Web3 weekly rollup: VeeFriends toys at Macy's, NFT bear market and McDonald's accepting bitcoin

Transcript

GM GM welcome to the weekly roll up where we run down the top web 3 news from the past week to keep you up to date and ahead of the crowd my name is Jay Bird and this is Kyle reedhead and our goal here at web3 Academy is to help entrepreneurs businesses and creators explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and build thriving communities what are we talking about today oh man we got a lot this week we are talking about the friends partners with Macy's and Toys R Us honestly I thought Toys R Us is bankrupt so I was this shocked uh we are talking about nft bear Market is it over question mark uh let's find out Moon Birds launching a dow and proof is

seeding it with a couple Millie that's nice good for you guys Moon Birds uh discussing composability uh and network effects on open source blockchain ecosystems that's probably like the nerdiest sentence I've ever said but I'm excited to talk about it uh McDonald's is accepting Bitcoin and of course we have a web three person of the month Jay you want to give us a quick hint before we get into the show quick hint this person is a leading a leader of a top nft project and they have just launched a new collection uh this week and if you listen there's a little bit of alpha in here I'll tell you how you can get on into the raffle

to possibly get this it's a free mint it's a free mint people we like free mints we like free mints what are you grateful for Jay I am grateful for Jupiter the planet Jupiter I learned this the other day I did not know this I am grateful for Jupiter because sitting out there in our solar system Jupiter's gravity is far stronger than our gravity and so Jupiter is often referred to as the vacuum cleaner of our solar system because it sucks in asteroids and comets that are could be potentially flying towards us and killing us so little do we know Jupiter is saving Our Lives constantly out there

in the solar system thank you Jupiter wow that is a great you always come with some great gratitude but you know what's actually really funny is my gratitude today um is also about a planet I guess it's a star I don't know what I even call it but it's about the sun uh my gratitude is sunrises and sunsets so um I'm in Madeira Portugal which is this beautiful island and just the other day a couple friends and I we hiked up a mountain we watched the sun rise over the over the uh over the clouds which was super super cool over the ocean in the clouds and then we moved into our play place here that I'm in now where we could watch the sun set because it's on the other side of the island and we watch it set over the water and so we've

got to see it both one day and I was like oh this is fantastic but I love sunrises um and I'm pretty sure the sun is much much bigger than Jupiter and it also does what you're saying because its gravitational pull it's got to be even bigger so we're on the same page today we're connected we're a line Jay always the line always alive now before we get into this news before we dive into this episode let's just take a quick second uh to hear about our favorite sponsor and yes our only sponsor lens protocol we'll see you in two seconds the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the

creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content or their profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well just like how crypto is freeing us from Banks web3 is freeing us from these centralized platforms on lens protocol creators own their content own their profile and even their social graph and followers in the form of nfts this allows you to move freely from one social application to another with your content profile and followers moving along with you lens protocol enables

self-saverty for your social graph and interoperability across the internet at web3 Academy we believe this is the future of Social and that's why we partner with lens to ensure that the path of social media is heading in the right direction visit lens.xyz to learn more today all right friends we are back in this time to dive into the top news stories of the week and the first one is a big one I'm excited about it Gary vaynerchuk my boy someone I've looked up to and followed for a while uh he launched V friends and V friends is now partnering with Macy's and Toys R Us Jay why don't you walk us through what is going on here this is big yeah this is really big in the uh let me just categorize this first because I

think one thing kind you are really working on as we train and teach our listeners about how to use web3 in their business is try to understand the different business models in web3 and so be friends from the beginning has fallen into this IP business model he Gary has said this they are building IP and they have taken a big step towards monetizing that IP with this news so as Kyle mentioned they have the friends has partnered with Macy's and Toys R Us to turn their nfts into physical toys and let me just give you a rundown of sort of a context of how this is working so selected holders will get access to claim the collection first and all of

the v-friends community will have like priority RSVP access so there's benefit to the holders to get access to these toys first here's how the IP licenses work though so the holders of six chosen characters so six characters out of actually not sure how many total characters there is in the v French collections 200 no I thought it was 200 and something characters maybe there's different versions but I thought it was so different versions okay yeah okay so of those 200 something characters six were chosen and they will receive the benefits of basically their character being turned into a toy you can see on screen here I've got a giraffe V friend

that is one of the characters that's been turned into a toy so there's gonna be two series of these toys series one is a 10 inch plus plush toy that's like a soft toy and then sir and then series two is a six inch figurine toy um and additionally uh all 10 characters in series one and series two uh there will be a there will also be a blind box of four additional character they come out in a blind box and they'll all be eligible for an exclusive so if your if your character your nft is used as one of these then you get a you I don't think you get this but you're eligible

for an exclusive 30-minute token gated video call with Gary vaynerchuk himself where he it's specific to you know this is this is the collection looking to you know give value back to their token holders right and reward them uh some other guy you want to jump in here you want me to keep going a little bit more context no keep going you're doing a great job let me let me give a little bit more context and then I I would love to to hear your thoughts on this because there's just so much unwrap on using nft IP for toys some other things that they're focused on um unboxing is a big thing in the toy industry you know it's a huge part of

the basically the user experience of buying a toy I mean if you think about it there's actually um whether you think about like uh a collector like baseball cards right uh you know you open that pack and what's inside right so sometimes there's this and garyvee is doing this sometimes there's this blind box right this idea of like you don't know what the toy is and then other times you do know what the toy is and you're buying the toy and so they're playing with that which is interesting they're doing this unboxing but they're taking that to the digital first and the way they're doing that is each each collectible or figure has a printed QR code that will lead you lead

the owner to a 3D animated uh experience right so you can have a digital experience as well as a physical toy experience um and then if we sort of step back for a second and look Beyond this toy collection there's a real macro Trend here we're very early so I don't really know if I can say this is a trend yet but I think that there is a key signal happening right now that toys might be one of the next big plays for nfts uh and and there's already some let me give you some stats here so but when you say

toys do you mean digital or do you mean physical yeah so I mean I mean both basically yeah yeah right right so this this concept of buying a an nft as as a toy and you get a toy like experience and there's a another company crypt toys that is really focused on that and building this out uh but essentially yeah you buy the you buy the nft you make the digital experience same you unbox it it's fun it's a it's like a family event your kids and the parents sitting around the computer you all enjoy this feeling of interacting with this toy and then

there's this second step which is the digital idea of okay now you can like burn that nft and we'll mail you an actual toy and there's lots of projects playing with in between Kai what's what's your take on on V friends and on this nft toy play I mean I got a few things here one I mean I love it I think it puts nfts in the mainstream um when something becomes physical it becomes more real to people right and so I think a lot of people you know hate the word nft and they hate nfts and it's hard to hate these like I'm looking at a little toy giraffe and a little toy you know what I mean like these little characters that they created so like I think it starts to bring people around and go oh wait these are nfts like okay

they're not so bad you know um and then also I mean being in Macy's one of the biggest I think department stores in the world um you know I think this is a a huge um just kind of marketing play for the whole ecosystem so I think uh that's definitely a good thing Toys R Us I actually when I read the is Toys R Us not bankrupt I don't understand how they're still just in Canada Maybe no they did go bankrupt and then I think they they got saved okay they got saved yeah that was like the the crazy but I think I think toys are huge and there's a couple things here so the the digital thing you mentioned I think is great right they get the nft they can they can get the physical One play around with it but I think what's happening is like

most kids are actually playing digitally anyway right they're playing in games with their friends and Roblox and things and so if you can start to use these in these games um then there's so much value so much utility to that toy where instead of them playing in their room they're on their iPad and they're playing with it somehow right um I think the other like to take it a step further we're not at this point yet in terms of the tech but just thinking of the the metaverse style things when we read um uh what's his name's book um is Matthew Vaughn Matthew ball that's a thank you is once they have VR and they can actually like go and hold that toy in the digital world like I think these things are going to be amazing and kids like they

don't even need to go play it in their room now they can literally do it in their VR system so I think that's really cool um but I think the biggest take here is I got a feeling that the friends is gonna drop a movie soon um and it's gonna be some kids movie taking on Disney or Pixar let's give you that style of movie and it needs to be huge and I'm pumped to see it I just I'm pretty sure that's what Gary's been talking about a little bit I say Gary like he's a friend of mine I call him by a first name but uh so anyway I say one movie because I think it's coming and I think that's going to be huge so I'm pumped yeah I think you bring up a really interesting point around the kids and digital and and I only know this I don't

have kids myself but my friends that have kids whenever I go over and I hang out with these kids and I ask them you know the what'd you get for your birthday or what'd you get for Christmas or what's your favorite new toy they tell me something digital you know they'll show me what they got on Roblox recently or what they got on Minecraft recently and and they're spending they're not spending you know a few dollars on these things so kids are spending they're spending hundreds of dollars on digital items already and that's the thing that we don't realize this is already happening they're just not nfts but they're going to be and this is the first step plus the other the other quick take I have on this is isn't this such a smart business concept

of okay garyvee launches an nft to however many holders there were 10 000 let's say and then drops a toy now you've got ten thousand customers that want to buy your toy right they're stoked yeah of course I want to buy that toy and I want to buy it for everyone I know because I'm a holder because I feel so connected like that's the community element that you're getting with web3 I wonder how they chose the six characters that they included with the toys you know what I mean I wonder where that came from but I'm sure they'll drop that but they have like a story and a background for each character so that's why I think it starts to make these things come to life and I think that's just pretty cool when we got here we got a wizard an ape a giraffe a peacock a cow and a a

something with a heart head I don't even know what that is a cloud with a hard head no idea but we'll see he's doing things good job e friends all right we'll keep it up what's what what's up next Kai yeah this is a news story this is the uh the bear Market's over for nfts I think uh not actually I hope so I hope so I bet you do uh but no I saw this thread on Twitter uh from Martin Lee I think he works at nanson but I'm not 100 sure Hanson is like on chain um like analysis platform and basically he was breaking down kind of just the state of the nft ecosystem right now and my big takeaways from this thread was volumes are down I think it was

something like 80 like something ridiculous like volume down like crazy um we talked about this I think it was down like 99 of open seat he kind of said it wasn't actually that bad they didn't have their data correct um but it's it's bad um and so that tells me okay speculative Mania is over cool get that we've been talking about that for forever what was interesting This Thread though is transactions both on ethereum and Solana are all-time highs and so that was a little bit mind-blowing right so volumes is is the transaction uh is basically the the amount of of money that's getting traded transactions just like everything counts as one kind of thing and so this tells you that okay specif Mania is over but more businesses or games or whatever are using these nfts and they're using them at these low cost

or potentially even free um uh nfts and what's even more interesting is the ethereum numbers which are all-time high currently this is not even including any of the layer two data and when I think layer twos we have okay we have arbitrary options not very big on the nft side of things yet immutable though massive so many games on there so much utility they're like one of the top blockchains in terms of transactions so like they like the all-time high here is way higher than anybody thinks we're just not actually looking at the numbers properly and then I think about polygon and what's going down on a polygon that's not being put into this stuff well we have lens for example so the way that all of these um

if you want to scroll down to show the chart here but the way that all of these charts are looking at volume and transactions is via secondary sales on marketplaces so they're only looking at nfts that are moving from things like openc right and and the other ones magic eating et cetera it's not actually looking into well what about just people claiming them and using them for something right like lens protocol there's 70 000 people that have have claimed their handle um that's not showing up in here but every person that has followed someone on lens also mints an nft every time you follow someone every time you post something every time you collect something these are all so they must be in the millions and that's not showing up here in this data then you have Ticketmaster we talked about

Ticketmaster a couple weeks ago they are on the flow blockchain I Believe yeah um I was talking to someone and they were saying that ticket masters already minted 10 million nfts this year 10 million million and again that's not showing up here and then I just think like okay there's all these other bigger things happening on Starbucks or on Starbucks or on polygon and there's Starbucks royalty nfts to come soon the rewards loyalties yeah sorry and that's going to be millions and it's just like we are not really tracking these numbers properly there is so much activity going on in nfts but we're used to this sort of speculative Mania where entities have to be worth a hundred thousand that's what tells us if nfts are useful or not um and to me I I would like I wish we

could have some better data that looks at maybe the amount of users interacting with nfts the amount of users that are minting nfts because I feel like those just got to be skyrocketed with all the different use cases here and all the different businesses yeah I was actually looking at this funny image I was literally looking at this data yesterday uh I took a a fun deep dive on Dune which is just amazing what a fun fun place to just go through all these dashboards and the the number of unique wallets that are currently active with nfts is actually still pretty low which is wild you know it's only around a hundred thousand so you're so yeah but that's like daily active I think that's

not overall monthly active yeah that's daily active that's not like Traders though right that's over all over all number of wallets that have ever interacted with an nft is six million I believe okay interesting and that's and that is exponential like that chart was like flat until like last basically when I started buying nfts because I always buy the top guys so if you ever want to know when the top is just just ask me when I'm buying and don't buy then uh so last like like end of late last year was when it like was sort of flat flat and then it's just going exponential I think it was about like 1 million at that point and now we're up to like six million unique wallets that have entities I mean there's even like ens for example had

their highest um minting of of new eat the dresses um last month in September right at almost half a million uh just in one month and that's growing every single month basically even though we're supposedly in this bear market right now the prices aren't you know 99 East or whatever like they were last year but who cares right doesn't really make sense for that what's crazy is it's now becoming normal is when you start a business you go to GoDaddy you get your normal domain and then everyone also goes to ens and grabs their dot eth domain right so it's just another use case here of these of these nfts that just continues to go as you said exponential um one of the things that's interesting and that Jay and I are working on is we really want to start diving into more of

this on-chain data like I've got a feeling I haven't seen any reports on like lens for example and I just I feel like there's so much activity there and this is not because they're a sponsor I just actually really like what's going on there but that I don't see any numbers anywhere same with like the flow blockchain with Ticketmaster it's hard to know that there's actually 10 million when Starbucks comes out I want to be on top of that and see how much utility how much movement is happening what's going on how many users and it's easy to do because you can just plug into the to these chains uh with their ether scan or polygon scan whatever so anyway one of the things that's coming out uh in the near future with web3 Academy is we've partnered with our Dow web through Academy Dao there's a bunch of really

awesome people in there that are learning to do this stuff to analyze the Auntie metrics and we're going to start putting out some content where we're going to give you some solid numbers and breakdown projects uh and see like what kind of metrics they're having what's working what's not and really start to analyze these business models from like a number standpoint not just kind of like our opinion so really really excited for that uh if you're part of the Dow I mean you already know this but if case you didn't feel free to reach out we are we have tons of people working on this and we're excited to get our first piece of content out who knows when I won't say a date but going to be some pretty cool stuff coming out soon I'm so fired up for this because this is how you learn the problem is it's so

hard to learn about web3 right now because there's so much click bait right you're stuck in this world of like all every influencer every news media Outlet knows that they will get clicks if they put a more date and some you know millions of dollars were spent on this and that's not teaching you about web3 that is not what we are building here folks most of what we are building is actually going to be using nfts for things like interoperability and composability which you're actually going to talk about in a second here uh and that is the game changer here but the only way to learn that is to see what people are doing and so yeah let's

go write reports that show what is being done and what the real numbers are and then that's how you learn right that's that's at least how I learn right and that's how we find out what what business models are actually winning right right now we're just assuming everyone in this industry unless we're really diving in we want to make this stuff available to everyone and we want to stop assuming and start really analyzing so I think that's going to be super exciting okay speaking of projects that are doing a lot Jay the next big piece of news here is what Moon Birds uh disclosure I am a holder of moon Birds uh Moon Birds is launching a dow so what they are doing is they are proof which is the owner of moon Birds the

creator of moon Birds proof is taking 2.6 million dollars and they are giving it to a dow treasury which will be managed by Moon bird holders so if you are a moon bird holder you will have access to proposed votes and to be part of the management of this treasury this is really exciting I think this is this is another business model that we have seen that is really fascinating to me and Kai know that you feel the same this idea of if you're going to launch an nft should you also take part of your mint and give it to a treasury and then

build with your community like what a fantastic opportunity to create together now in terms of let me just give you some details Kai on the moon Birds doubt because there's some interesting things that they've done and then I'd love to have a discussion about what you think the setup of these things should be okay the primary purpose of this is to further the moon Birds ecosystem reputation in lore so they're looking for people who want to create projects that basically push Moon birds out further uh and what's interesting is the Dow will enable enable the moon Birds holders to endorse projects with trademark rights around the name Moon birds so I didn't realize

this but when Moon Birds went cc0 about two months ago that the cc0 was for the art so they took the art and they made that open source anybody can use it and reproduce it but that doesn't include the moon bird's name so the moon bird's name is not cc0 that is trademarked so what can happen is if somebody wants to use the moon bird's name what they'll be able to do is they'll be able to go to the Dow and say Hey I want to use the moon bird's name to go do this project you know I want to go create a metaverse of you know or a game using Moon words

and then and then the Dow will be able to vote and say yeah yeah sure you can have the you can trademark the moon bird's name and use it in your project so that I thought was was really interesting um the other thing that's interesting is the manner in which they are seeding the capital so uh let me just find the details here okay yeah so they are 2 million in eth from proof which let's be clear here proof they raised I think it was 250 million in ethos the mint and then they've done about 500 million in secondary sales since the month wow which they take a royalty on that so uh and and proof has raised 50 million from

VC uh so proof is very well funded full Market high five say holy try doing that these days oh my God no chance no chance I I wonder will this ever happen again I'm not sure not at this level I don't think uh so so what they're doing is they're taking 2 million in each putting into a treasury then they are also taking Moon birds are sorry proof held back certain Moon birds in their own wallet and they're giving I believe it's 10 of those Moon Birds into the treasury and then they're also taking 500 000 U.S and buying the floor of moon Birds currently

so we're gonna buy like 30 they think it'll be about 37 Moon birds that they'll buy for 500 000 U.S and those Moon birds will also go to the treasury so what it means is the treasury is not just managing eth and dollars they're also managing about 40 to 50 Moon birds that they'll be able to decide like do we keep those do we sell those and obviously if you have Moon Birds those you can stake those and there's rewards for staking and you know so it's a it's a question of where the value is right like would you rather sell those and have the cash or the eth or whether you would you rather keep those and so it's interesting to think about Dow treasury management as well and then one more thing Kai and then

I'll let you jump in um the other interesting thing that they did here is okay so you think about like in case you give this money to the to the treasury and then you hand over voting rights to it to the nft holders and that's the way they're doing it basically there's going to be this hasn't launched by the way this is just their announcement that they're doing this you'll be able to log in or tokengade I should say into a site to prove you have an a moon version of T and then you'll be able to access the voting and proposals and whatnot um in the beginning they are holding back some rights around voting they're basically holding veto power in the beginning which is very

interesting so they're saying you guys have the control of this treasury you guys can vote but if we don't like what you are doing we can veto it so that's very like a short period of time or for how long that the way I understand it I haven't seen a time frame on it but it sounds like so nouns did this in the beginning Nance also did this and as I've heard I don't think they ever really necessarily take away the veto rights I think they kind of hold it forever but it's like a uh like a you know an agreement that okay we haven't used it we're never going to use it type thing or eventually they might change it I mean I don't I don't hate that like they are putting a lot of

money into here and a lot of effort into this and like sometimes you just like if they're the Visionary you know and they're the ones funding it and they're the ones kind of creating a lot of this and kind of pushing this thing forward like sometimes they might need to step in just in case you know it's again it's an experiment when's a lot like we haven't really done a lot of building these massive businesses with I don't know how many people are going to be in this Dow but um was it a thousand ten thousand ten thousand Moon Birds holders plus there's gonna be moonbird mythics which is their next collection that's dropping air dropping to holders in like the new year so you're probably talking like 10 to 20 000 people right I I think the the big thing is people understand like we don't

really have a lot of precedent of building a business with 10 000 people together right that are all strangers around the world so like as someone who's gonna go and say hey we're gonna put millions of dollars in here and put a lot of effort into building this thing like yeah maybe I might need some veto power for a little bit here just to make sure we're doing the right thing I don't mind that to be completely honest um but I what I would hope happens is once they go and things start rolling and they're confident in this Dao like they should step up and be like okay things are rolling like our veto power goes I don't know we'll see if they do that but that's kind of the way I would like to see it let me ask you this question Kai if you were to drop an nft

and let's assume that it sold out and it did well would you put a portion of the funds from the mint or from the royalty towards Adele uh yeah absolutely I think you kind of I I don't really understand why you wouldn't do that so like to me it's like if you're gonna launch an nft to build a community right um you make that money up front and then it's what like are you just gonna basically take that and then the community does what right like is that just is that it or is the for me the reason you launch nft is it's ownership you want to incentivize your community to help build with you and if you don't then share that treasury with them uh no

I'm not saying you have to share all of it I think that's a terrible idea you obviously have built up this audience built up this community you've probably been doing this for years if you were able to sell out something for ten thousand uh with ten thousand people so like you should be rewarded for that but I think X percent and it depends on many factors should definitely go to funding them to get started enrolling absolutely I mean there are many ways you can do it and I've actually just written um a very deep deep the deepest of Dives on token exit communities with nfts it's a three-part series the first one comes out actually uh on Monday and uh and I actually break down all the different ways that you can tokenize communities and the different business models and

what makes sense and it's very very interesting I actually have a lot more to say but I'm going to save it for that um because there's so much at stake in there's so many different ways you can do it but to me the whole point is you need to align the incentives of both the Creator uh and the community and so um but the thing is if you give away 100 to the community you no longer align the incentives because now the creator has just lost their entire business so that doesn't make sense either so there's the spectrum that I think people need to understand and this is cool I like that they're holding on to the Moon bird set of tease as their treasury because that again aligns incentive right um so that's really cool I don't know there's a lot of it right here and what

we've seen is we've seen we've seen a few different models we've seen 50 50 where nft projects have done 50 to creators and 50 to the Dow we've seen now we're seeing Moon Birds where they're announcing it later and they're they're giving seeding the Dow we've seen board apoc club which launched ape coin and then built a dow off of a coin uh so we've seen different models of this nouns is another example but I think that the the framing that I have in my head is it's probably somewhere between 10 to 50 percent that makes sense to give to the Dow that's sort of

the range that I keep seeing but exactly how you do it depends upon what you're trying to achieve but you nailed it Kai it's all about aligned incentives uh I'd love to hear from our listeners what do you guys think this is going to be our poll of the week is should nft projects provide a portion of their mint to a dow treasury governed by their holders what do you guys think yeah us know love to hear your comments check out our Twitter we're going to be putting up that poll in the next few days or reply to our newsletter and let us know what you think it's great to hear you guys takes on this it will be a pinned post on Twitter so you can go and you can uh you can put it in there uh but yeah would love to hear that I think this is again

something we're all experimenting and innovating with I think the one thing people need to understand is that as I was doing my researchers I'm writing this article some of these projects like Moon birds and V friends Etc they made like you said hundreds of millions that's not happening okay and anymore in this bear Market not to mention like there are a lot of creators like call them influencers people who create content who have newsletters Etc that can do this model but they don't have like moonbirds and Kevin Rose has I don't know millions of followers I think on Twitter right like he has a massive audience same with Gary vaynerchuk like tens of millions so like of course they can reach these numbers of hundreds of millions the most people who are going to use this most creators that are

building their communities are not that big and so they shouldn't expect this ridiculous amounts of money so this is why this do you share and how much do you share really matters because when it's hundreds of millions okay sure whatever share whatever you want everyone's happy but when it's like I don't know 50 000 or 100 000 it's like well you need some from all the work you did so like I don't know it really depends on a lot of things so let us know what you think would love to hear your opinion on Dows and whether they should or sorry nft projects where they should share with a Dao and also how we can align incentives better in this space but I think that leads nicely into our next topic here Kai which is all about a composability which is

another form of aligning incentives what's what's going on over over here at lensport what is lensport yeah so lots happening here uh on lens protocol and again we don't mean to always be talking about lens uh just because they're a sponsor uh they just actually have a lot of cool going on uh it's super bullish on this ecosystem as a whole what's really interesting here with lens so lens protocols you guys know is the social graph you have a bunch of social apps on top of it and then what we have launching are tools and applications and things that enable these apps to actually function and work better that the apps themselves don't need to build so for example um lensport dislodge which is a lens specific Marketplace so this plays off

of your discussion last week Jay on um more like unique or like Boutique marketplaces I don't know what we call these but you have the general ones like open C but then you have some that are specific to certain projects uh and that kind of stuff and I didn't really get why you said it was like well they can create a better user experience I was like okay I kind of get that but like I don't know I could probably just still use openc then I read what lensport is and this is a lens specific Marketplace and essentially what the purpose of this is is everything is an ft on lens protocol and if you want to go and collect let's say a post or an nft of someone who has x amount of followers or gets x amount of collections or retweets or is in this

type of you know industry or whatever it is you know this type of content there are specific filters and things that you would need to actually be able to search that and make that a good ux it'd be very difficult actually impossible to do that on openc because openc is a more General open Play Oh open C is a more General Marketplace which isn't going to have those kind of filters and those selections and for openc to do that for like every type of project like this it would just be unheard of and probably impossible so lens actually needs it's and the other thing is is a lot of the lens nfts are actually hidden on openc because there's so many of them right you don't need to see them you don't need to see like my follow nft of

following you it's more of an interoperability protocol it's not a thing that you need to see in openc for example so what lensport does is allows you to start filtering and searching for all these different nfts on the uh in the ecosystem and you can do it from with more kind of advanced search filters that you can't do on any of the other marketplaces so um that to me is super super cool uh and basically that just enables some great features for all of the let's think of the apps that are being built in their lenser lens tube um you know favor and orb which we just had on the podcast you know there's um there's so many different ones and they don't have to build a marketplace now it's already done for them and then if you pop over the next nfts here or

nfts the next uh tweets we have oh you didn't pull them up so we have two uh other launches one was push protocol um and the other one is ens and these are Integrations into the lens ecosystems this is really cool now one of the things you want on a social platform obviously is notifications you want to know that someone commented or retweeted or whatever right of course but what's crazy is lens didn't even need to build that someone else has built that called push protocol and that is now integrated into lens so all of a sudden this is um by the way epns who we actually had on the podcast uh I don't know a couple months ago they've changed their name to

push protocol and so now what's cool is none of these apps needed to build the push notifications feature it's already built for them because it already exists in the polygon ecosystem and they can just plug that in that's composability right then you have ens which is a way that we sign into different applications and it takes our display name it takes our profile picture Etc well instead of having your ens and your lens you can now integrate those together and when you sign in with your ens it now displays your lens name your lens profile picture your lens cover photo Etc so again we're sort of integrating all these different tools together and really the idea here is that this is an ecosystem right if we think of network

effects every time that a new project is built on top of lens or on top of polygon because they're all you know integrate with one another it adds more value to every single one of those businesses or those protocols that are already on there and so this is just this cool kind of like positive feedback loop that's happening on lens is every time a new project comes it lifts up all the existing ones that are already on it and this just keeps happening there's already over 100 apps being built on there um so to me and this is the same scenario that happened with ethereum and why it grew so much is these Network effects of more developers more projects more tokens Etc and you're starting to see this on lens and there's going to be other ecosystems that do the same thing and so it's just something to watch for

because that's really how this this ecosystem is going to play out it's very interesting yeah I think the power of interoperability and composability I mean those are two words that are sort of they're new right we haven't really used I mean they're obviously words that apply to many other Industries but they're they're supercharged in this web 3 world in a way that we haven't experienced before and quite frankly in in a way that we really we're only scratching the surface right like this is It's hard to because we're not we don't yet have you know hundreds of millions of wallets and hundreds of millions of people using this we're not

seeing all these composability benefits yet at their full scale it's like one of those like we're in that like cold start problem right where you know well it's fun to build but we need the users and we can't really do a lot of things until we get the users but I think these are they're clearly showing with this composability and integration with ens and was push the power of network effect but also the marketplace thing gets me really excited because I just think that there is if there's going to be trillions of nfts which I believe there will be how are we going to discover those nfts I I stand by there's going to be trillions of ethereum nfts bullish on

ethereum uh oh what this is two episodes in a row where you've done this done this you make it sound like I've sinned I mean I feel like back in the day I always was talking about a theory but everyone was chirped me for it so I don't know but anyways maybe I should say that they'll be optimism nfts or they'll be arbitrary nfts they'll be Layer Two nfts right uh but what if there's going to be trillions of nfts then there's this how are we going to discover those nfts how are we going to curate them how are we going to you know interact with them in a in a in a friendly user experience way well there's going to be marketplaces but

marketplaces aren't just going to be for selling like I think that's a key thing they're not just gonna be trading and selling they're also going to be for the purpose of just Discovery and searching the same way like think about think about search right and the SEO and Google well how are we going to search nfts marketplaces are going to play in that I'm not even sure I'm going down a little bit of a thread because my mind is so excited about this what happens when there's trillions of nfts but yeah I think there's lenses just really demonstrating for us the power of building together and how how much that can create absolutely open source product I mean it's not a block it's not necessarily a

blockchain thing or a web three thing it's just open source it's just thankfully web3 has you know predominantly been open source whereas web 2 chose the other route all right what's our last big news take of the week Jay McDonald's is accepting a Bitcoin as legal tender in Lugano which is a city in Switzerland that I actually visited this summer funny enough beautiful city on gorgeous Lake just highly highly recommend it uh I did not use Bitcoin to buy anything while I was there quite frankly I'm not sure I understand why you would use Bitcoin to buy anything but it's not just Bitcoin they are also accepting tether uh which is one of the

I believe tether is actually the largest stable coin in the world the most volume uh so but the the real story here isn't necessarily about McDonald's accepting this it's more what Lugano is doing that is very interesting so Lugano as a city is and I mean this is so Swiss you know the Swiss are known for being leaders in the banking world and being a big a country that a lot of people go to for their financial needs and obviously they want to be ahead of the curve on crypto too so Lugano said okay we want to be the blockchain capital of Switzerland

and of Europe and so they've made some very quick moves to they basically they created a fund of a hundred million dollars where they are using that money to I think they two funds one of a hundred million and one of uh like 10 million or 6 million a camera exact number and they're using those funds three million it's three million 300 million and it's Swiss Francs not dollars I don't know what that is conversion rate but it's fine Swiss Francs is uh pretty I think it's slightly higher than the US dollar but pretty much one to one uh so so and what they're doing with this is they're going out to local businesses and they're training them on how you can use blockchain and crypto in your business they are creating education programs

they are offering this to businesses is that want to set up and want to build blockchain companies in Lugano so they're developing this you know this basically like the uh I don't know blockchain Valley is the word but like the Silicon Valley of crypto in in Lugano and I think that there is you know there's there's a real need for we saw it with El Salvador making Bitcoin legal tender there is there's this sort of there's a real need for Regulators to show up right now right and to help guide us on how we should be doing this and how we should be building and in the face of Regulation there's also a need

for local governments to say hey here's resources and here's some help and it's really nice to see that coming from from the Swiss then Lugano make Bitcoin legal tender too or no it did I thought they did yeah okay I thought they did that's cool yeah yeah they do they're they're now in full competition with El Salvador to be the blockchain valley that's right that's right all right I gotta finish off my Euro trip here this year in Switzerland just to check it out although I wouldn't buy a burger at McDonald's first of all and then I wouldn't do it with Bitcoin second of all I love McDonald's I'm such a sucker for McDonald's I just love it it might have something to do with the fact that I'm like I'm tall and skinny and my metabolism works so fast that I

could eat McDonald's every day and never gain a pound but you know let me give you a quick a quick take on this you actually are also tall and skinny but you're you're more you're more fit than I am uh let me give you a quick take that i s that I heard on this which is actually not specific to legalizing uh making Bitcoin legal tender but more when you think about our currency and our current currency was developed what like a hundred years ago and when we developed it what did we do we chose some numbers in order to denominate bills to and coins to so we had a one dollar coin and we had a five dollar bill and a ten dollar bill and a twenty

dollar bill and as a result of that the pricing structure of of Commerce really tied to those numbers right that's why you see things that are like 99 Cents and 9.99 and 19.99 right and we still stick to that today but our currency has inflated like 99 since then right so what's happened is there is we're still living in this world where the we have to stick to the old currency pricing but we have so much inflation and all of a sudden if you step back and look at what's happening

in the nft market in markets where ethereum or another or Solana is the base currency you're it's like a it's like a reset and that is I think part of the reason why you've seen these crazy numbers in nfts because people are willing to spend oh it's one eth right okay sure I'll spend one eighth but that's two thousand dollars right there there is this I think there's this reset happening that's very very interesting if now I'm not saying I don't necessarily think we're going to use ethereum and Bitcoin as you know as legal tender and they're going to become

the common currency for purchasing Commerce online but I do think that there is an interesting shift which is what is allowed these nft projects to raise such crazy money yeah I completely agree it's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out uh but let's move on to a new subject now Jay and why don't you tell us who the web three person of the month is the web 3 Person of the month is do I get a drum roll drum roll please Alex Tobe Alexander Tobe Alex Tobe is the founder of and CEO of Truth labs truth Labs is one of the leading nft

projects and the reason we picked Alex is this guy is he's just he is messing around with blockchain in the most creative Innovative way I have seen and I'm so inspired by people like him and we need more Builders like him who are willing to take risks so let me just give you a little bit of background and then I've got a little bit of alpha because Alex and his team have recently watched something pretty exciting so background well Alex comes from the web 2 world he was a founder of a couple companies sold a company about a year ago he decided to jump into web three he started the Illuminati Project he started truth

Labs which is his Corporation and out of Truth labs they launched the Illuminati Project which was an nft that they launched at the beginning of of the year I think it was in January of 2022 8128 collection sold that out for you know bull market Vibes I think it was like 0.2 eth or something like that okay and and and split it with the Dow did exactly what we were talking about earlier in the episode 50 to the Dow 50 to the creators out of that Dow uh they have started to do and build really cool things truth Labs also launched Goblin Town which was

a really successful nft that came out uh in April and I think one thing that's really impressive is these guys are building in the Bear right and they've consistently launched things in the bear so here's what happened out of the Dow they start they're starting to you know get ideas and this doubt I I believe that they have like a weekly Dow call everybody can attend and learn what's going on and make proposals and so one one guy in the Dow saw found a smart contract that predates crypto punks so it was an avatar project that predates crypto

punks and so they looked into this and basically this Creator too early right this was too early nobody nobody was into this stuff yet but they said okay does do we want to try as a Dao to resurrect this project and so they came up with a code name OPP which is just a great code name OPP you know me you know got great rap vibes and OPP stands for operation pre punks and they've been working on this over the last few months and they have just launched this project and so they now have released the the actual name of

this project so the name of this project is crypto face and the way it's a terrible amazing it's really it's a pretty basic name but these guys are so good at branding so I'm sort of surprised it must have to do with let me tell you about this project it must connect to the project itself or maybe the original name although I'm not sure what the original name was so the way this project works is and this is where it's so fun to see people that are innovating with smart contracts and experimenting with them so this original project was uh never never minted out but the idea was like it was a build your own

avatar okay and then when you built your own avatar uh you could then like mint it onto the blockchain and apparently this this project was so old that the original website this is in 2017. they actually asked you to enter your seed phase directly into the website so what what truth and Illuminati Dao did was they've resurrected crypto face this project and now and essentially it's this you know idea of is this the first profile picture project is this the first digital Avatar project pre-dating crypto punks now crypto punks wasn't really meant to be a pfp project

it was more of an art project it was sort of a political statement at the time uh so a little bit different but what's cool is when they recreated when they built a new smart contract so right now you can go you can sign up for a raffle on procrement if you win that raffle you will get free mint of a I believe it's like a pass that you'll get so you'll get a free mint of a pass that pass will allow you to go to crypto face dot me you'll enter that using that pass you'll be able to use their Avatar Builder you'll be able to create an avatar and mint it and then when you mint that Avatar the token hash connects

to the original smart contract so in your wallet you can show the the provenance of this right that this was that this was a early project possibly one of the first and then this is what they also did which is super cool is this original smart contract and this is probably just because this is so old um was non-transferable so even those in nft you couldn't couldn't transfer it so I guess back then people weren't thinking about trading in marketplaces and speculation uh so they wanted to figure out how to honor that a little bit so what they did was they they put into the smart contract that the original mentor of the crypto face

we'll get three percent royalty ongoing on future sales so if you are the first you free mint this you build your avatar you mint your crypto face and then let's say you sell it to somebody else and you sell it for I don't know 0.2 each you get three percent of that and then that person sells it next for one youth you get three percent of that as the original mentor and what's interesting is at the same time two weeks ago uh Tyler Hobbs one of the leading general art art project or art artists I should say he launched his new project he did the same thing he gave two percent of royalty two original mentors in ongoing that's an interesting model I like that

I haven't seen that so far that's cool yeah that's what I wanted to tell you about this time I'm so fired up on this model I'm like oh new Revenue models to get holders royalties like right that is a nice little piece of utility I mean I wonder obviously it's not enforceable so like does this play out long term I mean my recognitions always don't rely on it um but it is that's very interesting I like that that's cool um well congrats to the web 3 Person of the of the month uh shout out Alex keep building shout out to Alex yeah if you want to come on the podcast we'd love to have you on the show really impressed with everything you're doing dude all right as we wrap up we're gonna do our

quick speed round uh we've got a few different uh pieces of news to talk about and then we will wrap up with our poll uh which we have a bit of a discussion on and then we are done folks so the first one um azerbala I don't even know how to say that azerbola nft mint postponed after art goes viral for wrong reasons Jay you've got 60 seconds on the clock to give your opinion go not again not again why does this keep happening folks do not invest in nft projects that are have Founders that are not doxed I don't understand this like we keep doing this and like it's like we're surprised every time Pixelmon did

this like this keeps happening there unfortunately is Bad actors in the space and if you are a project you should dox yourself you should build with your community you should be doing those things as a leader of a project what happened in this one what's the story well the story oh sorry I didn't even say what the story was you get two stories I got incited in my take you got 20 seconds hazar Bala uh created an nft and they minted their nft they raised 3.6 million dollars off the mint and then they revealed the art because art reveal happens afterwards often these nft projects and it's it's not good art Pixelmon is pissed exactly just like pistol man and so everyone's pissed and

they got rugged and yeah don't invest in non-docs teams somehow you made that in under a minute well done or close to a minute okay next up Sega Sega Genesis has announced its first blockchain game go I mean we've talked about over and over again how gaming I think is going to be one of the biggest things here on the blockchain and I mean Sega brings you back to my like young young younger days playing I think it was Sonic the Hedgehog uh so I mean I couldn't be more pumped about this we'll see what game they throw in here uh but uh you know I think this is the way it's all going to go and I think it's not going to be just Sega we're going to see Nintendo we're going to see you know all the big

players moving into this um so sega's just taking the first jump at it maybe it's because they were never really the biggest of the best and so this is their chance to like catch up but either way they're all going this route so good to see do you think Nintendo will go this route Nintendo has specifically said multiple times that they will not do nft yeah 100 they will go straight they have to otherwise see you later you know the amount of people in the music industry that said they weren't going to go that route either right the digital route and look at what happened so true we can try all right next up we have Horizon raises 40 million in series B backed by Ubisoft and take two shout out Horizon our boy Michael Sanders who we had on the podcast a few

weeks ago just closed a 40 million dollar round this is awesome this is so exciting to see and this is so exciting to see because who is horizon horizon is one of the leading blockchain game developers they've also co-authored uh some standards uh the co-author the ERC 1155 standard and let's be clear I'm very bullish on games being the biggest onboarding ramp to blockchain because if you give a free nft to somebody to play your game then they're excited they don't they play your game they don't even know it's an nft this is what's happening currently with the free to

play model or the free free to own I can't remember what's called the current model but free to own is the new model and the guys at Horizon are going to be leading this with their game skyweaver which is awesome if you have never played at blockchain a game go give it a try super stoked on this very bullish next up Kai I've got Gary again sorry I can't overlast uh Kim Kardashian gets a 1.26 million fine for illegally Shilling a token yeah she showed uh eth Max back in the day actually a few celebrities did I think I don't think it was just her um which is hilarious and kind of ridiculous and really is what

makes me uh someone hate you know parts of this whole industry I didn't even want to talk about this stupid yeah she probably got what she deserves and I don't really care it's this is nothing to her but the funniest part of this whole thing was that Gary Gensler actually tweeted out bragging that he charged Kim Kardashian for unlawfully touting of crypto security and he basically says that this is a reminder to other celebrities and influencers like he's warning the celebrities of the world to not show crypto and that is the funniest thing I've ever seen Gary you're just a big loser wait who who is the uh the head of the SEC so uh he runs like the Securities laws and things like that but he's also a blockchain expert

like he taught it at I think it was MIT so he actually knows a lot of this but he's just been like against this industry for a while now and uh but the fact that he's breaking over Kim Kardashian's just hilarious to me okay last last one Christie's launches nft art platform yeah this is really cool and really exciting uh Christie's which is one of the leading auction houses in the world for for art for high-end art I believe they're like a 150 year old company a 150 year old company is getting into blockchain and web3 folks like are we going mainstream or are we going mainstream this is also really cool if

you guys get a chance you should just go check out their platform because it's really well made they partnered with uh a spatial XR which is a leading um virtual reality metaverse Builder and so you can go in you can go into their metaverse you can see the art you can walk around it's new so it's pretty slow and it'll probably bog down your computer but I think that there's just there is something happening when a 150 year old company is like Hey we're going to start selling millions of dollars worth of digital art on our platform well they have the the benefit of seeing I think it was crypto pump and maybe an auto glyph or something or art blocks that was sold through Christie's like last year so yeah they get to see it

firsthand they go whoa powerful whoa okay last one oh I thought that was the last one I got one more for you Kai one more vayner3 publishes Enterprise guide to poapps I mean look I mean we haven't mentioned pull-ups in a long time actually but we used to always mention these and just say like this is your way of teaching your audience um or your customers or your community how to get into web3 right how to mince none of tea uh and get a wallet basically and I think it's the first touch that most companies should do um and vayner3 being a leader in this space for Enterprises um they're creating a guide for that and I love it this is actually what Webster Academy is working towards is creating

guides similar to this not for the Enterprise level but for those who are creators those who are entrepreneurs starting out and building business in here or want to move their web 2 business into utilizing nfts and tokens we are actually on the mission to create these guides along with our partnership with the web3 academy Dao so look for more guides coming your way not from Vayner 3 but from us from Webster Academy that's my take hahaha nice I love it I love it sorry enough okay great great quick hits well done we're getting good at those 60 seconds I think uh I think we're within it okay last last piece of news let's talk about the pull of the week Kai last week's

poll of the week came in very interesting results question was what's the best platform to build community in web 3. 46 percent said Twitter 40 said Discord 10 Telegram and then four percent said other what are your takes on this guy yeah I mean first of all this poll is on Twitter so uh I'm gonna assume you know maybe that's why Twitter has the edge here like we did this poll in Discord I bet you'd be different we did in telegram but to be different maybe that's something we should test um I would say this first I think to build a community you've got to be on multiple platforms because Community is where Community wants to be and they are

on different platforms doing different things right like I use Twitter Jay doesn't use Twitter so much right um and you know many people use Discord many people don't use Discord some people use Instagram like whatever so it's ultimately it's where can you create connections where can you like Community is how can you you know bring together a group of people who share a saved Mission or same goal or Vision uh and connect them right and so instead of just like us like a podcast right now this is not building Community this is building an audience because you can't speak to us and you can't speak to each other but if you go into our Discord which is currently closed but it's opening soon so stay tuned for a big news drop in the coming weeks but allows you to speak to us we can speak to you

and then you can speak to others that are a part of this as well that's real Community Twitter does enable this I don't believe it should be number one here I think it's actually Discord a lot of companies that I'm speaking to that have media platforms you know looking to turn Their audience into Community are electing to go the Discord route I do think a lot of people believe that Discord is too difficult which it is there's just a learning curve and they're building in some amazing features to enable Community I think the key thing is you just really gotta understand how to set it up properly um but I'm big on Discord I don't think telegram is a great place for Community it's a great place for announcements like I don't know to me you can't have a you can't scale community and telegram

Discord and Twitter though definitely the two best Reddit would be another great one yeah it's a great point of the difference between an audience and a community but I agree I think that you need in order to build a community you need somewhere you can interact with people it needs to be one-to-one and it's difficult to do that on Twitter you can do it a little bit with Twitter spaces uh either way happy to see how many people are voting on this because everybody wants to build community and that's what we're all about here at web through Academy is building community so thanks so much to all of you guys for listening and being a part of our community once again our Poll for next week as a reminder if you want to participate check out Twitter or reply

to our newsletter should nft projects provide a portion of their mint to a dow treasury governed by holders and take a step further and reply with what percent you believe you can just comment on the the pin post and let us know or you can do it in the newsletter that would be amazing and once we open the Discord back up for all of you beautiful amazing people you can actually just do it in there but give us a little bit of time until we make it just just bright and perfect for everyone that's a wrap Kai I love you man love you too brother thank you and that's another episode we'll see you guys in the next one thank you so much Everybody Take Care thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and

if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one