Web3 news rollup: Google and Coinbase, Binance bridge hack, BAYC and the SEC

Transcript

g m g m welcome to the web3 academy weekly roll up where we run down all the top news from the last week to keep you ahead of the crowd and up to date my name is Jay Bird and this is Kyle reedhead what is up my friends in this episode we have a bit of a banger and we are going to discuss many different things uh first Google and coinbase found some love and they formed a nice long-term relationship and I love that okay we're going to talk about SEC versus the Apes yep that's right you heard it uh the SEC is going after the board of yacht clubs in the yoga labs and we're going to talk about what that's what's all going on there uh hacks on hacks on Hacks BNB being the biggest of them all binance smart chain

was hacked we're going to talk about what's going on there as well as some other kind of shady things happening in this space Dapper Labs restricts Russians from using its applications NBA top shops and things like that um so what's going on with that and why is that even how's that even possible and finally our last discussion here before we get into a bunch of quick hits is tokenizing athletes careers this is actually super super cool I'm excited to dive into this one uh but before we do any of that we like to practice gratitude so Jay what are you grateful for today I am grateful for Dundas West Dundas West is a neighborhood in Toronto which is actually the headquarters of impact

DM which is Kyle and I marketing agency it's also where I have a property that I rent out an Airbnb so quick show if anybody's looking for an Airbnb in Toronto hit me up but the reason I'm grateful for Dundas West is it was recently ranked this just this week the number 12 coolest neighborhood in the world by timeout magazine so shout out to Dundas West what a neighborhood I love it then that's that's the little Portugal is it not that's right little foreign mix of you know old Portuguese immigrants Brazilian immigrants and then like hip coffee shops and like very like I wouldn't say high-end restaurants but

like sort of the restaurants that have a Vibe and are exploring like culinary and a new in creative way just yeah I mean kind of that was we lived together there for three months back in the day we did it's a great spot and it's funny my gratitude today is Europe I'm gravel for Europe I just spent the last 90 days in Europe 90 days is all I'm allowed to have and uh it was an incredible 90 days I was so excited I basically explored Portugal and Spain for the most part went to Germany for a little bit as well um but just uh it was great to live the European Summer and the European life for a little bit coffee there was amazing I even started watching a little bit of soccer I was gonna call it football but I'm going to stick to my

roots here and call it soccer I went to an FC Barcelona game uh but I'm back home I'm in can I will be here for a few months uh which is exciting and nice but I'm very grateful for my time there in Europe and thank you to all the Europeans who showed me the ways of the more relaxed and Chill Lifestyle of Europe so thank you that's that's so nice the relaxed Chill Lifestyle of Europe can you can we bring that back to Canada we can we can try but let's get into some of these stories uh because some of this stuff is not relaxing but before we do let's hear from our sponsor who makes this episode in this podcast possible lens protocol let's learn all about it future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens

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social application to another with your content profile and followers moving along with you lens protocol enables self-soverty for your social graph and interoperability across the internet at web3 Academy we believe this is the future of Social and that's why we partner with lens to ensure that the path of social media is heading in the right direction visit lens.xyz to learn more today okay first up on the news today Google partners with coinbase to take Cloud payments with cryptocurrencies Kyle what's going on here this is a big one you have the biggest company in web 3 partnering with I mean one of the biggest companies in the world not even web 2 but just in general in the world Google

this I think is a big step forward for the industry um and you know it's interesting we were just talking about Google Cloud I think it was two weeks ago on the roll up and we had said what they were doing you know they I think they put the merge thing up on Google and a few others and we were like feel like something's gonna happen here like I feel like they're kind of hinting at something and boom here it is basically what they're doing is one they are going to be allowing customers to pay for Google cloud and their cloud services in crypto starting in early 2023 so that's really cool they haven't said which cryptos they will allow but they did say that it's more than just Bitcoin so for you Bitcoin maxes out there um it's crypto it's not Bitcoin that they're allowing it's crypto okay uh and

so we'll see which ones they allow but either way that's really cool Google is also exploring using coinbase prime for storing and reading crypto so it looks like either they're going to put it on their balance sheet obviously if they're accepting crypto they need to do something with it so they'll probably use the um the corporate uh service and product that coinbase offers it's called coinbase Prime so that's really cool and then finally coinbase will move their apps some of their apps from AWS so Amazon web services over to Google Cloud um so this is great for many reasons uh but I think first of all it's we're building strong relationships and we're making friends with some of the biggest companies in the world and that to me is super super huge it legitimizes the the

industry there's also always this talk about like well what if Amazon decides to shut down their Amazon web services for crypto companies then we're screwed right and so now we're making a friend of a company who's not going to do that because they're in a partnership and they've made a deal on this so that's really cool I really really like that now the rest of it is kind of whatever accepting crypto like is that really a big deal and we actually in our Discord with our community we're talking about this and there's a few questions like why does that even really matter right like what's the point is accepting crypto really that cool like I don't want to pay and spend my Bitcoin or my ethereum yeah and I think what a lot of people miss here and why they're this is a big unlock actually to to accept

crypto and payments there's a few reasons one if you no longer need to use PayPal or stripe well they charge a three percent fee for every transaction that happens so it's actually cheaper to use crypto uh now if you're using the ethereum L1 maybe not because of gas fees although there's basically no gases right now but I mean when you're using layer twos and and you know things like Salon or whatever like it's essentially free um so you don't you can go peer-to-peer now we don't need an intermediary company to make that transaction for us so that is a huge unlock and especially when we're talking big amounts of money that is saving a lot of money for I mean people and for businesses so that's cool the other big thing I would say here is and if you're in the developed words you live in the U.S Canada Australia UK

whatever this might not really matter to you because you can switch into the US dollar and pay an US dollar or pay in your Canadian dollar Australian dollar and it's pretty easy there are a lot of countries in the world though that can't do this so one it is very expensive or very challenging for many countries to even get to euros US Dollars especially countries that are like sanctioned you know like Iran obviously like Russia right now is not able to do this um but there's many countries like Pakistan and a lot of countries around there in the Middle East they can't use stripe and PayPal so they have a means to like purchase things in in global Commerce um Argentina you know with the inflation they're having they don't want to hold their currency but it's super expensive to switch over to the US dollar turkey

like there's so many countries especially right now because currencies are kind of a [ __ ] show so it is a pain for a lot of countries outside of the developed world to actually one hold on to their own currency and two pay in the normal currencies like US dollars or Euros so by allowing crypto it opens up Global Commerce to the world right it allows anyone in any country to be able to use Google services and be able to pay for those services in a a way which does not tack on a bunch of extra fees and costs so that to me is super super cool it's a big unlock for businesses right because now they can sell the same product they've been selling but to probably hundreds of millions of more people uh because they don't have that barrier right of PayPal stripe or US

dollar um so that is really cool so for me I think this is a big step in the right direction I think the more companies start to accept crypto um the better this is going to be for countries all around the world so um I'm super bullish on this I absolutely love this and I think at first I didn't really realize why crypto payments was that big of a deal now I'm starting to realize oh [ __ ] this is actually huge and we need more of this so um hell yeah good job Google super excited Google cloud is the ones who's really had this partnership I don't think it's like Google the whole company um but we'll see where this goes super pumped what do you think Jay isn't it isn't it so exciting that last week we're talking about Apple this week we're talking about Google off the top

you know this is this is us going mainstream this is the biggest tech companies in the world jumping in full on into web 3 because this is where we're headed right like you don't there is no bigger signal than back-to-back weeks of of this my only question is like where the where are the rest of the guys like what's Netflix doing why have we not seen a single thing from Netflix I it shocks me actually that we haven't and even Amazon hasn't really done much it's mostly been you know we've seen we've seen Facebook we've seen apple and now and we've seen Google we've talked about all three of those a bunch but but not you know why

if I was Netflix I'd be I'd be dropping an nft and making a movie with my community right now why not Netflix has done a terrible job in building Community right like they have this thing where everyone's watching movies all they had to do was create a social component to their platform and they would have an incredible product and they just didn't do that and so they don't have the network effects like Facebook and others do because yep no one on using Netflix can connect with someone else using Netflix that's where they've kind of missed the boat um and so I mean it would be tough for them I think to launch nft because they don't have Community there Netflix there is no Community but um I don't know I mean the other funny thing that came from this Google Cloud uh well I guess

this is just Google Google not Google Chrome not Google cloud is you can start to search your um uh addresses your eth address right in Google um we've tried it though it doesn't work so maybe it's only in certain countries I don't know but yeah Jay's got enough on the street on the screen here but you can literally just type in a wall address into Google and it shows you like what what they're holding so that's really cool it basically just pulls the data from etherscan so anyway Google is starting to incorporate all these things um and uh yeah let's keep keep it just shows that all these all these big companies they're having they're having meetings they're running sessions they're running seminars and they're they're talking what is our web3 crypto metaverse strategy what are we doing

here and and it's it's clear that the the adoption rate for these big companies is picking up pace right we we keep seeing more coming out and so yeah it's very exciting blockchain rails is just a better infrastructure for these tech companies right it's cheaper it's faster it's more open it's just a better value add to any business in the world so like when we say web three strategy a lot of people think like what's there going to be their Community strategy their nft strategies like no no it's the flow of money and the flow of value is so much easier and more efficient on a blockchain than it is any other way and so every company is going to go this way because it just makes sense it's you

know it's just like when the internet launched like obviously everyone was going to use the internet right it was just so apparent the same issue with blockchain because it makes so many pieces of their business cheaper and faster and easier and more inclusive um so yeah all right next up let me ask you first Jay board a creators Yuga Labs faces SCC probe over unregistered offerings basically the SEC is going after the board up yacht clubs uh crew and the owners of the muga labs what the heck's going on here wow what's going off first came Acro to Ashley now board at Yacht Club what's going on everybody Watch Out Gary gensler's coming after you

yeah Gary's Gary's got a bone to pick with every nft and crypto there is no let's be real here uh scc's gotta gotta try to regulate so they're gonna make moves here's what happened um and this is this is Bloomberg reported this this is this is getting big news it was all over crypto Twitter this week uh is the SEC is they have launched a investigation or a probe into board apoc Club into and you go sorry I should say into Yuga Labs um for their nfts and ape coin being unregistered Securities right so this is this is just a probe they haven't

actually said anything there hasn't been any investigation released all they're saying in the Kim Kardashian case they did find her 1.2 million dollars or something and she actually does have to pay that right but this is this is basically I mean this is the SEC saying like they're trying everybody every regulator two things are happening we got to figure out who's gonna regulate this stuff is it going to be the SEC or is it going to be the cftc right and when you have two Regulators that are fighting basically over well we want this to be a commodity we want this to be a security I think we're just gonna see a lot of news like this where where

they're like throwing like Fireballs as much as they can out out the window to try to cause a stir and bring media attention to them and enable them to put funds behind it and enable them to approach the government and say hey you need to give us more so we can figure out and regulate this so there to be honest there isn't a ton of news here from I think a lot of people read this and they think oh my gosh like 48 block Club is getting you know sued by the SEC or there's some sort of Regulation coming down on them not true and honestly this probably won't lead very far the SEC has already tried to do this a few times right Kai are they looking

for them they have but what are they looking for is there anything specific so they're they're looking at two main things they're looking at one they're looking at the nfts as our nfts a security and if they are said to be a security but here's the thing that is a that the there is currently a large um not investigation but uh like a committee that is within the SEC um the is it the cftc that regulates Commodities yeah and uh um uh whoever the like uh one other large institution in America doesn't

matter are are all are all looking into nfts and figuring out what they're going to classify them as so that's happening in the background and honestly if you have a chance to participate in that you should because there needs to be a lot of web 3 people in that but this this is just in the foreground of like them them grasping at things the the interesting thing that they are doing is looking at a coin and what they're saying is because what yoga Labs did was Hugo Labs launched apcoin and then immediately gave ownership over to the Dow so the Dow governs and owns Bitcoin with ape Dao

and when they gave ownership over to the Dow that crosses some lines that are very undetermined because technically when you launch a security typically the whoever launches that security has to like register that security uh but because they gave it to a dow they kind of skirted around that and so now there's this question of well what what's the Dow then and how do we if you're the SEC would you go after the Dow if there's issues with the security so that's that's also part of this probe right so I mean the answer to why Netflix is not launched an nft is because this stuff is not clear yet

right is every lawyer in every big company in the world right now saying we are not doing any of this [ __ ] because it's nuts right uh so we need this stuff figured out now look the SEC is probing they've been doing this with they did it with uniswap last year too they want to look into the token same thing is it a security nothing came of it they they really found nothing from it um so they've been doing this with a bunch of different companies I mean they're in a lawsuit right now with ripple um and you know we'll see how all that goes but you know there's just not a lot um that they've been able to do from I mean the only thing they've come up with so far the SEC is to find Kim Kardashian for Shilling ethereum Max so I'm not too

concerned about this but honestly I hope it just enables them to create some good regulation because yeah that's what these big companies need so it's not a bad thing um just please create some regulations or give us some guidance on what to do that's they're just sitting there like they're they keep coming out with in this way come out and just tell us give us some guidelines we'll follow them like help us out so 8 coin dumped here is a seven and a half percent from yeah I think it actually just announced yeah it actually I think dumped nine percent at this point but interesting speaking of sketchy activity happening in the web three space Dapper Labs has hit Russian accounts with restrictions

Kai what's going on here yeah this was uh I don't like this one this is a bit weird and honestly I didn't see this happening so we talked about Dapper Labs quite a bit and how they're doing a lot to onboard some really big companies into the space you know they're working with NBA uh UFC NFL et cetera they are the ones who have NBA Top Shot um so I mean they've been doing a lot here which is cool and all this one caught me a little bit off guard so what's happening is um they've blocked all of the Russian wallet addresses that use Dapper Labs uh and the reason they can do that is Dapper Labs is a centralized company um and so it's kind of like I don't know guess what would be an example it's kind of like you could think of it like a

centralized exchange like coinbase where they can block their accounts there's this is not like a metamask metamask couldn't do this Dev Labs can because you actually sign up on their platform now it is the the nfts themselves in Dapper labs are on the flow blockchain so technically you have that self-sovereignty but they're storing them in the Dapper Labs wallet inside of a Dapper Labs application and so Dapper Labs is able to just block any Russian um uh related address and the reason that they have to have to do this I guess is because of the EU sanctions that are on Russia which is basically saying that you can't have um any payments so your payment service can't work with those that are in Russia and so they have a payment service in

order to use Dapper labs and to buy these nfts and so they've had to block that payment service so what's happened here is actually the the Russian people have not lost their nfts they just can't do anything with them so they can't sell them they can no longer buy anymore they can't trade them they can't fund accounts they just can't do anything which is a bit odd um I mean one Idol and I'm sure everyone has different reasons here and different beliefs the people that are you know using NBA top shots are probably families or kids you know who are interested in basketball I don't know why we would ever block them but this is the way it works and this is what's happening in our geopolitical world so it's ridiculous but it is what it is what kind of pisses me off here is why

is this even allowed why are we able to do this right um and I mean I guess it's important to understand like a lot of web 3 is just not decentralized yet right um I'm assuming that if these were wallets that were on the flow blockchain and where like a proper non-custodial wallet this could not be done uh just like if you had a metamask while in ethereum metamask could not block you from buying and selling or trading nfts openc could but you know you could do it peer-to-peer without using a Marketplace so um this one is just a little bit different because I mean Dapper Labs basically I think they own flow blockchain as well they're the ones behind the blockchain so like it just kind of makes me believe like how centralized or decentralized is

the flow blockchain like if I if there's someone that can just stop my nft from being traded yeah I still own it but what's the point it doesn't have any value if I can't sell it or trade or do anything with it anyway so it's like what's the point in using this blockchain I might as well just use you know an image on a Facebook server you know what I mean like there is no value to this NBA Topshop or two any of these things if it's not on a decentralized blockchain that they can't block it so anyway it makes me sort of question what we're doing here it just what's the point I don't really get it you know yeah I think uh this is the the transition that's so difficult of getting more major players onto web 3 is they are looking to use centralized

blockchains and this has come up this comes up like almost once a week right now but we want decentralization and we've talked about the the importance of decentralization you pointed out in the first story around Google and the fact that we're opening up payments to the world and you can sell your product to a much bigger Global audience and you can ensure that people who don't have bank accounts can purchase and can participate in the global economy that's amazing but then at the same time we we have to it's almost like we have to use some centralized blockchains to get there because that's the only way to onboard these large organizations like NBA and and to be fair is that just flow here

like for example on ethereum like if you use usdc which is a centralized company Circle who who mints those usdcs and sort of runs that they can block your address and not allow you to interact with UCC because it is a centralized application you could think of it as running on ethereum right so there are a lot of use cases like this like openc can block you as well if you're in a certain location from interacting with them no the beautiful thing is that if you're on ethereum you still own your stuff and you can go and trade with it elsewhere I don't even know if there's other apps and things on flow blockchain to like they could do this with but it sounds like Russians are just kind of screwed here they can't do anything with it and that to me if there's not an

Escape Route I I'm okay with some apps being like I don't want this person to you or these type of people to use my service and if they need to block that down then sure whatever I mean I don't love it but it's it's fine but they should at least be able to take their stuff and still go elsewhere you know what I mean like that's that's the weird part of it is like Hey we're not gonna let user service and the things that you own in here we're actually not even going to give that back to you it's like what screw you man like that's insane if you want to say hey you can't you can't use my service that's fine but at least let them take their [ __ ] and go on somewhere else right that's the part that really like pisses me off but

anyway well I'm gonna see where this goes and the uh the the example of that was I was speaking to uh somebody uh in who lives in Italy but is is Russian recently and she was saying that coinbase shut her account down coinbase said hey you have a Russian passport can't use coinbase anymore sanctions blah blah blah uh you know won't get into the sanctions and the fight that she had to deal with there uh but they just said remove she removed you just said hey you can you know you can remove you got to remove all your assets here's the process to do that you can move it wherever you want she moved it to finance right and right you know that's no sense it's not ideal it's not ideal for her socks but like you said they gave her the opportunity to just deal

with it right which is fine because we need these centralized companies to like we need coinbase right we we this we would be nowhere without coinbase right so we need it but coinbase is a US entity and it's a public company which again needed to happen to legitimize the industry so we need that and that's fine and they have to follow the U.S sanctions and U.S rules and it is what it is that's fine I'm not against that but you've got to give him an Escape Route otherwise it's like jail you know all right Finance smart chain hacked what was it like 500 million bucks or something like that I don't know tell me what's going on here Jake this is crazy yeah okay so binance smart bonus chain was hacked initially it seemed like it was 500

million it ended up being 200 million so is it so it's 2 million 2 million BNB which is worth 566 million USD was what the like total hack was but then they only ended up getting out 1 million so they didn't get it all out but basically what happened 100 million 100 million he means to say sorry 100 million yeah um basically what ended up happening here was Finance has two chains one which supports their app ecosystem and their smart contract ecosystem and one which supports their fungible token

side and so they have these two chains and there's a bridge between those two chains and somebody came in and it gets super technical and I don't even fully understand how the technical hacker side of this is that's why I'm not a hacker but somebody basically came in and was able to create a fake proof which is something that a block creates and creating this fake proof they were able to create basically create two million BNB to give to themselves so like they didn't even steal the BNB necessarily I mean they did steal it but they they actually like minted it like it wasn't in existence before they just created it and then gave it to themselves so they

like the Fed printing money printing money and then causing extreme inflation and then throwing us into a recession thanks uh so so in what happens here is they they do this hack they take the money and then very quickly binance responded they all validators shut down they paused they figure okay what's going on here and now it's what's very interesting about this is and you know we can talk about I think I will talk about bridges and Bridge the issue with bridges in a second because I think that's the main

conversation here but what the other thing that's interesting about this is what binance is saying they're going to do is they're going to allow the community to vote on what they do with this money and one option they could do is they could uh I'm trying to think of the word they could basically like burn it right they could take this money back from this wallet that they can see uh and so that's you know now we get back into the centralized decentralized conversation again but they're allowing the community to vote so if the community votes in favor of that uh yeah it'll be interesting to see the way this plays out very interesting I'm just looking to see

what happened to the price uh just uh checking it out on coing gecko I'm assuming it it tanked uh but uh I mean look we know that BNB is a centralized chain I think most of the validators on this chain are from binance so uh that's obvious it I guess it's cool that they're making the community allowing the community to make a decision I mean the big thing for me here is just man these bridges are a mess and like the thing is vitalik warned us a long time ago he wrote a big article on this of like look we don't have the ability to create chain to chain Bridges right now through cryptography there's always a centralized way now I don't know if this hack even had anything to do with that it sounds like if they're between two B and B chains maybe this isn't the

issue I'm not sure but the wonderful thing about blockchain is that it's all done in cryptography okay which is essentially it's not you can't hack cryptography because the way the incentives are aligned it's just it makes it next to impossible to hack okay but when you go from one chain to another chain you're no longer using cryptography right parts of it may be using cryptography which is um so parts of it may be using that but most of it is not and you have to rely on some sort of normal code and normal infrastructure and you also have to rely on some sort of centralization someone has to hold those funds and move them to the other chain they are not just all on a blockchain through cryptography and that is the big problem here the big unlock in blockchain is that they are

written in cryptography and that is what allows us to be basically immutable and unhackable but when you introduce Bridges from one chain to another and I mean things like ethereum to Binet smart chain or ethereum to Solana or whatever that's where these like risk factors come in and that's why all of these not all but most of these bridges are getting hacked right we've seen it over the last two years just Time After Time month after month it's a bridge getting hacked we need to stop using these Bridges number one um the way vitalik described is actually not going to be possible it's just never going to be possible to to completely have a bridge from one chain to a different chain through cryptography the only way that this is possible is if it's built in the same ecosystem like

layer twos on ethereum those bridges are fully done via cryptography and they can be fully decentralized and basically immutable but you can't build one from ethereum to let's say binance smart chain at least not right now maybe they can figure out a way to do this I don't really know and understand enough but the way that I've read it and explained from extras in this space it's just not possible and so there's this whole idea of it's going to be a multi-chain future and I'm sure it will I just don't know that it's going to be what people think it's going to be I don't think it's going to be these like hundreds of blockchains and they're all bridged together and moving around I don't see it I just don't it doesn't make sense I think yes there's going to be hundreds of layer twos built on

ethereum and that's a multi-chain feature future but it's all in one ecosystem and it's all done through cryptography so it removes all of the risk that we keep having here now that's not to say there's going to be no other blockchains other than ethereum I think there will be Solana and other things may exist but I don't know that they're going to be connected I I really don't know I think they're all going to serve their own purposes in some form of way and I don't know how we're going to connect them I really don't get it because we can't continue to have these sort of hacks this is a lot of money 500 million it's a lot right um and the the tech world right the rest of the world is not going to be down with this like Netflix and Google and these things they're not going to enter

act with these chains if there's 500 million dollar hacks going on all the time you know it's a [ __ ] show so anyway I don't know where this goes I don't have a solution I'm not a developer um I just would not trust any single bridge right now unless it is one that is done through cryptography which is a layer one to layer two other than that get out Cosmos also has this between their Chains It's all done through cryptography so great what they're doing Avalanche is working on that whatever but cross chain be careful that's all I gotta say it's just so interesting that the bridge is really the problem and it's a good reminder that all not all but the majority of the hacks that we see and

discuss in are related to Bridges and so I I just wonder is where do we go with this is this going to be are we just going to create another centralized point then so like Bridges because we will need Bridges if there's a multi-chain world so our bridges is going to be centralized organizations that are basically just like another stripe or something like that that takes a three percent and keeps it in custody and ensures that it's safe and we just you know we created nothing I think if that happens right I think if that happens though then we just don't go multi-chain like what would be the point you know what I mean like it's just yeah so yeah I don't know we'll see uh this is why I'm very much bullish in the ethereum ecosystem because they seem to

have all of these problems figured out um but I don't know about the small chain world I'm sure there will be more chains I'm not like an eighth Maxi by any means I'm just I'm a cryptography Maxie uh and I don't like a lot of I mean I guess I do like Risk because I'm an entrepreneur uh so but not with my money so anyway we'll see where that goes what about would you take your money Kai and would you put it onto an athlete's future by buying an nft so this is actually really cool at first I would have said no but as I've looked into this now I'm like this is actually super cool so check this out there's a company called phantium I believe is how you would pronounce it phantium yeah um and basically what they're doing is

fans can use digital assets to bet on the future success of their favorite up-and-coming sports stars right so instead of just placing a bet though and walking away with some sort of monetary reward you the bet that you're making is via an nft it allows fans to connect with the athletes and have reoccurring rewards based on their success so you actually share in the revenues that an athlete may make in their future potential salaries or sponsorships or however they do it now we've sort of talked about this before and we actually haven't really touched this too much lately but social tokens is what comes to mind here right is um you you kind of have an ecosystem for a musician or for a whoever you think about it like a Dao and you can share in

kind of the opportunity of The Upside right this is what a dow essentially is um and so we've we've talked about it with musicians with artists Etc uh but this company is doing it with uh with athletes and I was kind of like okay so I can launch a bunch of tokens and they could be fungible or non-fungible in this case Phantom does with nfts um and basically What's Happening Here is I'm saying hey buy this nft fund me right and I will give you X percent of my revenues in the future if I make it as an athlete as a musician I get it because you know you want your community to help support you they can help you with marketing and sharing your music and you know whatever else they can attend your events and things like that so cool that makes a

lot of sense but I was like as an athlete what can your community do to help you be successful like it's not like you need cheerleaders so I didn't actually get it and then I was kind of reading words to this and it's really around the funding part of it so well there's two points so one is the funding so one of the problems with athletes when they come out of let's say college if they don't have a family with a lot of money you know how are they going to make it as a professional athlete unless they've already you know been drafted to a big sport or something like that well a lot of times these athletes don't have any money especially in the NCAA they're not allowed to get paid um yet they have to you know uh you know playing their sport all the

time still go to school Etc so they usually don't have any money which means they can't afford a good training team they can't afford a nutritionist they can't afford a good physical therapist they can't afford all the things they need to keep their body healthy to prevent injury and to become a better athlete right but if they had a bunch of funding someone to support them early on at a young age maybe they could hire all those things and you know be able to optimize who they are as an athlete and what's really cool is here is you can go hey I'm a pretty good athlete in high school you know my town Believes In Me Right especially in the US is popular so I'm going to launch an nft 10 000 and my fans in my town that maybe are part of my high school or part of my community

whatever can buy this for x amount and fund me now let's say I earn I don't know fifty thousand dollars I can go and pay for a good physical therapist for a good trainer and you know blah blah blah whatever and that propels me as an athlete to hopefully make it to my college team or to a professional League whatever and now I can share some of those like revenues with that community and I can program that via nft that that to me is super super cool the other aspect that I thought of this is athletes don't just make money from the sport they play think of LeBron James right the guy has a million sponsors with so many different companies he's launching businesses he's doing so many other things and so now I'm like oh wait a minute this nft is also a Dao and you

can build this community to help you you know realize other opportunities in the world of being an athlete as an athlete you're going to gain a big audience so you can start to launch I don't know everyone launches a water or a vodka company right or tequila company is what I what most athletes do but now you have a dow working around you to help you do that as you build your following your audience as an athlete so that is actually super super cool at first I was like ah I don't get it um but I love it like I man if I'm in high school if I was in high school again [ __ ] I would do this for sure it's super cool what do you think Jay you're a big sports fan yeah it's interesting that you point out that this is for

junior athletes this isn't doesn't have to be but it can be but this but the likelihood that this is going to be used by a a professional athlete is fairly low right a professional athlete already is they've already got money they they've made it they don't need the additional funding to like you said pay the cost which are very high cost to become a professional athlete especially now right you want to become a professional athlete you need to be you know as you said you you got to be spending a lot of money to get there so I do think there is a big help for the junior level athletes for the up and comers this makes a lot of sense and there's also I think a great opportunity

for I mean the big we always talk about Community being the big unlock of web three well communities want to support their friends their family members and this is a great opportunity to support your somebody in your community in a meaningful way right by putting some money towards them making it right them going and achieving their dreams that's actually I think this is great for Humanity when you think about it in that manner we're tokenizing the world everything is becoming tokenized and what's really cool is you can now have ownership in so many things and not just ownership it used to be you had you could have ownership in a commodity or in a company now you can have ownership

of community of culture of artists of musicians of whatever and yeah it brings a lot of speculation Everything But like everyone now has the ability to just create Equity of their life just like this anyone you can be an influencer you can be an athlete you can be a musician and you can go you know what I think I'm gonna make it I know I have a bunch of people who think I'm gonna make it too so here's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna mint a token or a bunch of tokens and I'm going to sell it to them it's going to you know fundraise me and I'm gonna share it with them they're going to help me build which is so sick because I remember growing up like when I found a musician that I loved I would go around run around tell everyone right I wanted

to be the first person to introduce them to a cool new band or whatever right and I remember them being like [ __ ] I should be awarded for that but I can't how am I going to be rewarded for that you can't right even when Apple first launched the I was one of the first in my school at my high school to have the um Apple uh what was it called before the iPhone the um the music One iPod iPod yeah yeah one of the first the first iPod that came out and so I was running around showing people this thing and everyone loved it I was like [ __ ] you know I should be getting a commissioned here uh and I've just been an entrepreneur for a long time I guess uh and so what this does is it allows everyone to do that and so I

see a future 10 years from now or however long it's going to take we're just you can just speculate and be involved in everything and we're now moving to like an equity economy you know and that to me is super super interesting I also think there's a I think a lot of people might look at this and say well why would why would anybody spend money on this in comparison to the other things that you currently spend money on your life right because we're not this is a whole new category we're not used to spending money on this we're used to spending money on clothes and physical goods and coffee uh so but one big Point here I think is

we need to think about the current youth today who are very used to spending money on digital goods and the current digital Goods that they are buying does not give them ownership the current digital Goods they're buying they're spending billions of dollars on a JPEG in a game or on a sword in Roblox so in all fairness we did the same thing in web3 that appetite is there from the younger generation to buy digital Goods so I think that there's also I I think that we all we all look at this and we all think about like money so like okay I'm

an invest in athlete how am I going to make money from that but I think when the younger generation comes along and they do this I actually don't think they're going to care about making money from this they're going to say cool I get to invest in an athlete I love that athlete I think they're great like you said they go to my high school yeah I'll give them I'll give them 100 bucks and I'll feel good about it I don't care if it brings me any money back I actually would rather you know support them and maybe I get some merch down the road if they do well but I do think there is there is a difference in the view of expectation of profit versus being part of a community which I think the today's youth see it very differently than we do

yeah agreed I'd rather put my money in humans than in artificial things that are going to depreciate in value like clothes or cars right so I think that's a a great unlock as well okay so should we put our money where our mouth is should we invest in an athlete okay hell yeah I'll invest in athlete who do you got you got any upgrade I I don't have anyone I don't think santiam's actually launched yet it's just early no there's there's two athletes that are doing it already I forget oh yeah who they are it's like a tennis player and something else but I think if we're gonna do this we gotta go over to Cuba and look for the the star-studded kid who's gonna make the MLB yeah sorry I know that's really bad not a good thing but the US does this and

anyway let's talk about the nft of the month because I don't want to go into that any further okay the nft of the month voted by you guys moving forward we are no longer going to select our nft Dao web three person or tool of the month you our listeners are now selecting this by voting on Twitter 360 of you voted in the poll for nft of the month this month and the finalists were the gods qql ranga and our winner by an absolute landslide Pixelmon that's right you heard that right

Pixelmon now for those of you who don't remember last February Pixelmon released an nft without Landis Promises of the largest multiplayer world the largest metaverse game that was going to launch in 2022 by Q3 and they raised 70 million dollars in their men there went it was one of the biggest mints and then the art reveal came and the art was absolute donkey [ __ ] I don't know how else to describe it it was horrible pixelated art and it was the greatest rug pull there ever was now

for those of you who aren't watching and can't see this right now it is like I think they actually hired people from Fiverr to create this art like it is that was pixelated weird little animals in like this ugly grass and it just looks terrible they're not even like centered on the screen like it's the worst thing I've ever seen it's so bad I was surprised that we were good at select Pixelmon here to be completely honest because I didn't know this but Jay has taught me a little something new about what's happening so why don't you tell us where things are going since this okay wait but first I just need to bring up Kevin so Kevin was one of the characters out of Pixelmon this guy who I'm showing on screen right now who if you're in if you're an nftg Jen you know

Kevin if you don't go Google Kevin Pixelmon so when Pixelmon Tang Kevin Rosen value to the point where Kevin was selling for five six East because Kevin became a cultural phenomenon and here's how we get to where we are today of Pixelmon winning nft of the month is although it was an absolute rug pull there was a massive community that really believed in this and there was huge culture meme culture developed out of this a lot of everybody knows the name Pixelmon you might not know it necessarily what happened to it and you might actually get confused with Pokemon which is also possible but it achieved a level of cultural relevance that not

many others had so a company named Liquid X came in about two months ago actually and bought a 60 share in Pixelmon okay and made promises that we are going to reinvent it and then about uh more recently they went on a PR Blitz this is like a couple weeks ago went on a PR Blitz and said hey we're Reinventing Pixelmon they relaunched the website and they changed the art so Kai remember that art I was just showing you check out the art mouth look at this this is now the art so for those who don't know this this is a key thing to

understand about nfts is the when you own an nft you own the token on the blockchain the image or the metadata or video or whatever is attached to your nft is not actually on the blockchain so that can be changed and we've talked about this in the past about how clone X changed their metadata of one of their clones if you want to learn about this go back a couple weeks ago we talked with Kyle Tutt from pinata all about nft metadata and how that is managed but here we are Pixelmon change their images check them out what do you think Kai I mean they look not bad it's yeah I

mean if you're playing a game that looks pretty legit so I think that's cool my big takeaway from this and the reason why I was like okay let's let's do it and see the month here is this just proves the power of community right like the the I'm not sure the guy's name that invested in this that's part of that company there but what do they see in the value of this it was not the Arts it was not the ongoing revenue streams because I think they had probably well maybe they had created like royalties I'm not sure um but what they saw was the community right and they literally made an investment in this 100 because of community um and that is pretty powerful and if they can I mean they haven't done anything yet other than change the pictures so like I would say they're not

actually it's not like they're a success now but uh we'll see what they can do from this um but it would be a really cool story if they can if they can actually make things happen yeah I want to be very clear not Financial advice I I mean can you bought one could be the greatest could be the greatest comeback story of all time also could be a double rug pull like who knows right like I don't I don't know what's gonna happen yeah because when you look at their website there is some big promises that they're making once again but their website is cool it's it's much better than their old website it's revamped it tells a great story they the one thing that they're saying is they're saying that they're going to do a land sale which I'm like you're gonna say oh geez like

what what why are you gonna have something and honestly I'm kind of hoping for the devil just be an incredible story like that was so funny I'm kidding I don't want them to rug pull I hate these rug pulls but anyway great job Pixelmon uh and we'll see where things go and for everyone listening uh a couple things so every week we're gonna have these polls where you can choose the nft of the month thousand month Etc we also will be putting out tweets so that you can nominate people to be a part of these polls um so go to our Twitter and check it out you'll see it on there already I think the next one is Dao I don't know what is it yeah so if you're a doubt go nominate on the Tweet there and um maybe you'll make it this will be fun and tune in next

week so you can see who's winning all right it's quick hit time our first quick hit of the day uniswap announces they've raised 165 million in a series B yeah this actually just happened before we started recording so it's still a developing story we don't know too many details just yet but basically they've taken in 165 million and the whole point of this is one to build up their developer tools of course continue doing what they're doing but it's actually to start with their launching nfts in their nft Marketplace which they acquired I forget the name of which one uh last year and also it is to start building uniswap in the mobile version so I mean I'm super bullish on this uniswap the the Unicorn as their their logo is of

our industry um you know they are going to push mobile first for crypto and cheese do we ever need that so this is super exciting still don't know what the value of their company is at 165 million raise we'll have to wait and see what percent they're giving out on this raise um but I mean last time they did a raise they were in the billions so I'm going to assume they will remain in the billions but let's see what happens that's it for me all right Jay next one up here America's oldest bank b-n-y melon will hold your crypto now what's going on here I mean again going mainstream we got bny melon 200 year old Bank the largest custody Bank in the world is now going

to custody your crypto now this is not a uh retail custody that they're launching this is just them starting and they're starting with commercial custody so they're looking to work with their large corporate Partners corporate accounts and they're going to start to custody to crypto for them so they will hold the seed phrase and ensure that your crypto assets are safe and then they're also going to offer uh some bookkeeping services and some basic services along with that clearly the big the big thing here is how quickly will other Banks follow right is this are we about to see a landslide over the towards the end of this year I wouldn't be surprised if we

saw many more Banks follow suit this was reported in the Wall Street Journal folks this is big news mainstream news Wall Street is noticing crypto yes they still have a lot of fear yes they're not quite ready to go full into it but it's happening boring old banking stuff whatever [Laughter] okay next up Brian Roberts CFO of open C steps down yeah this is big um I mean I don't even know if it is Big to be completely honest still don't really know exactly why he stepped down um you know he he was part of Lyft before this uh now at openc I mean

obviously he's seen openc through to kind of their peak of of November of last year so he helped build a pretty incredible product you know they've done an amazing job and so kudos to Brian for everything he did for openc we would be nowhere without open seed to be completely honest the nft industry that is um where he goes next I don't know I would bet he's trying to go and maybe start his own thing maybe he just has his own ideas here he still looks fairly young um so I don't think it's because of anything bad that happened Open Sea at least nothing has come out on that we'll see um but uh part some people are spectating because if you look at the charts you know nft volume and that is down you know 90 something percent uh and he's leaving right at the same time

that that happened so is he is he leaving in uh as nfts are dying uh I'm gonna assume no uh I'm super bullish and I'm tease so we'll see where Brian Heads next but uh thanks for your service sir Kyle bullish on nfts folks I'm always trying to teach you yeah I just got a comment his line his first line in his uh goodbye tweet well it is time for me to come ashore from the Open Seas oh nice one nice one all right Jay manifold announces zero fee Marketplace for creators okay so manifold which is a leading Marketplace which actually is the same Marketplace that Christie's 3.0 is using

which we talked about on last week's podcast Christy is the oldest auction house in the world is using manifold and manifold is going to do a zero fee Marketplace I want to be clear here this is a zero fee Marketplace not a zero royalty Marketplace so there's a difference right the zero royalties would be zero zero royalties to go back to the Creator that's what pseudo swap has done and uh 2y 2X and then there's this is a zero fee Marketplace so openc takes a 2.5 fee on their Marketplace manifold is going to do a zero fee Marketplace this is really big news because this is really I think where a lot of the marketplaces are

headed they're all headed in the direction of of zero fees or low fees so way to go manifold shout out keep it up it all goes to zero okay openc adds Avalanche nfts uh open C getting a lot of uh in NFC Marketplace get a lot of talk here um I mean look openc has said this they're trying to be the general biggest you know Marketplace there is in the space and so in order to do that they need to be on multiple different uh blockchains um I don't know that there's much of an nft ecosystem over on Avalanche uh myself I don't really use Avalanche and I'm not very bullish on Avalanche um to be completely honest but open C's

got to do what they got to do and so they are on Solana now they are now on Avalanche um and I'm sure they will continue to be on other blockchains that that pop up around here um so open C just doing openc things man I would wonder if magic Eden comes out next and now Launches on uh Avalanche as well we'll see I I don't know that the Avalanche nftx system makes it through the bear Market though they did two 2.4 million in nft volume in September that's okay it's not bad it's not bad but yeah I agree I'm not sure what their value prop is all right Microsoft and meta partnership brings Office 36 365 apps to the metaverse okay who I started laughing who uses

Office 365 still that's terrible it's just like the worst the worst apps the worst experience um okay I got two I'm gonna play two sides on this quick take one side is that this is a a great thing and the reason this is a great thing is because Microsoft Office has massive users most corporations use Microsoft Office for word excel Outlook their email management and we want those people to come into the metaverse and meta is clearly the best organization at right now capable of working with Microsoft to develop these Virtual Worlds where they

can exist I mean a lot of the large corporations in the world have been trying to do virtual meetings not just the way we do in Zoom but even beyond that for for a while especially with covet they're trying to create that experience to be create more of an office experience and meta understands that and Microsoft understand so that's my good take on this my bad take on this is I don't think anybody who uses Office 365 has a [ __ ] clue what the metaverse is I don't think they have a digital wallet I don't think they want a digital wallet like it's the total wrong target audience what I don't understand and is go out and buy a company that's actually doing this that's smaller or start with a smaller a smaller play on

this because there's just I don't think this is the way that this adoption will happen at the office 365. we don't know that meta's metaverse is going to have wallets and stuff right you're this is a naive take for someone who loves who loves web3 they might go the completely opposite route okay metaplex token plunges 68 after adding Solana nft collections collectors to airdrop yeah so this is a application on Solana where they they launched a token they gave it to the people who were creating on top of their application and then they said well we want to kind of do a marketing play here and drop these tokens that we have that

have value to um anyone who's ever interacted with an nft on Solana essentially so we had 40 million tokens they air dropped it too I'm not sure how many people it is exactly but it was a lot of users um and what do you think the eugers the users did when they received these tokens they sold them no they completely dumped them and it makes no sense if you're gonna launch a token your token needs to go to the people who want to actually hold your token and they want to vote or they believe in their bullish in your project and they're going to hold on to it that's how the value of your token remains you don't use a token and just launch it to anyone and everyone who doesn't care about your project because they're just it's just free money that obviously they're going

to sell so this is a bad idea I'm not saying you don't do airdrops to people as a marketing play you just don't do it this big to a bunch of people who don't really know who you are which is a bad idea and now 68 has gone down and their existing token holders just got completely essentially rugged um so terrible idea we will Explore More on how to do this properly in the future by the way yeah all right last last one of the week CEO of sushi swap fingers a horse you heard that right folks you heard that right okay CEO Jared gray who's the CEO of sushi swap apparently is being investigated for sexual assault of a horse

I don't actually know the the truth behind the story I don't know if any of us do but it it absolutely blew up and it's been I mean the memes that have been happening on crypto Twitter have been insane and not to mention Sushi swap their token dropped 12 amid these accusations so we've got the chart up on screen here you see the drop I'm I just there was a way to profit off this did you see this no oh the the this is the altcoin yeah yeah so I thought it was so good yeah go ahead go ahead so of course in in typical crypto fashion because we just love what crypto happens to do the

moment this came out as Jay said of course a bunch of memes and everything someone launches the course token right on the blockchain and it goes up six thousand percent in one day so that's just crypto being crypto and what a lovely place to be in you guys are hilarious I absolutely love it I mean I don't love whatever this CEO did but that's so funny all right that's our quick hits for the week before we wrap the show let's talk about the poll of the week from the last week Kai we had an interesting poll last week we asked which Tech Giant will onboard the most users onto web3 Google Facebook and

Twitter or other were the options and Google one 40 said Google 23 said Facebook and 32 percent said Twitter so you didn't want to take on this my vote my take is that you didn't vote I can see I did not vote no but uh I mean I think it's going to be Facebook personally uh maybe Twitter if with Elon taking over but yeah I kind of think it's going to be Facebook mainly because they're already integrating with nfts um Google I'm not sure how Google onboards people I think they're gonna onboard a lot of devs I don't know how they onboard the mainstream into just because it seems like social media is the natural fit to onboard people here

um and so Twitter or Facebook seem to be better positioned Google I'm just not exactly sure but who knows Google Google is the king of apps right they built so many major web 2 apps you know if they decided to make web 3 apps to make some dapps then that could be the big onboarding right I guess we haven't seen any of that so far Google's been very focused on like the infrastructure layer which makes sense they are the data layer of our current Internet so actually I'll tell you my take it's none of these three it's Reddit reddit's gonna do it 100 once they launch their tokens on Arboretum which they've already they're they're playing pretty soon they're well ahead of everyone else uh that's gonna onboard I think they

have almost 500 million users and it's gonna onward all the tokens just like that um so I think it's gonna be Reddit Did anyone say that right on boarding for sure yeah that's my guess you heard it here first folks I wish I could well I guess I could I could mint a token we could all bet on it and put some Futures and that's the fun thing about this space right do we have another poll what's coming up next for for our listeners we actually haven't launched the report yet watch out for it it'll be coming out in the next few days the main the objective here is for every week for us to have a poll and for you guys to participate and tell us what you're thinking so that we can learn more together as a community we're building community and we want you to be a part

of that and uh we just yeah we're so grateful for you guys so grateful for our listeners it's uh it's a joy to do the show every week Kai I don't know about you but this is my favorite hour of the week past hour of the week no doubt we're gonna try to start doing it live actually so the hour of the week May change but we'll see so if you follow us on Twitter which is web3 Academy underscore or you follow us subscribe to us on YouTube uh we may do this live with the community let's see we'll see what we can do here but it's been fun dude live and then people can comment and share their feedback and yeah ask questions tell us when we're wrong please do tell us when we're wrong we're not we're not right all the time

although we try our hardest they can shun uh Jay for not voting on his own polls days of uber and doesn't use Twitter uh yeah I actually what's funny is I don't even think that you saw you shared a Tim Ferriss tweet yesterday and I comment on it and I was like this is great but I don't think you're even gonna know that I comment on your team it didn't touch anything yeah I know I didn't see it Tim Ferriss tweeted it out he and this is a reason to launch to get involved in web3 he saw his biggest day of email subscribers yesterday because he said that if you subscribe to his email you would be told about his upcoming nft launch and yeah that's just a bunch of

spammers he showed the chart went off the truth yeah he got scammed that's what happened you might know that yet it's the same thing to have an asset lens all right friends thank you so much for listening and uh we will see you in the next roll up next week peace out thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility

and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one