Web3 weekly rollup: Moonbirds, Coinbase NFT marketplace and Web3 UX

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode [Music] welcome welcome welcome gm gm web 3 doers so good to be here today is the thursday the weekly roll up wow what a what a week it's been so much to get through how you doing kai i am excellent and i've been excited for this one all week this is every day i got new stuff that i want to talk about it's a great week i think one of the things that got me so excited about this podcast is one of one of my clients who is a leader uh in the

mindfulness space uh and has quite an old clientele they have a online program about uh training mindfulness practitioners uh and today in our meeting they talked about crypto and web 3 for the first time so uh there's a there's a wave and it's still coming and every every day there's more people on boarding onto web it's it's wow i'm just gonna spoil the leading part of our uh of our episode here but that's not the thing that's exciting you this week if anyone's watching on youtube right now i can see what's on the screen it's the moon birds page and in the floor price of 31.22 east

which jay owns a moon bird i think that's something you're truly excited about but let's not talk anymore let's not let's not get there yet though let's not get there yet so uh today we're talking about moon birds we got to talk about moon birds uh we're talking about uh ux in web 3 some exciting things happening uh coinbase a big launch over there with their nft marketplace and some some great products that are going to bring on more people onto web3 and make it much more functional much easier to use so that's really exciting we're going to talk about some stuff going on in the nft space um some things that went well and some things that didn't go so well and what

we think you guys can learn from them and then we're going to talk about an airdrop that's coming up not because of the alpha of the airdrop but more because of uh the the systems in place to um build community and then create a brand and then using tokenomics to really launch a business and what that allows you to do and for all the builders out there thinking about launching a token what is the best way to do that we're going to use an example uh of a protocol that's doing that right now what we see them doing and then we're going to wrap up with uh our web three person of the month uh and really excited to uh highlight somebody

who's just an og in the space and really leading thought leader uh and then we also got a job uh that we wanna chat about at the very end uh we've got a job opportunity uh let's let's talk about it right now we're talking right now all right if you are a marketer and you're listening to this podcast and you want a job we are hiring both for web three academy and impact digital marketing uh and it is just someone who understands marketing email marketing copywriting uh mainly those two things but it'll be many different areas of marketing and you'll be heavily involved in webster academy and effective marketing if that is you or sounds like you and you're interested in space and you're interested in web3 uh in the job or in the uh links there will be a job description go apply we're

hiring so we can say it at the end too but i want to make sure we get at the front i love 101 uh lead with the call to action that matters most [Laughter] uh so okay um before we jump in uh we're we got so much to get through today and we always try to stick to one hour uh to keep this short and sweet for you guys uh so we're gonna actually skip gratitude not the kyle and i are grateful we always are um but we're gonna go right into it first up though kai what's the web 3 word of the week tiring no it's not it's uh it's moon birds was crazy this week and lots happening uh with moon birds

and it's going to start off the show as well so moon birds is it takes over web3 although coinbase nft almost took the word as well because this is huge there's a bunch going on right now as we like to say in the moon bird chat hoot hoot okay so let's start with moon birds um so for for those of you out there that know moon birds so moon birds is a pfp collection that launched uh this past saturday um let me just give a sort of a rundown here uh and a little bit of context and backstory uh and kai jumped in asking me any questions if you

think i'm missing anything uh so movers was created by proof uh the proof proof collective proof was founded by kevin rose kevin rose is a og web 2 entrepreneur he started a dig which most people do not remember but dig was basically reddit before reddit and then reddit won and became the big thing um kevin rose went and joined google ventures where he was a venture capitalist and now he continues to be a venture capitalist when nfts blew up uh he got really into the space and he started a podcast called the proof podcast uh which has i don't even know how many listeners

hundreds of thousands of listeners um and then in december he launched a nft membership called the proof collective 1000 nfts were launched in december uh it started at a floor of about 1 eth and kind of flew under the radar for a bit uh and then um i would say in uh maybe in like late jan early feb um proof started to pick up steam through some partnerships that they were doing they did a project called the grails project where they brought on it was really cool i did i brought on 20 of the top nft artists and did a a blind basically each one of them created a

piece of art and if you were in the proof collective you could bid on basically anywhere from one to twenty which one you wanted uh but you didn't know which um which artist you're gonna get but you could see the art so you could see the art and these artists were encouraged to do art that were slightly different but you didn't know which the artist you're gonna get anyway so it's really cool project that went really well i think the floor of some of those arts is up to like 30 east now um for those nfts and the proof collective is up to over a hundred east now for their for that nft so um then they decided that uh okay we we want to open up more of the community well we're gonna do a 10 000 piece pfp collection um and that's called moon

birds so initially the plan for moon birds was to launch a um to do a dutch auction one thing that's really interesting and i don't know how much we'll get into it today but kai at some point in a future podcast we should talk about all of the different ways that you can mint an nft and the different styles of auctions and we're actually going to talk a little bit later in this podcast about um if you mess that up you can cause gas wars and you can lose and waste uh millions on gas which happened with a pf uh nft collection we're gonna chat about later um but initially the plan for moon birds

was to do a dutch auction which is where you have a ceiling price that you start at and it was going to be two and a half eth and then basically the price goes down to whatever the eventual floor is um now this was before kevin rose went on his hype pr campaign and as a result of that moon birds caught the hype before they even launched and they realized that wasn't work so they switched to a raffle model so in the raffle i think they had about 70 or 80 000 people enter the raffle basically they used pre-mint which is a great tool if you're looking to launch an nft highly recommend it

and using pre-mint anybody could enter you had to have two and a half eth in your wallet and you had to follow moon birds um on twitter so you enter um and then you found out on last friday if you got the raffle i did not win the raffle uh some of my friends did win the raffle um talk about winning the lottery in a way so those people got a chance to mint at two and a half eighth uh and then moon birds went live on the secondary market um full transparency i grabbed a moon bird fairly early at about eight and a half eighth which at the time um let's be clear that's a ton of money for me i'm

not sitting here like i i'm not early in crypto um i was definitely later in crypto uh i started i first bought into ethan bitcoin um just it's not quite a year ago less than a year ago when they were at their their their peak uh i bought ethan like 5 000 uh east or maybe it was uh that might be canadian i think there were four thousand i think it was four thousand less it was four thousand u.s when i bought each so that was at the peak uh and i just watched eath actually i watched my my that go to half and then it never it's never come back up unfortunately yet um so so anyways point

is eight and a half heats was a lot for me um but but i i really believed in this project so i bought it um and here we are today the floor is 31 eth and the volume traded and this is what's really so amazing about this project this has never happened before this is totally new uh paradigm that we're in um there's been 91 000 eth trade volume on this project in the first 48 hours there was uh i think it was 30 000 eth was the trade volume it's trading at higher volumes than like board at yacht club and crypto punks right now it's the highest just in absolutely no

okay so let's let's talk real quick about okay so it sounds like someone is just launching a bunch of nfts and raking any money that's not really what's going on so i kind of want to make sure everyone understands this to correct me if i'm wrong this is just what i've learned over the last little bit looking into this proof is a membership pass which is like they do like nft reports and things so it's anyone who's like really an nfts and wants to be buying selling et cetera it's like that's what it's meant for it's limited amount i think a thousand or whatever one time you have the would you call it grail i think was the other rails yeah that was meant just for art that was really about art yeah and then you have moon birds here which is um it's actually meant for like events so

it's building a community it's a lot for in real life events i guess and i think it's also funding for a bigger um picture where i don't know if they're building like a metaverse style thing or yeah so they he's basically got a bunch of developers they're building a big team they're using the funding from this to to pay for that moon birds yes good and yeah they plan to build out like a full-on uh metaverse so that's sort of the utility around around the three of these things and why he's done so many nft launches in such a like a short period of time yes yeah and and really what well actually i got a couple other things that i'll show and then i want to jump into um what this means for what we can take away from this not from

a like making money standpoint but from like a learning okay you're a creator you're a business leader what do you learn from this for your business um first i just want to show off my moon bird if you guys are looking um this is my moon bird i'm gonna give him a name and i think one one thing of to mention of why i bought this moon bird is not only did i believe in the community um and the potential utility of this i really do believe in that and i'm excited about the brand and i'm excited about the team but one thing that's really cool about this project very similar to the board ape yacht club project and other projects is that you own the commercial ip for your nft so

i'm already thinking like you know what what brand can i give my my moon bird and you'll see you know uh there is many people online who have created entire twitter followings or they're making you know there's the board eight bianca that made a burger uh or a fast food restaurant um there's boarding clubs that are auditioning for movies now because coinbase is funding this movie trilogy so i'm excited as well to own this this piece of a brand that i might be able to commercialize and make revenue from um so uh and and then just to show you how big

the hype got yesterday jimmy fallon uh joined the moonburg community um and is he in the discord he's i don't know if he's in the discord i haven't seen him there the discord is crazy these discords is you gotta it's mayhem it's totally him to keep up with these things um but again like this is a business so what do good business leaders do they they get marketing and they get pr and they create hype and kevin rose is a master uh entrepreneur and so he has got jimmy fallon on board and obviously what does that do um you know that just pushes it even further um but okay let's just talk about for a

second um why this is interesting from the perspective of like being a business leader and why i think like if you're in a startup or you're at the early stages of startup and you need to fundraise nfts is really an incredible model for fundraising and i just want to walk through this this sort of this this tweet because it talks a little bit about about that um and so so here's a couple things that that really come out of this is um

what you can do it with an nft is you can essentially fundraise in the case of moon birds they raised at this point i don't actually know how much based on their royalties what they got but off the initial mint they raised about 50 million dollars so you got 50 million dollars now everyone's not going to do this not everybody can sell at two and a half eth but when you think even if you could raise 500 000 right or a million dollars for your project by launching an nft what you're doing is you're a you don't have to go through this typical fundraising model which is you know lawyers are involved and you've got to figure out equity and you've got to figure out you know whether you're doing

friends and family or you're going to vcs much more complex you're talking about months and months to do that nft much quicker and b you're also building a community who has a direct incentive to support and grow your nft because they care about the brand that they're buying into so i think there's a really interesting you know it's a powerful alternative to selling shares basically is what i'm saying right it's also yes most people can't do it at the level that kevin rose did it or gary vaynerchuk has been doing it but like

it is free to build a community on the internet it is free to post and put out a podcast or to put out tweets or to put out instagram stuff and you can many people have built very big large communities um for free and then you can go to your community and say hey if you guys are jiving with what i'm doing let's create a pfp together and there you go there's your fundraising so like it's possible to do it as kevin rose did it even without being kevin rose you know and i think that opportunity is really cool yeah yeah very exciting okay uh i could talk about moon birds all day uh but let's shift to equally exciting news that came out of coinbase this week

yeah i think nfcs in general are probably about to go into a bull market as a result of coinbase and moon birds so there's a lot of there's a lot of hype right now uh but first jay congrats on uh on buying this i know that's a big um a big purchase and uh and it's so far it's working out it's still very early but so far anyway it looks good [Music] and the other yeah i should mention one more thing that i totally forgot to mention um one thing that's i think my internet might have just glitched a little bit apologized by glitch uh one thing that i i think is one that was very interesting with the moon birds project is so there's this

when we talk about nfts a lot of people talk about the making money side we're just always so drawn to money and how to make money and then you get into flipping nfts uh which you know that's not a sustainable model for businesses it's also just not going to help us grow web3 in a positive way so what moon birds is doing and you are seeing more and more nfts doing this is moon birds built into their smart contract a way to stake your moon bird they call it nesting because they're birds and so you want to build a nest um but that also and you're seeing more and more of that you like that joke you're seeing that because

this is this idea of like you want to build sustainable communities so you want people involved and so what this nesting or staking allows so now what the proof team can do is they can see who has held and been committed to their project the longest and then they can reward those people accordingly and that's i think that is very interesting part of loyalty we all talk about customer loyalty a lot in marketing just think about the power of that absolutely this is one of those it's a great experiment they're taking kind of the board at yacht club model but changing it and trying to innovate on it and i think that's super cool does it work out who knows hopefully for jay's sake it does but right we'll see it's another pfp project with the goal of building a

metaverse world yeah so there's a lot of those let's see what happens um i mean at least kevin rose is someone who has been proven to deliver right and with many other businesses so um i think that's a big reason why it's gotten hype and and uh and it's worth what they are right now yeah okay coinbase nfc so this is something we've been waiting for for months i think they announced like in november last year they were supposed to launch this thing never did um they've launched it's only in beta so not i think only 100 people actually get to use this but it's the coinbase nft marketplace um and it looks pretty awesome so far uh if you actually you go to the next um tweet uh jay yes so here you go so this is yano i

don't know who that is but he um was one of the hundred that got to use this and he says they didn't just launch an nft platform coinbase launched web through instagram and if you see the images you want to click on them jay um they're basically you can comment on nfts you can like like and reply and you can follow either people and or um like projects uh which is super cool so it becomes sort of a social platform slash nft marketplace and it actually if you're looking at these images it looks very much like uh like instagram um so i mean this is what i figured was gonna happen is that nfts are gonna become sort of social and we thought probably it was gonna happen by like instagram um integrating nfts into their platform

coinbase beats them to the punch um but i kind of think we're gonna see what instagram did to snapchat many years ago when snapchat released stories and then instagram goes okay we'll release stories too and beats it and zuckerberg said zuckerberg said back in march that instagram is launching an nft marketplace yeah the only thing i would say is facebook and instagram is probably way off on the technology and building like i don't think that they would have i mean they have obviously the money and a ton of developers but how many developers they have that are actually in the web three space that can use smart contracts in that we always they all left instagram and facebook yeah i went to coinbase exactly so uh we'll see it it'll be probably an epic battle over the coming years anyway yeah

well and actually one of the things that i um uh as soon as i saw this i was like okay this is cool but it's still just a centralized company that has like uh centralized social media protocol so it doesn't do anything for web3 social it would be the same thing as if instagram just integrated nft's kind of thing it's still all owned by one company um now it's coinbase so maybe people like that more but it's still just essentially known company there's no difference there um but their their ceo brian armstrong tweeted out yesterday says coinbase nft has a social component to it just want to acknowledge that we need to make social more decentralized over time we're stuck in a web 2.5 world still moving toward web3 and then he said

assets are decentralized and identity can be if you choose to but follower graphs comments and some of the post content are still centralized um but there's lots of opportunities to work on that and we talked about lens protocol before and a couple weeks ago and that's sort of your like um uh like foundational layer to build social platforms on top of so maybe coinbase uses something like that or maybe they build their own but it sounds like they want to go the decentralized route which is nice and we'll see how that plays out i'm sure facebook won't yeah and and you can just see you know really the move that needs to happen is just moving these centralized things from online to on chain right right right but there's this rush to get there so i understand

why coinbase is they're just trying to get there first to build the community to be there to own exactly right it's a minimum viable product right now and i mean that's only in beta and they're going to learn from it and build it out and then they're gonna hopefully try to figure out ways to make it more decentralized the thing that i saw from this that i think is the most exciting that i haven't really seen anyone talking about yet is coinbase is basically becoming the the onboarding machine for web3 so one of the things that you see in the video there in order to use the platform they thankfully it's not like your coinbase account it's a it's a non-custodial wallet like your metamask and stuff you just connect in the actual web 3-way and so what's cool is coinbase has their

own wallet like their comp their com um competitive wallet to metamask and so um when you go into the coinbase nfc marketplace you click connect just like you would if you're going to uni-swap or openc whatever connect wallet but they also have the option of create a wallet which no other application in the space has this so if you use uniswap openc whatever none of them have their own wallet and none of them for some reason are integrated with metamask so meaning if you're not already on board into the web3 ecosystem and you go to unisop the only button there is connect to wallet and in the web 2 version this is like login versus create an account right and none of the apps in web3 have this yet coinbase nft marketplace is the first one we're starting to see sort of that like web 2

onboarding experience in the web 3 world so that is super exciting because now anyone with nfts they go to this part of the onboarding experience is just creating a wallet in the same application it gets really weird when you like wanna go to uniswap and it's like i gotta go create a coinbase account to buy eth and then i gotta go to metamask to create a wallet and it's like that's where people get lost this puts the experience all in one and now coinbase becomes this application where you can exchange your fiat into crypto you can get a non-custodial wallet to use the web three world and you can use an nft marketplace and connect and log into it all in one branded one application and i think that is is a huge unlock for this

space [Music] it it makes me think of uh this great line i heard on a podcast the other day which was um just the challenges of the user experience for web 3 right now are what is not allowing a lot of people to come into the space and the concept was brought up of if it was as hard to figure out how to use an apple phone as it is to get into web 3 then apple would have never become apple right the reason that apple became apple was because they were able to create a device that was super user friendly that anybody in the world could pick up and figure out instantly and

that is what coinbase is doing here and that's right i mean just huge it's exciting we'll see when it goes live for like everyone to use right now it's just a hundred people so yeah we still gotta wait for it to go fully live so speaking of ux stuff happening in web3 i think this is really cool um for those of you if you don't know what uniswap is um it is a decentralized exchange um so it is basically coinbase but in the web 3 world and so meaning you can use non-custodial wallets where you actually own your seed phrase you own your coins and you can exchange from one token to another um it's on uniswap actually it's on a bunch of blockchains now i think polygon uniswap and then all the layer twos um and you can switch from

whatever token you want uh like just immediately permissionlessly anyone can do it anyone can use it and you just connect with a wallet um and so in order to use it though the way that web3 has worked always is let's say i want to interact with i don't know the ape discord right the board yacht club discord and i need eight tokens i gotta actually go into my like url type in uniswap.org i gotta open up the app launch it make sure the url is correct so that it's not like a scam and then i can connect my wallet and um and then exchange but i have to actually leave the you know boarded yacht club or whatever thing that i was actually going to do very weird ux um so what uniswap has just launched is it's like a widget

where you can basically embed the uniswap decks into any website you want and so now what's probably going to happen here is any any tool or any application or protocol or community that requires you to hold tokens to use it it makes sense for them to just embed this the unit swap dex right into their website and so part of the call to action is connect your wallet switch your ether into x token and then boom now you can enter our discord or you can see x content or you can do whatever um and it'll be all seamless so that's actually a really cool unlock i think as well yeah i think it's it's huge because one of the one of the gifts of web web3 and cryptocurrency is the ease of which to move currencies

around but then one of the challenges became that all of a sudden everyone launched their own token and it was like oh my gosh wait a second now we have to transfer between all these tokens so we so thank you unispot thank you for making this easier on all of us i think if you if you haven't noticed the way that web3 is going is everything is going to become tokenized everything so it will right now i think there's something like i don't know 12 000 tokens or something in existence there's going to be hundreds of thousands over the next decade millions probably so we're gonna need tools like you to swap that makes me think uh if you're in if you're in our discord uh we'd love to start a conversation about uh what what should be on chain what what should be a token what could be a

token because there's just so much to to think about right now in terms of the potential of all this but then also i think there's a great question of should it be on chain because right now everyone's pushing everybody everything should and i think there's a balance that we need to find as well so it'll be more conversation to come absolutely okay so speaking of more ux uh let's just make the picture big here um this is when i first sort of heard about i first started to understand the way that blockchain was gonna work it was actually through this model that i think bankless created it but i don't know um and it's called the d5 mullet and uh i absolutely love it so there was like

this this picture actually just describes decentralized finance so it's not necessarily the web 3 full-on space um it's more for finance but it's a good it gives you an idea of how this works so um basically on the top left of this picture it says legacy financial services and it has front end in one picture then back end and then it says fintech right so fintech is like your paypal's or your robinhood hood or questrade if you're in canada um and basically it is um the front end and it has like an arrow with innovation right so that's your paypal your robinhood etc where it's an easy user experience right it's super simple to use instead of like your bank and then it's like the back end is still using the old clunky um swift payment systems and all the

like shitty systems that we've built in the like decades ago kind of thing so it didn't actually make the movement of money any better it just made the user experience a little bit better yeah and then you have d5 so d5 applications like ave and i don't know curve and compound etc and they are the innovation of the back end with the old legacy front end if you've ever used like curve or any of these things it looks like websites that were made in like the 90s like it looks dial-up websites they're awful and the user experience is brutal and so the the full result in where we think this is going is you have the d5 mullet where you have the like fintech in the front and the d5 in the back right and so you have and we're already starting

to see it with things like robin hood and paypal where they're now using crypto and you can buy crypto with it and so it's still the nice paypal user experience or the robin user experience but in the back end they're moving money around on the blockchain rather than using swift and all the other stuff and so they can get better yields they can then offer their customers better yields they can move things across countries much easier and not have to deal with like us um uh what's the word um where the u.s blocks people from being able to use sanctions is the word i'm looking for so it's basically yeah blockchain on the bottom and then like nice web two platforms on the top that's the d5ml and i think we'll see that a lot with i mean twitter is doing that right like with

your profile pictures you can you can show that you host an nft and it's still twitter on the front and then you have the integration on the back coinbase is doing that right now it's not a d5 mullet that's the called the nft mullet right it's still a centralized easy to use openc same thing easy to use platform on the front and but it uses the blockchain on the back to move value around and secure value and that's that's kind of where we think this is going uh at least for the foreseeable future yeah and i think what's what's exciting to think about in the next where there's so much opportunity i mean there's there's opportunity on both sides there's opportunity in the back end for developers and computer engineers and researchers to build out those base

layers and the infrastructure and lots of projects working on that um and then there's opportunities on the front end to build out the better user experience the better apps um the the ways that the you know really the masses will will engage with right and i think that the reason that this is important to understand is like what you see and think of web 3 right now in crypto right now this is not how we're going to use this stuff we are not going to be interacting with blockchains and like my mom is never going to interact with the blockchain and like think about using gas before she makes a trade like that's never going to happen that will all be put underneath you know underneath and behind the whatever

platform is going to make the apps look and feel the easiest even d5 which to me is not that difficult we will never touch those protocols unless you want to like that's the thing is you have the option to if you want to go direct to protocol but there will be the app layer built on top of it that will use those in the background that's how this is all going to work and so we can look forward to that in the coming years yeah i agree yeah uh we got a little safety tip for everybody out there no you you go for it okay so metamask has a an app uh version that you can use i don't know if it's on just iphone um but um iphone is just iphone okay so i i have it as well and uh so you can have it as

a your chrome browser you can have it on iphone um but what they what's happening is apple iphone backs up your data on all of your apps and if you don't turn off metamask it can back up your data including your seed phrase and now your uh your your seed phrase to get in your menomask wall is in icloud uh which is obviously hackable and a centralized database uh so you don't want that and i guess there's already been says an estimated 650 000 uh in phishing scams so um you can turn this off by going to your settings in on your phone not metamask settings but on your actual iphone go into settings you go to icloud and then you can see think you just click backups is what

it's called and then you can see all the apps that have it and just select it off for metamask and delete the the old backup because you don't need it yeah you don't want that yeah yeah we'll we'll link to this in the show notes to this very simple process both count i've done it takes you two seconds but yeah definite if you haven't met a mask wallet on and you're using an iphone please do this right and i guess the last so since we're on the topic of kind of ux here of web3 uh you can go to argent um right now wallets are i believe they're going to be the most important tool in this space it's going to be sort of our front page of the internet moving forward that's where it's like your new account your dashboard probably your browser and probably where you'll message people

and talk from it's where you'll hold your money it's going to be kind of everything that's hard to believe because they're an awful user experience right now like metamask really sucks and so does phantom and so does every wall out there so i get it uh this is not what they'll be like in the future um what i wanted to bring up is there is a a wallet that i feel like everyone should download and just test out now because it's it's kind of where the future's going and it's called argent and what's interesting is arjun has been around for a long time um before ethereum had all of the high gas fees and before it had layer twos like it has now it was actually a smart contract wallet on ethereum and what that means is you don't actually have to go to ave

or uniswap or all these different platforms and use them like i said it was all built into their wallet and it did all the smart contract stuff for you and so like if you wanted to stake your eth you could just do it inside that wallet and it would just interact with the blockchain on your behalf and you didn't even have to think about signing transactions paying gas whatever just all for you at the time they also paid gas for you but then gas got so high that they actually shut down their business they were like this isn't going to work anymore so they rebuilt it on top of um uh zero knowledge proofs which is a layer two uh technology for ethereum and they've relaunched a few months ago um but what's really interesting about them it's still the smart contract uh wallet like i said which is great and

they've integrated with a bunch of different platforms and there's a lot of tokens on there so it's really cool you can even stake your eth on there inside of each 2.0 but what they've done is they're they're changing how you secure your wallet so right now we have the seed phrases the 12 or or you know 24 words that you got to write down on a piece of paper uh which is a pain and that will not be the future argent has done social recovery and this is really cool when you when you create your wallet um you can either assign friends or family to be a um forget what they call it but basically you can think of it as like a a governor of your wallet kind of thing a guardian that's it a guardian uh there's two people behind me in the same

room because we have an office and they can hear what's going on if you saw one of them walked by earlier with no shirt on you know just pay attention we're surfing here so yeah guardian and you can you can either select like friends or family so people you trust or you can select um your ledger wallet or your trezor wallet um which is really cool so it's almost like backing up your seed phrase but on your your cold wallet and then if let's say you lose your your wallet or your phone or whatever um you can use your guardians to say like this is the correct person and they should get their wallet back and i think you can like select like maybe three or five or whatever you want it to be and then they can help you get your

wallet back so you never have to deal with seed phrases at all you just kind of create your guardians and that's it um and so i've been using argent and what an amazing experience versus metamask it's actually insane so highly recommend checking that out it's still in like beta and it's not like doesn't have everything yet um but it's it's they're definitely ahead of any other wallet i've seen on any blockchain with any platform you know what i'm most excited about this is definitely the new security layers that are coming in because if you the seed phrase is just i mean you you lose your seed phrase you put it in a vault and your vault you know doesn't the batteries go go out you can't get into your vaults like the

amount of reasons why uh and you hear about it all the time because they're the catchy stories of you know this guy lost you know hundreds of millions in bitcoin and whatnot right so that's a big big win when we're gonna solve that absolutely okay so next up here uh just some quick hitters some some fun things that are i mean fun or funny things that are happening and this sort of connects to what i was saying before is should everything be an nft uh is is there value in that um and i think that right now we talk so much about nfts need to have utility utility utility and artists are saying nfcs don't need to

have utility they should just be art which is also true and i think there's a big point there to be made um but then you also have people that are just making entities out of anything and so uh one of the original infts that was made on was original but another two was made early on um was an nft of jack dorsey dorsey's who's the founder of twitter somebody made an nft of his first ever tweet and then somebody bought it for 2.9 million dollars there's no utility in this nft it is just the proof of this tweet on the blockchain and so then he listed it for sale a year later um

the entrepreneur who bought it who i don't know who he is he's a crypto entrepreneur um he listed it for sale for 48 million dollars uh and the top bid he got was 280 dollars i mean jack dorsey doesn't even like like nfts or web3 so like why would anyone assume that this is going to gain in value it makes no sense no idea um okay let's let's shift to another project that launched recently um vayner sports uh which is um gary vaynerchuk and his brother aj vanerchuk uh they um have a sports agency where they represent

athletes i think they have i don't actually know i think they have like a thousand athletes under representatives there's a lot of big names i think you know it's a big it's a big agency um and so um they launched an nft called the vayner sports pass uh or you might see it be called vsp um and there's a couple of reasons why we bring this up i think one of the main reasons why we bring it up is a lesson in how not to launch an nft um not necessarily because of the the business itself but in terms of the technical aspects of an nft and so what happened when when they launched this nft there was

i can't remember the exact number but i think that it was about 28 million dollars in gas or 20 or it might have been 28 million in total and 6 million was to the project and 22 million was to gas 28 in gas i'm pretty sure okay so 28 million in gas was wasted because of the smart contracts that were used and i'm not a smart contract expert and i'm not exactly sure the intricacies of why and i don't know if you maybe can enlighten why that was the case um but i can't i can give you the solution i can't tell you why it happened yeah but okay so let's give us give us the

solution then well okay so so they've actually launched multiple different um nfts kv in general not vayner sports but he's launched v friends which was on ethereum mainnet um over a year ago and done well he's trying to build the next disney with those nfts um so that's cool then they launched um the books i don't know gary book yes i don't know what it is something new with his books and he did this on the mutable x which is a layer two of ethereum and it's gasless so you don't even have to deal with gas ever um and it's they've traded over a hundred thousand in volume or something like that i forget what the number is but it's done really well over there on immutable x um and you have zero issues of gas now it's on layer two so not as many people are on there yet the

onboarding experience to get from layer two is still a bit difficult um so it's not as mainstream not that any of this is mainstream um and then they did vaynersports which was on ethereum and of course when you have so much hype um the gas is going to happen it's what happens with moon birds as well um and like it's just it's the way it always works and i mean the the future of blockchain is not going to be on any main net the future is layer two and so i don't know why they've already launched in layer two they already know that it works and it doesn't screw over any of their people because it's free there is no gas um and it works so i don't know why they didn't do it there uh it's kind of frustrating i thought he was going to be the guy that starts to

like lead projects to to go there and realize he don't have to do it on each main net um anyway he didn't uh but i would look at we're going to talk about layer 2 in a second but arbitrarily has a big nft marketplace already that's growing fast uh you can do immutable x more on the gaming side of things but if it's in the gaming world then it makes sense there um but we just got to stop doing that beneath mainnet it's so obvious i don't know what we're waiting for one more uh thing that i want to talk about with nfts and this sort of connects to one of the issues that a lot of nft projects have is um basically the creator rugging the

the people buying the nft the investors and the way that they can do that is they can essentially launch an nft because of the the way that we have it's funny how we're creating all these systems and frameworks of how you should launch an nft but really this is all brand new in the last you know year uh but the idea is typically when you launch an nft um you have a mint and then after the mint you have a reveal where you reveal your art and and then the most probably the most famous one of this was pixelmon which sold 70 million dollars in uh their mint um and had promises of making basically the next pokemon metaverse game uh and

then they they released they revealed their art and it was the worst art anybody's ever seen it was like someone from up work that they take yeah yeah and it was just it was just awful and so um and then and then the i don't actually remember where that project i don't even think that they did take all the money i think they're trying to to try to figure out how to make it work and they brought on some board members anyways um but this is what can happen is you can get rugged on an nft project and it's not awful to lose all your money or lose lose money to that so um there's a organization out there called the crypto fighters alliance and what they have done is they have created um erc 721 r

which is a new standard that you can use to ensure refunds for your nft project so basically the way this works is if you were to build in this into your smart contract that what you could say is okay we're gonna launch this nft project and you could say that anybody who buys the nfp project has 30 days and in those 30 days if you want a refund you can do that and that's built into the smart contract or you could say that 15 days like you can set the number of days they have you could say that they get full refund you could say they get partial refunds you can build that all into your smart contract and into your nft launch which is going to

build trust and i think i mean it's a great thing for the space obviously the challenge is anybody who's planning to rug is not going to build on this standard so they're not going to put in their smart contracts you're not going to have the opportunity to get that refund at least it's like a red flag if they don't build on you're like okay well maybe yeah there's more risk to this um it's also a little bit weird to allow refunds because this isn't like you're buying like a product i mean it's it's weird because you're buying a product you're also buying like you're investing in ownership or governance and like equity you could call it and so yeah imagine like being able to invest and then be like actually three days later i don't really it went down you're like actually i want that back you know so i

don't know how that's gonna work um but interesting experiment and let's see what happens i'm sure there's something there okay so this one is is optimism this is a layer two and a theorem that i wanna talk about because there's rumors just happened yesterday that they are launching a token um and the reason i want to talk about this is not because optimism might be a good token to buy or to get i have no idea this is not financial advice but the reason is because um i think there's a great opportunity here to be able to see as a builder or someone who wants to create a token or an nft in the future to see growth web 3 growth at its finest right here so optimism is like

one of the longest standing scalability companies for ethereum they've been in this space for a long time they've done iteration iteration of their product and it came out as an optimistic role up on top of ethereum which is basically just a layer two that takes a bunch of transactions and turns them into one transaction on each main net so um it's super cheap for the users that are using optimism um it looks and feels the same as ethereum but it's like a couple cents instead of you know a couple hundred dollars or whatever it is on each main net and so they launched last year i think it was in august or september and they got all the big um protocols and applications to build on optimism they have a ton of users i think if you go over to the

right to the l2 one go write one more they now have um this is arbitrary but if you go back and and look for optimism um yeah here it is optimism there so they have 650 million dollars of value locked on optimism um which is quite a bit in under a year right it's been like nine months or something eight months of being live um they've built a big community and so they've done it if you if you listen to our podcast um earlier this week where we talked about web3 growth one of the most important things you can do is to build a community first before you launch a token and um and then when you launch the token it's like pouring gasoline on the fire right where then all of a sudden the incentives come and

it just grows but if you just launch a token immediately and you have no community once those incentives go away everybody leaves and so optimism is one of those ones that they've built in an amazing community they have great network effects a great product they've proven that product and now they're about to launch a token and i i don't have a crystal ball i can't picture what happens here but i can only assume that this tvl of six 650 million is going to skyrocket to billions in the coming months once that token launches and the user base and activity is going to go insane so this is an opportunity to sort of watch what tokens can do to a business in sort of real time so i would keep my eye on optimism here

because i think it's going to be pretty amazing to watch us and also probably many of the other layer twos are gonna follow suit um but we'll see what happens and the reason why i think this happens is um so ethereum's been around for a long time and then over the last like year and a half you've had avalanche and solana et cetera that have come out avalanche is basically kind of like a copy of ethereum but because it's less busy it's much cheaper so for new people it makes more sense to go and play around on there but what avalanche has done is they have just done tons of incentives right talked about this a lot last i think it was last week last week yeah about issuance and and um and that sort of thing so they have tons of issuance and tons of

incentives to use the blockchain and you can make a bunch of money if you do that um but what a lot of people are saying is like uh when that incentives run out then what happens right we've seen it with polygon they had a ton of incentives to use their defy stuff as soon as they shut those off all the users left and went to other blockchains um and so we'll see what happens here with optimism they went the route of like let's build the product first let's get users in and then let's launch token which is the opposite of what avalanche did so i'm really excited to see how that plays out and i think it'll be a good model for uh for launching products in web3 moving forward yeah for sure something great to watch we'll we'll definitely i think follow up on that in uh the next few weeks again

scroll up actually i think you can click on optimism uh down on the left you can already see so this came out it's not even like it's not even for sure that they're gonna launch token they just have this like very cryptic message at the end of their latest like article that said like we're moving on to a new phase or something which is community-led and community-owned or something and so everyone's like oh token and in one day you can see that their their tvl jumped what is it 50 million 60 million dollars in one day so there you go they haven't even actually announced it it's already working so we'll see we'll we'll keep an eye on this over the coming weeks okay uh to wrap up as always we finish with uh um a highlight of a nft a dow a protocol

or a person in web3 and today is our web3 person of the month uh drum roll please kai i got to get one of those sound boards i know yeah yeah i need a the web 3 person of the month is punk6529 we actually don't know who the person is all we know is there is their nft but we know from listening to multiple podcasts and watching him on twitter uh he is a really uh an incredible human who is really moving for the space of web three uh very grounded very much comes from a viewpoint of

building the right way not focused on financial gain but focus on building community and making the world a better place um yeah six five two nine so actually is this the nft of the month or what three person of the month is both the person yeah but it could be nft too because that's who he is yeah yeah yeah yeah true so what's interesting about punk 6529 he was just on real vision and uh and i i work with real vision so we got to learn a little bit about him he didn't dox himself or anything but um he did like a two and a half hour long interview with raul and he comes from the traditional financial slash web 2 tech world so like we don't know who he is but he's somewhat of a big wig or was um

in in like the the tech world so whether it's like a twitter or a facebook or something that he was a part of we don't know um slash also in the financial world so he's like he's he's big in the in that world in this whole tech world and he's been really big in calling like what's gonna happen in crypto web 3 and he's a big um uh just like puts out a lot of good threads mainly on twitter on like what he thinks happening and he did it all throughout that nft boom he's been doing a lot on like the metaverse and he just really opens your eyes to what might happen in the future and he's been writing about a lot of things and he's also very early to buying a crypto punk which obviously did really well for him um and he's just

if you're not following this guy on twitter you should because he's the best tweet threads and it just makes you see things from a completely different perspective i mean one of the things that i learned from him was just um about building a metaverse uh and how this is going to go is he doesn't think that there will be um land for sale he's like land in the metaverse is it's not limited by any means right it's unlimited and it will always be unlimited so why would we ever put a price tag on it and so he's actually launching um if we go to the next um tweet there it's called ohm yeah or just open metaverse i think is what it is right yeah right so openmetaverse which is um i don't know if it's a community-led metaverse but basically it's not gonna

sell uh it's not gonna sell land um but it will be open for communities to come in and build and create their own cities for free uh inside of his metaverse and it'll be sort of community-led um and just he has this this threat is like a hundred and something tweets so like we're not gonna go through it um but i highly recommend you go check out his twitter and read through it because it's it's kind of mind-blowing on all the things that he's talking about he also has an incredible nft gallery that he's built out inside of i don't even know what metaverse it is but um it's amazing and it's his nfts are worth something of like hundreds of millions in total it's nuts and and i think what's so exciting about

people like this is there's this this fear around identity and pseudo anonymity in the space but of crypto and i think that can sometimes bring a negative view but there's also this great positive view to it in the sense that you can have people like punk six six five who clearly are not in it for the fame but they want to share and be part of the progression of humanity and that is really allowing him i think to create this identity where he can say things that he might not say under his own identity so yeah shout out to punk six five two

nine listen to the the real vision podcast uh or the video i think it's a video on real vision site actually yeah really good um and yeah and follow him if you're not because super exciting things and yeah open metaverse seems to be an exciting project to follow yeah there's a battle of metaverses right now i think everyone is building one and uh i'm bullish on on six five two nine definitely definitely and i mean like you said main thing everyone's selling land right now we don't need to buy land no matter this it's not to say land makes sense to buy on earth there's a limited amount of it there's only so much but in the metaverse it should be unloaded uh and yeah there's a there's a skeuomorphic way of thinking this thing

exactly exactly well that's a wrap jay that's a wrap wow if you are a marketer don't forget we are hiring and look there's an application job description in the show notes below go fill that out we want you we want all you want uh join the discord if you're not in the web3 academy discord we'd love to see you there we'd love to chat uh read the report the web3 report uh that we produced uh a couple months ago lots of great stuff in there that's still super relevant today uh some things that we actually predicted uh and uh yeah shoot us a message drop us a line have a wonderful day a wonderful weekend everybody we'll see you next

week we got next week we're going to the pod next week next week the founder of jump this is a big one yeah really really excited jump down one of the one of the dows that's leading uh a doubt that's focused on web3 growth and marketers uh but also just a real great framework for how to create a dow so lots lots to discuss and learn from him i'm really excited for that thank you friends take care everyone see you guys thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic

happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer 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