Web3 weekly: Ethereum futures ETFs, Farcaster updates and OpenSea Creator Studio

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 jird joined by my co-host Kyle rehead and we believe that ethereum Futures ETFs are the start of changing the world and that's why we're carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3 I was almost like H this might be the first one I don't agree on there but anyway we're gonna talk a lot about ETFs in general so much going on in that world and then we're gonna talk about DraftKings who is really making some noise right now fantasy football is just a killer app I think especially when it goes on chain some upgrades in to the ux and usability of blockchain we'll talk

about that specifically what farcaster is building that might be something cool for the entire ecosystem as well as openc doing some really cool things talk about a big raise 24 million uh dollars from a onchain consumer app which is on BAS I think American Express is involved in that one so that's a big deal we'll dive into that SP SPF trial starts today I know or started was it yesterday maybe not something we really want to be talking about but you know what it's kind of interesting so we'll cover that and then so much more that's gonna be a great episode so I'm excited to be here I appreciate that you didn't slam me on the East Futures ATF changing the world I I I know that you love to say that uh Futures ETFs are payer garbage so thanks

thanks for being gentle me there Kai uh okay before we dive in and I'm excited about Today's Show by the way there's there's a lot of good stuff let's share some gratitude Kai I will go first I am grateful for my mom currently visiting my parents Sam myself Jack and potato were all visiting my parents in Toronto and we've been having a tough go anyone out there who has kids Jack is four months old and he is not sleeping well it's been a rough past month and now staying with my parents for this week it's been super helpful because my mom has just like Steed up and been so helpful during the days giving Sam time to nap taking Jack in the mornings dream

feeding at night don't know what I would do without your mom love you gotta love the moms gotta love the moms I am grateful for a best friend of mine Dave Ferris who got married on the weekend this is why I was not on Monday's podcast I was actually in the wedding and uh it was a beautiful wedding so much fun you had was it eight or nine guys in the wedding party so it was a bit of [ __ ] show but uh yeah it was big he had 20s something guys at his Bachelor it was insane but beautiful wedding and congrats to him still a bit shocked that he's married to be completely fair if you know who Dave Ferris is but but I hope his wife is listening to this I don't think she would be but anyway just grateful for that weekend

with them oh that's great to hear some exciting news on RN ad the web 3 Academy we are hiring we are looking for a new writer to join our team somebody to help with all of the content that we produced our newsletter our articles our courses our Twitter our Discord all across the board we're looking for a new team member who loves writing and is super passionate about web 3 so if you are one of those people if you want to join web3 Academy if you're looking for a full-time gig in the blockchain web 3 crypto space this might be your opportunity so check out the link in the show notes there's a job description as well as steps on how you apply and yeah

we'd love to have you be the newest member of the web 3 Academy team come on writers buckle up we need you not new Ra's still here don't worry we just need another one that's all we're we're preparing bull Market's coming and we need we need someone passionate about web 3 so make sure to apply you know who else is passionate about web 3 is our partner Herra who is just absolutely crushing it on the newsletter side so before we jump in let's just take a minute to hear from them 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 web 3 to supercharge newsletters for both writers and readers build a community not just

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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 welcome back as we always do start each episode with a little bit of market watch Kai what have you got your eyes on in the market this week yeah I mean today's market watch is all about the ETFs it's really the holy thing moving markets we've been pretty stagnant in terms of price for a while I do think that will change soon so this past weekend on Friday I guess it was and our last actually we recorded on Thursday last week as we usually do and we said it's likely the ethereum

ETFs were Futures ETFs were going to get approved probably on Monday what ended up happening I think on the Thursday pretty much couple hours after we recorded So that went through nine of them ended up going through by the beginning of of this week so nine ethereum Futures ETFs are now approved which is great I mean the market pumped and then the market dumped as usually happen so we're and then we're back at square one where we were before so not much on the market watch front but let's talk about these ETFs Futures ETFs as we talked about at the beginning of this of episode are not the greatest thing you don't actually buy the company doesn't have to actually buy the E so it doesn't move prices by any means what it does do is legitimize the space though so this

could not have gotten approved if eth was a security so this is very legitimizing for eth the asset which I think is very exciting it also puts ethereum's name in front of you know institutional investors in front of trafi so I think that's a really big deal so that's really good so we'll start there the reason why all this got approved ahead of time by the way is because of the government shutdown which I don't think ended up happening they actually they passed a 45 day emergency budget so they might shut down in 45 days but they're not shut down for now okay well so anyway these all went live a couple things first the first day was not so great there was $2 million in volume and trading volume which I mean is I think it was over a hundred million

for when the Bitcoin Futures ETF went live now that was back in the middle of or the end of the bull run so very different time two million is pretty tiny however it is quite average for new ETFs so it's not like it's something the end of the world by any means it just wasn't huge like some people I think were hoping I mean 2 million in volume there's [ __ ] coins that are below the you know the 100 token on coin market cap that get more volume that a day on Unis swap so it's pretty small but again people don't care much about Futures especially people that care about ethereum right so they're all waiting for the spot ETFs now this week they've started to pick up a little bit so I think we're at about 20 million this tweet that we have up on the screen here

is couple days old now but I think we're just over 20 million now in terms of trading volume across the nine so it's not it's not terrible by any means it is picking up but we'll see if if it really gets a lot of excitement or not the big thing I think that this really does is sets us up for the ethereum spot ETF which will happen probably after the Bitcoin spot ETF and those will be the things that probably will get a lot more volume and should really light up this this industry whenever that happens which I'll talk about just a second but first the big interesting thing that I saw from this was Vanek which is the first one to get impr approved they're a big ETF trafi company they were the first to get approved and what they did is they actually announced that they

intend to donate 10% of their profits from the ethereum Futures ETF to protocol Guild protocol Guild that's it sorry which is a a guild that essentially helps to fund ethereum core developers so really cool to see a trafi company taking Pro like I've never seen this before taking profits and giving it back to the community that built ethereum and that continues to build ethereum so really really cool obviously they're plugged in and really get this space because this is a big I mean what they're doing is great but it's also I think probably bit of a marketing Ploy here to spread this out to the theum community obviously this thing got a lot of traction a lot of shares 1.2 million views this tweet so great marketing if we go to the next tweet even better

marketing they had low volume like as we said in the first day and so they tweeted out low volume in all caps and said just like your jpegs uh and that got a million views so they're just whoever their their Twitter person is just crushing it right now um having some fun in the crypto Twitter world and it's good to see trifi having some fun and kind of you know legitimizing ethereum once again now some other big news that came out so the same day that these deer and Futures ETFs were passed all of the Bitcoin spot ETFs were once again delayed we were hoping they would go live in October we said there was a certain percent chance they would they're all getting delayed and they were delayed ahead of time so they didn't actually have to be delayed on that date but again they were delayed

because of the potential shutdown now the good news that came out of this is Eric Balcones who's the ETF guy that's got all the inside scoop he's actually tweeted out saying that even though they've delayed all the Bitcoin filings which is another I believe 45 or so days maybe a little bit longer than that I think it's the first week of January now when the next um answer has to come what the SEC is doing is actually contacted all the companies that have filed and is working with them to address some of their filings so some of the like plumbing and legality of what they've done which is a really good sign it means that the SC is actually helping them kind of figure out cross their their te's dot their eyes to get these things actually through doesn't

mean a guarantee but it really increases the chances of the next time they have to make a decision of getting improved which could be at some point in December or could be early early Jan I think it's like Jan 2 or Jan three so this is very different last time Bitcoin spot ETFs tried to get approved it was just delay delay delay cancel like there was just no and there was no Sil like it was just all silence there was nothing now they're actually working with them so this could mean really good things I think we said before it was a 75% chance that that the spot Bitcoin spot ETFs will get approved in 2023 and then something like a 95% chance in 2024 probably going to be first week of January if it does that's our next chance if not then it has to be by March

so otherwise they're canceling at all which I just can't see happening at this point someone from Black Rock came out and said it's for sure happening the next three to six months and someone from another company I forget which one says they still think it's happening this year so we'll see what happens here but I think overall we're seeing a lot of good things happening with ETFs and then the last thing as I said with ethereum Futures ETFs that's not a big deal but that opens up the door for eth spot ETFs and we've already seen grayscale who has filed to convert their ethereum trust eth e into a spot ETF so we already have one out there I'm sure there'll be more that will follow in the coming weeks but likely Bitcoin spot ETF gets approved if that does there's no

reason eth doesn't because eth is now basically on the same level as Bitcoin in terms of if it's a security because they both have a Futures ETF out so it's looking like good things happening we just don't know exactly when yeah super bullish man like this is all great news it's always so funny when news like this comes in a bull market versus a bare market right like this news came in a bull market prices would be soaring everybody would be going nuts people would be so excited but it's in a bare market so it barely moves the needle and but as you said Kai this brings so much legitimacy to the major cryptos in eth and Bitcoin and we are knocking on the door of the spot ETF for both Bitcoin and eth at this point Bitcoin as you

said for sure within the next six months eth I'm sure could come at the same timeline tough tough to say exactly but man very very bullish love it love it we're going into this next cycle in just a completely different place than we were back in the cycle of 2020 like in terms of we had no ETFs back in 2020 when that last Bull Run started we had no layer tws we had no functional L1 blockchains for the most part like salon and all them were not really a thing until later in 2020 more like 2021 nfts were not a thing in the last when the last Bull Run first started do you know what I mean onchain consumer apps was not even a word those didn't

exist they have things like friend Tech and other things we're going to talk about like the world we have now is just so so so so didn't have a abstraction or MPC Tech which allows wallets to be basically abstracted away like didn't have public company like coinbase it's amazing how much it's such a view of psychology like we are all so down right now and you get caught up in negative sentiment I had a call the other day with a a builder in the space who's been in the space for years and man he seems so sad like his Vibes were so down and this is like a really respected building in the face who everybody here definitely knows if you're listening I'm

not going to mention his names but he was like sad and it's because it's been a long what like year it's been a rough longer than that almost years now right been down only since November well I mean we're starting on our way up since basically November of last year but so it really shows how much psychology impacts markets right right because the tech is just so far so far ahead of what it used to be the legitim legitimacy in most of the world not so much in the US but it still is like we've got coinbase public company we have all these ETFs like the legitimacy even is moving along we still need some regulation but like overall I mean we've made just huge huge huge strides forward since a couple years ago and our and our next stories

basically all the stories that we have from here on are all about great businesses great stories that are happening in the space and none of them are well I shouldn't say none of them are speculation based the next one we're going to talk about is actually big- time speculation based let's jump in so I want to talk about DraftKings rain makers so DraftKings rain makers DraftKings you don't know DraftKings DraftKings is one of the largest Sports gambling sites in the world in America particularly and it's fantasy sports gambling and the NFL season started a month ago uh NFL one of the biggest Sports if not the biggest sport in America go Cowboys hundreds I got the Jags in my pool this

year so go Jags it's not the most exciting pack we and so DraftKings rain makers is DraftKings new product that's an nft based product and it is absolutely crushing it so if we look at the nft leaderboard over the last 30 days draftking rain makers is number two on leaderboard with over 21 million in sales that's above Crypt Punk that's above mutant Apes that's above Ford Apes that's above all the like pfp Community nft projects the only one it's below is below dmarket which is you know who dmarket is dmarket it's a gaming

Marketplace that Focus the builds they build games mobile games but their biggest game is an NFL game right you could see how yeah NFL is taking over but basic is so rare which is also football which is what soer I guess yeah right in the last month draft King Ray makers since it launched in September this is it second year has 30,000 unique users over 22 million or 21 million in volume and already this month in October they've got 10,000 unique users because basically they have drops every month is every week is how it works so it is growing in size now as I mentioned it's a nft based Fantasy game so basically

each week they have packs that you can purchase and in those packs are different rare cards and then you collect and you collect these cards and you build a team you could also buy these cards on secondary you build a team and every week you take your team and you compete against others with your team now why would somebody want to do this well the number one reason is that there's $30 million in prizes up for grabs over the NFL season last year and because and because it's fun to yell at your TV because you want players to like fantasy superball is a weird game because like you want the weirdest things to happen you know what I mean like the team will be up my like whatever and you're like throw the

touchdown anyway even though you should just kneel it yeah he nothing to do with cheering for teams you're cheering for like a player so you're people are going to play for the the prizes the big prizes and Draft Kings the the regular fantasy app also has big prizes but there's a lot less people playing rain makers so I think most likely a lot of the DraftKings regular users are saying oh wow there's a bigger opportunity to make money because there's less people playing rain makers so I'm going to go over there so that's part of it surprises the other big reason why people are playing DraftKings rain makers is the opportunity to speculate

on player value throughout the season and this is something that you could not do before blockchain Tech right so the way this works is when you get a player when you purchase a player and you get them through these packs these packs cost I think they're $40 a pack 100 there's a range I think there's a range there a range okay I think they're selling out very quickly and you open the pack and you reveal and you have a rare card in the in that pack well these rare cards are selling for and like upwards the highest one I think so far this season went for $440,000 somebody so so somebody paid basically 40 bucks in their pack they got a card that they then turned into $40,000 in return so

incred now obviously that's only one card that sells for that and I think that there's something like 70 or 100 cards somewhere in that range have gone for over $10,000 so there's big sales coming on the secondary but here's the thing you might maybe you don't get a player in a pack maybe you a player you buy them on secondary but you buy them early in the season they're a rookie they're unheard of no one knows them throughout the season they get really good and their value increases as a result of their value increasing now you can get return on that you made a bet on a player early on and they got better well you can sell them for more later in the season so that opportunity to speculate is a big part of that's what

sports management is all about and fantasy sports is all about pretending that you're a manager yourself well here's finally a way that you can benefit from an increasing value of a player I wonder how they deal with like let's say I have a bunch of money and i' buy all the best players I get Patrick Mahomes I get Travis Kelce I get like all the best players and then do those carry forward to the next year or do they maybe they find one year oh is it only one year okay that makes sense only one year right yeah every year it's a new it starts fresh I what they need to do is find a way way to like still reward the utility of those things it just go to zero then all those nfts once that season's

over yeah don't know what the I mean the utility is obviously in the season so like it just becomes a Sentimental collectible at that point I guess yeah true true I guess that could be interesting I mean I guess they could DraftKings could decide to do something for you that's what I mean I would think that they will but let's see I mean the one thing to to keep in mind is this so when you mint the packages they are Minted as nfts as you trades like the volume we're looking at it's not actual volume happening on chain it's just happening in draft King's database basically and then they're reporting that data over to polygon saying hey we moved this much but like there is no actual wallet you don't actually own these things there's no self- custody yet now I know some people are like ah

this is not web 3 blah blah blah I think the reason why this is smart is DraftKings needed to test and see if this thing actually makes sense do people want to do it this way do they want to use this new style of fantasy football and I think if they found product Market fit if a bunch of people actually came over started using like wow this actually more fun then they can go and build the tools needed to do this properly on chain right you think of like Reddit they did the same thing they had a wallet they The Vault you could get your avatars but you could do anything with them there's no Marketplace Etc they needed enough people to have prodate marketing fit to then go and build that they need to make some Revenue get people just make sure people actually want this and so

DraftKings I think this is why the way that they've done this they've been able to make this game work for what do you say like 30 th000 people I think it's actually like 100,000 total users and and it works no problem there's no issues and it's because they don't have to deal with a lot of the blockchain tech just minting and then leave it you don't have to worry about people securing their assets teaching them about wallets all that stuff so like this can go mainstream this year not next year but this year because the tech is ready in terms of non not using blockchain Tech now if it works they can go out and this year build a marketplace now they can because they're going to make a bunch of money from this game they can build proper wallets and using account abstraction they can do all the

things needed to make this game work fully on chain and so at any point they can just go hey everyone you now have a wallet embedded in your account we've placed your nfts in that wallet and now it's on chain you're good to go right so I think it's just a stepwise process and I think we'll see this with more and more companies it's a smart way to do it in my opinion even though I know people are like ah it's not fully onchain don't love it I think as a business especially a big business like DraftKings you got to prove Market fit before you go and just it's a lot of resources to build your own Marketplace so that they can get some royalties off it and build a wallet and make sure people don't lose their assets like that would suck and so

I I think the way they're doing this is actually quite smart we'll see if they continue to put things more on chain but that's my hope yeah I agree it's a it's a great take let's talk a bit about some ux some stuff coming out of farcaster and openc tools that are looking to make it easier to interact with web 3 uh tell us about what forecaster launched this week Kai yeah so forecasters launched two new things actually this week they launched something called the pass key which I'll explain what that is in just a second um but they've also launched a thing that allows you to think of like when you lose your password in your typical accounts and you can click forgot password and then it sends you an email usually you got to put in some code or recreate your password and boom

you have you can get access to your account again we don't have that for wallets right if you lose your seed phrase for your wallet and you lose or you lose the password to it as well you're just screwed right you can't access that wallet again it's just gone and whatever is in it is also gone and so imagine you had a a Social account imagine your Twitter account you lost the password AKA you lost your seed phrase you just never can get into it again that would really suck right and we have no solution to that yet in the blockchain world so again if we're going mainstream we need to find a solution to that so two things that foraster has done for this the first one is what's called a pass key which is basically you can just upload your seed phrase into

iCloud so iCloud keychain and so it's basically you still control it it's in your iCloud and it's secured by like B ID and stuff is it perfect if you had a billion dollars in your wallet would you use that probably not but like for most things like your Social account that's a pretty good way it's very unlikely and almost never I feel like that iCloud has been hacked so you're probably all right on that one right but again if it's your Vault of all your money don't do that but the other thing they did is actually quite interesting and so this is called I don't even think they have a name for it yet to be honest but it's just a way to recover your forecaster account let's say you have a wallet okay and that wallet has like an ident identifier for your forecaster account so your wallet a

is attached to your forecaster account well what you can do is I mean if you want you can switch your forecaster account to any wallet any time you have the ability to do that through your own wallet but what if you lost access to that wallet what you can do is set up like a not sure what the name of it is yet but basically a friend or it could be another one of your wallets maybe it's your Vault wallet to have not access but to have a what do you call it like basically be a point of contact for that wallet and what you can do is say that if I ever lose this this person can ask to take control of that and move the ID of your forecaster account or whatever to another wallet okay now the way it works is this I set my partnered

person my partnered wallet and at any point that partnered wallet can sign a transaction on chain and say hey I'm going to take control of this or I'm going to move the account to a different account what it does it doesn't just take control otherwise that would be a problem someone could just literally like a friend could screw you over it has a 7-Day window and you have seven days to disapprove or cancel that transaction now if you cancel it then you're all good it doesn't actually happen then you can if they're trying if they're a bad actor you can just remove them off it and now they're no longer able to do that if you don't do anything over seven days because you've lost your account and you can't do it all of a sudden they can move it over to another wallet of yours or to their wallet and

now you can access that account again so this the 7-Day window is the thing that really makes this work if you didn't have that 7-Day window anyone could just come and really do that if you happen to add them but that 7-Day window makes sure that you can approve it and of course if you don't have access to it you just there's nothing you can do and so all of a sudden gets switched over so it allows you to put like a trusted person to help you recover your your wall if you ever needed it so pretty good idea this works on foraster already so if you had a foraster account in any time you can go and do this and there's a lot of potential that this might be something that all wallets start to use like why not it makes complete sense I

was told that there's think the ethereum foundation is also working to build some of this so they have some similar setup but I think there are some differences it's not ready yet to go like to to everyone but I think this is coming which is something I never really thought about but makes sense right we have it in web two world for every account we no one have launched an account without a way to recover it yet we do that every day with wallets so we'll be interesting to see you know that's just a first iteration I'm sure we'll find more secure better different ways but that's one of them and something that's coming which is definitely going to be needed for the next cycle because the amount of people that lost their wallets previously is unbelievable I mean last week we talked about was it like $60 million was not

claimed for ARB tokens or something and a lot of that's probably just people lost their wallets and so if they had what forast just created they could recover them so cool upgrade in something that is is definitely needed yeah it's amazing how the account management is probably the biggest issue wallet management is the biggest issue that we face right like seed phrases huge hurdle right we talked to one of the founders of web3 o who works with McDonald's on their programs that they've done in blockchain when they did their nft drop about a month ago and he said that when people have to enter a have to create a seed phrase in when they're signing up for a wallet you lose 80% of your users don't convert 80% like

that's how big of a deal just creating a seed phrase is not to mention then you have to manage that seed phrase as Kai said and most people lose it if didn't have Kyle when I first onboarded into crypto and he explained to me how I should write it down on a piece of paper and then buy a safe and put it in my house like an average person is not gonna do that right like they're not gonna write it down on a piece of paper that seems crazy right like that actually seems back moving backwards they just going to put it in their password manager or something which might not be safe so anyways it's great to see farcaster and many others we've actually got privy coming on the podcast in the next next couple weeks and we're going to talk all about how wallets are

being managed in better ways in order to create great onchain user apps yeah I think wallets it's like accounts right we have so many accounts and so it's hard to remember all your passwords same thing with wallets we need ways to recover them so pretty cool what's going on with open SE they got a new Creator Studio coming in yeah so it's been a while since we've talked about uh the NF Marketplace Wars of 2022 and 2021 uh but they continue to rage and blur is losing these days you know blur was last time we talked about this blur was dominating everybody was going over to blur and now blurs down to just above 50% uh of the nft market volume and openc sees an opportunity they want to

get back on top of this and it's pretty clear that the way that they're going to do this their strategy is to lean into creators so just this week openc launched openc Studio or Creator Studio which is a studio where no code creators can come and create nft collections in very simple ways so basically anybody can manage an nft collection from end to end you can do allow list you can easily upload your media or your metadata uh you can build your drop page and do this all in simple simple ways right so it's very much for the average no code Creator which is a

big deal because in the past we've worked on some nft Collections and helped them launch and in the past you had to make your own minting dap basically right you had to create a website that was set up to Mint an nft that's freaking hard right like you need somebody you need two people basically you need a website developer and you need a smart contract developer so that was very challenging well openc obviously sees that so here's the four main things you can do in openc Creator Studio you can mint nft into your own wallet very simply so you can set it up minted into your own wallet you can build on all openc compatible

blockchains which there is many all the main chains Main l2s and eth are obviously on there you can let collectors mint using debit card and credit card that's obviously a key step and of course as I mentioned you can launch it with no technical skills it's like a Shopify to set up an e-commerce store same idea this is a super simple way to do that so look this is a big deal because there is going to be a Marketplace that is the Amazon of nfts there's also going to be a lot of Niche category specific marketplaces or white label Marketplace brand specific marketplaces but there is going to be an Amazon and openc I believe is the best

set up to do that blur is something else blur is the Bloomberg of nft trading it's for the speculators and the traders who are using this for financial professionals right openc is for the average Joe who just wants to buy an nft and get into the digital world and so openc is yeah really going after that I I think this is a great move by them launching Creator Studio it is a massive I mean it was not only difficult to find a developer to help you Min nft especially back in the day it's probably just as hard now it's costly and it's dangerous the amount of people that created contracts to mfts that could get exploited that did something wrong that had you know back doors to them like it

was because not only did you have to create that contract in that minting process you should also get it audited but no one was doing that because it is extremely expensive to launch to build a site get a smart contract minting within that site get it audited pay the developer to do all that plus in comp like it is a lot and now it's free so yeah that's M another thing what we didn't have in 2020 that we have now exctly exactly and openc also leaning into leaning into the understanding what do creators need Beyond just like this is like no code tools to set up and launch but there's also like the protocol level of okay if you're

building an nft collection what are you building it for what do you need it to do and one thing is is redeemables is a big category of digital that we talk a lot about that you get an nft and then you can redeem use that nft to redeem a physical product or use that nft to redeem another digital product or redeem a redeem a gift or redeem you know some claim something in addition and openc is trying to lead that as well and they have a current like side team right now that is focused on basically creating the whole protocol around redeemables so it's good to see some good stuff coming out openc I haven't been so impressed with them in the last little while so I'm happy to see positive news that is good for all creators what's going on in

restaurant loyalty and blockchain Kai Blackbird is going on so Blackbird is a onchain consumer app that exists on Bas that recently went live Jesse poock talked about a little bit at the permission list conference and the founder of black I'll explain what just a second but the founder of Blackbird is Ben lenthal who is also the founder of resi which was so the reservation platform for restaurants sold it to American Express for quite a bit of money and now had started this one which what Blackbird is is basically like a a Loyalty Rewards program for restaurants and so think of it like in air miles or whatever for restaurants rather than Airlines and so the reason he started is

that he noticed that there was a decline in the genuine connection between diners and eer and then their customers right and if you think about it it's because you don't call restaurants anymore but you don't even book them through their own reservations you typically do it through something like resi and as a result you don't really speak to them much right and and not only that but that data is not shared with the restaurants so the restaurants don't really know if you've been to the restaurant before unless you happen to get the same waiter and there's a lot of turnover in the restaurant industry so often times you're not getting the same waiter or waitress so the the data capture and like the connection of restaurants and those who attend restaurants has really gone to the Wayside and so this is an app that's going to or is

hoping to sort of fix that and so basically what Blackboard is is an app where restaurants can come on they can add their Restaurant to this program and then users can use it to book and check into I don't know if it's booking yet but anyway they use it to check in say that they've been to a restaurant essentially and as a result what happens is they have a token called fly and that's their sort of rewards token and so this token is is paid out to people who use the app that attend restaurants check into restaurants buy things at restaurants pay for things at restaurants and then that fly tokens also given to the restaurants themselves for using the app and in return what this app is doing is it's basically taking the data of these customers when

their birthday is what their favorite wine is what they like to order their favorite dessert uh etc etc and it's sharing it with other restaurants and so people can go to any restaurant in right now I think there's about 20 in New York uh in Brooklyn they're opening up in LA and can't remember where the other San franisco yeah San Francisco so they're getting a bunch more restaurants and it'll be a place where you can you know go to any these sort of like higher-end restaurants and the restaurants will be able to know a little bit more about you and can then give you better service and then you can earn things you can earn there's different tiers that restaurants have so if you've done certain things where you have enough points you can get you know a certain bottle for free uh or you can get a certain you know

reservation in a certain like nice area of the restaurant or you can whatever right there's many different things that you can give away from this so it's basically your Rewards program which is overall pretty cool right I think something that's that's needed and now it's brought on chain why on chain well the token so fly token obviously can be used to redeem your rewards redeem whatever it is but you can also just sell it and you can sell it to get usdc right so it's an open concept type of rewards which is something that Jay and I speak a lot about and are are quite bullish on now there was a article in the New York Times where they explained this they didn't mention crypto at all but they explained what the fly token does and I just need to read this out because everyone who has

an onchain consumer app who's trying to reach the mainstream this is how you need to speak about your token it is beautifully said so let me just read it each restaurant can determine its own system of rewards with tiers a kind to Gold platinum diamond Etc based on the number of visits additionally on each visit customers earn a certain amount of credit called fly that can be spent at any Blackbird Restaurant in technology terms fly are native tokens but for practical purposes they operate just like credit card points or airline miles seems like a very great way to explain this to newbies who have no idea what a token is or crypto is ETC very just like a nice presentable way right and it makes sense right everyone knows what air miles is in credit card point so that was really cool some other things

that they're doing that are quite interesting in terms of just the technology around the app one of the things they've experimented with is so they have either they have readers at the beginning at the front of the restaurant so as you walk in the restaurant you scan to say hey I'm a blackbird member and then immediately the people at the restaurant know who you are but the other thing that you they've done is they've put chips in the tables and so when you sit down at the table you either usually put your phone on the table or it's in your pocket which goes underneath the table the the chip can read it and know that you're a black m member and it notifies the restaurant and says hey this person's here boom sends them some tokens sends the restaurant some tokens and then it starts to tell you all the data about

that customer so you can walk in and greet them hey happy birthday or hey whatever so really really really cool thing that they're doing to try to just bring better connection to restaurants and their customers and of course using some onchain stuff to make it all happen so really cool yeah it's amazing I think that we talk so much about loyalty being one of the best use cases for blockchain and the thing about restaurants is because restaurants is this like fragmented industry where it's all these individual restaurants most restaurants don't have loyalty right you know they don't literally zero loyalty the only restaurants that do have loyalty are like the major chains that's few and far between so this is a great opportunity

to just to provide loyalty to an industry that doesn't really have it by doing it by offering a Rewards program that's simple to use for any restaurant when they sign up and they as you said Kai they can set it up however they want they within within like rails like bowling with bumpers right like it's like stay within the lane so that's great and the other thing I think is so great is we know that incentives Drive Behavior right we've seen that over and over again with nfts and with crypto and now you take that to restaurants so if you're a restaurant and you want to incentivize more people to dying at your restaurant well what better way to do it

than to give them an incentive of tokens points whatever you want to call them and that's going to lead people to come back or to get a free drink or whatever it might be but you can do this in such a simple way in this Blackbird app by the way I think the reason we're talking about this I don't even think I gave the headline of this story which is that oh yeah you didn't actually the reason we're talking was that black bird just raised $24 million we completely missed that and it was led by a16 but the other cool thing is the other investor American Express so I don't even know well I mean I'm sure they know but American Express is investing in in a crypto company which is is quite interesting but yeah really really cool I think what they're doing so very interesting love to see it okay

let's go to the hottest trial hottest court case of the week Sam bakman freed his trial started on Wednesday and we want to keep you guys updated on what's going on with this so Sam faces seven criminal charges related to the collapse of FTX and one of the US attorneys called this the biggest Financial frauds case in American history or one of the biggest in American history so a lot of eyeballs are going to Beyond this this is going to set a lot of precedent in the American judicial system and it actually might set a lot of precedent for regulation as well so this is a lot it's important to follow this and it's also I don't look I don't want to say

this is fun it's never fun when people use billions of dollars but there's just some it's just such a ridiculous story like it feels made for TV and SPF who's only 31 years years old faces 110 years in prison if he's convicted for all of these charges so this is no joke so let me just give you a couple of the rundown of what's happened so far we're two days into this trial the doj has asked to seize two private jets uh that were used by Sam bankman freed apparently purchased with FTX money that shows you how ridiculous this FTX whole thing was they were buying private jets with their money like why do you need to be buying private jets so unnecessary one of the key arguments that spf's lawyers have presented is that there's no regulation

so they've basically said hey s Sam didn't break the law there is no law right and the doj has basically said that no regs is not an excuse and they wrote a formal letter about why no regs is not an excuse but basically what the key line here is that they said the funds were misappropriated that's all that matters fraud happened here so who cares whether there's regulation or not doesn't matter about the industry it was in either way it was value that was misappropriated exactly exactly the jury has finally been selected they were going through jurors one of the things I noticed that they did was they ask any jurors have they ever lost money on crypto and any juror that raised their hand they were

like he you're out SBF has sued you might have seen this made a bunch of headlines he sued um ftxs insurance company you can't make this up too much before the FTX collapse they took out an insurance policy if they if legal uh claims were ever brought against the leaders of FTX obviously Sam bakman freed being one of those so so that if legal claims ever came against him he would be covered for the legal fees and obviously the legal fees for this for him it's already in excess of $10 million and the insurance company is

refusing to pay for it so now there's this lawsuit going on on the side s BMA Freed's lawyers do not want FTX customers to testify no surprise there but obviously the doj wants s wants FTX customers to testify because they lost money and they got [ __ ] and so like they want to hear those you know heartbreaking stories of everyday people who lost money and the final thing is that Sam BF freed if he asks this all the time every week he asks if he can be let out of jail and every week they are like no you can't be let out of jail you must stay under lock and key throughout the duration of this trial which will probably take up to six weeks and we'll continue to keep you guys up to date on everything that's going on let me ask

today do you think he gets off or do you think that he goes to jail for 110 years or somewhere in between I don't know if I'm like legally capable of this isn't legal advice if' be uh I I definitely don't think he gets off he's going to jail he's going to jail for a long time is it 110 years probably not it's probably like somewhere in the middle but like I this guy he's screwed like if you're America it's pretty clear that they want to regulate crypto and that they are behind the ball so you've got an opportunity to make an example of somebody like this who clearly frauded billions of dollars like you make an example of it but there is a lot of talk that he's like in the system you know

what I mean like they like got him to do this look bad because parent stuff it's like I don't know when you're talking with people that are rich and in politics in the US anything can happen crazy it would yeah I don't know see I don't know what's gonna happen there but God I hope not all right let's keep rolling like s bman freed by the way is that an nft or was that like an actual sketch from the court case this is the sketch you know like you're not allowed cameras in uh in the courtroom unless it's the Amber herd and Johnny de trial in Virginia because some some states allow cameras but yeah they don't allow cameras they made him look pretty badass that doesn't look like him at all I wonder if that's he does look badass he doesn't look like a little pipsqueak in

this photo in this sketch okay let's uh let's move to some news coming out of some big apparel and C consumer goods Brands Nike dos swoosh launch something this week Diesel and fossil have collabed and Adidas and Montclair have collabed so let me break these down for you first starting with Nike their blockchain program. swoosh of which many of our community members are part of Kai I know you've gotten some nfts as well even though you don't have a do swoosh you back doored in through a friend to get in there through candy one of our community members and do swoosh has launched their first shoe so this shoe which is appropriately called Ti n AJ Nike TI n AJ which means this is not a

jpeg and so this pair of shoe is being released on October 20th to anybody who has a swoosh and has also revealed at least one hour force one box so if you've done those things then you are eligible to purchase a pair of these shoes they're going to be sold for $120 and you can do so on October 20th so cool cool news coming in at Nike K I'm G keep rolling and I'll give you a chance to jump in on all of these programs the next program is diesel with fossil so two large Brands to apparo fashion brands have com combined on a watch and what they're doing here is

they're selling this watch which is very limited it's only 300 pieces as we keep saying most companies that are doing stuff in blockchain most these large companies are doing in in very small batches so it's more experimented right now but there's 300 watches and when you buy one of these watches it comes with an nft now here's what's interesting about this nft it's not just an nft to prove the authenticity of your watch it's also an nft which you can then use to claim an avatar and when you claim that Avatar your avatar starts off as a blank Avatar and you go through various

experiences in what is Diesel's basically metaverse world they're calling it The Diesel's metamorph their virtual realm and you can create an AV are in their virtual realm but you can only do so if you buy this watch so if you're a big diesel fan which I'm sure there are many of they're probably going to be want to be the first to create an avatar and be part of their digital realm so that's what's coming out there out of diesel and fossil and then Adidas launched a partnership with Monclair Monclair is one of the largest fashion brands that focuses on outdoor activity in Europe so hiking and skiing they're really big in like ski jacket get

outdoor apparel and very high-end very high-end uh stuff like their stuff is thousands of dollars not cheap stuff and they've launched to yes today I believe it it's today so this is Thursday you guys are listening this on Friday they launched Adidas and Monclair launched a full collab of an apparel collection there's like socks and there's shoes and jackets and sweaters all this stuff I was looking at it today a pair of boots were like $1,000 right so it's it's highend physical physical Goods but here's what's interesting along with this launch of this physical collection they also launched a digital one digital nft and they did that to the Adidas alt

Community Adidas alt is that is Adidas's blockchain community so if you have an ALT you can claim a digital version I've got it up on the screen here you can see it Kai a digital version of these shoes which who knows what the utility of them is there's a lot of speculation that Adidas is leaning into the metaverse long term and they believe that we will all want to wear the same things in the metaverse that we wear in the real world IRL so they're starting to drop these digital wearables right now you can't wear them anywhere there is no metaverse you can wear them but if you are an ALT holder you can go claim they're limited to 3,000 and I think that the Adidas Al

have different traits and so if you are a drip holder it's one of the traits I think either you get first access or in some way you get something special as a result of being a drip holder so three different brands all doing well actually five different brands all doing interesting stuff around blockchain and physical Goods so I think first all really cool love seeing the experiment from experimentation from you know such Nike diesel fossil Adidas Etc here's the thing that I think is really cool about this we're going to see more of is this connection of physical items luxury and not luxury but moving them into digital world same like this is what pudgy Penguins does right you buy a physical toy I think it's like what $9 and then

you can scan a QR code and all of a sudden you have this like digital badge that allows you to enter their game or whatever they're going to build there right I think every physical company's going to do this why and this is what fossil and Diesel are doing with their essentially they're doing with their watch now why would you want to do this well when someone buys something in the physical world you don't have any data on that person you can't remarket to that person unless when you go to the cash register to buy you're like hey can you give me your phone number can you give me your email and then they can you know they can email them they can send them some emails which that always goes to your spam so it's basically useless I don't even think a lot of companies

really do that so much anymore pretty much useless you could take that email upload it into like Facebook and Google and you might be able to remarket them that way but there's a lot of changes in how Apple Works how others are working that are kind of getting rid of that or making it less effective so ultimately you really as a business get one shot you sell them on it if you don't upsell there you're just hoping they come back maybe they follow you on Instagram or something like that or on Twitter what it does when you say Hey you bought this thing go scan this QR code and all of a sudden now they have an nft that plops into their wallet remember what that is is now they've entered the global database of ethereum remember ethereum is a global database right that you join

one time with your wallet or your account whatever you want to call it and now everything you do is in that one database that's shared against with the whole entire world right doesn't matter if you're buying things if you're playing games if you're speculating things whatever you're doing it's all in that Global database right so it costs nothing for a business to have that database it's just exist in the world and if you can tag a customer and say hey that person has purchased has shown interest in something that I've done into that database you now know so much more about that person and can hopefully remarket or retarget them in some fashion now we don't really have a lot of those yet on the blockchain but we will get there but it's more about data and so it just makes complete sense that

every single company that has any physical good is going to want you to attach that thing to your wallet right it's going to be the most important thing for everyone to do just like in the you know last 20 years the most important thing was get someone to follow my Facebook page or Instagram page or my Twitter account that was the most important thing now it's going to be make sure that you tag their wallet we need to know who that person is in that Global database and so I think what we're seeing with diesel and fossils instead of just scan this QR code and there's an nft no one is going to actually do that you'll maybe get like 10% of people that will convert if that right but they need to create an experience with it it needs to look cool it needs to give them more utility

because the conversion rate from just giving hey here's nft which people are going to eventually know that's just a a Tracker basically right they're going to say it needs to be here's nft that does this that gives you access to this that you know what I mean like there has to be a reason why some are do it like pudgy Penguins is scan this thing not because it's in scan it because it getes you access into this world to go and have fun right fossil diesel scan this thing because you're gonna get this thing that looks cool and probably gives you access to xXx so you're G to find a lot of creative ways where people are going to sell physical goods and then give you an experience or access online not because they necessarily care what you do there it's more just because they

want to tag you so that you're you're tagged inside of that Global database that's well and and and inevitably where it goes is the ability to reward your biggest customers right so sure you buy one product like great you get access that's the first step but you can imagine in the future all of these Brands we're talking about you know Nike Adidas pudgy Penguins whoever say oh you bought 10 of our products well now you get this right you get access to something special you can imagine that with concert tickets you can imagine that with really any good and here's the

thing you cannot do that without blockchain you cannot track the data and then reward your customers in an easy way without blockchain sure you could try to do it with like a web2 database and email but it would be a goddamn Nightmare and everybody would fraud it basically so and then you also couldn't open it up to other things as well right you could build your own database and do it with your own experience but then you can't get what else they're doing right and reward them for other things that maybe are Partnerships with other brands or give access with other brands and rewards from other brands so it's a massive change all right let's go to our community member of the month shout out to cryptos shrimp PhD you are the Community member of the month Michael

Michael is Crypt shrimp and Michael has just been a absolute Gem of community since the beginning very active in her Discord he himself is a great Builder I think you met Michael recently didn't you in person at permissionless guy I did I Priss I was in line at a taco place at like meeting up with someone else and all of a sudden cryptos shm who obviously I don't know because his name is Crypt shrimp in Twitter and Discord and His Image is I don't I think it's like an nft or something like that so all a sudden he opens up the door and I'm standing in line and he goes Kyle and I just looked down I was like I don't know he's like it's crypto shrimp that is the funniest entrance ever but yeah we met him I met him we went for a

beer and uh actually gave him one of our onchain hats so uh it was great to meet him we had a great time you're just teasing our onchain hats we haven't publicly announced this yet but we got merch that we are making everybody I'm actually wearing our t-shirt right now if you're watching this I'm not going to show you the whole t-shirt you can only see the top so uh it's a little bit of mystery still but we're making merch and you're going to be able to win this merch or purchase this merch but most excited you'll be able to win this merch we're launching something really exciting next week so keep your eyes out something is coming from web3 Academy that's going to give you prizes and hook you guys up for all your activity on chain because we want to celebrate you on chain love that back to Michael real

quick though Michael's in the I don't know exactly what you call it but Science World I think it's like bioscience type world or well so he is in that too I'm going to get to that but in his normal non- crypto life he's in the science world and so he's really gotten into D science d as well as a result of that and he's actually thinking about writing a newsletter on DSi to help people navigate that space and understand what's going on I was like please do that I would love that so if you're listening uh Crypt shrimp please please do that and for those that are also listening his Twitter is crypto with a K shrimp PhD tell him to go and and create that as well because we all want to stay up to date on the daat world and if you want to learn about

dite Kai probably doesn't even know this because he was on bayay but next Wednesday we got an episode dropping from Aaron from Athena da which is a leading da in dessi and we're talking all about how they are using crypto to change Women's Health and improve funding for health experiments and health research all focused on women incredible podcast D is gonna really change the world actually that's a big one for sure for sure change it's a lot to wrap your head around like he was talking about tokenizing molecules and stuff and so like some people are like wait what but it it's really interesting what they're doing and the more it becomes to life they have more examples I think people be able to wrap their head around it more easily all right let's do uh some quick hits before we

wrap here keep them short Kai hit me with the first one Ledger and Souther bees another partnership yeah Souther bees which is uh one of the leading art auction houses one of the oldest art auction houses in the world over a hundred years old has they've Doven into crypto web 3 nfts because they think that art onchain is better than art offchain so they launched the sbe's verse which is their nft marketplace where they curate leading nft artists and have auctions on a regular basis and they've now just launched a partnership with ledger so if you purchase a piece of art on Souther be verse and you are one of the top not

all purchasers but one of the top purchasers then you will receive a co-branded ledger times southern bees Ledger you'll receive a co-branded hardware wallet just especially for you definitely the digital art collection digital art use case for blockchain is huge and if you own art that you're buying on sues you should for sure store it on a hardware wallet okay next up DARS Arena yet another friend Tech copy Launches on avac yeah so this one's I mean somewhat taken off they've got you know close to I think 10,000 daily active wallets for the first time just the other day it's starting to take off we've talked about this there's lots of forks of friend Tech which is great this is what allows for Innovation

competition pushes people to be faster more urgent in what they're doing it allows us to keep experimenting from different angles and then you can take what works with and let go of what doesn't work without have to do it yourself so that's really cool I think so the difference with Stars Arena versus friend Tech is more focused on like the social set of things which is to say they have a feed and so you don't have to pay and buy keys to see all posts you can just see any posts but then if you buy Keys you can see hidden posts more like premium or Pro type post which I mean is basically what Twitter has right where you can see a feed of people's free posts and then if you subscribe you can see other one so like these Forks are starting to look like

people like yeah this is great they're focusing on social but it's like you're just recreating Twitter and you're not going to be better than Twitter so what's the point right Twitter Kai and speculating is fun that's true okay that is true actually waited putot that I like that I guess that's the one thing so wait with Stars Arena you're also I guess you're not just paying for a pro like payal you're also specting out like a key okay that makes sense yeah okay I could see that but you know what's gonna happen Twitter's gonna do it well X sorry X is gonna do it for sure for at some point although maybe not not actually because regulation they wouldn't be able to True like there's no do anytime soon so it

actually gives a bit of room for things like frch and you know Stars Arena to like gain some traction before Twitter can even think about doing it they'd have to go through so much legal stuff I thought you said what you were gonna say is you know what's going to happen is most people are going to get wrecked because that is exactly what was gonna happen to most people on friendtech yeah I mean I'm not a hater of FR Tech by any means but people are already getting wrecked unfortunately there's a lot of um Sim swaps happening and people you know hacking to someone's account and then selling all their shares and screwing over people getting wrecked from hacks I mean they're just gonna get wrecked because when you speculate there's winners and losers and there's a lot of people who lose and there's it's fun few people who win

right right okay let's go to the next quick hit which is momma momma is that I said m mom postcard momma postcard what's this Moma the Museum of Modern Art one of the leading museums in the world has launched a nft project we've talked a lot before about how nfts and digital art are coming to museums we just had the AP coin Dow pass a vote to take $12 million to purchase B A yaka anes and put them into museums so we're seeing more and more happen here and Momo Moma has launched a project which is pretty cool so basically this project

it's a postcard with 15 blank stamps on it and these stamps are designed collaboratively as it moves from one artist to the next so basically one artist starts with this postcard of blank stamps and they design each of the stamps and then they move it to the next artist and then the next artist adds some design so it's a collaborative it's basically generative art except generated by 15 artists and it features some top web three Artists Grant Yun Dimitri chernak is the one who did made ringers Casey Reese operator and many

others so really interesting to see Moma isn't just bringing digital art into their Museum they're actually also participating in the onchain creation of the art all right next up the SEC denied a court appeal yeah this is a nice little little win so back in I think it was August Ripple won a case against the SEC for their token sale on Central exchanges to retail investors it was called a security it was deemed not a security from the court that was a big deal people were pretty pumped up uh a couple like a week later or something the SEC um asked for an appeal and so this just went through discussion with the court and the court has decided that

they are not going to allow them to appeal this and so that means the way that Ripple sold its xrp token to retail investors was not considered a security so that is really cool there's still going to be a case going on which is they still found or they're still undecided on if the institutional sale of xrp was considered a security so they still have to figure that one out but at least to retail investors we're all good no appeal so this is actually pretty big news that didn't really go very big on Twitter surprisingly so a win for win for the industry that's for sure all right last one and we shall wrap it up this one's a fun one Tom Hanks says that AI version of him used in a mental plan ad was without his consent yes so we keep hearing about the

dangerous of AI you know deep fakes this is a real problem and here's an example of that so earlier this week Tom Hanks went to Instagram and posted a screenshot of an ad of himself and it looks just like him like you or I would never know that it's not Tom Hanks and it's him talking about a dental plan and saying that consumers should go buy this dental plan well here's the thing this company did not have Tom Hanks approval and it's not even Tom Hanks they created this using an AI version of Tom Hanks and so he's obviously pissed because he's like you're using my likeness

you're using my character to at to promote your brand that's illegal because you do not have my permission and obviously customers are getting screwed because they're like oh I trust Tom Hanks who doesn't trust Tom Hanks man he's Tom Hanks [ __ ] love the guy right he says I should go to this dental office I'm going to that dental office keep my teeth nice and shiny look like just like Tom Hanks I am in right so this is why look yes this points out the problem of AI deep fakes here's the solution that's what I want to focus on ver verified identity on chain this is why AI is going to expedite the need for blockchain

across really the entire world because we are going to have so much more fake content like this it's just going to explode in the next year and the only way to to solve this is by verified identity so we can easily see oh this was created by Tom Hanks or I see ads all the time of Joe Rogan that I know are deep fakes I'm like I know he did not say this about like selling supplements or selling like different random things and I'm like that's not actually him and you can you can kind of tell if you really look the mouth moves a little bit weird but I see them all the time almost daily sucks so scary easy fix easy fix Unstoppable domains ens whatever it is get your everybody here you guys should have your verified

identity on chain don't just have your verified identity be your wallet I zerx blah blah blah set it up with some sort of a domain name to actually show who you are and we can start to use that you'll see more and more tools I believe coming out in the next year around that that's a wrap thanks so much for listening in everybody have yourself a great weekend we'll see you next week thank you for listening to web through 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 our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web through insights so you can L 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 web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one