that somebody like budget bingins might be onto something there because they are turning their IP of budgets into Revenue generating business that sells toys stickers everything that we are familiar with the that the Disney is doing all the time you have the IPO of the Spiderman and all sorts of Spiderman things are selling so that kind of justify the trading infrastructure in my mind that if we tokenize all the IEP Revenue

generating IP in the world and put it on chain and make sure that you can buy a license on chin for this Revenue generating IP that would kinda justify the existence of have a trading infrastructure with loans with institutions coming up and building portfolios of Ip that they feel valuable and the second big direction for me is nft as digital goods and services where it's an actual item that you use and you buy it because you want to use it because it's fun because it's cool because you want to display your home you want to use it in the game you want to put it on your

avatar this is more like goods and services and in the goods and services I would expect more of the primary market and less of the secondary Market to even exist I think with nfts we got it first of all it's tough to just say nfcs in general because there's so many things that nfts represent right like obviously there's like the community pfps but then there's like you said there's things that are IP to most people they look like the same say like pudgy Penguins looks identical to D Gods let's say in terms of just like their images of whatever but they're actually very different businesses doing very different things then there's also things of like outside of Ip and Community there's like tickets right and there's like you said in-game items or avatars or like could be any we have

subscriptions like for our new that is based on an nft so like there are very different things I do think if it can be traded it will be traded so I think even like tickets to concerts those are a thing you would expect just Primary people would buy but if you have some Alpha you can get in on these tickets to Taylor Swift before everyone else does you're going to buy those things there's gonna be people that are going to buy them and sell what percent that is I don't know I I got a feeling because nfts and marketplaces make digital things much easier to trade like it's kind of hard to trade tickets right now for concerts you can do it but there's it's not the easiest thing StubHub has obviously helped that but then I think when those go all as nfts it becomes very very easy and same with

if you think that this IP is going to be big you're probably gonna go trade that if you think this music nft from this artist is eventually gonna get big you're probably going to speculate on that just people are now what percent I don't really know but this is why I think marketplaces need to decide are you going for that percentage of Traders which is what blur has basically done is like we're gonna go Traders doesn't matter what you're trading if it's you know an IP if it's a community if it's a ticket blur is going to handle that and they're gonna have the best trading platform and then I think marketplaces need to choose to be for primary right and whether those are very specific ones or more General and I think openc's problem is like they don't know what they are who they they're just like one

day to this the next day to that and they're all over the place and Jay and I have said since day one like pick a side and just like go all into that that's why we loved when you guys came over everyone we're just like hey we're standing with this we're not changing you guys have always kind of stayed that way I think whatever one you decide you just gotta you gotta stick with it and open to is really struggled on that one that's what I think has been their biggest business mistake in my opinion yeah that is hard that is hard when you're big and you you try to get the whole Market yeah yeah which is just impossible Alex what has been the response so you decided this last week I think is when you announced that you were going to

stand with royalties and you were as you said you were removing certain marketplaces from the aggregator so you took these steps what's been the response from the community from artists absolutely overwhelming lots of positivity lots of words of support from artists some of them I've seen in instantly started linking to wearables saying that oh if you want to buy go ahead and buy it through my variable page because they respect royalties I think holdy was one of this artists we also got a lot of product feedback that okay this might these things might be better for me as an artist when I'm linking it to you and

that is so precious for us I'll just double confirm if anyone hearing this would jump into my Twitter DMS and give the product feedback of how can we make it serve better for you that is the goal for us because there is a million people coming to wearable and understand things to prioritize is a hard job so 60 000 people minted are commemorate nft are for royalties that is also one of these signs of how important this for people we had double and triple traffic on the main marketplace nice this week and yeah it's been absolutely important

and a bunch of artists also lined up with drops they said we want to drop this variable and by the way this is where it's also helpful for us just come and drop with us that is what you can do for royalties yourself thank you everyone for supporting us that said the words of support that that shout shout out variable on Twitter that is helpful because it's not easy only for us to stand for royalties it's some like on the short term basis it's a little bit puts us in a disadvantage so was it a was it an easy decision or was there a lot of debate it's hard to tell I don't think there was a lot of debate

we've been thinking about royalties for a long time and that was more or less in line what we always thought obviously you caught a narrative that was very hot right now and there's a lot of concern around protecting royalties it's amazing to see how many whatever one of the major marketplaces does something against royalties all of a sudden all these creators start talking again and influencers about hey it's important that we stand behind royalties and the basically what you mentioned at the beginning of this episode of the opportunity to compensate artists more fairly in what in the way that they

deserve and it's created a bump for you guys right now I wonder do you think that's sustainable do you think that that bump sustains or is this just a moment in time it's like a leave and surfing the leaf is very long so it's important for us to be on top of it and to not lose the expectations of people that put it into us so when they say okay you support us but that creates an influx of people coming to wearable but then how do we retain them like we need to provide them a good service when they connect their wallet they should see their nfts in a meaningful way and again if you don't please tell us how we can be better on this if they

try to search something and can't find and or if they do drop and there is not enough of the sales happening it it is all like losing trust so this is where my mind mostly goes into how do we live up to the expectations of people that want to go with us and we feel responsibility for this do you think in the future that more people are going to be using these like more General NFC marketplaces or do you think more project businesses whatever are going to start to use your what do you call Community marketplaces obviously there's this like marketplaces of service is basically what you guys

have created do you think that's the route that we'll go like which one wins the biggest market share do you think in the future honestly we didn't know yet we're betting a lot on the community marketplaces because of the things we see in the e-commerce market right where okay there is Amazon but on Amazon you mostly it's very agnostic you try to go there to buy like toilet paper so they say something that you don't care where you buy it from and there is Shopify which is dominates 10 of all e-commerce in the United States it's huge it's huge and more luxury Brands more people who are care about

the ux that they give to the users use Shopify and me nfts are kind of into the second way but also the trading component the trading has historically been attracted to decentralized places because of the liquidity or your book is important for trading that's why there's always this dichotomy whether it goes more e-commerce route or it goes more Exchange Route I I think you make a good point of the Shopify Amazon comparison Amazon is like cheap you just want the cheapest thing you can possibly get you want it fast and you just don't care and so those when I think of that that's your general Marketplace which are people that don't

care about royalties and they'll always try to go the cheapest route because that's just that's the Amazon version right and then the Shopify is like I don't know if I'm luxury goods but like branded luxury type like the things where you want were like special things right and those people I think like Shopify that style of purchaser I think will pay royalties because they're buying it because of the person or the brand selling it right which is where I kind of see the Community Marketplace is going same sort of idea which I think royalties make complete sense there and then that's what leads me to think that royalties on the general side if you're going to the big whether it's an aggregator or not I feel like it's like less I feel like it's a less chance that it works out on those sides if that

makes sense royalties exist even on unislope so to say if you try to come up with the generalized version of what the royalty is so during 2021 D5 Bull Run there was a couple stable coins that try to introduce like a sales tax that if you solve this stable coin there is like one percent that goes to the treasury or something like that and it didn't work in that sense and that's why this royalties doesn't work for liquid assets but in the same time the uniswap itself it takes the 0.3 percent on every trade and it redistributes that to people who Supply liquidity

so to the infrastructure so when I saw that D Gods implemented 0.3 royalties on blur it makes sense to me that is okay to have sub one percent sub 0.5 percent royalties for the D5 type of my collection I'm saying D5 but to the trading collection it doesn't work I mean that's what friend Tech is right like you trade someone share or please I guess to call it on friendtech and there's what is it 10 because five goes to friends they're getting five goes to the the Creator so it's it's kind of like royalties as well actually if you think about it that way yeah thinking about it like a sales tax is a good way to think about it I think about

the Amazon Shopify example I actually think there's going to be a third category so I think there will be the Amazon which will be the centralized whether it's centralized or decentralized it'll be a Marketplace that is everything then I think there will be more of the like box store or the retailer and it'll be category specific so there will be gaming a gaming marketplace where you go to and all they do is sell gaming assets or there will be a real estate marketplace where you go and all they do and sell real estate assets right or there will be a shoe one where they combine they have all the Adidas and the Nike and the Puma and all the nft stuff all those

people are doing within that category and then there will be the Shopify one where if you want something from Nike you go to nike.swush or if you want something from Adidas you go to Ulta by Adidas so like I think there will be these three different like retailers to use that word of ways that you will purchase from each one this is Alex this is wearables aggregator aggregate the community marketplaces as well yes it does okay native orders okay cool that's interesting that makes sense of liquidity for the community marketplaces sellers provide liquidity so the people that have assets sent them on sale

and what if there isn't enough like I guess that's the cold start problem to doing your own Community Marketplace right is what if you don't have enough sellers listing on that Marketplace that's why we had aggregation in the first place not right okay that's the cold start problem and that's why we're currently reworking the way protocol works so that every Community Marketplace owner has the ability to choose whether they want to aggregate whether they want to impose royalties on top or not because on variable the account that's our decision but on the community marketplaces that's operators decisions right interesting

okay what happens in the next Bull Run we've been talking of course on the podcast for a while now about how we believe we're in the early phases of a crypto bull run we're certainly not in an nft Bull Run that's for sure I don't want to speculate on what the next nft Bull Run is going to be more so my question is where do we think people will buy if there's somebody new that's coming on what I think will I think we can all agree what's going to happen is in the next six months 12 months 18 months you pick your time frame there's going to be a large on-ramp of new people into crypto as a result of Bitcoin ETF eat

ETF all these things all of a sudden people are going to start showing crypto for the first time we saw this happen in the last Bull Run usually what happens is people come into crypto they own some Bitcoin they own some eth they own it for a while and that's fun and then they're like okay what else can I do and then they go down the funnel and maybe they buy some alt coins or they buy some nfts when they buy nfts at this point where do we think they're going to buy nfts like openc was where most people bought it in the last Bull Run probably most people listening to us that were around then bought their first nft on open C and then all these other platforms came out I'm sure lots brought in on wearable

too Alex shout out to you guys as well but what do you guys think because I don't think a Trader nobody knew is going to go buy a blur that's for sure I at least I don't think they'll go buy and blur and openc felt like the friendly onboarding place right it made sense it was easier to use just the look of it was more friendly and more accessible but so will it will that continue to be open C or is it going to be wearable what do you guys think it feels like many of the people would buy just directly from the producers that's what I was gonna say yeah there's so many apps right now like couple days

ago I logged in into an Amex my AmEx app and I was looking for a savings account and there was a button like oh upcoming features or that's interesting I click there and there's like nfts I was wow that's cool so they have wallet connect you can connect your wallets to Amex and they sell you digital Collectibles from their Partners wow so this is probably the way that we're going to see people buy nfts now I think the last Bull Run people bought NC is because they were nfts right it didn't matter what they did it was just like oh this thing nfts and so there was no real like great ux to get people to buy these and people weren't buying them because

it was just part of the thing that they wanted it was mainly Traders and speculators and so you just you always went to open C because there was just there was no ux around nfts other than openc and I think we've come a long way and now I agree it's going to be those that create them just like you like maybe you go to their site and then on their site isn't embed or a link to whether that's wearable or opens or wherever they chose to put it on if they wanted royalties or not and so I think the funnel is a lot different like last bull run it was probably Twitter to openc and now it's probably you know Twitter whatever anywhere to website whatever that website is to then buying them whether it's embedded in that site or going to whatever you know Marketplace they

decide to use whether it's Community Marketplace or aggregator kind of thing so I think people are buying them actually for the experience of the product or whatever this time around and it's not just people searching the explore page of openc I'm sure that will happen but like I don't see why that would happen this time around and in that case they're not buying nfts it is an nft but that is not why they're buying it they're buying the goods and the service as you said before Alex so they're buying you know a collectible because they like the art they're buying a membership pass because they want access to the community they're buying the ticket because they're going to that event and it just happens to be backed by nft technology but they don't know

that and so the purpose has changed and it's interesting how every cycle the tech makes things so different for the user and now we are at that point where the tech is available for the user to buy directly from the brand that you're buying for whereas that wasn't possible in the last site and one of the examples of why I think the ux of nfcs is very different is so for example paragraph which is what we use for our newsletter we have nfts on there where you can collect our newsletters or you can we pay for our membership you can mid-sit and we airdrop it directly to your account and then what's funny is they built in the ability to like well as soon as you mint you can click on a link that says view on open seat and it's like okay that made sense last couple

years but now kind of like why why does anyone need to view this on openc you can't trade these things they're soul-bound ones so like actually doing it on openc seems like an old time thing and now it's like well what's the point but it's just that's what we're used to of where you view nfts and I think that's no longer going to be the case so I was even talking about like I don't know what we put now but I feel like viewing on open C seems to be just a little bit old school at this point I don't know how it's going to go but that's just kind of one of the things I'm seeing of how the nft ux I guess is changing you you make a very interesting point Kai because um we don't just need to consider the buying Behavior and the buyering journey

we also need to consider the collecting Journey right of and it's true that one of the toughest things about buying nfts and I'll use like you know purely buying an nft was that once you buy it where is it like you didn't get that feeling of a physical good so everybody went to view on openc because it was like oh there it is it's like it's mine now I can see that it's mine you needed that experience Alex do you find that you guys are I mean you kind of mentioned this earlier in the show thinking about the buying the way that you view your wallet and view your collection do you guys find yourself thinking about that and what do you think about that for the future oh yeah absolutely everyone now has so many nfcs and there will be even

more there will be as many like emails that's fun so you need to find a way to categorize that and I'm seeing a lot about about that too just it feels like the biggest thing that crypto brought us aside from cross-border payments as the notion of digital identity you can now own this digital identity that can own money can own items can have Avatar can have a name on ens and can participate in the Dow the feeling in the air about or the latest thing that coinbase wallet added is the messenger the XMP messenger the feeling is in the air is that

there has to be a social app at least your profile the first stage and then some interactions between these profiles and that will ultimately supercharge the whole battery the biggest web tool app is social and people always speculate about oh how how are the web3 gains adoption and ultimately there will be super app of that pre that either brings a money station at everyone's hands or the social stage and or digital idea it's either a digital Identity or money right one of these two is going to come take

the World by storm when the infrastructure is ready and suddenly all of us would use that three it's crazy that all roads lead to social this is what I'm learning our last how everybody podcast every time we've got someone on doesn't matter what their product is it always ends up like will this turn into a social feed will this if it's anything with unchain everything's turning into a feed of let's see what's happening on chain it's like we had zapper which is kind of they've pivoted in that way they used to be just for portfolio design we talked about Dune analytics which you wouldn't think would be social but like it's already sort of coming that way right and then even now with nfts it's the same thing like you just said it's like it's all all roads lead to social that's what I'm noticing here we want to

show off the things that we own its identity it's interesting because people are social and every product needs to solve some people's issues to be successful well there's a good question then what's wearable doing for the social side of things or are you not trying to be a social app you're just trying to be the infrastructure for social apps to buy and sell or list and what in mid or are you guys looking to build in some sort of social aspect as well yeah don't get me tempted right it's always easy to get excited about something else to build and we're already building too many things I think that we do have a following feed on wearable it is interesting it is helpful but it

takes so much work to turn that into something meaningful but you see it is hard to build the social feed so so far we'll just concentrate on the apis infrastructure for nft is the Bare Bones who owns what and let the other people to build some social Feats on top of this yeah yeah that's smart because coinbase actually when they launched their NFC Marketplace whatever that was two years ago that's what they tried was the social feed and it just went absolutely nowhere which is kind of interesting but yeah it's interesting why it kind of doesn't make sense I thought it was a genius idea when they launched and then just know and used it and I was like oh okay I mean zapper's entire business model is basically that

right the social feed of on-chain activity and really right now that's two things that's like D5 Traders so you can see who's acting on interacting with D5 and then it's nft Traders so you can see oh follow this whale look what they bought today okay I'm gonna go buy that as well right it's not necessarily social yet because there's not enough people there's not enough scale involved it's more like follow follow is the better word okay before we wrap here Alex I want to give you a chance to give a little bit of a shill or if you have a message to artists or to nft creators the floor is yours

thank you right we are infrastructure company we have the indexers that know everything about all nfts on chain on all chains that we support and then that gets surfaced through three products that we have the variable protocol which is an API variable white label for Enterprises and communities to build their own Marketplace and variable main marketplace as the aggregator go to search everything so whether you need infrastructure or you want your own Marketplace or you want to go and use variable.com as the go-to marketplace to do drop with us or to discover new nfts just come talk to us we are here for the

audience we want to help we want to serve we'll we don't want to extract value we want to add value by adding things that don't exist today on the market thank you for having me here today that's important thanks thanks for joining us I got one more question actually just before you wrap Yuga is talking that they're going to continue to enforce royalties are you guys talking to Yuga are you trying to build out a Marketplace for Yuga I mean obviously they're focused on their own Community Marketplace is that a conversation that's happening well some maybe early conversations as on the general level all marketplaces are connected to collections but nothing

specific okay not going to get any Alpha today all right I had to try I had to try Alex yeah thanks so much for joining us thanks everybody for listening in I hope you enjoyed the new format of web3 hot takes we'll be doing this every Tuesday moving forward have a great day thank you for listening to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for a free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web through insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3. make sure to subscribe today one

final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and Webster are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one