[00:00:00] Hey everyone, you are tuning into a live episode of yap young and profiting podcast. I'm your host Hala Tahoe. And we are live today on clubhouse in the human behavior club. Today's episode is being recorded for the young and profiting podcast. And we have recruited an expert panel of guests to discuss NFTs, and we'll be learning the basics behind.

These new digital assets. This is part one of a three-part series. And in this episode, we'll cover the definition of NFTs, why they have value and we'll understand the different applications that NFTs have. We'll also unpack web three dot oh, and the metaverse and how they relate to NFTs and so much more.

And part two of the series, we plan to cover NFTs for content creators, and in part three, we'll cover NFT investing and how to avoid scams each week. I'm going to bring you guys different experts based on the topic. And we'll be hosting all of these yap live events right here in the human behavior club.

The number one club on clubhouse every Thursday at 8:00 PM Eastern. So make sure you guys give the Cub of follow so you don't miss out [00:01:00] on these amazing events. I'm here today with a panel of experts on NFTs, including venue, who is an entrepreneur crypto expert, a former Harvard student. He also is the CTO of curious Addie's trading club, which is a game that teaches new users about NFTs and crypto.

We also have John Kreskey, my friend and co-founder of NFT thought leaders and director of strategic partnerships at NFTE genius. We have Brian Esposito, another one of my friends, CEO, and founder of Esposito, intellectual enterprises. He's also a babes NFT and vapes clan founding partner. And lastly, we have Ashley France.

Who's going to be joining us soon. And she is a web three consultant that takes web 2.0 companies and helps them bridge into web three. So I'm super excited for this session and in terms of how it's going to work, we're going to have a guided interview with these panelists for the first hour, and then we're going to open it up to Q and a for the last 30 minutes.

I do love for these sessions to be super interactive. So if you have a question, just raise your [00:02:00] hand DME or question, and if it's relevant, we'll pull you up. If it will add to the conversation. So don't be afraid to raise your hand. We love to get interrupted. So we have a ton of ground to cover. I want to get started right away.

And I figured we could start off with the history of NFTs to warm us up. So unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard about non fungible tokens or NFTs. And in many ways last year, 2021 was really the year of NFTs. And FTS is an innovation that gives creators the ability to monetize their work easily.

And it also provides collectors with an efficient way to purchase and store value. And MTS kind of seemed like they came out of nowhere in 2021, but they actually trace back to 2012. They were originally supported by Bitcoin and they really took off once Ethereum came out in 2015 and they grew solely from 2015 to 2020 and had an explosion in 2021 due to other blockchains, such as Cardona, starting to get in the game.

And also because of Facebook renaming itself, Mehta and moving into the [00:03:00] metaverse. So it's super interesting to think about how NFTs really took off in 2021. So I'd love to hear from the panel. Why they think 2021 really became the year of NFTs. I'm going to kick it over to Benu first. And then let's go to John.

And if you're on the panel and you want to contribute to this question, just flash your money. All right. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me amazing majoring, uh, introduction into NFTs. And so, yeah, 20, 21 was just a fascinating year because the concept, like you said, of NFC states, years back, and yeah, the last bull market that we had really in 2017, we started seeing the first mainstream have use cases of NFTs.

The first one was CryptoKitties at the tail end of 2017. Yeah. There, there have been to date minted like 3 million crypto kitties, but they, they were kind of flashing pan. They never really caught on in the mainstream and in 2021. Yeah, we had the next major bull market. So, uh, Ethereum entered like a bear market along with everything else, 20 18, [00:04:00] 20 20 towards the tail end of 2020.

We started seeing just massive action of people being really interested for the first time on a mainstream level. It didn't NFTs. And so we have the massive people sale where, you know, uh, at Christie's the 5,000 everyday space sold for like 60, 69 million, I think. And then after. There was, uh, the NBA, the NBA top shot also just really brought this into mainstream.

And I think you have a pandemic, have a major part to play in it where you can see collectibles across the board, Pokemon trading cards, all this stuff, right. Just really started skyrocketing its value. And it became this natural outlet where people were like, oh wow, this is the first time that you can really have digital assets that, you know, have value and you can buy these things and, you know, prove your ownership over them.

And then there was just so much such a profusion after those like major stories came out, a crypto punk sold for 7.5 million earlier in 2021. As the bull market happens, as people started talking about this, those people started hearing about it. Yeah. Just a ton of people came into [00:05:00] space. And then we just saw so much innovation when bore they've yacht club came out there, just so many different PFD projects that started coming out of the world works.

And then one of one art pieces, the metaverse started becoming a big deal when Facebook launched, you know, they changed their names and Metta and everyone started jumping onto that and NFTs are the foundational building block of the mother. And so I think a lot of different confluence of events where the world is just progressively going more digital sped up with the Corona virus, pandemic and all of these things.

So it's just cause NFTs to kind of be a natural fit for a 20, 21 and people to really start paying. Yeah, I think that was an awesome explanation in terms of why they really took off. John. I'd love to hear your thoughts. That was an amazing answer. Ben, I don't really have that much to add, but you know, you talked about the pandemic and I really think that that did accelerate the growth curve because we were all holed up in our, our homes for the past three and a half years.

And I, and I think the, the community aspect is something that really, really kind of drove that, [00:06:00] that growth because you know, we're human beings and we want to connect with others. And there's a, there's a huge community building aspect around NFTs. Most of the successful projects have that. And, you know, on discord, you know, people were able to gather and interact and socialize.

So I think that's something that, uh, really, really helped kind of propel entities into the mainstream in 2041. Yeah. And in my opinion, it seems like NFTs took off and gain. Traction faster than other crypto products did. So does anybody have any ideas in terms of why it really took off compared to other crypto?

Yeah. So it's my point. Yeah. The reason that I'm actually in NFTs and why we started curious ice training club is because it's the most compelling mainstream use case of crypto that I've ever seen. And so I'm someone who's never been into art. I've never like ever collected, you know, physical art pieces or have any artistic tastes.

And so I always thought that other crypto products, you know, the major, the major use cases of crypto are you can buy and sell [00:07:00] cryptos. And then you can use defy, which is decentralized finance, which is where you can go off and lend your crypto to other people. You can stake your crypto or interests, lots of things you can do there.

And then there's, dhows decentralized autonomous organizations where you can basically create these democratic companies, just run by people all over the world, even anonymously. And then there are NFTs and those are three major use case areas that we're really seeing, uh, kind of as a profusion. The smart contract work that's being done on blockchains.

And all of those three NFTs are by far the most approachable where NFTs make a lot of inherent sense and it appeals to an audience that's not necessarily extremely into the intricacies of the finance behind crypto, which is what the defy audience kind of feels too. And not necessarily into all the technical kind of, uh, aspects of crypto as well, but really.

The concept is a lot more intrinsically interesting and appealing where it's bringing in an arts and culture crowd, and the way that I actually heard it, which is pretty [00:08:00] interesting from a friend of mine who runs a boss beauties, and he's an artist and he started, you know, like NFTs were so compelling to him because it was this way that you can actually start making money with your art.

But it's similar to the Bohemian kind of, um, city cultures where there may maybe like some places in the city where are this first starts to settle. And then they bring culture into the city in that, in that specific area. And then it kind of justifies over time and everyone else kind of comes in because it's become hip, it's become more popular and cultural.

I think that's really, what NFTs are doing to crypto is it's bringing culture to crypto for the first time. And now there's something cool and hip that you can, uh, actually just kind of, uh, understand without actually knowing anything about the underlying technology that's been really compelling about then.

How can I jump in a little bit here? So, thanks. Thanks again for having me. I really appreciate it. One thing to think about too is over the last decade, you have to understand the foundational work that crypto and digital assets laid, whether it's the [00:09:00] platforms like Coinbase and, you know, a Toro or whatever you may use, or the banking regulations, and being able to put digital assets in an account and trade it to Fiat currency and the marketplace, you know, open sea allowed this to also explode and become accessible.

So now it's at a position where anything that comes over top of what crypto and blockchain and all these digital asset movements that have happened over the last day. Things that come to the market now have a chance to explode very quickly. Uh, and then you start to attach very large audiences or celebrities or actors or actresses or athletes.

And one of our holdings turn coin is now sitting just under a $15 billion valuation, but it took us five years to develop the mechanism for people to buy virtual shares of people. And that's an NFT based platform, but we weren't going to launch it in a market and not work with regulatory. You know, some, a lot of the things that companies and projects like the ones that we do, we do it right.

We take the [00:10:00] long road, but all that foundation has already been built. The infrastructure has already been built. So that's why NFTs was able to really move a lot faster than crypto would move because that set the stage for Anaptys to be able to explore. Um, those are some really, really interesting points.

I'd love to hear from Ashley. And I was wondering if you could kind of take it back a notch because we've got a lot of beginners and I think we need to understand what NFTs are. So can you help us define what a non fungible tokens. Yeah, no problem. Thank you again so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

And I just wanted to piggyback off of the previous note that we were talking about in regards to why an empties were taking off so fast. And I think one of the main reasons is that it's a lot easier for people to understand and conceptualize as opposed to, I think like crypto coins in regards to really seeing how, not only just for like artists, but creators, [00:11:00] et cetera, can really utilize this tool to not only own the content that they'll be creating, but also how to monetize it from years on.

And then I think the second point also is actually the community that comes with an MTS in general. They've been super, super welcoming for people in regards to like teaching people how to, you know, set up their wallet, how to get started with NFTs, how to create a missing page. Would you need in your roadmap, et cetera.

And I think because there's such an openness of let's teach people how to bridge into web three through this space and let's teach people how to get set up with NFTs. I think that's something that's really helped driven and, and pushing people to want to actually get involved in this. Mm. I love those points.

Great job, Ashley. And, uh, maybe Ben, do you want to define what a non fungible token, as I know you have a lot of courses and so you're a great teacher when it comes to NFTs. Pretty sure that, yeah, absolutely. So non fungible token, even the word itself, right. Is kind of weird. We don't really [00:12:00] talk about fungibility so we can break it down.

So what exactly does fungible mean? Fungible means something that is perfectly Arun changeable or something else, and the most. Daily basic example that we took, we use is money. And so if you have one us dollar, it's perfectly interchangeable, unchangeable, any other us dollar in the world, technically, you know, they're not exactly unique.

One might be crumbled. One might be older, whatever it is, but you know, no one really cares that you're giving them one specific us dollar versus another one, because they have the exact same value. That's also true of things like cryptocurrencies. So you have Bitcoin, you have Ethereum. No one really cares.

If you have one specific ether that was mine, then, you know, 2016 versus one that was mine in 2018 because they have exactly the same value. So fungible things are, things are perfectly, are changeable. So non fungible things on the other hand are things that are. They're not perfectly you're unchangeable and this is actually most things in the world.

So if you think of, for example, dogs, right? Like if you dropped off your dog at a dark hotel and then you come back and they gave you another dog, you'd hear [00:13:00] like super upset. You'd be like, yeah, that's not my dog. Right. And they're like, if they were like, what do you mean? Like, all dogs are the same. You'd be like, that's totally insane.

And it's the same thing. If you like drop off your kids at daycare and like, yeah, you pick up your baby and like, they give you another baby. Like all these things are non fungible and we intrinsically understand that they're totally unique. And just because they're all babies or they're all dogs or they're all homes or things like that.

And, you know, they're all have different value and they all have different properties. And so non fungible tokens just refer to digital assets that are unique and you can't perfectly exchange one for the other. And so there are a lot of different categories of non fungible assets. And so the most common ones that you kind of see, and then the two worlds deal with things like art.

And so we're talking about. Images, we're talking about videos. We're talking about all these digital assets and you might've heard the things like crypto punks, and that's a collection of 10,000, just pixelated, little punks. And they all look the same. So they're all part of the same [00:14:00] collection, but each one is actually unique from the other one and they don't have the same value because of that.

Some of them are more rare because they have different traits. Like there are very few alien crypto punks. And so those are worth a lot more money. And even the Mundos their alien crypto punched with a pipe and like without the pipe and things like that. And so that's what non fungibility really refers to is the fact that these things are unique.

And then there are other kinds of non fungible assets, like for example, Digital land in the metaverse. And so there's a lot of virtual reality worlds that are coming out, that people are starting to basically be able to own lands in just like you might own land in real life. And so owning a specific parcel of land is also non fungible because it's valid.

Differs from a different piece of land based on the various environmental properties of where you are at. For example, if you're in the middle of the heart of like a central metropolitan area in the metaverse, it's kind of like buying land there, like New York city versus like Arkansas or something like that.

And so those are all the different concepts. And so a lot of the [00:15:00] concepts of non fungible assets in real life, like lands like real estate, like pictures, paintings are things like that are now just being applied into digital assets in the form of non fungible tokens. If that makes sense, makes total sense.

And that was an excellent explanation. So thank you so much. So let's talk about why NFTs are not easy to counterfeit and what's the underlying support of NFTs that make them so valuable. So why don't we kick that off to John? Why are NFTs hard to counterfeit? I think that's a bad question. I'm not even going to step on his toes with that.

Ben knows the answer. I mean, professor Ben is at the house. I don't want to disrupt his flow when it comes to the super technical stuff. So yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll, I'll, I'll say that there are no experts in NFTs. We're all, we're all learning this because it's so near, but I appreciate it. But, um, yeah. So why, why are enough to so hard to counterfeit?

[00:16:00] Well, th that's that's really interesting. It is true from a technical perspective and lefties are very difficult to counterfeit way more so than in real life, when you have one Gucci bag or something like that. And, you know, like people can easily count that these things are paintings. The Mona Lisa, there are like replicas that no one can tell apart in museums.

For example, literally it's been estimated that 20% of these art in museums is fake. And these are things that literally experts have just spent so much time with the best equipment, trying to figure out if they're fake or not. And there's no way to really tell. And so on that, on that degree, blockchain technology makes NFTs a lot more easy to verify actual truth of ownership and provenance and provenance just means kind of the history of a given RPS or any kind of digital asset or anything, uh, painting.

Meaning, you know, when was it created? Who was it created by who first bothered, who was the second owner, all of that stuff. And all of that stuff is extremely easy to [00:17:00] verify with a NFT because it's all recorded on the blockchain. So in order to understand why this is such a big concept, we kind of have to understand what the blockchain is.

And the blockchain really is a kind of distributed database and a database distressed the place where you store information. And so you can think of it kind of like a bank ledger, right? It records different transactional information. Like Ben sent one ether, $1, whatever it is to, you know, holla and so forth.

So that information gets recorded in there. But then, you know, Ethereum's main innovation was realizing that not only do you, are you able to record just financial information? You're also able to record any kind of information. So now you can record information about creating a T a digital asset and.

The information about who has owned that enough T for how much money I was sold and the entire history of it. And so when you look at a given NFT, like a crypto. And, you know, this was crypto punk, let's say 5,000 or something like that. You can check a thing [00:18:00] called the contract address, which is a Ethereum piece of code that's been put on the blockchain.

And with that contract address, you can read a couple of functions on the code, which are just programs that have been written so that you can check certain things and all NFTs, typically follow a given standard. So they're all interchangeable. They have the exact same function. So any program, any person knows exactly how the check like who the current owner is.

And then also you can check things like. Bought this token last and so forth. And so you can read this entire history of every single NFT. So if you look at crypto punk, 5,000, do you check the code? You go back, you can see, oh, this was actually made by the first the correct smart contract. The, uh, the one that the original creators of crypto punks, you know, kind of put on the blockchain.

Okay. So you got that information and then you can see, oh, okay. This was the first soul to Gary Vaynerchuk for like 180, for something like that, and then sold to this person so forth. And so they have this whole record. And so everything is perfectly transparent and every time the [00:19:00] blockchain can be viewed by anyone in the world.

And so it's this perfectly open database that anyone can see that just records a immutable transaction history of everything that's ever been done. So in theory, yes. Totally easy to verify truth of as long as you can understand those technical details, or as long as there's an easy enough user interface, that's been developed around like a simple website where people can just like go and check these details and plug it in and so forth.

Unfortunately right now there are a ton of scams in NFTs and it's because the space is so new. And so for sure in the future, it's going to be super easy for anyone to just know, oh, this thing has like the green check mark that you kind of see on like Twitter, right? This is a authenticated real transaction from a real, like a enough tea collection and open, see some of these major marketplaces over the, have these features, but they're not totally correct.

And so on the other flip side, anyone can create a smart contract to try to replicate and counterfeit a. And so it is possible for someone to just copied the [00:20:00] exact same digital image of a crypto punk or all 10,000 crypto punks, right. Click save them and then deploy them with a new smart contract and then say, Hey, this is a crypto punks collection.

And then try to give that to someone else. And if you are able to technically understand all that stuff that we just talked about, you'd be able to really quickly tell for sure that, Hey, this is a completely fake crypto punk, but if you don't look at that, if you're just looking at the picture, there is no way to tell the pictures apart or any of that.

And so there's a bit of a nuance. It is very difficult to care for it in the future. It will be basically impossible to have fake versions of these images and things like that. Once verification systems, all that are much more in place, but right now you do have to be careful. It is still possible. Get scammed with kind of a fake.

That was really, really great. And I know part three, we're going to really go into investing and scams. So if you guys are interested in that, make sure you stay tuned to another session coming, seeing Brian, I saw you flashing your mic and I know you just put out an NFT project. So I would love to get from you the steps at a high level [00:21:00] to launch an NFT.

And if you wanted to add to what Ben said first, that would be cool too. Uh, yeah, somebody just touched on the, the scams, uh, PARP of, I said at the end, you know, it it's, again, anything new, any new industry, everybody's got to get burned to, to learn what to look for. I think people get scared. When they're going through the pre-med, uh, phase, because the emotions are so high and they want to get it so quickly that they don't read the proper addresses and I'll make sure that everything's accurate.

And, and I'll tell you what these scammers are so good that even sometimes I thought it was our own stuff. I'm like, this looks exactly like our project. Uh, so it is unfortunate, but, uh, and there has to be some better systems in place to help protect people. But at the end of the day, right now, it's just, everybody just needs to take a brass and read everything correctly.

Make sure they're getting all the official announcements from that project's official Instagram, Twitter, discord pages, or servers. So I know, I think probably 90% of people that [00:22:00] are just jumping into the industry for the first time or buying an IFT have gotten scammed they're burnt. And so it helps them look for, look out for the next one, but just, just be careful, everybody listening and take a second and make sure you're getting all the correct information directly from that project.

But how we launched our babes project, I can tell. The steps that we did, it was, uh, it quickly became one of the fastest, organically growing NFC projects in the world. We looked at the entire market and we wanted to issue something very different. Something that we believe provide an exceptional utility, uh, enhanced value for its for the community.

And we did that by a launching beautiful design, our work by Pixar Disney and 21st century Fox designers. So that was our initial step was to give this market something really amazing graphics and appearances that really stood out from the rest. And then what we did was we went around and we pulled in what is known as a docs team.

And we brought in 25 exceptional business people and leaders from around the world. We brought in [00:23:00] people like the co-founder E entertainment. Larry. We brought in music, icon and legend. Uh, Charlie walk, we brought in, um, just, just, uh, an assault of amazing people, right? I could TJ list this year on amazing PR and marketing and branding, uh, of a woman, uh, obviously highly, you were one of our Dave's ambassadors.

So we want across the board into many different industries. And we brought in leaders and we brought in seasoned leaders that have been in, in, in, in their industry or in their market for a long time. And then we picked some exceptional rock stars that we believe are the future of NFTs and crypto and digital assets.

And that allowed us to really stand out and build this movement. And what happened. The community just grew massively and too fast. Honestly, we were not ready for the growth that that happened. We went to nearly a hundred thousand members in our discord within a few weeks. Our Twitter also blew up at the same time.

We were also, I believe the first project to successfully launch an NFT project on LinkedIn. [00:24:00] And we saw some amazing things happening there where everybody that uses LinkedIn, it's a professional network to do business. And the key thing, how are we talking about the summit on a previous Twitter spaces was the, the fact that people were changing their profile images to, uh, one of our Babe's designs was something I never thought I'd see in my life when you're doing business in LinkedIn.

And you're connecting with people. You want people to see your face and make that connection and maybe do a business deal or maybe set up meeting. Okay. The steps that we did here was everybody worked 24 7. We did Twitter spaces, sometimes three or four times a day. Some of those sort of spaces had over 8,000 people listening in to our babes ambassadors, to our founders and the contracts and partnerships.

We kept announcing almost daily, but we, you know, basically what I did was I took 20 years of work and all the mistakes that I made, don't do those, bring in amazing people and go into this market correctly, go on with seasoned [00:25:00] professionals that know how to launch major, major companies, projects, technologies, partnerships, and we created what is known as the first met investor fund.

So the utility behind the babes NFT is that everybody. Is part of the growth of what we do. Uh, the Dow is set up to take a portion of the funds and invest into a metaverse or web 3.0 projects, technologies and companies, the community votes on which projects we, we invest in and we create metal wards or metal bins for the growth of those companies.

So this whole thing is de-risks with capital coming in from the NFT sale and, uh, and an amazing list of business people to help support those startups, that the metaphor. And so, you know, we looked at this thing very differently. We created something that I think is completely unique and I hope we set a benchmark and a precedent as to how future and our two projects are launched and do it better than we did.

And ensure that this industry needs to survive by successful NFT projects. It needs to survive [00:26:00] by people doing good business and having ethics and morals and values. Because if that doesn't happen, this is fast. As it's growing, it can easily turn around and, and, and, and nobody will touch it. So we want to make sure that we're doing it right.

Yeah, and I can definitely attest to like vapes was like an idea to like, oh my gosh, this is like happening so fast. And there were so many people involved, so I can attest to how fast that grew. So this is a great segue to talk about community related to NFTs because NFTs can really function like a membership card and it can provide access to events and exclusive March and special discounts.

It's like having digital keys to an online space where only holders can engage with each other. And because the blockchain is public, it's also possible to send additional products directly to anybody who owns a given token. So I'd love to talk about that in a little bit, but really I want to talk about community and I want to talk about why it's so important for NFT creators to build highly engaged communities [00:27:00] with their NFP projects and to support their brand.

So I'm going to kick it over to Ashley. I think you probably have a lot to say about this. Can you talk about why community is such an important element when it comes to NFL? Yes, of course. So unlike in a web two, when you launch products or services and people will attach, um, random celebrities, influencers, et cetera, have been able to have successful launches.

That is not the same in web three. The whole point of our concept of web three is being decentralized and being community-based. So as this, as you're literally building. Infrastructures together and community is the core and the basis of any major in project. Right? Um, the current web through community, though, it's still super small.

We're still super early. They're definitely welcoming more and more people into this space, but they're also really being careful about the territory and making sure that those. Integrating into the current web three space have good intentions, they're providing value and they want to do, you know, basically good in this space.

So I would say not only building [00:28:00] your own community for your project is super important, but also taking the time to engage and bridge into the current web three community. Because nine times out of 10, something that you're doing, there's other like discourse or communities or groups that are already done it or touch it.

So definitely taking the time to engage into the current community, to network with people, be a part of conversations like this Twitter spaces, et cetera. So you can have that boost and community to help you actually grow your project. And then along with your own current community, it's super important to take the time.

And I want to reiterate again, taking the time to build your community because of. Projects or people who want to put out projects that I talk to on a daily basis, they take months and months in regards to the back end of the technical aspect of their project, whether it's creating the NFC, the smart contract, mentoring page, et cetera, but then they don't want to take the proper time to actually build a community.

They want to drop the next week or drop in two weeks. And unfortunately it doesn't really work like that. You need to take the time to curate content, to attract your ideal audience. You need to take time to integrate. [00:29:00] People you need to take time to actually provide to them. It's a two-way street in this space.

It's not the typical, you know, by your consumer type of relationship, it really is a community and people are buying into what you're doing. So if you want them to buy into what you're doing, you need to give them a reason to do that. You need to show them that, Hey, what we're doing, we want you to come along with us and this is the value and the utility that you're going to be getting.

So I really, really urge anyone who's thinking about currently putting out a project or has put out a project and kind of struggling with selling it, to revisit the fundamentals and taking the time to actually think about who is your ideal community, who do you want to be a part of this ecosystem that you're building and what are different ways that you can reach these people and show them that they should be a part of this community, whether it's curating more content, engaging with them, partnerships, et cetera.

I love that great job. So I want to kick it over to Ben now, and I want to talk about how NFTs can basically endow their [00:30:00] owners as time goes on with more value. And I think that's what makes NFTs really different from other things is that you don't only just own like the digital asset. For example, you can also get access to events later on or new things can come about because the blockchain is programmable.

So Ben, could you talk to us about. Absolutely. Yeah, no, this is one of the most amazing things about entities. Exactly. As you say. So I'm really glad that we're touching on this. A physical asset is fixed. It's like a painting. Can't really give you access to other things, because it's just a physical kind of object that hangs on your wall.

But in NFT, the skeuomorphic kind of, you know, initial understanding of, and I've seen, it was kind of an, an analog to that word. It's like, okay, now we have a painting. Now we make a digital. Now we give it ownership. And that's another T, but then exactly, as you said, because end is a program, but we realized over time and we keep building in this ecosystem.

It's like there so many more things you can do with kind of teas. And the end of tea itself, for example, can grow over time. And that sees. [00:31:00] Always immutable, meaning that they're not a changeable. You can have enough teams that can get animated over time or cannot become 3d and things like that. You can change the metadata, that and empty points too.

And so that's, that's one way that literally itself can even grow. But speaking to your second point of how a NFT can give you utility over time, an example is for us, for example, we have these curious Addie NFTs. There are these unique, little, cute little octopuses that you buy as a image and you get the image, but also with.

That image, that NFP is stored inside your Ethereum wallet. And so you have this metal mask wallet, it's, um, it's a place where you can store pretty much all your crypto assets like NFTs, like ether and so forth. And when you go to specific different websites, you can connect that wallet. And when you connect that wallet and you can sign the message up, proves that you own that wallet, it's kind of like your access pass to anything that that website kind of [00:32:00] wants to offer.

And so that website can be anything or it can be even more than that. And so, for example, for us, we have a portfolio tracker, and if you go to portfolio dot, curious, savvis.com, you can see you connect your wallet. And as you connect your wallet, we check to see if you have a curious Addy NMT. And if you have a curious identity, then you're able to go ahead and use our portfolio tracker, which allows you to just.

Pulls in all the data about your NFTs, how much you bought them for how much they're worth now, how much money you've made, things like that. And there's no reason that any entity we partnered with other projects, we let other NFTs also kind of use this as partners and things like that. And so that's, that's one thing that you can do with this.

Into the real world. And sometimes for different events, they actually track to see that you have a NFC and then you can go ahead and print a ticket to go to a real life event. So the kind of NFC can become an access pass to any kind of event in the real world, or even more digitally in the metaverse view, go in.

So the central lands, one of these kind of virtual reality worlds, and there are some events [00:33:00] that you can just gate where they only let you in if you have the right enough case. And so this is where a lot of entities are going is providing a lot of utility. It's not just that you're buying this image and like Brian, you said, right, like having an awesome image, like having really, really well-designed art is really powerful for a lot of these onto projects.

But on top of that, you can just add unlimited kinds of utility products, applications that they get access to events that they get access to even possibly giving them real physical prints, things like that. Merchandise, a lot of things that people can do and have been doing to add more value to MTS overtime.

A question that I have for the panel, and I'll keep this a free for all you guys can just flash your mic. If you want to chip in, I want to know why NFTs grow and value. How do NFTs grow and value over time? We did touch on it just now, but I want to speak on it a little bit more. Does anybody want to answer that question?

Um, so I think NFTs grow in value two ways, one it's from the [00:34:00] actual creators. So whenever I work on NFC projects, I focus not on the actual utility that people provide in launch, but utility that we can continue to provide over time, whether it be in the next three months, six months or four years. So continuing to add value to those who hold the NFC holders.

And then I think the second aspect is the actual community, whether it's the people who are actually joining the community and the size of the community. So I definitely think those two aspects are ways that have a really big impact on continuing to grow the. The NMT project. Awesome. And does anybody else want to add to that?

Yeah, I'll apply it to our project. Again, I'm taking old school business practices and philosophies, it's demand and scarcity and, and tremendous utility. Uh, the things that we're doing, I can speak on. I never liked to come up with opinions, but I could tell you we're adding tremendous demand because we've included private aviation perks.

Uh, one of our business Babe's ambassadors is Raul Leal. Who's the CEO of the [00:35:00] one hotel background and treehouses, so we'll be doing some incredible travel and, um, personalized experiences for our babes community and our, and our, and our NFT project. You know, we're also giving a part of the park ownership in, um, in our babes world where all of our NFT holders will actually want a piece of real estate in the metaverse, where they get an apartment with their NST.

Uh, we announced, uh, with Artemis space network that we're going to be minting our Genesis to NFT project, uh, from the international space station. Uh, so in our case, it's really. Value it's opening up. But w w what I love about the space play is that work we're utilizing Bates and our relationships with these amazing private space companies, uh, away for the regular public, which has been stuck behind a TV or a web screen, or their phones since the sixties, wanting to be involved in space.

And it was only. Government agencies. And then it was just the Uber wealthy now with what we're doing and some other great projects, [00:36:00] we're opening up opportunities where the community can be part of something that they never thought they'd ever have any real connection to. Uh, we also announced a music IP, you know, one of our Babe's community members is a phenomenal singer, songwriters and musician.

And we rolled out the vibe with the tribe, which is actually kind of an Anthem for our project. And we given, uh, the publishing rights minus all the admin fees and IP ownership to all the NFT holders. So they're actually going to be earning as that song is played or streamed, or if there's live performances.

So in our case, It's just business. You know, it's creating real value, creating real utility, and it's complete scarcity. If you think of public companies that have tens hundreds, billions of shares outstanding, and you look at those share prices. And then you look at NFTs that have 1000, 2,005,000, 10,000 and a T's issued.

It's not a lot. And if you have a smart team that really respects the community, that's smart with their [00:37:00] decisions and involves the community. You can always add value. And in our case, we don't want anybody to ever sell or NFT. We want them to treat it like Berkshire, Hathaway, class, a stock, and something that they pass down from generation to generation.

I loved that example, Brian and Ben, I'd love to understand from you how communities can actually help and if their NFT projects grow in value. So actually owners of these NFTs can actually increase their value just through their engagement. Can you help us? Yeah. Yeah. I think the best example of this is the original PFP project crypto punks.

And so I'll talk about that. This is like I wrote an article called MFTs one-to-one longest piece. Anyone's bothered to brand about MCs 30,000 words. And in there I basically spent like half of it talking about crypto bunks, which is this original thing, which like on its face value makes no sense why it's worth so much because you look at it and it's like, it's crazy that someone has paid $10 million [00:38:00] for this weird pixel way, the picture of a punk.

And so why, why is that? Like, why would someone do that? And it really comes down to community. So one of my good friends, his name's Dylan Fields, he runs Figma. It's like $10 billion company. He's the reason I kind of got into NFTs because I didn't understand it. I thought MCs were toll scammed. And like, you know, just crazy that people are spending so much money, like buying these books.

This guy is obviously way smarter than I am. And so I'm like. If he's into a, you know, I'll take a look. And so he was one of the biggest people. And so this, he started buying crypto punks back in 20, 20 18, and they were like a hundred dollars for one crypto punk. And then he bought what he thought was the most valuable one.

The most of the least of crypto fucking 7, 8 0 4 is where, you know, calling the closet for like $15,000. It's total crazy amount of money. And then he sold it this year or last year, rather for 7.5. And that's, that's totally crazy. It's like, well, what, what happens? What, what changed the, uh, the value so drastically over the last like three years, and it really [00:39:00] does come down to community.

And so he talks about this. He has a great interview that you can read where he kind of talks about why first he got into crypto punks. And it was really because he got into discourse. He started looking at the community and he was like, whoa, these people are like, they love it. They love this. And they're here, not for the price, paradoxically, not for any of the stuff.

They just genuinely love the other people who are in this community. And they're so dedicated to this project. And they were just like talking all day about the rarity and whatever a I'm like, oh, this one is like super cool for this reason. So forth. And they just kind of create this like very passionate kind of like cult following behind.

And then, you know, that that's sustained it to the point where his, his whole thing is, you know, all these communities that, uh, are really strong, long-term grow in this organic kind of slow way. And you have this like subculture that kind of forms around crypto punks. And then at some point, you know, you have this inflection point where it starts going mainstream.

And so what happened last year to really blow it up? Literally a Serina Williams, JC Snoop dog, [00:40:00] all these like insane famous people start turning their images on Twitter, to their profile pictures, to crypto punks. And you look at these people, they have like tens of millions of followers and it's like, how much money would you need to pay one of these people to actually advertise something to this level and to literally do it's a point that they would change their actual profile picture to your thing, right?

It's like, you can never pay enough money to get out of that JC or something like that. So go ahead and like change his image to a Adidas or like, you know, Nike or whatever it is like a company, but they're doing it for free for crypto punks. And not only are they doing it for free, they actually themselves paid for the privilege of doing this advertising.

They paid like $500,000, a million dollars to buy one of these like images and they're like advertising it. And that. So powerful and like, that's really what NFTs have kind of done in this like community natural building thing is everyone has skin in the game. And when you have one of these things, you just kind of [00:41:00] want to kind of increase the status of it.

You want to share it with all your friends. You want to talk about it. You want people to know about it, and that just naturally increases the mind share. And this goes back to why does any art have value? And why is like the middle of Lisa worth like 800 million? And really it's, it's an accident. The Mona Lisa itself, like you can say, oh, it's because it's the most famous painting in the world.

And the question is why is it the most famous painting in the world? And then maybe the answer is it's because it's the best painting in the world. But if that were really the case, what's really interesting. As the Mona Lisa was unknown for 400 years, no one knew about the Mona Lisa outside, like the art intelligence.

Until one random little accident in 1911. And that accident was the Mona. Lisa was stolen from the lube by this Italian thief called Perugia. And when that was stolen, it became the international overnight scandal. And everyone lived Worldstar hearing about it. And then after that, it was kind of a blip on the radar, you know, like you hear about it, but then it would die away.

But then someone made this really famous parody of the Malisa like this original meme. And then that means starts spreading like [00:42:00] virally, like wildfire, and then more people started beaming it. And now anyone in the world in Africa, Asia, Europe, America, you asked them about the Mona Lisa and they know it.

And that is extremely powerful. And you can even put this into numerical terms. There's an estimate by the former art director of loop, that 80% of people who go to the art museum, go there just to see the Mona Lisa and, you know, you pay $20 ticket. There are 10 million people who go that comes out to $160 million.

Uh, people basically just paints and go see the Mona Lisa. So when something is famous for, regardless of what reason something is, well-known there has Mindshare, it has real meaningful value that actually can't be translated even in like a direct financial case to real money. And that's what we see happening with communities.

The power of these growing communities with entities, when everyone in the world knows about crypto punks, because all these people who own it are spreading the knowledge and like sharing in advertising for free. Then these things become more, so much more money and everyone kind of wants one. It becomes a status symbol.

It can become a babbling [00:43:00] good things that paradoxically, as they become more expensive, become more desired. And there's more demand for them because everyone wants it. And there are only 10,000 in the world. How many rich people are there in the world who want the size of being. The owner of the original NFT profile picture.

And you know, that that kind of logic, that kind of scarcity plus the demand plus mind share that the community can build is extremely powerful and can really increase the value of MNCs. Well, that was so great. And it's just so crazy how community is just so important and fundamental to these, this NFT space.

It's something that I feel like nobody has ever seen before. And it just gives a lot of power to people that own the NFTs are actually like investors in this project. The other thing that I think makes NFTs valuable is the creators themselves. And as the creator kind of grows in popularity, the NFT goes up in value.

So Ashley, I'd love to hear from you the importance of having a very great creator behind [00:44:00] an FTE's that are related to some sort of digital ads. Yeah, I think it's super important as any type of creator creating an NMT project to, um, be in the forefront in regards to explaining who they are, what they do, who they're serving and the purpose behind the project.

Um, not only to increase that autonomy with your current community or to grow your community, but also to increase transparency. As mentioned before on stage, there's been so many different scams and rug pools in the in space. So I think it makes people feel a lot more comfortable and wanting to actually invest in your project to know exactly who the creator is behind the project.

Now, though projects that have like celebrities and big influencers behind them are cool and they do get, you know, more. Eyes on them quickly, but I don't necessarily think it means that you have to be like a famous person or have a lot of followers to have a successful NFT project. I think that your intent with your project, I E why you are doing it as [00:45:00] well as, you know, the utility behind it, keeping up with your promises, uh, taking time to actually grow your community.

To me, that one makes you a good creator. Not necessarily like your current status online or who you're associated with, but I've noticed, especially on Twitter. Thousands of creators who have less than 10,000 followers. And they're able to sell things for one ether to eat. And it's not because they have a bunch of followers or that they are attached to any type of celebrity.

But it's the fact that they actually took the time to do the groundwork. They took the time to grow their community. They actually, you know, provided utility for their audience, et cetera. Just to give an example, there's a creator called Humanae Europe, and she actually was able to fundraise for a house warming party where everyone who, you know, was able to chime in to fundraise for this.

They were able to see her new home. They were able to watch a live performance, et cetera. I feel like these types of things, where your actual community is not only investing in your [00:46:00] career, but investing your lifestyle and being a part of your journey you really haven't seen before. So I definitely think this creates a new space, not only for just influencers and celebrities, but also for independent artists and upcoming creators, to be able to actually monetize off of this and have their community really, really invest in them.

Thank you, Ashley. Does anybody else have anything to add when it comes to creators and how NFTs can grow in value based on the creators behind. I'm helping, uh, a guy that I'm sorry, Don. , I've seen this. And this has been kind of talked about that in the beginning. Sony and FTD creators were, I think there's been a lot of copycat stuff we're it is now seen, unfortunately is a get rich, quick scheme.

And I think that's why ashes to ashes credit. The people that are taking time to know their community is I think making people feel a bit, a little bit more comfortable, but I do want to ask Ashley [00:47:00] and the panel, you know, I talked to a lot of young people and the NFTA space is now like, this can be there.

I can retire early. What would be some advice that you'd give to young people to not necessarily buy into the hype, but look for NFT projects that are, that have gotten. Yeah, no, I actually get this question all the time. Often people say, well, how do we find out about the latest and newest projects? One of the best places to do that I would say is Twitter, because a lot of not only just creators, but a lot of the creators on Twitter are also investors in other projects.

So they'll host Twitter spaces on a daily basis discussing about different projects and things that they are, you know, investing in. They're allowing, um, people who are putting out new projects to like come on Twitter spaces and talk about their projects. So I definitely think that that is the, a really, really good space and resource to really understand, you know, what's new and certain things you can invest in.

Um, but also keeping your wits about it and saying, you know, if it's too good to [00:48:00] be true, it probably is. So making sure you're doing your, your own research in these projects and seeing exactly, you know, who's behind them. Do they have a good track record? What type of utility are they offering? Is it what they're offering realistic?

I think. Projects a good chunk of them have good intentions, but then a lot of them don't have the actual bandwidth our team to deliver on these promises that they have mapped out in the roadmap. So really just making sure you're taking the time to do your research connect with people who are currently in this space and getting advice.

And also, as I always say, don't invest money that, that you can't afford to lose. Brian, did you want to add. Yeah, just something that I thought was really interesting. And I think worked out to the benefit of these creators or these young creators is one of our holdings is sodium space. Uh, I'm a little biased, but I think it's one of the better VR metaverse worlds.

And I've been part of that company for over three years. And it was like pulling teeth to get brands, [00:49:00] IP artists into that world and have them understand here's a new medium for you to value your work and to monetize your work. And I've, uh, honored to know and work with some exceptional artists that they're there.

Their work is in museums. They're in, you know, six star resorts. They're just very credible, amazing artists and they couldn't get their head wrapped around it. And these are friends and I think what will worked out great is that these artists, these amazingly talented people that nobody's ever heard of were able to do.

Create such wealth with their talent and they were young and they were passionate and they use this new movement to become something. I think that was fantastic. Looking back at it. I think if that didn't happen, the way that it happened, there would have been another psychological block. Well, I can't do it because you have to be a on already established artist or creator to be able to make money in this new space.

Uh, so Monday morning, quarterbacking, I'm glad that it was the [00:50:00] youth and people that don't have the didn't have the credibility or the, um, or the long standing history that were able to expedite this movement. I think those are some great points done. Did you have anything to add there or any followup?

No, those were great. I echo a lot of the Sunday events. I, I, there's a lot of unknowns, uh, coming up and it's been interesting because, uh, Gary Vaynerchuk has been, you know, sending the signals that there's going to be a lot of projects that are going to go to zero, but there's also going to be a lot of learning and shifting and pivoting on people, figuring it out.

So I'm, I'm very, I'm very high on space, but I'm very. Well, heck I'm old enough to remember 1998 and the.com era with the add-on. There's a correction in every industry. And if you, uh, and if you have the resources to take advantage of, uh, there's always opportunities to pick up other distressed assets. It doesn't matter what market or industry, [00:51:00] you know, corrections.

Unfortunately, people get hurt because they get into late. Uh, but they are healthy for markets. They are healthy for people to get back in and, and, and to, and to make it stronger. And hopefully it doesn't drop to a zero. Number like some people are talking about, but I'm all for correction. I've always turned them into a benefit and it does add value in the long run.

Yeah. Thanks so much, Don, for that question. Speaking of questions, we're about to roll into our Q and a portion of today's segments. So go ahead and raise your hand. If you have a question for our expert panelists on NFTs, stick to the topic, NFTs or cryptocurrency, but we're mostly talking about NFTs today.

We covered a lot of ground. So go ahead and raise your hand. If you have a question and we're going to do Q and a first though, John, I have a question for you. I know you work with a lot of big brands in the NFT space, and I'd love to hear how big brands are getting involved. Absolutely. So my role I'm [00:52:00] director of strategic partnerships at entity genius, which is a mark Cuban, Ashton Kutcher, dapper labs, venture backed technology platform.

And we've just launched a marketplace called Gaya, and it's focused on five key verticals, TV, film, music, sports, and pop culture. And in my, my job on a day-to-day basis is talking to all these big brands in the music, Riverdale talking to all the big music labels and entertainment, vertical, and talking to all the studios and the sports vertical and talking to all the sports teams and sports leagues.

And then in the pop culture, vertical talking to. Companies and consumer products, automakers, and basically walking them through what an entity is, how do you drop a successful entity collection? And it's pretty interesting because I've been having these conversations with all these big brands over the last year, and none of them still have fully immersed themselves in space.

A lot of education. There's still a lot of concerns for big brands in terms of IP, environmental, friendliness, and another big struggle. Big brands has, is how do you build out internally an NFT team? What does [00:53:00] that look like? Is it who do you hire? Is it a creative person, the community manager, like who are these key resources you need?

So I, at this point right now, I'm still educating a lot of the big. You know, th th the, the crazy part is, is that, um, if you look today, I think non fungible release NFT sales for 2021, and they were 17 billion. And that was mostly from collectables and gaming. The big brands that mass consumer adoption hasn't even happened.

I think there's about 2.5 million crypto wallets. The population of the world is what, 8 billion. So, I mean, we're super, super early still, and it'll be really interesting to see which big brands kind of make a push. I mean, Nike made an interesting. Uh, acquisition by an artifact. So, you know, they already bought a company that was existing in the space.

Maybe some of these brands start to do that as well. It's just, it's just super, super interesting in just dealing with these brands and kind of another thing that the brands have a concern about is the community building aspect. Unfortunately, discord is there's a lot of issues in terms of [00:54:00] security and just controlling the brand narrative.

And there there's just a lot of concerns going in there. I mean, this quarter was really built for video gamers. It was not built to really scale up community building in web three. So, you know, as more smart money and smart minds enter the space, I think they're going to start seeing better solutions for web three, but, you know, I just, I don't think the infrastructure is there right now for a lot of these big brands and just jump in 100%.

I think there's a lot of AB testing. I think a still a lot of education. That's what I do on a day-to-day basis. It's fun, but it's, it's still super early. I think, I think what Brian's doing in terms of sort of a membership and a tea experience, I think that's sort of the next wave right now until the big brands really decide what they're going to do.

And just one other thing, just to kind of step back a bit a year ago, I literally didn't even know what an NFT was. And now I probably know maybe what 2% of NFTs are all about. And that somehow makes me an expert because I know 2% [00:55:00] more than 90% of the population, but anybody that's out there still trying to educate themselves.

Some of the things I did to just kind of get up to speed. I think LinkedIn is an amazing a resource aside from Twitter. I think Twitter focuses a lot more on sort of the collectors. I think LinkedIn, you're going to probably interact with people in a little more of a business mindset. I think going to these conferences like NFT NYC and FDLA is coming up here, um, in a couple of weeks.

Miami NFT weeks coming up. I mean, these conference where you can interact with people in real life and connect with them on a, on a more human level is super, super important. A real easy cheat is just set your Google alerts for NFT. So literally just put an NMT and get a daily alert and you'll get a download of every NFT article for the day.

Great way to catch up to speed on what's going on in the space. I think that ACC and Z crypto Canon is another great source. It has links to articles, videos really comprehend. And then I think NFT podcast, I have a podcast called NFTE where I interviewed the top thought [00:56:00] leaders in the space. And just through that, I've learned a ton about the entity space.

So I think those w you know, you don't have to do all five, but a few of those things, if you start to do them, you'll start to pick up, uh, kind of your, your knowledge on NFTs. And I just, I think we're all in it together, but it's still so new. It's so nascent, I mean, nobody like, like Ben said is really an expert.

So I think we're all here to support each other and just, just try to figure it out together. Yeah. John, those gruesome some great resources. Thank you so much for sharing. We are going to get into the open Q and a. So if you're in the audience and you have a question, just raise your hand and we'll bring you up on stage.

Before we do that, I do have to address something that we didn't define. And I know Ashley's an expert on this and that's web three it's texts, hottest buzzword. The term seems to be evolving rapidly, and I would love to understand the difference between web one dot oh two dot oh, and three dot. Oh, Ben, do you wanna, do you wanna.

Sure. All right. So yeah. What, what, what to, what three, the, the [00:57:00] terms don't refer to like a specific technology, but rather a concept of the internet. And so what one was the early days where you could only read information what to is when you can read and write information and what three is when you can read, write, and own information data in the internet.

And so what does read, read, write, read, write, and own. It really means if you go back to web one, it's really those static kind of news portal sites that you remember, like aol.com, right? yahoo.com, where you're just consuming information and there's like a central. A company like AOL, that's writing all the information and that's it.

That's all you can do on there is you just read information web 2.0 was a huge innovation. That's really what we're seeing kind of here. Right? Like clubhouse is like web 2.0. And like Facebook is what, 2.0 and all these interactive things that you can do on the internet where not only are you consuming data, but you're also producing data.

You're posting, you're talking to people, you're uploading images, Instagram, things like that. And that's extremely powerful because now most of the, [00:58:00] or not is like user produced information. That's like where we spend all our time, Facebook, Twitter, you know, discord, clubhouse, rather, whatever it is. Right.

It's all just random people on the internet coming together and naturally producing stuff, YouTube and so forth. And so that's really powerful, but the problem is you don't own any of that information. Right. And so this is a huge thing with content creators. It's like, if you're on YouTube, YouTube, Where you present of all your revenue and like Facebook does the same thing and all these platforms have this monopoly effect because you can't leave it.

Right. Because we're all your followers, right? If you like her, like, Hey crap, I want to make more money on YouTube. And like, you know, YouTube is taking 40% cut like Twitch or whatever it is, you can't read it because they're like, you know, we have all your followers, right. We own all your data and everything.

Right. It's all on our platform controlled by our databases. And if you go somewhere else, you're going to have to start from scratch and you like are totally screwed. Right? And so what 3.0 is really a complete re understanding of what the web can be, where they're no longer exist. These like massive monopolistic kind of like platforms that kind of [00:59:00] own all this information.

Rather you can own everything yourself. And so we're seeing a lot of different ways that this is coming about, and the teas are really central to this entire concept where NFTs are the real building block that give you digital ownership over assets. And that asset can be. From the actual content that you produce and so forth to the followers and all this stuff.

And the way that the web three kind of world is written as a lot of stuff is made at the political level and not the application level. And so what that means is it's kind of similar to a torrenting. So I actually started another blockchain company back in 2017 that literally our goal was to try to do this web three push where we were briefed the platform, walk in fact, in Lao content creators, like, yeah.

How about yourself? Like things like that, people with all this following to like, be able to own your own following and like have that following follow you across different applications, as opposed to being just locked into Facebook or clubhouse or so forth and how that works is, think of it like tornado, when you torn something.

You have Cedars and leechers, right? People who [01:00:00] own this information on their own computers, and then they share it with other people and you have this little torrent file and that's horn file. Really? You can plug it into any application. It doesn't matter which torrenting client you're using. If you're using, you know, uTorrent or Xirrus or acute BitTorrent rollover, this, you have access to the same underlying data, the same seeders and liters.

And so this is something that, in what three kind of like, you can do things this way, where everything is on this protocol level, where the application doesn't own the followers or the content or things like that. It's the underlying blockchain or the technology built on top of the blockchain. Just one layer up.

And then you just. Complete control of your own information and yeah, the same thing with NFTs on the more basic level, what three is things like just NFT is the top is you're the one owning your own assets, where before you post all these amazing art pieces that you make to Instagram and Instagram is the one making all the money from it.

Instagram is like a hundred billion dollar company, but [01:01:00] all these artists aren't making anything on Instagram, right? Because Instagram, when you post it to the, you like share in the terms of service, the rights for Instagram. So it kind of partially owns some of the copyright and be able to like profit off, showing all your work and things like that.

Whereas with end of teas, you can sell your end of T to someone else and you take all the profit yourself. And so those are kind of powerful concepts coming out. And what. That was such a great explanation, Ben, and something that I just want to chip in here. That's super interesting to me is all of these NFT land purchases happening right now.

So they have these NFT Mehta versus like NFT world and decentral land and the sandbox. And you can actually buy land in the metaverse with NFTE. So to me, that's kind of like the future of how NFTs will evolve. Does anybody have any thoughts? Yeah, super interesting. I think they like the land thing and the math versus just, we're just at the basic starting line of what NFTs will be in the world where I really think [01:02:00] the overall total value of NFTs will exceed the value of like actual physical assets and a large part of that is the metaverse and things like land in the metaverse where the physical universe is pretty constrained.

Like there's only so much room on earth and it's actually difficult to like get to most places on earth. Right? There are only a few like major cities that people live in and the rest of it is just like uninhabited. And like, you have to travel by a plane costs a lot of money. They can only hold so many people ever, all those constraints don't exist in the digital world where you can literally teleport into central and there's just like little jump buttons and you go, boom.

And then you go like anywhere in the world. Right? And so there's no constraints geographically anymore. You can have a concert in the metaverse where literally you can have people from Asia, Europe, Africa, America, altogether in one place, and you can hold it, hold it for like a million people. Right.

Totally possible. There's no fiscal constraints. And because of that, like arguably, you know, maybe the lens or digital assets on top of that land in the metaverse are worth more money than in real life. And the thought experiment is like, maybe there's a billboard [01:03:00] and what's the value of a billboard. If you buy one in real life.

Well, it's really that people see it, right? And it's an advertisement and maybe 20,000 people pass it. And you know, maybe that billboard is worth $20,000, who knows, but in the multiverse, you know, theoretically you could have a billable. Also 20,000 people might see, and that that's true. Then there were actually that billboard should have the same value as a billboard in the real world, right?

Because it's the same kind of power. It's a Mindshare, you know, people are actually seeing this and the advertisement spreads, and maybe it's even more powerful because you can target more specific or more broad demographics. So you could have a billboard that's seen by a global audience rather than just literally people in LA or New York or something like that.

And so there are just like so many possibilities that we're just starting to see with lands and assets in the metaverse. And I think that's super, super exciting and definitely one of the coolest things. I agree. Awesome. So guys, we're moving into the Q and a portion. If you have a question, just raise your hand and we'll bring you up on stage dimple.

You're up first. What is your question for the panel? Yeah. Thank you so much. [01:04:00] I'll um, and I came into the room late, so I don't know if this is answered, but for beginners, when it comes to determining which NFTs they should be buying or investing in, what are some tips or the process that they can go through to determine that, and maybe what are one or two red flags that they should look for when they are doing their assessment of which NFTs is to invest in.

Great question. You splash your mic. If you want to answer. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, yeah, yeah, no, I, I love the question to me. It's one of the most important things. And so I love, I love that you're looking at both red flags as well as like, you know, the positive flags. And I think Brian actually covered a lot of the really good ones before.

So you definitely want to look for things where there's a team with a doxed, like a background where you can see everything that they've done before. They're not anonymous and they're clearly experienced some building and they've done companies before. And now those two projects, isn't so different from making a company [01:05:00] that requires long-term commitment and a long-term vision for what someone wants to do.

Having like good values to behind something where the red flags are kind of, I stay away from projects that focus solely on the price or how much money you can make off this thing. Right. And there's kind of a paradox where the projects that tend to do the best are the ones that care least about the price and think of the places basically kind of a by-product of their success.

Actuating an actual mission that they're trying to perpetuate in the world. And by default of like doing that, I think, well, the woman for example, is a really good example of this. They really just want to set a powerful example for woman to make the world more inclusive, more equitable, bring more people into what three, uh, the other woman so forth.

And like, as a consequence, it's become this massively successful project for every single one. That's worth tens of thousands of dollars. And it's straight like hundreds of millions of dollars. And you know, it's not that they've ever focused on the price, but just by really having a mission and a vision that people [01:06:00] align with values that people align with the community really resonates with it.

It grows and there's, um, there's something that I kind of like say is that. And I personally, don't try to get into anything where I would sell it. If it went up 10 X or I would sell it, if it went down 10 X and F I personally have that much attachment to something. And the powerful thing would kind of tease this, you know, uh, they're emotionally sticky, more so than Ethereum.

Like I hold ether just because I think it'll make me rich some day. And I like really, won't be sad if I sold my ether. There's no emotional attachment there. That's totally untrue for my NFCS. I've never sold a single enough to actually ever I've collected over 30,000 in the last four years. And like, I hold all of them and I'm going to hold them for five, 10 years, at least because I would be extremely sad if I sold them for any price.

If I sold them for 10 X, I would be sad because I was losing this piece. I loved. And I sold them for like a 9% loss. And of course I would also be sad. And so, um, if I feel that way about something, I feel that, um, that's a good sign that chances are other people are going to feel the same way. And [01:07:00] if that's true of all the people who were kind of buying into the project, no one's going to sell.

If it goes up or if it goes down, then chances are, you know, as more people. Get into this project known selling the price has naturally, you know, one place to go and that's, that's pretty often. So that's, that's kind of how I really ultimately, I think everyone has to do their own research. That's the big theme of space and assess the project and the best way to assess it is just to see how you emotionally feel about the project.

And truly genuinely, if you want to hold onto this thing for a term, and if you really do, and you really believe in it, chances are other people feel the same way and there'll be like a project. Thank you, Ben. So I think you're saying like basically, you know, go after the causes that you really truly believe in and that's going to lead you in the right direction.

Exactly. Right. Yeah. Thanks for summarizing so much better than me. What would you like to add? Yeah, just, just one thing to add. Uh, and Ben touched on the first part. I was going to say, find things that you're passionate about and what I've experienced with the, some of [01:08:00] the NFT projects we've created. A lot of the value is the friendships that you're going to do.

Inside of that community. Uh, and I've seen some incredible things happening with our own projects where people are meeting people for the first time because of, of our MFT project are building amazing friendships or helping each other. So that's, I think a piece of the value when you get involved with these NFTs, in addition to the utility and the potential increase of monetary value may have, I think you inside the right community where you love the people it's positive, it's engaging, you'll feel really great about being part of something.

And that may be worth more than any, any money attachment that this thing could be worth a year or 10 years down the road. And I, I would, you know, in my own companies, I never look at, I never compare or really compete with anybody else. I don't like to look at others because it takes away the value and the.

The [01:09:00] self-worth that you have. So if you get involved in a small project, that's fine. Don't compare it to any of these big ones that are selling for millions or tens of millions of dollars. And you'll never feel good about what you're involved with. So I would suggest starting small finding things that you're passionate about, and it's okay to get burnt once in a while, just do it at a very small risk appetite, because that helps you learn.

It's like buying a stock. If it's a New York stock exchange stock and NASDAQ stock or a pink sheet stock, you're taking different types of risks. Some are a little bit less volatile, but just, just go into this market with, with, you know, the idea that you may, you may have a winner, you may lose everything, but there may be other reasons why you find value in spending your time.

Yeah, and I feel like such a theme in this segment and episode is the fact that NFTs really have more value than just simple ownership over a digital asset. It's this whole community aspect and, you know, providing value by the people that you meet [01:10:00] and who's behind it and the engagement of the community and the things that you can offer that community.

There's so much more than just that piece of artwork or music that's behind it. So I think that's really interesting. And if there's one thing that you learned today, I hope it was that and you understand and FTS a lot more. Uh, so let's go to the next question. If you're up next, how can we help you today?

Are you doing, I got a question that touches on a point, Ashley brung up in terms of. And the roadmap and seeing if it's realistic or not. Um, my question is directed to Brian. I'm a part of dates. I support you along with the community. My question is how did you deal with having a roadmap that a lot of people looked at and talk negatively about in terms of being able to pull it off?

And how could you respond to just how the team dealt with that and how you actually did pull it off? Because. Thanks. And you are one of [01:11:00] our most biggest supporters on Twitter. So thank you for, for everything and being, being part of this journey with us, the team is amazing. We have, you know, we have people that have been through so much in, in their career.

I'm used to problems, you know, it was going so fast, so positive so quickly, that was actually making me more nervous. Cause I was like, there's gotta be a problem. This is a problem. Uh, and we ran into our initial problem with, uh, we went after T to launch this thing on polygon. We had Twitter spaces with their senior management, uh, and I think we were part of breaking their system and we overloaded their network and, and most projects would have failed right then, but we quickly moved it over to a theory on what, less than 24 hours.

And we've had a successful launch, uh, you know, half a day later, but we didn't give up, we don't quit problems or. That's part of life. That's part of business. That's just, that's just the reality. I personally don't look at people talking negative. I can't stop [01:12:00] that. If somebody has an issue with what we're doing, I can't focus on that unless we're doing, unless I know we're doing something wrong, the only way that I can earn trust in any of my companies and including this NFC space is to execute is to continue to add value, continue to move forward.

If we have hurdles, get over them. And that's how we're going to ultimately have the best group of holders in our beta project that believe in us. But we have to perform and we are. So, you know, at the end of the day, to answer your question, very longly, there's always going to be people that doubt people.

I'm sure there's people that say negative things about Elon Musk, but he's doing quite well. I know that you can't stop people being negative on things. I wish they would spend their time rather than being negative on something. Find something that they love and spend that time being positive with it.

But I can't change people's demeanors or where they want, where they want to do or what they want to say. I can't allow that to affect anything that I do except prove them wrong, [01:13:00] but I'm only, that's not the, that's not the motivation. The motivation is to build something great, have a great team, build a great community, providing exceptional value.

And at the end of the day, the negative people are going to get bored with us doing what we say we're going to do, and they're going to go bother somebody else. So that's, that's where my mentality is. And thank you again for your tremendous support. I mean, Thank you. Great question. So I want to piggyback off that whole conversation point and I have to say from my personal experience, Crypto technology is not that user-friendly, there's so many different exchanges and wallet providers and things seem to like glitch all the time.

So I want to talk about some obstacles when it comes to NFT adoption. So anybody who hasn't talked in a while, maybe Ashley, Ben, John, anybody want to chip in, in terms of obstacles for mainstream adoption with NFTs. One of the newest things that I've seen in regards [01:14:00] to, um, even like web three websites. I, whenever I try to go on one on like Chrome or on my desktop, it doesn't work.

So even having to deal with the smallest things, it's like going to certain like websites or trying to see people's roadmap. Um, I guess the browsers are not really catching up sometimes when I go for my phone, that's an issue, but obviously that's just something that, um, technology has to catch up on. I know another issue that we've been seeing is the hacks and discords and scans, especially since, uh, when people usually join, they don't really, you know, understand how it works.

And they're super excited about getting engaged into the community and they click on links and then people's wallets will be wiped out. Unfortunately, there was like a really, really bad, uh, situation with Ozzy Osborne. He had. Another discord and people hacked like all the hundreds of thousands of people in his first discord.

So I've definitely seen like that be an issue also when people actually like launching collections in regards to like crashes or different sites, whether that be open, [01:15:00] see foundation, um, that is not really used to having that much traction, you know, all at once the site may crash or people may not be able to actually, you know, connect their wallet at all.

So there's tons of different bugs. I mean, whether that be with web three or even Instagram, Twitter, they still have. Malfunctions all the time. So I definitely think that people need to keep that in mind that this is technology, which means it's not perfect and there's going to be, you know, issues at hand.

But I feel like as long as creators and people who are putting out projects like accurately communicate with people. Then 90% of the audience will understand. Yeah, exactly. To Ashley's point just piggybacking off of that, because this is our huge passion point. It's literally why we created our project.

Curious Savvis is the main, the main obstacle we see is it's such a steep learning curve, technically to get into this space, you have to understand things like, you know, what's a private key, how to keep a private key secure. Why, why do you need to use a hardware wallet? Like, what is gas? Like why do I have to pay so much money to like send the transaction, all these like totally insane things that like in the [01:16:00] future.

It should be abstracted way where, you know, just like the internet, it's like using the internet in 1995 before there's like a browser. And you're like using a term load command line. And you're like typing in like a Crow commands, like go get page. And it's like all this crazy stuff that like almost no one could use the internet back then.

And yet now any like grandmother can use like tech talk and like, you know, post a video. It's just much more simple. And so the long-term solution, the major obstacle is we have to abstract away the difficulty of all this technology. No one should need to understand what private key is, how to keep your stuff secure and like, you know, do all this stuff.

But unfortunately that's what. At least another five years as the bird map, that kind of icy because we're literally still building out the fundamental blockchain technology today, right? Like Ethereum itself is like still going to 2.0, and like it's not even called 2.0 anymore. It's the consensus layer.

And like all this stuff, like they're still trying to figure out the technology. And so what we see as the real obstacle, the thing that we're trying to solve at curious Sally's is to educate people, to teach people how to safely get into space, to avoid number one. Most importantly, like Ashley said, are the scams, right?

How do we teach people [01:17:00] not to fall for discord scams, how to teach people not to get hacked, if their wallets, how to teach people not to go on fishing sites, not to, uh, you know, accidentally sign a transaction that's fake and so forth. And those things come down to, we made curious that XYZ where it's a site that you can go to and you can literally just go in and.

Learn from the ground up. If you've never touched crypto before you never stop a wallet, we walk you through every step of how the sub wallet, how to meet your first real NMT. We actually airdrop you some magic for free on polygon, and then you can go and meet your first entity. And we kind of do these interactive tutorials that walk people through the process of the technical difficulties and abstracting those away.

And then we also, um, we're building a Q and a site that it's, um, you can go to our discord right now. Discord GD slash JDC. You can, uh, ask any question. We have a service where literally we, our entire community just like answers questions. And right now another thing we see is there's just no good place where people can go and ask questions about anything from the technical difficulties to, you know, help.

They got scanned. What do they do to like, you know, how do I evaluate this [01:18:00] project? Does it look legit? Like all these things, we're building out a full fledged website to that right now. It starts with the discord kind of bot that we've created, where you can ask a question and anyone gets an answer and you can search all the questions I've been asked before.

But I think just more education in the space is super critical for those reasons to get people to safely understand and interspace. Yeah. And Benu is like super well-known for being an educator in this field. So thank you so much for joining us today. And that's curious, Addie, just so that's super clear for everyone.

It's curious, Addie, just Google that and you'll be able to find it. So we're going to move along to our last question of the night. W how can we help you today? Uh, I was just sitting back listening. Um, I am interested in, um, you know, I'm interested in the data lock. That's the most important thing I'm interested in as an artists and as an educator and a content creator, I would like to just [01:19:00] own my own stuff without having to go through the data being, you know, hijacked online, you know, and I think somebody was talking about this earlier today, like how our data is, is really not ours when we write something on different platforms and how, um, even if we write it to ourselves and we say, oh, it's only our eyes is only seeing this, but then we start hearing things that we.

Out and, and being, you know, utilized to make other people's, uh, you know, monies and, and, and fame and fortune, and not being compensated and not having any way to, to, uh, come back that. So I just, you know, want to know how can, um, when, as a user-friendly version of this, like you saying, um, nobody should have to know what a private key is, but I do what, like, I would like to know all of that information.

So I [01:20:00] know what goes into building something like that. But when is that going to happen or, or how. Uh, you work together to make that a reality where you, you can easily access or it's more user-friendly. Cause I, I was approached to go on, I think it was disrupt art and I, I didn't see a, a way that I could interact with them.

Well, one thing that I want to add is that we're going to be back here on March 17th, 8:00 PM in the human behavior club, and we're going to be going over NFTs for content creators. So we're going to be going over the minting process. There's going to be a lot of artists on the panel who are really going to help us understand how to use NFTs as a creator.

So I think that will be a great session for you. I'm not sure if anybody can actually answer your question because I think it involves everybody in this space. And so I don't know if there's any clear answer to your question, but Ben, I'm sure you have something [01:21:00] smart to say about. No, I think you, uh, you said all the smart things.

So I have nothing left to say, but yeah, no, I think these like sessions, like this are so helpful. Right. And it's so amazing that you're doing the solid to educate people in this space. And the next session, the three part series is perfect. Right. They'll just walk through all these things. So yeah, I think it really, to your point exactly.

All of us working towards this to make the space the appropriate time and like more easy to enter and like all these things and we're getting there. But thankfully, like this year is much easier than like four years ago. It's like night and day difference. It was totally impossible to do anything like, you know, uh, in back in 2017.

And, um, it's getting better. It's going to take a lot more time sadly with the technologies. It just takes time. In the meantime, what we're doing, you know, is to try to try to educate people. We put out content, we have an Oz academy course on NFTs. That kind of makes it easy. If you want to learn all those things, like you were talking about the private key and all of that, like the curious that XYZ website, if you go there curious XYZ, we walked through and we have explanations [01:22:00] interactively.

So you can learn by doing so as you actually met your first 70, as you set up your wallet, you can click and learn, oh, what is a private key? Yeah, why do I need one? Why do I have to pay gas? Like all those things. So we're trying our best to do the education, but hopefully over time, there are just tools that are also built that abstracts all of that way.

And it makes it really easy where you've mentioned, you know, you were trying to join the project and it was just very difficult to know how you could actually interact with it. Hopefully in a few years, we'll have just, um, ways to make it very simple, to onboard and so forth. But, um, in the meantime, I think education is a big one.

Things like these clubhouse spaces and so forth. Thank you w for your awesome question. All right, guys, we're about to wrap this up, to close this out. I want to give all my panelists an opportunity to let you guys know where they can be found, um, and where you guys can connect with them. So why don't we close this off with a round Robin?

Why don't you guys tell me why you think NFTs are going to be so impactful in 2022 and [01:23:00] beyond, and where people can go find you after this? Why don't we start with Brian and then we'll go to John Ben, an Ash. Yeah, thank you again, Holland and remaster, this amazing panel brains Naspers typically only use LinkedIn and Twitter for all of my communications, my corporate websites, E I E dot Rox, E R E D R O C K S a.

It is a holding company now that consists of over 85 entities, over 150 joint ventures from around the world and proudly operating in over 25 different industries. And I believe as long as projects continue to do things correctly in the NFT and also the crypto space, uh, with the right team, the right execution and treating people's harder and tax money with respect and dignity, I think we can create one incredible market that continues to create value and utility.

And I'm honored to be part of this market with some exceptional projects and talented people that. Thanks Brian for joining us today, John finally, fantastic panel follow. I love just listening to all the [01:24:00] panelists that I've learned so much, actually. So, uh, you can find me on LinkedIn. That's where I spend most of my time, John.

And the last name is Kristi. K R a S K I, I mean, since I've been in the NFC space, I literally grew my LinkedIn falling from about 10,000 followers to almost 25,000 followers in just a year. So LinkedIn, there's a lot of great activity going on. So definitely check me out there. I post almost every day, I also host a podcast called NFT heat.

We just released our 40th episode, focused on top thought leaders in the space, and we really focus on female and diversity inclusion. That's super important to me. So as part of my community, building NFC thought leaders, I'm really focused on representing females and unrepresented voices. And we're also going to be hosting an NSE super conference as part of MTU.

In October, it's gonna be an Austin. And the whole lineup and panel panels are really going to be focused again on that female and diversity inclusion. So, you know, we're building right now, web three. So from the ground up. So why not address [01:25:00] this issue right now, as opposed to web two that you want to, you know, kind of address it after the fact.

So that's super important to me, but, uh, again, amazing, amazing stuff off. Awesome. And also Michigan, I didn't know that Ben, any final words for me? Yeah first. Yeah. Thank you so much again, this was amazing. And actually John huge, huge round of applause for you. It'd be awesome. I should connect you with, um, our CEO, actually my, uh, who's a woman, um, this entire curious ice program and, uh, yeah.

It's, it's awesome. I totally agree with you that inclusion is like, we have a chance to completely change the makeup of what three from day one. So it's really important. And it requires people to actually do that work like you are so really cool for you doing that. Um, yeah. So we're curious, obviously you can find the site curious Abby's on Twitter.

That's curious a D D Y S and discord is discord.gg/ca TC. And so that's where you can go. You can ask any question that you have on what three will get answered. [01:26:00] 95% of questions get answered in six hours of user question service. And to answer your question, all of like, you know, what, what we see and where we see is going in 20, 21 last year.

And F T uh, crypto at large crypto comes a report in January 20, 20 to 300 billion people, uh, are in crypto now up from 100 million in 2020. And this year they actually see that accelerates a billion people. So it's the first time that we're actually seeing on the scale of hundreds, millions of people coming, people coming into crypto, and they're not going so deep yet.

Like the active monthly users in open sea are still like half a million people, but it's growing exponentially. And this is really the year that I think we're going to see a lot of the people come into the real use cases. They're coming in at the top of the funnel into buying crypto. And they're starting to dip their toes last year.

They dip their toes into NFCS this year, I think is a year that they're really going to start coming in in a real way where we're seeing major companies come into space brands, Nike, Adidas, so forth, and they a lot more of that. And I think it's going to be really exciting [01:27:00] to see the space really go mainstream and.

It is super setting. Ben, you dropped so much value and you know, I hope you join us for the upcoming sessions as well, because you are just like such a knowledge base. So thank you so much again for your time, Ashley, any final thoughts from you? Yes. Thank you again so much for having me and you guys can connect with me on LinkedIn.

It's just my first and last name, Ashley France, as well as Twitter and Instagram. It's the Ashley France. I really, really focus on discussing the launch and marketing aspects of NMT projects and also teaching small business owners, creators, et cetera, how to integrate NFTs into their current business. So definitely make sure to connect with me on there and sign up for my email list.

I'm going to be dropping gems on there as well. And in regards to the NFT space, I definitely think NFT memberships is going to take over this year. Um, we've definitely progressed since the start up crypto punks and board apes, and more and more people are seeing the importance of not just buying the NFT, but what you can get [01:28:00] after purchasing it.

So I definitely think, and FTE memberships are going to be taking over this. Amazing Ashley also so much value. Thank you so much to all of our panelists. Again, we had an amazing conversation today. We talked about what an NFT is. We talked about the different applications, community involvement, web 3.0 the metaverse.

We talked about so much. It was so great. So I know all of my young improv litters out there are really going to enjoy this episode. And I encourage you to rewind it a few times because there was a lot of information packed in this one. So thanks again. This is Hala and friends signing off until next time.

Thanks everybody.